Cassandra Voices

Tag: peter

  • Poetry: Peter O’Malley

    The Only Time Our Adult Hands Touched

    I was 29, he was 72
    We were building up a stone wall
    That a Hereford bullock knocked
    When trying to leap over

    Our hands went for the same stone
    Then both pulled back
    I was embarrassed
    That’s how he raised me

    He said after 7 hours
    ‘Ah we will leave the rest till tomorrow’
    I was shocked
    It was the first time in my life
    I heard him say such treasonous words

    In the car on the way home
    I realised that some day, within my lifetime
    He was going to die on me
    Leaving me unable to hold anything in my hands
    Except cold dead stones

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    The Bridge
    After Meryon

    Bridge of Be-ing, all arches mirrrored upon
    The river running – Heraclitean ;
    Looming above… turret trumpeting,
    All Barnonial excess, pure 19th century.

    And aligned in sheer proximity the great monolith
    Of glass and concrete, its emphasis
    Presenting a sheer 20th century existentialism.
    Seen from the quays, it’s pure Baudelaire!

    The candelabara of Street lamps whose
    Illuminating auras burnish the passerby
    Ghosting them with their luminance, and lustre.

    Fate drops like a Stone in the water
    Troubling the stillness with ripples outward,
    And whose faces Flow forever onward into the Dark Pool.

     

     

    Heidegger’s Dasein 

    There is a philosophy born of storm to encompass Be-ing,
    And it assails in the tumult of the unending assault of the days.
    To storm troop on and over into the assailment of the heavens;
    God forbid, what is left of them those splintering fragments!

    As in the woodwinds onrushing conducive to the Heart-fires
    Still governing, just about, out from the holocaust of Thought.
    Essence at the forefront of being, attuning to the tumult
    Of the Sway, like anyone finding their ground.

    Such as the down and outs rolled up in sleeping bags
    On the public benches on the boardwalk,
    Those pupae, or premature mummies,

    Whose alarm clock would be police siren,
    Heineken clock and other hallucinatory prey,
    And whose breakfast would be coloured by the sweet aroma of Hashish!

     

    Gothic Landscape 

    Thought’s colour broodingly bleeds through to the skull,
    Seeped to pour and stream into the brain.
    The bridge is moored there through its anchor
    Above the liquified riverbed afflux.

    The skeletal fragments of a backdrop,
    Etched architecture of a Gothic replica.
    Its organic structure today looms out of the fog
    Which to the stoner is a mesmeric enterprise to induce Funk!

    Through the viral air of a city masked,
    Its denizens the very harbingers of their own Hell,
    Introduces the notion of Dantean comeuppance.

    Tramping along on Bachelor’s Walk,
    Crossing the widened Carlisle over Gandon’s hump,
    Only to reach Eden – the irony sits well.

     

    Roman Noir
    “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
    Raymond Chandler
    For
    Daniel Wade

    John A. Maher, Private Detective, peered out
    The window of the fourth floor of Lafayette,
    His vantage point on par with a Gargoyle!
    The river split the city like a fissure, before him.

    It was a city divided by accent and money.
    On the northside, speech was contracted to the point
    Of almost unintelligibility, which he liked
    Never quite trusting language himself.

    While on the south, it was all accent darling,
    Barring the odd enclave. Maher moves through it all
    Monosyllabic, stony-faced and with mild amusement.

    Humans are weak creatures, so prone to error.
    And some are driven to crime; one needs a hard fist,
    Copious amounts of alcohol, and a certain penchant for metaphysics!

    Feature Image: Lafayette House and O’Connell Bridge © Peter O’Neill

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Irish Rail

    Dublin, that old whore, with her piss -stained pavements
    Abruptly transforms into a woman of a certain station.
    Such are the, at once, brutal and subtle shifts where
    In an instant, Hell aligns in an altogether strict

    Congruence… Like when you climb aboard
    The final commuter train of the week on a Friday
    Evening on Platform One at Pearse Station.
    And, as the train finally pulls out, leaving

    Behind her the contents of a working week,
    Passing images are reflected back to you
    Through the compartment windows, revealing

    Dune and marram at Portmarnock, to a passing
    Lagoon at Malahide, and then the panoply of imagery
    Miraculously washes away all of the whoredom from your mind.

     

    The Great Burnishment

    Your Pirelli calendar moment must last, at least, twenty score years;
    Nobody makes this very important point entirely clear.
    So, try to remember, while cavorting in the Sun,
    That the memories must endure, and for everyone!

    Call it, if you will, the great Burnishment.
    When like two figures from a fabled myth or play,
    You roam the most remote shores and the very
    Earth appears made for you both alone.

    It is the cliché – you look on her then and on those mythic shores –
    With the aroma of wild rosemary, myrtle and Goat;
    Desire bears you both ever onward with its emblazoned sail.

    Fast forward two decades now and she stands before you in your kitchen,
    And the initial violence of the sun from that first day,
    Tell me, do you still feel its impact burning your skin?

     

    The Flies 

    The two house- flies, Beckett and Joyce, buzz about you
    And the TV screen. There they land, buzz again
    Before flying off to Memphis copulating
    And multiplying on the wing. As a sign of virility,

    The Egyptians displayed them on their amulets.
    That great race, unlike our own, had a great respect for insects!
    Even the Greeks showed a similar respect,
    When having a BBQ they offered a sacrifice to Shoo Fly Zeus.

    The crabby meat men, in this way, could eat their own
    Undisturbed by patrolling swarms and Oxen that had fallen
    Were replaced by Lotus Eater, and burning eucalyptus in the Sun.

    Now, you look at the books of both these modern sages
    That you have been reading for an eternity,
    And still you hear the flies buzzing across the pages!

     

    The Vico Road

    From the vantage point of Strawberry Hill,
    A Victorian Villa recently selling for a cool 5 million,
    A place more evocative of Raymond Chandler
    Than anything remotely Irish. I am reminded,

    Again, of the Neapolitan philosopher who
    Peopled his New Science with giants. In fact,
    While lunching there on one of the picnic tables,
    I had a slightly hallucinatory vision of Gulliver

    Striding in 18th century breeches, and croppy hair
    Over the Sugar- Loaf Mountain, while
    The Lilliputians below discussed the ongoing

    Business in the property sector: vulture funds
    And NAMA; hedge funds in Texas,
    Where the multi-headed Cereberus roars.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Poems in the Manner of the Devil
    After Alexandar Ristović
    (1933-1994)

    If you can’t chew on oxtail, eat knuckles instead.
    The bounty of bedlam,
    Let these crumbs be your Thanksgiving,
    Or Last Suppers.
    Imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.
    See the world now through the light of wine.

    Do you have confidence in the morning?
    Do you have faith in toast?
    Each morning, do you spread marmalade
    Under the clouds in the sky?

    Here, drink this little cup of coffee.
    Taste the bitterness brewed in countless suns
    And raise your little finger, subconsciously,
    To honour the martyrdom of little buns.

    These trees that surround you,
    Why do there branches rise like accusatory fingers
    Holding peaches up to the clouds?
    Where have all the flamingos flown?
    Into the jaws of baboons in hell.

    Columns, arches… shit!
    Commerce herself is dizzied by the sun.

    But know also this,
    That within all of this madness
    There is one alone who sleeps quietly
    Nestled in dreams like a bird
    And she dreams of housing owls
    While presiding over countless committees.

     

    Break  Fast 

    The table- cloth was a souvenir from Turkey.
    It had a very simple olive pattern,
    The kind you might find in a good café
    Or restaurant where the meals were affordable.
    The kind you might find your hands floating over
    Stirring spoons of sugar or lifting glasses
    And bottles of water and wine, picking up bread
    And paper napkins or surely raising to take out
    Bank cards, in order to settle the bill.
    In order to settle the bill.

    Hardly is this last phrase out and everything,
    The whole panoply of artifacts,
    Suddenly is in freefall before you,
    Like that last joke you heard before leaving.

     

    The Familiar  

    Don’t talk to me about storms in teacups,
    Speak rather about the dervish in your espresso.
    For your idioms and metaphor are tired,
    As tired as my crocs worn out from pacing
    Over the same old living space. Here, then,
    Is where I dwell in both the word and the poem.
    And, in memory! The ontological shifts
    Which we must surely feel as much as the pedal
    Pressing down on the pianoforte, sustaining the SOUND
    The words vibrating, each particular element,
    Each particular word, key, shape or movement
    Given the proper attention it deserves.
    Such is modality. Yes, I would speak to you of modality,
    And the ontological shifts in taking a coffee!

    Janus  

     I will Putinize you, you know what I mean!
    As I think it say it my reptilian eyes roll over
    Blocking out momentarily the carrion tinted sun.
    For, each encounter is a potential existential threat.

    So, I repeat it again as I move closer to you
    Physically and you will have the opportunity
    Of understanding what it is I am now telling you again.
    If you do Not do as I ask, I will Putinize you!

    Putinize – a verb designated to describe
    The systematic annihilation of either a person,
    A place, an animal or a thing so that the object

    Is no longer physically recognisable anymore.
    Just as the city will be left in rubble, the person
    Will no longer be recognisable instead left lifeless; like himself.

    Kyiv 

    After the heroic age there are only two options remaining,
    for hatred can only burn for so long before eventually capitulating
    to either madness or so- called reason.

  • Poetry: Peter O’Neill

    Spring
    For
    Lois P. Jones  

    I

    The gentle discord of rainfall,
    its alternating static dance are
    Reeds of air in suspension
    before the corona of sensation.
    A droplet splashes and trickles
    along your neck,
    its joyous grief
    is welcomed by you with a shudder.
    The courage of the leaf
    passes beneath the banks of cloud,
    the burnishing lustre blossoming
    upon your limbs,
    the flowering sounds
    of the sun’s brassy trumpets
    illuminate the oracle of the hills.

    II 

    The space between the words
    Is akin to the space between the rain;
    This is syntax –
    The syntax of the rain.
    Each word, each drop,
    With its cohesion of letters
    Is an alphabet written in water
    Pooling in language.
    The liquidity of words.
     Your waters fall like rain,
    Their quiet sudden declensions thunder
    With an astonishment of showers
    Light and gentle as thought’s forgotten tributaries
    Brining relief from the tropics,
    The tropics of the spring.

    III 

    The distillation of the night
    ferments the dawn,
    minute revolutions of uninterrupted
    sleep; night being a dark day
    for things that silently creep.
    Out of such stuff things bloom!
    The leaf of thought could fill a room
    With the bestiaries of the night.`

    IV 

    Upon the crest you cycle
    With the Black Hills as register.
    Sheepless and quiet.
    The dissemination of clouds
    Pass, yet you are the only witness
    To such wonder.
    Accompanying all with aural springs
    Cadence and rhythm pick up
    With the invigoration of muscle.
    Thought’s labour on the passing of the evening
    Still clinging to the web of sleep
    Like the silken trail of a woman’s stocking,
    While banking on your side
    Sheer locomotion shunts
    Fabulously across the morning.
    A thousand hermaphrodites
    Lie slain and severed upon the heath,
    Yet not a sole is being recorded.
    While placed religiously upon the library shelves,
    A hundred almanacs of the tides!

    V 

    Along the footpaths, trees stand erect
    As arrows, Virgilian sentinels
    To patrol the fingerless dawn.
    Wisps of Rose.
    Cotton fields upended.
    The fields are aliens reflected
    In the lagoons filled with
    The mythology of both Roman and Norsemen.
    Out by Lambay their ghost’s hover.
    Fingal’s cave but a haven for 19th century
    Smuggler.
    There is ruin and mail under the watery skin
    Of every wave. Gut its belly,
    Debone and scale the morning.
    The electric prophets prophecy nothing.
    Mendacity is cultural.
    Aural pollution is on the wing.
    Emissaries of the void would but spill.
    Frustrate them.
    Offer other flavours of the evening.
    The evenings where shapes still bring
    Mythologies as finely wrought
    As summer dresses
    Garlanding the superb limbs
    Of the approaching Amazons.
    See there!
    Now, they come…

    VI. 

    The elemental walk of the Vitruvians,
    Divinely proportioned,
    Aqueous folds cocooned in the lithe
    Expansive limbs of the morning.
    Flesh burnished by a billion suns,
    Atomised to the core; Bataille’s erotic
    Solar economics beats all Keynesian excess.
    Even pedestrian they Kill, for She is slow.
    Her cadence and rhythm shift in shapes
    Of undulating, mesmerising patterns.
    You follow her like a servant, reciting some lost phrase,
    Bringing to her the garlands of the morning.

  • Interview: Father Peter McVerry

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

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

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

    DI: Where do you think this stigma comes from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Third, the Landlords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    With editorial from Ben Pantrey.

    Featured Image by Gareth Curtis

  • Poetry: Peter Challis

     

    Encumeada

    It was the very last shot on the roll
    Before the film disappeared into the spool –
    You, sitting on the terrace, on a three-legged stool.

    That night, you felt too tired, you said
    For a glass of vinho verde, and headed to bed

    At half-past eight. We had spent the days
    In the laurel-girded hills, trekking the levadas

    Clinging, for dear life, to a mountain edge
    Until you had come to rest on that hotel ledge –

    Serene, in jeans and a flower-print tee.
    Next day, we went to Boca da Corrida by taxi
    So you could ascend, one last time, to the sky.

     

    Grace

    If you wander down Platform Four, it’s still there:
    The Waiting Room. But Grace can’t be seen anywhere –
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who polished the tall arched windows and doors?
    Who waxed the oak benches and parquet floors?
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who stacked the long vases with sword lilies and mums?
    Who filled the sills with soapwort and sweet williams?
    Grace, the Queen of the Ladies Waiting Room.

    Who tended the men before, on their way to War?
    With barms, tea and blankets, on Platform Four?
    Grace, and four hundred more, in the Ladies Waiting Room.

    The four hundred are recalled – at the eleventh hour
    But who remembers Grace, and her flower-filled bower?
    Who will put a white carnation for Grace
    In the Ladies Waiting Room?

     

    What can be created, can be destroyed

    In Wordsworth’s time, they surveyed the land,
    Men in stove-pipe hats and coats with tails,
    To plot a way to Bowness, and beyond –
    And ply the green between with iron rails.

    From all around, they came, to speculate
    As company shares begat more, still more –
    And rails were laid right next to Bassenthwaite
    Bringing Durham coal to smelt the lakeland ore.

    By Larkin’s day, they came with balance sheets,
    Men in grey trench coats and bowler hats,
    And pronounced the railway could not compete –
    With their consultant’s report and doctored stats.

    In panelled rooms, behind spectacled smiles,
    They approve yet more motorway miles –
    See, now they’ve tarmacked Bassenthwaite’s shore
    So we can drive right up to Wordsworth’s door.

     

    Division

    At ten, our year was divided in two, A and B
    and then, A was divided again, and we,
    our half of A (a quarter of the year)
    practised verbal reasoning for the remainder
    of our time at primary school, till we sat
    the eleven-plus exam, and half of those that
    sat the exam went to the grammar school
    and the rest to secondary modern school,
    so that our group at grammar was one eighth
    of our year at ten. At grammar, we were split again
    into A, B and C, and one-third of us
    were in A, which was one-twenty-fourth of us
    who were all together at ten. At sixteen,
    we were joined by some people from secondary modern,
    including my friend. He said he was one
    of those told he had failed at eleven –
    a ball that didn’t bounce, one of those written
    off. I was one of those that bounced,
    but by eighteen I was well and truly trounced
    by my friend, who went to study history at university
    (while I went to work at the Pennine Hygienic Laundry).

     

    Two Limeys in a Carolina town

    As the afternoon heat gave way to evening’s humid pall
    We headed cross-town to the Hummingbird motel
    Following the streets through the sprawling grid
    Walk, Don’t Walk; cross Main, First, Second, Third
    And past the all-night liquor store, where a no-tooth man
    Says, hey you, honkies (bony hand proffers a bottle of gin)
    We return a grin, and then a light – blue, blue, blue –
    Whirligigged, as two cops stepped into view
    Wanted to know what we were doin’ in this vicinity
    Realised we were two limeys, didn’t know the city
    Where one ‘hood ended, and another ‘hood began
    How urban foxes scented the streets where they ran
    Said you walk there, you don’t walk here (had a word
    In our ear), then drove us right up to the Hummingbird.

     

    Portage

    The Indians tramped the eight miles,
    a crow-fly line from the squalling waters
    of the Cuyahoga, to the eponymous
    Tuscarawas – boats on their shoulders.

    That eight-mile tramp along the portage path
    joined four worlds: Erie to the north,
    and the Great Lakes; the Ohio
    below – and the Gulf, deeper south.

    We landed in the Indians’ wake,
    came to the portage path to study –
    to learn how the trail became a canal,
    became a road – multiplied – grew to be a city.

    Two years on, we took once more to the sky,
    carried our researches across the ocean,
    then on our backs, to a town, down home –
    to rest there, with us, or perhaps be born again.

     

    Feature Image: Wordsworth House on Main St, Cockermouth, Cumbria, U.K.

  • Peter Dooley: An Independent Candidate for Political Homeless

    Dublin Bay South by-election candidate Peter Dooley has an impressive track record of fighting for a just society, especially through the Dublin Renters’ Union, and unlike many on the left in Ireland, has drawn attention to the devastation to ordinary people’s lives caused by the longest lockdown in Europe.

    This by-election in Dublin Bay South allows voters to say enough is enough with the FG, FF and Green coalition government’s inadequate approach to the housing, health and climate emergencies. But some lifetime left-wing voters are now feeling politically homeless due to the adoption by the established left-wing parties of a ZeroCovid policy, which apart from being hopelessly Utopian, would hand draconian powers to corrupt State institutions and impede the free movement of people in and out of the country, including the Irish diaspora living abroad.

    Throughout Ireland’s never-ending lockdown, Peter has openly questioned the wisdom of handing extraordinary powers to the Minister for Health, which infringe basic constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly. Not only do lockdowns come with a huge human cost – in particular to school children denied an education for months and small- and medium- sized businesses prevented from trading – with little impact on the virus itself, but it has also created a political vacuum, where people affected don’t know where to turn for representation.

    Observing the colossal transfer of wealth to the billionaire class, while small businesses go bust and workers see their jobs disappear, Peter asks whether the Irish government’s response has been proportionate.

    Peter Dooley stands for an equal opportunity Ireland. He walks the talk through his daily activism, galvanising grassroots movements around housing and tenant rights.

    As a co-founder of the Dublin Renters’ Union in 2017, he has helped prevent evictions and supported renters. Peter’s ideas on housing involve resistance to the vulture funds, and ensuring that the rentier class pays a fair share in taxes. Although Dublin Bay South is the most affluent constituency in Ireland it also has the highest number of homeless people living in tents in Ireland.

    Peter has also called for a full public inquiry into the unprecedented scale of nursing home deaths at the beginning of the pandemic in Ireland, when the elderly seemed to have been sacrificed due to a flawed epidemiological assessment, and for the utility of antigen testing and drugs such as Ivermectin to be adequately examined.

    Unlike the other main opposition candidates in the area he has expressed deep opposition to divisive and exclusionary vaccine passports.

    He calls for the end to a two-tier healthcare system, and for a proper cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken if any lockdown is ever contemplated again.

    You can reach Peter Dooley and his campaign policies here:

    FB: @PeterDooleyDublin

    Twitter: @PeterDooleyDUB

    Email: peterdooley@gmail.com

    IG: @PeterDooleyDublin

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Peter O’Neill’s Henry Street Arcade

    Covid-19 has perhaps spelt a temporary death for, amongst many other things, flaneurship – that is, the practise of being able to wander throughout a city freely and unobstructed, making observations as one goes. Peter O’ Neill’s latest collection addresses the flaneur directly. With a background in translation, academia and his long- avowed admiration of Beckett and Baudelaire (to whom the flaneur label is most regularly attached), O’ Neill puts his own unique slant on Dublin, and he is not alone.

    Henry Street Arcade is a bilingual edition, with O’ Neill’s poems in English appearing alongside their French translations by French novelist and poet Yan Kouton. This is an indicator that O’ Neill is a poet who must, out of necessity, operate always between dualities.

    Henry Street Arcade forms the end of his Dublin Trilogy, a triumvirate of poem sequences centred around Dublin, which include The Dark Pool and Dublin Gothic. The collection’s title comes from the name of a commercial passage located just off O’ Connell Street, built in the style of a Parisian arcade. A loose sequence of a single day in Dublin is gradually formed, in the title which directly addresses the arcade, O’ Neill asserts:

    It evokes the cave which according to Vico,
    In Scienza nuova, Plato singles out as the origin
    Of civilisation.

    Like Baudelaire and Joyce before him, O’ Neill’s aesthetic lies in transplanting ancient, iconic mythologies into a contemporary setting, underscoring its timelessness with regards to the human condition. In his case, it is a freewheeling mix of classical and literary understandings, now set to the backdrop of Dublin’s streets and architectural mismatches, that frames his poetry. He gives us a city in a state of uncertain but unstoppable transition, one in which the ideals of Ireland’s revolutionary past seem to hold little relevance to the social ills that continue to plague the very city – itself in the grip of lethal capitalistic freefall – in which they were first enacted. This constant collision between mundane, everyday reality and the author’s eye for both myth and observational capacity lends it a finely-tuned tension.

    In ‘Portrait of a Woman on a Train’, he writes: “Her handbag/Hangs from the gentle scaffold of her arm/The murderous black leather having been tattooed/With bolts of burnished gold, also bearing/The holy runes of some designer’s name. What inside does the urban Pandora bring?’

    O’ Neill almost seems to revel in this dualism. His own philosophy can perhaps be surmised with a line from the poem ‘Portrait of a Woman’: ‘Beauty must always be contrasted with banality.” His continual pairing of the two also becomes a way of interrogating whether making sense of the city is even a worthwhile endeavour.

    As an ultramodern metropolis of cosmopolitan glamour and multicultural receptivity, the social blights of homelessness, poverty, addiction and waste also remain on full display. Even a crushed coffee cup: ‘The premium of price per individual coffee/Reflecting back the macro environment of the/Property world which the cafe finds itself in.’ – is indicative of a society in extreme disrepair.

    A later poem, ‘Heraclitus’, describes: On the high street, in broad daylight, Bordello chic is promoted in plain view. And for all to see – though they pass by unseeing! Our age is one of casualised distraction – the ubiquity of screens, whether from phones, laptops, tablets in the majority of peoples’ lives, necessary for both business and pleasure – conference calls and dating sites, social media as well as the commercial necessity for businesses to have and maintain an ‘online presence’.

    Running through Henry Street Arcade is a desire for a sense of mystery – arguably essential to the poetic imagination – to be returned to an age, as O’ Neill describes it, ‘of blinding all-seeing, all knowing/All encompassing… nothing!’ He urges the reader to ‘Reappraise/The splendour of the shades and the shadows.’ This is not a call to return to a state of benightedness – it is a call to acknowledge that there is still a place for beauty in a world that seems to be increasingly accelerating.

    By Peter O’ Neill trans. Yan Koutan. Editions Du Pont de L’Europe, 95p, €12.00 ISBN: 978-2-36851-573-0