Cassandra Voices

Tag: ireland’s

  • Ireland’s Toxic Culture of Omertà

    Recently walking into a garage to pay for diesel, I scanned the news stand, as is my habit, to see if I had missed any of the day’s events. Something did catch my eye, and surprised me. A county Louth paper, the Drogheda Independent, had a headline about the Lourdes Hospital’s, disgraced surgeon Michael Shine.

    It seemed a group of his victims had come forward and the Taoiseach was considering a public enquiry. Such abusers leave deep scars that in many cases never truly heal, but he was enabled by the culture of that time. A toxic cowardly omertà still evident in Irish society.

    The reason the story caught my eye was that I was once a patient of Michael Shine. At the till, I reflected on that brief experience as a twelve-year-old.

    Much to my parent’s dismay, at age twelve, I was six foot tall, and had size twelve feet. My father was a fisherman, skipper and trawlerman in the Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Wherever the fishing was at, he was there. He had a wife and four children who would literally eat him out of house and home. The four children that is, not my mother, who is a saint.

    The height issue was not so bad. East German army coats – available from the now long-gone army surplus store in Dundalk, Jocks – tended to grow with you, but getting the size twelve footwear became problematic. Decent footwear in Ireland has always has been difficult to find and expensive. Even now if I want a decent pair of shoes, I have to go to Dublin for the size, range and quality.

    Cheap footwear is a false economy, but when you’re size twelve at twelve back in 1989, you have to occasionally hang on until all the other bills are paid, and rightly so. None of us ever starved, but purchasing size twelve shoes, on occasion, had to wait, and this wait unfortunately caused a small issue over time to arise: an ingrown toenail. It went on for a while and caused some pain, which resulted in a referral to the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. I can’t remember whether I was twelve or thirteen by that stage.

    Drogheda.

    Small Scar

    I do remember that it was corrected very effectively through a small surgical procedure. As I type, barefoot, I can still see the small scar Michale Shine cut in, removing the side of the nail and the infected area of my left toenail. But before he did so, I had a consultation with him.

    I was brought into a medical examination room, high up in the hospital, from where I could look out over the town. The room had a lot of windows, but was far too high up for anyone to see inside. I walked to the side of the examination table, and I think I heard him say something about my toe, so I took off my runners and socks and went to get up onto the medical examination table.

    His response was “no, no, your pants as well.” I was wearing jeans at the time. I did as I was told and found myself on the examination table sitting upright, looking out over the roof tops of Drogheda. Boxershorts had not entered my wardrobe at this stage of my life. I think the under garment I was wearing are referred to as slips – men’s underpants. So, from hip to toe, on both legs, I was bare skin.

    Shine placed his right hand on my upper left thigh, for my ingrown toe examination, tapped my thigh twice with his palm, smiled a shark’s smile and told me I was a “fine big boy”. Now DaVinci’s Vitruvian man measures a palm as the width of four fingers and I say it with no shame that Shine’s hand was just the width of another four fingers away from my cock. I should probably say penis, but it’s not a word I would ever use and in fact it’s a bit creepy to be honest.

    The memory or indeed the incident has not affected me. It might have added some uninvited flavouring to my psychological or sexual development as a confused teenager that I could have done without. But honestly it has not adversely affected me.

    I am lucky, very lucky in comparison to some. That was as far as his hand went. In fact, when he said it, I said nothing but stared over his shoulder at the only other man in the room, a junior doctor. It is the memory of the look on his face, that has stayed with me ever since.

    I have learned a lot about people over the years. One thing is about how people perceive fear. Experience has taught me that they feel it in one of two ways: fear for themselves or fear for others. It can be a fleeting moment, which you can correct, or it forms who you are for ever more.

    In my time with the Airport Police, I was fortunate enough to have been trained in behavioural detection. What I have learned about people, through many life experiences, allows me to honestly assess my memory of that junior doctor’s fear. It was only fear for himself. The nameless coward was mute, grey with fear and looked at me as if to say: please don’t say anything.

    The enablers who reside within and contribute to the toxic culture of an organisation or indeed society are sadly simply cowards. Many are not bad people; in fact, most are not, but their cowardliness contributes to the very problems they grumble about. Some in positions of supervision and management are dangerous cowards, as they misuse their limited power and will push you under the bus in a heartbeat to save themselves.

    I wonder how many boys were not as lucky as me, and actually said something? You can imagine the enablers, can’t you? Silencing the innocent to save themselves. I imagine that junior doctor would have seen nothing if I had said something.

    Perhaps you’re even one of them yourself, an enabler? It’s a disease in Irish society that needs to be challenged at every level. To target those who speak out, tell the truth and call it as it is, is an attack on your own safety and your own democratic right.

    https://cassandravoices.com/society-culture/a-whistleblowers-motive/

    False Rumours

    Sadly, enablers cannot see that and the coward in them likes to see the whistleblower get what he deserves, which reinforces their cowardliness. They may even spread a false rumour, like the DAA Airport Duty Manager who held court in the airport control room weeks after my departure, informing those present that I was in trouble for being a wistleblower. It is not the case; it was not the case.

    Or the Police Inspector who wanted me to facilitate and provide whatever training I could to a candidate for a position in the Airport Police Dog Unit, even before he had been interviewed. I might never have bothered pointing out how it might look to other officers, or how people would perceive that. I had wasted my time objecting, as the candidate still got the job. People like this all needlessly and carelessly damage our democratic society. We spend so much of our lives in a workplace; of course it is part of society. The values and culture we experience there permeates society.

    I can speak about these things as I declined DAA’s unfair dismissal offer of €4,800 in return for a non-disclosure agreement. An agreement that listed forty-two separate pieces of legislation that would have inhibited me from taking any further legal action against them. If they have done nothing wrong, why have forty-two pieces of legislation and a non-disclosure agreement? Evidently, I did not sign.

    The main evidence that I wanted was in a redacted report. The enablers’ legal team had the evidence statute barred. I wasn’t prepared to move forward without it.

    That legal interpretation, I will argue in the future, in employment law is a scam and one that the Workplace Relations Commission are failing to acknowledge as such. Perhaps because it makes their lives easier. The statute of limitations to take a case for unfair dismissal or penalisation in the workplace, under employment law, is six months. I would argue it is not six months for the admissibility of evidence of penalisation in the workplace. This is a legal scam that a weak Workplace Relations Commission are enabling! But don’t judge them too harshly.

    The enablers are alive and well in Irish society, just ask the victims of Michael Shine.

    Feature Image: Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda

  • Weighing up Ireland’s Hate Crime Law

    The new so-called Hate Crime Bill [Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022] in Ireland has generated quite a furore, including outright condemnation by Elon Musk, who described the measure as a “Massive attack on freedom of speech.”

    It has also been branded “insane” by Donald Trump Junior, which was used as a distorted form of justification for the law by Minister Simon Harris. However, criticism has also come from Paul Murphy of People Before Profit from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the Trump family. There has also been criticism from human rights bodies.

    The crucial provisions are Section 7 and Section 8.

    Protected Characteristics

    Section 7 is the mechanism by which offences against those of protected characteristics can be criminalised. At one level it is an admirable measure. Indeed, I have represented people with disabilities, who are one of the categories included.

    More controversially, transgenderism is one of the protected categories. It was surely not hate speech for the feminist author Germaine Greer to say that a man who becomes a woman can never really understand what it is to be a woman.

    In my view it was a serious violation of fair comment to no platform Greer for the comments – no matter whether one agrees with her ideas or not. To criminalise such a statement would be a return to the Dark Ages of the Papal Index.

    One hopes that a statement such as that made by Greer would be protected as legitimate political or cultural criticism, which are important delimiters and qualifiers contained in the Act, but the defence would arise only if the matter actually came to Court. The existence of a criminal charge might still be bandied about to damage the reputation of an individual or publisher. Malicious prosecutions are not unheard of in the Emerald Isle.

    Perhaps what really stoked the ire was Greer also stating “because he does not have a smelly vagina”. This brings us to the subject of ridicule. Ronald Dworkin wrote an article on the right to ridicule inspired by the Danish Cartoons incident.

    ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended….

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, enjoys a right not to be insulted or offended. Christopher Hitchens and the English judge Stephan Sedley have also remarked that any freedom to speak inoffensively is worthless.

    In more carefree times, political opponents Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley came together as pundits at the behest of a failing network for the 1968 Democratic and Republican Party Conventions. This has recently been documented in a film called ‘Best of Enemies’, which is now a West End play by the same name.

    William F. Buckley was the archangel of neo-conservatism, while Gore Vidal was an embodiment of what now seems an excessive liberalism. They deliberated on a state of siege, with riots in Chicago and democratic legitimation in question. America, along with the rest of the world, was on the brink, just like today.

    The debate famously culminated after the Republican Convention nominating Richard Nixon, who now seems a more sympathetic figure when compared to what followed him. Indeed, Nixon’s statement in 1969 that government has a great role to play in health care, ‘but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the federal government,’ is perhaps an idea that still has some merit; especially when one considers the damage of the top-down, dictatorial approach taken by many governments in response to Covid-19.

    In front of a live TV audience of millions, Buckley vented an anger, which he later regretted, calling Vidal ‘a queer’; in response to Vidal describing Buckley as a crypto-Nazi.

    Hate Speech

    Let’s consider both comments in the light of the current Irish legislation, Section 7 and Section 8 in particular. Buckley’s comment is arguably hate speech directed against a protected characteristic, i.e. gay people, although a term that was originally meant as an insult has since been appropriated by the gay community as almost a badge of honour, in a way similar to the artistic licence taken with the “n-word” among African-American (or Black?) communities. Can offensive terms be used by those with a protected characteristic?

    Moreover, in a 1974 essay for the New York Review of Books ‘Fascinating Fascism’ on Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag wondered how it had come about that ‘a regime which persecuted homosexuals [had] become a gay turn-on?’ Under the current legislation would it be a crime to suggest that the Nazi (anti-)aesthetic could be ‘a turn on’ to a gay person?

    A latter-day Gore Vidal might also be prosecuted for branding a right-wing Republican such as Buckley a crypto-Nazi, as Section 8 criminalises grossly trivialising genocide, crimes against humanity and peace.

    Crucially Section 11 of the act allows for a defence of criticism with respect to protected characteristics. But this does not apply, remarkably, to crimes against humanity under Section 8. To this we now turn.

    The language of Section 8 which criminalises inter alia crimes against humanity may be desirable in principle, although the overly broad language sets off alarm bells.

    Arguably, condoning or negating such crimes ought to be a criminal offence. Imagine being an Armenian and having to listen to Turkish propaganda justifying what is considered the first orchestrated attempt to eliminate a national group in the twentieth century?

    But this may easily become a legitimate subject for debate, such as exploring whether the Malthusian policies of the British Crown in Ireland during the Famine of 1845-51 should be described as a genocide.

    Also, who decides whether a genocide has taken place, a body of historians, or a court of law? Do we need to allow the fog of war to dissipate before any such adjudications with criminal ramifications are determined?

    Could it now be an offence to claim that Putin’s war in the Ukraine is really about Great Powers competing for resources rather than an attempt to eliminate Ukrainian national identity? By assessing the attendant brutality of the war in terms of Great Power politics, would a publisher or individual then be “trivialising” a crime against humanity.

    A measured denial of genocide – such as claims that the ICC’s Putin arrest warrant was based on State Department funded report that debunked itself – is completely different to an ahistorical assessment of a wide range of primary sources. The crucial issue here is adherence to the facts. It must be open for historians, journalists and lawyers to scrutinise questionable narratives around controversial events, such as the Kennedy Assassination. A distinction perhaps is that crimes against humanity are generally on a scale such as to make them undeniable.

    Criminalising that which grossly trivialises crimes against humanity is far too opaque and subjective a ground for a prosecution. The Act ought to be challenged under Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution: ‘The right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions.’

    An Article 26 Reference (by the President to the Supreme Court required within seven days of his receiving it) poses the risk however that if is unsuccessful there will be no further opportunity challenge any aspect of it in an Irish court.

    Ecocide and Economicide

    There may, however, be certain unintended consequences of the Act that could be used to advance progressive causes.

    In international law there are established candidates which are part of customary international law so called lex lata (established principles of customary international law), and more speculative controversial candidates over which there is an increasing lack of consensus, called in international law terms de lega ferenda (not yet firmly established).

    Thus, for example, one potential crime against humanity supported from the 1970’s proposed by Richard A. Falk is ecocide or crimes against the environment. Since such a crime involves various forms of intent and can include a conspiracy, it would involve at least the meeting of minds of the major oil and gas companies, and those who profit from them, including legislators.

    There is also a potential new crime against humanity for which there is less authority to date of economicide. Perhaps all of those who peddle a neoliberal world view, or support vulture or cuckoo fund, or allowed wealth to be siphoned off by Big Pharma during Covid-19 could and should be prosecuted!

    It could be said that the lifting of the eviction ban by the government is a form of economicide, as it is indirectly fuelling far-right wing extremism, led by gangsters attacking people with baseball bats. Thus, arguably, government policies, or the lack thereof, have indirectly generated racial hatred, and racism (speech directed against a protected characteristic) is criminalised by the Act.

    The framing of the innocent is also a de ledge ferenda candidate as a crime against humanity. One might argue that the Garda and/or the Department of Justice have condoned or been in denial of this.

    European Convention

    The Act is also likely to be challenged, and is subject to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Irish courts are bound, but rarely properly observe the Charter, despite the interpretative obligation. In reality we follow the ECHR selectively, ignoring it if it is too awkward, as in the nefarious Dwyer case.

    In a number of cases such as Jersild v Denmark (1994) and Lingens v Austria (1986) the ECHR have indicated under Article 10 of the Convention that speech encompasses a right to outrage and shock. These are deemed hallmarks of pluralism, tolerance and broad-mindedness in a society.

    Not everything is permitted. Thus, Holocaust denial or racist speech are excluded from protection, but the parameters are wide and restricted categories do not go quite as far as this Act.

    The crucial case of Lehideux and Isorni v France (1998) is particularly instructive. Here Le Monde newspaper were protected under Article 10 of the Convention for publishing an article celebrating the career of Marshall Pétain, the Vichy French leader who collaborated with the Nazis. The content was not set out in a way to negate or revise clearly established facts.

    It should also be noted that no action of publication or broadcast of hateful material is required, bringing us into the territory of thought crimes. The much-trumpeted defence of legitimate artistic and political criticism only applies to possession of such material.

    Considering the imposition of close to absolute liability for the distribution of so-called offensive material on the internet, and even a reversal of the burden of proof, it is no wonder Elton Musk is concerned. He may be put out of business!

    Moreover, the term ‘may be prosecuted’ is very loose statutory language. On whose behest?

    Stress Test

    Let us stress test the crucial sections of the Act against potential scenarios.

    1. Stating that Leo Varadkar is like Verruca Salz from Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a spoilt privileged brat, and a wart on the body politic offence falls short of being a criminal offence on a literal interpretation of the Act. But what if one called him a crypto-Nazi or inferred that Nazism could be a turn-on to him? Would that be grossly trivialising crimes against humanity or demeaning to a protected category? Crucially, the defence of political criticism is unavailable for crimes against humanity.
    2. Adrian Hardiman, our finest judge since Declan Costello, once addressed my King’s Inn class to defend his decision in the Portmanock Golf Club case (2009) where he sanctioned the barring of women members from the club, much to the distress of the Equality Authority, which had taken the case. He then argued that a lesbian rugby club should not be obliged to accept him as a member given he was not a lesbian and couldn’t play rugby. These comments by a Supreme Court judge were in a public place. We may have to shut down, or sanitise beyond recognition, the hallowed debating societies of Ireland in response to this Act.
    3. Is Michael O’ Leary the Chairman of Ryanair in his denial of man-made climate change grossly trivialising the crime against humanity that is ecocide? Or what if one were to say that supposed climate change activists including the IMF and Bill Gates are themselves guilty of crimes against humanity for condoning Malthusian practices, rather than focusing on regulating the extractive corporations devouring the planet?

    Book Collector

    I have been a book collector of first editions since I was sixteen. One book in my collection is a first edition of Vladimir Nabokov Lolita, (1959) which narrates in baroque language an affair between a middle-aged man and an under-age girl. I also possess a first edition of the notorious fascist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night (1932). In possessing works that seemingly supports crimes against humanity, and another that undermines protected characteristics am I guilty of an offence?

    Even if I am not prosecuted, does the very existence of such an offence generate opprobrium towards great literature?

    One fears that even the great Dostoevsky’s books may soon be de-platformed if any of these are deemed a “Kremlin-favoured work.”

    Simon Harris has suggested that there is no conspiracy, or campaign being orchestrated against free speech in response to condemnation. The jury is still decidedly out on that question. Perhaps what we see at work is a coalition of interests, or a just a confederacy of dunces.

    A chill wind blows. Slow train coming and more acts to follow.

  • Literature: Ireland’s Last Minotaur

    In Ireland, North and South, the Arts Sector, currently, is a sinecure. Those middle-class mentalities which dominate, and, indeed, hold most high profile positions, would argue vehemently against such – as they would see it – an offensive statement, but nevertheless I believe it to be a fair characterisation.

    ‘Stephen says bitterly, “It is the symbol of Irish Art. The cracked lookingglass of the servant.” This was Stephen Dedalus’s view in Joyce’s modernist magnum opus, Ulysses, and we find this idiom pre-settling into an ‘independent’ Republic as a statement on colonial subjugation, and a lack of confidence in the national character. And since that imperial rule withdrew, neoliberal, self-serving attitudes, have moved – and settled – in as they have done across the Western World.

    With the arrival of mass market production, relentless advertising and consumerism, which took over Irish sensibilities around twenty years ago, Ireland became no different to elsewhere.

    Up to €7 for a pint of ‘Stout’ in Temple Bar?! Dublin rents going through the roof, past the cloud-clapped ivory towers and beyond into the dazzling astral heights, for pure unadulterated profit. This is an Ireland I do not care to recognise anymore. Everything, including morality, is up for sale.

    With the internet, one can purchase the ‘lookingglass’ and have it in your hand the next day if one so wishes; but it will, inevitably, end up being tossed away, into landfill, soon thereafter. We live in ephemeral ‘throwaway’ times. Qualities like validity, truth and morality are diminished – and indeed ‘blend’ into ‘fiction-meets-truth’ in an Orwellian-era of ‘fake news’, outright lies and endless spin.

    Ireland enjoys intellects but only if they are not overtly clever, and don’t create a sense of inferiority. Does the cracked lookingglass serve as a basis for the national character or identity?

    Indoctrination and Subjugation

    A deep resonance of shame bubbles up from oppressiveness, whether it is indoctrination through the Catholic Church and a State which could not separate the two; and, in the wake of centuries of Viking, Norman, and indeed Anglo-Saxon, subjugation a deep hurt has not even been addressed. The need for a healing process in the collective psyche has not been considered by the remote heads of the post-modernist, mildly liberal, and increasingly secularised state.

    Ireland was banished, but she was not razed and buried; she would return. And return she did onto her fertile isle, on the edge of Western Europe – the land of milk and honey, so rich in potential and verdant imagination.

    It is true: I am in love with Ireland as landscape; and the mythical potency brings to mind an unconforming otherness – which espouses freedoms that rouse the romantic variant in a wanderer.

    There is, however, now the prescient, palpitating and unresolved issue of the published writer: the ego, which conflates on the surface area of their proposed brilliance, leading to the belief that they, and their literary output, rival, and even surpasses the authors of literary Classics. In effect, canonising their own brand – this is where we are.

    Let me add, that the Western World’s Canonical Works are up there for a reason, they are regarded as ‘the Classics’ and should be read and championed as such. A ‘Classic’ can be considered a strongly composed noteworthy book.

    Among the writers who are generally considered the most important in Western literature are: Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Horace, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Molière, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Walt Whitman, Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett.

    First Usage

    The first writer to use the term ‘classic’ was Aulus Gellius, a second century AD Roman writer who, in the miscellany Noctes Atticae (19, 8, 15), refers to a writer as a classicus scriptor, non proletarius (‘A distinguished, not a commonplace writer’). Such classification began with the Greeks’ ranking their cultural works, with the word canon (‘carpenter’s rule’).

    Moreover, early Christian Church Fathers used canon to rank the authoritative texts of the New Testament, preserving them, given the expense of vellum and papyrus and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being placed in a canon ensured a book’s preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization.

    Contemporarily, the Western canon defines the best of Western culture. In the ancient world, at the Alexandrian Library, scholars coined the Greek term Hoi enkrithentes (‘the admitted’, ‘the included’) to identify the writers in the canon.

    If you are a writer with a couple of books in print, and if you deride these works because you are so high upon your stamping, nose-blustering, mighty charger, due to being published, I am sorry, but this is out-and-out naïveté. It is emotional, inferior narcissism and ego-led savagery and in its way, denigrates the reputations of great writers of the past and their output.

    Recently, reading an interview in which a writer stated that they did not, or could not, raise a little interest towards Jack Kerouac’s Beat Classic, On the Road, equating the experience with hitting one’s head ‘with a plastic spoon.’ – a petulant and unworthy response.

    Infantilised Youth Culture

    Infantilization of culturally accepted ‘norms’ through Happy Meals’ language, ‘LOLs’, and other solipsistic accepted ‘bant’ has led us down this cul-de-sac. Snowflake is used as a pejorative term. Other ‘trendy’ Smartphone-induced abbreviated terms such as ‘Merch’ and ‘Bae’: are now the common argot of an infantilised youth culture that permeates mainstream discourse.

    Any perceived ‘criticism’ of these so called ‘established writers’ i.e., a writer who has a recent published book on the shelves, is meted out with condemnations and calls the gallows! In this solidarity, an insidious, irrational, emotionally-charged cabal is missing the point.

    The media in Ireland love to promote long established writers and their works, but they routinely forget the Garret-based writers who slog bravely away by a figurative candle over their ‘Art’.

    Please, fellow scribes, do not ‘Drown’ your ‘book’ like Prospero. Do not become disheartened because you are not alone. Your magic is your own and do not let it die because of the success of mediocre fare, which publishing houses choose to release.

    Irish publishers, like UK publishers, and American publishers, are greedy for a quick return on profit and this mantra only serves their deity, the golden calf of money. Forget this wide-eyed, commandeering for a few hedonisms, and continue on.

    Yeatsian Revival

    Simply because Ireland has a vibrant literary-cultural inheritance – which came to the fore especially during the Yeatsian Irish Literary Revival from the turn of the twentieth century – should not, ergo, give prominence to literary reputations simply on the assumption they are part of a great tradition. Extreme reverence is the death-knell of strongly composed literature, which is kept in its primordial place for lack of oxygen, dragging itself off to the literary hinterlands, to peer through fissures of granite rock – redundant.

    There are simply too many Creative Writing Courses being run in universities, which gladly take a student’s money – assuming they pay it up front and often – in order to place their ego on a pedestal; but the massive issue with this kind of fawning is that it misses the whole point of literature, which is to enjoy the simple immersive experience of reading something new, fresh, challenging that sets you upon the unknown territories of an adventure, knapsack in tow.

    In Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come, the main protagonist, ‘Gar’ Gareth O’Donnell, has a public and private self, played by two actors. The mimetic structures of the ego, in the Irish Literary Art’s Scene(s) do not allow for any logical critique – this kind of thought is placed in emotional narcissism, firmly rooted in insecurity: the public image of oneself in a position of power and the private self behind pulled chintz curtains. Seemingly, the paradoxical self is difficult for the Irish mentality to examine closely.

    The Commentariat

    Who are the Irish commentariat on which these assertions are based? One does not have to look too far: remember when Roddy Doyle, a decent Dublin novelist, took a few naïve swipes at Joyce’s masterpiece:

    ‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Doyle told a stunned audience in New York gathered to celebrate the great man who is credited with inventing the modern novel.

    ‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’

    ‘I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time,’ he added. ‘Dubliners was Joyce’s best work, but Ulysses was undeserving of reverence.”

    According to Richard Ellmann’s biography Joyce was once described as ‘A corner boy who spits in the Liffey.’ Jealously appears to lie behind denunciations such as Roddy Doyle’s.

    Working Class Writers

    The reality is that many aspiring Irish novelist are forced into work that prevents them from writing: no one doubts this, but many working class writers are living on the breadline; the cultural establishment response: ‘Ah, he’s grand’ desensitizes them to this struggle.

    They may console themselves, ‘Sure, he was rejected thirty-seven times.’ Well, Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected over a hundred times – so statistics have little relevance, especially considering a lot of agents don’t know their furnished onions from their hot potatoes? The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, died in abject poverty. Those who seek justification in ‘statistics’ lack in the cold reasoning of logic.

    The effete North – once a fertile ground for freedom of expression, and in around the harrowed fields of poetry, has been conquered by a small literary clique, who look out from their parapets, pouring scorn on anyone who dares to have the tenacity to write ‘good’ work – work which they see as threatening to their output.

    A few diminutive literary-based, artsy, types run pop-ups and suchlike, now and again, as an alternative to the mainstream, but some, most, fall like a bright star into the slopping wetness of the Lagan, or the Foyle, only to have their inner-core frazzled and inevitably extinguished – another avenue burnt-out.

    There will be those who will be quick to trot out, on horseback, with lances aloft, with ‘Ah, sure he has a chip on his shoulder,’ and other negative, quick-to-judge, comments. My riposte to this is: yes, I do have a chip, or rather the plural, ‘chips’, one on each shoulder, which helps balance me out. They will use the term ‘bitterness’, but ‘frustration’ is more apt. Ingratitude will be another conceited proclamation.

    Also, the Halo-Effect: this being the over-promotion of well-established writers, with no love left for the outsider, unknown writer. Ireland’s cultural media embargo on new and fresh writing is wan to say the least; anytime an important event comes along they wheel out figureheads. Michael Longley’s poem, ‘Ceasefire’ is often wheeled out upon a gurney; again to be speculated upon; again in times of conflict; but I can safely say Ulster Unionism, which Longley would identify himself with, would never get down upon their knees to kiss anyone’s hand except their aristocratic, they believe, betters.

    Ireland’s media has an infatuation with their well-established poets – poets who have been hanging around for thirty years –  waiting for them to come on stage to deliver homilies of breathy, dramatic words. A false panacea for ongoing violent times.

    The cult of literary reverence and priesthood in the Irish poetry scene is archaic, embarrassing, and non-progressive, and equates to the mystical sorcery in a Harry Potter inspired world of fakery. The ‘everyone wants to be famous’ and well-regarded, and thought highly of as a ‘writer’ is a trope which has simply gone too far.

    It is fine to have dreams and aspirations, but one has to put the hard work, through falling, in failure, by rejection, after derision, and in managing jealousy. One only has to look at the work which is coming out of university produced magazines to see this. Recently, I read a short story in an Irish newspaper, online edition, and I despaired. What I see is diaphanous clichéd fare time and time again.

    Given Up

    Not so long ago, I conversed with a very fine, and clever, female Irish poet who is not well known in Ireland. She told me that she has given up trying to have her work published in any Irish Arts-led magazines as her work is continually rejected.

    I have read her work, it is good, and all that I can summarise is that some of these Arts folk do not know what they are doing, but, or rather, what they really are doing is selecting the work of their chums and, indeed, the work of themselves, for publication.

    These are magazines which are supposed to have a fair-handed, even democratic, selection process for work which is submitted from the four tent-pegged corners of the island of Ireland. Nepotism is rife in the Irish Arts scene. If you are a friend of a friend, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, then you are ‘A-Okay, pal…I will get you published,’ literary merit notwithstanding.

    There are of course exceptions, with real talents. Colm Tóbín is up there with the alive Irish intelligentsia, as is John Banville, both are true novelists in the sense of sitting down to read, to learn, then to write their own work, in conformity with the traditional literary model, and they should be applauded for their due diligence. They have hauled long nets and reeled in empty lines for their patience and perseverance to their Art, to pay off in the end.

    What is to be done?

    Easy – read more books. Read the Classics. A good novel will lead you to a wood at dusk, whereupon you will find a finely woven thread of golden-silk, and, as night falls, slowly traverse the wood and feel, along with the golden-thread, a growing self-belief. That is the power of strong writing. Do not shy away from challenging yourself with any prejudicial assumptions around what a reading experience is, should, or could, be.

    Feature Image: Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) Studio Party (Soirée).