It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy … if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers
What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? Charles Trevelyan
At the end of March last year, during what proved a marvellously sunny spring, a horticulturalist friend imparted the rudiments of potato cultivation. Granted, I wasn’t a complete novice. I knew about chitting (allowing seed potato to sprout in an egg box on a sunny windowsill) before planting, and banking (piling earth on a potato plant as it grows), but his instructions elevated my gardening to another level. An area knotted with grass and weeds would be transformed into neat potato hillocks – or ‘lazy beds’ – within a few hours, breaking that ground up for further cultivation in subsequent years.
First, my guide carefully measured the length and width of each bed, using string attached to an iron stake to mark the boundaries, thereby giving each plant space to thrive. Next, he layered a bag of manure along the length of each row, sprinkling potash on top, and placing chitted potatoes at even intervals atop.
Then began the real work, mainly using what he referred to as a Fermanagh spade with a long thin blade that lifted the sod on each side over the potatoes, sealing them off and creating a small ditch between each row. The cherry on top was a sprinkling of pine needles to cover the gaps and keep the weeds at bay.
Initially the effort required to lift and turn the sod defeated me. My height seemed an unshakable impediment until, after much grumbling, I grew accustomed to lowering the spade sufficiently to use a thigh to make the lift. After another lesson I was equipped to dig my own beds, allowing me to go forth and evangelise about how easy it is to grow the tuber.
Beyond occasionally removing nettles and thistles, I expended no further labour on the potato beds over the course of spring and summer. A potato’s vigorous growth in Irish conditions easily outpaces any weed and requires no watering. Then, after just over three months, my ‘earlies’ were ready, and, as any grower will smugly volunteer, there’s nothing quite like the taste of your own, not to mention the joy of letting everyone know about it.
In growing potatoes, it felt as if I was partaking of an ancient ritual. Yet the potato plant solanum tuberosum is an exotic, native to the Americas, probably introduced to Ireland by Basque fishermen, rather than Sir Walter Raleigh, in the early seventeenth century. Potatoes are a very modern phenomenon in Ireland.
Nonetheless, it is a remarkably fecund crop in Irish conditions. Thus, before the Great Famine, an acre of potatoes could amply feed a family of six, as well as sustaining pigs and fowl. Indeed, prior to the famine half of all potatoes were fed to domestic animals, which were primarily used to pay the rent, with little meat consumed on their farms. At that time, an acre of grain was reported to produce about 4,200 pounds of saleable produce, while an acre of potatoes yielded as much as 72,100 pounds of food for subsistence.
Such abundance seems miraculous, but as Virgil’s Georgics warns us: ‘The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.’ Over-reliance on any subsistence crop brings great danger, and the dependence of the Irish poor on the potato was extreme. Indeed, an entire rural economy, benefitting a largely absentee landlord class, was built around it.
The wars of the seventeenth century led the Irish peasantry to take advantage of its unique nutritional profile – unlike wheat it contains all eight essential amino acids – and suitability for small scale storage, but not largescale export. In retrospect, Henry Hobhouse opined that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazy bed, was in the end the most damaging.’[i] In the meantime it allowed the Irish population to scale heights in the mid-nineteenth that still haven’t been returned to.
Peasant Funeral in the Mam Turk Mountains of Connemara, Ireland.
Modernity
In Rot: A History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan explores the modernity of Ireland’s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He details how ‘[p]otatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work large, export-orientated farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds.’
Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Scanlan asserts that ‘[t]he staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potato failed.’
In their impoverishment, ‘[t]he Irish poor made complex wagers on their rent and potato yields, hoping to find any marginal advantage. They knew that changes in a day’s trading price of crops and livestock in London might ruin them.’ Scanlon therefore argues that ‘the Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.’ He suggests that Ireland’s rural economy had many features of a squalid modern slum, where faith in luck, supernatural or otherwise, prevailed, just as ‘pyramid schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation’ are evident today.
An early nineteenth century German visitor to Ireland, Johann Kohl, had never seen anything like Irish poverty, wherein ‘Irish labourers had no national dress, no institutions of peasant life that could contest the power of their landlords.’ This was a society in terminal decline, stemming in particular from the departure of its remaining tribal leaders in the early seventeenth century Flight of the Earls. This permitted the seizure and plantation of the entire country, heralding a steep cultural decline, including the gradual loss of the native tongue.
The Great Famine would provide the coup de grâce that shattered the bonds of social life and civility. That is not to say societal collapse was inevitable – the famine of 1741 actually had a higher proportionate death toll, but its ill-effects did not linger in the same way. By 1845, however, a seemingly inexorably rising population was placing intense pressure on scarce land. Most of this remained in the possession of landlords, who cared little for their tenants and were often seeking to convert small, intensively cultivated plots into extensive pasture, in conjunction with a rising class of indigenous ‘strong’ farmers.
Ireland’s social segregation, especially in the wake of the Act of Union – reflected in and reinforced by sectarian divisions – was the underlying cause of the country’s vulnerability to famine. There was certainly sufficient food to feed the population – only in 1847 did grain imports exceed imports – but most produce was destined for the English market.
It’s hard to imagine a disaster on a similar scale occurring in England at that time, or any major European country for that matter, where landowners maintained a more paternalistic relationship with their tenants. Notably, the proposal by the leading nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell, himself a landlord, to embargo food exports for the duration of the Famine was greeted with derision in Westminster.
Signs of such scarcity in a more urbanised country would surely have caused a major political upheaval, as in the case of the French Revolution which has been described as an extended bread riot. Ireland did experience a Young Irelander rebellion in 1848, but the starving populace were unable to summon a coherent resistance.
The Blame Game
A colonial discourse had long been evident in English accounts of the Irish, going back at least to Giraldis Cambrensis in the late twelfth century. These are akin to the ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes that emerged in Western accounts of the Islamic world, and depicted the Irish as lazy, dishonest, prone to violence and thus requiring civilising.
By the mid-nineteenth such stereotypes were joined by the discourse of political economy, positing that ‘the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world.’ Edmund Burke argued that God would not look kindly on ‘breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature.’
Irish reliance on the potato as their primary foodstuff was considered an affront to this spirit of capitalism. Many blamed the potato for Paddy’s laziness, ‘whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.’ The economist Robert Malthus maintained that until they starved, they would not learn.
The leading civil servant for Ireland over the course of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was ‘some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principle article of national food.’
The sanctity of the market would have an important bearing on the nature of famine relief. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, then Prime Minister Lord Russell said would impel them ‘to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.’ Extensive public work schemes therefore substituted for direct aid to the starving, who were forced to expend what little energy they possessed building roads to nowhere.
Most insidiously in 1847 an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief was introduced by William Henry Gregory (ironically the future husband of Lady Gregory the co-founder of the Abbey), an M.P. for Galway. The ‘Gregory Clause’ caused thousands to lose their land in order to avail of the meagre relief available, forcing many into emigration aboard coffin ships.
As a result of the failure of the crop and these cruel policies up to a million starved or died of disease, and another million emigrated. Unlike after the 1741 famine, the population would not increase, as often their land was converted to pasture, which by then had become more profitable than tillage.
Old lazy beds.
Potato Myths
In Rot, Scanlan refers to numerous sources claiming the Irish peasantry ate on average between 12 pounds and 14 pounds (c.6kg) of potatoes per day. He takes issue with the veracity of these accounts, however, arguing that ‘the idea of a heroic Irish appetite for potatoes revealed a thriving British colonial vision of Ireland.’
He admonishes ‘credulous’ historians – including this one – for uncritically accepting reports that the Irish poor seemed unusually healthy compared to the British working class ‘a view that indulges in one of the most durable colonial myths that of the strapping and noble savage.’ He asks pertinently: ‘why reject only the insults and believe only the claims that flatter the Irish.’
Scanlan’s argument that the level of potato consumption was purposely exaggerated appears valid: he adduces evidence to the effect that eating such gargantuan quantities would have caused digestive difficulties. Nonetheless, in years of plenty at least, the rural Irish were surely healthier than their British working class counterparts, who were already consuming a diet high in sugar and refined wheat, deficient in protein and lacking fresh fruit and vegetables. In a rural setting highly nutritious wild foodstuffs would have been foraged or hunted. Moreover, most Irish children were not by then forced into hard labour inside factories, and, moreover, there were no ‘satanic mills’ in the countryside diminishing air quality.
Scanlan also effectively dismisses the notion that there was anything peculiarly noxious about the much-maligned lumper potato, which prevailed over other varieties at the time of the famine, arguing ‘[h]ad the blight not struck, another people’s potato would have taken its place, and the Lumper might have to be considered a treat.’
‘The weakness of potato crops,’ he writes, ‘was not the individual variety of potato planted or the mode of planting, but the genetic liabilities of using sets, rather than seeds.’
A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine in Ireland.
Legacy
Dependency on the potato plant was a product of war. Its cultivation then allowed unprecedented numbers to inhabit rural Ireland. What was really lacking in that culture was the application of demographic brakes, as the population continued to expand despite decreasing access to land. This is perhaps best attributed to the absence of an indigenous political and cultural leadership from the seventeenth century. A form of social atomisation seems to have occurred, where the individual family unit took precedence over the wider tribe or tuath.
The arrival of the potato plant to these shores is responsible for the size of the Irish diaspora around the world. Far fewer would have survived the conflagrations of the seventeenth century without it, and the rural population would not have expanded in similar fashion on a grain-based diet.
The mostly callous response of the British government to the Famine probably ensured that Ireland could never be comfortably integrated into the United Kingdom. Yet conversely it also accelerated Ireland’s absorption into the Anglophone world. This paradox yielded a distinctive national literature in English. Also, ironically independence was achieved primarily by the descendants of the petit-bourgeois strong farmers that saw their holdings expand in the wake of the Famine. Kevin O’Higgins’ description of his colleagues as ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution,’ makes sense in this light.
Despite largely being ignored in mainstream discourse today, the cultural legacy of the Great Famine lingers. It may be identified in an unhealthy relationship to sex, and the absence of a gastronomic culture, and also, arguably, in a prevailing sense of futility that still pervades rural Ireland.
Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot is an important contribution to scholarship on the Great Famine, maintaining a dialogue with an unhappy past we often occlude. Perhaps those of us still living here suffer from a form of survivor guilt that prevents us from adequately engaging with its legacy.
The attention Scanlan points to the “complex wagers” pursued by Irish peasants in unstable markets is a particularly useful insight, presenting an agency that is usually denied to passive victims. This may also inform our understanding of modern Ireland, where the political class display all the skill of the middleman in attracting foreign capital, but rely increasingly on insecure taxation income from this source – a bit like our ancestors relying on the remarkable fecundity of the potato.
[i] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business” Henry Ford.
“Improving Employee Wellbeing”. “Creating Social Good”. “Sustainable Procurement and Consumption”. “Fair Pay for Fair Work”.
These are just some of the slogans used by people talking about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR, hereafter), which refers to practices benefitting society at large, or developing a fair and transparent working environment.
The ‘people-planet-profit’ (3P or Triple Bottom Line) concept also falls within this ambit. It has been of great interest to businesses since the 1980s.
However, Milton Friedman once said ‘the business of business is business’ and rightly so in many regards, since the primary objective and also the responsibility of a business is to survive as a profitable entity, regardless of how socially responsible (or irresponsible) it is.
Nonetheless, one of the commonly ignored aspects of his work is that he added, “…shareholders want to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society”, and this brings the wider society into context.
Friedman’s classic work on the ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits gained significant traction throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but clearly the ideal situation is where a business is both profitable and also meet the needs of other stakeholders. This creates a ‘win-win’ scenario, in addition to ensuring business sustainability in the long run.
Defining Corporate Social Responsibility
CSR can be viewed as a form of business self-regulation with the aim of being socially accountable and – to more cynical – being seen as a ‘good’ social entity. We live in a conscientious and environmentally aware society, where employees, customers, suppliers, and civil society in general, places significant weight on choosing and supporting organisations that prioritise CSR. CSR is also a way for companies to measure and control their impact on society.
CSR can be also be perceived as demonstrating how a business can be organised in a particular way that could empower them to act in a socially responsible way. So, indeed again, it could be seen as a form of self-regulation that could manifest in say, social or environmental initiatives or strategies, without compromising organisational goals and agreed stakeholder objectives.
CSR does not have to be a distraction from a company’s main goal, and instead could aim simply at aligning a company’s social and environmental activities with its purpose and values. Many examples in recent years show that CSR activities can mitigate risks, enhance reputations, and even contribute to the bottom line.
Contributions via CSR initiatives, therefore, can be both positive and negative (also known as externalities) to the economy, environment, and wider civil society.
There is increasing realisation among business leaders that companies should not choose to be driven solely and exclusively by profit, and that they have a responsibility to do what’s right, not only for shareholders but also to hit the Triple Bottom Line, i.e., people, planet, and global civil society.
Typically, CSR list four categories of responsibilities that organisations can cater for: environmental, ethical, philanthropic, and economic. Now we have examples of companies that rebranded themselves as B Corporation (B Corps), social purpose corporations (SPCs), low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs), and a variety of ‘green companies’.
Creating Social Good
Research by Cone communication has shown that over 60% of US citizens expect businesses to participate in social and environmental change in the absence of government regulation. Interestingly, about 90% of surveyed consumers said that they would purchase a product because a company supported a social cause or environmental challenge that personally appeal to them.
These initiatives could many forms, including: proactive environmental efforts (e.g., reducing carbon footprints, recycling innovation, managing e-waste); funding philanthropy (e.g., Tom Shoes whose slogan is ‘one for one’, whereby they donate one-third of net profits to various charities, supporting physical and mental health); ensuring ethical labour practices, i.e. treating employees fairly and ethically, including employment outsourced in the supply chain; or finally, through volunteering. Thus, how Vodafone World of Difference Challenge has assisted community development in most parts of the world already.
There is an important caveat. While CSR may help brand the image of a company, if this does not come from a genuine moral conviction or altruism it can easily backfire, and lead to accusation of hypocrisy. So any approach has to be embedded in the core of what any company is doing.
Examples of CSR initiatives creating ‘social good’
An early ‘good’ CSR initiative was one taken up by Starbucks when they secured the ‘Fair Trade foundation’ certification. Thereafter all of their products had the Fair-Trade logo (resembling the Chinese ‘ying-yang’ sign) on them, this logo insists that farmers and everyone else in their supply chain are all paid fairly and are free from illegal exploitation.
Starbucks remains the largest purchaser of fair-trade-certified coffee, globally. Fair-Trade initially started as a social movement, saying their goal was ‘to help producers in developing countries achieve better trading conditions and to promote sustainability.’
For businesses, it is a matter of being fully aware of their responsibilities towards the society as much as being about delivering value for business and society via creating social, environmental, or economic (similar to people-planet-profit) benefits, thereby ensuring the sustainability of a company.
Interestingly, most of the business CSR initiatives these days are connected to SDGs or the global development goals. This could be about ensuring good health and well-being through a work-life balance, safety at the workplace, or supporting mental health of employees.
Amongst other approaches are: decent work and economic growth (i.e. global goal 8), particularly in reference to the sharing or ‘gig’ economy. where the workers are not considered to be ‘employees’ and therefore not guaranteed benefits or entitlements; Responsible consumption and production (i.e. global goal 12), which does connect back to the Starbucks example, and also how certain University campuses in the US were terming ‘fair trade’ universities where students and academic faculty would only buy and consume products labelled fair-trade.
Also, we have partnership for goals (i.e., global goal 17) where newer forms of institutional arrangements are created and sustained, moving on from the generic public-private partnership models, towards more inclusive and innovative ways of actor engagement via public-private-people partnerships.
Build it and they will come…
Lego has invested a fortune in addressing climate change, developing alternative energy usage, and reducing waste. Since this is also a part of the company’s philosophy, Lego’s environmentally conscious moves include reduced packaging, and also the use of sustainable materials.
This is somewhat similar to Ben & Jerry’s, whose core goals have always revolved around supporting local dairy farmers and investing in the community where they have operations.
Johnson & Johnson, another familiar brand, focuses heavily on reducing its environmental impact by investing in various renewable energy sources. At the global level, they also work towards providing cleaner and safer water to communities.
Proctor and Gamble (P&G) is another example since their development of the two laundry products, Ariel and Tide, were sourced based on identifying environmental problems. Their research demonstrated that the most significant environmental impact that our laundry has is the energy used to heat the water in washing machines. 90% of the energy in a load of wash is expended on heating water, contributing to about two-thirds of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the Tide lifecycle. So, they developed products that could easily use cold water for washing, thereby reducing the total carbon emissions significantly as well as helping to save up to $150 a year on household energy bills.
At the same time, it is not so much what the companies do, e.g. becoming environmentally friendly or ‘going green’ in its operations, it also about helping to generate a sufficient amount of awareness across society. For example, through adverts around packaging of P&G’s product Ariel would inform customers how to save energy by turning down the washing temperature on washing machines to thirty degrees Celsius.
Similarly, Plan A by Marks and Spencer (M&S) has the goal of building a sustainable future by enabling their customers to have a positive impact on wellbeing, communities and also the planet through everything (process and product) that the company does. For example, in spring 2021 they launched their most sustainable denim range that was made using 86% less water, kinder chemicals and 100% responsibly sourced cotton. During the pandemic, the company distributed more than 11.8 million meals to those most in need and also raised £8.3m for NHS Charities Together in the UK through their M&S rainbow sale.
No Longer Optional
In recent years, however, companies cannot brag about ‘good’ practices and their ‘greenwashing’ philosophy anymore since the EU has now developed product requirements criterion; an environmental policy audit system for organisations; and EMAS certification, as a way of governing progress and control of eco-management.
So, what was considered to be a ‘proactively good’ social action by a company is now somewhat mandatory by law. For example, the EU’s principles for global trade and sustainable development, development of sustainable development criteria and CSR in individual trade agreements can impact sustainability assessments of trade deals.
Over the years, however, there has been numerous scandals around ‘brand image’. Among the questions we should be asking of businesses would be: What does a good corporate citizen mean? Is ‘profit’ a dirty word? How much should society pick up the ‘external’ business costs such as pollution? Does society really care about ‘fair trade’ or getting a good value in price and quality suffice? How are ethical decisions made by businesses?
Another important issue is how we address all these questions before jumping to conclusions based on subjective judgment and at times, situational ethics.
Cases of workers exploitation, harsh working conditions, paying a wage that is lower than the statutory minimum wage are plentiful. From the customers’ perspective, organisations are not always transparent and honest. A plethora of issues include: false labelling, misleading pricing, quality differentiation, misleading information on packaging and advertising, and in worst cases, dumping products.
Greenwashing
The term ‘greenwashing’ was coined in 1980s by Jay Westervelt, which essentially means companies either misleading consumers about the green or environmentally-responsible credentials of a product or service, or misleading consumers about the environmental performance of the company.
Then the question turns to whether companies ‘should’ tell customers everything. Corporate Governance plays a huge role in determining whether a school of thought that dismisses CSR altogether dominates.
There is also a widespread assumption that businesses cannot be trusted, and that terms such as ‘sustainability’ or ‘community development’ are meaningless concepts for multinationals. It is interesting that the two key contrasting views that we come up with when reviewing CSR comes from two individuals, Milton Friedman and Edward Freeman.
Briefly, Milton Friedman believed that businesses need to simply keep their shareholders and business owners satisfied, while Edward Freeman believed that businesses should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, civil society, government amongst many others).
Stakeholders vs Shareholders
The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham once opined that ‘action is best that produces the greatest good for the greatest number’.
In the context of CSR, it is also a matter of fact that satisfying different stakeholders while maintaining profit isn’t everything, the idea of ‘contractarianism’ is equally relevant which is when no action by a business should cause uncompensated harm to ‘anyone’ else. So, it is also about the rights and responsibilities of a business. This is clearly not a black and white area, although dismissing CSR may seem an easy idea.
For example, every stakeholder wants a ‘good deal’ for themselves. Employees want good pay, customers want value for money, suppliers expect a decent contract and fair prices. But this leads to inevitable friction. While customers want low prices, employees expect good wages. However, good wages lead to higher costs, thereby increasing the price of the products, which ultimately makes a customer unhappy.
Similarly, suppliers want a good price for their supplies, which again could lead to higher costs (e.g. Starbucks works with the Fair-Trade Foundation), while a high price could leave a customer unhappy. Whether we take the example of a multinational or an SME, these challenges are common and unavoidable while also illustrating that a business cannot possibly satisfy all stakeholders. Therefore, the question becomes what CAN a business do?
Three options, are possible: deliberately ignore all stakeholders, except shareholders, and go ‘flat-out’ for profit; pretend to take account of stakeholders and still go all out for maximum profit (e.g., ‘greenwashing’); engage with stakeholders and balance their ‘aspirations’ while not losing sight of profit.
Bad Actions…
Foxconn has been in the news with CSR scandals for over two decades now, particularly for violating employment laws.
The company used to make Apple products in China and more recently Amazon’s Echo Smart Speakers and Kindle Devices. However, there have been reports of workers in hazardous factories run by Foxconn who are given sick or holiday pay. They can also be fired without notice during lulls in production. 40% of the staff that Foxconn used in their factories are ‘agency staff’ or ‘dispatch workers’. Those who worked overtime were paid at the normal hourly rate, which is illegal since both under Chinese law and even Amazon’s supplier code of conduct says that workers should receivetime and half rate for such work.
Foxconn has a history of worker exploitation, witnessed after a wave of workers committing suicide back in 2010, when Apple used to heavily outsource their manufacturing of iPhone and iPad to them. Besides, wage and worker exploitation, Foxconn also had serious factory accidents where workers died of electric shock in 2011, and also a factory explosion that killed four people and injured eighteen others in the same year.
On top of that there have been frequent employee riots, use of underage (from as low as eight years-of-age) and illegal workers, along with violation of local laws. All of which has been to reduce costs.
More recently, the company had invested in robotic technology to replace workers in manufacturing and to tackle the diminishing trust in the company name. At some level we (as customers) should also wonder, how much and how badly do we really have to use the products of these giant companies such as Amazon and Apple?
Just Do It?
Similarly with Nike, 593,468 hours of overtime work went unpaid between 2010-2012 in Indonesia, which sent shockwaves through the Indonesian labour movement. Eventually after strikes and negotiations, Nike agreed to pay off $1 million to about 4,500 workers at a Nike plant in Serang, Banten in Indonesia.
Again, there is nothing new about Nike’s labour exploitation and maintenance of sweatshops since the 1970s. From the early 1990s reports were flooding in detailing poor wages, child labour, and harsh working conditions in Nike’s outsourced factories (called ‘sweatshops’).
After initially shrugging its shoulders, Nike said it was up to the outsourced parties. But subsequently, as the brand suffered, the company started auditing their factories for occupational health and safety. Their ‘bad reputation’ as an employer made them go to greater lengths than usual, while competitors adopted similar procedures.
In the mid-2000s, several ‘anti-sweatshop’ groups were established, and at Brown University, Nike had to pull out of a contract with the Women’s ice hockey team after a student activist group demanded the company establish an ethical code of conduct. Similar cases occurred between 2010 and 2016 in Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, while at the same time the community activities on these matters became stronger, through fair labour associations and workers’ rights consortiums which exposed how child labour represented 70-80% of their workforce.
Further examples can be drawn from fast fashion companies such as Zara, H&M, Gap, Primark, who all adopted exploitative labour practices at one time or another.
Balancing Priorities
Multinationals mentioned in this article are major players in our economies. Many multinationals have exploited workers or like Google, Coca Cola, and Starbucks systematically exploited tax loopholes across the world over the years. Of course many of these companies have simultaneously done some ‘social good’ with their CSR or ‘responsible image’ campaigns. This makes any assessment of the role of CSR difficult and prevents us from drawing definitive conclusions, such as that multinationals are inherently bad, or perform a social good that may be a part of the company’s culture.
CSR activities can be designed in such a way as to align with the companies’ business purpose, the values of the companies’ key stakeholders, while identifying the local or glocal needs that the company (local or global) can serve in a particular community where they have their operations, among other considerations.
Thus, for example, in countries that lack sufficient government funding for public health, business organisations can step in with philanthropic funding to develop clean water and sanitation. A strategic CSR can still create various levels of continued ‘win-win/s’ for a company, its wider list of stakeholders, and the community.
Surveying the demise of the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O’Toole devoted an opening essay ‘‘Do you know what a republic is?’ The Adventure and Misadventure of an Idea’ in Up the Republic! Towards a New Ireland (2012) to assessing the health of the Irish Republic. He considered its vitality based on the presence, or otherwise, of three indicators: Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens.
These features of a healthy republic, he wrote, diverge from a narrow form of republicanism associated with Rousseau ‘which argues for the notion of a single, sovereign popular will: ‘the People’ effectively taking the place of the king in a monarchy.’ Up to that point in Ireland, O’Toole argued, this latter, narrow version had predominated, which he associated ‘in vulgar terms’ with appeals being made to ‘pull on the green jersey’’; and where ‘an idea of accountability implicit in mixed government is ditched.’
‘For most of the history of the state’, O’Toole concluded that the state ‘failed miserably in the basic task of ensuring citizens were free from subjection to the arbitrary will of others.’[i]
Now, as Ireland slowly unwinds from an interminable lockdown that tendency of Irish governments to pull on the green jersey, avoid accountability, reject obstreperousness and a conspicuous failure to ensure that citizens are free from the subjection to the arbitrary will of others, is evident once again. This regression has arrived especially through what O’Toole himself described on April 28th, 2020 as the ‘top-down, command-and-control approach’ of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), which the elected government has deferred to throughout most of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to reshape the Irish political landscape, eroding foundational certainties of left and right. When the dust settles new formations may crawl from the debris, with democracy itself in peril, as the coalition government chooses to extend emergency powers until November, while other countries such as Denmark aim for a swift return to normality.
In terms of the pandemic’s wide-ranging impact, there are parallels with the outbreak of a global war. As Hannah Arendtput it: ‘The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of the an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion.’[ii]
Placing billions under lockdown around the world had a shuddering effect on daily routines, altering intimate exchanges and gestures, besides radically reducing the ambit of daily peregrinations. It’s a very modern form of trench warfare that confined most of us to within 5km of barracks – spilling out invective on (anti-)social media.
In Ireland, with the advent of bigger government, there is a confidence among some on the left that their time has arrived, and that a relatively youthful population will vanquish age-old privileges of wealth and caste through a permanently enlarged state.
However, as Eric Hobsbawm records, one reason Engels (and even the late Marx) ‘began to turn away from calculations that the international war might be an instrument of revolution was the discovery that it would lead to ‘the recrudescence of chauvinism in all countries’ which would serve the ruling classes.’[iii]
Similarly, nationalism chauvinism – ‘excessive or prejudiced support for one’s own cause, group, or sex’ – has been witnessed throughout the pandemic in Ireland. This is perhaps unsurprising as, historically, infectious diseases have given rise to, and fed, plagues of prejudice and outright racism; the diseased ‘other’ at the gates of the city is a recurring theme. Ruling classes have often put forward strongman rulers to harness this xenophobic sentiment.
Since March 2020 we have poured over spreadsheets of daily deaths, infections, testing rates and vaccine roll outs to determine how ‘we’ are doing relative to ‘them.’ In Ireland we tend to measure achievements and failures against the noisy neighbour next door, whose boorish leader has somehow managed to transform one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from Covid-19 into a great British victory pageant, through a rapid vaccine rollout. Boris now looks unassailable, notwithstanding Brexit storm clouds, Dominic’s revenge, Indian variants; and just the suspicion that the vaccine may not prove quite the panacea it seems now in winter 2022. Time will tell.
Indeed, the narrative arc of Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic should serve as a warning to the Irish left that ruling classes can easily steal their best clothes. In this respect, Johnson operated with far greater flexibility than Donald Trump, shifting from a ‘take on the chin’ herd immunity approach in March, 2020 to championing what he would have previously decried as a ‘nanny state’ lockdown. He and his chumocracy used the pandemic as a pretext for introducing draconian legislation againstprotest and civil disobedience, apparently aimed at movements such as Extinction Rebellion.
The End of American Leadership by Christopher Parkison FDR said there was nothing to fear but fear itself, while JFK asked what you can do for your country; now Donald Trump resorts to blaming foreigners.#FDR#JFK#Trump#TrumpMeltdownhttps://t.co/JrJupSJhKI@broadsheet_ie
Similarly, though less dramatically, Leo Varadkar resuscitated his political career after Fine Gael’s disastrous performance in General Election 2020, donning proverbial scrubs for the initial phase of the pandemic. Having identified himself with “early-rising” middle class voters Varadkar was smart enough to realise that his preferred Thatcherite policy of reliance on an Invisible Hand of market forces could lead to a public health disaster during a pandemic.
Since entering the coalition, Fine Gael Ministers have emphasised a law and order approach – Simon ‘TikTok’ Harris was quick off the blocks denouncing as ‘disgusting, grotesque and obscene’ a comparatively unobstreperous anti-lockdown protest in Dublin by European standards. Fine Gael have also allowed Fianna Fail to act as a mudguard for a failing system of public health: Ireland’s health expenditure is the third highest in the EU, yet we have only 5 ICU beds per 100,000, compared to 35 in Germany and 28 in Austria.
Fine Gael represents itself as a centrist party, placing emphasis on its belated support for marriage equality and abortion referendums, which obscures from a failure in government to address structural inequalities and ongoing environmental damage. Replacing James Reilly as Minister for Health in 2015 Leo Varadkarpromptly abandoned universal health insurance (UHI).
After becoming leader of Fine Gael and Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar claimed he would represent thrusting early risers – tantamount to saying he would not alter structural inequalities that are most apparent in access to housing. In combination with Fianna Fail, Fine Gael has represented the dominant interest of large property owners, indifferent to whether their wealth is maintained via independent corporate entities, the state, or as in Ireland’s case increasingly, a corporate-state nexus.
Simple distinctions of left and right are often misleading. Thus, when considering the virtues, or otherwise, of big government it should be clear that administrative levers and patronage may drive inequality; most obviously through mind-boggling salaries, such as the €420k paid to the Director General of a dysfunctional HSE, Paul Reid – ironically a former Workers’ Party activist. Reid has no medical or scientific qualifications, and previously acted as chief executive of Fingal County Council.
Moreover, left-wing politicians and their supporters are often drawn from higher income groups; a tendency that within Fine Gael circles used to be referred to as noblesse oblige – accompanied by the obligatory glass of fine Cognac – of which the Just Society was the apotheosis. But a left-wing identity may be superficial, as the distribution of state largesse, or patronage, apart from being expressed in high public sector salaries, often benefits established professional elites of lawyers, academics and indeed doctors.
Big government patronage motors along fine in Ireland for all concerned as long as the tech and pharma sectors do the heavy economic lifting. This is the ‘Leprechaun Economics’ that Paul Krugman referred to dismissively. But now the Biden administration’s taxation proposed changes to the global tax system may make the current Irish model unworkable. The ECB is also likely to desist eventually from quantitative easing, with inflation looming.
Renewed fiscal rectitude and the prospect of multinationals leaving a perpetually unaffordable capital city for workers, will place increasing reliance on those indigenous SMEs that have endured the Crash of 2008, and the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. Yet whole sectors have been furloughed for over a year, with some such as events and tourism wondering whether they have a future at all. The Central Bank has warned that one in four firms could fail when pandemic payments cease.
It should be unsurprising, therefore, for a small businessperson living from transaction to transaction to be wary of parties promising higher taxation on the left, and instead be attracted to politicians on the right, or even far-right, that are acquainted with the language of commerce, however superficial this may be, in the case of Leo Varadkar at least, whose concern for SMEs has disappeared after his supportive comments proved unpopular last October.
'None of those people would have faced being on #PUP, none of them have to tell someone they are losing their job, none of them will have to shutter a business for the last time' – Tánaiste Leo Varadkar on #NPHET#cblivepic.twitter.com/ZAw7sDxGLo
An objective for a progressive left should be to attract support from an increasingly marginalised mercantile class, emphasising that a favourable environment for entrepreneurship, as in Scandinavia, is enabled by efficient public service, including a one-tier, functioning health system. The left can argue that leaving healthcare to market forces – as in the U.S. – is not only deeply unfair, but also, crucially, leads to greater costs than a functioning one tier public system which also – as in most European countries – delivers better outcomes overall.
The inherent danger of Ireland’s two-tier model, where health care provision is subject to market forces is epitomised by a question recently posed by a Goldman Sachs executive: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” In an age of profound health insecurities – which are amplified through subtle advertising cues – market forces will continue to distort public health priorities.
It was the father of economics Adam Smith who warned: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’ However, while resisting a buccaneering tendency in the delivery of a vital government service such as healthcare, the left cannot afford to dismiss the dynamism of entrepreneurship in society at large. Just imagine the food you would be served if the government was running all the restaurants.
Following Public Health Guidance
While there are a range of financial supports available to SMEs, the world-beating length of Ireland’s lockdown has made trade impossible for many businesses, some of which may never recover. The failure of the two centre-right parties in government to represent their concerns arguably, lies at the heart of Ireland’s deeply flawed response to the pandemic.
From March to June, 2020, 96% of additional deaths related to COVID-19 in Europe occurred in patients aged older than 70 years. Yet, despite having the youngest population in the Union, according to a Reuters by February Ireland had endured 163 days of workday closures. This was the highest, by some measure, of all the European countries surveyed at that point. By contrast, Denmark had lost just fifteen days, having experienced a death toll almost half that of Ireland’s per capita.
The uncritical attitude of mainstream Irish left wing parties towards public health officials should also be reconsidered. Recall the major mistakes in particular by Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan, who saw nothing wrong with fans going to Cheltenham in early March, 2020, ordered care homes to re-open to visitors that same month, and then transferred 4,500 untested patients back into care homes – surely contributing to the second highest level of care home mortality in the world during the first wave. Yet Irish left wing politicians have consistently complained about the government failing ‘to follow public health advice,’ despite Holohan’s long history of cock-ups and cover-ups.
Even before Christmas NPHET – a body composed primarily of career civil servants and notably short on scientific expertise – seemed to have been all on board for the ’meaningful Christmas’ of Micheal Martin’s imagination. The only significant deviation between the government’s approach and NPHET’s advice was that the latter preferred to permit household gatherings rather than opening the hospitality sector. Cue raucous Christmas house parties, as opposed to what were mainly orderly affairs in pubs and restaurants.
In fact, Ireland’s ‘third’ wave, which coincided with the more transmissible B.119 variant (although apparently not more lethal as was widely reported) actually commenced in week 48 of 2020 (22/11/2020), while the country was still under Level 5 Lockdown restrictions, according to a report by the HSPC.
Sadly, public health obscurantism has also brought denial of their own data, which said outdoor transmission of Covid-19 is about as frequent as curlew sightings.
The latest embarrassment over NPHET refusing to acknowledge the benefits of antigen testing, underlines that if left-wing politicians are slavishly going ‘to follow the public health advice,’ and whatever Yes Minister civil servant advises then we won’t see radical reforms in Ireland any time soon.
Frank O’Connor
Guests of the Nation
Over the course of the pandemic Irish attitudes have hardened against the free movement of people in and out of the country, culminating in the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantines for some foreign, including EU, arrivals at the end of February.
Contemporary Irish attitudes to hardworking foreigners resident in Ireland recall Frank O’Connor’s classic 1931 short story ‘Guests of the Nation.’ Set during the War of Independence 1919-21 it portrays a bond of friendship that grows up between two IRA men, Bonaparte (the narrator), and Noble, who are detailed to guard two captured English soldiers Belcher and ‘Awkins who have a natural affinity with the country:
I couldn’t at the time see the point of me and Noble being with Belcher and ‘Awkins at all, for it was and is my fixed belief you could have planted that pair in any untended spot from this to Claregalway and they’d have stayed put and flourished like a native weed.
Ultimately ‘Awkins and Belcher are sacrificed at the altar of of a narrow nationalism, just as a today the Populist appeal to ‘protect our own people’ has ordained that the rights of immigrants in Ireland, and abroad, to see their families was disregarded.
"We need to protect our own people. We have a duty to protect our own people to the maximum. This legislation fails to do that"✖️
That's why we have proposed an amendment to make hotel quarantine mandatory for everyone travelling here with the exception of essential travel 🛬 pic.twitter.com/wwaFueUbvz
This appears to stem from a widespread notion that ‘we,’ like faraway New Zealand and Australia, can eliminate the disease from ‘our’ shores altogether – devolving into the juvenile #wecanbezeros hashtag adopted by some politicians on the left. The problem is that ‘we’ are a society with lots of ‘them’ immigrants living here, and an enormous diaspora of ‘us’ beyond the shores of an island divided into two jurisdictions, highly dependent on international trade in goods arriving on trucks (with drivers).
Moreover, apart from the extreme geographic isolation and sparse populations of Australia and New Zealand, ‘we’ in Ireland have legal obligations to preserve freedom of movement under European treaties and the Good Friday Agreement, enshrining a porous open land border. Apart from committing economic hari-kari, pursuit of ZeroCovid appears legally impossible, unless of course we want to pursue an Irexit and build a wall along the Northern border.
Nonetheless, egged on by febrile – ‘if it bleeds it leads’ – coverage in a national media increasingly reliant on government advertising, a prevailing view is that all deaths from Covid are essentially preventable; emanating from the failing of the state, or the reviled Covidiot, rather than being the tragic consequence of a pandemic, the death toll from which has been systematically exaggerated.
Moreover, intercepted correspondence within the ZeroCovid ISAG group of independent scientists – who have taken on the Opus Dei role to the Catholic hierarchy of NPHET – reveals, among other disturbing insights, that they were looking ‘for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.’ As these revelations first appeared in right-wing Gript, however, the left-wing echo chamber refuses to acknowledge it is being played.
Are you right there Michael?
Nonetheless, a number of politicians have come forward representing an anti-authoritarian left, concerned by the harms of lockdown and favouring a targeted approach – protecting the elderly – and building up ICU capacity. In a recent blistering Twitter attack the independent (and former Labour) TD for Clare, barrister Michael McNamara – who as chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Covid-19 Response became as well acquainted as any Irish politician with diverging epidemiological assessments of the pandemic – identified a recurring Irish deference to vested authority.
In response to a Fintan O’Toole article critiquing the DUP McNamara wrote: ‘Instead of criticising unionism, let’s look at the complete mess we’ve made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We’re ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same.’
He continued: ‘If it wasn’t for Unionism, we’d be like Hoxha’s Albania now. There’d be no way off this island. But there is a beacon. Belfast Airport and Larne are beyond the reach of NPHET, just as surely as the rule of the Archbishop’s palace in Drumcondra didn’t pass the bridge in Portadown.’
He added more controversially:
‘We can’t blame the medics for their experimental therapy, any more than we could blame the clergy for their zeal. Successive governments have abdicated their democratic responsibility throughout this State’s short history. So why would Unionists want to be “governed” by Dublin?’
Instead of criticising unionism, let's look at the complete mess we've made of Irish nationalism and nationhood. We're ruled by a junta of medics, just as we were Rome Ruled for 7 decades. The Orthodoxy changes but the crawthumping remains the same. https://t.co/05VbBmHnSI
It was a fair question, when one considers the North is reopening far sooner than the Republic. Although this has arrived after a rapid vaccine rollout, the experimental nature of which McNamara raises problems with.
Facing Up to Errors
Here we come to the crux of an unhelpful cultural division between left and right that the ruling parties will use to divide and conquer. This is the new identity politics arising out of the pandemic, epitomised by attitudes towards face masks.
For too many on the left the science on this issue is proven as opposed to followed. Wearing a face mask now appears to have become an article of faith. Yet a recent report by the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention entitled ‘Using face masks in the community: first update – Effectiveness in reducing transmission of COVID-19’ stated:
The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 in the community is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect, but there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect. Evidence for the effectiveness of non-medical face masks, face shields/visors and respirators in the community is scarce and of very low certainty.
Additional high-quality studies are needed to assess the relevance of the use of medical face masks in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, the Irish left should consider our dependence on pharmaceutical behemoths that jealously guard intellectual properties, notwithstanding huge state aid grants, and indemnification against adverse reactions. It is akin to the dependence of small farmers in developing countries on genetically modified seed, under a model of Philanthrocapitalism overseen by Bill Gates, who according to a recent article by Alexander Zaitchik has shown “a lifelong ideological commitment to knowledge monopolies,” and devotes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to whitewashing his reputation through “charitable” media grants.
Moreover, all too often, media debates around Covid-19 fail to acknowledge the link between pre-existing morbidities – ‘underlying conditions’ – and morbidity and mortality from Covid-19. Thus, US Studies have shown that having a BMI over 30—the threshold that defines obesity—increases the risk of being admitted to hospital with covid-19 by 113%, of being admitted to intensive care by 74%, and of dying by 48%, making it almost as relevant a consideration as having been vaccinated.
In Ireland, moreover, Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor recently questioned the attribution of deaths to Covid-19, saying: ‘In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple other serious co-morbidities. People can die from Covid and or with Covid. I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis.’
Furthermore, by embracing ZeroCovid Utopianism many on the Irish left failed to focus on the failings of a decrepit Irish health system. This epitomises a tendency among politicians to dance to the tune of a corporate media that has placed relentless focus on the disease itself, regularly interviewing mendacious ISAG figures, while generally ignoring underlying social and environmental factors that drive morbidity and mortality.
The canard that Ireland could simply shut its borders and reach ZeroCovid perhaps points to the need for reform of an Irish secondary educational system, which according to the a rather unkind assessment from the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher is designed to produce ‘second-class robots.’ Perhaps too many of us are lacking the requisite critical faculties to look beyond news headlines.
In fact a radically different, defiantly left-wing approach to the pandemic been put forward by, among others, Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kuldorff in The Jacobin. They pointed out:
Elites have seen their stock portfolios balloon in value, and many professionals have been able to keep their jobs by working from home. It is the country’s poor and working-class households, particularly those with children, who have borne a disproportionate share of the burden. Lower-income Americans were much more likely to be forced to work in unsafe conditions, to have lost their livelihoods due to business and school shutdowns, or to be unable to learn remotely.
Beyond ZeroCovid, the Irish left should emphasis the harms of Ireland’s reliance on lockdowns, and harness the malcontents of the poorest, including small business owners. Otherwise they court irrelevance as the traditional ruling parties have already taken on the role of ‘caring’ for the people, while retaining the power to ease restrictions in the face of opposition from the left.
Science and Technology are not Neutral
Also, as opposed to running in fear from being labelled anti-vaxxers by a cheerleading corporate media, the left might at least consider the wisdom of foisting vaccines that have been granted under emergency use conditions on all age groups. Indeed, many on the left in Ireland seem unwilling to question dominant institutional narratives, a tendency recently criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris in The Jacobin, who said: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’
It remains unclear whether universal immunization will bring about long-term ‘herd’ immunity; while in the absence of long-term safety data the benefits to young, healthy subjects of vaccination may not outweigh the cost in terms of adverse events from treatments granted under emergency use licences. Sober assessment seems to have given way to an ideological and, at times, a coercive approach.
In terms of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, writing in the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, pointed to how in the media ‘a relative risk reduction is being reported, not absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%’ for severe disease.’ Ollario et al in The Lancet referred to absolute risk reductions of ‘1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.’ The authors also pointed to how ‘considerations on efficacy and effectiveness are based on studies measuring prevention of mild to moderate COVID-19 infection; they were not designed to conclude on prevention of hospitalisation, severe disease, or death, or on prevention of infection and transmission potential.’
Doshi has also objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’ This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer those who received a placebo the opportunity to receive its vaccine.
Doshi argued that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’
An alternative policy would be to reserve vaccines for those most susceptible to severe symptoms – the old and the obese – along with healthcare workers and others unavoidably working around the world in congested environments. Devoting scarce resources to increasing ICU provision to bring us into line with European averages might be a better approach than relying exclusively on the quick fix of the vaccine.
The Irish left should now desist from identity politics around vaccine uptake that the centre-right is relishing. ‘Tiktok’ Harris previously stoked tensions with talk of mandatory vaccines and promoting vaccine passports. The left should resist vaccine apartheid, nationally and globally, while demanding the release of patents earned through state supports.
On the Horizon
Ireland can expect significant social problems to emerge out of our world-beating lockdown strategy that recalls a prior devotion to austerity; a mental health pandemic and mass youth unemployment are upon us already. Moreover, the young are currently denied the safety valve of an easy hop to another English-speaking country for work. This may be a recipe for radicalism, but unfortunately genuinely dark forces on the far-right are ready to pounce on malcontents.
It is surely vital that we maintain our European connections, thereby scrapping Mandatory Health Quarantine that is an insult to immigrant groups in Ireland, as well as the diaspora. 90% of scientists believe that Covid-19 will be with us forever, so it seems there will always be ‘variants of concern’ to contend with, just as there are with influenza.
As a country Ireland has serious work to get on with in terms of addressing a housing crisis and improving our environment. A narrow focus on the pandemic should not be allowed to derail these efforts. This may be like a war but it is not a war. Even prior to vaccines, this is a virus with an infection fatality rate of less than 0.2% in most locations. Moreover, up to 86% of those infected may not have symptoms, such as cough, fever, or loss of taste or smell, according to a UK study from October. We require better provision of public health and an adequate plan to address the ongoing obesity pandemic.
We also need to start thinking more critically — and speaking more cautiously — about Long Covid, considering ‘at least some people who identify themselves as having Long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.’
The pandemic calls for a new social contract to be negotiated in Ireland that acknowledges republican values of Non-Domination; Mixed Government and tolerance of Obstreperous Citizens. The French COVID-19 Scientific Council led the way in a paper for The Lancet:
it is time to abandon fear-based approaches based on seemingly haphazard stop-start generalised confinement as the main response to the pandemic; approaches which expect citizens to wait patiently until intensive care units are re-enforced, full vaccination is achieved, and herd immunity is reached.
They continue:
Crucially, the new approach should be based on a social contract that is clear and transparent, rooted in available data, and applied with precision to its range of generational targets. Under this social contract, younger generations could accept the constraint of prevention measures (eg, masks, physical distancing) on the condition that the older and more vulnerable groups adopt not only these measures, but also more specific steps (eg, voluntary self-isolation according to vulnerability criteria) to reduce their risk of infection. Measures to encourage adherence of vulnerable groups to specific measures must be promoted consistently and enforced fairly. Implementation of such an approach must be done sensitively and in conjunction with the deployment of vaccination across the various population targets, including all generations of society.
They argue against reliance on lockdowns:
Using stop-start general confinement as the main response to the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer feasible. Though attractive to many scientists, and a default measure for political leaders fearing legal liability for slow or indecisive national responses, its use must be revisited, only to be used as a last resort.
To date, many on the Irish left appear to have had their heads in the sand promoting a Utopian ZeroCovid solution. This should give way to a more balanced appraisal that considers the interests of all of Irish society. With the youngest population in Europe, and as one of the richest countries, the Irish government could have preserved a far higher standard of living for the population during the pandemic. We now need to draw up a social contract that takes a more balanced approach.
Featured Image: Daniele Idini
[i] O’Toole, Fintan (editor), Up The Republic: Towards a New Ireland. Faber and Faber, London, 2012, p.1-52.
[ii] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Penguin, London, 1966, p.22
[iii] Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism, Little, Brown, London, 2011, p.79
I went in my first chatroom when I was 12. My name was ‘Phoebe’ – she was my favourite friend – and every day after school I rushed to the computer to chat to the other liars in the chatroom who were probably aged 38. It was like stepping into Narnia. One evening I dialled up the Internet, let off some steam (or trolled people) and left the chatroom. I set up a new identity – possibly ‘Rachel’ – and told everyone that I had terrible news. Phoebe had jumped out the window.
It was fun when the sympathies came in, with people so shocked and sorry for the loss of my friend (myself). Rachel left the chatroom, and we never returned, me or myselves. The chatroom was, like Narcos episodes or Easter eggs, too much of a good thing. My life since then has been one chatroom disappearance after another, though the chatrooms have the more benign shape of ‘social media’ and the disappearances are not so dramatic, just the absences you don’t notice when the algorithm wipes people out.
I never cared for networking sites, and Bebo and MySpace seemed to be just culchie hang-outs. Then one day people started using this Orwellian surveillance technique called Facebook. Now, I thought Facebook was the laughing stock of everyone. The Irish, enemies of narcissism, seemed to particularly hate it. Imagine having an online diary all about yourself, putting pictures of yourself online for all the world to see. Imagine being seen to think thoughts about yourself. People jeered, with the glazed look of the captive just before they enter the cult. In around Summer 2007, my friend Francis told me that within twelve months, everyone we knew would have a Facebook page. He eyed me. Everyone. Everyone except me, I promised.
Then you move abroad and Facebook sounds like a good way of keeping in touch with old friends. Also I had the selfie application on my Apple Mac that took gorgeous pictures of the beholder (myself). So I handed Facebook all my personal details and took some gorgeous pictures of me and my flatmate in our new London pad, and posted the hell out of them one restless night. Friend requests came pumping in – it was viral, a friend disease, a cholera outbreak of camaraderie and everyone I’d ever met was stricken. I sat in bed enthralled by kite surfing conventions and weddings in Capri, envy infiltrating my shivering soul so quietly I didn’t even know it was there.
The next night my flatmate knocked on my door.
‘You put pictures of us online in our pajamas.’
It was all about learning, but it was all still very compelling, and I kept stalking people, kept infecting new friends. The picture slideshows were like a beautiful sedative. Evenings, mornings, were thrown away gazing at edited lives and it really didn’t matter. Facebook had rooted out an obsessive strain in my character and I wanted to click and click until I could be absorbed into the screen, indistinct from the digitised friends whose own friends’ lives I was preying on, and then I would just fall asleep. The friends which, by the way, were incongruously arranged. What was Bianca from Spain doing with those idiots from primary school, and my mum’s friend and that new girl at work who seems nice but boring. The whole thing was a fiasco.
I stayed on Facebook about three weeks before trying to disappear. (‘Are you sure?’ They asked when I begged them to unchain me. What makes you so sure? What is your real reason for wanting to leave us? Would you like us to keep your personal information? It doesn’t matter, we’re going to keep your personal information anyway, and have it ready for the moment you come crawling back to us.’) The exit was labyrinthine, I recall, and even after I’d got away one of their men was crouched there waiting to intercept me.
Many humorous articles were written at the time, parodying Facebook and taking issue with what these Californian kids were asking us to do with our ‘friends’. The ‘poke’ was a great source of naughty excitement. Privacy was a real talking point. Anonymity was much pondered as a modern belief system. Trolling, bullying and abuse were not okay. And over the years, Facebook listened to its critics, had some glossy AGMs, cleaned up its act, and created a more softly controlled ‘tool-kit’ for its ‘community’. Even when it recently got caught publishing fake news written by Russian teenagers, Facebook was terribly remorseful. Top nerd Mark Zuckerberg has been compared to Lennie, the giant in Of Mice and Men, for his helplessness in the face of his own power. Doesn’t he hate himself? I don’t know. I am way above Facebook now (aside from borrowing my mum’s password if I need to prey on someone). I went on Twitter.
In an old diary, on ‘June 11th, or 12th, or 13th, probably 13th’, there is written in an angered hand: ‘Miseries, miseries. Today I entered Twitter, or it entered me, penetrating my thoughts and [illegible] and perceptions and thrusting onto me all the familiar friends and famous people I could ever hope to meet in Lillies [Bordello]. Oh the grimness. Most of the evening spent uploading a thumbnail image – what kind of [illegible] crackpot keeps thumbnail images of themselves on computers. Kafkaesque. Like introducing yourself at a dinner party you know you will never get out the door of.’
That was 2012, when there were still names for people who used Twitter, like ‘Twitterati’. Now Twitterati are just people. All of us. There is no special tribe. My first season on Twitter wasn’t a success. I didn’t know how to tweet, or even what a tweet was. Then one day, early in my unprolific and ongoing career in journalism, I wrote an article that struck a goldmine. It must have been about beautiful women or something. Everybody retweeted the hell out of it that fine, salubrious day. I watched my numbers build. Watched that tweet balloon. I was getting fans, influencers on my side. Like the gambler, flush from her first winning horse, I bet higher – wrote more daring tweets, with opinions. And nobody retweeted those. I disappeared, let my Twitter profile die of natural causes and returned to friendlessness.
My late and unlamented LinkedIn presence must have emerged around then, too. I’d been having requests from all my mates – Vincent Browne, David McWilliams, Rosanna Davison, everyone really – to connect with me on LinkedIn. (It took time before I realized that the LinkedIn nerds and losers had a kind of hari-kari click, whereby with one slip of the hand you’d asked everyone you’d ever written an email, including that guy from the hostel in Buenos Aires, to be your peer in business.) So I thought I should make the career move. I spent an afternoon setting up a LinkedIn profile, publishing my work CV, which would surely be fascinating reading for people, and, thus whored to the Western elite, waited for something to happen. I wasn’t head-hunted instantly. The odd message came in, from an old real-life friend, who laughed with me about meeting like this. I never once used LinkedIn. I tried to disappear from it, tried hard to remember old passwords that would let me disappear forever, but LinkedIn is still loafing around the unwanted ‘Social’ section of my Gmail account, sending daily spams, together with its creepy sister Pinterest. Apparently I’m still ‘on’ LinkedIn. I haven’t used it in six years. Bit of a long-shot, eh, LinkedIn losers? Though it regularly tells me that so and so has been admiring my profile and I do get a little bit excited.
Around 2013 I went back on Twitter for a second shot, keen to make it now. The years I spent in shared office spaces, where there were signs in the bathrooms asking office mates to kindly not steal toilet paper, I remember without fondness. Each morning, I would get a coffee and a double chocolate chip muffin and sit at my lair with a bleary kind of ambition. I was going to have a great day. I knew people who forced themselves to write 2000 words before they could open their Twitter machines, but not me, I was way above Twitter. I would go directly, nonchalantly, on Twitter, first thing in the morning, just to show how little it meant to me.
And so I scrolled through the Neoliberally sorted parcels of news. And scrolled, and clicked, and engorged myself with other people’s success, until envy’s poison seeped into my veins again. I felt awed, embittered, and then, something I couldn’t put a finger on, something uncomfortable. Something that made me want to throw a few hardbacks out the window, or worse. Anger. I felt a great, blood-letting anger. And by the time the double chocolate chip muffin and the coffee had worn off and my little Twitter profile was still little, I felt as good as dead.
Depression usually enters a person through an unconventional route. Not directly through consciousness, more through the back of the heart, and in around the stomach, through the legs, gently paralyzing them. I watched an old friend become ultra-famous on Twitter, and I think in real life – there’s no difference now. I conversed with him publicly on Twitter thinking – I’m not doing this for show, not to gain followers, not me. I watched as media storms blew up, over terrorist attacks or sexism or people captured and tortured by terrorist groups themselves formed by Twitter and Facebook; threw in some hashtags and lent support to causes that made me look pretty good, as a bonus. I watched as my ultra-famous friend wiped out thousands of followers one night. Just deleted us. Apparently it’s something you do when you get ‘there’, so that more people are following you than you are them, and I was lost in his genocide.
It came to me one day. The backslapping lie of the whole thing. People only say nice things about other people with their names in the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage. (@famousfriend. I can’t thank @famousjournalist enough for her amazing article about me in which I talk about @influentialfamousfriend. I love you all so much. #mybook. Blah.) It looks nice to be nice. Who doesn’t like niceness, when there are all those terrible trolls to contend with! And it also wins you retweets, when the person retweets the nice thing said about them. Niceness makes you a really big deal. So I said nice things about other people with their names linked into the tweet, in order to get a mega retweet out of it and an orgiastic public massage.
How then do you even write an incredibly successful tweet? This was the next great challenge of my career. There were just 140 characters to hang your reputation on, those days. I’m sure they teach that at journalism college now but I had to learn it alone.
When there was an article to plug, a ware to sell, that was easy. You just sent the link out to do your dirty work. But when I just wanted to tweet about something on an ordinary day – when I just wanted to be a natural, loveable wit. That could take hours. No matter how ingenious the idea, how hysterically funny the sentiment, how neat the observation, how succinct my little aphorism really sounded, it always ran over those 140 characters into the dead zone of untweetable words. (‘Your Tweet is too long. You have to be smarter,’ Twitter told me once. I think they’ve changed that auto setting – like Facebook, they’ve grown up, become nice young men.) Sometimes, seeing my tweet sit there unliked, or seeing one or two charity likes under it, I simply had to delete the wretched thing – had to proverbially ball up the opus that hadn’t gone beyond the first draft. There were all too many of those. The ignominy of my tweets! My career was not blossoming, my articles not grandly shared – and by the way, every year I got hit by the mother and father of a tax bill. Journalism, on Twitter, was a stupid existence.
I quit the Twitter machine in December 2016. That’s when I went heavy on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp led me back to something like the good old days in the chatrooms. It was just hanging out, with your closest friends instead of bots and strangers. And, you could post cute pictures for free. You could barrage close friends with cute pictures. Nobody would not find these pictures cute. Nobody would desert their friends. (‘X left’ in small font was your shame to live with if you tried.) You could keep in touch with your friends abroad, for free. You could make a plan for a night out together, and then change the plan, for a night out that never happened, then comment convivially on the night that never happened, then set up another group for a night that will never happen, as the group ‘Nite on the Tiles!’ sinks lower and lower into the graveyard of groups – down with ‘Table Quiz Larks’ and ‘Summer Swims’ and ‘Trip to Tayto Park?’
I liked WhatsApp. Liked how the popularity contest wasn’t numerically driven, how we were all equals. Liked the dopamine punch-up when you threw something really successful, and nobody didn’t comment. Liked the crying-laughing emoji, the dancing girl emoji, pressing my finger on the crying-laughing emoji so you got a whole paragraph of them, just to show how heartbreakingly LOL all this was. I liked to see that such and such was ‘typing’ – I was glued to that. With one friend, we were both ‘typing’ so much, so cleverly, I felt sure our dialogues would be optioned for a major motion picture. I loved to share pictures. Any pictures, of any of the fabulous things I was doing in this efflorescence of my digital life – Campari cocktails at home, the beaches of Santorini, my little newborn’s first bath. WhatsApp was so safe. There were protocols, but of course. Some memes were not acceptable in the wider WhatsApp community, and silence was the loudest comment of all. But WhatsApp was a wonderful place to spend the evenings. I had events to look forward to: birthdays of people I didn’t like; Christmas parties planned years in advance; expensive lunches. I felt what I had been missing all that time on Twitter. I felt massaged. WhatsApp brought me and my friends so much closer together.
And every waking minute was dedicated to catching up with the latest hilarious chat. There was a feel of unreality to the ever warm, congratulatory tones of WhatsApp. There were no trolls here, just the opposite of trolls – friends. Who, despite all the groups that kept multiplying, I didn’t actually ever see. I wanted something real. I wanted at least a good trolling. It was sitting by the fire one night with my family, shooting off sneaky WhatsApp replies between Snakes and Ladders moves, that I saw how antisocial social media is. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, barbaric dating sites – they’re all free but we’re prisoners. Like the fawns of Narnia, they gave us the sweets, then had us frozen in pretendy-world.
One day on the bus I was about to catch up with the latest hilarious WhatsApp chat but instead I pressed delete on the WhatsApp icon. Now everyone is gone.
I still check my emails 248 times a day, so that’s social. And the Internet keeps my pancake brain nice and flat, so I want for nothing in terms of intellectual decline and death. As for personal validation, I can always be Peeping Tom via my mum’s Facebook password. So when this article goes out, it better be liked.
Maggie Armstrong is the fiction editor of Cassandra Voices. Her short story ‘My Space‘ appeared in the last edition.
