Cassandra Voices

Tag: society

  • Eviction Ban: Towards an Unjust Society

    An earlier version of this article was recently published in the Irish World newspaper, we commend the courage of the editor Bernard Purcell for doing so, but a week is a long time in politics and we felt it required updating and a short addendum on the possibility of a legal challenge.

    Indirectly, the failure to deal with the issue of housing and homelessness has led to the rise of far-right protests, tar­geting immigrants in temporary accommodation. This is the slippery slope to fascism.

    Housing is the defining issue of this Irish generation. By extension, it is the defining issue of Ireland’s next general election.

    One slender thread of hope to ensure matters did not decline further was Ire­land’s temporary ban on evic­tions. But that has been re­scinded.

    In contrast, Scotland had the good sense to extend its own evic­tions ban until September. But in the midst of the worst housing shortage in the country’s history, the Irish government is prioritising the financial interests of land­lords.

    Ireland’s recently ap­pointed Attorney General Rossa Fanning SC had advised the Irish government that landlords’ groups could mount a constitutional chal­lenge to the extension of the ban. But the Irish government subsequently insisted its de­cision to revoke the evictions ban was a political one, rather than one based on the AG’s advice.

    Nevertheless, the Irish governments have frequently hidden behind the issue of constitutionality. It’s the first line of de­fence whenever the question of genuine rent control is pro­posed, and the last line of de­fence when the calls for the introduction of the eviction ban were first made.

    Constitutional Problem?

    We believe there is a constitu­tional solution to a suppos­edly intractable constitutional problem. The origin of the problem is that in Blake v Madigan (1982) The Rent Restrictions Act 1960, (1981) limited the amount of rent which could be charged on certain con­trolled dwellings.

    It also made it difficult for a landlord to recover posses­sion of a dwelling affected by the legislation. Landlords argued that the legislation amounted to an unjust attack on their property rights.

    The Irish Supreme Court agreed, referring to how the scheme operated in an arbitrary manner, with no means testing of either landlord or tenant, and that no compensation was available for the restriction of the prop­erty rights of the landlords af­fected.

    So, under the Constitu­tion, the right to property is to be protected against “un­just attack and the landlords’ rights unjustly attacked.”

    But constitutionally, this idea of an unjust attack is sub­ject to the proviso that the rights of landlords must give way to the common good – where the legislature is informed by Directive Principles of Social Policy set out in Article 45  – and also that the means used to intrude on property rights are proportionate.

    Social and Affordable Housing

    The social justice and common good arguments for maintaining an eviction ban are, in our view, overwhelming. But, of course, this would limit and restrict the property rights of landlords in an increasingly neolib­eral Ireland.

    Compulsory purchase schemes have, however, been upheld in such cases as Dreher [984], with the suggestion that sometimes there is no need to pay any compensation.

    In Re Article 26 and Part V of the Planning and Devel­opment Bill [2000] 2 IR321, Part V of the Bill aimed to provide affordable housing and social integration, imposing a con­dition that planning permis­sion for residential developments would either have to cede some of the de­velopment for affordable housing, or instead pay com­pensation.

    There was no require­ment that the State pay com­pensation to the developer under the scheme, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in a judgment which focused largely on the reasons for the restriction on property rights.

    The Court noted that the restriction on property rights was justified and proportion­ate to the objectives of the Bill.

    Based on this precedent, today the government could acquire properties at less than market rates, paying a measure of compensation to the landlords and thus avoid­ing the unappeal­ing vista of increased homelessness, leading to further social divisions further social divisions, and creating conditions for the rise of a far-right fas­cism, which may serve the interests of this neoliberal coalition, and its apolo­gists.

    It could also have a wel­come deflationary impact on the price of property which now exceed Celtic Tiger levels.

    Shared Equity

    Alas, it appears the Irish government does not want this and has pro­posed an alternative. They are currently drawing up leg­islation which in effect will extend their Shared Equity scheme to second hand homes where the land­lord wishes to sell but has a tenant in situ.

    The drive to introduce this Shared Equity scheme came from the two main property lobby groups – Property Industry Ireland and the Irish Institu­tional Property.

    Neither group came up with the idea itself. It is based on an English scheme which research by the London School of Eco­nomics (LSE) found pushed up London house prices by 9per cent.

    In effect, it operates as a dual mortgage, whereby the tenant in situ would have a mortgage to a bank and also be required to repay the State who would take an “equity stake” in the property.

    This is unlikely to work, or even be ready in time, for the forthcoming wave of Irish evictions. A simpler proposal is to follow the South African model of amending the Consti­tution to include an enforce­able right to housing in an emergency context.

    The Irish government’s promise of a housing referen­dum has foundered on a dis­agreement about the wording. We suspect that it will not implement what is needed for an immediately enforce­able emergency housing right, as is enforceable in other jurisdic­tions.

    A Just Society?

    We doubt the pre­sent government has the po­litical will for meaningful action on housing. But there is an al­ternative, which is to launch a constitutional challenge so the Supreme Court can recant on such ne­farious cases as O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation [1989] in which Mr Justice Declan Costello (1926-2011) held that he lacked jurisdiction to compel the defendant to pro­vide the plaintiffs with ade­quately serviced halting sites, because this was a question of distributive justice.

    Such matters of social justice, he intimated, were for Leinster House, not the Four Courts. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC [1994].

    Costello (1926-2011), the son of former Taoiseach John A Costello, was a former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General, barrister and judge, who served as President of the Irish High Court from 1995to 1998.

    As a politician he was the author of Towards a Just Society, a policy document which shifted Fine Gael towards the left and social justice, and which made Fine Gael a more at­tractive coalition partner for the Irish Labour Party.

    Costello also created Ire­land’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Law Reform Commis­sion, making him the most effective and consequential Irish Attorney General in the history of the State.

    He was a thoroughly de­cent man, and a visionary, but also a product of his background. Fine Gael has long since parted company with Costello’s vision of the Just Society for Ireland. Just like Fianna Fáil, it has been completely cap­tured by business interests, landlords and property de­velopers.

    Their politics is little more than the shadow cast upon society by big business, as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) might have said.

    The portents for a constitutional challenge in this period of an unprecedented housing emergency are not, however, all bad. In a fledgling way recent judgments have hinted at a more interventionist approach, in pro­portionate terms where there is recklessness or bad faith.

    Well, if throwing people out on the street, disrupting family units with no afford­able place to go, is not reck­less, what is?

    The very fabric of Irish society frays, as dust is left to gather on those copies of Just Society which remain shelved and unread in Fine Gael’s basement.

    The current crop of Fine Gael TDs have no interest in reading that document, but are happy to deploy it for public relations purposes when it suits them.

    Last week Sinn Féin forced a vote on the govern­ment’s lifting of the eviction ban, which led to one Green T.D.’s Nessa Hourigan breaking ranks and voting against the government.

    As the doomsday sce­nario for terrified tenants looms large, and the Irish government looks on with complete indifference to such pain, we are reminded of the word of a Christy Moore song- “the spirit that dwelt within, now sleeps out in the rain”.

    Addendum

    With the government’s rejection of last week’s motion from Sinn Féin to extend the eviction ban, and with the help of certain “independent” TDs, the same result is now likely to be reached today. The Labour Party’s no confidence motion has also fallen short.

    This government and its drive to break all homelessness records is bruised and battered, but not unbroken. In our view the last remaining hope for the thousands facing eviction rests upon the kind of last-minute legal challenge our initial article set out.

    Papers could potentially be lodged on Thursday seeking an interim injunction for violations by the government of Article 43, Article 40.3 and Article 45 of the constitution. This will require state-sponsored lawyers to show cause, and seek a return date for a fully-fledged interlocutory hearing with skeleton arguments and detailed consideration.

    The logic is that the implementation of the lifting of the eviction moratorium on Friday would not happen as mandatory relief and an injunction would be sought against the lifting. This would require careful judicial consideration, and thus time for cool judicial heads to resolve whether it could be secured.

    If a lawyer cannot be enabled to seek an interim injunction on such short notice any member of the public can do so.

    However, a powerful symbol would be the representatives of the opposition in Dáil Eireann coming together, in conjunction with some of those currently facing eviction, to try and avert the inevitable prospect of a humanitarian catastrophe on our streets in the months to come.

    A new Socialist Lawyers’ Association of Ireland announced its establishment in January of this year, so perhaps they might even want to lend a hand. There are also organisation likes CATU and other campaigning groups. But time is of the essence.

    Our conservative political classes seem to have either sleep-walked or deliberately created this unprecedented housing crisis and its dysfunctional property market. Sterile and detached cost benefit analysis where households are units and people products lead to the increasing dehumanisation of those impacted by policy decisions.

    Even the most basic rights we can think of like housing and a safe and secure upbringing seem to wither on the vine. To quote someone who Fine Gael should know well:

    “We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood, and complacency must be dispelled, and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.”

    Those are the words of the late Declan Costello former Fine Gael TD, Attorney General and author of the “Just Society”. They seem to ring truer than ever.

    The time has come for a Housing challenge, for we the people.

    David Langwallner is an Irish Barrister based in London. Cillian Doyle is a political economist and policy advisor. The views expressed are their own.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • COVID-19: Shame on You

    A new book COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury, 2023) co-authored by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose explores how the British government under Boris Johnson used shame as an instrument of coercive control during the pandemic.

    ‘Shame’, the authors contend, ‘is commonly understood to be a personal experience that arises when one feels judged by another or others (whether they are present, imagined or internalized) to have transgressed or broken a social rule or norm.’

    It appears to exert a particular force in Westminster politics where cries of “shame” or “shame on you” are regularly hurled across the floor of the House of Commons. An anthropologist might trace this to the public school upbringing of a significant proportion number of MPs – David Cameron recalls in his biography, ‘At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster’ – or a proletarian habituation through spectator sport.

    The stigmatisation of apparently errant behaviour through shaming is not, however, unique to English (or British) culture.

    Over the course of the lockdown in the U.K. the authors argue that shaming became ‘an important component of the ‘collective suffering, exacerbating and complicating other negative experiences and emotions.’ Those that stepped out of line were dubbed ‘covidiots’, while people questioning canonical scientific accounts could be dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorists’, belonging to the ‘tin-foil hat brigade’.

    Arguably, a drawback of the work is a tendency to assign primary responsibility to the bumbling and often insidious response of the British government, as opposed to a wider international consensus around COVID-19 within which that government’s face-saving policies emerged.

    The authors also seem reluctant to criticize a medical profession, which, they argue, were subjected to widespread shaming. Surely governments lionised ‘front line’ doctors, albeit for their own ends?

    Moreover, some doctors even participated in the shaming effort, agitating for stringent measures that often were not based on cost-benefit analyses, while demonising ‘granny-killing’ objectors.

    The book contains important insights into the lives of ordinary people, many of whom suffered in silence as a result of a British government strategy that often relied on ‘Second World War kitsch.’

    Social Media

    Gabor Maté describes neuromarketing as ‘a strategic invasion of human consciousness.’[i] The extent of the role of social media companies in generating fear and curbing dissent is only now being revealed. The authors draw attention to its enabling role:

    Pandemic shaming was enabled by the rapid formation and spread of virtual groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, created by physical neighbours to stay in touch and help each other out during lockdown.

    They recall that, ‘[a]lthough often started with the noblest of intentions, solidarity and shaming frequently inhabited the same virtual spaces.’

    ‘At times,’ they observe, ‘the groups became mediums for ‘curtain twitching’, or the unspoken, unofficial surveillance or monitoring of one’s neighbours.’

    Thus, ‘So-called pandemic ‘transgressions’ … were  documented by ordinary citizens on these platforms and elsewhere, presumably looking out for themselves and other concerned members of their community.’

    It should also be noted that social media companies platformed so-called fact checkers that were responsible for disseminating misinformation that cast opposition to a dominant narrative as simultaneously absurd and sinister. A ‘Strawman Conspiracy Theorist’ was used to stifle reasonable scientific debate.

    ‘Covidiots’

    When historians get around to providing an account of the pandemic response – that increasingly seems like a bad dream – the cartoon villains of Johnson and Trump will surely figure prominently.

    Thus, the authors observe that when the term covidiot began trending on social media in early March, ‘there seemed to be only one covidiot for Anglophone Twitter, and that was Trump.’

    They say this ‘gave the earliest iterations of the term a political valency: it offered an insult that the otherwise powerless might use as a means to humiliate a powerful individual.’

    They argue:

    [this] relied upon a historical tendency to portray Trump as morally and intellectually deficient throughout his candidacy for, and eventual elevation to, the US presidency. Seen in this light, the neologism owed its first success to the ease with which it fitted into an existing paradigm, as a novel shorthand for describing an existing situation.

    Whatever came out of Trump’s mouth was consigned to covidiocy, even if he, occasionally, made sensible suggestions such as that the cure should not be worse than the disease. Profound antipathy towards Trump seems to have been exploited by lockdown evangelists, which caused profound damage, especially in developing countries such as India.

    The book provides harrowing accounts of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of what became a culture war. The authors point to poignant accounts of the effect on society from the Mass Observation project:

    I went out on Tuesday, with my son, to buy stamps. I sensed a slight hostility. People who would usually smile and let you through a door now avoid eye contact and stay their distance. The woman working in the Post Office was expressing her anger at people who had congregated on the beach the previous day. She hadn’t seen it herself, she said; but it was on Facebook (it must be true!) She said they were idiotic. It differed from her usual affable small-talk and it made me un-easy. I said we had been ourselves on Sunday and there was no-one around.

    Irish Experience

    In Ireland we witnessed similar shaming tactics. Thus, in the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, a column from Dr Padraig Moran from November, 2020, arrived with the by-line: ‘Mindless rule-flouting behaviour is the real problem in the pandemic.’ Another article by Kathy Sheridan from 2020 referred to ‘maskless ignoramuses with Trumpian belief systems.’

    A grandmother was even jailed in Ireland for refusing to wear a mask in shops and restaurants.

    Unsurprisingly, we have seen no retractions or reassessments on the subject of those “maskless ignoramuses”, despite a Cochrane review stating that the ‘pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.’

    The shaming reached a crescendo in Ireland with vaccine passes and the scapegoating of an unvaccinated minority by politicians and prominent journalists in late 2021.

    Gabor Maté provides a fitting description of the political class that exploited the virus for their own ends:

    The system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from itself, others and meaning. A select few – especially those with the sort of coping mechanisms that prime the to deny reality, block out empathy, fear and vulnerability, mute their own sense of right and wrong, and abjure looking at themselves too closely – will be elevated to power.[ii]

    Sadly, many among the medical profession were fully on board with this effort, disregarding the traumas caused by lockdowns, which seems to be contributing to the excess deaths we are witnessing in the wake of the pandemic. The fact that Sweden has experienced the lowest level of excess death in Europe over the period is widely ignored by those that condemned that country as a pariah state.

    This is perhaps unsurprisingly given Gabor Maté’s observation that, ‘[a]t present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession’[iii]

    Given so much of what we saw during the pandemic in the U.K. and beyond was guided by the medical profession it seems, as Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry put it ‘a complete revolution in medicine is exactly what is required.’[iv]

    [i] Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, New York, 2022, p.299

    [ii] Ibid, p.357

    [iii] Ibid, p.277

    [iv] Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry, The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 2020, p.198.

    Feature Image: Village stocks in Bramhall, England, c. 1900.

  • Leitrim’s Glass Half-Full

    In a recent article Frank Armstrong traces the historic decline in the population of Leitrim, triggered by the Famine of the mid-19th century. He notes that Leitrim County Council’s recent attempts to encourage people to buy and rehabilitate derelict cottages has been disappointing.

    This analysis is based on cogent statistical analysis. ESRI analysts have reached similar conclusions. As somebody who first became acquainted with Leitrim and the North-West of Ireland in the early 1980s – I went on to purchase a house through a non-profit housing organisation in the mid-1980s – I would have agreed with the glass-half-empty-pessimism.

    Decades later, however, as an inside-outsider with a physical stake in the county, I would argue that the historic decline has shifted and if only government and non-state actors can push the pull the right levers I am optimistic about the future.

    My childhood was spent in a Kildare village near the Curragh. After five years studying in Dublin I spent almost three-and-a-half years teaching English and promoting school agriculture in a remote boarding school in Zambia. After further book-learning I returned to a town school in Zambia and again promoted school food production in addition to my English language teaching duties.

    I grabbed an opportunity to leave the urban bubble of Dublin early in 1981 and took up a development education post based in Sligo. Much of my emphasis was on cultural education, using slides and attractive artifacts, touring schools and a few Irish Country Women’s groups in counties Sligo, Leitrim, Donegal and north Mayo.

    I spent six years until 1987 travelling around in a second-hand Renault van – the model then driven by An Post mail delivery personnel – organising hotel and community hall exhibitions in Sligo, Letterkenny and Ballina on development challenges in the Third World.

    Deserted Villages

    Enough about me. The visual and socio-emotional feel West of the Shannon was different from what I was accustomed to in Leinster.

    The rural hinterland, small villages and stagnating towns, had Third World characteristics, minus famine and ethnic wars. On crooked country boreens I came across ‘deserted villages’ with derelict schools and abandoned cottages.

    Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem The Deserted Village about Sweet Auburn came to mind. I thought parts of the North-West could figuratively be termed “a Sahel with rain”. Figurative language is colourful but has its limitations.

    At the same time, however, I saw positive attempts by blow-ins (incomers) from other parts of Ireland, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France – even a few from Italy – to restore dilapidated cottages with a few acres around them.

    Such in-comers had begun arrived in dribs and drabs from the 1970s. They cleared scrub and stones from small plots of land, brought in topsoil and grew unusual vegetables in things called polytunnels.

    Indigenous locals knew the “pollies” were different from friable glass houses that the gentry in Big Houses used in walled gardens. Sceptical locals also thought that reconditioning the soil for vegetable tunnels and trying to make ends meet by keeping she-goats for milk and cheese was a hopeless enterprise.

    They were right. Some in-comers worked their guts out, became ill in mind and body and returned to their urban societies.

    I tried to paint a broad picture of this, the North-West, the West and the South-West mostly, in a 2007 article published in a fringe pacifist magazine edited by a friend in Belfast. Read it see what you think. Link: Blow-in rural settlers made an impact in Ireland (innatenonviolence.org).

    Relative Affluence

    Relative affluence came to Leitrim and nearby counties when Ireland became awash with EU money and foreign direct investment, systematically enabled by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA).

    We were told that the housing boom of the 1990s until the financial meltdown of September 2008 filled the coffers of county councils and gave local employment. Polish and other immigrant workers aided the indigenous workforce. The intelligent Poles remitted money; some repatriated savings for business start-ups; a few married Irish locals – beneficial to both societies.

    I know of country folk who never caught sight of the money sloshing about in ‘the economy’ of the Celtic Tiger era. They lived frugally to the end of their days. Then dispersed relatives either left the ancestral cottage to rot or sold it off to divide the money.

    An originally German real estate agency, Schiller & Schiller, sold lots of derelict cottages in Leitrim and Sligo. Dublin-based Sherry FitzGerald did its business. Leitrim and Sligo agencies sold many places. Sites near towns and important roads sold well. Off-road properties in the back of beyond were left to dereliction.

    Urban statistical numbers crunchers don’t realize that North Leitrim (from Ballinamore to Kinlough and Kiltyclogher) differs in developmental growth from South Leitrim.

    The county town of Carrick-on-the-Shannon is ideally situated on the Shannon with its cabin cruiser tourism. The Sligo to Dublin railway line and the frequent bus services are an added boon. Dromod, Jamestown and Rooskey have also experienced increases in population along with opportunities in the food and hospitality sector. Rooskey alas witnessed recent hostility to an empty hotel being made ready for refugee and asylum seekers. There was mysterious arson, possibly with involvement by outside racists.

    Kurds

    Carrick-on-Shannon was the major hub of Leitrim’s housing boom. Before the bust government agencies leased new houses to settle Kurdish refugees from Iraq and nearby danger zones. Asylum seekers from Africa and elsewhere also arrived in the town. Some Kurdish families settled into a low income working class estate where I saw children happily running around with Irish peers.

    We may assume they went through the local schooling system and acquired local accents. In downtown Carrick a Kurdish shop selling foodstuffs of oriental and Middle Eastern provenance opened and did good business until Covid restrictions.

    Meanwhile asylum seekers, who later took out Irish nationality and became members of the New Irish, sought group cohesion through Sunday services with a London-linked African apostolic faith group, held in a hired hotel room. African Baptists and independents found fellowship with relevant communities around town. Catholics blended into schools and parish life – along with believing Polish residents.

    Drumshanbo, linked by canal to the nearby Shannon, is half an hour’s drive north of Carrick. It was the site for Lairds Jams factory. The factory is long closed, but during the recent past has been regenerated as an industrial park.

    Whiskey and gin distilling are among new enterprises. Gunpowder gin has become a famous export. Has it arrived in Hong Kong to take its place on supermarket shelves beside the local Gunpowder Tea I wonder?

    Drumshanbo is the only town that continues to stage an An Tostal (“Ireland at Home”) festival – now named after Councillor Joe Mooney who promoted it – which governments during the depressed years of 1953-54 encouraged to drum up (excuse the pun) flagging national morale.

    The town holds another festival featuring delightful temporary sculptures made from hay and silage bales. Drumshanbo is on the way up because it has a self-confident community spirit and entrepreneurs making deft use of government-assisted inducement grants.

    Image: Morgan Bolger

    Northern Stasis

    By contrast, North Leitrim has seemed to languish in a glass half-empty stasis. Manorhamilton is the main town. Its name derives from Hamilton’s Castle built during the period of the Cromwellian conquest. Originally it was known as Cluainín Ui Ruaric – O’Rourke’s Meadows.

    This Gaelic chieftain was executed at the Tower of London for failing to submit to the colonial authority of Elizabeth I. Manorhamilton became a run-down town especially after the privately owned The Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway (SL&NCR) railway line that operated between Enniskillen and Sligo closed down in October 1957. This and containerization radically affected the cattle trade. Old family run shops closed. The main street today has numerous boarded up shops, while the old Central Hotel is no longer in operation.

    But in the wake of Covid, Manorhamilton is slowly clawing its way back. A few factories established with IDA grants have offered job opportunities.

    A number of strongly motivated entrepreneurs have sunk big bucks into developing off a side street what is called the W8 Centre. Modern buildings with a good restaurant on ground floor and self-catering apartments on the top floors have been designed to attract holiday makers from Dublin and beyond.

    Moreover, local history and heritage activists are pushing for Manorhamilton, with old buildings and historic political associations, to be declared a National Heritage Town.

    The town also has the Leitrim Sculpture Centre. A few people from Dublin and England who did ten-month sculpture courses – previously financed by FĀS – fell in love with the area and settled into renovated cottages.

    Today the Centre has residencies for emerging sculptors and they add to the lake and woodland landscape with site-appropriate sculpture trails. The Glens Centre caters for visual arts and drama in an old Methodist Church that was replaced due to a diminishing congregation by a smaller church nearby.

    One sporting innovation is the revival of handball, with encouragement and training of local girls and boys, using a reconditioned handball alley that fell into neglect a few decades ago.

    Dromahair Castle, 1791.

    Dromahair

    The village of Dromahair, with close job links to nearby Sligo town, grew considerably during the housing boom. Sadly, one still sees some houses that weren’t completed before the 2008 bust that vacant.

    It seems the Council is powerless to do anything. Would a constitutional amendment to Article 15 on property rights give local authorities effective powers to sort out the empty property syndrome?

    Dromahair has benefited from the practical talents of several incomers. One German national who restored old cottages in the area set up a successful candle making enterprise. Read here my interview with him: Pete Kern – Craft candle maker – BeesWax Candles Ireland

    In 2017 Rosemary Kerrigan and some other local like-minded colleagues were pleased to dress up in period costume and witness the official opening opposite the old railway station of a 1.2km demonstration Greenway on the old line that connected the village with other places.

    The Big Dream, of Kerrigan and the small group who labored to create the demonstration is that state backing will soon enable governments in Dublin and Belfast to develop a cross-border Greenway for cyclists and walkers linking Sligo, Collooney, Ballintogher, Dromahair, Manorhamilton, Glenfarne, Blacklion, Belcoo and Enniskillen.

    This Greenway will invite domestic and foreign tourists to savour the scenic and cultural joys of Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh. The demonstration stretch, bordered by trees and hedges protecting a SAC, has convinced British, Irish and EU dispensing inter-regional and peace funding to act. Monies have been voted and statutory consultations are taking place before work commences.

    Local Campaigns

    North Leitrim’s potential is thwarted by bureaucratic and material blockages. Decisions made and policies pursued by officialdom and companies have aroused suspicion and dismay.

    Protest groups have responded to some unwelcome phenomena. Take the decision to allow private companies to prospect for gold on Leitrim hills and along river concourses.

    Treasure Leitrim holds area meetings, distributes information brochures with maps and warns of what gold mining has done in other countries. Love Leitrim is an active anti-fracking campaign group.

    Another concern is about the visual and health impact of hillside electricity generation clusters.  Some windmillification has occurred, often by stealth, taking residents by surprise. Windmills emit a ‘white noise’ that campaigners say badly affects hearing and sleeping patterns.

    Yet another concern is about the tree planting policies of Coillte and its links with foreign investors. The curse of sitka spruce tree planting and short-term harvesting, leading to soil acidification, is decried.

    Ecological activists are happy that Coillte is steadily laying out forest trails for public recreation access in many localities, but say that indigenous tree species such as hazel, sycamore, alder, Scots pine, elm and so on, are under-appreciated. There is anger and distrust; government spokespersons and Coillte personnel argue with campaigning critics.

    The Organic Centre, Rossinver. Image: Morgan Bolger

    Organic Centre

    Individuals from the UK and Leinster who settled in North Leitrim (and many other counties of course) from the 1970s onwards went on to establish the Organic Centre at Rossinver, adjacent to Lough Melvin and the border with Fermanagh.

    The Organic Centre is on ordinary land with outside and enclosed spaces – polytunnels and a catering and classroom building featuring a live grass all-weather roof.

    It is purposely family friendly with play corners for children. Despite the practical achievements of the Organic Centre and the organic farming of UK and continental settlers throughout the county, attempts by Green Party candidates to win votes in local and general elections have been in vain.

    Farmers are set in their ways and suspicious of Green Party influence. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, the two largest parties historically, and increasingly Sinn Fein attract most support, while a few strong independents win Council seats.

    What does Leitrim need? People need to branch out into new farming methods and recommence growing fruit and vegetables (as in the old days) while continuing to reduce livestock numbers and thereby reduce emissions.

    People need to see that similar challenges also face adjoining counties – West Cavan, Roscommon, Mayo and Donegal for example.

    In his pioneering work, Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered (1973) the eco-economist E. F. Schumacher developed the slogan Think Global and Act Local. For Leitrim today it might be adapted to Think Regional and Act Local.

    Slogans are catchy but are no substitute for reversal of unwanted policies. Parochial thinking is prevalent among elected representatives. Many promise to drain the flood rivers, to fix the roads or to save the rural post offices. Tá said ag snamh in agaidh easa with some promises. Vain promises should never be made and only keep the glass half empty.

    Feature Image: Morgan Bolger

  • A Golden Shower

    I would imagine I am no different to many people in that I suffer from a degree of anxiety. Prior to 2019, this usually manifested in a mild degree of agoraphobia. I could manage a packed train or a bus whenever necessary, but concerts, bustling streets, or shopping malls were always places to be avoided.

    In recent years I have found that my tendency to avoid crowds, has become a more acute need, extending to the company of people whom I don’t know very well. On a ‘one to one’ basis I don’t mind engaging – my misanthropic default is often proven wrong – as I encounter people whose ideas emanate from outside the RTÉ news bubble.

    As such, attending for my car’s NCT test last week was not an impossible task, but something I was not looking forward to.

    Leitrim Life

    I moved from Dublin to county Leitrim some months ago, and as a consequence my agoraphobia is almost entirely under wraps. There are very few people where I live, down a little laneway off a quiet road, just outside the small town of Ballinamore, in the shadow of the Iron Mountains.

    Leitrim is relatively unmolested by the excesses of modernity. The population of the county would only half fill Croke Park. Forestry, fracking, semi-abandoned villages with neglected vernacular architecture, garbage in the hedgerows and ugly one-off houses, are among the few assaults a sensitive soul must endure.

    I am very fortunate to live across the road from an entire family of agoraphobics; an IRA veteran and his wife and family. They home-school their kids and similarly hide from the world; wary of its narrow materialistic ideals, the ongoing romance with consumption and superfluous technology.

    The two eldest sons of this family spend their days tinkering about with old cars: painting, sanding, welding bits of metal and fixing engines. Unemployed but gainfully so. Like me, they hide from a world they are somewhat apprehensive and mistrustful of.

    The evenings in my garden are quiet enough to hear an owl hoot in the twilight. The old Gods still reside here. Sometimes I join my neighbours across the lane for a smoke and a cup of tea, free of judgements. I gaze in wonder at the mechanical heaps of rust and rot they are about to resuscitate.

    The ‘lads’ did a service on my Yaris to get her ready for the NCT, changing the oil and brake pads. My wife hoovered it out, and I was ordered to give it a power-wash and click the rear seatbelts in place, as they are supposed to be visible – all in preparation for the big day.

    Since resigning my Dublin medical practice in protest at the mad Covid Policies, and as a means of avoiding injecting children with the stuff that was called a ‘vaccine’, I have had a lot more time to myself.

    Time to devote to bees, a polytunnel, NCT’s and other hitherto trivial things. Indeed, my wife was most concerned that the car should pass, as our son needs to use it for his driving test next month.

    Coiled Again…

    The test centre in Carrick-on-Shannon is about a forty minute drive from our cottage. As you have probably guessed, despite the attention of the two lads and all the hoovering and power-washing, the car failed. A front coil-spring wasn’t up to scratch, and one brake bulb was brighter than the other.

    I wasn’t surprised given the car is ten years old. When I told the lads the news they laughed and told me to get the parts and they would address the ‘problems.’ This I did, and after finishing the work they showed me the old coil-spring. Apparently (they informed me) a coil spring is one of the suspension springs for the car.

    They put the the old one before me and said that it was perfect, save for a bit of rust at the tip of one end. They insisted that this would cause no problem to the car, saying that the spring was tested under the heading of ‘suspension’; that it passed the physical test and that this was printed on the fault sheet that had been returned to me.

    I then asked: “if it passed the actual test of its integrity and function, how did it fail the test?”  They informed me that the chap who was looking underneath the car, saw rust on the spring and that it was a ‘visual failure’.

    The lads aren’t highly educated by any means, so what would they know? They insist that for the most part the NCT is just “a multi-million money making racket”, an enormous source of revenue for a few people, and a way for government and car dealers to get perfectly decent cars off the road and replaced by new ones.

    Buying new cars is, of course, really good for the environment, particularly if they have big lithium batteries. Across Dublin suburbia, dizzying heights of environmental virtue can be scaled at the bottle bank if one can pull up in a battery powered car.

    Nonetheless, I find it hard to get too worked up about the nefarious powers behind the NCT network. The ideals of capitalism are pretty much universal at this stage. I was happy enough that the bulb and spring had been replaced and the car was ready for her retest. I had already devoted an afternoon to the first one.

    The following week I returned for the re-test at my scheduled time of 4.30pm. The little waiting room was packed. The tests were running behind time. They didn’t get to my car until well after 5pm. I had plenty of time to listen to the people around me come and go, sharing their stories of success and failure.

    Wayward Bus

    Some years ago I read The Wayward Bus, a little known work by John Steinbeck. It’s one of my favourite stories, concerning a group of people travelling on a bus, all from different social and cultural backgrounds.

    The bus breaks down on a lonely road, and when it does the barriers that normally separate people also break down.

    As a consequence of either boredom or necessity, when these barriers come down we may be compelled to get to know one another. I suspect that most people have had the subliminal experience of finding themselves stuck somewhere in the company of strangers, united by unforeseen circumstance.

    The experience was also recently masterfully explored and brought to a beautiful conclusion in the film ‘Triangle of Sadness’. In that passengers and crew of a luxury yacht find themselves stranded on a beach and are compelled to get to know each other after the boat sinks.

    Stripped of the relevance of their wealth and station, all must rely on actual abilities to survive. It’s a wonderful film with some great twists. Perhaps when the ship of humanity flounders, if we have time, we might pause and get to know each other a little better?

    The Moment of Truth

    As we sat in the waiting room of the NCT office I dealt with my agoraphobia by going outside for a smoke, at the point when people were getting to know each other, and social interaction seemed imminent.

    There was no public toilet in the centre and no coffee machine, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was cold outside and a cigarette doesn’t last as long as an NCT test.

    There were about ten of us seated in the plastic chairs around the wall of the waiting room. Occasionally the NCT man would magically appear at the empty hatch and call out a name for one of us. The chit-chat and various horror stories associated with tests and re-tests had brought us together, to the point where success or failure of one’s test became a shared experience.

    Soon, a round of applause was being awarded to each successful testee (no pun intended). Commiserations and a few empathetic sighs were offered to the failures.

    At last my name was called and I went to the Perspex hatch to receive the news. The man taped on his computer, and I caught a glimpse of the green and yellow of a new NCT cert emerge from the printer. The few who remained in the waiting room were anxious to know if I was deserving of applause or commiserations.

    Not wishing to be a sour-hole, I turned to the row of seats and gave my comrades two-thumbs up, informing all that I had joined the ranks of the victorious. A round of applause was tendered, and a middle-aged lady seated with her daughter offered me a handshake – which seemed a little over the top!

    Her daughter should have been heartily confused but seemed rather amused, the rules that applied to strangers were out the window.

    Small Print

    As I took the certificate, however, I noticed that the date on the new cert was only valid until May 2023. So, I had passed the test, but my car was deemed roadworthy for less than four months, at which time it would have to be retested. I felt certain this was a mistake, and brought it to the attention of the attendant.

    “This cert is only valid for four months,” I said. “I thought the test would be valid for at least a year?”

    He took the forms back from me and looked them over. “Your last test is out of date for over six months,” he replied, by way of explanation.

    By then I was a bit irked, having paid for a test, and then having paid for a re-test, and now being expected to test the car again in four months’ time.

    There was a three month wait for my first test, so, effectively, I would have to book the car in next week in order to be on time for the next test!

    Despite being conscious of the fact that he was only the messenger, I still wished to shoot him (metaphorically speaking of course).

    I replied: “but you are not testing the forms, you are testing the car, and the car has passed the test.”

    Unfortunately, the starter motor was jammed, the spark plug failed to ignite and the attendant hadn’t a clue what I was banging on about. He smiled and then disappeared from behind the screen like the cat from Alice in Wonderland.

    Flashbacks..

    My questioning and dissatisfaction did not go unnoticed by the small crowd in the waiting room. I looked about their faces as I departed with my Pyrrhic ‘victory’ in hand. One or two of the faces appeared sympathetic to my plight, others seemed mildly indignant that despite having passed the test, I still seemed unhappy – making a fuss and potentially causing a delay.

    I felt the breath quicken in my chest. It was as though, for a moment I had been plunged back into the near forgotten Covid days of ‘put up and shut up’, because we are ‘all in this together’.

    As I departed a large poster on the pane of the waiting room door said ‘goodbye.’  The poster was covered with smiley emojis encouraging people to buy an NCT disc-pocket that sticks in the window and holds ones new cert. ‘Hooray! I passed my NCT’.  I wonder do people actually buy these gimmicks on top of paying for their test?

    The poster reminded me of the smiley buttons that the HSE were dispensing to the vaccinated during Covid. I also recalled the free iodine tablets that were dispensed by the Government when they worried about the Sellafield nuclear reactor exploding, and that then reminded me of the Millennium Candle that came in the post at the turn of the century.

    I’m not sure how or why I should feel that these little tokens are related in some indistinct manner – all buttons and smiley faces to stick in the window or upon one’s chest. I recalled where I had wanted to stick the candle when it arrived in the post.

    The phrase ‘all in this together’ still makes me nauseous. As an old farmer in Rush where I once had my surgery used to say: “Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.”

    Just Political Deserts

    I suspect that for many people it’s always raining in Ireland, a golden shower that moves from Leinster House, and then on to Mizen Head and Malin Head, each day of the year. Yet I am perhaps cynical enough to believe that we get our just political deserts.

    One need only watch the recent rebranding of Bertie Ahern as the population is groomed into accepting him being provided with an armchair in the Áras. Or that recent RTÉ documentary that had Sean Quinn weeping, and staring wistfully out upon the lakes of Cavan, from the third story of his palace, like Ozymandias King of Kings.

    One of the impossibilities of democracy – perhaps its greatest limitation – is a tendency to elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear. Nowadays our cast of chosen doctors – like the bishops of old – tell us what we want to hear, and give us the pills we have been groomed to demand.  Should they venture outside of this brief and tell us what we need to hear, the ice generally thins beneath their feet.

    Perhaps the greatest evil in the world is in the realms of paedophilia, and when this was exposed within the Church, it ended many people’s belief in and respect for Catholicism.

    There is of course a sinister underbelly to our scandals, and that is the strangely complicit nature of “we the people”, whether it’s in the pew, or in the waiting room at the NCT centre.

    I recall, as I made my confirmation at the National School in Swords County Dublin, how my classmates and I innocently queued down the church aisle to partake in the ritual honour of kneeling and kissing the Bishop’s ring.

    We did it because we were sent up to do it by our parents. I also remember answering proudly in the affirmative when my grandmother asked me if I had I kissed the ring.

    I was also an alter boy for a time, a role that was foisted on me by my grandmother, with the full and enthusiastic backing of my parents. Had I perhaps returned home and informed them that something ‘bad’ had happened, that I had been ‘interfered’ with, I probably would have been given a clip on the ear, or simply told to shut up.

    Most kids who were victims of abuse, said nothing to their parents, and the reasons for this are rarely ever spoken about in Ireland. You can perhaps find traces of this in the NCT centre, or see it on the face of a teenager who is sent home from school because he has had his ear pierced.

    My parents were not bad parents, they were just typical of their time. My point here is that in Ireland we like to think that paedophilia within the Church was entirely the fault of the Church and the priests. I tend to disagree. Parents, the state and society at large were as much a part of the problem, perhaps the bigger part. ‘We the people’ were invested in the scandal as much as the perpetrators. It seems that all too often we are ‘all in this together’.

    Facing Up

    Ireland will never be capable of really face up to the abuse scandals because we will never accept the blame for our own part. We will never question our gullibility, but our children might, as they are less likely to suffer from our co-dependence upon RTÉ.

    In all likelihood, we will never explain the scandal of Covid policies, the waste and the suicides, because we the people were so invested in the narrative; a tsunami of indignant virtue in the midst of a state sanctioned pogrom in the nursing home sector.

    What has this to do with my NCT? Perhaps nothing. But the lads were right, it is indeed just a racket for making money and taking perfectly decent cars off the road – another racket that we are all complicit in.

    It’s no different to the Covid racket where billions in potential hospitals, schools and footpaths, were foolishly handed over to Big Pharma and men in yachts. In Ireland being ‘all in this together’ comes with an unspoken historical warning : you are either with us or against us.

    Against us, and you run the gauntlet of vilification or exclusion, at best being depicted as a weirdo, at worst a bad apple. If you are with us, ‘there is one for everyone in the audience’, and any ‘minor inconveniences’ one might be compelled to endure becomes just another shower of golden rain.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Finding Your Voice After Trauma

    Have you ever experienced that emptiness, that deep silence, that infinite ignorance following trauma? Well, I have. And let me tell you, it doesn’t always happen right away. Sometimes, you have to actually look past the first few weeks or months to feel it. You’ll eventually see it at some point, with support or not. You’ll find yourself entirely alone, in that nothingness where everyone else – maybe even you – thinks that enough time has passed.

    Time as an Almighty Healer?

    Like a lot of people, I used to picture time as the ultimate solution. Because that’s what we’re told since we’re little, isn’t it? “Time heals all wounds,” they say. You have obviously heard that phrase before, whether from your family, a friend, a TV show, or a book you once read.

    Now, I’m not a scientist, but I learned how wrong that expression is.

    It would be great, of course, to have one miraculous way to fix things, to simply go through life, ignoring all the issues you may have, because time will gladly deal with them for you. Except it doesn’t work that way.

    Seeing time as a cure is one of those made-up illusions we keep telling ourselves in order to feel better. It’s reassuring to think that if you’re still suffering, it’s not because of you or anyone else, but because you didn’t give yourself enough time.

    Don’t get me wrong, time does help. It sure makes you stop crying, but it won’t heal you. Letting time pass means going into a routine. Eventually you recognise the pain, the sorrow, the sadness. You know what it feels like, and you settle into it.

    Not long ago, I questioned a lot how humans respond to trauma and how we handle it, not just individually, but as a society. Well, usually, we hold it locked inside. Again, believing that time will sooner or later do its thing. I’m sure, if you’ve endured trauma, and talked about it, you’ve heard people say: “I’m here for you, but you just need a bit of time, really.”

    Like you, probably, I once thought it couldn’t hurt to speak those things. But recently, I experienced first-hand how painful it actually was.

    Time is personal. Some might need weeks, other months or years. It depends on so many factors: past trauma, education, environment, support… So truly, it’s “your time”. Now, let’s say, you need three years. Yet for a friend of yours, three months might sound enough. What happens then? What happen if you don’t improve in those three months? You gave yourself time, or at least, you suppose you did, and everyone around you assumed you did too. But still, you don’t seem okay. Well, guess what, you start feeling guilty about it. Like it’s your own fault if you don’t get better.

    It’s deeply anchored in society. Take therapy, for example. Some people, governments even, actually think that you only need a few sessions to deal with an issue, to “move on”. As if trauma only takes ten weeks to what, disappear?

    Now you see why I believe perceiving time as a healer is dangerous? Because once you start, you put a quantifiable value on trauma. Which also means that, eventually, everyone stop talking about it. For them, it’s in the past. Yet for you, it’s still very much a part of your life. So you find yourself alone, not being able to confide in anyone, feeling guilty for seeking support. Even the loved ones who first supported you think it’s all gone now, assuming that, with time, scars fade, as if they never happened.

    Yet here they are, inked. And to ignore them, worse, to declare they ceased to exist is not only a denial of reality, it’s indicating that a victim of trauma – whatever the trauma is – doesn’t have a reason to be one anymore. As they say: “It’s water under the bridge.”

    And so, it’s creating an excuse for people to stop listening, a true motive to silence the voices.

    Silencing the Voices

    You might think I’m cynical. However, by creating an illusion, you end up denying what life is like, sealing society in the unspoken and taboos. You’re not questioning the world’s problems, you’re not looking into the real issues; you’re merely waiting for things to wash away – silencing the voices in the process.

    By making the victims guilty about the depth of their recovery, you’re locking them in this inner pain, in the long aftermath that lasts only for them, for us. People get lost in that silence, in that emptiness where no one dares to speak up for fear of moving the knife again, of showing once more that “time has not yet healed all wounds”.

    Feeling as angry as I am? Well, don’t worry. It’s a good thing.

    Anger Led to Revolutions

    Want to learn something? Anger makes the changes. So don’t be afraid to awake her. Rise and shout until you turn the earth upside down. Scream at those who refuse to face reality, to see pain for what it actually is.

    Don’t look back. Don’t search your voice in some past you left behind. For she’s still here, within you. She’s in your rage, your sadness, your innocence, your beliefs, your joy, your sorrow, your despair, your fear, your bravery; she’s in all those emotions and those memories you locked yourself in when you noticed no one was listening. But make them listen; keep talking.

    For it’s not their voices that society needs to hear, but ours.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Kevin Higgins: 1967-2023

    According to the recently deceased Kevin Higgins: ‘Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.’

    Responding to his assessment by email (sadly, I never met Kevin in person despite publishing over twenty of his poems) I wondered whether the three archetypes he had identified could be located in the Romantic canon as the suppressed Percy Bysshe Shelley, the rather banal John Keats and the decorative Poet Laureate William Wordsworth.

    He replied from his death bed on Tuesday, January 3rd:

    I wouldn’t count Keats among the banal. I would more be thinking of the older academicised poet of the post WWII world, who is mostly locked into an Irish Times/Guardian/NY Times world view whereby the only permitted historical variables are their own divorces and their parents’ deaths. Keats wasn’t that. Though you have categorised Shelley and Wordsworth right in that regard.

    Note to self: read more of John Keats.

    Paul Muldoon

    Kevin’s final poem for Cassandra Voices ‘Congratulations’ responded to what he regarded as ‘a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way’ by Paul Muldoon in the Irish Times. As he saw it, for establishment poets:

    Life will be mostly festivals
    of enforced grinning,
    during which you’ll pass the hours
    counting each others’ teeth.

    If not actively suppressed, Kevin Higgins was certainly blacklisted by the so-called paper of record for having the temerity to question that newspaper’s coverage of the War in Ukraine. He would be amused to find the appreciation he had anticipated, and another from the President himself, Michael D. Higgins, who was also not spared his satire.

    In the poem ‘Presidential’ he chided:

    I had no option but to vote for
    that tax on women’s shoes
    but greatly admired the fight you put up against it;
    have kept all the press cuttings,
    especially those that took care not to mention me.

    Another barbed poem, which he confided was written in the voice of Michael D. Higgins (as he imagined it), ‘having known him for forty years’ was Memorial to Myself:

    I was not bought and sold at the market stall
    where you can get (third hand)
    Fianna Fail senators cheaper
    than Mayo flags two weeks after
    an All Ireland defeat.

    Kevin Higgins was a poet unusually animated by political events. Invariably, he took the side of the oppressed, whether desperate migrants, or Travellers on the fringe of Irish society.

    Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat

    His verse took aim at those poets who engaged with what he considered the commonplace and banal. The first poem he ever published with Cassandra Voices Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat offers a caricature of a contemporary Irish poet:

    I only read novels
    which interrogate the relationship
    between gout and Islamist terrorism,
    translated from the obligatory French;
    and poets whose words make me sink
    more comfortably into
    my brown swivel chair.

    More of this contempt flowed from ‘The Most Risk-Taking Poet In Ireland’:

    Under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
    I once took one more Paracetamol
    than I should have.

    Indeed, he recently contemplated starting a new Irish Literary Awards in ‘When I’m Allowed Leave The Cancer Ward’:

    Categories will include: least authentic
    poetry collection, most intellectually empty
    novel, most cowardly book review,
    publisher who made the biggest
    eeijt of themselves this year

    And in ‘Formation of a Young Irish Intellectual’ he expressed deep concern about what he considered a homogeneity of thinking around a damaging consensus reigning ascendant in Irish universities:

    We have a library of pre-existing think pieces
    from which you can choose your opinions,
    which we’d like you to massage
    so they seem different at first
    but end up being exactly the same as the rest of us.

    Unsurprisingly perhaps, he expressed indifference for ‘grunts of approval / from fully clothed minor male poets’ in ‘My Approach to Literary Networking‘.

    The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann

    Kevin unmercifully pilloried what he perceived as latent fascistic tendencies in Ireland directed against the forces of radicalism he identified with. As he put it in ‘The Continuing Story of Óglaigh na hÉireann’:

    All around the snot-nosed parishes of Ireland
    small people of both genders, and neither,
    are flapping open
    copies of The Sunday O’Duffy
    getting worried
    about the continued existence
    of the Citizen Army, Fenian Brotherhood,
    Official IRA.

    It’s fair to say Kevin Higgins despised advocates of neoliberal policy in Ireland. In ‘The Ballad of Lucy Kryton’ he described her fiscal policy as  ‘dampness moving / down other people’s walls.’

    ‘Homage to Henry Kissinger‘

    Further afield, Kevin reserved particular scorn for realpolitik pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger, who as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State presided over a particular brutal phase of US foreign policy under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Kevin seemed to have little faith in karma catching up with Kissinger:

    Someone dies of politically necessary starvation
    but that someone is never Henry Kissinger
    A bomb is dropped on someone whose name you’ll never have to pronounce
    because it’s not Henry Kissinger

    He also railed against ‘the adults in the room’ of this neoliberal era, depicting an anti-democratic slide in ‘After Recent Unfortunate Results’:

    So when all’s said and counted,
    people who shouldn’t matter
    can go back to not mattering.

    The Joke

    Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of Donald Trump offered ample opportunities for his satire:

    A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit
    donated by a casino owner who knows people
    with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top
    because it was the only available metaphor for hair
    was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia
    against an old coat with holes in it.

    Nevertheless, he viewed the phenomenon of Trump as symptomatic of a sick American society, rather than the causative agent necessarily – the ‘old coat’ – which he saw as embedded in power.

    Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste
    made the raging boil on the nation’s privates
    way too obvious, and hoped by throwing
    the old coat over it they could again
    forget it was there.

    Kevin was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and actually expelled from the UK Labour Party following satirical poems about Blair and the Labour right. In ‘Tribute Acts’ he wrote

    Each witch hunt is a tribute act to the last.
    There is always a committee of three.
    The gravity in the room is such
    they struggle to manoeuvre
    the enormity of their serious
    faces in the door.

    He also expressed contempt for polite, ineffectual demonstrations in ‘Note From The Organisers’:

    our gathering will resemble
    less a revolution
    than a church group
    on its way somewhere
    to pray for a cure
    for rheumatism,
    or even better,
    no cure;

    Time and again he expressed a serious worry about the neoliberal hegemony in comedic terms. Thus in ‘Our Posh Liberal Friends‘ he wrote:

    This Future has a face that one day
    might raise the corporate tax rate
    by zero point five percent,
    and is a little too insistent
    that poor people be allowed live,
    give or take, as long as the rest of us.

    And mocked a neoliberal tolerance of diversity that provided cover for any manner of outrage, as in ‘Liberals and Death’:

    … you’re the first village
    no-one’s ever heard of
    successfully abolished
    from thirty thousand feet
    by a transgender person
    pressing a button;

    ‘The Happy Song of Us’

    No doubt the period of the lockdowns was tough for someone in ill-health who had previously attempted to bring poetry to the people with live events and workshops. While he appears to have been generally supportive of lockdown measures, we do find worries expressed around the arrival of a techno-dystopia in ‘The Happy Song of Us’.

    Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
    Illegal for them to lick it.
    Fine to bake granny
    a gleaming fruit cake,
    as long as you only email her
    a high resolution photo of it.

    Kevin Higgins was an uncompromising poet. His verse vented a deep disenchantment with the economic structures of our time. He fought against the spiraling inequality and outright cruelty he saw in the contemporary world, sparing no one he believed was collaborating with this system. Not even Michael D..

    He inveighed against the well made poem that puts on a dicky bow, and ‘which walks to the top of the hill, / and has what it calls an epiphany.’

    The well made poem believes
    nuclear weapons are necessary
    to keep poems like it safe
    from all the rough language
    gathered ungovernable at the border
    forever threatening to invade it.

    Above all perhaps, he scorned the hypocrisy of people who only speak out only when it is safe to do so, as in ‘Safe To Say’:

    Sometime the century after next.
    I’ll be against giving the children of Bethlehem
    something from Lockheed Martin
    to occupy themselves with for Christmas.
    Like I was against rhino-whipping the blacks
    into line in Port Elizabeth, Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg
    after it stopped happening.
    But, for now, see no alternative.

    Thanks for your support Kevin! We’ll do our best to keep going.

  • Welcome to the Jungle

    Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself famous has there been such an example of world-wide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair.
    The New York Evening World    , 1906.

    Perhaps others, better acquainted with the genre, may argue to the contrary, but Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is surely a contender as the Great American Novel. Though far from an ideological bedfellow, Winston Churchill nonetheless wrote admiringly that Sinclair had marshalled his forces like the general of an army on the attack.[i]

    That the work is not better known today is probably on account of the butcher’s blade it takes to the American Dream, and the presentation of an alternative vision for humanity. Thus, Socialism is described as ‘the new religion of humanity – or you might say it was the fulfilment of the old religion, since it implied but the literal application of all the teachings of Christ (p.346)’.

    The Jungle is generally credited with the swift passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in June 1906 – eventually leading to the creation of the FDA – after laying bare to the American public the unsanitary practices of the Beef Trust in Chicago’s Packingtown.

    Notably, however, action was only taken when the health of the US population at large seemed at stake. Sinclair claimed the “embalmed beef” scandal ‘killed several times as many soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards(p.105)’ in the war of 1898.

    The Act did not, however, address the frightful working conditions of mainly immigrant workers in the meat packing industry; let alone the millions of animals subjected to industrial slaughter. Moreover, in certain respects, the industrial food system is now more disturbing than ever, while the FDA has long been subject to Regulatory Capture.

    At least we have The Jungle to remind us of ongoing fraudulent misrepresentations:

    The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences of the wayside, the lamp-posts and telegraph-poles, were pasted with lies. The great corporation which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country – from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie(p.82).

    A Time of Hope

    The opening chapter introduces an unlikely hero, Jurgis Rudkus – ‘he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands (p.4)’ who is ‘the sort of man the bosses like to get hold of(p.23)’ – a recent Lithuanian immigrant to ‘Packingtown’, Chicago, along with an extended family group, who are being ground down by unrelenting work and squalid conditions.

    In spite of abject poverty the family nonetheless insists on a proper occasion for Jurgis’s wedding to his beloved Ona: ‘these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls – they cannot give up the veselija(p.15).’

    At that point, still imbued with optimism, Jurgis’s response to any of the multiple challenges he confronts is to shrug his broad shoulders and say he will just have to work harder. It makes him an early model for Boxer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His love for Ona – recalling in certain respects Odysseus’s journey towards Penelope – means he resists the lure of the saloons, which most workers frequent.

    But in a pedagogic aside – after the family are confronted with a higher than expected bill for the wedding – Sinclair intimates that the brutal nature of the work in Packingtown erodes moral as well as physical beings: ‘for men who have to crack the heads of an animal all day seem to get into the habit, and to practice it on their friends, and even on their families.(p.20)’

    At the time about ten thousand head of cattle and as many hogs and half as many sheep were disposed of every day, amounting to eight to ten million live creatures turned into food every year.

    It was ‘the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place’, employing thirty thousand men, supporting directly two hundred and fifty thousand people in it neighbourhood, and indirectly half million, and ‘furnished the food for no less than thirty million people(p.45)’ – or at least whatever could be passed off as such.

    Speeding up the Gang

    In what is a distressing account, the reader is introduced to a succession of despicable practices that drain away human life by degrees, while imperilling consumer health. One such is “speeding up the gang”, where a foremen alternates picked men to set up a hectic pace ‘and if any man could not keep up with the pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try(p.63)’.

    As he works, Jurgis finds numerous examples of shoddy corruption. Thus, a good many so-called “slunk” calves turned up every day:

    Any man who knows anything about butchering knows that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is not fit for food … if they had chosen, it would have been an easy matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food.

    This inconvenience would lead to a loss of revenue however, thus:

    whoever noticed it would tell the boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of the cow would be cleaned out(p.68).

    There were also “Downers”: cattle that are injured or die on the long journey to slaughter. These too are surreptitiously placed alongside healthier specimens.

    Shockingly, the meat of tubercular cattle is also permitted to enter the food chain, in return for ‘two thousand dollars a week hush money.(p.104)’ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the book triggered a political scandal.

    Property Swindle

    On arrival in Chicago the family find a dilapidated boarding house to reside, but strive to purchase a property in fulfilment of their American Dream – assuming this will be a saving in the long run for a working family.

    Jurgis chances on an advertisement featuring a brilliantly painted house, under which there is a picture of a husband and wife in warm embrace. Underneath is written – helpfully in Lithuanian – “Why pay rent?” “Why not out own your own home.(p.51)”

    When they view the house, however, it is not ‘as it was shown in the pictures(p.52)’ –albeit it has been freshly painted. Despite the agent’s exhortations that the sale must be closed without delay, or they risk losing the opportunity, they follow their gut instinct and hold off from purchasing. They are eventually duped into signing on the dotted line by a dodgy lawyer who assures them it is a perfectly regular deed.

    So, they part with their savings, leaving them on the hook for a monthly repayment that stretches them to the limits of endurance.

    As if this isn’t hard enough – especially in return for what they soon discover is a house that is barely fit for human habitation – a few months later they are presented with an annual insurance bill that threatens to starve them into submission.

    Predictably, after Jurgis gets into trouble with the law and cannot work, the family loses the home – and their hard-earned savings – and are forced to return to the boarding house from whence they came, where further trials await.

    Ironically, a century later millions of Americans, and others, had a similar experience of losing their homes, and savings, in the Financial Crash, in large part due to banks offering easy credit.

    Cartoon from Puck, August 9, 1899 by J. S. Pughe. Angry Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters and demands, “Why should I let these freaks cast whole ballots when they are only half Americans?”

    Shenanigans

    The novel explores the ethnic composition of Packingtown’s workers. Waves of cheap foreign labour have fed an industry which, Sinclair argues, is ‘every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave-drivers(p.117).’ Based on this account, it would be hard to disagree.

    First came the Germans, and afterwards the Irish, who Sinclair generally casts as profiteers and political fixers. After that came Bohemians, followed by Poles, then Lithuanians, who were then giving way to Slovaks.

    Having ascended a grease-laden pole, many of the Irish in the novel seem determined to keep others from scaling the heights. Sinclair’s is perhaps demonstrating that success in Packingtown depends on a willingness to embrace corruption and exploitation; at the behest of the Beef Trust itself, ‘a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land(p.346).’

    Some are damaged souls, however, such as Tommy Finnegan, ‘a little Irishman with big staring eyes and a wild aspect’, who expounds on ‘The method of operation of the higher intelligence’. Finnegan informs Jurgis that ‘shperrits … may be operatin’ upon ye(p.97-98)’

    Far more sinister is the ruler of the district, Mike Scully who, ‘held and important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket.’ As a result, ‘He was an enormously rich man(p.101)’.

    Eventually we learn:

    It was Scully who was to blame for the unpaved street in which Jurgis’s child had been drowned; it was Scully who had put into office the magistrate who had first sent Jurgis to jail; it was Scully who was principal stockholder in the company which had sold him his ramshackle tenement, and then robbed him of it(p.287).

    Yet when we do finally encounter Scully he is ‘a little dried up Irishman, whose hands shook’; who is ‘but a tool and puppet of the packers(p.288).

    Jurgis’s beloved Ona is also raped and beaten by Connor ‘a big, red-faced Irishman, coarse featured, and smelling of liquor(p.167).’ In revenge, Jurgis violently assaults him, landing him a spell behind bars.

    This brings him before another Irish-American, ‘the notorious Justice Callahan’:

    “Pat” Callahan – “Growler” Pat, as he had been known before he ascended to the bench – had begun life as a butcher-boy and a bruiser of local reputation; he had gone into politics almost as soon as he had learned to talk, and he held two offices at once before he was enough to vote.

    Unfortunately for Jurgis, Callahan had developed a ‘strong conservatism’ and ‘contempt for foreigners(p.173).’

    Yet another Irishman called “Buck” Halloran, ‘was a political worker and on the inside of things(p.281)’. He employs Jurgis to enlist fictional voters for forthcoming elections in a sham democracy.

    At last, we meet one Irishman, working in an enterprise owned and managed by a socialist who pays a decent wage and sets reasonable hours. He explains to Jurgis ‘the geography of America, and its history, its constitution and its laws; also he gave him an idea of the business system of the country.’ Sinclair seems to be showing that in circumstances where labour is not alienated, even an Irishman is capable of decency and culture.

    How were immigrants persuaded to work in such appalling conditions? Sinclair tells us that ‘old man Durham’ (the proprietor of the Beef Trust):

    was responsible for these immigrations; he had sown that would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of of work and high wages at the stockyards(p.72).

    The grotesque lie places naïve workers such as Jurgis at the mercy of a system that degrades its victims by degrees. Sadly, it was not just adults who are engaged. Thus, even the young children in Jurgis’s family group are obliged to work – and die – joining the million and three-quarter of children who were at the time similarly compelled.

    Sing Sing prison (New York). Date unknown.

    Off the Rails

    While incarcerated Jurgis encounters men for whom, ‘love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation.’ He shares a cell, and befriends Jack Duane, a likeable, though ultimately callous, rogue, who reveals the possibilities of a life in crime. Jurgis avoids this temptation for he still has a wife and child to keep him on the straight and narrow.

    After being released from his first stretch, Jurgis is black-listed and thus unable to work. He then loses his beloved Ona to childbirth. From that point on – like so many others of his class – he numbs his pain with alcohol. He remains with the extended family group, nonetheless, on account of his baby son Ananas. But the tragedy is complete when the infant dies too – drowning in a puddle in an unpaved street.

    At that point, Jurgis is a lost soul, with his dreams of a new life in shreds: ‘So he went on, tearing up all the flowers from the garden of his soul, and setting his heel upon them(p.235).’

    He leaves Chicago in the spring as a hobo, working for farmers and foraging wild berries along the trail, which restores his health, but he cannot escape reminders of the old life:

    Ah, what agony was that, what despair, when the tomb of memory was rent open and the ghosts of his old life came forth to scourge him!(p.244)

    Thus, he returns to Chicago in the fall – like a moth to flame – where further obstacles and humiliations await. There he reconnects with Jack Duane, who introduces him to a life of crime. On their first outing they mug a man who, they learn afterwards, has suffered a concussion on the brain. This troubles the conscientious Jurgis, ‘but the other laughed cooly – it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it.’

    Duane assures Jurgis, “He was doing it to somebody as bad as he could, you can be sure of that(p.279).” Duane seems to assume that ‘behind every great fortune lies a great crime.’

    Jurgis’s moral descent is complete when he takes on a job as a foreman and then a scab worker during a general strike.

    Brothel “The Paris”, 2101 Armor Street, Chicago.

    The Only Way to Get Ahead

    Jurgis’s career as a thief and strike-breaker brings a measure of financial success, implying the only way to get ahead in Chicago is to debase oneself. By then, however, having lost all family connection – and lacking a belief system – he cannot develop a stable existence. Instead, he frequents the saloons and sprawling flesh pots.

    Earlier we learn of Chicago: ‘there was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl(p.116)’:

    Thousands of them came to Chicago answering advertisements for “servants” and “factory hands,” and found themselves trapped by fake employment agencies, and locked up in a bawdy-house(p.282).

    One of the saddest episodes, among many, is Jurgis’s reconnection with Marija Berczynskas, Ona’s stepsister. At the beginning of the novel, like Jurgis, Marija displays all the characteristics of a model worker, but by the end she has been forced into prostitution in order to feed the family, and is addicted to morphine.

    Prior to this Marija conducted a touching love affair with the fiddler Tomaszios, who previously spell bound the wedding party with his music. But Packingtown is no place for an artist – or romance. Marija tells Jurgis that Tomaszios has left her, having ‘got blood-poisoning and lost one finger(p.320)’ in a work place accident, meaning he cannot play the violin any longer.

    Marija has interesting insights into her fellow prostitutes:

    Most of the women here are pretty decent – you’d be surprised. I used to think they did it because they liked to; but fancy a woman selling herself to every kind of man that comes … and doing it because she likes it(p.327).

    Cartoon by Udo Keppler, first punlished in New York by ‘Puck’, 15 October 1913.

    Commercial Competition

    Towards the end of the novel, after a quasi-religious conversion to socialism, and securing a steady job with a socialist proprietor, Jurgis meets a number of talking head intellectuals in a kind of underworld sequence.

    Here he learns that the Beef Trust are just one part of the capitalist system:

    There are other trusts in the country just as illegal and extortionate as the Beef Trust: there is the Coal Trust, that freezes the poor in winter – there is the Steel Trust, that doubles the price of every nail in your shoes – there is the Oil Trust, that keep you from reading at night.

    This character asks rhetorically, ‘why do you suppose it is that the all the fury of the press and the government is directed against the Beef Trust?’

    He informs Jurgis: ‘the papers clamor for action, and the government goes on the war path’, then ‘poor common people watch and applaud the job’, but this is ‘really the grand climax of the century-long battle of commercial competition.(p.355)’

    The hysterical reaction of so many in the media to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter suggests that this age-old “battle of commercial competition” continues – as the billionaire class squabble over the spoils.

    Campaign poster from his 1912 presidential campaign featuring Eugene Debs.

    Much Abides

    The Socialist Party of American became a powerful political force around the turn of the last century – at least until it was beaten into submission. But already by mid-century, in response to the excesses of the Soviet Union, the socialist ideal had become to many in the English-speaking world ‘The God that Failed’. A hybrid social-market ‘New Deal’ emerged under FDR in the 1930s, but neoliberalism has reigned ascendent since at least the Reagan Presidency. In today’s muddled era of identity politics, activists often lack commitment to countering the structures that produce an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

    Today, US workers are afforded far greater protection compared to Sinclair’s day, and child labour has largely been eliminated. However, in ‘the most health-obsessed society, all is not well.’[ii] Sixty percent of adults suffer from a chronic condition, and over forty per cent have two or more of such conditions.[iii]

    Most Americans still live on the edge of financial ruin. A recent poll found 63% are living from paycheck to paycheck — including, remarkably, nearly half of six-figure earners, as the cost of living continues to rise.

    The stress caused by this precarious existence seems to lie behind ongoing substance abuse, including an Opioid Crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands, while enriching Big Pharma that preys on the country’s pathologies. Other self-destructive behaviours – such as over-eating – are normalised in a rigid two-party political system that leaves little room for dissent.

    Alarmingly, there is little sign of political change in the US, while many other countries appear to be embracing neoliberal norms. Since the 1970s inequality has spiralled, and most political radicalism seems more inclined towards self-reliance than cooperation, but as Gabor Maté points out, in what could be a commentary on The Jungle:

    If I see the world as a hostile place where only winners thrive, I may well become aggressive, selfish and grandiose to survive in such a milieu … beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building[iv].

    The Jungle characterises US society as being one where willingness to participate in a “gigantic lie” underpins success. This deceit goes on, as people continue to be persuaded to buy things they don’t need, while a successful boss still extracts as much as possible from workers. It means that even some of the best, like Jurgis Rudkus and Marija Berczynskas, are still being ground down – unless they too are prepared to display the required “aggressive, selfish and grandiose” qualities that success depends on.

    [i] Hugh J. Dawson, “Winston Churchill and Upton Sinclair: An Early Review of The Jungle,” ALR, 1991.

    [ii] Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, the Myth of Normal: Trauma Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, Random House, London, 2022, p.1.

    [iii] Christine Buttorff et al, Multiple Chronic Conditions in the United States, Santa Monica, CA RAND Corporation, 2017.

    [iv] Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté, 2022, p.31.

  • Open Mics or Open Micks?

    I immediately twitch with an almost intolerable discomfort when I hear the words freedom and equality. Alas, they have become quite meaningless.

    Let’s take freedom for starters. Where does such a notion come from? Freedom implies choice and yet we are offered so few, in this world or ours.

    For example, did you have a say in your birth? No, you didn’t. This singular event, without a doubt the most tumultuous and catastrophic in a whole litany of debacles you call your life – the one which possibly defines you the most – you have had absolutely no say in it.

    So, right from the beginning you were forced, without any choice, to take part in the whole abominable exercise called Life. And, when you think further about it, the choices did not grow from thereon in, they only diminished all the more.

    Your family, your country, your social background, your people’s history, again, you were not consulted in any of this. Nor in your sex, creed or language, might I add. All of these profoundly important features were thrust upon you.

    Look at your body? Listen to your heart beating. Who determines that? And your lungs. Are you in control of them? Is it not that whole horrendous mechanism that houses that thing you call a spirit? Isn’t your body but a vast cell entrapping you in its ghastly prison?

    Grammar of Being

    As a language teacher, again not by choice, I call it the Grammar of Being! For, as in language there is very little freedom – if none at all – until the day arrives when you have mastered the extremely complex mechanisms of any language.

    Anyone who has learned a foreign language will attest to how difficult this endeavour is; there are grammatical and lexical rules, as well as social rules, conventions and idioms – culture in a word – that you must also be aware of. There is Very little freedom until you have mastered all the systems.

    Freedom? Where is the freedom in any of this, I ask you? Will you choose the day that you die? Well yes, only if… Camus spoke of suicide as the ultimate act of freedom, and, on this, he was of course totally correct.

    And what about that other word: equality? I am reminded of the Spartan at Thermopylae who turned to his immediate neighbour, upon hearing him utter the word, and laughing at him pointed to the oncoming Persian army and said that one single Spartan was worthy of a thousand of ‘them.’

    Jumping forward…

    So, what does freedom mean here in twenty first century Ireland, the Republic of Ireland at least? That idea of a country we have.

    What does freedom mean to us here? When we think of freedom, for example, what do we see? Do we see a rainbow-coloured flag? Sometimes this appears to be all it represents.

    I work in a school, for example, and outside my classroom door (I teach foreign students who are obliged to learn English as a foreign language for their visas) there is a notice board which I instigated. Although originally it was to be a place for student messaging, there is now a lone flyer explaining the origins of the rainbow flag, which we see so prominently all over our towns and streets.

    Indeed, on Culture Night one inevitably sees a veritable sea of multi-coloured rainbow flags, which come from the government-backed Arts Council. Indeed, when you attend any Arts Council-funded event these days, you come to expect the usual plethora of rainbow colours everywhere you go.

    So, I hear you ask. What is the problem with this? Are you asking: “Is he one of them – a homophobe?”

    On the contrary, as a writer and artist, I have been profoundly influenced by gay-lesbian- trans and bisexual writers and artists since I was an adolescent: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, John Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Lee Miller, Mae West… the list just goes on and on.

    So, on this point, I can assure you, I am not against the LGBT community at all. What I am against, and profoundly so as an artist, is the notion of equality that the Arts Councils, and arts groups in general, would appear to be promoting. I am against this for an important reason that is often lost sight of.

    Open Mics

    A few days ago, I was on my way to catch a train when I bumped into an acquaintance. The man was familiar to me through certain public readings – open mics as they are called – as I sometimes had the occasion to join him at them.

    The open mics that we both attended at the time promoted very strongly the ideas that I am now fundamentally opposed to, so much so that I have now adopted an anti-open mic policy.

    This notion is that all writers and artists (just like all lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals – who decides who goes first?) are equal and so should have the same time frame allotted to them at a public reading (usually a mere four minutes).

    This means that a complete novice, who wouldn’t know a stanza from a portmanteau, is given the very same amount of respect as, say, a translator and poet who has had multiple books published and has been working very diligently on their art for over thirty years.

    A professional musician asked me the other day if I had been attending any open mics recently. In return I asked when was the last time that he had shared a stage with a bunch of amateur musicians for free?

    He suddenly smiled and about-tracked, finally realising what it was he had been asking me. And yet open mics are now all-pervading.

    Where once they were regarded as a rather harmless exercises promoting ideas of inclusivity, now they are the absolute norm. Yet they are only considered normal in the world poetry.

    Why is this? My friend, the musician, understood very well my situation. He knows me as a semi-professional writer and translator that is expected to share the stage with any newcomer at any number of so-called arts festivals.

    I attended one recently for which I was very generously compensated. It had been funded by the Arts Council, but when I looked at the website after the event, to see what kind of photographs had been taken etc., there were simply thousands of photos of so called ‘poets’, meaning the actual poets who had attended were lost in an absolute avalanche of amateurism.

    Beckett of Joyce

    My friend at the train station also asked me what I had been up to of late. I mentioned that I was going down to Cork to present a paper at a Beckett symposium, but that I would be deliberately present on James Joyce, just to annoy the Beckett aficionados.

    In response, my acquaintance looked at me with a kind triumph in his eyes – a look he could never have had twenty years ago – and declared that his opinion on James Joyce was just as valid as anyone else’s.

    He made this boast with such firm conviction that I assume he actually believed what he was saying. I remained mute.

    What could I say? After all, both of us knew he had never read Ulysses not to mention Finnegans Wake. As I watched my acquaintance shuffle on – with some bravado I might add – I couldn’t help, there but for the grace of God, go I!

    Featured Image: Marina Azzaro

  • Classic Paddies

    The music was the code. It was the transliteration of the style. It was not giving a bollocks in a thoroughly musical manner. It was fuck this and fuck that and frankly fuck you. A rockety life came with the territory. You didn’t have to be Irish. Their England had been influenced by that Ireland of the 50’s. Behan, Kavanagh, O’Brien. Roaring Boys all. Drunken, rackety, genius bores. And Shane could be as drunk and boring and rackety or he could write as beautifully as any of them.
    Bob Geldof, Waiting for Herb, 2004.

    Night Crossing

    As the ferry lurched out of Dublin port we reminisced on crossings of yore. In response to regretful talk about the withdrawal of the service out of Dun Laoghaire – which at least had a rail connection – Shane MacGowan recalled, with typical belligerence, “Dun Laoghaire was there before a fucking DART line,” before hissing reassuring laughter.

    He then spoke wistfully of his grandfather telling him about how ‘lower order’ passengers would have to share decks with the livestock on board. It seemed a very different world to a Stena Lounge bereft of passengers on this night crossing, but at least the wine was complimentary, and Tina didn’t mind a few messers on board.

    Indeed, the aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of the Pogues was a throwback to a bygone Ireland – and Irish – often scorned by ‘respectable’ people. In particular, those compelled by economic circumstances to take up jobs ‘across the water’.

    Shane MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, but spent his early youth living with maternal aunts and uncles in Puckane, Co. Tipperary. Formative teenage years were spent in 1970s London.

    For the emerging poet, rural Ireland – for all its faults – seemed a fairy realm, enlivened by song and alcoholic excess, compared to the industrial decay and entrenched class system of England at that time. Having dabbled in punk with The Nipple Erectors he returned to his musical roots, forming the Pogues (from the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning ‘kiss my arse’) in 1982.

    He previously described the ‘Irish look’ the band self-consciously adopted:

    The suits, black suits with white shirts which we wore, were Brendan Behan uniform and that’s why we chose them, not to look smart, but to look as if we could have come from any decade … We could have looked like people from the fifties, sixties, or seventies … we just looked like classic Paddies.[i]

    Extended Fairground

    As the night wore on, in particularly good cheer, Shane began humming a medley, beginning with the ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, “When off Holyhead wished meself was dead / Or better far instead”, culminating in a vision of Irish inclusivity – at least before the men in the mohair suits moved in – at the ‘Galway Races’:

    There were half a million people there
    Of all denominations
    The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,
    The Presbyterian
    Yet not animosity
    No matter what the persuasion
    But failte hospitality
    Inducing fresh acquaintance
    With me wack fol do fol
    The diddle idle day

    This evocation of carnival wherein social hierarchies disappear in joyful Bacchanalia helps understand what Shane MacGowan engendered with the Pogues during the 1980s: a two-fingered reaction to Thatcherism that helped define our Irish identity.

    As the cultural critic Joe Cleary put it in Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Field Day, 2007) in the music of the Pogues: ‘The [Irish] nation is imagined as a kind of extended fairground.’[ii]

    He adds, however, that with the Pogues: ‘this version of carnival is never allowed to become cosily celebratory because it is always shot through with sentiments of anger and aggression, sometimes strident, sometimes more muted.’[iii]

    Hooliganism

    The word hooligan derives from the surname of a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song from the 1890s. Later, applied to the antics of English football fans, steeped in post-imperial hubris, it took on angry connotations.

    But the Pogues were all about the hoolie – a big noisy party – and unashamedly “Up the RA”, when it was still risqué to be so. Their song ‘Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six ‘refers to the plight of the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four and was censored by the BBC.

    Their old school, rumbunctious hooliganism, fused elements of punk and traditional Irish music with the incantations that arouse from Shane MacGowan’s errant soul.

    As Cleary puts it the Pogues, ‘merged the ‘modernist’- and ‘avant-garde’-coded aesthetics of punk with the ‘romantically’-coded idioms of the Irish musical forms.’

    He argues:

    For the Pogues to yoke together … the avant-garde future-orientated metropolitan aesthetics of punk, with the retro aesthetics of céilí and the broadly political edginess of the pub-ballad scene was an inspired act not only of musical synthesis but of semantic sabotage as well.[iv]

    Alongside self-destructive excess there was something serious going on, ‘saving folk from the folkies’ as Elvis Costello put it[v], while asserting a brash, yet accommodating Irish identity – after all, many of the band were not even Irish – notwithstanding an unashamed approval of violent Republicanism, based on a long historical memory of famine, torture and resistance.

    The success of the Pogues and Shane MacGowan – who transcended traditional Irish music to become a rockstar celebrity – may go some way to explaining an enduring, relative openness among Irish people to new cultural encounters – even multiculturalism – at least by comparison with erstwhile colonisers.

    Like it or not, any witness to an average Saturday night in Dublin can testify to the presence of a carnival of sexual deviancy, donnybrooks and nonsensical pranks. This has become a generally inclusive ritual for Irish self-expression.

    In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London, 2021), David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest ‘[t]he really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.’[vi] That just about sums up the Pogues’ contribution to Irish culture.

    After the Pogues, along with their precursors and followers, we would wear a distinctively wild Irishness as a badge of honour, invite everyone to the party, then regale each other with far-fetched stories of nights that should have ended sooner, at least before the cops turned up, when the fun really started.

    The Big Red Fun Bus

    With the Irish Sea bathed in pale moonlight on a blissfully calm night, conversation turned to Westerns. With a glint in his eye Shane reeled off his favourites – ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans’ (1972), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962), “with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne competing for the same girl”, and ‘The Searchers’ (1956).

    But fittingly for a bard whose songs are steeped in tales of underdogs – like the navigators who ‘died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where / Save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur’ – his favourite was the more recent ‘Geronimo: An American Legend’ (1993), in which, unusually, a Native American victim is the hero.

    By now the rest of our posse seemed to be asleep – it must have been passed 4am – but Shane’s mind was racing in this liminal phase. The high life of London beckoned and the rockstar in him was growing giddy.

    We had another Brendan to thank for the drive to London. He and Shane’s full-time carer Elizabeth provide vital assistance and crucially, a sense of humour, in support of Victoria, Shane’s loving wife.

    Once installed in the hotel room there was a chance for more songs, including a few Percy French ditties. Then an overlooked classic from his underrated period with the Popes: a homage to the nineteenth century poet James Clarence Mangan: ‘The Snake with Eyes of Garnett.’

    It begins fittingly:

    Last night as I lay dreaming
    My way across the sea
    James Mangan brought me comfort
    With laudnum and poitin

    The vision moves to the scene of a public execution being held on Stephen’s Green in 1819, before another crossing

    If you miss me on the harbour
    For the boat, it leaves at three
    Take this snake with eyes of garnet
    My mother gave to me!

    The snake is a symbol of renewal, and for Shane perhaps the republican ideal. It also reveals his engagement with the literary canon. After all, he did once earn a scholarship to the exclusive Westminster public school.

    He chimed in:

    This snake cannot be captured
    This snake cannot be tied
    This snake cannot be tortured, or
    Hung or crucified

    It came down through the ages
    It belongs to you and me
    So pass it on and pass it on
    ‘Till all mankind is free

    Contrary to the association of the snake with deceit and temptation – a phallic devil – according to Chevalier and Gheerbant’s Dictionary of Symbols, the serpent is ‘a continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.’

    It is an archetype representing ‘an “Old God”, the first god to be found at the start of all cosmogenesis, before religions of the spirit dethroned him.’[vii]

    This becomes the moving spirit of another vagabond poet, James Clarence Mangan who as a Young Irelander renews the spirt of the nation, suffers and dies, apparently of malnutrition at the height of a cholera epidemic, but re-appears in spectral form.

    He swung, his face went purple
    A roar came from the crowd
    But Mangan laughed and pushed me
    And we got back on the cloud
    He dropped me off in London
    Back in this dying land
    But my eyes were filled with wonder
    At the ring still in my hand

    ‘this dying land’

    Arriving in central London I am struck by the imperial grandeur. The scale and ambition of the architecture makes Dublin seem like a provincial town, but there’s a cold reserve that used to send a shiver down my spine when I lived here.

    So many buildings appear uninhabited; unimaginably grand hotels seem more like fortresses with concierge-sentries posted outside to keep the hoi poloi at bay; uttering “can I help you sir,” with a snarl. We’d have to make our own fun.

    The launch of Shane MacGowans’s art exhibition ‘The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold’ took place at the boutique Andipa gallery in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, where his art resides alongside that of Banksy’s.

    Walking in I pass Bob Geldof, an unlikely presence, given his aversion to Irish nationalism, but he has credited Shane and the Pogues with awakening an interest in traditional Irish musical forms that he had previously disparaged.

    In the relatively narrow confines of the gallery, with the king sitting contentedly on his throne, a carnival atmosphere asserts itself. He had escaped from all this, but that night he was enjoying a return to the crazy celebrity madness, which in England is built on a bedrock of aristocracy.

    The champagne flowed, as minor celebrities converged – “he’s Liam Gallagher’s brother you know” – when the ocean parted before the eternal beauty of Kate Moss. A face to launch a thousand camera phones, and sell a few paintings.

    Then on to Soho, where the weather at least remained dry. The police were even called. It took seven of them to take old Tom down, or so they say: never let the truth get in the way of a good yearn…

    Critics

    Acording to Joe Cleary:

    Ever since the Great Famine and the Devotional Revolution, and especially when they came to power after the establishment of the Free State, the traditionalists had been concerned to make Irish culture more refined and respectable by filtering out, as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘degraded’, all its more licentious and anarchic or uncouth elements – those very elements that were to make such a whoopingly triumphant return of the repressed in the Pogues’ music.[viii]

    In many respects, the unapologetic Shane MacGowan remains an embarrassment to the Official Ireland narrative, now principally articulated in the Irish Times, which inculcates a new breed of conformity that brooks no divergence.

    Previously, Irish Times journalist Joe Breen suggested that his distaste for the Pogues resembled the attitude of contemporary African-Americans who preferred contemporary music to a musical tradition obsessed with the miseries of slavery and Jim Crow.

    Breen’s reference to American culture betrays the apparent objective of many Irish neoliberal cheerleaders to establish a deracinated Americana in Hibernia, a tax haven for multinationals where the atmosphere of the carnival is strictly commodified. Here, Irish history is reduced to the struggle of modernisers against religious authority – with nothing in between – and where celebration of the national struggle is associated with Populism, or even an exclusive ‘white’ nationalism.

    The art of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues offer a rowdy alternative to a creeping homogenisation. He endures, seemingly just to spite them, and even in the dying land he can still revive the spirit of the carnival.

    [i] Clarke and MacGowan, A Drink with Shane MacGowan, (London, 2001), p.168

    [ii] Cleary, p.283

    [iii] Cleary, p.277

    [iv] Cleary, p.271

    [v] Nuala O’Connor, Bringing it All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music at Home and Overseas (Dublin, 2001), p.159.

    [vi] Greaber and Wengrow, p.54

    [vii] Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan, (London, 1996), p.845

    [viii] Cleary, p.290

  • Niall McDevitt (1967-2022)

    The London-based Irish Poet, Art-Activist, Musician and Psychogeographer, Niall McDeviit died at his home in North Kensington, London on Thursday September 29th 2022 aged fifty-five, after a short battle with cancer.

    Born in Limerick in February 1967, McDevitt moved to Dublin as a child. There he was educated at the Jesuit-run Belvedere College secondary school, and read English literature at University College Dublin. Both institutions were also attended by James Joyce, of whom McDevitt was a lifelong devotee.

    Joyce inspired McDevitt to create his popular London Bloomsday Literary Walk, which over the years attracted hundreds of followers to West London.

    Niall was a deep thinker, gifted scholar, poet, actor, writer and art-activist. To some he became almost an urban shaman.

    As a young poet, not long in London, he became the ‘Resident Poet Laureate’ at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith from 1995 until 2009. There he enthralled audiences with unforgettable live poetry performances.

    Niall was one of the most distinguished poets on London’s avant-garde literary scene. Author of three poetry collections, b/w ((Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013), and Firing Slits – Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016).

    McDevitt’s poetry was by turns, solemn and sage, and savagely witty with melancholic romance. He was lauded by fellow poets, including Iain Sinclair, Patti Smith, John Cooper Clark, and Grey Gowrie.

    James Byrne described McDevitt as, ‘arguably the most significant London-Irish poet since W.B. Yeats’.

    Jeremy Reed, an older contemporary who influenced McDevitt’s early style, described him as ‘a luminous custodian of the great poetic mysteries.’

    Niall was also one of London’s most admired and lauded ‘psychgeographers’, leading literary walks across London, with a particular emphasis on the revolutionary poets who called London home, including Arthur Rimbaud, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, as well as Irish writers such as James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and W.B Yeats.

    He recently led a five-part London Literary Walk on his fellow Poet and Visionary, William Blake. Niall himself was regarded as one of the foremost Blakeans of his generation.

    Over lockdown Dublin filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle collaborated closely with Niall to make the films ‘The Battle Of Blythe Road’, which won won the ‘Special Award’ at ‘The Portobello Film Festival’ (2021) is about W.B. Yeats time practising magic at in an ‘Isis Temple’ in West London.

    Another ‘James Joyce – Reluctant Groom’ is about Joyce’s year living in Kensington.

    It’s fitting that Niall’s last collaboration with Sé Merry Doyle was five films, captures Niall leading five walks on the life of William Blake.

    It was an emotional moment, just a few weeks ago, when Niall spoke at the Premiere Screening of the first of those five films, ‘BlakeLand – William Blake and Thomas Paine,’ at the Portobello Film Festival 2022, which was to be his final public appearance.

    As an actor and musician, McDevitt performed in Neil Oram’s twenty-four-hour play ‘The Warp’, Ken Campbell’s ‘Pidgin Macbeth’, John Constable’s ‘The Southwark Mysteries’ and John Arden and Margaretta Darcy’s 24 hour ‘Non-Stop Connolly Show’.

    He was resident Pidgen poet/translator on John Peel’s Home Truths, and appeared on radio shows The Robert Elms Show, The Verb, Bespoken Word, The Poet of Albion and he was a regular guest on Portobello Radio’s ‘Bright Side Of The Road’.

    As an ‘art-activist’ Niall also campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent, for the release of poet Saw Wai from Insein prison in Burma, and against overdevelopment of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields.

    In 2013, he read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown in the Future Exiles: Poetry and Activism event. In 2016 Niall performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival.

    Earlier this year, Niall was invited to read at a special event presented by the Francis Bacon Society, and in May Ireland’s leading photographer John Minihan, invited him to read at the opening of Minihan’s latest exhibition ‘Poet Of The Troubles, a Tribute to The Late Poet Pariac Fiacc’ at The Irish Cultural Centre Hammersmith.

    Niall’s poems have been published in many anthologies, magazines and periodicals, including The London Magazine; Wretched Strangers, an anthology of non-UK born writers; Urban Shamanism, poets from north, west, south and east London; Diamond Cutters, poets in Britain, America and Oceania; and the STRIKE! Anthology. His blogs can still be read at www.poetopography.wordpress.com.

    On the eve of Niall’s death, the final proof of his last collection of poetry London Nation arrived, just in time, in the post from his publishers, New River Press. It will be launched in London in the coming months.

    Niall’s poetry deserves a place alongside the work of other great poets of the past and present. He was on the cusp of greater international recognition.

    Niall McDevitt leaves behind his beloved partner Julie Goldsmith, her son Heathcote Ruthven, Niall’s Mother, Francis McDevitt and siblings Roddy and Yvonne McDevitt.

    Feature Image: Sé Merry Doyle