What comes to mind in Ireland
What is black? An absence of light,
the cassocks of parish priests,
dark peat in an Irish bog.
What is brown? A leather belt,
decaying plants, veins of iron in stones,
the layered bark of a log.
What is grey? Lowering clouds,
skies threatening rain over windswept water,
the speckled muzzle of an old dog.
What is silver? A crucifix round a neck,
handcuffs and shackles, thirty shiny coins,
a flash of light through heavy fog.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
In 1977 Fianna Fáil Minister for Industry and Commerce, Desmond O’Malley, announced the government’s intention to build a nuclear power reactor at Carnsore Point, where the Irish Sea meets the southern Atlantic. Members of Cork Friends of the Earth, along with other groups and individuals, decided to oppose the idea.
Four rallies by opponents of nuclear power took place each August at Carnsore Point in Co. Wexford from 1978 until 1981. I attended each rally and helped to write reports and observations in a fringe peace magazine that I helped to produce, called DAWN – an Irish Journal of Nonviolence. I won’t attempt to write a comprehensive account of the anti-nuclear campaign. I recommend Simon Dalby’s pamphlet as a good starting point for anybody researching the matter.
I want to mention about half a dozen names: Mary Phelan, Eoin Dinan, Adi and Sean Roche, Christy Moore, American scientist Keith Haight and his South African born wife Maureen Kip Sing (Chinese ethnicity), Petra Kelly (German Green Party MEP), some of whom I encountered.
Simon Dalby studied at Trinity College Dublin for his first degree and subsequently did a Masters at what is now the University of Limerick. He wrote an account of the Carnsore anti-nuclear rallies and the national campaigning of various anti-nuclear groups. This was published in A4 pamphlet form by DAWN magazine. A comprehensive history of the antinuclear movement remains to be written, outlining the pro- and anti- arguments put forward in public meetings and radio-tv discussions during those years.
Simon Dalby’s article, ‘The Nuclear Syndrome. Victory for the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement’ was first published in Dawn Train No. 3 Winter 1984-85 and is now lodged in the University of Limerick archives. The U.L. description begins: The collection comprises published and unpublished material collected by Simon Dalby for the preparation of his MA thesis, Political Ecology: A Study of the Irish Anti-Nuclear Movement, for the University of Victoria (Canada) in 1982. Published material includes articles; books, booklets and pamphlets; conference proceedings, speeches and public lectures; EEC communiqués; newsletters; periodicals; press cuttings; reports; and treaties and acts.
First Rally
The first Carnsore rally was held in August 1978. Attractive posters listing ballad and rock groups that had agreed to perform were circulated around Dublin, Cork and other towns. Get to the Point was the slogan. Right from the start free music was on offer to protesters. I am not sure if a chartered diesel train termed The Anti-Nuclear Express was arranged by Mary Phelan that year, but I took the train from Westland Row station down to Rosslare with Mary Condren. Passengers brought drinks and sandwiches for the trip and were ferried by buses to the rally site. There they were greeted by volunteers directing them to a huge marquee on which they could place sleeping bags and groundsheets. Information about toilets, a concert and public discussion venue, and food. Another area was available for people who had brought their own tents.
Mary Phelan was originally from Waterford City and had lived in West Germany for a few years, where she befriended German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly (whose Irish-sounding name came from her stepfather, a U.S. army officer stationed in Germany). Mary Condren was a Dubliner who had studied in Hull University and became interested in feminist theology and journalism. She obtained seed money from feminist contacts in the USA, notably New York, and asked Mary Phelan to co-run a Resources Centre in Rathgar Road.
The resources centre was supposed to earn rent from groups using the facilities and gradually become self-financing. That aim was not fulfilled alas. Many anti-nuclear activists visited the Resources Centre, even though it was not intended as a central contact point. The downstairs office was used to cut stencils and roll off on a Gestetner inky duplicator copies of their magazine called Contaminated Crow.
I worked in a basement office with Mary Condren honing my journalistic skills by producing a student magazine called Movement. Every other month with half a dozen people I also used the basement and the resources centre to produce a cut-and-paste periodical called DAWN.
We had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with disposable carbon ribbon cartridges – a laborious process that took 2 or 3 days to complete. On alternate months we met at Rob Fairmichael’s home in Ormeau Road Belfast. From early morning we could hear the rumbling of machinery in the Ormeau Bakery behind the house as daily bread was being baked for delivery around the city. A small backstreet business in the Lower Ormeau called The Print Workshop printed issues of DAWN at reasonable rates. Some of our pamphlets were prepared with typeset, after special fundraising, and laid out mainly by Rob. He was a good self-taught layout artist.
The first rally drew everal thousand, including Sunday afternoon visitors from Wexford and other counties. There had been light rain on Saturday, but Sunday was glorious sunshine. On Monday morning an aerial photograph appeared on the front page of the Irish Times, making a great impression. The next day an eminent Professor of Jurisprudence at UCD, John Kelly, also a top politician in Fine Gael, issued a statement warning the government of the day, Fianna Fail, not to treat the protesters like children. He mentioned huge sit-down protests by antinuclear activists in Tokyo. The professor’s warning may have been somewhat exaggerated, but the publicity was gleefully welcomed by rallyists.
On Sunday many individuals spoke from an open-air stage about their nuclear concerns. Visitors from France, Germany and Italy spoke of their vehement opposition. A continental European contribution to an Irish protest movement undoubtedly worried mainstream Irish politicians – they envisaged co-operation in the EEC with governments, bureaucrats and captains of industry. Instead they encountered opposition from unmoneyed, ad-hoc, uncontrollable protest groups.
Free music concerts, headlined by Christy Moore and others, entertained crowds in the evenings. People sitting near the stage enjoyed free music. Others listened in other locations to amplifiers.
Post-Rally Clean-Up
After the crowds went home a lot of detritus had to be collected and carefully tidied away by voluntary workers. The latrines were maintained with copious shovels of sand and sprinklings of Jeyes Fluid during each rally. Then they were filled in. Recyclable bottles and drinks cans were brought to wherever money could be received. Paper was buried in pits for eventual decomposition. My colleague Eoin Dinan worked the latrines and supervised other maintenance activity. Ordinarily, he drove a taxi in Dublin. During the years of the Carnsore protests he made friends with people and went on to help found the Dublin Food Co-Op.
Eoin Dinan was a quiet individual who didn’t give platform speeches, but he contributed constructive suggestions at committee meetings. His taxi experience came into play when the Children of Chernobyl project was set up by Adi Roche and her husband Sean Dunne after the 1986 accident which released huge doses of radiation, connected to a host of diseases.
Eoin helped with transport convoys carrying medical supplies, food and bottled water from Rosslare through France, Germany and elsewhere to hospitals in Belarus. It would be interesting to see maps of the routes taken. People in the UK, Germany and North America soon began to emulate the Cork project. Adi Roche published her book The Children of Chernobyl about the work, badly interrupted by the Covid lockdown of 2019-20.
Friendly Internal Criticism
Some friendly criticism of Carnsore appeared in issues of DAWN. For instance, in number 51, probably from September 1980, Auveen Byrne of Cork Friends of the Earth remarked in a personal capacity: ‘…it involves en masse camping and thus mainly attracts ‘young trendies’ and passes up the opportunity to influence the greater portion of public opinion.’
Also, in 1980 an unsigned article by a trade unionist said: ‘The third Carnsore anti-nuclear rally simply marked time for the movement to stop nuclear power and uranium mining. He added that ‘the six-pack brigade were bored’ by the dragging on of the event and the resort to recorded muzak on amplifiers when live concerts were finished.
In DAWN 73 in the autumn of 1981 I signed a personal article with the headline ‘Labouring the Point – Which Way from Carnsore?’ in which I noted the declining numbers attending. I finished up with a suggestion that instead of being anti-whatever, interested activists might positively organise an Ecology Festival at a different venue and stress positive living.
I met Maureen Kim Sing, an ethnic Chinese in exile from apartheid South Africa, and her academic freelance journalist husband Keith Haight from the U.S.. They spoke with detailed knowledge of nuclear power and radiation releases at Carnsore and meetings of groups at various venues throughout the year. Keith sold a couple of articles to the Irish Times and contributed many others to U.S. publications. They also spent time campaigning against apartheid.
At Carnsore and elsewhere they conducted nonviolence workshops. Later they went to France and had a baby girl called Kim. She had automatic French citizenship, was brought to America when Keith resumed academic life, and has lived in continental Europe since Keith died in March 2005 and Maureen died in January 2006.
Mary Phelan’s friendship with German Green Party MEP Petra Kelly, and Mary’s fluency in German, were important for forging links with anti-nuclear activists on the Continent.
Although Petra Kelly visited Dublin for antinuclear conferences, I don’t think she visited Carnsore, but she did develop a strong rapport with the head of the ITGWU (today known as Siptu) John F. Carroll. They produced a pamphlet called ‘A Nuclear Ireland?’ in 1978, which was highly influential and came as a shock to government decision-makers.
Mary Phelan presented on RTE radio programme on ecological and environmental matters. Later she worked on a Dublin FM channel called Radio Liffey, I think. After that she went west of the Shannon and lived in Galway from where she drove a campervan turned into a mobile studio. As a freelance radio documentary producer she interviewed the travel writer Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore Co. Waterford. A 4-part series was broadcast by the national radio.
In the early 1970s Mary helped produce a 12-page feminist magazine called Wicca in Dublin. She had a daughter who as a young adult went to India and was profoundly affected by chemical damage done by multinational companies. She remained in India promoting non-polluting energy systems and lifestyles. Mary Phelan died suddenly in March 2015. Her passing and key role in the anti-nuclear campaign was not noted in the national newspapers.
Adi Roche was nominated by the Labour Party to contest the Presidential election of 1997. Eoin Dinan became her driver during the campaign and was described thus in an Irish Independent report: ‘Eoin Dinan, a Project director, former taxi-driver and quiet, supportive presence, is acting as her driver and personal support. Joe Noonan, a poker-faced Cork solicitor, veteran of the [Raymond] Crotty legal challenge to the SEA and friend of 15 years, is on hand for legal expertise.’
It was a bruising campaign with five candidates, Mary McAleese eventually received 45.2 percent of the votes after the first count. Roche limped in with a mere 6.9 percent. She was later awarded the Tipperary Prize and other honours for her Chernobyl work.
Reminiscences
Full Tilt: from Ireland to India with a bicycle, was the travel book that launched Dervla Murphy as a major travel writer. In 1981 she published a book in London called Race to the Finish? – the nuclear stakes.
She was unimpressed by the Carnsore protests, which apparently she attended but did not speak at. On page 55 she caustically noted: ‘In 1979, at the Carnsore Point demonstration in county Wexford, I was aghast to find myself surrounded by Women’s Libbers, IRA representatives, Abortion for All, Hari Krishna and Co., the Communist Party of Ireland and sundry other enthusiasts for whom I feel little or no sympathy. In a rigidly conservative society like Ireland’s such hangers-on make it more difficult for the embryonic anti-nuke movement to gain support.’
So what did the Carnsore anti-nuclear movement achieve? Firstly, it was an independently run, decentralised movement of Irish citizens and supporters from other countries. That cosmopolitan protest initiative caught mainstream politicians off guard.
Moreover, Carnsore brought many individuals together who, after 1981, promoted environmental and non-consumerist lifestyles. Organic vegetable growing was promoted in Dublin and other areas. It is likely to have brought support to the Green Party/Comhaontas Glas. Some of the protesters eventually left the city for the countryside and contributed to wholesome rural alternatives. Major political figures today visit, in muddy wellingtons and raincoats, youth-oriented musical events like the Electric Picnic to pay tribute to The Youth, also called the yoof.
Now that the ‘six-pack brigade’ are a lot older I wonder do they ponder the moon and the stars, and wonder about the meaning of it all? Do they reminisce about Carnsore and tell children and grandchildren about the good old days of free music?
Around Ireland and in its online expressions, there is vocal and colourful support for the cause of Palestine. Its flag is draped from windows, hung from gate posts and serves as WhatsApp profile pictures. PLO scarves are again in vogue, while watermelon t-shirts are worn when the weather allows, and charitable fund-raisers on behalf of Gaza seem to have people cycling the length and breadth of the country. Members of Ireland’s small Jewish community have complained of anger being directed against them, unfairly, over the conduct of Israel. Pro-Palestinian advocates are, however, invariably, committed anti-racists: the kind of people who showed up for Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. It is not a Populist movement built on resentment against ‘an enemy within’ – an outlook characterising antisemitism of the past in Ireland and elsewhere – but an aspiration, however naively expressed, for a better world, and an identification which can be traced back to the Irish people’s historic experience of colonialism.
Solidarity with Palestine is identified with leading artistic figures such as the globally renowned author of Normal People Sally Rooney, who has declined to have her books translated into Hebrew. It is a cultural phenomenon as much as political agitation. Numerous musical acts – notably Northern Irish rap group Kneecap – have courted cancellation and even potential criminal prosecution in the U.K. for drawing attention to the cause. It is also, admittedly, a well-received form of protest, within Ireland at least, garnering social media likes and real-world approval. It does not risk the wrath of the community – as was the case with dissent from the Covid consensus – or police jackboots, as we see descending in other European countries, and the U.S..
Ireland’s octogenarian poet-President Michael D. O’Higgins has been an outspoken critic of Israel over the treatment of Gaza in particular. Despite occupying a largely ceremonial role, his stance has conferred legitimacy on expressions of rage on this issue. Referred to affectionately as ‘Michael D.’, his emphasis on human rights, social justice and the arts transcends ordinary politics, but a commitment to military neutrality – including in response to the War in Ukraine – has created tensions with the centre-right Irish government. This government under Micheál Martin as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) is also a vocal critic of Israel on the international stage, joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel earlier this year. There is evident, nonetheless, among the Irish government an underlying anxiety to avoid a serious rupture with a significant trading partner, and especially that country’s sponsor the United States. Ireland remains, remarkably, Israel’s second biggest trading partner.
Members of the Irish government may well care about innocent Palestinian civilians caught in the crosshairs, and having famine inflicted on them. A more cynical, and arguably realistic, view would be that political expediency is paramount in the Irish government’s response.
A low corporation tax rate regime and other incentives over the past fifty years have attracted a raft of large U.S. companies, particularly from the tech, and pharmaceutical sectors, to Ireland, along with other investment of various kinds, predatory or otherwise. Donald Trump even owns a golf club, Doonbeg, in the west of Ireland. Since the Financial Crisis, Foreign Direct Investment has delivered consistently high economic growth and near full employment, but the attendant spiralling cost of housing, in particular, has eroded support for the parties in government. Recent decades have also witnessed unprecedented immigration into a state which, for most of its history, has been ethnically homogenous, save for the North, which remains part of the United Kingdom. There, sectarian tensions between Catholics and Protestants generated a bitter, low-intensity thirty-year conflict that ended after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Opposing factions adopted different sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – still evident in murals on buildings across the province – thereby conflating Irish Republicanism with the cause of Palestine.
U.S. companies in Ireland also have ties to Israel – notably Intel which employs almost five thousand in Ireland and approximately ten thousand in Israel. Importantly, Israel wields even greater clout in Washington than Ireland, despite an Irish diaspora in the U.S. of over thirty million dwarfing the five million Jewish-Americans – some of whom are leading critics of Israel.
Irish government politicians often characterise Irish sovereignty as severely circumscribed by dint of our being a ‘small, open economy,’ susceptible to global shocks. As a result, government politicians tend to bend over backwards on behalf of Irish-based U.S. companies. Thus, former Taoiseach Enda Kenny is alleged to have told Facebook executives in 2013 that he would use Ireland’s presidency of the E.U. to lobby member states over data privacy laws. Although we rarely hear of such exchanges, doubtless they occur. Ireland’s strained relations with Israel – which last year removed its Irish embassy describing Ireland as ‘the most extreme country against Israel internationally’ – is surely discussed, given major tech companies’ evident (as we will see) allegiance to Israel. Presumably Irish government officials stress their vulnerability on this issue to the left-wing opposition, especially Sinn Fein, which emerged as a serious threat to a long-standing political duopoly in the 2020 General Election.
Representatives of U.S. and other capital surely recognise that their interests are best served by the two parties of the centre-right – compelled to coalesce in the wake of the Financial Crash – retaining power. This probably explains the leeway given to the Irish government in criticising Israel on the global stage, including joining South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in January 2025. A red line would appear to be drawn, however, under any serious interruption of trade with Israel, including the transport of munitions to that country over Irish aerospace, or the use by the U.S. military of Shannon Airport as a stopover.
A looming threat to the status quo emerged prior to the 2024 General Election when, under pressure from the opposition, the government parties agreed to adopt an Occupied Territories Bill. This bill – a version of which was previously approved by the Dáil but never brought into law – purports to place an embargo on trade with the Occupied Territories. In its current form it will not, however, apply to services. If passed, it is unlikely to amount to anything more than a symbolic gesture. It is, nonetheless, causing disquiet in Washington.
It’s also notable that in January 2025 the Irish government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism, which according to Israeli and international civil society organisations has been used ‘to muzzle legitimate speech and activism by critics of Israel’s human rights record and advocates for Palestinian rights’. This definition was used to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and could have serious repercussions in the context of recent ‘hate speech’ legislation.
In recent times, Irish government policy tends to inform, or is perhaps informed by, the content and tone of legacy media. This includes the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, which dominates the cultural space in a similar way to the New York Times in the U.S.. The government cannot, however, easily regulate what is being said on social media platforms. As the Israeli response unfolded after the October 7 attacks, Ireland’s canny neoliberal handlers would have observed the mounting fury being expressed, often by otherwise apolitical people, on platforms such as Instagram. This also became apparent in widely attended public protests. The Irish government’s faltering embrace of the cause of Palestine might be interpreted as a form of controlled opposition, wherein they stand as a placeholder for genuine supporters of Palestine. Such controlled opposition of a relatively malleable proxy (Ireland) may also, at times, act as a useful counterweight to the U.S. in its dealings with its Israeli ally.
A developing fracture within Irish nationalism associated with the advent of multiculturalism should also be noted. A nascent nativist movement departs from traditional Irish Republicanism, sympathetic to the cause of Palestine. The emergence of what is often simplistically labelled a ‘far right’ – mainly drawing support from deprived urban areas and others on the margins – is undoubtedly inspired by other Populist movements around the world. Such movements have tended to be anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli – an influential U.K. actor Tommy Robinson is an active supporter of Israel; albeit, recent criticism of the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel from leading MAGA figures likely exerts an influence over Irish fellow travellers. Nevertheless, support for Palestine is certainly still evident in Dublin’s working class districts, where Palestinian flags are often unfurled.
A Shot Across the Bows
‘In the light of what’s happened in Israel and Gaza, a song about non-violence seems somewhat ridiculous, even laughable, but our prayers have always been for peace and for non-violence;’ so said Bono on October 8 at a concert in Los Vegas, before adding menacingly: ‘But our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed … So sing with us… and those beautiful kids at that music festival,’ he continued, before launching into ‘Pride (In the Name of Love).’
Bono would subsequently receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Biden. His apparent endorsement of Israel’s response to Hamas’s brutal (but far, far less impactful) attack on Israeli civilians formed part of a global propaganda wave providing cover for Israel’s actions. In the wake of October 7, dissent from the somewhat disingenuous proposition that ‘Israeli had a right to defend itself’ became almost impossible for anyone in a position of influence, including in Ireland. This became a carte blanche to attack Gaza, and elsewhere, amidst disinformation and exaggeration.
On October 13, the founder of Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrave, one of Ireland’s leading businessmen and a prominent critic of the Irish government, wrote on Twitter/X: ‘War crimes are war crimes, even when committed by allies,’ referring to Israel’s airstrikes and blockade of the Gaza Strip, which the U.N. had warned could lead to mass starvation of the 2.3 million people living there. Cosgrave followed up with a message condemning the Hamas attack. In response to criticism from leading technology figures and investors, he posted a statement on the Web Summit blog apologizing and clarifying his position. ‘I unreservedly condemn Hamas’ evil, disgusting and monstrous October 7 attack. I also call for the unconditional release of all hostages,’ he wrote. ‘I unequivocally support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself … I also believe that, in defending itself, Israel should adhere to international law and the Geneva Conventions — i..e, not commit war crimes.’
The apology was insufficient to sway major sponsors and headliners who announced they would boycott the Web Summit event. These included tech heavyweights Meta, Google, Intel, Siemens and Amazon, all with Irish operations. ‘Unfortunately, my personal comments have become a distraction from the event, and our team, our sponsors, our start-ups and the people who attend,’ Cosgrave said in a resignation statement; ‘I sincerely apologise again for any hurt I have caused.’ Cosgrave’s maverick opposition could not be controlled, unlike, arguably, the Irish government. Nor did Cosgrave have friends within the Irish political establishment to plead his case. His immediate resignation probably saved his company, and he would return as CEO six months later.
In the wake of October 7, the Irish government seemed prepared to be going along with the U.S. position and that of the E.U., under Ursula von der Leyen, which projected an image of the Israeli flag over European buildings in solidarity. Tánaiste (deputy-prime minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs, currently Taoiseach, Micheál Martin visited Israel the following month. In response to a request from Alon Davidi, the mayor of Sderot a town near the border with Gaza, to support Israel Martin responded: ‘I’m here to see this firsthand and to listen; to seek to understand the trauma that your community has gone through and not just in horrific events over the seventh but as you said for over two decades, if not three decades, in terms of rockets.’
He then set out the Irish government’s position: ‘Ireland is unequivocal in its condemnation of the Hamas attack and will give no quarter to that form of terrorism. We are explicit in our public statements in condemning without condition the unconscionable attacks on children, on women and on innocent civilians.’ Martin added that Ireland’s long-standing support for a two-state solution should not be equated with support for Hamas and ‘absolutely’ affirmed Israel’s right to exist – ‘in case that is in question.’ He noted that Irish-Israeli citizen Kim Damti had been murdered by Hamas and Emily Hand taken hostage in Gaza. Martin said he did not believe that a military solution would create a safe environment for future generations: ‘We may have to disagree on that – and I respect where you’re coming from – but our sense is that there’s a real danger that you will radicalise opinion of future generations even more.’
Martin’s approach was calculated, recognizing historic Irish support for the Palestinian cause, while making sure to be seen to be on Israel’s side. In response, left-wing opponents described it as a propaganda tour. Since then, Martin has been a prominent critic of Israel on the international stage, somehow reconciling this with his government permitting munitions to pass through Irish aerospace, and for Israel to remain a major trading partner.
Martin appears to have another, more important, agenda, which would, in all likelihood, be supported by U.S. interests in Ireland. In the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war he sought to align Ireland more closely with the rest of the West, seemingly endeavouring to abandon a policy of neutrality that emerged during World War II and which continued over the course the Cold War, when Ireland remained outside NATO. Despite consistent opposition among the population to any change, Martin’s government has pushed forward with proposals to end the so-called Triple Lock, requiring the approval of the U.N. Security Council, a decision by Government and a vote in the Dáil (the legislative assembly) before Ireland commits a substantial number of troops to peace-keeping operations.
White House Criticism
In 2000, a prominent government Minister is believed to have described Ireland as being closer to Boston than Berlin. In some respects, this remains the case. Government services are generally poorly resourced relative to other European countries, while apartment-living is uncommon and the private motor car is generally relied on ahead of public transport. On the issue of Palestine, however, unlike the U.S., the Irish population has been relatively consistent in its opposition to Israeli incursions, and supportive of a two-state solution, however remote, and indeed unsatisfactory, this outcome now appears.
There are, however, a few political outliers on this issue, one of whom seemed to be former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Back in 2017, hawk-eyed Irish activists observed the then Taoiseach’s online interaction with Barry Williams, who they considered Ireland’s most ardent supporter of Israel and ran the group Irish4Israel. Then, in 2019 Varadkar replied to a letter from ten members of the U.S. Congress by noting his opposition to an Occupied Territories Bill ‘on both political and legal grounds.’
Furthermore, in early 2024 speaking once again as Taoiseach, Varadkar expressed caution about accusing Israel of genocide based on the spurious consideration that millions of Jewish people were victims of it in the past. He said the government wouldn’t use the term unless it was ‘absolutely convinced’ that genocide was occurring. Responding to the question of whether Ireland would join South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about the Israeli state’s treatment of people in Gaza he said: ‘I would be a little bit uncomfortable about accusing Israel, a Jewish state, of Genocide given the fact that six million Jews – over half the population of Jews in Europe – were killed.’ Adding, ‘I would just think we need to be a little bit careful about using words like that unless we’re absolutely convinced that they’re the appropriate ones.’
The dial seemed to have moved considerably, however, by the time of Varadkar’s last major public appearance as Taoiseach in the White House on St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, 2024. This occurred just days before he announced his surprise resignation, after his government suffered damaging defeats in two referendums on references to family and women in the constitution. In a speech that was well-received in Ireland, and which seemed unusually provocative given where it took place, Varadkar said:
Mr President, as you know, the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have so much empathy for the Palestinian people. The answer is simple: we see our history in their eyes. A story of displacement and dispossession, a national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now – hunger.
Adding:
The people of Gaza desperately need food, medicine and shelter. Most especially they need the bombs to stop. This has to stop. On both sides. The hostages brought home. And humanitarian relief allowed in.
A looming General Election perhaps explained the unusual force of the criticism. Indeed, the issue of Palestine did not become a significant electoral issue once the ruling parties agreed to introduce their own Occupied Territories Bill. Perhaps the U.S. Democratic leadership, with close ties to the Irish political establishment, recognised the political ramifications of his speech and even green-lighted his words. External criticism, moreover, might have been useful for the Biden administration in its own dealing with the Israelis, given student protests then occurring across the U.S., and their own unpreparedness to criticise Israel with the Republicans emphasising unwavering support. Meanwhile, Varadkar could sail into the political sunset with the approval of Ireland’s many Palestinian activists ringing in his ears, and in a good position to take up future political roles.
St. Patrick’s Day 2025
The issue of Palestine did not figure prominently before Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s visit to the Trump White House in 2025. The concern at that time was over the new President’s tariffs wreaking havoc on the Irish economy, by forcing U.S. firms to transfer their operations to the U.S..
At one point, however, a reporter inquired of Martin whether he planned to discuss Trump’s previous plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza. At this, Trump jumped in, responding with a denial. ‘Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,’ he replied. Palestinians were again brought up by Trump as he reminisced about his recent speech to a joint session of Congress. The term ‘Palestinian’ was used in a bizarre fashion to insult his rivals in the Democratic Party. He described Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader as a Palestinian: ‘as far as I’m concerned. You know, he’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore: He’s a Palestinian.’
Martin, nonetheless, in contrast to Varadkar’s outspoken comments the previous year, lauded Trump for his approach to securing a peace agreement. After Trump was asked about the St Patrick’s Day boycott, the Taoiseach interjected ‘to pay tribute to the president on the peace initiatives’ in Gaza and elsewhere. It’s clear from these exchanges that Martin and his advisors were unwilling to risk any loss of influence for the sake of Palestine. Perhaps Trump also recognised that those in power in Ireland were prepared to serve U.S. interests and were, in effect, “controlling” popular Irish solidarity with Palestine.
A Looming Presidential Election
In a recent opinion piece for Ireland’s so-called ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, regular columnist Finn McRedmond (incidentally as a student in Cambridge she wrote an article revealing how she had voted for David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2015) wrote:
Irish foreign policy is in a strange place right now. We are, as has long been the case, totally impotent on matters of global politics – with no real army to speak of, outside of Nato, militaristically neutral and never even close the so-called grown-ups table when the future of Europe is at stake. (Did that invite to the White House with Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Rutte get lost in the post?)
But simultaneously, there are plenty of members of the Irish establishment who – in full cognisance of this basic reality – believe that the world is somehow willing to listen to Ireland’s lectures on affairs of international morality.
The main object of McRedmond’s ire was, unsurprisingly, President Michael D. Higgins. She complained bitterly that he had bent ‘the shape and contours of the office [the Presidency] to his whims, professing to the world on behalf of the nation as though he speaks for us all.’ O’Higgins’ fourteen-year tenure comes to an end later this year, and McRedmond expressed concern that another left-wing candidate Catherine Connolly – the natural heir to Michael D. Higgins – could win the election this November. McRedmond professed herself:
anxious to learn that Catherine Connolly is a contender of relative significance. She has recently said Irish people should resist a “trend towards imperialism” in the European Union, as the bloc is becoming “increasingly militarised under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen and the European People’s Party”; that the EU has “lost its moral compass”; and that “the US, England and France are deeply entrenched in an arms industry which causes bloodshed across the world.
McRedmond’s own rise to prominence as a regular columnist for the Irish Times might be traced to an influential father’s acting as CEO to a commercial body – An Post the postal service – owned by the state, and political views inspired more by her time in Peterhouse College, Cambridge than the Falls Road in West Belfast.
Her piece articulates an anxiety within the Irish establishment, a section of which she castigates, that a figure similar in her outlook to Michael D. could win the presidency. While overcoming most Irish people’s reluctance to abandon neutrality – another Irish Times columnist recently described it as ‘absurd and complacent’ – and even joining NATO, appears to be the primary objective, popular Irish opposition to Isreal and attention to Gaza remains a serious inconvenience. Apart from placing the Irish government in a difficult position vis-à-vis U.S. investors, unwavering U.S., E.U. and U.K. support of Israel undermines the West’s claim to moral leadership in supporting Ukraine against Russia. Most Irish supporters of Palestine are now opposed to Ireland entering any military alliance – and are increasingly hesitant about a militaristic E.U. – in any way supportive of Israel.
Under the Irish Constitution, the President occupies a largely ceremonial position, similar to that of the monarch in the U.K.. Despite a lack of executive or legislative function, an individual, such as Michael D. Higgins – and Mary Robinson before him – may still use the platform to bring about cultural change, and legitimate outrage. Thus, what are controversial positions on Israel elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. have become the norm in Ireland. This makes it politically expedient for government politicians to represent these viewpoints. If a less radical candidate wins the forthcoming election, as seems more than likely, the heat could be taken out of criticism of Israel in Ireland. Indeed, it is possible the change to the definition of antisemitism could, in time, lead to criminal prosecutions for ‘hate speech’ under new laws, supposedly designed to counter racism.
The plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation may seem remote from an Irish Presidential election that is likely to see a turnout below fifty percent, but Ireland’s popular support for Palestine could easily be blunted in the absence of a legitimating figure in that office. This could have the effect of altering the tone, and content, of Palestine’s most consistent advocate in Europe on the international stage. The Irish government’s adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, continued permission for Irish aerospace to be used for transporting munitions, and ongoing trading ties between the two countries, do not point to genuine conviction on the part of the Irish government on this issue.
Members of the Irish government are given to portraying the country as fragile and dependent, but this ignores the significant ‘soft power’ at its disposal. It is, by most measures, an extremely wealthy country, with an enormous government surplus, and commercial banks in a far better state than before the Crash. Moreover, the country’s geographic position on the edge of Europe insulates it from Europe’s historic zones of conflict, including the current one in Ukraine. Contrary to media scaremongering, Russia has no designs on Ireland. There is also a vast Irish diaspora around the world to call on, particularly in the U.S.. Donald Trump even referred to the importance of this constituency in the aforementioned White House meeting with Martin. It explains why any Irish Taoiseach is warmly welcomed on St. Patrick’s Day, no matter which President occupies the White House. Ireland’s outspoken opposition to Israel will, however, be easier to control if a less steadfast individual wins the forthcoming Presidential election.
This article was originally published in South African magazine Herri.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.
He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it.
In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local residents, many of whom remembered formative events such as the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War. These interviews also documented memories relating to life in Dublin’s tenements, experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries, dock work, women’s roles, deaths of children, money lenders, orphanage life, and more, covering both the public and intensely personal history of inner-city Dublin.
Fagan’s work extends far beyond oral interviews. He is the longtime director of the North Inner City Folklore Project, an initiative that began as a jobs program and allowed him to preserve and publish stories from his community. Over decades, he has amassed a vast collection of tenement artefacts: photographs, books, letters, coins, dockers’ buttons, children’s toys. His vision has always been to open a dedicated museum so this vital social history is preserved within, and for, the local community rather than being housed elsewhere.
This museum has been a reality in the past and Terry’s current passion is to reestablish it.
Terry has published works such as “Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle” and “Dublin Tenements: Memories of Life in Dublin’s Notorious Tenements,” both drawn from his extensive oral history collections. He is also a popular walking tour guide, interweaving tales from his own life as well as audio samples from the collections he oversaw. The Monto tour includes tales about brothel madams, dockers, and a “hidden Dublin” many would prefer to leave interred in the past.
It’s Mother’s Day morning and I am on the brink. Desperate, determined, exhausted and certain all at once. I have passed an eternal night trying to push out a child, with no apparent progress.
I don’t have a midwife gently coaching, or calling the ambulance, as the case may be.
I am freebirthing.
‘Is that like a home birth?’, people would ask, when I told them of my birth plans. ‘Yes, only without a midwife,’ I would say. ‘Oh,’ they would respond; an ‘oh’ loaded with ambiguity. Because, in fairness, it doesn’t sound ideal.
Most Irish women choose to give birth in hospital because they think home birthing with a midwife is a riskier option. This is a view promoted by every medical professional in the country. However, some reading of alternative birth experts soon reveals the best kept secret in the Coombe: a woman’s body is designed to give birth unassisted.
Known as a physiological birth where each biological process activates the next in a delicately balanced sequence, it is the origin of the hypnobirthing image of the unfolding lotus, petal by petal. The most dangerous thing one can do at a birth is interfere with this process.
Modern obstetrics which is based on the ‘active management’ of birth, is the petal plucking inverse of this ideal. Drugs to induce and speed labour and pain medications which stall labour, are standard interventions in normal hospital births. These then lead to ‘emergency interventions,’ such as antibiotics, episiotomies, foreceps and Caesarean sections (c-sections).
In effect, obstetricians are busy ‘saving’ mother and baby from the complications they themselves created.
From the perspective of physiological birth; modern obstetrics is akin to a sexual violation of women. It is predicated on ‘getting the baby out alive’, an approach which traumatizes and damages the long-term health of both mother and child.
Most obstetric staff have never even witnessed a physiological birth. Midwifery training in Ireland takes place in a hospital setting only, and most will have never witnessed a home birth, and could be more accurately called obstetric nurses.
As Irish hospital policy is increasingly determined by insurance liability, where the proof ‘we did all we could,’ is the best defence against malpractice suits, there is a corresponding rise in the national rate of c-sections.
So, in the medical paradigm, which expectant Irish mothers are forced to occupy, for lack of an alternative, where home-birthing is risky, freebirthing would be considered reckless.
And we all know what happens to reckless mothers: They get Tusla called on them.
A HSE homebirth
I applied to the HSE home birth scheme for my first birth in 2018. But the community midwife serving West Kerry had retired one year previously and had yet to be replaced.
There are about twenty community midwives serving the entire country – and the HSE insurance requires that at least two midwives attend each birth. As there is no community element in midwifery colleges in Ireland, our national home-birth scheme relies entirely on midwives who have been trained abroad. Little wonder then that just 0.4 per cent (approximately 280) of births in Ireland occur at home.
So, despite occupying an entirely different health paradigm; the hospital was the only option available to me. And then I discovered freebirthing.
After reading Laura Shanley’s Unassisted Childbirth, which lists the myriad ways that medical intervention causes birth complications, I decided to birth at home, without a midwife.
But with the combination of a long labour, doubtful doulas and a fretting family, fear overtook faith. In the early hours of Little Christmas, we drove from our home on the Dingle peninsula to Tralee hospital, naively thinking we could get checked out, allay our fears and be on our merry way.
We hadn’t accounted for the Hotel California door policy of the Irish maternity ward. Labouring women can check in any time, but security locked doors ensure they cannot leave. ‘For our own good’ presumably.
And there in the belly of the beast, I fell foul of the highly medicalised birth policy, which allows a woman just 18 hours to deliver her baby from the time of her waters breaking before emergency intervention. In the U.K. birthing mothers are given at least 24 hours before ‘emergency deliveries’ are considered.
So, despite the fact that first time births can take up to forty hours to deliver, mine was treated as an emergency and my refusal of syntoconin (a drug to speed up labour) infuriated the obstetrican. The umbilical cord was cut immediately after birth, still pulsing full of blood. The child was pulled from my breast, even as he began to grub for colostrum and taken next door to instead be given a shot of glucose for pacification, as the paediatrician syringed a vial of blood from his tiny veins.
My refusal of ‘precautionary’ antibiotics on the grounds that it would destroy my son’s virgin microbiome precipitated a stand-off in which we were threatened with a court order, the Gardaí and Tusla. The Tusla officer was almost embarrassed, being called to ‘investigate’ and indeed intimidate the only woman on the ward who was breastfeeding.
There followed three arduous nights in hospital in which my son’s sugar and salt levels were monitored, each day bringing new threats to my hopes for a natural beginning to his life: ‘If you don’t get those levels up, we’re going to have to give him formula.’
That was my trauma. Minor compared to most, but it radicalised me, made me an advocate for birthing reform and affirmed my position outside the system. But Life will always buck an affirmed position.
For my second pregnancy I was even more determined to birth at home. But at thirty-six weeks, after a heavy, heart-wrenching bleed, I went for a scan that showed placenta previa, where the placenta is encroaching on the perineum and obstructing the safe exit of the child. Though the child’s head could nudge past, it’s a high risk one, even for a fervent opponent of the system like myself.
So, again I was bound for the belly of the beast and Eirú, my daughter, was delivered by c-section. And I saw the medical maternity machine from the other end of the spectrum. As a birthing mother not wanting intervention, I was treated as a pariah, but as a birthing mother needing intervention, I was treated as a queen. As in this way, I made my peace with these two faces of the Irish medical industry; a merciless machine staffed by heartfelt humans.
But, though tempered, my view was unchanged. Previa affects 0.2% of mothers. And the national rate of c-section is 30% and there is a chasm of accountability between the two figures.
A film looking at the way people give birth in Ireland, the system and how it should change.https://t.co/2ivReYmId1
— Frank Armstrong (@frankarmstrong2) March 30, 2024
Third time lucky
So here we are in 2024, pregnancy number three and we are older and wiser and much less furtive than we were as first time parents. Now we are open about our plans to freebirth. The pregnancy is fully ‘off grid’. I don’t even feel the need to visit the G.P.. My dates are sure. My pregnancy is healthy.
Having gone through the rigorous and ambiguous process of ‘getting signed off’ for a HSE home birth previously, I knew my designation as a geriatric VBAC (meaning a forty-one-year-old vaginal birth after c-section) would eliminate me from the narrow confines of ‘low risk’. So, I spared myself and the child the bother of engaging with a ‘care system’ that would reduce me to such terms.
A doula with a doppler the week before gave me the reassurance I needed that the placenta and baby were in a good position. I’d read the freebirth manual twice over; I was packing shepherd’s purse tincture for post-partum haemorrhage, clary sage and castor oil to stimulate the uterus, chilli tincture for the child’s respiration and I had the numbers of a few good women that I could call for advice in a pinch. Ready as I would ever be.
The Initiation
To become a mother, a woman must shed aspects of her youthful self that would create chaos for herself and her new child. So Nature, in her infinite wisdom, made birth a rite of passage. An initiation into motherhood.
Initiations are characterised by endurance. Birth is not painful per se – a contracting uterus after birth is usually more painful – though birth ‘complications’ can be very painful indeed, but it is intense – earth-shatteringly, butt-rackingly intense.
The initiate must undertake a journey into the unknown, meet her limits and transcend them. She is shown the insubstantial nature of her persona and must rely on the felt experience of her body and access the instinctual wisdom of her mammalian brain. The two aspects of her self will grapple, the little and the large, the personal and the impersonal taking turns to lead. Her fear will do battle with her trust.
I cannot say for certain that my faith was stronger than my doubt or that my courage prevailed over my fear. For there were times in those eight hours of the most intense pushing sensations, in which every fibre of my being shuddered and squeezed with the effort of expulsion; pushes so magnificent as to be worthy of the crowning glory of a head; only to succeed in squeezing out yet another tiny piece of shit – which my faithful partner faithfully wiped away; the orgasmic foreplay of pre-labour forgotten in the less pretty reality of active labour – that my weakness and doubt did prevail.
Between these surges, I sometimes collapse weak on the bed taking the minutes of reprieve to drift into a semi-conscious nap. But it was no power nap. On the contrary, using the intervals in this way left me ill-prepared for the violence of the surges and less than aware riding them.
In the other times, I breathe and remain alert and rise like a disciple to meet those waves as they roll my body; and those waves I rode. So, on I go through the night like a surfer, catching a few and getting wiped out in others as my strength gives out; my pre-labour thoughts of Macha, the horse goddess, running a marathon in childbirth, gone as I half roll on the bed baying like the cow goddess Boann.
Transferring to a hospital is as inconceivable as it is impossible in my current state in which all that exists is me riding an ocean of sensation.
Sometime, about half-way through the storm; Diarmuid drills a hook into the ceiling and hangs an extension cord from it that I could bear down on it.
Alien Cow Goddess
Eight hours of eternity passed like this. Me and Doubt and Faith and Baby and the rest of the Gang going up and down. Diarmuid keeps vigil on the periphery. The children sleep soundly next door.
Then there is birdsong and dawn light. Morning arrives but the baby does not. From the frontal cortex of my brain comes the thought (for I now occupy the recesses) occurs: ‘I don’t want the children to witness their mother as an alien cow goddess’.
The children wake and Diarmuid goes out to them. I stay in the room, baying through the surges and I hear Eiru start to cry at the strangeness of the sound.
My instinct says there is nothing wrong, but here I am again in a labour that is taking ages. Patience. Tenacity. Endurance. The words rise from my subconscious as guidance. But my frontal cortex says: ‘Diarmuid, It’s not progressing, we have to call someone.’ Something for him to do. He’s on it.
I emerge from the bedroom to reassure my daughter, my body a boiling ocean.
‘Mammy when I woke I thought there was a cow in the room,’ my son says. Amused, I feel the wave building inside me again. I hug my anxious daughter quickly, ‘Mammy’s good, baby will come soon;’ as the wave towers over and in me, about to break. I step out of her embrace and into the toilet, close the door, sit on the bowl in a sequence of seconds.
And the wave breaks.
Only this time, unlike the hundreds or thousands of other times throughout the night, the wave carries a little body in it and pushes it all the way down the birth canal.
‘Diarmuid’ I croak, with jubilation and anxiety and blood all mixed. And he is there. ‘Oh thank God, the head.’ And he calls out to our six-year-old: ‘Uisne, take your sister into the neighbours, I’ll come soon’.
‘Dig deep, one more push,’ he says, not knowing that I am being dug, I am being pushed. But I follow his instruction anyway, like a robot. And a big slippery child comes out. And we catch him between us.
There is blood; looks like a lot of blood. How much is too much? We don’t know. But seven drops of shepherd’s purse tincture under the tongue should be sufficient. Is he breathing? I suck mucous from his nose. Yes, he is. Oh, sweet slippery baby. Diarmuid tries to carry me to the couch, but the domesticated mammal bridles at the prospect of getting blood on the couch. So, I sit in a pool of blood on the floor. Looking every inch the warrior. Bruised and weeping, utterly spent and victorious.
We haven’t been out in public yet. We are resting. I am writing. We are content. I tend to his umbilical cord myself. I treat my hemorrhoids with frankincense and aloe vera and look at my cervix with a hand mirror and great fascination. I am my own healer, calling on fellow warriors for advice.
He has not been outside yet, felt the spring on his silken skin. But I will not rush him, I wish for his separation to be as gentle as possible.
Some authority that had been taken from me at Uisne’s birth by coercion, at Eiru’s birth by fate. It has been restored by this home birth; this freebirth.
Maternity Rights
I represent a growing number of Irish women who have an ‘alternative’ approach to health. My faith in modern medicine is limited to its functionality in diagnostics, bone setting and some emergency interventions. That’s it. I don’t believe it has any real role in solving chronic illness, which cancer would be, and I most certainly don’t think it has any role to play in 99% of births.
From this worldview then, giving birth at home is a ‘no-brainer’, except that it’s also a ‘no goer’, for many Irish women, who, either through age or some perceived health issue, (i.e. low iron, vegetarian diet or high blood sugar) or geographical reasons, do not have access to the very limited HSE home birth service.
In 2008, community (home birth) midwives were compelled to sign very restrictive memorandum of understanding with the health service. Midwives became obliged to transfer birthing women to the hospital in scenarios previously considered normal, such as heightened blood pressure or a delay in labour, or risk losing their licenses to practice.
The U.K.-based Private Midwives Ireland operate under a slightly less restrictive insurance requirements, but the cost of €6,500 to €10,000 precludes many women.
So, into the barbarous hospitals we go. Or not. Freebirth is our bright shining alternative.
The highly medicalised maternity model in Ireland is compelling Irish women to give birth unassisted by midwives at home. And though this may sound like a dangerous scenario to the uneducated; the experience has been both empowering and healing for a growing number of Irish women, many of whom are now sharing their stories on social media.
Instinctual Mammalian Brain
The physiological unfolding of birth requires that a woman relax completely in order to occupy the instinctual mammalian brain that governs the birthing process. Anything that draws her into the frontal cortex is discouraged in this non-intervention, best practice birthing model. Hospitals then, are exactly opposite to the optimal environment for a birthing mother. This reality has been recognized in many European countries such as the Netherlands, which has an extensive national home birth service and birthing centres.
Ideally, Irish mothers would be attended by experienced midwives who did not have to operate under such punitive criteria and the threat of losing their licences. But in the absence of this, giving birth at home under her own authority is one of the most liberating and empowering things a woman can do. Finally, I can testify to this.
Life contrives to give us what we need. In the decimation of our home birth service, there is an opportunity for us to step into the gap ourselves alone. The rewards are great and many. And perhaps if enough of us step into that breach, the country’s health care professionals will be compelled to answer the call for maternity reform and give us the support in our own homes that we deserve.
Follow Siobhán de Paor’s blog: http://insideoutpost.ie/
Dublin was the second city of the British Empire until end of the eighteenth century. After the Act of Union of 1801, however, many prosperous land owners departed the city and, indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century Belfast’s population was greater.
The former did, however, retain a residual aristocracy who formed the clientele for the few restaurants that emerged towards the century’s end; albeit, the absence, of a significant bourgeois class over the course of the twentieth century meant there was little demand for restaurants for those on middling incomes.
It was perhaps unfortunate for Irish gastronomy to have been colonised by the English who Voltaire described as being a nation of forty-two religions but only two sauces. Besides, Ireland was a poor country by European standards in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. The Great Famine was among the most devastating of its kind in human history. Culinary celebration was muted.
Nonetheless, numerous French chefs had already emigrated to Ireland to work in aristocratic households and gentlemen’s clubs by the time the first recognisable restaurant emerged in Dublin in 1861. The Café du Paris on Lincoln Place was intriguingly linked to a Turkish baths on the same premises. They advertised both dinners ‘a la carte and table d’hote; choicest wines and liqueurs of all kinds, [and] Ices.’
Jammet’s
Any history of Dublin restaurants lingers on the legendary Jammet’s which was founded by two brothers from the Pyrenne,s Michel and Francois Jammet in 1901. They purchased the Burlington Restaurant and Oyster Saloon on Andrew’s Street in 1901 and renamed it Jammet’s. Michel had been chef to the lord lieutenant so knew all about what appealed to the aristocracy whose descendents continued to patronise the establishment until its demise in 1967.
In 1908 Francois Jammet returned to Paris leaving his brother in sole charge until 1927 when he handed the reigns to his Belvedere educated son Louis. By that time it had moved to Nassau Street to the site of the Porterhouse Central.
One observer from the 1940s describes the interior of the restaurant: ‘the main dining room was pure French second Empire, with a lovely faded patina to the furniture, snow white linens, well cut crystal, monogrammed porcelain, gourmet sized silver-plated cutlery and gleaming decanters.’ It was the hangout for artists and the literary set such as W.B. Yeats, Michael MacLiommar and Dudley Edwards as well as wealthy professionals and men of commerce.
The family first lived in Queen’s Park, Monkstown but moved to the sixteenth century Kill Abbey in the 1940s where vegetables were grown for the restaurant. A 1928 article in Vogue describes Jammet’s as ‘one of Europe’s best restaurants … crowded with gourmets and wits, where the sole and the grouse was divine.’
It was during the years of the Second World War that Jammet’s really came into its own as the location for the ‘finest French cooking between the fall of France and the liberation of Paris.’ Like other Irish restaurants, Jammet’s managed to evade restrictive rationing and serve customers the fare they were accustomed to. According to one observer ‘American servicemen, cigar-chomping and in full uniform, were streaming across the neutral border to sample the fabulous food in the prodigious quantities available here.’
Red Bank
If Jammet’s was the location for Allied excess another long-established restaurant the Red Bank was the place of Axis intrigue. On April 22 1939 the German colony in Ireland celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler there. The Irish Times records: ‘A large portrait of Herr Hitler occupied special position in the special decorations. On either side of it were swastikas and every guest wore a swastika or Nazi party badges.’
Disturbingly in May 1940 as the Nazis Blitzkrieged through Europe, the ‘Irish Friends of Germany’ (aka the National Club) held a meeting in the restaurant that was attended by fifty people. George Griffin, veteran anti-Semite and ex Blueshirt, spoke on the subject of the ‘The Jewish Stranglehold on Ireland’. Griffin mentioned many Jews by name and went onto advocate that … we should never pass a Jew on the street without openly insulting him’.
The Unicorn
But Jewish émigrés were themselves involved in the restaurant trade and could dish out their own retribution. It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold but for Austrian Jews Erwin and Lisl Strunz from Vienna it could be salty too.
They escaped from Vienna in 1938 and purchased a premises on Merrion Row which they called the Unicorn. They bought it for a song as Irish people thought the premises was haunted after W.B. Yeats had supposedly conducted séances there.
Lisl would cook her mainly Austrian dishes while Erwin entertained at the front of house. He reminisced ‘during Christmas 1940 when all the lights had gone out over Europe I played my guitar in the restaurant and sang Christmas carols and folk songs in eight languages.
But not all comers were welcome. When Edouard Hempel and his acolytes from the German legation visited Erwin became apoplectic with rage. But he kept his wits about him and calmly took their orders. Before each plates was delivered he doused each one with enough salt to clear a frosty driveway. Hempel nearly choked and the whole table walked out and never returned.
After the war the Unicorn was sold to an Italian family the Sidoli’s and it brought exotic ingredients like pasta to its Dublin clientele. It also involved females chefs which was unusual for the male dominated profession in Dublin.
Another immigrant who came to Ireland to work in the restaurant trade was Zenon Geldof a Belgian citizen who set up a restaurant called Café Belge. His grandson Bob retained an ambition to feed the world.
Steeped in the haute cuisine tradition of Escoffier Jammet’s continued to prosper after the war when it was joined by other restaurants including The Russell.
Ireland’s first phD in the history of food, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire argues that on a per capita basis in the 1950s Ireland was the gastronomic capital of the British Isles. Although this may not have been that great an achievement as given the nadir that English food had reached by the 1950s. Elizabeth David wrote of her experience in one English restaurant of the time: ‘there was no excuse, none, for such unspeakably unpleasant meals as in that dining room were put in front of me. To my agonized homesickness for the sun and southern food was added an embattled rage that we should be asked – and should accept – the endurance of such cooking.’ Perhaps she should have visited Dublin.
All persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by, and entitled to, the benefit of laws publicly and prospectively promulgated and publicly administered in the courts.
Lord Bingham, ‘The Rule of Law‘, Sir David Williams Lecture, Cambridge, 2006.
I have written extensively about the whittling away of due process in Ireland. This is derived from Article 38 of the Constitution, which states: No person shall be tried on any criminal charge save in due course of law.
In 2017 Supreme Court Justice Gerard Hogan at least had the courage to argue that the Irish Courts have, in effect, failed to enforce due process, constitutional rights in Ireland for the past thirty years. ‘Moves’, he said, to reduce the scope of ‘the most fundamental constitutional safeguard of all‘ — the habeas corpus guarantee in Article 40.4.2 – ‘speaks volumes regarding the prevailing constitutional zeitgeist.’ That zeitgeist has only become more illiberal, especially with the advent of emergency powers in response to Covid-19.
Indeed, we have no equivalent to the UK’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 giving statutory protection to anyone suspected of a crime.
The particular violations of due process have been exposed in the J.C. Case (2015) where the Supreme Court – notwithstanding what was probably Adrian Hardiman’s most brilliant dissenting judgment – effectively allowed the police to characterise as an accident, what seems to have been a purposeful and deliberate breach of constitutional rights.
We have also witnessed the subordination of privacy rights to considerations of public order in the Dwyer Case on appeal to the Supreme Court. There, the Court simply sidestepped the State’s breaches of directly applicable EU data protection legislation, rendering privacy rights a dead duck.
But if these developments aren’t sinister enough, consider what is happening now for the liberty of the subject.
In Camera Proceedings
The term in camera in legal and juridical terms is about a hearing being held in private. It is a pragmatic feature of civil or industrial processes, such as patent violations or family law proceedings. It has various implications, including that the names and identities of the parties to the suit are kept out of the public gaze, and reporting restrictions are in place, including press coverage and conventional law reporting. A judgment could be published, and context made clear, but details may be kept out, redacted or anonymised.
The intra-jurisdictional consensus – a fundamental principle of international law – is that when a process or a piece of legislation or an executive decree is adjudicated without there being independent representation or scrutiny it is of dubious authority, as it has not been adequately challenged.
In camera proceedings can be a shortcut to secretive laws, which were even condemned by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt. Schmidt’s view is echoed in the minority report on the future of the Special Criminal Court.
So-called emergency powers have a nasty habit of becoming permanent, everywhere. In the face of opposition, however, the UK government repealed its controversial law, giving police the right to apprehend people suspected (hence ‘sus’) of ‘intent to commit an arrestable offence.’
Within Lord Bingham’s summary of the Rule of Law is the idea that the law ‘should be publicly administered in the courts.’ It is crucial for any democracy that all judgments become a matter of public record or, failing that, only partial elements are excluded, and then only by implication, after independent representations of counsel.
This is violated when in camera proceedings occur. Justice, as Bingham said, cannot be achieved behind closed doors.
The current Minister for Justice Helen McEntee TD has, nonetheless, obtained a High Court order from Justice Owens requiring telecommunications service providers to retain certain data – including user, traffic and location data – for a period of twelve months, for the purpose of safeguarding the security of the State.
The Communications (Retention of Data) (Amendment) Act 2022 came into operation on June 26, 2023. Under the terms of the Act, the Minister for Justice must have been satisfied that there exists a serious and genuine, present or foreseeable, threat to the security of the State.
She also, presumably, had regard to the necessity and proportionality of the retention of Schedule 2 data, and how this could potentially impact on the fundamental rights of citizens under the Constitution. Justice Owens was obviously persuaded by her arguments, which are not in the public domain, for reasons of state security; do you see where this is going?
It should also be noted that the Minister consulted with the Garda Commissioner prior to making the application. The Act was, in effect, a transposition of an EU Directive, but no scrutiny has been permitted. No independent counsel. No counterweight.
So what could this threat to the security of the state amount to? Minister McEntee also recently stated that Sinn Féin presents a threat to the criminal justice system because they timorously suggested adopting suggestions of the review group on the Special Criminal Court.
The Yam Case of 2020, which Geoffrey Robertson QC litigated before the ECHR under Article 6, clearly identified that even partial exclusion under the in camera rule and partial reportage invites scrutiny.
Thus, T.J. McIntyre from the Sutherland School of Law in UCD argued that Ireland’s new mass surveillance regime is ‘certain’ to be challenged in the European courts. He said the government’s decision to seek a High Court order was made ‘behind closed doors, without any consultation with the data protection commissioner, with civil society, or with the industry’ and, importantly with no detail provided on the supposed national security threat.
In a damning assessment he stated:
The 2022 Act has to be treated as of no legal value … You can’t have a measure that’s supposed to authorise mass surveillance of the entire population, and be the basis for criminal investigations and prosecutions for years to come, where its foundation is so uncertain. It’s grossly irresponsible to do that.
Special Justice
The Special Criminal Court is a three-judge criminal court, convened without a jury to avoid any potential intimidation of its members. It is enabled by the Offences Against the State Act, the first of which was published in 1939 to prosecute members of the IRA and declare any similar organisations unlawful. More recently, the Court has been used to deal with the deadly rise in gangland crime and organised criminal syndicates.
The legislation, and its Court, have been criticised by Amnesty International, the United Nations and the Irish Council of Civil Liberties over the last number of decades and at its inception by Mary Robinson.
Most of the recent review group concluded that the use of a non-jury court is ‘justified’ and that the court is needed to counter ‘a real risk to juror intimidations.’ However, the review added, contradictorily, that there is ‘an absence of concrete evidence’ on the nature and extent of the risk posed to jurors today. The review added that a non-jury court should only be used in ‘an exceptional case.’
One way that the review recommended this should be done is through abolishing ‘scheduled offences’ – where certain offences are automatically tried by a non-jury court – and placing the decision in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), which, it should be noted, is a political appointment.
As an additional safeguard, the majority review recommended the appointment of a judge to review whether the correct procedure has been followed by the DPP, and whether the decision had been made based on of the evidence heard in that case alone. This would mean, under the new Court, that the DPP would decide whether it is suitable that a citizen, who stands accused of a crime, be tried in a non-jury court based on the evidence in the case, regardless of the case’s threat to national security.
Accompanying the majority review, there is also a minority review which argues that the establishment of a permanent non-jury court is ‘constitutionally inappropriate’. The minority review said: ‘Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done, we are in danger in all sorts of way as Iseult O’Malley of the Irish Supreme Court said of becoming ‘overly habituated to the abnormal.’
Commenting on the recommendation to replace the SCC with a new Special Criminal Court Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said that the Special Criminal Court eliminates the very real risk to jurors and potential jurors posed by subversives and organised criminal groups. She said that the recommendation from the review group ‘requires serious consideration’ due to the importance of the Special Criminal Court and its place in the Irish judicial system.
‘Belief Evidence’
As well as non-jury trials, the SCC has special powers to accept ‘belief-evidence’. This allows the belief of a Garda Chief Superintendent that a person is a member of an illegal organisation to be used and accepted as evidence of that person’s membership. While the majority’s report recommends that new legislation be created to provide more regulation around the use of non-jury courts, they have deemed the continuation of belief-evidence ‘appropriate’.
While the report says that belief-evidence can continue to be used, it adds that someone must not be prosecuted ‘solely on the basis of that evidence.’ There needs to be corroboration. The minority simply notes that the UK police did not need belief evidence to prosecute and recommends its abolition.
Last month, Minister Simon Harris, who took over as Justice Minister while McEntee was on maternity leave, received approval to propose the resolutions to extend the legislation. A Government spokesperson said Harris considered that there remained ‘a real and persistent threat from terrorist activity, primarily from so-called ‘dissident’ republican paramilitary groups.’
Conclusion
We appear to be witnessing a serious regression in the Rule of Law in Ireland, where unspecified threats to the state are decided in camera, and an extension to the use of judges without jury with police belief evidence continuing to be accepted. All of this twenty-five years after the signature of the Good Friday Agreement which effectively ended the Troubles.
The colourful humourist and English poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) is the subject of Dominic Moseley’s Betjeman in Ireland (Somerville Press, 2023), which is lavishly illustrated with photographs.
Betjeman, who took his teddy bear, Alfie with him to Oxford in 1925 was the inspiration for the character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Posted to Dublin as press attaché in the British Embassy during World War II from early 1941 to autumn 1943, his love affair with Ireland had begun two decades earlier in Oxford. There he met, and had a unique affinity with, the remnants of the Irish Ascendancy in all their fading glory. Chief among them was Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford who lived in what is now, Tullynally Castle in Co. Westmeath. It was Pakenham who first brought Betjeman to Ireland in 1925.
An unapologetic social climber, Betjeman was the son of a furniture manufacturer from North London. Yet he was often ridiculed for his remorseless snobbery and his upwardly mobile pursuits. He finally enrolled in Magdalen College, Oxford after some difficulty in 1925, and it was in Oxford he met influential people such as C.S. Lewis and Maurice Bowra and Evelyn Waugh but also members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy who held a unique charm for him and with whom he formed a special bond. Indeed, his road to social success seems to have been through the back door of the Irish Ascendancy.
Betjeman nourished an abiding fascination with Ireland from his Oxford days, especially the Irish Aristocracy – the more eccentric the better. He declared his ‘particular’ fondness for ‘people who had gone to seed’.
Others in the roll call of Betjeman’s Irish friends were Lord Rosse of Birr Castle, Basil Ava of Clandeboy House, Co Down Northern Ireland. His life-long love affair with Ireland was cemented in 1951 when, aged forty-six, he met the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Cavendish of Lismore Castle, who became his lifelong mistress and muse, causing occasional, great misery to his aristocratic wife Penelope.
It was through such aristocrats that Betjeman got his first taste of Ireland and when he arrived in Dublin as press attaché in 1941, whereupon he immersed himself further into that circle. Described affectionately by Moseley as ‘an ambitious social alpinist’ who ‘dearly loved a lord and lady’ he shamelessly cultivated them. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the Irish upper crust bordered on sycophantic.
Moseley chronicles an awesome litany of love affairs, flirtations and dalliances indulged in by Betjeman. But this larger than life, affable, and energetic figure could still say, incredibly, in later life that the one regret he had was not ‘having had more sex.’
It was possibly because of Betjeman’s popularity among Ireland’s Ascendancy he was chosen as press attaché. He soon became an instant hit among the literati of the Palace Bar, on Fleet Street in Dublin. This helped fulfil his mission ‘to ameliorate the anti-Irish tone of British press and to dilute the anti-English sentiments of the Irish press.’
In the Palace Bar the influential editor of the Irish Times, RM Smyllie ‘held court’ among a wide audience. Betjeman charmed a formidable array of artists and writers such as Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Brinsley MacNamara, Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Terence de Vere White, Maurice Craig, Cyril Cusack and numerous others from the world of literature who also wielded a lot of influence.
He was no less popular among the artists he befriended such as, Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Sean O’Sullivan and numerous others. This group was ‘the locus of soft power’ in Ireland and once Betjeman was accepted and esteemed in this circle his success in Ireland was assured.
Ireland could easily have become a strong ally for Germany against Britain. Betjeman had ‘stepped into a historical minefield with little resources except his natural affability’. He certainly seems to have had a major diplomatic impact, and his friendship with the writer, Elizabeth Bowen – herself working for the British Ministry of Information and an on-off lover of Sean O’Faolain – was sure to have helped Betjeman.
It was Betjeman’s easy charm, wit and affability that made him a huge success in Ireland and his encounters with the Irish politicians of the day, including Éamon de Valera were very successful too: he had a sympathy with the problems posed by partition in the North, but this did not prevent the IRA classifying him, for a time, as a person of ‘menace’, although the plot to assassinated him was later dropped.
In 1942, he used his influence to get the English Horizon literary and artistic magazine to do an Irish number, featuring among others, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Patrick Kavanagh and Jack B Yeats.
What this entertaining page turner underscores is that John Betjeman was first and foremost a gifted poet who ‘celebrated every aspect of the idea of love’ and was especially ‘a poet of place whether it be the home counties, Oxford, Ireland or his beloved Cornwall.’
Unsurprisingly, he had a particular affinity with, and admiration for, Patrick Kavanagh where a sense of place is always foremost in the latter’s poems.
A major early influence was Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village.’ Betjeman’s passion for place, for architecture, for locations, for churches and old ruins saturates his poems and this is very much the case regarding his most celebrated Irish poem ‘Ireland With Emily’ where place fuses with his unrequited passion for Emily Hemphill of Tulira Castle in Galway (later to become Emily Villiers-Stuart of Dromana House, Waterford). It is one of his finest and most evocative poems about Ireland.
Betjeman’s passion for architecture flourished in Ireland too and his love of stately houses often outstripped his passion for their occupants, albeit he later wondered ‘how many linen sheets in the houses of Ireland received his lustful limbs.’ The combination of place with the erotic in his poems is described as a ‘potent brew’.
He waxed erotically about Furness House, Kildare, Shelton Abbey, Wicklow, Woodbrook House, Portarlington, Pakenham Hall, Westmeath and numerous others. Betjeman even learned the Irish language and frequently signed himself Sean O’Betjemán. His heart-rending Irish poem ‘A Lament for Moira McCavendish’ is another fine example of how place and love conflates in a way unique to Betjeman.
He might, as the author suggest, ‘have by his association with Elizabeth Cavendish, ascended to the highest rung’ socially but the portrait that emerges in this book is of a complex, flawed but likeable, warm human being with a large-hearted humanity and a unique generosity of spirit. It was that quality that made him the perfect diplomat in Ireland at the time.
A devout Anglican who feared the afterlife he emerges as the most loveable of ‘sinners’ in this book. His ‘Ballad of the Small Town in Ireland’ is likened to a Thomas Moore melody in which he celebrates the ordinary life of fair days, burned barracks, elegant squares, neglected graves, ruined churches and court houses.
Above all, Betjeman’s pre-eminence as a poet of merit is vigorously reclaimed in this study. The author notes how the ‘Modernism’ in poetry championed by T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings paved the way for an, often ‘graceless poetry devoid of scansion, rhyme, metre and original thought’.
As a traditionalist Betjeman is often dismissed as a ‘trite poet’ and, lamentably, does not feature today on school and college syllabi. None of this takes from the fact that his Collected Poems sold over two million copies and that when he died in 1984, he had been England’s poet laureate for twelve years, from 1972.
This book is not just an inspirational, charming and entertaining account of Beckett’s time in, and life-long love affair with, Ireland but it is a passionate command to restore him as a major poet of the English language.
Betjeman In Ireland by Dominic Moseley is published in paperback by Somerville Press and costs €15.