Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sean O’Faolain

  • A Variety of Voices

    ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’
    Vincent Mercier on his editor at The Bell Sean O’Faoláin.

    In this second and final instalment, Frank Armstrong reviews Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices edited by Mark O’Brien and Felix M. Larkin and published by the Four Court Press in Dublin this year.

    It follows his review of Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth Century Ireland: Writing Against the Grain (2014) edited by the same authors.

    This book delves deeper into the canon of dissenting Irish journalism and weighs up the consequences of the arrival of the internet for critical journalism in this country.

    Digital Flood

    John Horgan observes in Great Irish Reportage (Random House, Penguin, London, 2013) that ‘Writing about current events will have been transformed by the rise of digital media in ways we can only guess at.’ This may seem an obvious statement, but we can surely hazard a guess as to some consequences for journalism that goes against the grain, in particular.

    If the invention of the printing press in Europe in 1450 germinated a diverse range of ideologies and religions, signs are a distracted and smart-phone-addicted civilisation arising out of the technological rupture of the Internet is inclining towards homogeneity and conformity – not least in terms of the sub-Americana patois increasingly mouthed in the Podcast-verse.

    Thus, we have just witnessed widespread uniformity in the response of governments around the world to Covid-19, as dominant – group-thinking – academic scientists, doctors, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies harnessed traditional and social media to manufacture consent for unprecedented curbs on civil liberties to contend with a contagious respiratory pathogen.

    We may argue into the night over whether the response was right or wrong, proportionate or disproportionate, motivated by mamon or otherwise, but no one can now doubt the global reach of digital power, controlled especially from Silicon Valley. A latter-day Napoleon would not consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets. Rather he would surely recognise the capacity of social media to mould opinions and frame political choices: concluding the algorithm to be mightier than the best opinion writer.

    Moreover, the profound challenges legacy publications contend with pale in comparison to that faced by dissenting journalism that in Ireland has generally appeared in the marginal periodicals explored in these reviews.

    Thus, the editors of A Variety of Voices find it ‘hard to envisage that it will be possible – or profitable, in intellectual or any other terms – for historians of the future to compile two volumes on twenty-first century Irish periodicals like we have done on the twentieth-century ones.’

    Contemporary dissenting journalism that is not dependent on the financial largesse – and whims – of wealthy institutions and individuals faces extinction. This point is driven home by the recent demise of www.broadsheet.ie, a resolutely independent news and satirical website, representing no fixed political abode, apart from exhibiting a deep suspicion of state and corporate institutions that left it subject to charges of being informed by conspiracy theories, but which on a number of occasions displayed a willingness to publish purportedly defamatory material that mainstream publishers shied away from.

    Revealingly, the recently published Tolka – ‘a journal of formally promiscuous non-fiction’ – displays the logo of the Arts Council. A first edition lacks any obvious political intent, and hosts among other contributions a whimsical essay by Irish Times funny man Patrick Freyne on the origins of his attachment to list-making. It contains no advertising, so we may safely assume it will last as long as its annual grant applications proves successful.

    Other magazines funded by Arts Council in 2022 include: Banshee, €75,000; Comhar Teoranta, €46,800; Crannog Magazine, €18,000; Cyphers Magazine, €13,000; Dublin Review of Books, €25,000; The Dublin Review, €75,000; The Journal of Music, €75,000. Such magazines are not necessarily apolitical, but generally do not directly address political questions or engage in investigative journalism.

    The huge problem attendant to the public-private RTÉ model, emphasises the difficulty with the State directly funding political journalism and investigative reporting. With readers generally unwilling to pay for content, however, publishers are increasingly beholden to advertisers, including the state. This insulates powerful institutions and individuals from investigative journalism and critical commentary.

    Finding a Voice

    According to the editors A Variety of Voices the periodicals featured in their second volume ‘are mainly organs of important communities within Irish society – not always mainstream, but significant communities nonetheless that would not otherwise have a voice in Irish media.’ The authors acquaint us with important titles representing a feminist outlook that has remained distinctly marginalised until recent times, as well as publications emanating from a gay community whose sex lives were only decriminalised in 1993.

    There is also a strong analysis of myriad religious periodicals representing the full spectrum of views on the political, social and economic questions of their times. This includes the Catholic Bulletin (1911-1939) under firebrand editor Timothy Corcoran SJ as editor, who, according to Patrick Maume, considered the leader of the Blueshirts General Eoin O’Duffy insufficiently fascist.

    There are also accounts of other Jesuit publications from Declan O’Keefe that challenged the illiberalism associated with the Catholic Church in Ireland, under Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid especially; and an analysis of the shifting outlook of the Church of Ireland Gazette from Ian d’Alton.

    This volume also finds room for more contemporary publications such as the resilient Phoenix and In Dublin, although it is disappointing to find no entry for the literary and intellectual publication The Crane Bag (1979-1983) edited by Richard Kearney, and others including Ronan Sheahan; or for that matter, Envoy Magazine (1949-51) edited by the late John Ryan; although there is a passing reference to his correspondence with J.P. Donleavy, discussing the prohibitive cost of publishing.

    Ryan went on to become the author of a wonderful memoir celebrating Baggatonia, entitled Remembering How We Stood (1975). It provides intimate accounts of writers such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien, and a memorable description of the first Bloomsday in 1954, organised by Ryan himself along with Flann O’Brien. He was, coincidentally, the father of his namesake former editor of www.broadsheet.ie.

    In eschewing self-consciously literary publications, the authors perhaps draw too firm a line between the political and the poetic. It might suggest to a contemporary editor that the two do not mix easily, but Irish history suggests that an emulsification of forms – especially evident during the Irish Revival at the turn of the last century – animate political action. Empiricism or strictly factual journalism has its limitation, if we acknowledge as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it: ‘the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

     

    The Fourth Estate

    This volume draws attention to a remarkable series of articles (1944-5) in The Bell by Vincent Mercier and Conor Cruise-O’Brien (under the nom de plume ‘Donat O’Donnell’) assessing the Fourth Estate in Ireland, including dominant titles the Irish Independent, Irish Times and Irish Press. Mercier also attempted to define the timeless nature of Irish humour in his assessment of Dublin Opinion.

    In his account Felix M. Larkin describes it as a ‘dramatic intervention’ for a series of articles to critically assess fellow newspapers and periodicals, including itself.’ Recalling a contemporary reluctance on the part of Irish journalists to criticise directly one another, Larkin argues that

    to dig deeper into the affairs of other organs might delegitimize the status of the press generally, diminish its influence and give ammunition to those wishing to circumscribe its freedom. There was also a certain esprit de corps within the press, notwithstanding often fierce competition between individual newspapers and periodicals – a sense of ‘dog doesn’t eat dog.

    He further opines that ‘The idea linking all six articles is that the Fourth Estate was accordingly complicit in the stagnation that followed the revolution.’

    Mercier identified the Irish Times as the newspaper of the Protestant professional classes rather than of landowners ‘the true ‘people of Burke and of Grattan’, but observed how ‘slowly but surely it is becoming the organ of the entire professional class, Protestant and Catholic.’ He characterized the politics of the Irish Times as ‘on the left’ but qualified this by intimating it had ‘its own particular brand of conservative progressivism’. He nonetheless regarded its journalism as ‘ten times more alive than its rivals in the newspaper world.’

    O’Brien argued that the Irish Independent was first and foremost a business undertaking. He observed how: ‘Middle class Catholic families who were reading the Independent ten years ago are reading the Irish Times today’. He anticipated that it might react by using ‘its commanding financial position to get better features that other papers could afford.’ One such contributor would be Cruise-O’Brien himself!

    The now defunct Irish Press – of which then Taoiseach Eamon de Valera was still the principal shareholder – was also analysed by Mercier. According to its first editorial in 1931 the publication stood ‘for independence, for the greatest temporal blessing a nation may enjoy, the full liberty of all its people … Our ideal, culturally is an Irish Ireland.’

    By the mid-1940s, however, Mercier believed ‘it could justifiably be described as ‘the Government organ’ and that it was ‘almost as closely linked with the new Big Business of Ireland as the other two daily papers’. Nonetheless, he conceded that it is ‘mainly read on its merits as a newspaper rather than on any political count.’

    The same writer also analysed the Bell itself under Sean O’Faoláin as editor. Among O’Faoláin’s uncompromising articles was one entitled ‘The Stuffed Shirts’, where he fumed: ‘[T]he final stage of the Revolution was – and is to this day – a middle-class putsch. It was not a society that came out of the maelstrom. It was a class.’

    In a refreshingly iconoclastic piece Mercier wrote of Sean O’Faoláin: ‘I have never met a man so in love with the written word – provided he himself has written it’; but asserted that he ‘is not just a figurehead, he is the magazine.’

    In his essay ‘The Parnellism of Seán O’Faoláin’ O’Brien described O’Faoláin as ‘parochial’

    He [O’Faoláin] neither affirms nor denies anything of universal importance… His stories are illuminating about Ireland; an anthropological entertainment to the curious foreigner, an annoyance and a stimulus to the native. To Ireland, the stimulus is of great value; in a time of sleepy stimulation Mr O’Faoláin’s irascible and dissenting temperament has struggled, not without success, to preserve some honest intellectual life among his people.

    It is hard to imagine a contemporary Irish publication subjecting its own editor to such stern critical analysis.

    Irish Humour

    According to Larkin, Vincent Mercier’s The Irish Comic Tradition (Dublin, 1962) asserts that ‘comedy is the central tradition of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature and can be traced back to oral Gaelic roots in the ninth century.’ Mercier identified apparently timeless elements of this tradition as ‘a bent for wild humour [and] a delight in witty world play.’

    His article: ‘Dublin Opinion’s Six Jokes’ represented a foretaste of later scholarly work. These include the Civil Service Joke, which is also the Cork Joke: ‘if you took away the Corkmen, where would the civil service be? And if you took away the Civil Service, where would the Corkmen be?’

    There was also the Where Were You in 1916 Joke, the Irish Navy Joke’, emphasising its miniscule size, the ‘New Ireland Joke’, a ‘back-handed cut at the more absurd manifestations of the Gaelic Revival’; the Ourselves-As-Others-See-Us Joke, ‘usually located in Hollywood, and pigs in the kitchen generally figure in it somewhere.’

    And finally, The Farmer Joke, depicting the archetypal Irish farmer ‘filling up forms, submitting to inspection, resisting inspectors, selling his cattle, giving them away the price goes to hell etc.’

    Mercier regarded Dublin Opinion as ‘one of the most political funny papers in existence’. ‘The real secret’ he argued was its impartiality. He believed that ‘its sympathies were with the losing side [in the Civil War]’, but that it could not ‘attack those in power, who then had the majority of the people behind them. At least … if it wished to keep its circulation, or even, perhaps, some freedom of speech. On the other hand, it had no desire to persecute the unhappy Republicans.’

    However, he criticized the magazine for ‘failing to address such issues as unemployment and the Dublin slums’, at least since the end of Arthur Booth’s Cassandra-like prophecies of war and famine.’

    Fortnight

    Another important contemporary magazine covered in this edition is Fortnight, which emerged as an important voice of moderation during the Northern Ireland Troubles under the stewardship of an academic lawyer Tom Hadden in 1970. The article in A Variety of Voices was written by a former editor Andy Pollack, who reveals how he valued the opportunities it gave him to use controversial material he could not publish in ‘a more risk-averse national broadsheet newspaper’. This included accounts from the notorious Kincora boys home in east Belfast.

    At times the magazine experienced embedded resistance to its human rights advocacy, as when staunchly Unionist Lurgan printers made it clear that they did not want to continue to print it after an issue came out strongly against internment.

    Fortnight also contained one prescient critique of the Northern Ireland Peace Process from David Guelke who warned that that – unlike its South African equivalent – by concentrating on securing and sustaining ‘ceasefires by paramilitary actors at the margins’, it could actually make the situation more difficult by freezing in place ‘a Cyprus-type bloodless conflict’, where there would be ‘no incentives for cross-community collaboration’

    The publication received ‘substantial grants from the British charity the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.’ However, according to Pollack the advent of a social media – which spelt ‘the death knell for small, radical print publications everywhere’ – led to its demise. It did, however, resume publishing in September, 2020.

    Phoenix

    In his article on Phoenix Magazine Joe Breen cites a warning from Tony Harcup’s Journalism: Principle and Practice (London, 2009)] to the effect that investigative journalism, while achieving notable results might be seen as ‘perpetuating a myth that society is divided into a large number of fundamentally good people and a smaller number of fundamentally bad people’.

    Harcup asks where the investigative journalism is into structural forces in society answering: ‘Largely notable for its absence. Instead, particularly on television, we tend to have personalised stories of goodies, baddies and heroic reporters’.

    Nonetheless, the achievements of The Phoenix under the control of John Mulcahy and with Paddy Prendevilll as editor (a bulldog quality, untainted by ideology is also attributed to deputy editor Paul Farrell) in this vital sphere are arguably unsurpassed in the history Irish journalism.

    Fittingly, an Irish Times obituary describes John Mulcahy as ‘one of the most significant journalists and publishers of the last half century in this country’. Phoenix’s major scoops have included: Charles Haughey receiving £1 million from Ben Dunne; the pension of £27.6 million paid to Michael Fingleton; Father Michael Cleary fathering a child with his housekeeper; and Anglo-Irish bank being technically bankrupt

    In October 1991, Dick Spring quoted a Phoenix article at length in the Dáil. It had been pulled from the magazine when Smurfit Web Press refused to print it.

    The magazine’s investigations are still accompanied by a Private Eye-infused humour, where Breen argues ‘laddish sexual innuendos were a staple’: as with the cartoon: ‘How’s the queen?’ Queen Elizabeth: ‘Edward’s fine, thank you’. The magazine has also displayed an unusual sympathy – in an Irish journalistic context at least – for the Republican cause in Northern Ireland.

    Despite its achievements, Breen warns that that ‘it is notable that with the rise of social media, where people play fast and loose with facts, rumours and innuendo, The Phoenix has lost some of its traction.’

    Second row: Far left: Hilda Tweedy

    The Irish Housewife

    The origins of the unradical-sounding The Irish Housewife magazine can be traced to a public ‘Memorandum on the Food and Fuel Emergency’ authored by Hilda Tweedy, Andreé Sheehy Skeffington; Marguerite Skelton and Nancy Simmons in 1941. According to Sonja Tiernan they ‘drew up an economic plan urging the government to ration all essential foodstuff, control prices and supress black-market sales.’

    In response it was denigrated by journalists as ‘a housewives’ petition’. The authors appear to have inverted these prejudices by using ‘housewife’ in the title of the Association they founded, which went on to publish the magazine.

    It is instructive that after Hilda Tweedy ‘applied for a teaching job in a Protestant girls’ school, she was told that as a married woman she was unsuitable; the headmistress said it would not be nice for girls if their teacher became pregnant.’

    Importantly, according to Tiernan the Irish Housewives Association ‘had made a rather astute business deal with an advertising agency: The agency printed and distributed the magazine and in return they kept all of the advertising income.’ As articles were contributed for free it was kept at an affordable price.

    Among its contributions, Katherine Watson recorded her experiences of visiting female prisoners in Mountjoy, while George Yeats (the daughter of W.B.) published an article entitled ‘Can Your Child Draw’ in which she warned: ‘don’t be too cautious! Beware of all that restricts a child’s boldness of hand and of imagination. More is at stake than his future as an artist.’

    The advertising market began to slow down in the 1960s and by 1966 it was no longer viable for the agency to print the magazine. Nonetheless, it had provided an important outlet, and Tweedy later mused: ‘Who would have thought in 1942 that women would move from the kitchen to Áras an Uachtaráin.’

    75th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, O’Connell Street, President Mary Robinson. Source: Dublin City Library Archive.

    Status

    Signs of the rise of future President Mary Robinson’s generation of successful and ambitious women can be identified in Status Magazine, a short-lived feminist news magazine from 1981.

    Its origins lie in in the gathering of about 1,000 women and several men at a conference in Liberty Hall, which led to the founding of the magazine with Marian Finucane as editor. She was already a well-known Irish media personality. 31,500 copies of the first issue of Status were printed and these sold out quickly; yet curiously ten months later Status closed down.

    The decision to launch a magazine squarely focused on women’s rights had come from the proprietor of Magill Magazine Vincent Browne’ who said: ‘News coverage and investigative journalism from a woman’s perspective is what we are aiming for.’

    Cutting-edge reportage included Nell McCafferty writing from inside one of the mother and baby homes where single, pregnant women effectively went into hiding until their babies were born.

    One regular feature that scared advertisers was a page headed ‘No Comment’, which reproduced snippets of sexist nonsense sent in by readers including advertisements and articles from national newspaper. This included one from the Irish Times, which observed that ‘sitting TDs, Mr Eddie Collins and Mr Austin Deasy, are regarded as “Garret men”, though not fanatically so: the young and pretty Mrs Bulbulia is taken for a dedicated “Garret woman”’.

    Without adequate advertising revenue it was, however, doomed. Vincent Browne felt from the start the magazine was ‘gratuitously offensive to advertisers … There was too much sniping which antagonises people to no purpose.’ He noted that ‘marketing managers are male dominated and – dare I say it – some of them maybe, a little frightened’. Status was, he felt, a ‘bit too aggressively women’s lib’.

    According to Tiernan: ‘The usual rules did not apply: Those controlling these decisions did not want to see their advertisements in Status no matter how many educated women were buying the magazine.’ Eventually, even those stalwarts of magazine advertising – cigarette companies – abandoned ship.

    A Future for Hard Copy Journalism?

    A final word goes to John S. Doyle the former editor of In Dublin, which was inspired by Pariscope, the New Yorker and London’s Time Out. It remained largely removed from the cut and thrust of national politics, apart from assessing the planning decisions of Dublin Corporation, and then providing an outlet for the campaign against the development of Wood Quay.

    Intriguingly, Doyle revealed that

    none of the people who started In Dublin, or who came to in the first few years, considered themselves to be journalists, or had thought of that as a career. They were people who, in their different ways, wanted to write, and one of the strengths of the magazine was that it attracted so many of them.

    It may be that through some such formula – involving those with a desire and even need to write – we may revive dissenting journalism.

    The challenge may be to find a broad-based platform that is not dependent on an increasingly commercialised and censorious social media for citizen journalists to publish. In this respect we mourn the demise of www.broadsheet.ie, which showed an usual willingness to court controversy, even if this occasionally placed them in the company of characters who apparently set out to cause offense.

    A future for dissenting hard copy journalism that is not funded by an emanation of the state or philanthropy is difficult to identify, but it may be – just as music connoisseurs are now purchasing vinyl which was once considered obsolete – that readers will revert to a tangible format as the promblems with the digital medium become increasingly apparent.

     

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  • Irish Housing: Historic Roots of a Crisis

    As a UCD undergraduate I recall Professor Tom Bartlett likening Irish history to a pint of Guinness, ‘with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth everything else, including all the political movements.’

    Old habits die hard. The issue of property remains a paramount concern. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at approximately 82%, a proportion that only declined, to 69% in 2014, after the Crash from 2008, precipitated by reckless lending, often to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. This reflects the ongoing effect of a global financialisation of property as a speculative asset from the 1980s, leading to the exclusion of a substantial proportion of a younger generation from home ownership across most of Europe, North America and beyond.

    Ireland’s housing crisis is a special case however. In order to understand its long term causes – Dublin is now the most expensive city in the euro area primarily due to staggeringly high rents – it is necessary to explore an historic relationship with land, arising out of a colonial experience. This has brought an economy where the land grabber reigns ascendant.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Urbanisation

    A nation derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits. Over recent centuries, in Ireland, as elsewhere, mass urbanisation, disproportionately directed at Dublin, has occurred, but we have built our cities on historical patterns of land ownership.

    There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish relationship to property that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation, in particular the Plantations, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation through the Land Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    The second is the dominance of pastoral, livestock agriculture, particularly since the late nineteenth century under a system of individual land ownership – as opposed to treating property as a collective patrimony under Brehon Law in Gaelic Ireland.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    It is incorrect to assume cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlements emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture; and in earlier centuries cattle were kept for domestic milk production rather than to produce a (beef) commodity for export.

    Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato from the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, bringing marginal land into cultivation for the first time. Although, ominously, according to John Reader in The Untold Story of the Potato (2008), ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated.’ It acted like cheap credit in generating a ready source of subsistence on small parcels of land, but the potato cannot be preserved for a long period like grain so cannot easily be traded, thereby impeding development.

    Over time, the impact of Irish agriculture, especially extensive grazing, on Ireland’s nature has been profound. According to Frank Mitchell in Reading the Irish Landscape (1997): ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape.’ This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, before the most intense period of colonisation at the end of the eighteenth century when a poet lamented:

    Cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad? / Tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár;
    Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that further degrade the land, while offering little scope for biodiversity.

    The sixteenth and seventeenth century Plantations trapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society, in a Malthusian grip that culminated in the Famine.

    Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s

    Describing the acquisition of annual leases by small farmers, who had previously held land in common under the Brehon Law system, Seán O’Faoláin wrote in The Irish (1947): ‘The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession.’ Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory, as land became an asset to be bought and sold, rather than a collective patrimony.

    Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century. The raising of cattle, often exported ‘on the hoof’ to England for eventual slaughter, began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage as the British discovered cheaper sources of grain after Napoleon’s blockade ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Henceforth, the cheap labour of the Irish peasantry – a substantial proportion unconnected to the market economy – were an anachronism to the British administration in Ireland.

    The Famine (1845-1851) was, according to Charles Trevelyan the architect of Britain’s response ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil.’ Anticipating the Shock Doctrine, the Famine, he declared, was:

    the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…

    Wood engraving, 1886. cc Library of Congress

    Strong Farmers

    The Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture, increasingly under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this mode of production was (and is) that profitability depends on a low labour input. It made no sense for numerous sons and daughters to remain on the land, and so the tsunami of emigration that formed during the Famine gave way to steady migratory waves. Over the long term this brought precipitous population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

    As Joseph Connolly put it in his Labour in Irish History (1910): ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places.’

    This process should not, however, be attributed solely to remote authorities in Westminster working on behalf of absentee landlords, as is commonly assumed. Significant gains were made by Catholic Irish farmers holding farms above twenty acres. As Kerby A. Miller wrote in The Atlas of the Great Famine (2012): ‘an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties.’

    As Ireland did not witness an Industrial Revolution, except in the North-East corner, this shift from tillage to pasture led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world with a lower population now than in the 1840s, when the population stood at almost nine million. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold.

    National Independence

    The struggle for Irish independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, a comprador class selling their primary products on the Imperial market, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures, culminating in Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903, the British administration sought, but failed, to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country.

    This allowed their sons to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. This cohort entered the professions, established a National University in 1908 (Maynooth University had also been established in 1796) and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to an individualist and competitive approach to land, in contrast to collaborative arrangements typically associated with tillage, including the Clachan settlements of pre-Famine Ireland. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was a cattle farmer, and duly aligned the national interest with the economic fortunes of his ‘grazier’ class.

    After independence in 1922, pastoral Strong Farmers continued to sell mostly cattle onto the Imperial market, notwithstanding the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to more labour-intensive tillage for domestic consumption; except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing subsistence crops.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Individualist Outlook

    The outlook of the peasant-pastoralist has informed our laws and values since the inception of the State, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it:

    we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like a beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch.

    The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, high levels of precipitation and humidity make Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited to mechanised harvesting. The traditional method of ‘bindering’ – drying the harvest over months in stacks – became uncompetitive due to high labour inputs, and so the population drain form rural Ireland continued.

    Moreover, since the 1970s price supports from the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy have reduced flexibility and dynamism in land use, by inflating values as farmers were guaranteed payments, even on poor land, without adequately addressing the associated population drain.

    Legal Protections

    As the sons and daughters of peasant-proprietors migrated to cities, especially Dublin, Ireland’s politics of clientelism embodied in the two main political parties took hold. An urban population with roots in raising livestock prizes land as an asset from which profit is derived, as opposed to a situation where crops are cultivated for the family table and traded within the community.

    An inherited skill in deal-making was readily applied to urban development, which is also reflected in strict judicial interpretations of private property, allowing enterprising developers to make a killing. Thus, State institutions have favoured the landed interest over the property-less, in a troubling reminder of a bygone era.

    In 1973 the Kenny Report recommended that land around the hinterland of Dublin should be compulsorily purchased by local authorities for 25% more than its agricultural value. According to Frank McDonald, the former Environment Correspondent of the Irish Times, Dr Garret FitzGerald, a member of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government that received the report could not remember why it wasn’t acted upon. ‘It just slid off the agenda’ he said, and no subsequent government acted upon it. McDonald said that ‘Ostensibly, the reason for this was that Kenny – a constitutional lawyer himself – had proposed something that would be unconstitutional. But no attempt was made to test this in the courts.’

    That was until Part V of the Planning Act 2000. This was referred to the Supreme Court which held that the acquisition of land for social and affordable housing did not offend against the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, that provision did little to ameliorate the housing crisis during the Celtic Tiger as developers evaded responsibility by paying over sums to local authorities, and successive Ministers watered down the provisions.

    The reluctance of politicians to implement the Kenny Report reflected a genuine fear that any such provision would fall foul of the Court, which has tended to vindicate a constitutional right to property under Articles 40.3.2 and 43.1.2 over competing interests of renters to security of tenure or a controlled rent.

    Thus, in 1981 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional attempts to introduce rent controls under The Housing (Private Rented Dwellings) Bill, while the wide scope of Article 45 has been given little attention.

    This reflects a sectional bias as the common good (to which all constitutional rights are subject) should allocate a reasonable prospect of basic accommodation to all permanent residents.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Unenumerated Rights

    The idea of an ‘unenumerated’ Constitutional right – in that instance a right to bodily Integrity – was first identified by the same Justice Kenny in his landmark High Court judgment of Ryan v Attorney General (1965). A right to adequate shelter may also be unenumerated. For instance, Kenny’s seminal Ryan judgment cited the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) which states that: ‘every man has the right to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care and finally the necessary services.’ Yet the Court has avoided vindicating a basic human right to adequate shelter.

    Now, underpinned by legal and political deference to the property interest, we see huge swathes of land and buildings that have been left fallow in urban areas: a 2016 report in The Dublin Inquirer identified at least 389 derelict sites. We are unaccustomed to urban density, or community developments, except as a sign of poverty – with the 1930s schemes of Herbert Simms a rare and inspiring exception. Strict demarcation between properties, and a lack of community spaces, may be interpreted as a legacy of extensive cattle-rearing for the imperial market.

    Furthermore, the sons and daughters of nineteenth century pastoralists, accustomed to low-density living with few neighbours on the horizon, sought distance from their neighbours, and the assurance of owning a motor car. This accounts for the sprawl, and prevalence of needless boundary walls, in Irish suburbia; as well as a preference for one-off housing.

    The commercial culture can also be linked to the pastoral outlook. It is revealing that few successful Irish businesspeople have been technological innovators. Rather, success has been built on buying low and selling high, just as a cattle farmer buys a calf and seeks to sell him at a higher price – the entrepreneur Tony Ryan was quoted as saying ‘you make your profit the day you buy.’ Thus developers often purchase land at a low price and sit on this until financial conditions improve. The Irish dream is built on living off the fat of the land, creating conditions to the liking of the vulture and cuckoo funds our government now accommodates.

    Photo ©Daniele Idini

    Historic Failings

    No Western economy experienced growth, at least in the period 1995-2007, comparable to that of the Celtic Tiger, but this was achieved, at least in part, through the availability of cheap, and ultimately ruinous, loans, by unscrupulous bankers. But like the wonder crop of the potato, these loans generated ultimately ruinous growth.

    Failure of both property and potatoes emanated from America. In the case of the Famine it was the dreaded blight, phytophthora infestans, which first blackened the leaves and then reduced the crop to inedible mush. The pin that burst the Irish property bubble, a large boil on a global wart, was marked with another American sign, that of the ruinous Lehman Brothers. Both the potato blight and subprime mortgages afflicted other countries, but perhaps nowhere as severely as Ireland.

    The austerity that followed may be likened to the extreme Shock Doctrine practised by Charles Trevelyan, while the feeding frenzy that occurred through NAMA recalls the land-grabbing in the wake of the Famine.

    In order to address Ireland’s Housing Crisis we must face up to the sins of our fathers, including an enduring bias in favour of strict individual ownership preached by the two main political parties in government, as well as the judiciary.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine.

    Title Image: House in proximity to Dog’s Bay, Connemara. ©Daniele Idini

  • Mother and Baby Home ‘Whitewash’ Compounds Victims’ Torture

     Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
    Blase Pascal

    While researching my new book Feminism Backwards (Mercier Press, Cork, 2020) long held worries about the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland, particularly its role in relation to women, really snapped into focus for me.

    At this moment, as a nation, we are in shock at the horrors pouring into the public discourse about what went on in Mother and Baby Homes. But just step back a minute to consider where this viciousness and misogyny came from.

    Most of us are probably aware that the Catholic Church’s hatred of women has a long tail: the first bad girl being of course Eve, who ate the apple, and then persuaded Adam to take a nibble, and whizz-bang-wallop everything went to hell. Since time immemorial, as far as the Church ‘Fathers’ have been concerned, women are the ‘root of all evil.’

    The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel the Elder, c. 1615.

    And, just as centuries of antisemitism reached its apogee in the Holocaust, so centuries of Catholic anti-woman propaganda culminated in the ‘Burning Times’, the Inquisition, and the burning alive of 80,000 women, some believe many more, as ‘witches.’

    While the Inquisition didn’t reach here, we got the Great Famine (1845-51) instead. Things were appalling for almost everybody under centuries of British occupation, but after the Famine life suddenly became considerably worse for Irish women. Before this the Catholic Church was not all-powerful: there were few churches, and priests had to be sent to France to study, while seminaries and convents were almost non-existent.

    Then the British government made a devilishly clever intervention: trebling its annual subvention to Maynooth University so that from then on the teaching of priests would be done at home, far from revolutionary ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité! With the terrible outcomes of the Famine scarring Irish society indefinitely their objective was achieved more fully than they could have imagined.

    With the last remnants of a clan-based, more matriarchal Gaelic culture destroyed, the big farmers – those who collected rents for landlords – along with the ‘gombeen men’ who extended credit, would decide, no matter what the cost to their sons and daughters, that the family farm should never be subdivided. Ever. These early capitalists suddenly found common cause with the freshly-funded zealots of Maynooth.

    Late marriage or no marriage. Permanent Celibacy. Emigration. A convent or a mad house – take your pick young lady.

    Abandoned cottage, County Sligo.

    Late Nineteenth Century Catholicism

    The newly funded, and energised Catholic Church, with their big farmer foot soldiers – only big farmers could afford to send their sons to Maynooth, or their daughters to a newly opened convent – filled the power vacuum left by the post-Famine societal collapse.

    Repression became the order of the day.

    How was it possible that normal people could be made to accept it? As Goretti Horgan writes in her paper: ‘Changing Women’s Lives in Ireland’: ‘normal life after the Famine was impossible.’ Millions had died horrible deaths, hundreds of thousands had emigrated in ‘coffin ships’, the template for survivors of a repressed, patriarchal, misogynistic, conservative, anti-sex and anti-woman Ireland had been laid, and the Virgin Mary, a goddess stripped of sex, agency and colour, was to be the icon to which all Irish women were to henceforth aspire. ‘Passive, virginal, pious, humble, with an unlimited capacity to endure suffering’, as Tom Inglis put it in ‘Origins and legacies of Irish prudery: Sexuality and social control in modern Ireland.’

    The Church gained further power when Charles Stewart Parnell promised them control of education and health in return for support in the national struggle. And after the 1916 Easter Rising, when many of the poets and revolutionaries had been shot and thrown into pits of lime by our old friends the British, once again the Church and the gombeen men slithered into the power vacuum, establishing what Sean O’Faolain famously described as their ‘dreary Eden’.

    As Peter Lennon says in his wonderful 1967 film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ – which has still not been shown on RTE! – we’d survived seven hundred years of British occupation only to sink under the weight of our new (deeply conservative) leaders, and the Catholic clergy. Or as Sean O’Faolain put it: ‘We became a society of (browbeaten) urbanised peasants, without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWY8hkF3yWk

    Bloody hell.

    It seems probable that Éamon de Valera, ‘the father of the nation’, suffered a nervous breakdown during fighting in 1916 and must surely have suffered from PTSD and Survivor Guilt, having been the only signatory of the Proclamation to avoid being shot and thrown into a lime pit thanks to his American passport.

    Once in power after 1932 he got joined forces with the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid – the J.Edgar Hoover of Irish society – a prelate with spies everywhere; a sexually repressed celibate, obsessed with women’s sexuality . The imprint of these two damaged men over the Irish Constitution of 1937 is clear.

    John Charles McQuaid and Eamon de Valera, December 1940.

    The Constitution of 1937 is a document very different from the wonderful Proclamation of 1916. Misogyny, sexual repression, and a viciously anti woman theocracy was set in legal stone, and over the following decades Ireland slowly sank into economic, physical and psychological stagnation, characterised by hypocrisy and widespread mean-spiritedness – if I’m not having a good time then sure as hell you can’t either; with sex the only real sin.

    The Church, with its supposedly celibate priests, brothers and nuns had set up a dictatorship; and the State backed them all the way.

    The terrible ‘architecture of containment’ – eerily similar to the brutal Workhouses set up by the British complete with terrible food, contempt for inmates and mass graves – grew like a cancer over the whole country. Mother and Baby Homes. Industrial Schools. ‘Orphanages’. Magdalene Laundries. Lunatic Asylums.  The Church had control over, and benefited financially, from them all.

    By the 1950’s Ireland, proportionately, had more people incarcerated in such institutions than the Soviet Union.

    Of course the middle classes were affected by the general repression, ferociously implemented by the Church – our very own Taliban – but the real horror and damage fell on the working classes, and the rural poor.

     

    There was inter-generational incarceration. Children snatched by the ‘Cruelty Man’ were dumped into Orphanages, from there graduating to Industrial schools, the girls going on into Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene laundries and, if they dared speak out or speak up, into the nearest lunatic asylum. All of the institutions were abusive. Once inside escape was virtually impossible.

    The worst of all the institutions were the ‘Mother and Baby Homes’. The most vulnerable of all:  mostly teenage mothers, very often rape victims, and their ‘illegitimate’ babies were hit hardest. Having a baby ‘outside wedlock’ was never a crime, at least on the statute books. but an all-powerful Church punished ‘offenders’ with torture. The damage usually lasted a lifetime, and the place of incarceration was a charnal house, while the State looked the other way.

    The hideous farce was not lost on everyone that all of this took place in a country where you couldn’t even buy a bloody condom, where the priests said ‘life’ was too precious to put on one, that contraception was against God’s will.

    Whitewash

    Fast forward to January 12th, 2021 and the long-awaited, much-anticipated, very expensive, 4,000 page-long Final Report on the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. Hurray, hurray!

    After five years work, with an €11 million euros tab for the taxpayer to pick up, breath was bated.

    The government held a webinar for a handful of surviving mothers. The Taoiseach issued a rote apology. Survivors, in confusion, begged for time. They hadn’t even received the Report yet, so how could they comment? The government told them to download it. Download and print a document running into thousands of pages? For many of the women the height of technology at their disposal was a smart phone.

    Within hours, social media had exploded with shock and dismay. The historian Catherine Corless, whose tireless work had uncovered the unlawful deaths of 796 babies, and toddlers, stacked and wrapped in rags in old septic tanks once belonging to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, and forced the government into commissioning this Report, looked deflated and exhausted. ‘It’s a whitewash.’ she said on the evening news.

    The mothers, the survivors, who’d waited so patiently for their stories to be finally taken seriously, to be apologised to for the horrors they had been through in the Homes, were gutted at the Report’s conclusions, the choicer of the conclusions were: there was no abuse; there were no forced adoptions.

    The girls were doing the same work they would have been doing if they were at home. There was no coercion for girls to enter these places. They were refuges, harsh refuges yes, but refuges all the same. And choicest of all: Society, and the men who fathered these children, must take blame. Everyone in the whole country must take blame.

    If everyone’s to blame, no one is to blame, right?

    Liveline went into meltdown. Could it really be, after everything that was said and explained and poured over, that this whitewash was the best they could come up with? Joe Duffy often sounded as if he might break down himself. Could it really be that this whitewash was the best they could come up with?

    Survivors

    I spoke to some survivors.

    Ann O’Gorman described being taken pregnant and aged seventeen into Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork. Her head was shaved, her clothes appropriated, and her name was taken. She remembers ‘a terrible place of sadness, mothers crying, babies crying.’ The girls worked all day, every day, scrubbing and cleaning on their hands and knees. Cutting the nuns’ precious lawns with hand scissors. Every girl lived in fear behind twelve-foot high walls, forbidden to talk to each other, forbidden to make friends. Forbidden to even think of leaving. If any girl did so the Gardaí would pick them up and haul them back again.

    When the time came for Ann to give birth she was brought into a bare room and put on a table, with one nun in charge. She didn’t even know where the baby would ‘come out of’. She was terrified. The labour was long, and very difficult. There was no pain relief. Not so much as an aspirin. When her baby was finally born she knew there was something wrong: the nun turned her back and was ‘working on the baby.’ The seventy-three-year-old nurse, asleep upstairs, was sent for. She ripped Ann’s afterbirth out so savagely that Ann passed out for two days. When she awoke, still haemorrhaging, a nun said, ‘You have an angel in heaven’. Ann ran to the window and saw two men, one carrying an orange box, the other a shovel. Were they off to bury her baby?

    Ann cried and cried and cried.

    For fifty-two-years she begged and pleaded and wept beseeching the nuns to give her information about her baby. She had called her Evelyn. Could she see a birth certificate? Could she see a death certificate? Could she be told where little Evelyn was buried?

    The nuns slammed the door in her face. They denied Evelyn had even been born.

    Two years ago with the help of another survivor, Catherine Coffey O’Brien, Ann finally got a death certificate for her baby. She and other survivors once again begged the nuns to tell them where their babies were buried.

    It turns out there are nine hundred missing babies in Bessborough, though as Ann says, ‘they weren’t buried, they were just thrown in a field.’

    Surely the Commission would help? For Ann, for all these mothers, finding their dead babies was all they cared about.

    The Commission said the nuns couldn’t remember.

    And that was that.

    Ann is not looking for redress. She is not even looking for heads on plates (I know I certainly would be), she just wants to know where her baby is buried so she can mark the spot, put in a wildflower garden and a bench so that all the mothers grieving so dreadfully for so many years for their disappeared babes can have somewhere nice to sit. To heal.

    I spoke to Sheila. When her baby, a little mixed race boy, was born the nun held him up and asked: ‘What is this?’ When he was being Christened the priest said her father’s offering wasn’t sufficient and raped her in the sacristy.

    She said for the nuns it was always all about money. Every week the nuns would take the women in a van down to the social welfare office to sign on. Then the nuns kept the money. The nuns also got money for each mother, and for each baby, from the government. They also got money from the families. They got more money for the rosaries and baby clothes the mothers were forced to make. And they got lots and lots of money when the babies were adopted. Sometimes they kept on getting money for a baby who’d died, or been adopted, by ‘forgetting’ to tell the authorities.

    The girls came out of the homes broken-hearted. Empty. You couldn’t speak about it to anyone. You were just dirt.

    As for having a choice, Sheila laughs bitterly, We had nothing. None of the girls had anything. The priest would go to the hospital and make sure you wouldn’t be allowed in. He’d go to the baby’s father and tell them to avoid having anything to do with you: it would ‘spoil their chances’ in the future, as for a landlord letting you in pregnant, or with a baby, are you joking me? There was nowhere to go. There was no choice. Nothing. You were blacklisted. They made sure of that.

    Sheila says she’ll never forgive the nuns. Ever.

    Catholic Emancipation Centenary procession from the Phoenix Park, 1929

    Torture and Exploitation

    Other Survivors filled the airwaves screaming their outrage over what has been done to them. And now over what is being done again by this whitewash.

    Of course there was torture! Of course there was exploitation. Of course there was abuse on a massive scale. Of course the mothers were half-starved and many of the babies starved to death. Of course there were ‘dying rooms’ where babies were left to die. Of course there was brutality, what else do you call giving birth on a table with a nun screaming at you?

    “You weren’t shouting and roaring like that when you were having sex were you?”

    Of course it was inhuman to labour without so much as an aspirin, with you and your baby butchered in the process by nuns who had no training in midwifery, and zero interest in making your labour and little babe’s passage into the world any easier, au contraire, your labour was in return for your sins; your little babe was the result of sin; if your baby died, or you died, what of it? Both of you were contaminated, you were nothing, you were filth and nobody wanted you. Nobody. 

    Of course there were forced adoptions. What else do you call a child ripped out of a mother’s arms? What else do you call a mother shown the door, her little one kept back so it could be sold: sometimes for thousands of dollars to returning WWII American GI’s; to ‘good Catholic families’, and/or whoever else fancied a baby? Passports, birth certs, names, all handily manufactured by the powers that be.

    The nuns put advertisements in the Lost & Found offering babies, as if they were puppies.

    Of course there was abuse on a massive scale. What else do you call the discovery of seven-hundred-and-ninety-six little bodies wrapped in rags and ‘stacked like Cidona bottles’ in old septic tanks in Tuam? What else do you call the ‘burials’ of nine hundred babies in the field in Bessborough? What else do you call death certificates that showed babies died of heart failure, malnutrition, ‘choking on porridge’, rickets?

    And of course the government, successive governments, knew. One infamous inspection in 1944 described a room crammed with babies, ‘emaciated and not thriving’, aged between three weeks and thirteen months there were ‘fragile, pot bellied and emaciated.’ Another doctor lifted nappies to find them ‘crawling with maggots’.

    For decade after decade the government looked the other way.

    Now many survivors believe the Commission is compounding that dereliction.

    What happened was, and is, the Church the State’s responsibility. They were the people in power.

    Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

    It Can’t Be Goodbye

    After a week of agony for the mothers, the Commission responded to the flood of desperate queries with a message to the effect that their job was done, and that they were shutting up shop. Goodbye.

    Except it can’t be goodbye.

    The government, the Church and the Commission in refusing to engage, and in trying to spread the blame so widely that no one is really to blame, are compounding an already ghastly wound. It’s a bit like what happened when the first little bones were discovered in Tuam: the local priest came in, threw a bit of holy water around and said a prayer, then the government came in and dumped a load of concrete on their graves. It might have seemed like a clever solution in the 1970’s. This time round it just won’t wash. It shouldn’t wash.

    This time round the Catholic Church needs to be put in the dock.

    All of their assets, currently handily concealed under ‘charitable’ status must be revealed, their ‘charitable’ status removed. Now, and forever.

    All of  their financial entanglements with our schools, hospitals, day care centres, mental health facilities – everything – must be revealed.

    They must be forced to pay the remainder (74%) of the redress they slithered out of previously, and pay in full, proper and generous redress to the mothers and babies, the families, they tortured in their terrible ‘Homes’.

    Not that it’s going to be easy. Last weekend the ‘Primate’ of all Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin – sounding spookily like Daniel O’Donnell – said he didn’t wish the Church to be ‘scapegoated’ for what happened.

    Scapegoated? Really?

    A growing number of people believe the Church should be criminally prosecuted for what happened. They orchestrated this terrible hate against women. They kept at it and at it and at it, until the whole country was distorted and weird. They kept at it until their coffers were  bulging and when finally, FINALLY, the State was forced by the Women’s Movement to bring a pittance in for ‘unmarried mothers’ and terrified young girls found they could manage, they could keep their babies, and didn’t need the terrible ‘Homes’ anymore, the nuns said; “Grand so”, sold the properties for millions and pocketed the cash. Same as they’ve always done. Just like other dictatorships drunk on power, hypocrisy and an inflated sense of their own importance have done.

    This time it has to change. This time we, as a society, and the government in our name, has to stand up to the Church.

    So many of the survivors who’ve spoken out in the last week say the one good thing this time around is that society is listening to them. That this time around society is turning the nuns’ and the Church’s weapon, used so viciously against all those terrified young mothers, for so long, against them: NOBODY WANTS YOU. Nobody.

    We’ve had  so many reports, so many television programmes, so many books, radio documentaries, films, plays. We’ve had the Ferns Report, the Ryan Report, the Murphy Report, the McCoy Report, and now this Report. All of them documenting in vivid and horrific detail the violent abuse – sexual, physical and psychological – by the religious of the Catholic Church. Their victims? Irish babies, Irish children, Irish teenagers, Irish mothers.

    The government Reports take years and cost millions in taxpayers money. The Church says sorry. The government says sorry. A pathetic redress scheme is put in place mostly for the benefit of lawyers, and which taxpayers mostly finance. Criminal convictions for criminal behaviour by priests? By nuns? The stumping up of millions by the Catholic Church? You must be joking.

    We’ve come so far in liberating ourselves in Ireland. We have a young, educated, and brilliant population absolutely aghast at what has happened. It is time to bring the whole horrible mess out into the light of day. It is past time to separate the Church from the State. It is time to grow up, and face the Church down.

    It is what we, as a society, what the mothers and survivors, desperately need.

    This time we must do it properly. For once, and for all.

    Featured image: A shrine, with an image of the Virgin Mary, is seen in the corner of an enclosed area on part of the site of the former mother-and-baby home run by the Bon Secours nuns, where the remains of an unknown number of babies and toddlers were found buried, in Tuam, Co. Galway, March 7, 2017. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls

  • Irish Musicians’ Lives Without Live Music

    In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly … and indeed one can hardly think of life without music.
    Sean O’Faolain

    In March the live music industry essentially ground to halt in Ireland. Sadly, owing to safety concerns, live music remains prohibited under current restrictions, and now even buskers are banned from playing.

    Undoubtedly, the first lockdowns provided for a period of reflection, and many artists appreciated getting off the merry-go-round of gigs and promotional events.

    Indeed, music was to the fore throughout the spring. Who can forget the indomitable spirit displayed by musicians singing from balconies? Although in Ireland, where few of us live in apartment blocks, most musicians were reduced to entertaining the birds, or other local fauna, in their gardens.

    It is apparent that many musicians used the time wisely – drawing inspiration from introspection – embarking on new projects, and finishing off old ones that had been gathering proverbial dust in hard drives.

    Yet as time goes by it is clear that among the biggest losers from Covid-19 are musicians, and others involved in the live music industry. The term ‘gig economy’ actually derives from the way most of them have been earning a crust since time immemorial. But in March the taps stopped flowing.

    Lacking a live audience that is intrinsic to a performance, and which no Zoom session can replicate, we’ve heard that some are no longer even taking up their instruments.

    It was a mad enough career at the best of times, with many doing it for the buzz rather than the money. Sadly, many may never resume their careers.

    As we strike a balance between safety and the wellbeing of the population, music should figure prominently in the conversation, and state funding of the arts should be at least commensurate with other EU countries. In the short to medium term, concerts may take a different form, but we do need to make them happen or face a cultural decline that we may never recover from.

    We asked a number musicians and others working in the industry to strike four notes in response to the pandemic.

    From the top:

    Fin Divilly – Songwriter and Performer
    John Cummins – Poet, Musician and Creative Workshop Activist
    David Agnew – Musical Artist and Legendary Concert Performer
    David Keenan – Songwriter and Performer
    Aisling Moore – Songwriter & Performer
    Gareth Quinn Redmond – Ambient Composer
    Daniel Lambert – Music Venue Owner, Band Manager and CEO of Bohemians Football Club
    Avoca Reaction – Drag Artist & Producer
    Ger Murphy – Live Streaming Host, Photographer and Gig Organiser
    Robbie Dingle: Songwriter, Busker and Artist
    Stephen James Smith – Poet

    Fin Divilly – Songwriter and Performer (Also featured in the cover image by Daniele Idini)

    Optimistic Note: In the face of financial and social pressure, songwriters have far more to sing, think and talk about. Dreaming of comfort and stability is far more fruitful than the real thing.

    Pessimistic Note: Read above on a bad day when you can’t even support your arse in a pair of trousers.

    Practical Note: More time alone allows for more self-reflection on what it is you truly want to be creating and who you are.

    Existential note/How you are coping: Read above and picture me smoking, drinking and writing in peace at home in my underwear, forgetting what day of the week it is.

     

    Veteran Oboe player David Agnew by Virtuoso Fotografia

    David Agnew – Musical Artist and Legendary Concert Performer

    Optimistic note: Lucky to be supported by the broadcaster I work for, recorded many pieces remotely and lucky to have performed live several times despite restrictions.

    Pessimistic note: Worried that vaccines won’t bring the live experience back in a meaningful way for classical music. It will be a long time before older audiences will congregate, I’m sure.

    Practical note: It has given us all the time to evaluate exactly who we are as musicians, and value what we do. It has been difficult to maintain match fitness, going from one hundred concert performances a year for the past forty years in my case, to six small-scale live performances with twenty-five people in the large church. You need the constant organic and charged musical environment with colleagues and the big audience-throng to sparkle.

    Existential note/How you are coping: Online teaching has been rewarding. Remote recording on your own is difficult but fantastic to see it mixed and realised in the final cut. Writing, collaborations with others, when we haven’t had the time before has opened up new avenues and friendships. When we get back to something, and we still don’t know what that is going to be, we will have a greater sense of value and appreciation of everything we’ve probably taken for granted, and assumed would last forever.

    John Cummins. Daniele Idini/Cassandra Voices

    John Cummins – Poet, Musician and Creative Workshop Activist

    Optimistic note: time to take stock, see where my art is at…time to plan an approach when allowed to play again … levelling the playing field somewhat in the industry across the board, artists can stream easily enough, if they so choose…

    Pessimistic note: the impact on the mind and the pocket of so many people who have had the rug pulled…

    Practical note: difficult and frustrating for people to plan anything with certainty…

    Existential note/How you are coping: trimming the day down to its particular parts – having a morning, slow and steady … being in the afternoon … embracing the evening … connecting to the night … whether we like it or not, we are all in this together … I try to keep an eye on the bigger picture and not get bogged down in just me and me and …

    Songwriter David Keenan by Mark William Logan

    David Keenan – Songwriter and Performer

    Optimistic Note: Being creative and expressing observations, internally and externally has always been the go to reaction, a means of understanding. I sense a unity in the artistic community in the face of the current restrictions and the trauma inflicted on our way of life. Swells of creativity are stirring as people are going to their tools and collectively spewing. Adversity breathes action and there’s a duty to self and to the craft to try to articulate what we’re seeing now and beyond.

    Pessimistic: The eradication of live gigs has been a severe trauma on the individual, the facilitators and the audience. Live medicine, that age old human ritual is being denied. Psychologically this is so destructive as well as to the livelihoods that have been erased. It brings into question the concept of essential work and how reverence for the Arts has diminished in recent times. I worry that the Arts are not being valued as crucial sources of emotional and psychological wellbeing and will continue to be devalued in the new year.

    Practical note: Those involved in the production side of the industry have vast experiences to teach. I suggest that initiatives to support unemployed teachers such as these should be set up to help them pass on this knowledge to young and old. The same goes for funded workshops for artists be it online or in person. We have to revalue the work, not devalue it even more in a time where so much is given away for free online, almost expectedly so. The shop local concept should be encouraged and applied to Irish Musicians / Artists. Buy a physical copy of a record / t-shirt / book from your favourite artists or venues. Streaming is of no use in terms of making a viable living.

    Existential note/How you are coping: I’m doing my best to stay as creative as I can and trying to protect my energy reserves, building for the new year. These past few months have invoked a lot of anxiety, confusion and anger but it’s important to me that I try to grow and turn the base into something pure. Expressing myself through music and words has always gifted me healing and renewal. I’m staying as tight as I can to those lights, hopeful of what’s to come.

     

    Ashling Moore by Megan Shannon Photography.

    Aisling Moore – Songwriter & Performer

    Optimistic note: I think there is a lot of opportunity to wrote and really find myself as an artist. In terms of the music industry, there is more and more recognition from the government and others of how important music is. I just got awarded a grant to start my EP which is a helping hand. Also a scheme might be coming out that pays musicians hourly like other jobs which is ideal.

    Pessimistic note: Trying to be inspired to write about things other than the lockdown can be difficult. It is hard to know how long it will take before performing can go back to the way it was

    Practical note: Lack of practice with performing.

    Existential note/How you are coping: I’ve started reading books again. I’ve started exercising and being more aware of what I’m eating. It’s been hard but I have a socially distanced gig coming up so that has helped a lot. Knowing that there is solutions being created gives hope to us musicians

     

    Gareth Quinn Redmond by Daniele Idini

    Gareth Quinn Redmond – Ambient Composer

    Optimistic note: I felt very vindicated having spent so much money on recording equipment at the start of the first lockdown, it has been a lifeline being able to continue writing and recording throughout the year. I’m not sure what state I would be in now if I didn’t have this set up.

    Pessimistic note: It has been a tough year mentally, which got even harder at the start of October when I lost one of my best friends and bandmates to suicide. I have a great support network of friends around me but nevertheless it is so hard to grieve his loss when nothing about my day to day life reminds me that he is gone.

    Practical note: It has been a great year for reflection but this is constantly overshadowed by the eternal dread of possibly not gigging ever again, not like I did before anyway. I can’t imagine doing anything else in my life, so I’m worried about the impact the new reality will have on the arts.

    Existential note/How you are coping: Taking it day by day, my family and friends are so supportive. Compared to many I am very fortunate, I just need to keep reminding myself of that.

     

    Daniel Lambert – Music Venue Owner, Band Manager and CEO of Bohemians Football Club

    Optimistic note: we’ve been given the space to somewhat remove ourselves from the rat race, to breath and contemplate.

    Pessimistic note: the lack of a clear date for the restart of live music as we knew it makes it hard to motivate each other.

    Practical note: spend the time wisely, develop the online shop, investigate opportunities outside of core gigs, see the opportunities in difficult times.

    Existential note/How you are coping: by swimming in the sea every single day.

    Optimistic note: It’s nice to have a break from the hustle.

     

    Avoca Reaction by Kyle Cheldon Barnett

    Avoca Reaction – Drag Artist & Producer

    Optimistic note: It’s nice to have a break from the hustle.

    Pessimistic note: Performing on Zoom/similar platforms is a paltry substitute for a real crowd at a regular gig.

    Practical note: All of the work opportunities I’ve had since March have been better paid than pre-pandemic.

    Existential note: The first lockdown showed me how much my self-worth was tied up in my work/output. Over lockdown I’ve been working on finding satisfaction outside of performing.

     

    Ger Murphy – Live Streaming Host, Photographer and Gig Organiser

    Optimistic note: I’m in the unique position of doing pretty well out of Covid so not sure my opinion counts! But here ya go…. A lot of people and businesses were working nonstop, gig to gig, so this break has given time to look at how they work and hopefully come back stronger.

    Pessimistic note: Can’t see live events coming back for another 6-12 months so bulk of my mates jobless until then.

    Practical note: I have a live streaming company so never been busier.

    Existential note/How you are coping: I’m graaaaaand.

     

    Robbie Dingle by Daniele Idini

    Robbie Dingle: Songwriter, Busker and Artist

    Optimistic note: I’m finding this time to be very productive and am using the time to hone and polish my skills. I have surrounded myself with great musicians and am learning and busking on the street every day (with safety precautions). I am finding myself to be more focused and driven as it gave me the time to really think about what I want to do, projecting myself and thinking about my future in music. In the band I am in we have been chosen to be part of a Covid series called “justtheone” alongside some great artists and this gave us a kickstart to release more which I am very excited about.

    Pessimistic note: The fact that bars have been closed and sessions I used to play at, open mics, jams I attended and hosted I am missing the interaction with a crowd and artists. In these spaces artists share their ideas and performances. Artists polish and cut the fat off songs to see what works and without this space I feel it will have a detrimental effect on art, creativity and an artist’s livelihood.

    Practical note: With no gigs and regular busking I have set up a PayPal and moved into the city centre to play every day. The money earned from YouTube videos via PayPal has paid for a bike I now use to travel mobile and light around the city. The bike has a rack and I just use my busking amp and guitar which is very handy. No time on buses which is saving me money and I can access and travel to places that I could not before as I used to carry a hiking bag with all my busking stuff for the day. Now I can busk, go home for lunch, relax, recharge my batteries and even busk a second time.

    Existential note/How you are coping: Recently I moved to the city centre to busk and play every day and sometimes struggle with rent (like everyone if you’re not a politician). Some days can be very bad and others brilliant. This can be due to the weather, location or getting stopped by the police if there is a congregation of people. The public are very generous to us and I feel we are much appreciated during these hard times. People light up as many have not heard live music in weeks or even months, they dance and sing and for us to bring that out of them while doing something we love outweighs anything negative about a buskers life.

     

    Poet Stephen James Smith by Babs Daly Grace Photography

    Stephen James Smith – Poet

    Optimistic note: What won’t kill you….

    Pessimistic note: Many won’t recover.

    Practical note: We’re learning

    Existential note/How you are coping: ‘Let everything happen to you / Beauty and terror. Just keep going / No feeling is final ― Rainer Maria Rilke.

    Are you a musician denied a living from live music? Answer these questions in the comments section.

    Optimistic note:
    Pessimistic note:
    Practical note:
    Existential note/How you are coping:

  • The Rocky Road to a Republic

    You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.

    From the opening shot where the proud young boy reels off the complex theological dictates of the Catholic catechism in a machine-like patter, beaming with pride at his own parroting, oblivious to the meaning of the words he is reciting by rote; the film not only captures a moment in Ireland’s time, but achieves something far more profound: it captures the Irish sensibility, a quality slower to date than many would like to believe, and one which still informs how we do business even today.

    For instance, in the opening summary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the commentator (Peter Lennon) says that one of the goals of the leaders of the rising was to ‘awaken a lethargic and indifferent Irish population to an ideal of freedom.’

    To awaken to an ideal of freedom. What does that even mean? Not just freedom in the context of colonial Ireland, but freedom itself? What would it mean to be awakened to an ideal of freedom?

    Vulgar Chancers

    In a 1916 essay – the perhaps over-dramatically titled ‘The Murder Machine’[i] – Patrick Pearse critiques the British education system as it was applied in Ireland, arguing that it was deliberately creating lesser people; people for service, and people, in times of war, to be wasted on battlefields, as was happening in France at that time.

    His point was that an ideal of freedom entailed having a say over your own education system, which would then be designed to enhance natural gifts, rather than designed essentially for enslavement to the requirements of a greater, indifferent power.

    In the essay he recounts a wonderful story, which we would now recognize as a foundational argument for arts subsidy. A farmer comes to him (Pearse was a teacher) complaining about a ‘lazy’ son who chose to do nothing all day except play the tin whistle. ‘What am I to do with him?’ says the farmer. ‘Buy him a tin whistle’, says Pearse.

    But is our education system any better equipped now? It seems to have been designed, like the British education system of Pearse’s time, to facilitate powerful institutions. Even at the top end, the universities often seem like dispensers of tickets for corporate jobs. In Ireland today the bulk of jobs are to be found in retail and ‘hospitality’. The modern equivalent of service.

    President Michael D. Higgins recently criticised Universities for being too focused on market outcomes where they should be places to provide a ‘moral space’ for discussion. He said that this was due to a perception in academia that there was ‘magic happening in the marketplace… when in fact actually what you had was a whole series of vulgar chancers.’[ii]

    In this brave new republic we now occupy, where neo-liberalism informs the values of everything, the arts appear to be regarded as something of an anomaly. Talented people are flung into dead-end jobs with the same casual disregard that they were once thrown into gunfire. The unions are weakened, landlords are murdering people, economically speaking, with killing rents; workers are over-worked and underpaid; the government is in thrall to big business; and people at the bottom are now going hungry and homeless. No matter how you might like to dress this up with figures for job creation and GDP percentages, I doubt that any of it adds up to anyone’s notion of an ideal of freedom, except perhaps the small percentage at the top, benefitting economically from the enslavement of the rest.

    Silence and Gratitude

    The sense I have after watching ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ is that little has changed. The place has been repainted and the furniture moved around, but it all seems eerily similar, with one set of sacred cows replaced by another. The ‘economy’, that eternally needy abstract entity, serves as a replacement deity to whom we now must all pay homage, or face dire consequence.

    Thus in 2011 Enda Kenny endowed his government’s austerity budget with a penitential quality: “The budget will be tough, it has to be,” he said, adding it will be the “first step” on the road to recovery.”[iii] Cut-backs to vital services appeared to be punishment for the ‘sins’ of excessive spending during the boom era.

    The point is, people’s relationship to power in today’s Ireland is more or less the same as that portrayed in ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’. They are just now focused on a different God and a different set of authoritative ‘priests’, but the relationship to authority seems essentially the same, and a similar apathy still prevails.

    As for an ideal of freedom; this has neither been articulated nor discussed in the state’s short history. It is not an ideal that informs the cultural life of the country. If anything, it is understood in the negative. Freedom from, rather than freedom to.

    In the Rocky Road the question after independence becomes: what to do with your revolution once it has been achieved? The idealists hoped for the emergence of a true republic of equality, fraternity and so on.

    Instead, as the writer Sean O’Faolain says in the film:

    The kind of society that actually grew up was what I called urbanized peasants…A society which was without moral courage, constantly observing a self-interested silence, never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a completely obscurantist, repressive, regressive and uncultivated church. The result of all this was…a society utterly alien to the ideals of republicanism…a society in which there are blatant inequalities…the republic is not going to come slowly, it will be the creation of a whole generation, perhaps two generations… who will have the courage to speak and who won’t be afraid of those sanctions that are continually imposed on them if they do so.

    Those sanctions of silence are still imposed on people who speak against the prevailing orthodoxies. And often those sanctions are most strenuously imposed by those who are themselves victims of structural inequalities.

    The role of Irish people, mainly born in the 1930s, as identified in the film was to be ‘one of gratitude, well-behaved gratitude’, says Peter Lennon. The understanding being that freedom had been won; now, simply, shut up.

    Criticism was regarded as betrayal. But whose freedom was it? What was being asked of Irish people now by the revolutionary generation, or those who had ended up in power, was a ‘new kind of heroism. Heroic obedience.’ In essence, to wait patiently while those in power created the republic.

    That, to my ears, sounded exactly like what was asked of Irish people after the banking collapse. Heroic obedience and gratitude. It seems to be the same bargain struck in the name of austerity. And again, criticism is seen as betrayal. Your duty is to be patient while those in power rebuild the republic; to demonstrate allegiance with obedient silence.

    But who betrayed who this time around? Did Fine Gael in power care for the people targeted by vulture investors? No. They let them fall into homelessness and left them there. It would be dull to go through the litany of Fine Gael betrayals since austerity. Everyone knows what they are. Besides, this isn’t about Fine Gael. It’s about Irish people and their reaction to being lumbered with yet another, self-serving authoritarian clique, supposedly building or rebuilding the republic.

    Participation

    How do you build a republic anyway? What does it need? I suppose you could say that a century of heroic obedience and silence – while the big boys build the thing – hasn’t really worked. And there is a very good reason for that. Submissive silence in a people is the antithesis of a participative republic.

    A republic presupposes participation. But as the documentary about the reaction to ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ shows, Irish people seem to guard jealously the silence that acts as cover for the powerful, more than they aspire to the necessary participative nature of a functioning republic.

    Put simply, it is not up to powerful vested interests to build a republic – they’ll never do it anyway, because, as Mel Brooks once observed, ‘It’s good to be the king.’ Who in power is going to spoil their own party by introducing policies that reflect true equality and fraternity?

    It’s up to people, by being participative, to build a republic. You don’t even have to do anything dramatic. In the Irish case a way forward might be to simply quit ridiculing those who speak out, as was the fate of Patrick Pearse when reading the Proclamation outside the GPO; and is the metaphorical fate of most anyone who speaks against the prevailing orthodoxies in Ireland.

    This above all is what the Rocky Road reveals, the Irish penchant for keeping itself enslaved by imposing on itself heroic obedience and silence. By shutting itself up.

    Peter Lennon’s film was widely denounced in Ireland, characterized as a betrayal of a people. The usual rubbish when Ireland is looked at critically by an Irish person. This was in 1968.

    In contrast, the film became a huge hit in Paris – a place where they build and maintain republics. It served as inspiration for many French students for what happens to a people when they agree to the pact of heroic obedience and silence.

    Interestingly, when Peter Lennon came back to Ireland in the mid-sixties he still saw the glaring power of the church everywhere. But people in Ireland, he found, genuinely believed that all that church stuff was now in the past.

    They were enchanted and duped by the ‘modernising’ trend – more-yah in the guise of crooning, finger-snapping, condescending Fr Michael Cleary, singing acapella to new mothers in a maternity ward, of all places.

    The young people of the time assured Lennon that Ireland was changing, that the grip of the church’s power was broken, that the grey 30s, 40s and 50s had been consigned to the past. And yet, Lennon’s film, shot with the unerring gaze of Raouel Coutard’s artist’s eye, showed a country still hopelessly in thrall to power; and, most tellingly, in total denial of its own condition. Unquestioning, obedient, silent. Until, that is, they saw Lennon’s film and found something to turn their mute hatred on.

    How To Build A Republic

    There is in the attitude of the ‘great little country’ – ‘the Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business’ according to Enda Kenny’[iv] – to its own myths and legends, a sense of the magical mirror that only flatters. And when you critique any of it, you bring down upon yourself the wrath that surges angrily from denial revealed as delusion.

    But that, unfortunately, is how you build a republic: by questioning its precious presumptions. This may explain why it has taken so long to even frame the question: how do you build a republic, without getting yourself killed?

    The Ireland we dare not look at is decked out with cruel inequities everywhere you care to look, particularly in relation to the low paid, the unemployed, Travellers and Direct Provision tenants.

    More recently we were reminded again in the RTÉ documentary ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’[v] that state officials, in their cumbersome way to make right, actually had the effect of re-traumatising the victims by way, really, of imposing on them an old authoritarian relationship.

    This time the concern was whether the victims were fibbing for monetary gain. For the victims it was just another cold authority disbelieving them.

    The authoritarianism that truly informs Irish culture peeks out in all its judgmental cocksureness everywhere you look. It’s there in the house rules for Direct Provision tenants, ‘No excuses!!’ it says. It’s in the jokey management sign at the expense of workers, describing them as animals: ‘Where’s your sense of humour?’ It’s in the contempt for the jobseeker as ‘welfare cheat’. It’s in the greedy landlord hinting that payment through sex might be acceptable. It’s in the look-at-me-publican hushing almost the entire county because he feels an urge to sing a song and the world must stop to listen because he’s the man who controls the drink tap. It’s in the bus-driver’s contempt for the social housing passengers who ‘should’ have cars. It’s in the anti-intellectualism that seeks always to control through ridicule.

    How do you build a republic? By participating. By speaking up and speaking out. By taking responsibility for the thing that needs to be said, and not waiting for someone else to come along and do it. Or by simply deciding not to ridicule and demean the speaker, because you’re proud of the fact that as a salt-of-the-Earth Irish person that it’s considered clever to broadcast your ignorance and affect a pose of being unable to tell the difference between art, intellectualism and insanity. Even valiantly locking your jaw in that context would be a small contribution in the right direction to the development of a wiser republic.

    Peter Lennon’s The Rocky Road to Dublin was restored by Sé Merry Doyle at Loopline Film, https://ifi.ie/film/rocky-road-to-dublin-4/

    [i] ‘The Murder Machine’ (1916) by P.H. Pearse: https://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf

    [ii] Jack Horgan-Jones, ‘Universities do not exist ‘to produce students who are useful’, President says’, Irish Times, March 2nd 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/universities-do-not-exist-to-produce-students-who-are-useful-president-says-1.4190859

    [iii] Mary Regan, ‘Living Beyond Our Means’, Irish Examiner, December 5th, 2011, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/living-beyond-our-means-176062.html

    [iv] Peter Bodkin, ‘s Ireland the ‘Best Small Country in the World in Which to do Business™?’ Not any more…’, TheJournal.ie, December 9th, 2014, https://www.thejournal.ie/ireland-ranking-for-business-1844047-Dec2014/

    [v] RTÉ ‘Redress: Breaking the Silence’ https://www.rte.ie/player/series/redress-breaking-the-silence/SI0000006787?epguid=IH000390934&seasonguid=127629864186