Cassandra Voices

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  • Bullying: It’s You, Not Me

    Bullies can take many shapes, forms, and disguises. It seems a daily occurrence that can be defined as repeated behaviours that are intentional or have malicious intent to cause fear or to instil feelings of superiority in the bully, while also causing anxiety and hopelessness in the victim, due to the bully’s relentless behaviour.

    Northern Ireland, where I grew up, is a hotspot for bullying. It seems to thrive in an environment where tribalistic differences are constantly debated, leading to hostility, sectarian violence, hatred, and ultimately, often, murder.

    When I was a boy, from about the age of six for a few years I was indeed a bully myself. I should add that I have been bullied many times.

    Anyway, I bullied a girl at primary school who had an eating disorder. She used to make large bubbles with her mouth because her stomach was troubled. I mocked her over it, because I was a damaged child and did not know any better. She was thin, wore glasses, and I was a pig-ignorant, angry little boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. It was as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, adults used to say about me once they realised, I was a bully without an emotional processor.

    But I could not understand what I was doing due to poor emotional regulation and underdeveloped emotional skills. One thing was certain: I was damaged.

    I come from a broken home and a troubled, all-encompassing background where violence was often inflicted by a parent or guardian. They were young themselves and did not know any better.

    I was constantly on the defensive. And I remained so for decades. Fight or flight with pounding anxiety, cortisol coursing through my system.

    It is a difficult paradigm to break – the cycle of aggressor abuse and the inflicted aggressions, both verbal and physical.

    I was aggressive and used to demand that other school kids bring in a football to school until two much tougher brothers roughed me up out the front of the school on the grass one afternoon. And the bullied girl’s mother accosted me at the school gates, calling me out, rightly so, but I did not know any better. My bullying was reactive without conscious thought. My prefrontal cortex was not developed. Anyway, that was the end of my primary school bullying career.

    Cottonbro Studio

    Bullying in Adulthood

    There is always an opportunity to make money, poke fun at someone, or treat someone like a lesser human being; and here’s the thing: people definitely do, and try to do it, daily.

    I have watched several TEDx Talks on bullying and other YouTube videos on the topic. There seem to be two types of bullying: implicit and explicit.

    It’s a complex human behaviour to gauge on the social barometer. That is, many people are involved in these actions. It is part of us. Indeed, one wonders which circle of Dante’s Hell houses bullies and what they have awaiting there.

    Is it a deliberate choice or a visceral response to something in their psyche? Sometimes, individuals with damaged self-esteem find it challenging to know how to repair themselves. They have become so deeply traumatised that they cling to what they know, or rather, have become.

    There is the Dark Triad of Personality: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and, in a pitiful corner, Psychopathy, which is quite common in Northern Ireland if you ask me.

    In Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, he posits that some individuals employ mind games and manipulate others’ emotions to achieve their goals.

    In my teens, a bigger mate bullied me because of his size and skill as a fighter. Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

    A few years ago, he emailed to ask how I was and say that he missed me, or something to that effect. I replied telling him that he had bullied me, and I had dark thoughts about getting revenge on my bullies.

    He emailed back, saying he didn’t believe it, that he, it, the bullying ‘was that bad.’ But he was – he was a bully. He is probably still in denial.

    In some ways, he was a rather unusual character. I believe he was bisexual and concealed it, using aggression as a coping mechanism. He also tried to project an image of being a tough man.

    In Northern Ireland, the projected image of ‘don’t mess with me sunshine’ is all. The knuckle-dragging image of the hard man, the person feared and respected for his reputation as a fighter, is deeply ingrained in the collective, broken Northern Irish psyche.

    Loudmouth

    When I turned eighteen, I was quite the loudmouth, and a young, tough bloke at a local disco bullied me.

    One night, he was waiting outside the disco, itching for a fight, slouched against the wall under the arch of the local hotel. I was walking alone, leaving the disco, and he decided to pick a fight with me. He approached and swung a big, balled-up fist. I took it without ducking, as I was intoxicated – as usual – and he clocked me. Since I was skinnier and therefore fair game, it was on for him.

    He thumped me, and I staggered away. Afterwards, I sat on a low stone wall, and I think I had a bloodied nose – I cannot quite recall, but I do remember putting my jeans in the bath with warm water and salt, which drew the blood out of them.

    On another occasion, I was a bundle of nerves due to anxiety, excessive drug use, and simply not being well. I suffered from cannabis-induced psychosis and alcoholism. When he came over and threatened me I soiled myself. I sat there in the front seat of my mate’s car, let it happen, and wetted my trousers. I didn’t show anything to my friends inside the car, but that’s what occurred. The bully left after realising I wasn’t taking the bait or accepting the challenge of a fight. I was very skinny then, not eating properly, and most likely he would have beaten me to a pulp.

    Years later, I wanted to attack this individual. Full of rage, I was letting him dominate me in a way. I often thought of killing him. Decades of pent-up rage came to the fore in my psyche, and I was not going to lie down and take it anymore. The fact is that he was an ignorant halfwit and would have had little insight into his behaviour.

    Then there was the self-proclaimed ‘Christian’ in a homeless hostel in Belfast. A ‘Baptist’, ‘turn the other cheek?’ They were full of shite. He was, and probably still is, a narcissist who ‘knew better’ than the rest. He bullied me, well, it was institutional abuse, while I was resident in a homeless hostel. He became insanely jealous of the friendly relationship I had with one of the female staff. Getting through that situation over a year severely tested me because I had finally a bit of strength about me then, and I wanted to test that out.

    After that there was bullying, from a verbally abusive, ‘celebrity’ chef, who I worked for. He called me ‘a useless bastard.’ because I didn’t dress a plate of raw salmon to his standard. I informed him that I would not talk to a dog the way he talked to his staff, and I walked away not to return. He was well known as a bully. One day, allegedly, he grabbed one of his smaller trainees by the neck and pinned him up against a fridge. Needless to say, he doesn’t come across as a bully on the television or radio.

    Image: Pietro Lang

    Owning up to my own Failings

    I intentionally bullied a rather large, but chilled out guy with whom I shared a house as he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. He would not lift a finger to keeping the house in shape. He lay in bed all day nursing a hangover, something I had plenty of experience with.

    He was angry with me, but I later apologised and explained I only tried to motivate him when he lay in bed all day. Once I pulled him and his mattress off his bed and took him downstairs, as it was a lovely day outside, and he was lamenting his life while suffering from a hangover. This was his, or rather our norm.

    One day, I made a loud noise behind him in the kitchen, as he didn’t know I was there, which startled him while making a sandwich. He held a steak knife in his hand, turned around, and said: ‘Just you wait, Burnsy. One day I will get you.’

    Bullying also occurs in relationships. They must always be right. They will gaslight you into believing that you are the problem. They play the victim and are rather good at emotional manipulation. They cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They call the shots, hold the power, and you must bend to their ways.

    I have been gaslight into believing that I was always the problem. Playing the victim is a form of emotional manipulation. Some cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They must call the shots. Bullies rarely change. I work on it.

    Yet, sometimes you have to act aggressively when no other option is working.  Once, back home, a letting agency with questionable ethics, known for rather shoddy practices, failed to answer my calls, refusing to return a deposit of £527.00 owed to me. They dragged their heels and told me one date and then another, and wouldn’t pay.

    The owner has been done for fraud multiple times. It seemed as if the ‘management’ were trying to rip me off for the sheer fun of it. So, I went to their office and told them they had ten minutes to pay me, or I would have to get a bit rough. I got my money back within an hour or so.

    Robert Greene

    Robert Greene on Bullies

    Robert Greene, in his book The 48 Laws of Power, doesn’t explicitly discuss bullying as a primary topic, but he does address behaviours and tactics that are often associated with bullying, particularly in the context of power dynamics and social interactions. He highlights how insecurity and a desire for control can motivate individuals to engage in manipulative and aggressive behaviours towards others.’

    I do not stand for bullying nowadays. Although I wonder whether challenging or confronting a bully is really only a Pyrrhic victory? Or perhaps it’s a way to square the circle of your own trauma. I will leave it the reader to decide. I wrote this piece to confront my own mistakes and bullying behaviours to help build clarity and humility in myself, from now on.

    Feature Image: Mikhail Nilov

  • It’s All Academic: Bad Ideas Bloom

    A few years ago, I had occasion to walk regularly past the university in Galway. My journeys took me across the Salmon Weir Bridge, which had narrow footpaths and has since been relieved by a new footbridge, and up past the cathedral and the university. Often, I found myself walking against the current of students coming from the university. The various encounters along the way were sometimes surprisingly hostile. Many of the students seemed fired up with startling aggressive intent. Their demeanour reminded me of us as kids pouring out of the cinemas having watched a Bruce Lee movie, flexing fledgling muscles, feeling ready to take on the world.

    Naturally, I wondered: is it just me or is this a thing? On one occasion, when a young black woman glared at me on sight, for no apparent reason, a paraphrase of Ali G’s line popped into my mind, “Is it cuz I’s white?” That made me smile, for a while anyway, until I realized there was likely more than a grain of truth in it.

    I had attended that university as a mature student, took an arts degree, majored in English and sociology/politics (soc ‘n’ pol) and I do recall feeling similarly fired up at the time about the injustices of capitalism and so on, leaving me inclined to glower at men in suits. Was I now the man in the suit?

    I read up on what was being disseminated in the universities that was causing students in England and across the West to tear down statues and demand reparations for slavery, among other outraged activities. Back in the 70s and 80s, this same type of young person would be forming bands or theatre troupes, annoying no one, but neighbours and critics. What has changed?

    Pilgrims Going to Church by George Henry Boughton (1867).

    The New Puritans

    I came across a very helpful book by Andrew Doyle called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which pretty much laid out the entire state of play: woke ideology filling the place that religion used to occupy and becoming a pseudo-religion itself.  It seemed that I, as a “white hetero male with colonialist tendencies,” as a student might put it, was actually the new framed culprit for everything wrong with the world. A kind of latter-day elder of Zion, guilty of everything, with an innate desire to colonise as a result of an innate desire for violent expression and appropriation. In a word, I’m “bad”, and not in a good way, as in rapper “cool”. And not even salvageable. To put it religiously, I’m beyond redemption.

    This idea of the “white hetero male”, as being “violent” likely stemmed from a confusion of terms, where male competitiveness was equated with “aggression”, which then brought the word “violent” into the word family, to be used for effect in argumentative debate, because everyone responds to scare stories and everyone loves a villain to make themselves look “good” in comparison. And what is a lecture after all but a kind of performance, the students filling the lecture theatres of the western world being the audiences. From this perspective the idea of the violent white male is a kind of pulp fiction, designed to thrill, while giving the freshers something to shoot at.

    But as philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris puts it, there usually aren’t that many bad people around at any one time. Maybe only 1% or so of people are psychopaths and sadists in any one historical moment. More often there are bad ideas that good people act upon with good intentions and usually disastrous consequences.

    And it seems from what I’ve learned from Doyle’s book and other sources, that Western universities have been disseminating some very bad ideas for a long while now, among them the idea that all white men are innately violent and all their works corrupt and deserving of destruction. But they don’t call it “destruction”. They call it “dismantling”. Meaning, I suppose, polite destruction.

    “No, Marie Antoinette, we’re not chopping off your head, silly girl, we’re simply dismantling you.”

    Then as if things weren’t complicated enough, meaning itself is regarded as a “construction” to facilitate patriarchal power, and that definitions of anything you care to name are totally subjective. Meaning, everything has many meanings. As many meanings as there are people. Which means that nothing has any real meaning, only subjective interpretation. Which means that everything is meaningless and ultimately the best yarn wins.

    All these bad ideas then became cornerstones of black studies, leading to the conclusion of the increasingly discredited doctrine of Critical Race Theory, which itself is racist, and often proudly so – “Now it’s our turn!” – that “violent” white people owe people of colour big time, with, apparently, justified hell to pay. A belief system which is perhaps even inspiring the killing of white farmers in South Africa.

    Incidentally, the “Now it’s our turn” idea also comes from feminism, and was used by some feminists to justify abuses of power when they gained authority over others, conveniently failing to recognize that far from creating equality Heaven on Earth, many of them seemed instead quite determined to create the same old same old, with themselves in the seats of power. Proving, at least, that power and ambition still have very definite meanings.

    Compulsory

    When I started in university in the early 1990s, one of the things that struck me as odd at the time was that gender studies was compulsory. The last time I’d been in “school”, Irish language was compulsory and eventually people saw that this was a bad idea because it created a system of inequality, favouring some and side-lining others. Now here I was, back in “school”, and the university, which I understood as being a place of free-thinking, had a compulsory subject. It all seemed a bit “off” to me.

    I asked some people I knew who worked in education about the oddity of having a compulsory subject in the free-thinking university, and both just looked back at me and said absolutely nothing, immovably shtum, although both exuded the vibe that this was some kind of unmentionable thing and that I would be best off saying no more about it, which I duly did, obediently attending the various compulsory gender studies lectures and seminars, to no great advantage.

    “To put it clearly, girls: white men are bad, but white women are good. We’re their first victims. And there’s hell to pay”

    Ironically, feminists also appear to have placed themselves in the role of white saviour to the Third World. Now heading up NGOs and helpfully inviting millions to “deserved better lives” in the likes of Newtownmountkennedy, they continue the task of identifying “bad” people, most of whom, oddly enough, come wrapped in white skin with male genitalia, making them easy to spot.

    “Look! A violent colonialist misogynist! Get him!”

    On top of all that, those radicalised students emerging from Western universities appear to believe that anyone who disagrees with them, on even the most trivial point, is actually evil, if not in direct league with Satan, and possibly psychically and spiritually contagious, justifying physical reprimand, as was demonstrated recently in Limerick when student Jamie O’Mahoney waved an Israeli flag during a pro-Palestine meeting. It’s little wonder then that these unfortunate students, at the receiving end of an education seemingly designed to make enemies of their fellow countrymen, now appear to have so much in common with radical Islam.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Theory to Practise

    Well-intentioned theory, as was so strikingly demonstrated by the Nazi misreading of Nietzsche, doesn’t always bloom beautifully into reality. For instance, one of the current real-world consequences of the teachings of comfortable academics serenely creating theoretical paper models in ivy-decked tenure, is mass immigration. The thinking and moral lesson being that male white Europe owes reparations to the Third World for colonialist crimes committed in previous centuries. This idea is partly driven by another text called The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, which was a big ideas source in my university time.

    The ensuing academic-influenced invitation to the actual wretched of the Earth has resulted in, among other perplexities, the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, with a population of 200 or so, being joined by almost 300 male strays – sans WAGs – from the Third World who no one quite knows, least of all our government, with locals being labelled criminally racist by the apostles of the global equality agenda for even questioning this more than extraordinary imposition. If there was any real social justice, those migrants would be housed in the universities. Chickens coming home to roost and all that.

    “Now girls, listen up! I want you to give a big feminist ‘Hey there’ to your new exotic boyfriends.”

    John Rawls

    The Pot is Black

    If the Humanities become selectively humane, as appears to be happening, it’s no longer the Humanities. It’s something else entirely. And the particular slant of “humanities” that is becoming evident in universities across the West seems more than a little racist and sexist, the very things it claims to be attempting to eradicate, itself apparently unwittingly succumbing to malignant Freudian projection on a grand scale.

    Referencing political philosopher John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, Thomas Sowell, economist and historian writes in his 2010 book “Intellectuals and Society”:

    Justice is the first virtue of institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

    The way things are going, we may one day see a social movement demanding reparations from the universities.

  • Judge the Strength of a Democracy by its Treatment of Whistleblowers

    In light of recent developments, not least, the announcement of Michael McGrath as the next EU Commissioner, it is timely to look again at the infernal plight of workers of conscience – those noble people who blow the whistle on wrongdoing, and who strive to keep a corroded system from descending further into the abyss.

    Until 2022, Michael McGrath was Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform (referred to henceforth as DPER). Under his Ministry, new EU protected disclosures legislation of 2014 was advancing, and also EU Directive number 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of Europe of 23 October 2019 was set to be transposed into Irish law.

    The provisions of this Directive give significant further protection to persons who expose breaches in EU law as provided for in the Irish Protected Disclosure Amendment Act 2014. The aforementioned EU Directive was only finally transposed into Irish law in January 2023 and the new Act became known as The Protected Disclosure Amendment Act 2022.

    This provision was, however, effectively sabotaged long before it was transposed, and Minister Michael McGrath was central to that. The entire Protected Disclosure Act is under the remit of DPER.

    Cynical Collusion

    The now sinister OPLA – Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisor was exposed on these pages before in November 2022 and again in March 2023. Its rapid expansion appears to have been in anticipation of the significant effectiveness of this EU Resolution on Protected Disclosures to stem corruption and protect whistleblowers. Two things happened to neutralise and sabotage this EU provision before it was transposed:

    • The vast expansion of OPLA involved OPLA being placed, unconstitutionally, on the statute books in December 2018, just as the Dail was rising for its Christmas recess. It occurred with no committee stages, or debate. This was in defiance of the Dunning Capacity Report, into OPLA which was not sent back to the sub-committee on Dail reform for consideration in December 2016 by the Dail Clerk who received it from Dunning. Thus, Dunning’s report was effectively suppressed. The integration of the OPLA into the Houses of the Oireachtas as rank-and-file civil servants, under the Dail clerk (a civil service appointee) in the Executive Arm of Government, is, as pointed out, a violation of the constitutional Separation of Powers. The discovery that OPLA was secretly involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures in defiance of the provisions of the Act since 2013, and that it was all set to escalate as per Dunning, exposes a sleight-of-hand to virtually cut the legs out from under whistleblowers, striking a lethal blow at an integral part of democracy. 
    • The unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman by the civil service body – the PAS (Public Appointment Service) – is a violation of the Ombudsman’s Act 1980, and subsequent amending acts. The Ombudsman Act specifically disallows the Ombudsman from being appointed by the civil service. The Ombudsman was also appointed as Commissioner for Protected Disclosures, another canny moved within DPER while Michael McGrath was Minister. The Ombudsman knew full well that the OPLA – since 2018 a civil service body – was already involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures since 2013, and that this was considered the main area of “growth and challenge for OPLA.”

    I have been in email contact with the CEO of the PAS about this unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman. I accused her of stepping outside of her remit in the appointment of the Ombudsman and pointed out that the Ombudsman’s Act 1980 specifically excluded it as a civil service appointment. To this she replied that it was done by PAS as “sanctioned” by the then Minister, Michael McGrath.

    He has no power to unilaterally alter legislation. The competition for the Ombudsman’s job was held by the PAS in August 2021, when the Dail was in recess and during the holiday season. The only Irish applicant was Ger Deering. On the appointment board was David Moloney, SG in DPER who was central to the entire legislation, as it was progressing at Committee stages in the new Protected Disclosures Act. David Moloney merely continued what Robert Watt, whom he replaced, had commenced.

    Both David Moloney and the Ombudsman appeared before the Finance Committee, which was responsible for the deliberations into the Protected Disclosures legislation, and which met several times in 2021 and 2022 to discuss the enhanced the Protected Disclosure Bill 2014, and the EU Directive about to be transposed.

    David Moloney effectively misled the Finance Committee in failing to inform the Chair and members that the PAS, with the apparent collusion of Minister Michael McGrath, after unlawfully taking over the appointment of the Ombudsman, whom it was also decided would become the new Commissioner for Protected Disclosures.

    Ger Deering’s appointment is a Constitutional one, and it thereby had to be ratified by the Dail before he went to the Aras to get his seal of office from the President. Mr Deering appeared before the Finnance Committee and made a speech on his appointment in December 2021 for the purpose of his appointment being ratified by the Oireachtas.

    I contend that Deering also misled the Committee, whose members and Chairman seemed to have been unaware that the Ombudsman should not have been appointed by the civil service body – the PAS – by law. Deering knew that he would be using the unconstitutional OPLA as new Commissioner for investigating Protected Disclosures, but he never revealed that at the Finance Committee despite the fact that John McGuinness, the Committee’s chairman, discussed the plight of whistleblowers with him fairly extensively and name checked a number of better known ones.

    McGuinness and his committee approved Deering’s appointment on behalf of the Oireachtas and he duly went to the Aras to receive his seal of office from the President.

    Whistleblowers – The Walking Wounded

    The dual strategies of the newly expanded OPLA – an unconstitutional entity since 2018 – and the sabotage implicit in the appointment of the Ombudsman utterly neutralised the provision of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures, even before the full transposal of the EU Directive in January 2023.

    It was all done by DPER under Michael McGrath as Minister. The senior civil service have dealt a mortal blow to democracy, with full ministerial collusion and, above all, have commenced the ongoing campaign against whistleblowers – the walking wounded in a deeply corrupt system.

    In 2022, at a meeting of the Finance Committee, which McGrath attended with his senior civil servants, including David Moloney, and where a number of whistleblowers were also present, the civil servants backed by McGrath managed to get the provision of the EU Directive on PDs known as ‘The Presumption of Causation’ excluded from the EU Directive as transposed.

    This had provided for the presumption of victimization of a whistleblower, who reports wrongdoing without the whistleblower having to prove victimization is as a result of whistleblowing. This, of itself, was a significant blow to the effectiveness of the EU Directive.

    Democracy Under Threat

    Democracy depends on five major planks:

    • A free, robust and independent press.
    • A free and independent judiciary.
    • A robust and independent police force.
    • Robust whistleblower legislation.
    • A functioning democratic parliament where issue of major public import can be raised under privilege.

    The combined forces of the OPLA and the unlawfully appointed Ombudsman has dealt a direct, mortal blow to at last three of the five planks listed above. OPLA is unlawfully involved in Protected Disclosures and in the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and the Labour Court – both courts are subordinate to the High Court and a significant number of whistleblowers prosecute their claims, or aspect of their claims, in the WRC/Labour Court.

    Above all, OPLA has dealt an absolute mortal blow to the Dail itself. Arguably it has paralysed our parliament: there are numerous examples of OPLA muscling in, in a very heavy handed way on Dail Committee, especially in cases brought under privilege by whistleblowers to the Committees.

    The Committee Chairpersons are gormlessly allowing this, and are being bullied by the Committee Clerks who, in turn, are taking their instructions from the Dail clerk, Peter Finnegan, himself the chief architect of the draconian new OPLA in December 2018.

    In a case I had with the CPPO Committee, the OPLA took over the case from its clerk designate. I pointed out to the head of OPLA that no Standing Order (SO) of the Oireachtas allowed for it and asked what allowed it. I received no reply from Melissa English, the Chief Parliamentary Legal Adviser, whom I have accused of unlawfully and unconstitutionally trespassing into the sacrosanct area of the Oireachtas and the Ceann Comhairle, in a violation of the Separation of Powers, and a blow to the prudent use of Dail privilege.

    Irish Prison Whistleblower Sean O’Brien. Image: Daniele Idini.

    Protected Disclosure Legislation Disabled

    As OPLA operates in secret in addition to its listed function in Dunning’s capacity report of December 2016 as listed below, it may well be involved with the Gardai, and indeed with media enquires as fielded by the more robust elements in the media. I know from personal experience that the Gardai co-operate with the Ombudsman, attempting to sideline one complaint of a criminal nature I made to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman cannot investigate suspected crimes.

    The table below from Dunning’s Capacity Report (Dec 2016) includes all the secret areas OPLA are involved in where they have no jurisdiction:

    OPLA, and indeed its boss, Peter Finnegan (Dail Clerk) have no remit in at least four areas of growth as listed above. OPLA’s remit is ostensibly confined to the tripartite functions of 1) Advices to the houses of the Oireachtas and its staff, 2) Defending the Houses of the Oireachtas in Court and 3) Help with drafting Private Members Bills (PMBs). Enhanced Protected Disclosures legislation and the whistleblowers who rely on it have been taken out with military precision.

    ‘A Whistleblower’s Motive’ by Matthew Butterly. Image: Daniele Idini.

    The Whistleblowing Industry

    I have raised the OPLA and the unlawful Ombudsman appointment with John McGuinness, Chairperson of the Oireachtas Finance Committee unsuccessfully. I have also made a complaint to the Relevant Section in the EU, responsible for the transposal of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures into Irish law, backed by a number of other whistleblowers. The EU passed the buck back to the Irish courts. As if any whistleblower can afford to go to Court!

    Several whistleblowers (myself included) have appealed to mainstream media outlets to expose the OPLA in its unconstitutional reconfiguration since 2018 and its unlawful involvement in PDs. They have all refused to act.

    Transparency Ireland have become a quangoistic arm of state, which now fully funds the organisation. Dr Lauren Kierans, the Maynooth academic in the area of PDs who wrote the new Protected Disclosures Act for DPER has been informed that her act was sabotaged as outlined above. She passed the buck to Transparency Ireland and is now on maternity leave.

    The retaliation against and destruction of whistleblowers is all set to escalate as OPLA continues to expand. As Transparency Ireland expands too, and academic departments and units on whistleblowing mushroom in Maynooth and Galway Universities, whistleblowing has now become a lucrative industry, where everyone is well-remunerated bar the destroyed whistleblowers themselves – for whose welfare these organisations ostensibly exist.

    Whistleblower, Shane Corr (where OPLA also interfered) was suspended as a Principal Officer by Robert Watt in the Health Department. Watt was himself central to the creation and the funding of the OPLA since 2018 when he was SG in DPER until replaced by David Moloney in 2021. Corr was threatened by Watt with a criminal breach of the Official Secrets Act after OPLA deemed his submissions to the PAC were not covered by privilege.

    Whistleblower and very senior official, John Barrett, the Garda Head of HR according to a Village Magazine article some time ago, was subjected to tyrannous retaliation by Drew Harris for exposing the Templemore Garda slush funds scandal. He is awaiting a hearing in court. This is to name but two of an army of destroyed whistleblowers.

    In a deeply compromised, dysfunctional democracy, everyone will be rewarded bar whistleblowers. The Finance Committee is in a state of paralysis and the Minister who colluded all the way, Michael McGrath becomes an EU Commissioner in circumstances where he actively incapacitated the EU’s own Directive for the protection of whistleblowers.

    The irony of this cannot be overstated. What part the early announcement of his departure has to do with my rigorous challenged to the CEO of the PAS in recent days, Margaret McCabe, is anyone’s guess.

    After all, the vacancy for the EU Commissioner does not arise until October. Meanwhile, whistleblowers will continue to be condemned, vilified and relegated to the ranks of public pariah, while endless amounts of public money will be thrown at the industry and the army of persons who have colluded to destroy them. Foremost among these is OPLA and the Ombudsman. According to the Law Society Gazette in July 2018 OPLA’s Melissa English believes she’s worth it. Our democracy meanwhile, which can always be measured by the treatment of whistleblowers, was never more undermined.

  • Dust in your Eyes: War and its Image

    The bomb might be dropped any time soon now, apparently.

    The end of all ends, a nuclear war, looms among the narratives of where Ukraine and Russia’s war might end. Timothy Snyder warns in this regard that a nuclear bomb ‘would make no decisive military difference’; adding that looking at ‘the mushroom cloud for narrative closure, though, generates anxiety and hinders clear thinking. Focusing on that scenario rather than on the more probable ones prevents us from seeing what is actually happening, and from preparing for the more likely possible futures.’

    As much as we can agree with this statement, and as much as it is nothing but a prediction for one of the possible futures, other geopolitical analysts such as the Italian Lucio Caracciolo warn of the ease with which the nuclear option has entered public discourse, the talk shows and political debate.

    What now seems evident after Ukraine’s successful counter offensive in the north, and the ongoing systematic bombardments on its energy infrastructure, is that hostilities are continously escalating and we should prepare for a new phase in this war. If the unspeakable does happen, it will coincide with a new era of warfare. Maybe the last.

    How we develop historical awareness, and a particular narrative, depends more and more on which side of the Iron Curtain 2.0 we fall. For all our apparent enlightenment, time and again, we show ourselves incapable of building diplomatic bridges without brandishing the Sword of Damocles.

    The Bomb might be dropped anytime now. But a cultural bomb, the normalization of the possibility of nuclear war, has already dropped from the virtual skies that we carry in our pockets; conveying an endless stream of images, produced by and for everyone, but curated and filtered by a few.

    No one can say when it started dropping. Maybe with the invasion of February 24, or maybe 2014. Some say even 2001. Regardless of the date, we join other generations of humans that must now worry about the existence of nuclear weapons; of the apocalypse.

    The first shockwave comes in the form of war’s inevitability as soon as Russia’s tanks began rolling down towards Kiev; until the last moment many, including me, were unconvinced the troops amassed at the border would ever march. The taboo of a land war directly involving nuclear superpowers was still intact.

    We are generally shielded, or not even exposed, to pictures revealing the true horror of warfare. For the most part, what is put in front of us depends on the political agenda of warring superpowers or various forms of commodification of suffering. One wonders whether we are now even capable of autonomously creating our own memories; or freely perceiving the present and past, never mind the future under such conditions of conditioning.

    The effect of an endless flow of images, tailored and auto-curated to arouse emotions – residing alongside our most intimate obsessions – requires acknowledgement. Their capacity to induce fear and trigger desire are the preferred tools of contemporary propaganda and such tools are used by both side of the Iron Curtain 2.0.

    Global Civil War

    The political consequences of a lack of cognitive freedom in response to weaponized imagery and information are not new in history but, as with every historical constant, is a question that ought to be explored.

    The times we live through are what the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi calls the Global Civil War, where:

    ‘[…] relations among individuals are wired and subjected to automatic connections: political power, therefore, is replaced by a system of techno-linguistic automatisms inclined towards the automation of every space of life, cognition and production.’

    For example, how we react to the pictures of Nord Stream II’s bubbles or the Crimea Bridge strike, depend mostly on which conveyer belt of opinions and positions (“the techno-linguistic automatisms”) we find ourselves exposed to.

    The same goes for how we perceive the veracity of the images of the massacre of Bucha, as well as Russia’s depiction of neo-Nazism in the Ukrainian armed forces, which was previously extensively covered in our media as well.

    Voraciously consuming images of war – of a particular war – I often consider the extent to which images are being used to perpetuate suffering rather than end it.

    Just like in the times of COVID-19 – if your memory stretches back that far – it now takes a great deal of discipline to regulate the right dose of news consumption, as the induced anxiety can be overwhelming. Never mind the moderation necessary to digest and discuss it; or put ourselves in another’s shoes.

    With a diabolical enemy in our sights, such as our culture demands, as well as a defined timeline of events, wherein we struggle to look past February 24, 2022, we weary of discussing strategic failures – reckless dependence on Russian gas – and broken promises – NATO’s expansion eastwards despite undertakings – over the last two decades by Western governments.

    Are we capable of comprehending and reconciling Russia’s (not just Putin’s) very real phobia around encirclement – something that history teaches us is hundreds of years in the making – alongside Ukraine’s legitimate path to independence, which also goes back centuries? Is there now scope for rational dialogue?

    Filo-Putinisti

    Recently, one of Italy’s most prominent newspaper, Il Corriere Della Sera, published the names and pictures of ‘influencers’ who, allegedly, the Kremlin benefit from. Labelled ‘filo-Putinisti’, among these are independent journalists, academics and politicians, treated as ‘enemies of the people’.

    It is not very different to how Clare Daly and Mick Wallace have been treated by the Irish Times.

    To call for a strategy that would include negotiation with Putin’s regime would be to go against what Italian journalist Nico Piro calls the ‘Pensiero Unico Bellicista’ (Unique Bellicose thought current). Unequivocaly taking NATO’s side is what counts. Whoever doubts the legitimacy or even the sanity of ‘interventionism’, even in the closet, is accused of aiding and abetting the enemy.

    How is it that we have been shielded from what has been happening in the Donbass since 2014? Fourteen thousand died in brutal trench war raging at the edge of Europe. Now, suddenly, we feel the heat of the battle across Europe, and simultaneously wonder whether we will have sufficient energy to heat our homes.

    Let’s keep pretending Putin’s invasion came as a surprise. Countries don’t invade each other anymore. Nuclear superpowers don’t engage in land wars anymore. Right?

    The mnemonic silence over the war in Donbass, has morphed into a cacophony of coverage in the wake of a fully fledge invasion, filling, for months, the void left behind by the receding pandemic, as ominously Europe faithfully follows the dictates of a declining US Empire.

    Actually, it seems that as much as rest of the world is preoccupied and even annoyed with Putin’s invasion, it is now giving the finger to the West, after centuries of exploitation.

    It seems incredible how the US, apparently so tired of being an Empire, and on the retreat elsewhere, is still willing to unleash the most pervasive and subtle of propaganda campaigns, suppressing dissenting opinions in countries it sees as vassals, perhaps in order to preserve itself, or what is left of its power.

    This is no time for negotiation is the message, or better still, there was never time for any. Negotiation cannot occur with a genocidal dictator, or can they?

    The propaganda operates not just to change the narrative of the past; it makes one forget that there was a past; or that the past is always brought to us through competing narratives on the battlefield of time and discourse.

    Now, with our sense of time destroyed, and with that an opportunity to discuss, and possibly negotiate, we become more and more ready, and even eager, to kill one other. This is the paradox of a time we had dared to call the “End of History”.

    The Dust

    To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.
    Susand Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

    As Susan Sontag remind us, representations of war and suffering have a long history and contain codes of production and consumption: From Goya’s print series The Disasters of War; to Fenton’s Crimean war pictures; Picasso’s Guernica; and pictures of the 9/11 terrorist attack exhibited in the exhibition ‘Here is New York’.

    Francisco Goya Disasters of War – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

    Nonetheless, exposure, or really, the immersion in the infosphere, where the weaponization of images and messages is unprecedented, cannot be compared to any of the previous decades of warfare.

    There is now an overwhelming revival of violence in this all-pervasive info-sphere. The message of its inevitability seems a deliberate imposition to distract us from those past and present voices with a lot more to say than a fleeting frame destined to be rapidly replaced in our compulsive doom-scrolling.

    At the same time, it devalues those frames, often taken by the rare photojournalists who are able to go where it really matters – at great risk to their lives – and actually convey what their subjects are unable to. Often because they are dead.

    The curated, over-mediatic exposure of one tragedy instead of another is not really a novelty in the way we use and experience imagery of a current context of interest, but, as well explored in a recent podcast by the Economist, we live in a radically more transparent battlefield.

    The abundance of what is called Open Source Intelligence data, of which photography is a key component – its democratization as with the latest Iranian protests – is to be welcomed, even if it is a double-edged sword.

    On the one hand, we can say that we have never had as many tools available to us in the search for truth. On the other, the concept of truth, or what is truthful, has never eluded us to such an extent as in recent times.

    In an attempt to clear the view amidst the Fog of War, we create individual, atomized fog, which follows us wherever we go.

    Little wonder that in our so-called liberal-democratic hemisphere we have no idea how to bring democratic oversight to social media platforms; even leading some of us to cheer on the idea of Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, taking control of such a decisive device for dialogue and confrontation as Twitter.

    No amount of moderation, fact-checking, algorithm-driven-filtering or surveillance, can keep pace with the endemic disinformation present in our feeds; as much as no amount of critical thinking, rational argumentation and corroboration can prevail over a propaganda machine built right inside our minds.

    In Vogue

    There’s little doubt that photography carries the popular connotation of bearing truths: ‘the image doesn’t lie.’ But we don’t need not look too hard to work out how easy it is it for a photograph, and its caption, if not to lie, to deceive. If not to manipulate, then to be as alluring as a Vogue feature can be.

    Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska before a grounded Antonov plane and surrounded by fierce special forces is, in my modest opinion, a photographic masterpiece.

    Having said that, going through Rachel Donadio’s piece, and Leibovitz other pictures I recognise how instrumental this is to the current war struggles. Via the gloss of what many desire – to be a celebrity or to become a hero – the image of a presidential couple of a devasted country becomes something we aspire to.

    With each blast we feel more and more impotent at creating the conditions for dialogue to occur. Is it possible that neither Putin’s Russia and his allies, nor the West, composed of thirty NATO members supporting Ukraine is willing to take a step back from the brink?

    How are we to create the conditions, if the dominant message is one founded on our utter impotence, because it’s always the other sides fault?

    Hannah Arendt remind us in her essay “On Violence” that

    It is often been said that impotence breeds violence, and psychologically this is quite true, at least of persons possessing natural strength, moral or physical. Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power […] and that violence itself results in impotence.

    If we are actually talking about the possible, and rational, use of the most powerful weapon available it is exactly because power is slipping away from the Western alliance, as much as from Putin’s regime.

    Nothing new in that as the re-allocation of power is one of the preoccupations of history itself, seldom unaccompanied by violence. But what does it mean when the existence of nuclear arsenals capable of causing our premature extinction are carelessly normalized as facts of life? Like any other storm. Like any other crisis. Like something we’ll remember. You see the path? And where it leads?

    In 1955, Bertolt Brecht published a book called Kriegsfibel or War Primer. It was a collection of photographs, cut out of newspaper and magazines, which he re-captioned with his own verses.

    Such a document now exists not only thanks to Brecht’s artistic sensibility, but also because new generations survived to look at it again.

    “What are you doing, brothers?”-“An iron tank”.
    “And with these slabs here?”-“Bullets that will pierce those Iron armors”.
    “And why all this brother?”-“To live, nothing else”. From Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel

  • A Net Depends On Its Knots

    My arse was born before my head. I’m told I shouldn’t remember, but I do.  I recall my skull being stuck in the warm, wet cave that’d been home for nine months; recall, as well, starting the struggle to breathe. With all my infant might I managed to shimmy out backward, so the rest of me could join my bum in the chilly dominion of which it had become a citizen. The cold air was terrifying yet so sweet to my lungs when I finally slid free. My left foot was curled in, my left leg being shorter than its mate.  My left hip is dodgy as well. With my crutch I’m alright, indeed faster than many. That was my beginning, and curses on any who don’t believe me.

    Twenty years later I went through it again; the yearning, that is, to leave what was cosy and safe in search of a place where I could properly breathe. The cosy place was this place: Cobb’s Hole, North Yorkshire. Thatched cottages huddled together in the shadow of massive sandstone cliffs. At the bottom of our cobbled street yawns the North Sea, big and cold as the world itself. Tiny boats sliding about on its great black waves.  And there was I, stuck again in a womb on the edge of wildness.

    Father was a fisherman and mother was a mother. Near every house had the same matched set. The fathers spoke little, but when they did it was to say something that sounded thoughtful and wise. The mothers were worn out with work and worry.  Brothers joined fathers just as soon as they were big enough. Like all daughters, I was given a needle and taught to mend the nets. I’ve heard folk talk of weaving nets, but in truth it’s not so much weaving as knitting. Instead of two thin needles you have one fat netting needle and a gauge that decides the size of the mesh. The nose of the needle dips over and down, over and down, and the flax unwinds into this pattern, this web, that grows and grows beneath your fingers. It’s simple but not easy, if you see what I mean. You can’t be larking about.  A fisherman depends on his net, and a net depends on its knots. But here, I’ve gone right past the thing I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about when I was twenty.

    And Rosanna.

    Rosanna was a ladies’ maid at the Verinder estate, about two miles northwest of Cobb’s Hole.  She had Friday afternoons off, and the groom would bring the two of us into Frizinghall.  Rosanna might buy hairpins and bows. I’d get the latest issue of the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser. If it was dry we’d sit on the grass in the park and I’d read to her about suffrage and strikes. Her small face would squint up at me from under her straw bonnet.  “What is to happen, Lucy?” she’d say, as if I was reading her a fairy story.  “There is such suffering in the world,” she’d say, and pull her grey cloak closer about her shoulders as if the thought made her cold. She had a way of making such remarks, simple on the surface, but coming from such a tender part of her heart that you’d shiver to hear them expressed in her tiny bird’s voice.

    When you’re young you think the world has only been waiting for you to turn up and put it right. We read with great excitement of the Chartist camp on Bingley Moor – so close by! The great crowds, the fiery speeches. Then the arrests. It was frightening and glorious to feel ourselves on the cusp of revolution, and we grew very dear to each other as we sat there, braiding blades of early spring grass, waiting for mobs of angry workers to march past us on their way to storm the Magistrates’ Court. I tell you, we could nearly hear their boots on the cobbles. “England is like a pot on the boil,” she’d say, into the green stillness.  They were champion, those afternoons with Rosanna.

    She was not beautiful; nothing so ordinary. Just good, through and through. She believed in a sort of sunlit decency that nothing in her experience gave her reason to expect. She was from London, orphaned when she was only eight. Her curled shoulders told of her suffering; her lovely fingers, gesturing, making ecstatic pictures in the air, told of her faith.

    I had shagged women already. Two, to be exact. One was much older than me and gave me lots of instructions. The other was my own age, and those meetings were much friendlier but fumbly and quick, usually hands under clothes rather than clothes off. From the first time I met Rosanna I felt if I could once sink inside her creamy flesh, could penetrate to the heat beneath that sweet nature, that it would change me. Would set summat free inside me. I don’t know how better to say it than that. It was a young sort of love, in which you want to have the person and be the person all at the same time. And somehow this will make everything right. Oh, why must I try to explain it? I loved her. With all I had, I loved her.

    I kissed her once. Just once. It was among the firs on the path that leads to the cove. Her back was to a tree and I pressed her into it, pinned her with my hips and chest and arms, felt her breath fluttering against my neck. Smelled her private smells, stroked her hair, lifted her chin with my hand. And kissed her. There was no surprise in her. She had known how I felt, had seen it, and had shown neither excitement nor revulsion but only a shy acceptance of my love. We had often held hands, embraced, even danced together playfully. But to kiss her. To open those pretty lips with my tongue, explore the inside of her, to breathe into that angel mouth. I feel it still.

    But our ending came wrapped in our beginning. For beneath my lips, my hands, I felt her submitting to me. Not desiring me, holding me; just allowing me to do what I liked with her. The world, after all, had done what it liked with her and I was merely a part of the world. Nothing more. She could take herself away, could make herself open and empty. I almost hated her for it. Why withhold herself from me, the one person who saw her true worth? Why could she not at least try to love me?

    The answer was Blake.

    Blake was nobody, some well-travelled third cousin of the Verinders who ended up marrying their daughter. Rich people always marry their cousins, they haven’t enough imagination for anything else, and besides, it keeps all that lovely money within the family. I met him once, and found him to be your standard upper-class halfwit. Not really a worthy subject of either her love or my hatred. But we were young. Our feelings were flames we couldn’t stop staring into.

     

    I still get a knot in my stomach when I remember that last day. Summer it was, and proper hot. Rosanna appeared in my room, and she was shaking all over and looked like she might be sick. She had seen something, some proof that Blake fancied the Verinder woman. I sat her down on my bed, and her breath turned to sobs. She wept into my shoulder because her love was unrequited. The irony! I suddenly laughed; a low, bitter chuckle.

    She backed away. Gaped at me, like a mouse who’s just discovered her best mate is a cat.  “How can you snicker at my broken heart?”

    I lifted her chin with my finger, reminding us both of our one kiss. “How can you ignore mine?” I asked softly.

    She looked away then. I knew it was hopeless, I knew. Still I pressed on, daft and love-struck as I was. “We should get away from here.”

    Her dark eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

    “To London. Together. I’ve money saved. We could live like sisters. We talk proper, write proper, we’re good with our needles. We could make a living. We could make a life.” It came out all higgledy-piggledy, I’d been wanting to say it for so long.

    Rosanna’s eyebrows went that high, they nearly disappeared into the black tangle of her hair.  Then she abruptly looked down at her hands. Her eyes grew wet. “Lucy, you are a dear friend.”

    “Give over.”

    “You’re kinder to me than anyone ever has been.” She raised herself, trembling, to her feet. “But where I’m going, you cannot follow.” And with that, she turned and left. I heard her footsteps going downstairs, heard the door slam shut.

    I didn’t cry. Sometimes summat hits you as though you’ve walked straight into the sea, and you’re left gasping, cold all over. I knew, somehow, that this was the end of Rosanna and me.

    When the letter came, arriving with autumn’s swollen moon, her small, careful printing on the envelope made my breath stick in my throat. Maybe, possibly, she was writing from someplace warm and bright. Maybe she was sitting in the grass, under a kindly sun, waiting for me. Cruel hope made me tear open the letter, only to learn that Rosanna was dead. By her own hand. The letter an apology and a goodbye.

    Everything was strange. The scars in our table, the salty smell of the broth my mother stirred.  My father’s tuneless whistle, carried by the wind up our narrow street. A cold wind it was, and the rumble of waves beneath it, and in among these things that meant home, I was alone.  The letter shook in my hand. The final line mocked me. I will forever be, your Rosanna.

     

    By year’s end, the blaze of revolt had gone to ash in the grate. The Chartists had largely given up. Men like Blake held the world like a ball between their soft hands. I’d have gladly belted Blake in the bollocks with my crutch. But to what end? It seemed there was no cause left to join. I had missed everything.

    Life had shown me what could be and then had shut the door. No, it said, you cannot have your love returned by a lass so gentle it’d make you weep. No, you cannot make things better for your mother or your father; take some of the worry off their brows, help them stand a bit straighter. No, you cannot put warm food in kiddies’ bellies or make sure the men get a fair price for their catch. That was all a joke, m’love. In truth, life is long, lonesome and grey and it reeks of fish, dampness and despair. Yearning gets you nowt but an ache in your ribs every time you try to take a clean breath. This is all there is, pet. Your fault for dreaming.

    All that winter I trudged along the shoreline, wind burning my face, sand stinging my eyes and gritting my hair. On the one side of me, cobbled paths and firelight glimpsed through windows, and chimney smoke rising like song over our little village. On the other, the sea.  Dark and wild and promising an end to remembering. Unable to choose between them, I’d walk until the ache in my hip was blinding me. Then, emptied for a time of sadness and longing, I’d hobble back to our house and up the stairs to my small bed.

     

    Mary Silkey’s husband Tom died in late December. He died on land – his heart, they said – so she was able to have him laid out proper, his red hair all tidied in the coffin as it never was in life. A body at a fisherman’s wake is a rare thing. With that and Christmas just past, the village was in a mood to give Tom a good send-off.

    Mary’s youngest, Jane, was stuck in Scarborough as the tracks were flooded, so the burial was delayed for her. Life arranged itself around the Silkey cottage for those three days. The mourning started out sombre but grew raucous, as it will do. I had played with Jane when we were little but had quite lost touch with her since; the rest of the Silkeys were, to me, fair and freckled nodding neighbours. There were sprigs of rosemary all around the coffin, for remembrance and to mask the scent of death. Nothing, however, to cover the sweat-and-whiskey smell of the living. There’s little worse than feeling lonesome in a crowd. By the time the music started, I was itching to be elsewhere.

    At the centre of things was Mary, her stout figure being helped into chairs, helped to a cup of tea or glass of whiskey or a bit of cake. May God forgive me, but I was fiercely jealous of Mary then. She who was waited on hand and foot. She who told stories about her Tom that’d bore the arse off the most Christian soul; yet the villagers greedily drank in every word. I had held my grief for Rosanna close, and it had pained me all the more for that. If Rosanna had been Robert, would I have been invited to share it? Would I have eaten cake and told tedious stories too?

    On the fourth day, a Sunday, Tom was brought to the churchyard and I went home, limping up the stairs to my room and shutting the door. I settled into the chair by the window and watched the little patch of sky that belonged to me. It was quiet, apart from the seagulls, the creak of moored boats, and the shush-shush of the sea, like a mother soothing her child.

    The needle was on the bedside locker, and then it was in my hand. The sheen of the flax against my fingers was truth, or what I know of it. And then the solid, warm wood of the gauge. The first knot stitched me to the work. After that, everything fell away but the practical dance of the needle. My hands were strong and quick and I fell into a trance watching them. It was as though there was a curtain of loops and ties that was there all along, a glimmer in the air that I could coax and tame into a simple, needed thing.

    Hours passed; the sky lost its shyness and deepened to an afternoon blue.

    A net works by trapping what’s worth summat and letting what isn’t move through. It doesn’t try to hold everything. It might be that as I sat there, the net growing length and heft and draping itself across my lap, I was also starting to let things move through. Maybe that was when my self-pity drowned; to the surface came the knowing that Rosanna was never for me, any more than Blake was for her. Oh, it still hurt to think of her. But it got to be less like a wound and more like a tender place. Summat I could maybe live with.

    A net gathers in what you need. As the light dimmed and the waves swelled, I thought I could feel mine gathering the broken parts of me from where they’d been scattered, across the ocean floor of my mind. During that sleepless night I fastened myself back together again. One strong knot at a time.

     

    When pink clouds marbled the morning sky, my father came to find me. He pushed on the door, but it couldn’t open all the way. Overnight, the net had crept across the floor and over the bed; it had filled the whole room. I’d tied the last knot and slipped the gauge free, and now was sat against the wall, my creation heavy on my legs. I felt peaceful.

    My father peeked round the door. He was amazed at what he saw. I knew this because one of his white eyebrows went up a bit and he began to stroke his beard. “Here,” he said. “What’s this?”

    “I’ve made a net.”

    “Aye, I can see that,” he said. “Did you not think to make it out of doors?”

    “No,” I admitted. I didn’t really think at all. How was the burial?”

    “Fine, lass.” He crouched down and rubbed the flax between two fingers. “It’s good work, is this.”

    “It’s a bloody queer size and shape.”

    “E’en so, we’ll make use of it. Mind you, we’ll have to get it nearer to the fish than this.” He stood up slowly, his knees stiff. “If I start from this end and roll it up, like a rug – if I roll it tight enough, we can shove it out that window.”

    And that is the end of the story, though it’s also the beginning of another. For, when we did push it out the window to the path below, who do you suppose was on that path? Only Jane Silkey, paying us a call during her visit home from Scarborough. The net unrolled a bit in the air and landed right on top of her. She screeched and fell backward onto her arse. From above, we could see her dark dress and yellow hair spread out, her arms and legs wriggling about beneath the mesh.

    “Flippin’ ‘eck,” said my father.

    I hopped downstairs and out the door. “Sorry sorry sorry!” said I, as I tried to free her.

    And what did Jane do? She could’ve cried. She could’ve boxed my ears, once her arms weren’t pinned. She could’ve said, “Lucy Yolland, I always knew you’d grow up to be a  heathen and a menace!” And I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit.

    Instead of which, she laughed. As I lifted the net’s hem over her head, she looked right at me with her lively grey eyes and she laughed like a mad thing.

    And I knew.

    Featured Image of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London in 1848