I have just finished representing a client in a murder case and have plenty to reflect on about guilt and innocence. This is a two-part excursus for Cassandra Voices dealing first with why certain people are found guilty of crimes they did not commit.
The Innocence Project, with which I was involved over many years, has flagged the issue of cognitive or confirmatory bias, which often plays a crucial part in my closing speeches. The idea that we are liable to jump to conclusions based on pre-existing prejudices or our life experiences is as old as Dante or Francis Bacon.
The idea explains why in natural justice terms the aphorism: justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, cautions against a decision based on the perception of bias, including objective bias. The crucial point is to be self-reflexive and to acknowledge shades of grey. Such is the path of wisdom – esteem nuance and not dogmatism. That is how to judge or be a juror, or even an investigative police officer, and not a persecutor.
In terms of Confirmatory Bias Drs. Dror and Hampikian of The Innocence Project have demonstrated that even when experts review a DNA test, if the police disclose which is the suspect’s DNA profile, a favourable match to the evidence may be found.
In a case study they conducted, two state experts who declined to exclude a suspect had information about his background. Whereas, when that same evidence was sent to seventeen out-of-state experts at another lab – who had no information on the suspect – twelve of the seventeen DNA analysts excluded the suspect from the inquiry, four deemed the matter inconclusive, and only one agreed with the original state police lab scientists that the suspect could not be excluded.
We refer to this as confirmatory bias, and in my view it goes beyond police officers and social workers. It also seems to apply to pathology experts and forensic experts. The best are trained to understand such biases exist, and as one expert I recently cross-examined recently intimated, allow for a spectrum of doubt.
A crucial problem emerges in the trial and investigative processes when repetitive, leading questions are asked.
Elizabeth Loftus and Maggie Bruck specialise and are associated with the Innocence Project in false memory syndrome, which is accepted as persuasive in many courts. So, for example Loftus conducted a survey familiar to lawyers as to how different participants react to how any question is framed.
An example of a leading question is illustrated by the difference between the following questions.
Question 1: At what speed did car one contact car two?
Question 2: At what speed did car one smash into car two?
The question using the verb to smash led to the witnesses seeing broken glass when there was none and to assume guilt. In short, the question was framed to achieve a particular answer. It was suggestive and leading.
A leading question the big no-no of the criminal courts, as it is used to elicit a desired answer, and build a conclusion from a premises. Unfortunately it is often employed by police officers and social workers. A barrister may attempt to lead, but is chastised if it is obvious.
Language matters and those who misuse or traduce it to achieve outcomes whether for personal, political or commercial reasons should be treated with the utmost scepticism. It is increasingly tolerated in a culture of obvious untruth and exploitation, which is now seeping into the criminal justice system.
Brains can be reduced to mush by leading and direct questions. By such mechanisms children can be led to believe that day workers slaughtered rabbits, as Stanley Schiff recently remarked in a book about the Salem Witch Trials.
Examination of a Witch (1853) by T. H. Matteson, inspired by the Salem trials.
An opinion once adopted
Francis Bacon, the great British philosopher and intellectual as well as Lord Chancellor of Britain also remarked in this context:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects
In rape and abuse cases such attitudes as this have spiralled out of control, particularly through the overloading of a formal accusation with endless satellite allegations, which create an overwhelmingly prejudicial effect; compounded by the admission of bad character evidence in the U.K.. This represents the over-weighting of morality to determine criminality.
Historic cases are hugely problematical, as is delay. The all too convenient idea that a victim waits donkey’s years because of suppressed memories leaves a defendant, twenty or more years later, relying on the fallibility of memory – often in the absence of documentation – to defeat allegations. When relationships break-up and partners move on and there are children involved it often opens up an unholy vista.
That is not to undermine the victims of serious crimes. But the falsely accused are also victims and their lives are often destroyed.
Conceptual closure, and stereotyping are necessary as a survival plan but not for justice. Black and white thinking leads to tick box, or slot machine justice.
Luke Sheehan explores the latest developments in the Assange Case, and is joined by barrister David Langwallner to discuss the approach of the U.K.'s High Court.https://t.co/gHTNYXJ4fb@Stella_Assange@DanielFooksArt
Life of course is messy, as is the criminal justice system , and we need categories or categorisations to survive, but we must confront the problem of over-categorisation.
The legendary jurist Jerome Frank was much attuned to how the prejudice of participants in the trial process (judges and indeed jurors or witnesses) influenced decisions, and how selective recall or mistakes about facts often affected the outcome of a case.
Thus, the unpredictability of court decisions resides primarily in the elusiveness of facts and deep-seated prejudice. He wrote:
When pivotal testimony at the trial is oral and conflicting, as it is in most lawsuits, the trial. Court’s finding of the fact involves a multitude of elusive factors: First the trial judge in a non- Jury trial or the jury in a jury trial must learn about the facts from the witnesses and Witnesses, being humanely fallible, frequently make mistakes in observation of what they saw and heard, or in their recollections of what they observed, or in their courtroom reports. Of those recollections. Second, the trial judges or juries also human, may have prejudices – often unconscious unknown even to themselves – for or against some of the witnesses, or the Parties to the suit, or the lawyers. Those prejudices when they are racial, religious, political or economic, may sometimes be surmised by others. But there are some hidden, unconscious. Biases of trial judges or jurors – such as for example, plus or minus reactions to women, or unmarried woman, or red-haired woman . . . or men with deep voices or high-pitched voices.
Identification evidence or the fleeting glance is often subject to the Turnbull Warning of the dangers of same, and although safeguarded it remains troublesome.
Juries have always been swayed by advocacy, and it is, as I have hitherto written, about a dark art more akin to magic or sorcery, but even the most ingenious sorcerer cannot normally produce a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Jurors are not entirely naïve and, in my experience, do focus on the evidence, but particularly in America, hysterical prosecutors often confuse morality and criminality. That this is fuelled by excessively religious people warrants condemnation.
There are other causes of false convictions. In Ireland since 2015 when the JC Case jettisoned the exclusionary rule, allowing the police to characterise tainted evidence as inadvertence or a mistake, it created an open door for targeting and framing. The prevalence of police corruption and incompetence in Ireland recommends, in my view, a special layer of checks in addition to the DPP, before any arrest is sanctioned.
Another consideration is where an offence is far too loosely defined such as the proposed Irish criminalisation of so-called hate crimes.
I am very attuned to dealing with vulnerable people with mental health problems and drug addictions. The problem of false confessions arises when a person is interviewed often without an appropriate adult in the room, and starts to sing like a canary. Vulnerable people will confess to almost anything, often based on lack of self-esteem and incredibly short-sighted desires to get out on bail, sometimes just to go to the pub or attend a football match. Solicitors should always be present. Psychiatric reports need to be secured.
The explosive growth of social media has led to a proliferation of new crimes, such as what may be a mistaken decision to engage in a sexual role play conversation and, in that context, there is the rise in demonic entrapment, including the targeting of perceived sex offenders by vigilante groups who prepare the case for the police.
We live in an age of extremes, characterised by witch hunts, increasing executive decrees, secret laws and over-regulation. It is eminently possible to stray into a wrong place at the wrong time and be accused unfairly.
A crucial final point is to appreciates the damage caused by a false allegation. Even if a person is ultimately found not guilty, they may be traumatised for life.
I hope the Innocence Project gains more traction improving processes at the beginning of the system, rather than providing a photo opportunity twenty years later, when someone’s life has already been destroyed.
The question of compensation also arises, as in the recent Andrew Malscherk case who served eighteen years for a rape he did not commit.
But to anticipate my next article not all are innocent, and some who are guilty are assumed to be innocent. Bob Dylan’s song about Rubin Carter ‘Hurricane’ is forceful and brilliant, although it may have given a sanitised account of the accused. Not that he could have been the champion of the world but that he was always an innocent man in a living hell.
SYRIZA’s rise to power in 2015 created shock waves around the world. The international Left celebrated a victory that seemed unfathomable a few years earlier. Its electoral triumph gained even more attention than it otherwise would have, because the stakes surrounding it were exceptionally high.
The Coalition of the Radical Left, as is the meaning of the acronym, was about to engage in a crucial and tough negotiation with the E.U. and particularly Germany, regarding Greece’s debt. The party had been elected after promising to take a much harder stance in these negotiations. Analysts around the world were warning that this clash could endanger the global economy.
Nine years later, this once mighty political force that scared the world’s financial establishment, now lies in ruins. Poll after poll shows its electoral support diminishing. Opinion polls consistently show it to be in third place, trailing PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) by a small but steady difference. It is now perilously close to single digits.
Furthermore, after two recent splits (not counting the one in 2015, which will be mentioned later), and the clear and present possibility of a third one looming, it appears to have fallen into complete disarray internally, as its recent, almost farcical, convention exposed. To fully understand the trajectory of its downfall, however, we need to return to the historical context that created its rise.
José Manuel Barroso and Kostas Karamanlis in Dublin in 2004.
There is [plenty of] money…
In October, 2009, Kostas Karamanlis, president of the right wing Nea Dimokratia, the ruling party at the time, called an early election, after his party lost ground in the European elections in June of that year. In his election campaign the Prime Minister, who had been ruling Greece since 2004, was very open about the necessity of taking significant austerity measures.
On the opposite side, Giorgos Papandreou, president of the centrist party PASOK, the main opposition at the time, just a month before the election, in September 2009, uttered the phrase that was going to become emblematic in the years that followed: ‘There is [plenty of] money…’
Naturally, PASOK won in a landslide, taking 44% of the vote, while Nea Dimokratia subsided to a mere 33.5%. It is important to note that SYRIZA was the last party to enter the parliament in this election with only 4.6% of the vote. Soon after his emphatic victory, however, Giorgos Papandreou had to face the grim reality of Greece’s problematic economy within the context of an unraveling global crisis, its perpetually rising debt, as well as a rising deficit, and probably worst of all, the cold determination of key players in the EU to make an example of Greece, as a means of enforcing hard line fiscal discipline across the Union.
On April 23, 2010, a mere few months after taking office, the PM made an historic announcement, from the picturesque island of Kastelorizo, at the far end of Greece.
In it, he explained that the real volume of the deficit of 2009 had just been exposed. The previous numbers had been cooked up it was revealed, which led to the coining of the expression ‘Greek statistics.’ He continued to say that his government inherited ‘a ship that is ready to sink’ and that Greece was unable to borrow money from the markets on viable terms.
Hence, he had to ask for the activation of a support mechanism from the EU, which was the colonial-style loan agreement that became known as the Memorandum. What followed was an almost decade long period of havoc, that saw Greek living standards plummet, the welfare state dismantled, and a great number of strategic national assets being sold off.
The worst shock for the citizens of Greece was in the beginning, which gave rise to massive popular protest movements, fierce clashes between demonstrators and police and a broadly acquired culture of disdain towards the political establishment. In this turbulent political climate, where governments formed and dissolved repeatedly, the two traditional big parties kept losing ground and PASOK in particular, saw its electoral base being gradually dissolved. SYRIZA, led by the young and charismatic Alexis Tsipras started gaining momentum.
Alexis Tsipras in 2008.
Leftwards
The disillusioned and desperate voters of PASOK were increasingly turning to the Left, where an up-and-coming new leader was promising another way out of the crisis, with better terms and more dignity. In the elections of May 2012, Nea Dimokratia won a Pyrrhic victory with a meager 18.8% of the vote. SYRIZA breached the traditional two-party system by coming in a close second on 16.8%, and PASOK dropped into third place with 13.2%. This was also the first time the unashamedly Nazi Golden Dawn party entered the parliament with 7%.
These results didn’t allow for the formation of a government, so a second election was swiftly called. In June 2012, Nea Dimokratia won the election again, this time with 29.6% of the vote. SYRIZA came a close second again with 26.9%, and PASOK dropped a bit further down to 12.3%. Nea Dimokratia was then able to form a coalition government with PASOK and another smaller party, but the old two-party system was thoroughly broken, and SYRIZA had by now cemented its place as the main opposition party. As the Memorandum policies tore apart Greek livelihoods, it seemed only a matter of time before the Left would win the next election.
That time arrived two and a half years later. In January 2015, after relentlessly campaigning against the Memorandum Agreements (there were three by now), Alexis Tsipras became the first Prime Minister to come from the traditional Left in Greek history. SYRIZA won the election with 36.3% of the vote and formed a coalition government with an ‘anti-Memorandum’ populist right wing party. Meanwhile, PASOK’s share collapsed to 4.7%.
Negotiations with the Troika
The rest is history as we say in these cases, implying that most people remember at least the gist of what happened. SYRIZA went on to try and renegotiate the Memorandum with the so-called ‘Troika’ (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund). This effort was spearheaded by the eccentric economy professor Yanis Varoufakis, but stumbled upon the unrelenting determination of people such as Germany’s Minister of Economy at the time, Wolfgang Schäuble, to create an emphatic cautionary tale, by steamrolling Greece and even pursuing its expulsion from the Euro currency, a scenario which became known as “Grexit” at the time.
After six months of futile negotiations, on June 27, Alexis Tsipras decided to call a referendum on the agreement proposal presented by Jean-Claude Juncker on behalf of the ‘Institutions’ – which was simply a new label used for the Troika, a shift in semantics, arguably, of very little substance.
This referendum was never meant to be about Greece leaving the Eurozone and technically the question was not that, but it was widely presented as such, inside and outside Greece. It was perceived that if the Greeks voted ‘NO,’ that would lead to a head on collision with the EU, which would in turn end up in Grexit. This might have been the case indeed, if the SYRIZA government had held its hard line to the end.
On July 5, 2015, Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected the Troika proposal, with NO getting 61.3% of the vote, while YES received 38.7%. The next day, Yanis Varoufakis, who was a proponent of the hard line, filed his resignation from the Economic Ministry, as requested by Alexis Tsipras. This was meant to be seen as a token of good will towards the Institutions, but was mostly interpreted as a first step towards capitulation.
On July 12, after seventeen hours of negotiations, Greece came to an agreement with the Institutions, effectively signing a new Memorandum, with similarly harsh terms to the ones rejected in the Referendum, leaving many in Greece, and around the world, to wonder, to this day, what was the point of it. Essentially, the SYRIZA government and Alexis Tsipras had completely capitulated.
To be fair, this was done under immense pressure from the Institutions, particularly the EU ones, whose stance during the final stage of the negotiations amounted to a threat of total economic war. On the other hand, however, that stance was entirely foreseeable.
Yanis Varoufakis.
The First Split
After the capitulation came SYRIZA’s first split. On July 15, the first part of the new Memorandum was voted into law by the Parliament, thanks to the votes of opposition MPs, after 32 of SYRIZA’s MPs voted against it, including three Ministers. Others had already resigned.
Alexis Tsipras was then compelled to call an early election, which was held on September 20. He managed to win this election again with 35.5% of the vote, and form a coalition government with the same right wing populist party. Importantly, a new party formed by the dissidents from SYRIZA, who voted against the memorandum, didn’t manage to get more than 3% of the vote and was left without parliamentary representation.
SYRIZA was able to snatch victory in that second election of 2015, as the wrath of the public against the old political establishment was still warm, but also after getting rid of its ‘far-’Left faction, which was more open to examining Grexit scenarios. Thus, the party had effectively made its first pivot towards the political centre, notably retaining the bulk of the former PASOK voters that brought it into government.
At the same time, however, the glass had cracked, as the popular Greek expression goes. The party had received a massive dent to its credibility, which had not matured sufficiently to find expression in those very early elections. The path forward though, was going be one of gradual, albeit constant attrition.
Thereafter, SYRIZA’s rule was full of challenges, imposed by the memorandum, which finally reached a point of completion in 2018, although many (Yanis Varoufakis for instance) would argue that there are still commitments in place that bind Greece for decades to come. Regardless, Alexis Tsipras celebrated what he proclaimed to be the end of the memorandum era and tried to present that as a successful outcome from his administration. His time in office, however, was heavily tainted by the terrible tragedy in Mati, on July 23, 2018, where a wildfire claimed the lives of 102 citizens, in what was seen as a gigantic failure of crisis management by the State.
On July 7, 2019, SYRIZA lost the election, but not as badly as many had anticipated. Nea Dimokratia won decisively with 39.8% of the vote, and was able to form a single-party government, but SYRIZA came in second with 31.5%, thus maintaining the status quo of it being the other major party in the new two-party system. At the same time though, PASOK had managed to regain some ground, coming in third place with 8.1%.
After the defeat, Tsipras announced there would be a reorganization of the party, with more involvement, and also an increase in membership. He therefore presented plans that would make the party more inclusive, which also meant politically more inclusive, so that it would represent the whole spectrum of the Left to Centre-Left and would be appealing to the middle class, which had been heavily taxed during his administration. This was met with some resistance and begrudgery from a big section of the rank and file, namely the old guard of the traditional New Left.
The leader of Nea Dimokratia, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, became the new Prime Minister, continuing a Greek tradition of dynastic families dominating politics, as his father had been Prime Minister in the early nineties. His administration was riddled with numerous scandals and fiascoes and was also seen as autocratic, with brazen disregard for the Rule of Law. Many would argue that it is the most radical right wing administration the counrty has witnessed since the military dictatorship (1967-1974).
It was also tainted by a terrible tragedy, the train collision at Tempi, which claimed the lives of fifty-seven citizens, mostly young people. Therefore, it came as a massive surprise, including to the politicians and voters of Nea Dimokratia, that in the recent elections they won by an unprecedented landslide, while SYRIZA as the main opposition suffered one of the most comprehensive defeats in the history of the Greek parliament. Twice!
On May 21, 2023, Nea Dimokratia won the elections with 40.8% of the vote, a 1% increase on 2019, crushing SYRIZA with a double score, as they came in second with 20.1%. PASOK regained some more ground, establishing itself in third place by raising its share to 11.5%, and has since been considered to be back in the game. These elections could not easily produce a government, as they were held by the ‘simple proportional’ system, that was voted into law by SYRIZA during its rule.
According to many pundits, this was one of SYRIZA’s most critical failures. They legislated for the simple proportional system – a long-standing demand of the Left – but they were unable to navigate its consequences. This system doesn’t give any extra seats to the first party, so it makes it almost mandatory to form a coalition government with other parties.
SYRIZA was unable to convince the electorate that they would be able to secure such a coalition agreement, as they confronted the stern refusal of PASOK to leave that window open, as well as the Varoufakis party and the Communist party. The right-wing populist party that had been their partner in government before, didn’t even exist by then. So, isolated by the rest of the Left, they ended up falling victim to their own law, while at the same time creating the impression that such left-wing ideas sound more democratic in theory, but are dysfunctional in practice.
Nea Dimokratia wanted to achieve a single party government and seeing this was entirely within their reach, they instantly opted for a repeat election, which would be held with the old system which provides an up to fifty seat bonus to the party in first place. Nea Dimokratia had already voted this ‘boosted proportional’ system back into law in 2020, but when the election system changes, it comes into effect after the next election.
The campaign period was very short. The repeat elections were to be held over just a month. The results of the May elections had taken absolutely everyone by surprise. No polling was able to predict this. In fact, it was the first time anyone could remember in a long where the polling was not seriously favouring the right wing faction.
The shock was numbing for SYRIZA politicians and supporters. There was very little time and very low morale to be able to make any drastic changes for a more effective campaign. A second electoral humiliation seemed inevitable, and the main sentiment was fear that the second defeat would be even worse. And it was.
On June 25, 2023, Nea Dimokratia won with 40.6% of the vote, and formed a single party government, while SYRIZA lost even more ground, getting 17.8%. PASOK made very little gains, coming in third with 11.8%, but found itself closer to second place, affirming its comeback, after sinking into near oblivion eight years earlier.
President Joe Biden greets Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Monday, May 16, 2022, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Resignation of Alexis Tsipiras
After such an unmitigated disaster, it was inevitable that Alexis Tsipras should resign. He didn’t do so immediately, but a few days later, fueling conspiracy theories down the line.
Many supporters and colleagues tried to dissuade him, as it seemed unthinkable to replace him. He was the leader who drove the party from barely entering the parliament, to governing the country in the space of a few years. There was almost a cult of personality around him, which persists to this day among a broad section of left-wing voters. But no leader, no matter how historic, could bear the weight of what had just happened. So, on June 29, after being president of SYRIZA for fifteen years, Alexis Tsipras resigned, leaving the party in even further disarray.
An internal election was called to elect a new president. In July, four candidacies were submitted to the party Central Committee. These candidates represented different fractions within SYRIZA and the different approaches within the reorganization and the political direction of the party in the future.
Efklidis Tsakalotos, a former minister of the economy, was the candidate representing the old guard of the New Left, the generation that broke away from the Communist Party after the split of 1968. They had been pushing back for years against the agenda of pivoting further to the centre.
Representing the aforementioned centrist agenda was Nikos Papas, the former right-hand man to Alexis Tsipras, a former Minister for State, as well as Minister of Digital Policy, Telecommunications and Media. He is probably the most Machiavellian figure to emerge out of the Greek Left in several decades.
Between the two, politically, was a female politician that had risen to prominence within SYRIZA’s rank and file. Well-educated, rather moderate, but still representing the Left, Effie Achtsioglou is a former Minister of Labor, Social Security and Social Solidarity. She became the clear favorite to win the race.
Finally, a fourth candidate entered the fray as a dark horse – the seventy-seven-year-old Stefanos Tzoumakas, a former minister from the old PASOK administration of the 1980s, which had been much more left-leaning in policies than the PASOK of the mid-1990.
This internal election was scheduled to take place in September, meaning most of the campaigning would take place in the summer. Given that timing, on top of the destroyed morale from the preceding national election, the trajectory of the campaign seemed very idle and ultimately grim. There was no hype, no discussions, no passionate political argumentation, no media coverage, and not much interest if truth be told.
It felt as if hardly anyone cared about this election and there was serious concern that the whole process would take place very quietly, with Effie Achtsioglou being elected after an embarrassingly low turn-out, undermining her position from the beginning. Her victory was considered a certainty, as polling showed her to be very far ahead of the other three candidates.
Stefanos Kasselakis.
A Twist in the Tale
Then out of the blue in late August, a massive twist in the tale occurred. It took most people by surprise, but there had been assiduous preparations going on under the radar during SYRIZA’s idle summer of wound licking. A young, rich and handsome, gay Greek businessman who had been a resident of the USA since adolescence –previously working for Goldman Sachs and being a ship owner – who had only very, very recently joined the party, started getting a lot of traction on social media in the last days of August, making TikTok-like videos with political statements.
Rumors started spreading among SYRIZA supporters that an almost messianic figure had come from America to save the party. It escalated very quickly until finally, on August 29, ten days before the internal elections were scheduled to take place, Stefanos Kasselakis announced his candidacy to the Greek people by means of a viral video (and also with much less fanfare a few days later, through the official party process).
Έχω επίγνωση ότι δε διαθέτω κομματική προϋπηρεσία. Η προϋπηρεσία μου είναι στην εργασία, στην κοινωνική ζωή. Η υποψηφιότητα που τώρα θέτω δείχνει έναν άλλο δρόμο: Από την κοινωνία και για την κοινωνία. Αρκετές γενιές χάθηκαν. Είναι ώρα να φτιάξουμε το Ελληνικό Όνειρο που τόσο… pic.twitter.com/cUejwTOany
— Stefanos Kasselakis – Στέφανος Κασσελάκης (@skasselakis) August 29, 2023
The stagnant waters of the internal election suddenly turned into a full-blown tempest and took the spotlight of media coverage, even monopolizing the headlines for many days. This guy who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, was exclaiming that he was the one who could beat Mitsotakis, and appeared to pose the only credible threat to Efi Achtsiolou after the resignation of Alexis Tsipras.
Most of the party cadre were taken aback, especially as, despite his enormous clout, he didn’t seem to have the support of any of the party’s prominent MP’s. Except one that is. Pavlos Polakis has been a very particular character within SYRIZA. Known for his abrupt manners, coarse rhetoric and polemic stance against the Mitsotakis administration, he was passionately loved by a significant section of the party’s supporters and fiercely hated by his political opponents. Often labeled ‘toxic’ by his opponents, a label which may have even appealed to some of his own supporters.
Polakis had previously disagreed with the decisions around the process of succession back in July, and, although he was widely expected to, had not submit a candidacy for the internal election. Now it seemed that he had figured out another plan altogether.
Other than their common Cretan ancestry, the somewhat aristocratic Kasselakis and Polakis seemed a very odd couple. And yet, from the beginning, Kasselakis was being labeled ‘the Polakis candidate.’ Among the thirty members of the central committee that signed endorsements for Kasselakis’ submission of candidacy, there was only two current and six former MPs. Except Polakis, most of them were largely unknown to the general public.
The rank and file of the party was instantly rather suspicious of the American-bred newcomer, his dramatic entrance and his precipitous rise in popularity. The other candidates and their supporters within the party also quickly expressed their reservations. Except Nikos Pappas.
In retrospect, it’s tempting to think that he never seemed as fazed as everyone else. For one thing, Kasselakis soon made it clear that he represented the ‘pivot to the Center, so we can govern again’ line, with a twist of American modernity. He spoke about ‘the Greek dream,’ the ‘modern, patriotic Left,’ ‘healthy entrepreneurship’ and other rather centrist-sounding rhetoric. Indeed, he had already written an article back in July, calling for SYRIZA to become a Greek version of the Democratic Party of the USA. But his wildest statements were yet to come.
After the initial shock, and the realization that this guy was not a joke, but was in fact, getting significant traction among the desperate and disillusioned SYRIZA voters, the criticism began, and got gradually harsher.
The old guard, the remaining left wing of the (increasingly less) left-wing party, was the first and loudest to react. Tsakalotos and his supporters labeled him ‘a phenomenon of meta-politics,’ ‘TikTok politician’ and accused him of wanting to abolish the left-wing character of the party.
Meanwhile, various revelations about Kasselakis’ past started circulating, fueling resentment against him among the traditional Left. Articles and speeches by him were uncovered from no more than a decade before, where he expressed openly neoliberal views, even praising Mitsotakis specifically.
Stefanos Tzoumakas completely unloaded against him with raging rhetoric, but he had very little influence, as he was nothing more than a cult figure in the race. Effie Achtsioglou was more reserved in expressing her doubts around his suitability, albeit she eventually did. Nikos Pappas on the other hand, merely welcomed him in the race, saying that new candidacies would bring more attention to the race.
He got that right for sure. This election had hardly even making it into the news, but after Kasselakis’ appearance, his candidacy became a primary focus of the news media. This was only interrupted by the catastrophic flooding in Thessalia, which was also a reason to delay the first round of the election by one week, to September 17, thus giving Kasselakis more time to unfold his communication strategy.
Effie Achtsioglou.
Social Media
What played a critical and rather shady role in this whole affair was social media. It had been mostly word of mouth and social media rumours among members throughout the summer, that many prominent party cadre and MPs had been undermining Tsipras in various ways and had invested in his defeat in order to replace him, cancel his plans for broadening the political framework of the party towards the centre and take back control of the party. This was especially directed at the traditional Left faction, coming mostly, but not exclusively, from former PASOK supporters that had joined the party at the time of the Memorandum.
There was also, however, apart from the informal channels, a certain digital tabloid media outlet, called Periodista, that consistently peddled that precise narrative, sometimes even boasting ‘you’re not going to read this anywhere else.’ The owner and chief editor of Periodista, Dimitris Bekiaris, is widely considered to be a stooge of Nikos Pappas, who had, among other things, given him an enviable position in the public service under his Ministry, back in 2015.
In September 2023, these rumors and conspiracy theories spiraled out of control on social media, with very well known and prolific SYRIZA twitter accounts raging against the ‘nomenclature’ in favor of Kasselakis. Many people with inside knowledge of the party’s higher echelons, would swear, mostly in private, that the informal communication apparatus of SYRIZA in social media had always been controlled by Nikos Pappas.
This rumor mill peaked just a few hours before the first round of the election.
On Saturday, midnight, September 16, Nikos Manesiotis, a journalist largely unknown to most people until that point, but highly controversial since then, published anarticle, where he claimed that Efi Achtsioglou sent an sms to Alexis Tsipras the night of the second defeat pushing him to resign.
Very quick to reproduce that article was Dimitris Bekiaris, through his tabloid. So quick in fact, that either by a typing error or some dubious miracle, the article appears until today to have been reproduced before it was publishedin the original Manesiotis outlet. The aforementioned SYRIZA twitter accounts picked it up and waved it like a pitchfork. The news spread like wildfire and became the headline of the day. The day of the election that is.
Kasselakis won the first round with 44.9%, gaining a serious advantage for the second round against Achtsioglou who got 36.2%. At the lower end of the same clash, Tsakalotos came in third with 8.8%, followed closely by Pappas who got 8.6%. Tzoumakas got 1.3%.
The next day Pappas got behind Kasselakis and Tsakalotos behind Achtsioglou.
The two camps were set for the second round that would come after one week.
On September 19, one of the closest associates of Alexis Tsipras, Thanasis Karteros, wrote an article in Avgi, the official SYRIZA newspaper, where he completely dispelled the sms conspiracy theory, using notably scathing language. describing: ‘Lies, provocations, revelations from the intestines about malicious sms, that neither the receiver, nor anyone else was aware of, until we were enlightened by the rats of the internet.’
But it was too late. The election campaign was muddied and any notion of the truth had been relativised by the proliferation of incessant trolling polemic in social media.
Kasselakis Victorious
On Sunday, September 24, Stefanos Kasselakis won the second round with 56.7% of the vote, against 43.3% for Efi Achtsioglou and a new day dawned for the Greek Left. A pretty grim day so far. To be fair, Kasselakis appeared to make an effort to reconcile the different factions of the party, but the chasm was too deep. He immediately offered Achtsioglou any position she might want in the new reality of the party. Achtsioglou declined claiming she was ‘too exhausted’ to take on big responsibilities, which, admittedly sounded disingenuous, given she was contesting for the leadership of the party until the day before.
But the most acrimony kept coming from the Tsakalotos faction of the old guard. They were particularly triggered byKasselakis’s speech on October 10 at SEV, the Union of Greek Industrialists, where he introduced himself as a left-wing businessman and made remarks hardly distinguishable from a ‘trickle down’ narrative. He stated that ‘SYRIZA is passing to the next stage of its historical trajectory, where it does not demonize the word ‘capital,’ but sees it as a useful tool for prosperity.’ Going even further, he suggested that they should offer stock options to employees, something already previously proposed by Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
From that day on, it was a mere countdown before the first split. Or rather, the first stage of a two-stage split. A month later, on November 12, the Tsakalotos faction, including the majority of the prominent historical cadre of the old guard, announced its departure from SYRIZA with a strongly worded text of resignation. Two MPs and 45 members of the Central Committee left the party.
This had seemed inevitable for some time, and the supporters of the president didn’t appear very worried about it. It was seen by many of them, and definitely by the raging trolls on social media, as a politically hygienic purge, that would liberate the party from a burden holding it back. At the end of the day, they didn’t have enough MPs, or popular support, to create another party that could be competitive. The assumption was that they would soon be all but forgotten as a relic of the past. This had happened before and could be the case again, but the splitting was not complete yet.
Kasselakis and his entourage were hoping that they would merely get rid of the annoying, ideological old geezers, but keep the predominantly forty-something Achtsioglou faction within the party. But that was not how things turned out.
After his victory, Kasselakis became increasingly aggressive with those who he considered to be questioning his authority and were not keeping in line with his vision for the transformation of SYRIZA. He maintained a harder stance towards the Tsakalotos faction, which was expected to leave anyway, but his somewhat authoritarian style created discontent that spilled far beyond the old guard.
On November 23, 9 MPs and a total of fifty-seven party cadre from the Achtsioglou faction announcedtheir departure from SYRIZA, stating in their text that ‘Stefanos Kasselakis was elected democratically. But his course is undemocratic.’
The nine MPs declared themselves independent, and as had been speculated over the days before, they joined the other two MPs from the Tsakalotos faction, so that they could reach the minimum threshold of ten MPs necessary in the Greek Parliament to form a ‘parliamentary group,’ and enjoy institutional status and representation.
Thus, the two-stage split was completed and a new party was founded, called Nea Aristera (New Left). Its name was meant to point at its historical ideological origins, but also project the idea of a new beginning. The new political force found itself with little time to build an apparatus before the European elections, but with a ready-to-go parliamentary group.
Quite belligerently, Kasselakis labeled the Achtsioglou faction and the new party ‘defectors,’ and raged against them for not surrendering their seats back to SYRIZA. Their usual response was that the SYRIZA they were elected to didn’t exist any longer, and the new ‘Kasselakis party,’ as they labeled it, was hardly even left-wing any more.
Suitability for Prime Minister?
As time passed, the consequences of the acrimonious split started registering in the opinion polls. After the Christmas break and the new year, poll after poll was showing SYRIZA’s electoral influence waning and PASOK making gradual gains, until several of them started showing SYRIZA in third place with a tendency to reach single digits. At the same time, Kasselakis performance in the question of ‘suitability for Prime Minister,’ was staggeringly low, reaching just 4% in one poll.
This became yet another cause of friction and nagging within the party, as a shimmering question arose in everyone’s mind: What happens if SYRIZA performs as miserably as the polls suggest in the European -elections? There was a lingering murmur that Kasselakis would have to resign in that eventuality.It was in that climate that the party was heading towards its convention in late February.
On February 17, five days before the convention which was set to take place February 22-25, Kasselakis took an initiative that created yet more turmoil. Completely circumventing every party organ, he used his personal social media to ask members to log in to the digital platform SYRIZA, in order to fill in a questionnaire, with a rather provocative content.
Questions included whether SYRIZA should change its name and symbol and as whether it should identify as Left or Center-Left. The remaining rank and file of the party went ballistic over this and called for an immediate meeting of the political bureau, where Kasselakis was expected to explain his actions.
Kasselakis did not, however, attend the meeting on February 19, as he was in London. Instead, he sent a letter which left the assembly of the political bureau unimpressed, and which was characterized as patronizing. Party cadre who had supported him in the internal elections were now openly expressing their discontent about his behavior and even mentioning the possibility of replacing him.
Notably, Pavlos Polakis and Nikos Pappas both expressed criticism during that meeting. After the fallout of a two-fold split, the new president was once again being doubted and his leadership questioned. In response to that he made an unequivocal statement in London, during an event in LSE, that same evening, three days before the convention. After being asked if he would consider resigning if he lost in the European elections by more than twenty percentage points, he answered with a simple, unequivocal ‘No.’
The following day, Kasselakis returned to Athens and attended the second meeting of the political bureau, giving the members an ultimatum. He refused to be judged by the results of the European elections in June and asked the attendees to commit that they would not challenge his leadership for the next three years – all the way to the next national elections – regardless of how the party performed in June. Otherwise, he would call for another internal election. According to reportsthe response he got was that nobody can receive such a blank check and that this was an unprecedented request.
The next day, on the eve of the convention, some in the media described the meeting of the political bureau as a defeat for the new president, as he didn’t get the commitment he had asked for (only three members supported that request) and had to walk back his threat of an internal election. In any case there seemed to be some kind of compromise reached that members hoped would make the convention less contentious than it was projected to be with that last minute escalation. But another massive plot twist was about to take everyone aback and light a fire under the convention.
Dramatic Intervention
February 22, was the first day of the convention. It was set to begin at 6pm, with Stefanos Kasselakis giving his introductory speech at 7pm. At 4.48pm, Alexis Tsipras broke several months of silence and neutrality with an emphatic intervention that he posted on social media. In it, he passed critical judgment on almost all the protagonists.
Regarding those who had left to form Nea Aristera he wrote: ‘The defeated of the internal elections already left the party, because they lost the fight for its leadership. Not concerned with this fragmentation, the one who wins is our political opponent.’ Of Kasselakis he said: ‘The winner is reportedly asking for a three year blank check, regardless of the result of the European elections. Thus projecting an anticipation of electoral failure and also not caring about its consequences.’ Finally, towards unnamed plotters, he said: ‘While others disagree behind the scenes, but are quietly waiting for the electoral failure to come, so they can pin it on him. Not caring about what that would mean for the party and the country.’
Most importantly though, he brought back the internal election scenario, saying that Kasselakis was right to bring up the issue of his leadership being questioned, but advised him ‘to seek a vote of confidence, not from the political bureau, but from those who made him president.’ Despite the omni-directional criticism, Tsipras’ intervention was mostly interpreted by media pundits as an attack on Kasselakis. Not just in terms of what he said, but also given the timing. The text was posted without prior notice, just over two hours before Kasselakis’ opening speech. One can only imagine the panic and frenzy of his speechwriters, having to adapt to that at the very last minute.
The new president picked up the glove thrown by the former president and delivered a fiery opening speech at the convention. His passionatep0erformance was likened by some commentators to a television evangelist sermon. He spoke away from the podium, using a teleprompter, often addressing the crowd directly, which was overwhelmingly on his side. He finished his speech shouting ‘Find me an opponent and let’s go!’ proclaiming an internal election for president, seemingly ignoring that it wasn’t his decision to make, and he could only submit it as a proposal for the convention to ratify. Which it didn’t.
But there was quite a roller-coaster before getting to that point. The first evening of the convention was promising more heated confrontation, and definitely a lot of behind-the-scenes commotion. Late into that same night there was, reportedly, ameetingbetween eight prominent SYRIZA cadre, to discuss the rapid developments. Nikos Pappas was one of the people present.
The main topic of this dinner meeting was which candidate would stand against Kasselakis, after his flamboyant challenge. The meeting decided to call on Olga Gerovasili, a former minister, government spokesperson, vice-president of the parliament and a very close associate of Alexis Tsipras, to be the new president’s opponent. This stand-off, however, would be seen as a proxy clash between Kasselakis and Tsipras, something that would be likely to tear the party completely apart.
The next day, Olga Gerovasili had a series of meetings with many key figures among the rank and file. Her name was already all over the media until finally on February 24, the third day of the convention she announcedher candidacy, before loud booing from the crowd, that forced the facilitator of the convention and even Kasselakis himself to intervene to stop the heckling.
What ensued was an unprecedented back and forth, impromptu debate between Kasselakis and Gerovasili, that continued the following morning – the final day of the convention. There was a strong disagreement about the procedure and the date of the proposed election that heated the atmosphere even further, as two different proposals were submitted by the two opposing sides.
As more and more of the people attending were agonizingly realizing that there is a clear and present danger of yet another split, perhaps even more acrimonious than the previous ones, Kasselakis and Gerovasili started calling on each other to stand down, in a bizarre blame game that seemed to reach an impasse.
The future of the party was hanging on a thread, until the final plot twist occurred that provided a way out by means of vague compromise. Three prominent SYRIZA cadre submitted a carefully worded proposal to the convention. Its main point was to reject the proclamation of an internal election, confirm confidence to the president and go forth united to the battles ahead ‘the first one being that of the European elections.’
The effort was led by Sokratis Famelos, the leader of SYRIZA’s parliamentary group and one of the few remaining people who enjoy widespread respect within the party. Along with him was Giorgos Tsipras (a cousin of Alexis Tsipras), who had supported Kasselakis in the previous internal elections. The third one was Nikos Pappas.
If this proposal were to be voted on, the other two would automatically become redundant. It gained enormous traction very quickly and easily passed by a large majority among the 5.000 representatives that were present. There was a general sense of relief, mixed with a realization of damage sustained, as if everyone had managed to run out of a crumbling building during an earthquake. The next day was not going to be easy, but the worst outcome had been averted, although the party had (barely) survived.
Olga Gerovasili.
Winners and Losers?
There was a lot of discussion in the media after the convention, about who were the winners and losers. As much as there were different interpretations to that, the common denominator was SYRIZA had lost overall. Some pundits described it as a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. The only one who came out unscathed, as the one who, almost literally, saved the day, was Sokratis Famelos.
Kasselakis and his team tried hard to present it as a victory for their side, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t get any guarantee that the president will remain in his place regardless of the outcome of the European elections. Also, his proposal, which he insisted on until the last moment was ultimately rejected by the convention in favor of the Famelos one. Furthermore, his rather erratic behavior at many points during the convention might have received a lot of applause from the attendees, but these people are not representative of the population at large. His overall image among the broader public definitely sustained damage.
Olga Gerovasili also had her image tainted, as she was repeatedly booed by members of her own party on prime time national television. Furthermore, she appeared rather weak, after preferring to avoid the head on collision with Kasselakis. As for Alexis Tsipras, he also undoubtedly had his status wrinkled, as his own proposal was also rejected by the convention and his intervention was seen by many as making things worse. Many pundits describe him as the main loser of this whole debacle. Some other pundits, however, speculate that his main purpose was to distance himself from Kasselakis for future reference.
All these plights of the Greek Left, make one wonder to what extent SYRIZA ever really stood a chance. Its rise to power was a product of a very specific and very turbulent historical context when for a moment, everything that was solid was melting into air. They saw a massive void in the previously galvanized political establishment and jumped excitedly in to fill it. They grabbed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but ultimately left the impression that they didn’t really know what they were getting into.
Their administration was suffocated and chastised by all the main powers of the Western world as soon as they got into office. They fought against them half-heartedly, without ever convincing anyone that they would be prepared for an ultimate showdown. And thus they had to succumb. All the back and forth and pointless drama made them look like amateurs who were hopelessly improvising. And once the fervor and turmoil that brought them into power subsided and became a bygone era, they struggled to find a road map to become a sustainable force for the long term.
Eventually, a majority of them internalized the idea that the party wouldn’t be able to govern again as itself and had to change its appearance and even its political identity. The tragic irony is that this had already been happening, little by little over the previous years. But it seems they needed a more definitive and somewhat ceremonial manner to make a point that this is not any more the old SYRIZA of the 2015-2019 administration. No longer the Coalition of the Radical Left
that bites far more than it can chew, but a modern, moderate and patriotic party of professional politicians that know what they’re doing and can play the contemporary communication game just as well as the Mitsotakis gang.
Truth be told, that’s not been going too well either. However, while this article was being written SYRIZA has seen a slight recovery in the polls, which, coupled with the simultaneous stagnation or even small drop of PASOK in the same polls, has brought it back into second place, but still below their last national election results. But even if Kasselakis manages to overcome his very bad start and gain more ground in the polls, or even get a positive result in the European elections, SYRIZA as we knew it is gone.
In any case, the road ahead is a very difficult one for the Greek Left. Polling consistently shows the unchallenged domination of Nea Dimokratia under Mitsotakis. It seems extremely unlikely that any single party could defeat them, especially in a national election. A completely fragmented political spectrum of the centre-left is heading towards the European elections without any prospect of cooperation whatsoever. The assumption is that every force wants to maximize its electoral influence in June. Then, after the dust settles and there is a certain hierarchy established, there will be a gradual process of political fermentation (as we say in Greek) in order to form an anti-Mitsotakis front. But right now, this prospect seems light years away.
His blue look was on the ground, as though it held the reason for the last five minutes. She took him all in. The hair was wavy on top and cropped tight at the sides, sprinkled grey. He looked down at her on the step. Are you ok?
My hero? she ventured.
From her seat on the steps in the archway, she watched the rain come fast and heavy on the lane.
He laughed, lowered his head and folded his arms, looked at his shoes then at the rain, searching for the next thing to say.
We should bring you to the hospital.
No, she said. No hospital.
The steps led up to what looked like two apartments with dark, imperious doors. Across the lane, the open back door of a commercial kitchen, wheezing steam, chattering work and a churning smell of Italian food mingled with the food bins parked by the door. The rain was the type that felt like God tipped over the sky and the blue was washing away. She loved it. She wanted to ride down a newborn river crashing through the buildings, forests, mountains, meat till she reached the ocean and swallowed it. But she had just been hit by a car so instead, she wanted her seat.
Do you live near here? he said, biting his lip.
He sure wore that black suit.
Sorry I slapped you, she said.
Ah, he waved his hand. You were in shock.
Ask me the next thing.
Are you drunk? he said, smirking.
No. I just want to go home.
It’s just I saw you in the restaurant –
I want to go home.
I’ll take you.
No, she said, trying to rise.
She stopped because she lacked the strength, so she concealed it by instead shifting to fish out her purse from underneath her.
Were you drinking? he pursued, worrying his lip again.
Ignoring him, she lit a cigarette, and blew a drag at him, careless, spent. With something like tiredness, her long lashes closed slow and long on him. She felt languorous, suspended for an unknown interval, free and anonymous on a step behind the rain. Her head rested on the wall.
A pack of girls in hotpants skittered trilling and swearing through the alley like a fuckle of turkeys, their jackets held high over their heads as umbrellas. Celine could taste blood on her tongue.
Gimme one a’those, will ya? he said, dabbing his face dry with the cuff of his jacket.
His finger grazed hers when he took the packet – a shock of intimacy worse than his manhandling when he cowboyed her clear of the road, away from the traffic and chaotic onlookers. Snatching her lighter from the air between them where she threw it, he moved closer. Her palm massaged the hip that caught the bumper. The car that hit her threw bawls of abuse out the window, taking her for drunk as well. It struck her how much taller than her her rescuer was when he was close, the way trees get taller when you walk toward them.
So what are you fallin’ all over the place for? he said, squinting down at her.
Fuck off, she said, quietly.
He laughed. Is it your birthday or something?
She looked at him.
Well, you’re all decked out in leopard print and silk and eating alone in a restaurant. And falling all over the place drunk.
I’m not drunk, she said, emphatically flat.
Really? he smirked.
And I’m not engaging your asshole-ishness either because if I do collapse and start spitting up blood you’ll know I’m not drunk and that yes, you tool, I have a condition. Tachycardia.
I don’t care.
Jesus.
Because you’re just so fucking beautiful I can’t think of anything else.
She laughed, a great blart of a belly laugh.
Fuh – I haven’t laughed like that in a while, she said.
Well at last, he beamed, A fuckin’ smile outta ya.
You think this is funny?
I do, a bit, yeah.
She spiked him an awful look.
He retreated and exhaled, letting the air flupper his lips like a horse.
The rain was thunderous on the cobblestones and rooftops.
And I’m not a l-lady, she stammered, I’m a strong woman. I’ll take it from here.
I’m Bob by the way.
Ya. Call me a taxi, will ya?
I can drive you.
No.
Bob followed Celine’s taxi in his car without her knowledge. It brought her through Shantalla and dropped her at the University Hospital. The night was dirty green and umber with trees and street light. He parked outside Mr. Waffle and watched her in the mirror walking away from him toward the building where she was born.
He shadowed her to the ICU. In an open plan of a dozen beds, she rounded a corner and was gone. Staying hidden, he spied out from the corner and saw her. Four beds down, stopped at the one near the window. The bed contained a small figure, a child.
As she faced the bed with slumped shoulders, Celine’s expression was sombre. Her heart separated through water. She stood still at the foot of the bed and raised a hand to her mouth.
You won’t let me leave, wee one, she whispered to her fingers.
The child’s small, closed eyes, with the tubes up her nose and down her mouth. Her daughter hooked up to the Matrix, and not the Ribbon, where it was easier to spend time with her. Celine softly traced a curl on the sleeping forehead. With soundless poise, she placed herself on the plastic grey seat next to the head of the bed, and lightly rested her hand on the bedspread. The night drank the place down. Beyond the window, it painted with hate.
You can’t out-G me, she said to it. I’ll hate you dead.
She wished she knew what she thought. In that moment she was blessed with the truth that it was not possible to know anything, not even that you didn’t know, because you often did and had no excuse. And what did knowing and not knowing at the same time do to each other? Give birth to something, anything you wanted. She wanted freedom. In that moment, she had it. But the guilt of having it swept in to rob her of it. Nothing after nothing, and she was herself again, for the first time that day, without self, nobody, happily, with all the answers and no way or wish to convey them. She was without her body, left with a voice that would not speak, wiser than her and uncontrollable until the time called for it, and it just came to cut through the ugly and vulgar. She almost worshipped it. She hesitated to call it truth, in case it taught her a lesson in manners about labelling and chose never to speak to her again.
Christ, anything but that, she prayed.
No, it wasn’t gone. It would hold its peace. It would hold all the pieces.
Maybe it will be today, she thought. On your birthday, Polly, pet. I’ll be there to welcome you. Here or there, in the next place. Don’t be scared. Ever. When it comes time to go.
Polly hadn’t moved. Not a twitch or a sniff, in her deep sleep. Did she sense her mother? Celine did not aspire to that level of vanity. She loved her daughter, she wasn’t in love with her, and didn’t expect the same in return, she didn’t expect any love.
It will cleanse you, she said silently, covering her mouth with her fingertips again, afraid that the world might see the words.
Your death, love.
Something selfish made her acknowledge death; where it was in the room, where it came near and pulled up a chair. It carried the details, and the world’s ‘reality’: the floating world, a weaponised litany of details masquerading as facts, aiming her memory at her with diagnoses, prognoses, projections, reflections, incompetence, fallacies, failure, contingencies, hope for the best, prepare for the worst, deny God, deny faith, accept death, a reality that did not accept the agency of free will, but stole it and sold it back in the form of vanity branded as truth. Untraceably, one’s own truth. Good or bad.
Details. She didn’t want charts, names of medicines, names of doctors, nurses. Let death slobber over those. But she had them. Like a disease, she couldn’t get rid of. If she had them, Polly didn’t have to have them and if Celine tossed them, they’d be far from Polly. Either way, Polly was free. Either way. She would be free.
And with that endorsement, Death reached a hand out toward her child. Celine caught the wrist. It was like catching solid air. It struggled. She put its fingers in her mouth, and bit down. They slithered down her throat and fizzed in her oesophagus. Peristalsis saw them to her stomach where they were corralled in a dance of digestion. She swallowed all the death in the room. And felt better.
The pain of envy struck Celine’s breast. Polly was closer to birth, and therefore death, and was the only guide Celine had to her own point of origin, the point in space and time where she was born. Yes, Celine was caught in vain self-preservation and all its grey shades. With a shock, she realised that it had been here in this very building, thirty years ago in two days time. Celine was born into this on September 17th 1988, perhaps on this very spot. It was violent genius, divine.
Polly or Celine. One or the other would go. The old way. Barter. No. Not that way. It was what Celine would mean it to be. For one to live, the other did not have to die. No deal of Celine for Polly. Or the threat of what no intervention would bring – Polly for Celine – with nature favouring the robust. She appealed neither to the god of nature or the one who was supposed to control it. She blessed herself and thanked whatever was the most honourable aspect of God, the one who protected the meek, for her life and for Polly’s. She had always accepted Polly’s immortality. For the first time she was able to accept her mortality, two years into her small but powerful life. If Polly lived, her mother would live. If Polly died, her mother would die, she promised God. But she swore neither of them would die and she put her foot down.
If she dies, she said to God, I’m coming for you.
Bob, watching her from the corner, saw a small curly brown head on the pillow above a face of rosebud features. A potted plant sat on the bed stand. He was struck by its dark green leaves and bright red flowers, a liminal vigil above its small human ward. What he saw – mother and daughter – he couldn’t process at that moment, and slipstreamed into an oblique thought.
Bob considered the watering of a potted plant, why it could never be a good thing to pour water from a jug down on top of the soil. It would only wash the nutrients away after the manner of a flood. For another thing, if plants were sentient, and he had some doubt as to whether they were not, it would become distressed, and he couldn’t abide the thought of that. For the overall health of the thing, at least, it was better to be gentle with watering, like rain, as gentle as nature is when it waters. Even heavy rain distributes water evenly, hitting the ground lighter than a jug’s spout aimed at a stem.
The roots took in water from below, he acknowledged, watching Celine’s face. The leaves took in light from above.
I’m the youngest of five, and I grew up in a home surrounded by musicians and artists. My parents and siblings all participated in art or music in some form and shared circles with those of similar interests, with our home setting the stage as the hangout spot to what were in my eyes some of the most creative and talented characters that the early 2000s had to offer. It was this upbringing that would contribute to my eclectic taste and deep appreciation for art and the work that goes into creating it.
At home, there was vast a collection of music in every medium from every decade, paintings and ornaments were placed on every available wall and surface all while musicians were jamming in the sitting room on what seemed like a daily basis. Naturally, being the youngest of such a big family and their groups of friends, I always wanted to get involved with whatever was happening!
Creativity and its exploration were always appreciated, and my enthusiasm to participate was seen and rewarded by those around me with everyone imparting hints of wisdom and technique of their respective craft to the young and eager student that I was. These early experiences would later ignite a passion within me to explore the vibrant cultural landscape of Ireland, where I discovered a wealth of talent but also a myriad of challenges facing artists.
In 2017, my journey into the Irish art scene began in earnest with a simple introduction of just sharing some of my own artwork on Instagram. It started as a “sure we’ll see what happens”, but over a short time I began to really enjoy the process of creating and publishing, and the thought of pursuing art as a career looked like an intriguing endeavour. But upon looking at the established and more experienced artists around me, I quickly discovered the struggles many faced due to the lack of resources available to them.
First Painting.
Limited studio availability and often prohibitively expensive. Seemingly exclusive gallery spaces and minimal stage time opportunities. Few to promote them and those who did seldom had the artists’ best interests at heart. And importantly, nowhere left in Dublin to socialise while also being able to explore art through play. It seemed despite undeniable talent and passion, an artist in Ireland often found themselves struggling with financial instability, limited exposure, and a lack of support networks and opportunities to develop their craft.
Becoming a professional artist appeared an impossible task, and I was frustrated by the fact that I was put off before I could really begin. Moreover, I thought about everyone else who might have experienced that same feeling of “why bother”. The number of tortured artists plagued with that “what if”, and the number of great concepts and ideas that would never make it to print just because they had nowhere to go to even begin. Myself, I didn’t always have dreams of being an artist, I just had an interest and wanted to explore the possibility. But I do feel that someone who really has that desire to pursue a career around creativity absolutely should have every opportunity to do so.
So, at nineteen years of age, I turned my art page, “Newmanations”, into my first attempt to go into business with the aim to provide all these resources to artists and the wider community. I would spend the next two years on research – volunteering at conventions, speaking with artists and musicians wherever I could find them, property viewings, attending city council redevelopment proposals and whatever else I could do to soak up information about the art and business landscape around me. It was then time to put some of this self-education into practice, and on the 17th of August 2019 I hosted my first ever music and fundraiser event. “Newmanations Presents: Raise The Bar!”
A small but respectable beginning to my endeavours, the event proved successful on all accounts, and the wave of positive responses from the community made the possibility of the long-term success of my venture very real. However, the pressure of continuing to operate a business and the extended social media use that went with it proved too much for my health. At twenty-one and with burn out in full swing, I silently bowed out of operations, but always with my mind fixated on the possibility of what I was trying to achieve. It would take another three years, several jobs, and a global pandemic before I would get back to my mission, all the while fine tuning my business model and preparing for a return.
On the 19th of August 2022, 3 years and 2 days from my first ever event for which this current project gets its name, “Raise The Bar Events” was born! Founded on the principle of putting artists first, Raise The Bar Events is the continuation of my dedication to provide a platform where artists’ voices can be heard, their talents celebrated and their careers supported. Its purpose is to strengthen and develop the communities around me, all while elevating the Irish arts scene by empowering its most vital contributors – the artists themselves. It has quickly gathered momentum, having since organised 30+ showcase style events, headlines and an Ireland tour for an international act, with lots more to come!
Central to my business ethos is a commitment to fostering a safe and inclusive environment for artists and audiences alike. That’s why I’m proud to be partnered with “Safe Gigs Ireland”, an initiative dedicated to promoting safety and awareness at live events and keeping them free from any kind of abuse. By partnering with Safe Gigs Ireland, I work to ensure that every event or showcase I host prioritizes the safety of everyone in attendance including the performers, creating spaces where everyone can enjoy the transformative power of music without fear or hesitation.
Looking ahead, I’m excited to embark on new initiatives and partnerships that will further my mission of empowering artists and enriching our cultural landscape. There is immense talent and potential within the creative arts in Ireland, and we need something like Raise The Bar Events to provide a comprehensive platform that supports artists across all disciplines, amplifying their voices and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration. It will push the boundaries and challenge the status quo of business and art.
Lastly, as a business owner, I firmly believe in using my platform to affect positive change beyond the realm of art. That’s why I’m proud to participate in “Hell and Back, June 2024” to raise money for “Feed Our Homeless”, a Dublin based charity providing vital support and services to those in need. By leveraging my resources and influence, I hope to make a tangible difference in the lives of others, embodying the spirit of solidarity and compassion that defines my business ethos.
In summary, Raise The Bar Events is more than just an event management company – it’s a labour of love, driven by a deep-seated passion for art, community, and social responsibility. As it continues to grow, my commitment to supporting artists, promoting safety and wellbeing and giving back to my community will remain unwavering. This is a legacy project for a positive infrastructure to remain long after I do. Together, with my family, friends, collaborators, the artists I work with and the project’s growing community of supporters, we are shaping a brighter, more hopeful future for the arts in Ireland and beyond.
Raise The Bar Events – The cornerstone of artistic and community development for generations to come.
There is a poem by Mary Ruefle called „Provenance“. It ends with with the following words:
„So I have gone up to the little room in my face, I am making something out of a jar of freckles and a jar of glue
I hated childhood I hate adulthood And I love being alive.
This is also what my artist statement closes with, the one I occasionally have to send out to residencies or other art institutions to prove that I am always ready to be my entire weird self and produce something out of nothing (or a jar of freckles and a jar of glue) for a humble chunk of money, or simply a room to live, sing, sketch, write, sew, paint, film, and make noise in.
I don’t like the categorisation of creative work, those restrictive boxes for organic, wild, un-boxable growths. „I make things“, I often say. „You’re a storyteller“, my partner says. „You point at what has always been there, and make me see it for the first time“, my cousin says. „Ha ha“, my brother says.
There isn’t one thing that was here first. I was not making music before I was painting, or painting before I made sculptures. The documentation available to me from my childhood in provincial Austria shows that I made drawings as a baby, and at one point I glued three pieces of paper together and called it „Staubsauger (Vacuum cleaner)“. There is also a cassette tape that features me at kindergarten age, passionately singing a song I had just made up called „Wenn ich alleine bin, bin ich verloren (When I am alone, I am lost)“ about feeling mistreated and very, very sad and I can happily report that nothing has changed. I still do all those things, partly because I must, but mostly because nobody was silly enough to tell me to stop. I am also, of course, still very, very sad.
Creating music and visual art, similar to dancing, aren’t primarily fancy, romantic, dramatic jobs. It is mostly basic human behaviour. I am glad I get to do all of it to this extent.
I don’t think the ways in which I came to make music are particularly interesting. It was just a way of saying something when things needed to be said; a way to prove to my teenage self that I, too, could say those things in that particular way. I can’t play any instrument „properly“, but I put many to good use. My music reading skills are still that of a seven-year-old learning to play the recorder. I don’t know which notes or chords I am playing most of the time, but music has been a solo endeavour for the majority of my life, so I don’t need to communicate my unorthodox ways of producing it to anybody.
I made my first record back in 2005-ish, using a very slow laptop, the free software Audacity, a peanut-sized clip-on microphone, and the audacity to think that this is how you could make an album. I learned how to be my own recording engineer, learned how to mix my songs by knowing no theory but knowing my ears, learned how to turn field recordings into rhythms, learned how to make beats by trial and error, copy and paste, and I obsessively wrote lyrics because that was always the easiest part. I wrote in English because it was fun, it was a game of discovery and growth, and it was the right tool to reach beyond the confinements of home. When I was twelve, in the early days of the internet, I would stay up all night to talk to American teenagers in music-themed chatrooms. It made me feel connected to the world in a way that seemed vital and endlessly exciting at the time. Connecting to my international audience through poetry brings back very similar emotions.
The narrators and characters in my work have a tendency to seem lost, searching, observing, often barely tethered to the earth. I myself have trouble figuring out the boundaries between the self and its surroundings, often losing track of who I am and what I do. My work is strongly influenced by recurring dreams and folklore, images of the subconscious that are found again and again throughout the history of humans explaining themselves. That is how i put myself in context, this is how I find my footing.
Every morning, I wake up raw and shapeless, barely remembering who I am, as if it was all lost in sleep. Creating music and images means re-making myself, establishing my contours, every day anew. The work is what tethers me to the earth; this is gravity.
Between 2006 and 2022, I made six solo albums, three or four EPs, an album with my band Twin Tooth, a few short film soundtracks, a bunch of singles, a hard drive full of unreleased material, and various songs in collaboration with friends, most of them long-distance because I love to make things difficult and expansive for myself.
As I am writing this, I am sitting on a couch at an artist residency inside a former stove factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A fellow resident is frying something in the adjacent kitchen, and a pickup truck down in the parking lot has the bass turned up so high that the walls are shaking. At night, the freight trains blow their horns. I have an old guitar at my disposal, a stack of watercolour paper, and a lot of empty wall space to fill.
Songs will happen here, and if not here, then somewhere else, after. There are four music-related projects I would like to finish and five I would like to start. An album’s worth of lyrics for the next Twin Tooth record need to be written. A solo EP demands polishing. A scrap of found fabric wants to be shaped into a person. Paper is patiently waiting to be sent through a Letterpress. What must be said will be said, if not in sound, then in color, light, paint, fabric.
Jar of freckles and jar of glue, both in my back pocket.
Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
backward into my mouth and forward only
when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
guided identification of desires, year of my father
unable to discuss that which is not the village
council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
madness, year of attending to various screens, year
of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
the year of being trapped in a word document
the year of being trapped in a word
Noah Artowski, by now a six-year veteran of the Israeli Defence Forces, looked out towards the azure, glimmering sea. He imagined it melting like water colour into the blueness of the sky. He stood on the balcony of his aunt Sarah’s apartment in Tel Aviv, where she lived alone with her two dogs. His hands rested on the warm metallic bar as he became trapped in the sea’s embrace. How beautiful the sea, alive in the sunshine, beyond the human ways of things. He knew that it would live on, unaware of death, even to the end.
“Would you like tea or coffee? Or perhaps something stronger?” It was his day off.
“Coffee please.” He said with a smile, and when it arrived he lit a cigarette and took a drink, savouring both flavours simultaneously, stoking the warmth of the morning like bellows on a midnight fire.
“A beautiful day’ he said sitting down on the balcony chair, and his eye caught the sea again.
“Yes.”
“I’ve got something to show you” said Sarah. Her dogs followed her inside and back out onto the balcony where she placed a shoe box on the table.
“I found this box of photographs when we were cleaning out Grandma’s house. Take a look, there are some interesting ones.’ Noah took the lid off the box and gathered the photographs in his hands. The first one was taken in the 1980’s judging by the fashion of the clothes, and was in colour. It showed his mother and father smiling on their honeymoon in Portugal. They looked happy. The next one showed his mother in military fatigues. He went on slowly flicking through the pile with his index finger. He came to an old photograph, black and white and faded. There was an old crease mark where it had once been folded away. He turned it over and saw ‘August 1939’ had been written on the back. He turned it around and stared at it for a while. It was a family portrait. The smartly dressed mother and father sat in chairs and in front of them their three daughters sat on the floor, all of them looking directly into the camera. As was the custom of those days, no one smiled.
“Who are they?”
“They are your Grandmother’s cousins. From Lodz.”
“Where is Lodz?”
“Poland.”
“Did……………………..” He paused. The sea had caught his eye again. Or perhaps it was the blue.
“They are all dead. They were sent to Dachau.”
“Yes, I remember. She told me. I haven’t seen them before. In a photograph I mean.” She thought about saying how sad it was, but the silence did the job for her. He looked intently at the photograph. Without any sense of urgency he studied each one of their faces, one by one. There was a kind of stoicism in their expressions. They had no idea what was coming. Looking at the photograph he didn’t feel the benefit of hindsight, but knowing what became of them, he was able at least to attempt to touch the lives within the picture frame. To connect somehow. He noticed that one of the little girls, the youngest one, was holding a bracelet made of pearls. She was the central point of the portrait. That she was holding the pearls in her hand seemed strange, in such an austere setting. Maybe she had began to play with it and neither the photographer or her parents had noticed. He looked closer and detected a twinkle in the little girls face as if she was indeed about to burst into laughter. He carried on looking at the photograph, particularly at the young girls face and the pearl bracelet that she held, captivated by the image. Then he thought about what became of her and her family. He looked back out to sea. The sun was beginning to set.
KHAN YOUNIS – GAZA – SEPTEMBER 2023
Heba, which means gift, stood up with her doll in her arms and followed her mother into the kitchen. It was the birthday of her older brother and members of her extended family, including her grandmother and her aunt had been invited over that evening to share a meal. When her uncle Meerab arrived he picked Heba up and took her out on to the balcony with her doll still firmly clasped between her arms. The sun was setting in the west and they looked out at the fire dance sea. There was suddenly no need for words.
“It’s like we’re in jail” said Meerab.
“How?” Said Heba.
“There is the sea and we’re not allowed to sail away on it. Can you think of another people who live by the sea and can’t sail?” Her silence was her answer.
“No. That’s alright. There is a lot your generation must learn about. About our people, our history.” Heba looked up at her uncle and then back out to sea. The sun had almost passed over the horizon.
Heba’s mother came out on the balcony to call them in for dinner. There were large bowls of maqlubeh and a plate stacked high with taboon, bottles of soft drinks and jugs of water. The family sat around the table and began to talk happily and freely. When they were together around the table as a family, eating and drinking and talking, they were free.
By the end of the meal however the conversation had taken a serious turn. That almost always happened at their dinner table when politics became involved. Meerab said the politics had been imposed and where politics is imposed, suffering always follows. Meerab had never left Gaza. He was now twenty-three years old. Every day he looked at the sea and wondered what lay beyond and as each year passed into another, Heba wondered the same. She was becoming the same as her uncle because she asked the same questions.
When the quarrel abated Heba’s Grandmother, who had been listening quietly to the whole conversation, began to speak.
“When I was a little girl, I lived in the mountains. We never saw the sea then. It was like it never existed. I was near Heba’s age when I first saw the sea. I remember when the soldiers came and told us to leave.” Suddenly, a distant expression, woven in sorrow, came over her face. Some memory too painful to linger on, entered her inner vision. She carried on speaking to sooth the memory away. “We travelled here to Gaza, my family, your grand-fathers family and many others. Almost our whole village came. I remember seeing the sea for the first time. It was beautiful.” She looked at Heba and remembered being her age. They smiled at each other, but Heba didn’t really know what they were smiling about. She thought it was the sea.
When the meal was done and the plates were being washed Heba’s grandmother called her over and sat her on her lap.
“I have something to give you.” Heba looked up at her grand-mother and smiled. She loved presents but she loved surprises more. She wondered what it could be. The old lady reached into the large side pocket of her dress and produced something in her open palm, showing it straight away to Heba. Heba looked down at the object and then looked up at her grand-mother.
“Here. It’s for you. I had it when I was a little girl and now it is yours. I want you to keep it. Maybe someday when you have a grandchild you can pass it on to them.” Heba looked down. There in her hands was a beautiful white bracelet made of pearls. It glowed and shined with equal beauty. She put it on her wrist and looked at it in admiration.
“Thank-you.” Said Heba. And they held each other for a while.
“There is an answer to all our problems in this part of the world. Sometimes I think no one has thought of it.”
“What is it?” Asked Heba.
“Love.”
OCTOBER 7th 2023 – TEL AVIV
Noah lay on the sofa in his apartment looking through the photographs that his aunt had entrusted to him. He was an early riser but had laid in bed for an extra hour that morning. He enjoyed coming in and out of dreams. They would usually evaporate like morning mist with the dawn alarm. That morning he had written the dream down immediately after he had woken up, slightly disorientated by its vividness. He had walked out of the gates at Dachau with the little girl in the photograph who held the pearled bracelet and as they passed out of the camp he woke up. They were holding hands as they left. Once he had written what he remembered of the dream down, he tried to fall asleep again and re-enter the dream. It didn’t work. He just lay there, staring at the wall.
He placed the photograph of his family, and the girl holding the pearl bracelet, on the floor. He sat up on the sofa and drank from his coffee cup. Then he took the television remote and turned on the television. It was the news. Bewilderment and fear. ‘Israel invaded by Hamas.’ ‘Many killed and captured.’ Noah sat there in his apartment with his mind in many places at once. His mobile phone buzzed and he picked it up off the coffee table. The message was from an old friend and simply read ‘Sons of Satan.’ Each lineament of thought continued on its path to the same conclusion. War.
The more information that filtered through on the news the more tense he became. With the kidnappings the anger turned to fury. Just after noon that day his mobile phone buzzed and he picked it up once again. It was the army. He was to report to duty the following morning.
OCTOBER 7th – KHAN YOUNIS.
Heba was woken by the sound of a barking dog below on the street. It was just after dawn. She got out of bed with her doll in her hand and walked out on to the balcony. There before her lay the great shining sea with all its mystery and secrets, and all its possibility. The sun was rising up over the land, warming the balcony by quick inches. Heba sat there with her doll, listening to the silence.
The morning warmed. Somebody in the kitchen turned the radio on. At first it was just a noise but as the newsreaders voice rasped, the words began to solidify, creating their own gravity, somehow filling the air with weight. The report was clear. Hamas had penetrated the fence border between Gaza and Israel. The death toll was unknown. Heba’s family gathered in the kitchen to listen to the radio reports coming through. A new dread fed them all. It didn’t even need to be spoken. Something terrible was about to be unleashed.
Heba’s mother took her by the hand and led her into her bedroom.
“Pack up your things. We may have to leave soon. She looked up and saw her father at the doorway with a look of worry on his face. She had never seen him scared before. His expression frightened her.
“What’s happening? Are we leaving?” Asked Heba.
“We may have to.” Said her mother.
“Don’t worry. Everything will be alright God willing.” Said her father and he smiled at her. The worry on his face had gone, even if only for a few moments. She smiled back at him. She took out the suitcase from under her bed and began to pack her things as her parents had asked. She left the pearl bracelet on her wrist.
DECEMBER 7th 2023 – KHAN YOUNIS
Noah opened his eyes and then shut them again, wondering where the edge of dreams lay. Then there was shouting. He rubbed his face and stood up. All notion of dreaming vanished as he saw his army fatigues hanging neatly at the end of his bed. He rubbed his face and stood up. He knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. This was the day his platoon was going to enter the city of Khan Younis in the south of Gaza. The north had already been laid waste.
The fear of death was on him. If there is a nature to war it must be that, death, fear and suffering. Except for those in charge. He knew that he was too young to die so well that he had stopped thinking about it. To think about death was to give into it. He sat down on the toilet and released his bowels and then had a quick cold shower. He looked into the mirror and felt ready for the mission. It was time to go.
His platoon moved slowly down the empty Gazan street. It was a waste land. As he looked around, images of Hiroshima came to Noah’s mind. The buildings skeletons, the people gone. It seemed the place was haunted. They walked on, ten feet apart, and came to a small square. This is what they had been trained for all those years. This was when they were told their soldiering would count. They were told it would be of value. Noah’s keen eyes scanned the square, up and down, south, east, north and west. There was no one there after the heavy bombing. The civilians had either left or were dead. The intelligence they had was that there may by some Hamas fighters left, likely in tunnels underground. That was the mission of his platoon, to flush them out and kill them.
Noah’s OC ordered him and three other soldiers to head west along the street that led out of the square for one block and to enter the building on the left side to see what they could find. Once it was secure they were to reconvene immediately at their present position. The soldiers took the order and left in single file moving cautiously along the street ready to fire in an instant. Slowly they went with guns raised, still ten feet apart, alert to the possibility of an ambush at any given moment. They entered the building by forcing a door. When they were inside Noah took the corridor which led to a courtyard at the back. Filled with trepidation he went along, now feeling the sweat on his face. He had to overcome the fear of being killed and of killing. He remembered why he was there. He took off his dark glasses and used the back of his shirt sleeve to dry himself. He couldn’t hear a sound on the bottom floor so he went on down the long passage way until finally he came to the end.
He put out his hand and opened the door. He suspected they were lying in wait for him outside. Vigilance was critical. He stepped out of the open doorway and stood still. The place had been virtually destroyed. His eyes tracked along the courtyard to the other side where a broken wall was still standing. His eyes carried upward where he saw a dead girl hanging from the wire at the top. The force of an exploding bomb had left her there. He stood motionless, his eyes and soul at odds. His eyes and his soul in conflict. His eyes and his soul falling. Tangling in the wire her hair fell backwards to the ground, almost parallel with her right arm. Her doll lay below her. Heba’s eyes were closed. He stood there looking. The colours on her dress becoming more vivid. Becoming brighter. His eyes followed down and there he saw the pearl bracelet on her wrist, undeniable. He remembered his relative, the little Polish girl. He swayed in sickness. The unfading beauty of the pearl bracelet seemed through his eyes to be pulsing with the life of us all. It passed through time, across generations, beyond the fathomless sea. He felt himself falling, falling slowly through the air, falling to the place where there is no light, and the end is only dreamt.
Jim Sheridan condemns the Irish government for handing over the file on the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case to the French authorities, wondering whether we are ‘still an independent country.’ He argues that this should never have been done ‘over the head of the Director of Public Prosecutions’ who concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring Ian Bailey to trial in the wake of the murder, or subsequently.
Sheridan says:
So okay, let’s just send it to France where they won’t allow Maureen Farrell [the witness who retracted her earlier claim that she had seen Ian Bailey with Sophie before the murder] to appear and say that she lied … And we have Francois Macron coming on the television speaking about this murder. Has he nothing better to do? I know the French family probably are trying their hardest … But there needs to be an intake of breath now and stop all this. It’s just too insane.
Sheridan nevertheless claims to have ‘a soft spot’ for Sophie’s son, and ‘his pursuit of justice’, which he describes as ‘heroic’:
But he was on the Late Late Show … and he said Bailey burned his coat on Christmas Day. But even the slightest perusal of the facts shows you that on the Christmas Day Bailey was on the Christmas swim, which is the only piece of video evidence we have.
Jim Sheridan maintains that branding Ian Bailey a murderer, despite no criminal charge ever being made against him in an Irish court, brings shame on Ireland. But he argues there is no shame on West Cork.
Sheridan also refers disparagingly to a 2000 New Yorker Magazine article by John Montague entitled ‘A Devil in the Hills’ – ‘Which meant the murderer had to be in West Cork because of a ludicrous idea that the only a local could know where she lived.’
He believes, ‘we have to look at ourselves and grow up a bit … We can’t replace the French with the British.’
Final Meeting
Sheridan met Bailey two days before Christmas, ‘ostensibly to do an interview, but really just to see him.’ He adds that
an interview with Ian was never of much value because he said the same thing over and over in the same way. He was almost like a child who wanted attention … his height, six four and big bearing and big voice … but when you got past that, there was a little child still there … He was like a big child. So I began to see him as a kid who thought he was in charge of everything … He was the admiral and I was the captain of his ship … he was crazy in a way … But it wasn’t a bad crazy.
In the podcast, Sheridan explores what made Bailey the perfect fall guy or scapegoat:
In that valley where Sophie lived. In 1845 there were probably twenty-seven hamlets. In 1848, there were probably none. So the tribal memory of West Cork is of a disastrous famine.
He reveals how, remarkably, the name of the landlord at that time was Bailey:
It’s almost like the Sophie’s murder in its appearance mirrors the events of the Famine with a body left exposed. And I think it hit a tribal memory of shame and devastation, and somebody had to be responsible. And who’s responsible for the famine? It’s not the potatoes. It’s not a blight. It’s the English … whether they were or not. To name an Englishman was almost perfect, as they say in darts: 180.
He adds that
The Englishman they named was very eccentric and had a sergeant major accent, and he used words and phrases in a very ironic and sarcastic way, almost like a military man.
Sheridan insists:
The only way you can understand sarcasm and irony is in a power structure where even though somebody is saying something you understand, that doesn’t mean what it says. For instance.. [if] the Queen saying to the servants, “I love your shoes this morning,” means he hasn’t polished them. But the servant is so troubled in the power structure he knows exactly that the compliment is the opposite. That produces a dissociation with people in the way we speak and act. And Bailey was English perfection in sarcasm and irony. So, when he’s first asked, when he’s first told that he’s going to be sacked. Like anybody. He’s angry. And like anybody, he’s trying to rationalize it and he asks why. And they say, well, people are saying you’re the killer. At which point Bailey is probably the only journalist who’s really pointing the finger at France, at the husband … correctly or incorrectly, we don’t know. Probably incorrectly, but we leave that aside. [Then to the] editor who is firing him he says people are saying, you did it. And he says: “of course I did it to get a good story” … Which actually means nothing like: “I killed her” It means: “if my objective was to write stories about the murder. And that’s the reason I killed her. It’s not working, is it? I’m being fired.” That’s what it means.
Jim Sheridan is unsure whether the new documentary he has made will blow the case open, but contends that ‘some of the information that I’ve got is very, very interesting … Some of which I got too late to include in the Sky documentary, and some of which I’ve got subsequently.’
My formative years were spent growing up on a pretty amazing cul-de-sac called Verbena Grove in the north Dublin suburb of Bayside, a 1960s/1970s sprawl of low-rise semis that borders the coast road between the city centre and Howth Head. My Dad, Mick O’Brien was a schoolteacher and is one of Ireland’s leading uilleann pipers. My Mam, Fidelma is a music teacher who comes from a large family of Irish dancers and musicians. Both grandfathers were musicians, My grandad Dinny O’ Brien had a huge influence on us growing up. All of my aunties, uncles and cousins play. Music was water and air to my family. I had it on both sides, there was no escape.
So it started right there in Bayside. Once the parents on the road realised that Mam was a music teacher they came knocking on the door for music lessons. My first memories bring me back to the front room of our house with the children of Verbena Grove sitting around the table with tin whistles, I was often sitting on the table as a baby, watching, listening. Those children were the ones I looked up to, particularly the Peat family across the road who treated me like family from day one. So when Joanne Peat started playing the violin – so did I. I was two years old when I started violin lessons. The rest as they say was history.
Growing up in Dublin, I was very fortunate with the teachers that were available to my siblings and I. We all started on the violin in the Young European School of Music with Maria Keleman and Ronald Masin, to whom I owe my early years of practice and dedication to the violin. Then I was fortunate to study with Maeve Broderick in RIAM, Dublin before finding myself in Nantes, France under the watchful eyes and ears of Constantin Serban and eventually to Leipzig, Germany where I had my forever teacher, Mariana Sirbu. An incredible person, musician and friend. She took care of every student as a person as well as the music. But she was also very tough. She’d make me sweat. I really respected that. I’m not sure anyone had ever understood me as well as she did and I was so fortunate to have her in my life.
Throughout those years of study and practice I was working constantly, a musical gun for hire if you will. There are few gigs I did not do. From the West End to classical recitals and concerti, Bach to Tommie Potts, contemporary music with Crash Ensemble to performances with Baroque ensembles on period instruments, jazz improvisation and jamming in studios with singers and actors. Looking back it has shaped who I am in many ways, but I often wonder what life would have been like if I had chosen one path and dedicated my life to one musical genre.
When I think of those years I have a feeling of imposter syndrome. To exist in both and classical and traditional world musically was difficult to get my head around. Not only from a playing point of view but from a personal point of view. Who was I? And what was I trying to say with my music? Luckily I kept myself so busy I never had time to really dwell on those questions or answers! Then two things happened. A cervical cancer diagnosis put a stop to my worldwide gallivanting. Life got put on hold. Not a month after the final surgery this virus shut down theatres and concert venues all around the world. Now I had time on my hands. Lots of time and nowhere to go.
Fast forward to 2021. Lockdown was still in effect but Other Voices Cardigan were having their festival online and I got asked to play. It was a solo gig at first until the wonderful Philip King called me up and asked would it be possible to collaborate with the Welsh harpist Catrin Finch. “Catrin who?’ I asked. “Google her” said Philip “and call me back”. It was a very quick Google search and an even speedier reply when I called Philip back and said “absolutely 100 percent yes”.
Catrin and I met up to rehearse in Cardiff – no mean feat in lockdown. Test, letters and permission from the BBC just to play a few tunes. It was a hit. Having grown up playing music with my immediate family I knew what the feeling was to have an instant rapport with someone. It’s very rare and something I cherish anywhere that I find it. It all started with Bach, a composer close to both of our hearts. From there we just let the music take us where we wanted it to go and started composing together. We heard things similarly. We speak the same language, but we’re also not afraid to push each other. And I’ve never met anybody I’ve had that instant connection with who was not related to me or a musical friend from childhood. It was really extraordinary. From there the project has turned into our debut album “Double You”. A record I am very proud of as it combines all the elements of our musical lives and meanderings. The different musical accents we have developed over the years.
That is something that I feel explains what I do in music. Accents. My Dublin accent my Irish, my French accent, my German accent. All part of my musical DNA and all unique. In music I knew I could never play one style over the other. I never felt I really had the opportunity to dedicate myself solely to the classical thing because there was always the responsibility to continue with the traditional music, I knew I could never turn my back on what my family gave me as a gift. And that brings us to the here and now. A real melting pot of music and ideas.
The future for me is as winding a road as ever. The next projects include a book on the fiddle player Tommie Potts who was a shining light for me growing up and someone whose recordings taught me a lot and allowed me a freedom I would not otherwise have known existed. A new album with the Goodman Trio (that being Dad and Emer Mayock) as we continue our excavation of the incredible manuscripts. There is an album to be released in the near future with my avant garde string quintet Wooden Elephant and the incredible spoken work artist Moor Mother, a new duo with viola da gamba virtuoso Liam Byrne; a new recording with my childhood friends Eoghan Ó Ceannabháín and Caoimhín Ó Fearghail; as well as a few solo recordings featuring Enescu, Locatelli, Ysaye and some Potts inspired traditional tunes.
It is definitely not an easy task being so in love with classical and traditional music and trying to respect them in their truest form also blending them in live performance to bring the music, regardless of genre to a new audience. I was fortunate enough to perform Shostakovich’s first Violin Concerto in Germany recently and my encore was Enescu into the Maids of Mitchelstown. A few years ago, I would never have had the courage to step up and be so musically blasphemous, but music is music, people are people and if you can convince the audience that what you are playing is informed, authentic and true to who you are as an artist, a musician and as a human – they don’t throw tomatoes, they applaud.
I think the future is bright for music, collaboration and open-mindedness, but, if anything, it takes twice the amount of work and practice, so on that note – I can hear my metronome calling!
The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Patrick’s father Claud, a leading British Communist member and journalist fought in the Spanish Civil War and eventually settled in Ireland. Patrick says of his father:
He used to say the big battalion commanders want to convince the small battalions, the weaker, the less wealthy that there’s absolutely no point in resisting the big powers, they might as well give up. Claude believed exactly the opposite, the big powers are always more fragile, that they had points of vulnerability and you can attack them, and that’s why I have just published this book, which will be published later this year which is a biography of my father which is called Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied.’
Following in his father’s footsteps, for fifty years Patrick Cockburn has been practicing the art of journalism with integrity and persistence: a specialist on the Middle East, he has written extensively on wars and political machinations from Beirut to Belfast and Baghdad.
Within books like The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (2002) (written with his brother Andrew), Patrick Cockburn has revealed the workings of Arab dictatorships and Western Imperialism alike. Over the last decade, he has also created a separate, no less distinguished profile as a memoirist: The Broken Boy (2022) describes his survival of a Polio epidemic in 1950s Cork, while Henry’s Demons (2011) co-authored with his son, immerses the reader into the pain of psychosis.
For our conversation with Patrick Cockburn, we sought to sketch out the lives and work of two independent-minded writers: both himself and his father, Claud. As indicated, Claud’s fifty-year career brought him around the world, from Civil War Spain to Wall Street during the crash of 1929, back to 1930s London, where his newsletter The Week both documented and fought the rise of Fascism. It was only after WW2 that Claud moved to Ireland, where Patrick and his siblings would be born from the 50s onwards.
Making use of unclassified MI5 files, and an abundance of material directly remembered from his late father, Patrick spoke to Cassandra Voices as he was preparing the final manuscript of a new memoir, covering Claud’s life.
Patrick also spoke out passionately about coverage of the war in Gaza:
Evil becomes normalised … and a lot of the governments don’t want to recognise and the papers and those outlets that support the governments don’t want to go on about it. So it’s perfectly reasonable that we should have a big story about the Russians firing some rockets into a city in Ukraine and half a dozen people are killed and others injured. That is wrong and that gets a lot of publicity. Then several hundred people are killed in Gaza and that’s on the bottom of the page now, if it’s mentioned at all.
The first part of the podcast is freely available. You can listen to part two by subscribing on Apple podcasts. We will also be sending the second half of the show to our loyal Patreon supporters in the next few days. The decision to charge for the second half comes from our determination to maintain our independence.
