For this Saint Patrick’s Day episode, Luke Sheehan asked Irish-American historian and New York history expert Terry Golway to help create an overview of the Irish American experience, with a focus on post-famine migration and the infamous Tammany Hall.
Episode Credits:
Host: Luke Sheehan
Music: Loafing Heroes – https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com
Produced by Massimiliano Galli – https://www.massimilianogalli.com
The Turkish phrase Gözaltına alınıyorum translates simply as: ‘I’m being taken into custody.’ This was selected by the independent media outlet T24 as the phrase of the year for 2025. Had it not been that, in my view, it just as easily could have been Türkiye’de yargı bağımsızdır, meaning ‘the judiciary in Turkey is independent,’ a line repeated endlessly, like a tongue-twister, by Ministers and MPs from Erdoğan’s ruling party, the AKP. And yes, I’m being ironic.
On March 19, Turkey woke up to a morning marked by an operation aimed at eliminating the possibility of a change in power through elections, and declaring open war on institutional opposition.
The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and the opposition’s presidential hopeful, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody along with dozens of IMM employees and close members of his team. Shortly afterward, university students organized and gathered in front of Istanbul University main campus, marching toward Saraçhane, which is the location of the Istanbul mayoral headquarters, just a couple of kilometers away.
Then more people joined. And more.
Emergency bans on unauthorized demonstrations and marches were imposed at lightning speed. Metro and bus services were cancelled by government decree to block access to the area. The police presence and traffic checkpoints increased rapidly. Even these hastily implemented measures – designed specifically to prevent people from gathering in front of the IMM headquarters – failed to stop hundreds of thousands from filling the streets within hours.
In the days that followed, people maintained a vigil through the nights, both at Çağlayan Courthouse, where Mayor İmamoğlu was taken, and in front of the municipality building. They refused to leave the Squares.
While all this was unfolding, people like me – those watching from afar living abroad – fell into a grimly familiar ritual. Every morning around 6am, opening X (Twiiter) meant watching your entire timeline fill, within seconds, with posts like:
“I’m being taken into custody.”
“Police raided my home at dawn. I’m being taken into custody.”
“The police came to my apartment in Şişli around 4:30 a.m. Please take care of my dog. I think I’m being taken into custody.”
There were dozens of such tweets. Some days, without exaggeration, hundreds.
Turkey Isn’t Outside the West. It Helped Build It
Fast forward to today. Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with over 400 others, has been held in pretrial detention for nine months. Those detained include sixteen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP); his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan; his election campaign adviser, Necati Özkan; his drivers, Recep Cebeci and Zekai Kıratlı (whose names do not even appear in the 4,000-page indictment); his assistant, Kadriye Kasapoğlu; district mayor Murat Çalık, a two-time cancer survivor currently undergoing treatment; and hundreds of others I cannot possibly list here.
As I write these lines, social media is once again flooded with news of fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. The municipality’s deputy secretary general, the head of the fire department, Remzi Albayrak, and dozens of others have been taken into custody as part of the ongoing operations against İmamoğlu and his circle.
All of these individuals are accused of forming a criminal organization, corruption, causing public financial loss, and terrorism – charges that, over time, have increasingly been reframed as espionage, alongside several other alleged crimes.
According to legal professionals and academics, these accusations are laid out in an indictment of roughly 4,000 pages that does not read as if it were prepared with professional rigour. The document has been widely criticized for being grossly inflated, riddled with technical errors, filled with repetitive sections, reliant almost exclusively on anonymous “secret witness” testimony, and strikingly devoid of concrete or substantiated evidence. More troubling still, some of the more than 400 people currently in detention are not even named in the indictment, yet they remain behind bars.
Very recently, the European Court of Human Rights decided to fast-track Ekrem İmamoğlu’s case, specifically his application concerning unlawful detention. The application was filed by his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan who is himself currently in detention.
Yet the European Court of Human Rights, along with international institutions more broadly, is increasingly portrayed by the Erdoğan government, now in its twenty-third year in power, as anti-national, foreign-backed, and unpatriotic. In official rhetoric, these institutions are cast as insufficiently “domestic” and allegedly hostile to Turkey’s national interests.
This framing follows a familiar authoritarian script, but reality is more complicated, and far less convenient. Turkey is not an outsider to the Western political and legal order. It helped build it.
Turkey is a founding signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Council of Europe, making it legally bound by both the Convention’s provisions and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is also a party to the core United Nations human rights treaties.
What, then, is the purpose of this fabricated, anti-Western, exclusionary narrative?
‘Down With Tyranny, Long Live Freedom!’
The aim is to crush resistance, normalize sweeping losses of rights, freedoms, and prosperity, and impose a “new Turkey” modelled on a hybrid of Central Asian authoritarianism, Russian-style rule, and the institutional failures of parts of the post-colonial Middle East.
This vision is fundamentally incompatible with Turkey’s realities: its diverse socio-cultural fabric and, more importantly, its socio-political legacy of more than two centuries of struggle for democracy and modernization.
That legacy dates back to 1839, a decisive turning point in Ottoman history, when decades-long, Western-oriented reform efforts were institutionalized through the Tanzimat Edict. These reforms eventually led to the establishment of the first parliament and the first civilian constitution in 1876.
With the Tanzimat Edict, Ottoman subjects were recognized as equal citizens for the first time. Egalitarian reforms in areas such as taxation and military service aimed to ensure that non-Muslims, alongside Turkish Muslim citizens, bore the same duties and responsibilities toward the state.
The reforms also sought to guarantee the security of life, property, and honour for all citizens; to ensure property could be lawfully inherited; to establish transparency in judicial proceedings; and to prohibit executions without due process.
These principles were not merely rhetorical. Concrete regulations gave them legal force, and the constitution that followed formally limited and distributed the powers of the sultan.
In 1858, homosexuality was decriminalized, making the Ottoman Empire the second state in the world, after France in 1791, to take such a remarkable step.
The path toward building a republic grounded in parliamentary democracy and equal citizenship, however, was never linear. As in France, Italy, or Japan, and many other democracies, progress came through reversals and ruptures. The Ottoman Empire’s first constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved, only to be reinstated three decades later. As borders across Europe were redrawn through wars and upheaval, this turbulent process culminated in the founding of the Republic of Turkey.
Like other nations, Turks did not abandon the desire for a better future or the struggle required to build it. Today, however, all of this is under threat.
President Erdoğan has amassed more power than many Ottoman sultans and continues to seek more. Research by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg shows that Turkey’s democracy score stood at 0.17 in the early 1900s, rose to 0.53 in the early years of the republic, reached 0.74 in 2002 when Erdoğan’s AKP first came to power, and has since fallen back to 0.18.
It is no coincidence that a slogan more than a century old has returned to the streets: Kahrolsun istibdat, yaşasın hürriyet! meaning ‘Down with tyranny, long live freedom.’ It has been one of the most frequently chanted slogans at the Saraçhane demonstrations following İmamoğlu’s imprisonment.
For more than two decades, Turkey’s media has been monopolized by oligarchs handpicked by Erdoğan. As a result, the voices of ordinary, hardworking, middle class Turks have been largely silenced, especially abroad. Deliberate policies have severed society’s connection with the outside world, suppressed public expression, and helped cement an image of Turkey as a failed democracy which is a perception many in the West has accepted uncritically.
The Syrian war, and the years-long influx of refugees have reinforced this distorted view. Since 2012, Turkey has become nearly inseparable from Syria in the Western imagination, as if the country had absorbed another nation entirely. Over more than a decade, this association has come at steep economic, political, and moral costs, leaving Turkey and Syria almost interchangeable in the minds of outsiders.
It is precisely these deliberately erased realities of Turkey that I want to bring back into focus in this article.
Through its constitution, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, and until roughly a decade ago, it functioned as one, at least since 1950, around the same time many Western democracies were consolidating. Eastern Europe, by contrast, remained under authoritarian rule until the 1990s. Since 2017, however, Turkey has gradually morphed into an electoral autocracy, with steadily eroding rights and freedoms.
Yet Turkish society itself is not defined by these trends. Erdoğan is attempting to impose a regime change against the will of the people.
Even before the unlawful detention of İmamoğlu and hundreds of others, a 2024 PEW Research survey showed that 67 percent of Turks were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy. Among those under 35, that figure rises to 75 percent. Eighty percent of respondents support direct, electoral democracy, while 62 percent reject the idea of indefinite rule by a strongman.
In another striking example, 56 percent of people in Turkey believe that religious texts – given the country’s Muslim-majority population, in this case the Quran – should have no influence over the constitution or laws. This figure is several times higher than in other Muslim-majority countries, where comparable research could be conducted.
For context, the same survey analyzed thirty-six countries, including Tunisia, which experienced a brief period of parliamentary democracy between 2011 and 2021 and today scores slightly higher than Turkey on democracy indices. Yet Tunisia is excluded from the section of the study that examines the role of the Quran in politics simply because even asking such questions is socially unacceptable there, despite Tunisia being one of the West’s preferred points of comparison with Turkey. By comparison, the equivalent figures are 51 percent in the United States, 57 percent in Poland (referring to the Bible), 54 percent in Israel (Jewish scripture), and just 12 percent in India (Hindu scripture).
Only 17 percent of people in Turkey believe religious texts should influence national laws. By contrast, the figure is 66 percent in Indonesia (home to Bali, often perceived as a globally famous, relatively secular tourist destination), 22 percent in our complex, love-hate neighbor Greece, and 28 percent in the United States.
Why does this matter?
The overwhelming majority of Turks, regardless of religiosity or whether they vote for Erdoğan and the AKP, support Turkey’s constitutional definition as a secular, parliamentary, democratic republic. They want these founding principles to remain intact, and they are deeply dissatisfied with the current system of governance.
A new constitutional amendment is expected soon. Just as previous amendments were justified with buzzwords like “military oversight,” “judiciary status quo,” or “democratization,” the government is likely to use the cultural rights demands of Turkey’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, as a pretext for a full constitutional overhaul. In reality, these issues could be addressed through minor, targeted adjustments without rewriting the constitution.
In the near future, many will try to tell you otherwise. Please, don’t believe them.
Are the Eurocrats and their allies most delusional about the topics they profess to find most urgent? Or are they just setting out to delude the rest of us?
This was Ursula Von Der Leyen speaking at the 9th Brussels Conference on Syria, on Saint Patrick’s Day last:
The agreement between the central authorities and the Kurdish SDF… is nothing short of historic. As is the signing of a constitutional declaration by interim President al-Sharaa. On the other hand, the attacks on security forces and the violence against civilians in Syria’s coastal region show that the situation remains fragile…
The Syrian authorities’ commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice, to protect minorities, and form an inclusive government – all of this is vital for reconciliation.
As these words were being prepared in the run-up to the conference, informed observers of Syria’s situation could see a different picture: targeted sectarian massacres of Alawites, not just “violence against civilians”, had begun. To precious little outcry in the West, death squads indifferent to calls for restraint from Damascus were fanning out in coastal Latakia. Far from cohering into a place of “inclusive government”, Syria looks more likely to be approaching a condition of volatility and chaos, not a “fragile” democracy with “freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press”, as claimed in the text of the interim constitutional document. Quoting an acquaintance living in Maaloula, a Christian town Northeast of Damascus, Patrick Cockburn relates how multiple groups have been plunged into trepidation: “The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened, even the secular Sunnis are frightened…”
That fear relates not only to who is supposedly in charge in Damascus, but to the extent of their control, if any, over the forces made up of jihadis from around the world who are now the primary wielders of military power across most of the core of the country. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council, meanwhile, has actually been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamist-shaded constitution, saying it has “reproduced authoritarianism”.
Every single premise of Von Der Leyen’s statement as quoted above is questionable.
Its conclusions are absurd.
Why do we start by picking out the ancient Christian redoubt of Maaloula? This frame of reference helps to show how far back in time the communities of modern-day “Syria” go, as well as Cockburn’s in-person familiarity with their inheritors’ attempts to survive in the horrible present. Writing back in 2012, Cockburn concluded a piece for the Independent by observing that “the sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the Civil War, their future will most likely be worse than their past.” The omens, he felt were not good. He was right.
In Syria, they seldom are. This Post-Ottoman, Post-French mandate state goes back to 1945 in its current form. Will it even continue to exist in another few years? The massacres now taking place in Latakia, Cockburn would write a few days after our conversation, are being “ignored”, but “may shape the Middle East”. (iPaper, March 15)
The former #Irish ambassador to Russia Philip McDonagh joins the podcast to discuss prospects for peace in Eastern Europe & recalls an interesting encounter with Mikhail #Gorbachev.https://t.co/bzRouHBFou#IrishNeutrality #RussiaUkraineWar #UkraineRussiaWar
— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) March 5, 2025
As the second part of the conversation in this episode outlines, European leaders and their friends are prone to magical thinking in the matter of their proximate crises as well as distant. In recent coverage on Ukraine for the iPaper, Cockburn has argued that “Western governments, media and PR firms” have crafted a depiction of the conflict as a replay of WW2. In this vision, “compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since… the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.” In an echo of that argument, Cockburn’s contemporary Peter Hitchens stated, in an interview in Slovakia’s Standard magazine:
“The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace.”
On grave matters of peace and war, European leaders are failing to adopt a realistic vision, concludes Cockburn.
This is something of an understatement.
With Europeans apparently determined to tool up for armies that don’t exist (and would be unlikely to have much fighting morale even if they did) and prone to praising the emergence of “progressive” states that have all the long-term prospects of a snowman in the Sinai, we are looking at a new era of wishful, read delusional thinking.
The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Please Subscribe!https://t.co/mEQSm0fI0k
— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 31, 2024
A final note:
This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.
Listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from just €5 p.m.) on Patreon.
Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do things stand with the so-called Lab Leak Hypothesis? One thing is for sure: in this pressing matter, one of the hardest combined attitudes to take is to be both engaged and polite.
Many combatants, previously capable of professional comportment, have descended into bare knuckle insults of the kind academe has not seen since the world decided one must be on the Left or the Right, or that one should comport oneself responsibly in the face of a Cold War that may become hot. Are you on the right side of history, or involved at all? You are either ready for flak, in this situation, or keep your head down.
Many scientists with an opinion worth sharing are choosing not to do so.
They might be wise. After all, some of this fighting has gotten dirty. Where some engaged in respectable debate before, rivals are now trying to cancel and professionally immolate one another. Direct exchange rather than article or book writing now makes up the majority of this discourse. Peer-reviewed articles on either side of this exchange have been few. Before you say – ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the lab-leak’, or ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the wet market/ zoonosis’, consider this: the Chinese government most likely had insight, and most likely destroyed evidence related to one or the other.
Viscount Matt Ridley, our interviewee here, has been both interested and engaged with the question of the virus origin since the start. He has been so without lapsing into ad hominem jibes. Though he has lapsed into Twitter exchanges of fire, his manner throughout has been civil. He stands with scientists, skilled researchers and a majority of the public in thinking that COVID-19 resulted most probably in a misadventure connected to a Chinese lab.
This does not mean he is correct.
Why is it important to point this out? In a context where both sides of a highly contentious argument disagree over all but the smallest of premises, the question of decency – and its cousin attributes honesty and responsibility – does come to the fore. Decency is also a cousin of openness by the way, and as we encircle in our conversation, China’s rulers have been anything but open. Therefore, take a listen to this exchange, and a look at Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book, as a start about posing this question for yourself. For all of us who lived through the pandemic, and in memory of those who didn’t, asking questions about its origins remains a primary part of the aftermath.
Read Luke Sheehan’s account of his time in China, published by The Lilliput Press.
What is a ‘real country’?
For the Irish, living as we do on a divided island, the question doesn’t have to be facetious. As a negative example, to try to land on a positive answer, Northern Ireland comes to mind. Wherever that congenitally deformed statelet ends up, its passage through the twentieth century will form a storyline we will never stop arguing about. God bless us.
Lebanon, where I lived briefly from January 2011, is a mystifying and compelling organism.
Were it on the seafloor, it would be brightly coloured, shape-shifting and perhaps equipped with a defensive poison. A territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire via the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it formed with Syria the ‘French mandate’. It has held together against expectations, and enjoyed tangible golden ages through the same century-long lifespan as our post-colonial Ireland.
The local cultures, which still roughly map onto the religious arrangements of the confessional political system, have incredibly deep roots. I say ‘cultures’ and ‘roughly’ because this is a land where people will seriously make the case that they are the direct descendants of the Phoenicians, if not the Canaanites. Some of the ingredients here are antiquated enough to make monotheism look like a recent fad.
Other claims include references to identifiable cities and mythologized landscapes in ancient history that remain traceable today: the cedar tree that appears on the flag is of the stock used to build the Jewish Temple, and the forests are referred to in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In cities like Batroun, Saida and Sur, the phantoms and visible stubs of Phoenician harbours can still be observed. Compressed between the plains and deserts leading to Mesopotamia, and the coastal route to the Nile and Egypt, it has produced merchants and travellers over the millennia. The Lebanese diaspora may number seventy million.
To live in Beirut at the time I did, was, I now realize, a taste of a brief golden age all on its own. One of the clichés that had to be learned was the fable of the glorious 1950s and 1960s: the period after the Second World War and before the domestic civil war, when the traditional merchant classes were joined by elite émigres from other parts of the defunct empire to create prosperity. They became ‘bankers to the Middle East,’ a role now occupied by Dubai.
Wealthy post-Ottoman families that retreated there included the Sursocks, who would form a link to Ireland, and Jewish families from Iraq and beyond. Nadim Shehadi, the guest speaker on our latest podcast, is a product of the cosmopolitan confidence of that time.
In 2011, the Arab Spring was triggered by events in Tunisia the week I arrived. Through connections, I had the opportunity to meet the renowned journalist Robert Fisk for coffee, and as we sat in a place on Sadat Street, the TV in the corner was flashing images of Mohamed Bouazizi burning. I had been reading about the story, and Fisk hadn’t, so for a few minutes I was the one explaining events to him.
My journalistic Larp brought me up and down the country. No-one ever called me out on it. I wrote one story for the Daily Star, the Saad Hariri-sponsored newspaper, about a scheme to write essays and theses for brattish students at the American University of Beirut. My real job was writing multiple choice questions for a rich private school and educational company.
I had a blast. Young and hopeful journalists were everywhere, and the dismal course of that profession, with Facebook annihilating the business side and ISIS looming into view with plans to cast them in their snuff movies, was not yet obvious.
One young English writer I knew noted that “the next few years are looking pretty good for work.” She might have been right, but that sort of attitude, shared by the foot soldiers of the international NGOs, was already watering seeds of uncommon bitterness among the Lebanese. Their rivers of trouble were sources of fresh water for well-paid and often decadent hordes of expats. One wonders how high the shoots might have grown by now.
At the moment of the horrific Port explosion of 2020, I was living in Paris. A Lebanese woman I knew there, a filmmaker[1] and activist, called me briefly, with her voice inflamed from sobbing. “Really Luke, what have we done to deserve all this?”
Add to this the financial collapse which wiped out savings and plummeted the domestic currency, the Syrian refugee influx which increased the population by at least 30%, the pandemic pains and now a very possible Hezbollah-Israel war, and you might have a country that even her most ardent lovers will leave. Who will stay, and who will join the seventy million-strong diaspora? What cause for hope might persist?
One of the characters I met during my time there was Nadim, during a dinner at the palace of the Sursocks in Gemmayzeh. With characteristic Lebanese curiosity and openness, he simply stayed in touch with me, a random person who had breezed through then strayed very far from Beirut, like most of our overconfident cohort running around at the time.
One also wonders, incidentally, whatever happened to all those little girls and boys?
Feature Image of Beirut: Jo Kassis
[1] Of course she was, and is. Her first films were beautiful, artful, personal things shot through with a heatwave of avant garde, mostly concerned with her much-traumatized locality of the Shia south. Some recent work is here.
In a rousing introductory speech, retired diplomat Philip McDonagh described the publication of Cuban Love Songs as a ‘significant moment for the Irish province of the Republic Letters.’ He spoke of the ‘importance of the Republic Letters for us all’, that space where we ‘can explore intelligently and in a disinterested way both the world and our place in the world.’
Edited by Ronan Sheehan under the imprint of Cassandra Voices, Cuban Love Songs is a selection of Cuban poems translated and interpreted by Irish writers.https://t.co/EWfTuCqJmW#CubanLoveSongs #poetrybook@broadsheet_ie @Andrea_Rey48 @connolly16frank @IlsaCarter1 @NMcDevitt
— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) November 26, 2020
McDonagh also spoke about his concerns over the blockade against Cuba. He argued that there had never been a level playing field to allow the Cuban economy to prove itself and looked forward to a better dialogue between Washington and Havana.
Reflecting on a challenging period in international relations, McDonagh wondered:
are we prepared to wait for the gifts of the muses, on political truths that do not depend on what Shelley called the calculating faculty? Are we prepared to work towards restoring the resonance of great fundamental words: mercy, discernment, justice, trust and hope?
He said:
we need the poets and the public authorities to come together in something like the Republic of Letters to practise humility and re-evaluate key aspects of our culture, and this must be done of course in freedom … where citizens are prepared to discuss public challenges on the basis of first principles.
There were also readings from Anthony Colclough, Caoimhe Lavelle, Karl O’Neill, Anne Haverty, Luke Sheehan, and Ronan Sheehan.
The event took place in Merrion Cricket Club and drew a colourful crowd.
All images (c) Yaqoub BouAynaya (www.theconsciouscamera.com).
