The intense green colour of much of the landscape of Ireland – the so-called “Emerald Isle” – bears testimony to Garrett Hardin’s assessment that ‘As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain’[i]. The predominance of highly verdant grassland across most of Ireland is not a natural phenomenon. In most regions hazel and oak are the summit vegetation. The synthetic fertiliser used on the abundant pastures creates an artificial glow. An outsider might assume that the absence of a ‘strong state’ is to blame for an unwieldy agricultural system dedicated to the production of meat and dairy for export, but this is not necessarily the case. This essay argues that state intervention, in the form of a land tax, could provide an important means of ameliorating a system that rewards a shrinking number of farmers, at a high environmental cost. The state can also facilitate the development of ‘alternative agriculture’, involving more sustainable environmental practices, higher employment, improved health outcomes and a reduction in the cost of living for the wider population, but this must allow farmers as Silke Helfrich puts it ‘to act like entrepreneurs on a local scale’[ii].
On the climatic periphery of grain cultivation, and with a wet climate, over millennia farmers, mainly seeking new grazing land, steadily removed most of Ireland’s native tree cover. Thus, according to Mitchell and Ryan in Reading the Irish Landscape: ‘from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape’[iii]. This left a mere twelve per cent of native woodland by the 1400s. An intensive period of British colonisation from the seventeenth century removed much of what was left, leading to the extinction of native fauna, includingthe wolf. The loss of access to woodland also presented enormous difficulties to a native population subjected to land seizure and discriminatory colonial laws. By the eighteenth century the poet Aodhagan Ó Rathaille asks “cad a dhéanfaifimd feasta gan adhmaid / tá deireadh na gcoillte ar lár” (Now what will we do for timber, / With the last of the woods laid low?). Today, despite ideal conditions, Ireland still has the third lowest coverage of forestry in the EU after Malta and the Netherlands, and much of that is in the form of non-native Sitka Spruce plantations that do further damage to the ecology.
Contemporary Irish agriculture is dedicated to the production of food commodities for export, principally beef and dairy that fuel climate change (the Irish agriculture sector was directly responsible for 38.4% of national Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emissions in 2022). Despite excellent growing conditions, largescale horticulture is rare – and small-scale allotments are few in number – while public health authorities contend with a host of ‘lifestyle diseases’, linked to obesity and sedentarism. Irish agriculture is far from being the result of a free market. The system is underpinned by EU subsidies, and other regulations, which often do more harm than good.
An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847
Thus far we have not referred to the (non-native) staple crop most identified with Ireland, which appears to serve as a vivid illustration of the tragedy of the commons, and the pessimistic view of Thomas Malthus that food production fails to keep pace with population growth over time. Ireland was the first European country to adopt the potato (solanum tuberosum) as a widespread staple. This was an inauspicious development, according to John Reader, as ‘the innocent potato has facilitated exploitation wherever it has been introduced and cultivated’[iv]. The catalyst for the potato’s successful adoption was the traumatic wars of the seventeenth century especially Oliver Cromwell’s subjugation of Ireland (1649-53) since ‘the potato could both be cultivated and stored in a manner which might intuit the spirit of destruction, and the malevolence of the enemy’[v]. However, Henry Hobhouse argues that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazybed, was in the end the most damaging’[vi]. Another author, A. T. Lucas denigrated the ‘dark reign of the potato’ for ‘banishing’ most other foods from the table.[vii]
For the Irish peasant farmer the advantages of the potato far outweighed its disadvantages. The remarkable growth of the population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from approximately two million to over eight million is unlikely to have occurred without the availability of a subsistence crop whose yield exceeds that of wheat, and which was suited to Ireland’s moist, friable soil. The potato has a nutritional profile that allows for almost exclusive long-term consumption unlike most cereals, which lack the essential amino acid lysine; although the tuber has the drawback of a high glycaemic load. At the start of the nineteenth century Irishmen’s heights were greater than those of equivalent Englishmen in a variety of occupations and situations, and life expectancy was higher than most Europeans of that time. Daly has described it as ‘a wonder crop the only subsistence foodstuff which provides a nearly perfect diet, a crop which would feed a family on very little land, in almost all types of Irish soil, irrespective of rain or lack of sunshine’[viii].
As any student of Irish history knows the story ended in tragedy with the Great Famine of 1845-51. The potato blight (phytophthora infestans) proved devastating for the three million out of a population of eight million almost exclusively dependent on it. According to Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s’[ix]. This was because by the eve of the Great Famine three million (out of a population of eight) were living on just one million acres of land which represented a mere five per cent of the total acreage of twenty million. Crotty argues that ‘with twenty million, instead of one million, acres of land available for the production of the population’s food requirements even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed eight or more millions of people’[x]. This view is endorsed by Mokyr who argues that Ireland was not overpopulated on the eve of the Great Famine.[xi] Perhaps uniquely in the world, the population of Ireland has never scaled similar heights.
Over generations, peasant proprietors would have noticed that holdings were being continuously sub-divided, and that sustenance was increasing dependent on the unpalatable but prolific Lumper variety of potato. Yet the pattern of early marriage and large families endured; gynaecological brakes were not applied as seems to have occurred in other European peasant societies at that time. Importantly, during these decades of unprecedented fecundity, political activism was lacking, even in the face of the continued injustices of the Penal Laws. Notably, most of the leadership of the first republican independence movement, the United Irishmen, were from Protestant and Dissenter minorities in Dublin and, in particular, Ulster, the northern province. A Catholic society denuded of its native leadership (the Earls flew in 1607 and ‘the Wild Geese’ in 1691) failed to mobilise politically.
Surprisingly, Crotty laments the tenant land purchase schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as: ‘[t]he abandonment of competitive rent in favour of a system of peasant proprietorship naturally introduces an element of immobility into the allocation of land among farmers’. He argues that: ‘[t]here are reasons to believe that under Irish conditions this immobility is likely to be particularly severe, leading in turn to serious misallocation of land’.[xii] Thus, between 1850 and 1900 the number of cattle on Irish farms increased by over 60% and the number of sheep more than doubled. The area under tillage declined from 4.3 to 2.4 million acres, but the rural population fell from 5.3 to 3 million. The revolutionary socialist James Connolly identified the effect on rural Ireland: ‘Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of large farms, a dozen shepherds now occupied their places’[xiii]. Crotty argues that:
concentration on cattle and sheep . . . has had an extremely harmful effect on Irish agriculture and on the whole Irish economy. While on the one hand is has led to the enrichment of the numerically small landed interest, on the other it has given rise first to famine and subsequently to chronic emigration and to very slow economic progress for the numerically much greater non-land-owning section of the population’[xiv].
The successful movement for land reform in the late nineteenth century created a society with a preponderance of peasant proprietors who maintained a model of production that offered few employment or investment opportunities.
According to Crotty: ‘The structure of the agriculture, characterized by the predominance of beef-cattle and sheep, provided little opportunity for the employment of labour or capital and with a static volume of output these opportunities did not improve’. He further contends that the interests of farmers, or landowners, and the nation ‘are essentially conflicting’; because: ‘[t]he scope for intensifying grassland beef production is very limited. The profitability of the system depends on a low rate of expenditure’[xv]. Thus, the Irish population continued to decline after independence, while the price of food tended to be at least as high as in Britain, despite far lower population density, and greater possibilities for local production.
Patrick Hogan 1891-1936.
Independence brought little change in agricultural priorities with Ireland remaining a primary producer of livestock products and cattle often exported ‘on the hoof’ to Britain. This was driven by the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan (1922-32) whose sympathy lay with large cattle farmers. The early commercialisation of agriculture has cast a long shadow as farmers have continued to produce commodities for the international market, and purchase their own food from the same anonymous source. In an address to Macra na Feirme in 1974, the psychiatrist Ivor Browne observed the irrational scenario of: ‘a small farmer in Mayo taking his calf to the town to sell and his wife asking him to pick up a chicken for dinner in the supermarket while he is there; he manages to sell his calf for £1 and pays £1.50 for the chicken for dinner’[xvi]. Similarly, writing in 1968, Fennell bemoaned the demise of country markets and how a ‘frequent complaint in Ireland is the lack of variety of in vegetables for sale and the high prices charged’[xvii].
From 1972 the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) perpetuated this pastoral model, generating further specialisation and reducing the unprotected horticultural sector which struggled, as a result, to compete with cheap, often subsidised, imports after the removal of trade barriers. Farm supports did allow large farmers to earn incomes comparable often to urban dwellers but generated further imbalance: a miniscule proportion of Irish farmland is devoted to tillage, much of it used as animal feed; there are over seven million cattle and almost six million sheep in the country.
The adoption of agricultural alternatives from a variety of international ‘toolkits’ could confer significant advantages through reduced dependency on imported food, and increased employment in more labour-intensive tillage and horticulture as well as raising the health of a population that is beset by lifestyle diseases linked to a stunted food culture. One challenge for alternative agriculture is the historic inflexibility in the land market which thwarts diversification. It remains the case, as Mitchell and Ryan observed that ‘In Ireland it is still next to impossible to rent land on a lease of sufficient length to make improvements and where land can be bought it is often in small parcels at too high a price’[xviii]. The CAP subsidy regime maintains the high cost of land, as farmers are guaranteed incomes from privileged pastoral farming.
Any alternative agriculture should involve far wider direct participation than is the case today. Farmers and farm workers could work on a part-time or seasonal basis. The hinterland of cities would be especially important. Crotty argued that: ‘A land-tax offers the only means of reconciling future increases in cattle and sheep prices, relative to those of other farm products, with the general welfare’[xix]. This would involve the broadening of the property tax to encompass agricultural land. Taxation revenue emanating from any land tax could be redistributed in the form of low-interest loans, allowing enterprising individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. However, the involvement of government agencies should be restricted as according to Thirsk:
[T]he strong assumption of our age that omniscient governments will lead the way out of economic problems will not in practice serve. The solutions are more likely to come from below, from the initiatives of individuals, singly or in groups, groping their way, after many trials and errors, towards fresh undertakings. They will follow their own hunches, ideals and inspirations, and obsessions, and along the way some will even be dismissed as harmless lunatics. The state may help indirectly, but it is unlikely to initiate, or select for support the best strategies; and, out of ignorance or lack of imagination, it may positively hinder.[xx]
Thus, it will be important for farmers to “act like entrepreneurs on a local scale”.
A relatively sparsely populated island such as Ireland ought to be equipped for self-sufficiency as we enter a turbulent era in human history. Above all, for this to occur, we require a political leadership representing the interests of the people in alignment with entrepreneurial opportunities and environmental constraints. The introduction of a land tax could allow for a more equitable distribution of land, revenues from which could be used to allow individuals or cooperatives to acquire land. Any government should be mindful, however, that over-regulation may hinder development. The role of the state should be to provide access to land. Thereafter, farmers should be allowed to experiment. The history of Irish agriculture prior to the Famine, when three million were subsisting off just one million acres without artificial fertilisers or machinery, demonstrates how fertile Ireland can be. It will be necessary, however, for farmers to avoid dependence on a single staple, and for the state to insist on an increase in the coverage of native trees which provide additional ‘services’, including clean water and air.
[i] Hardin G. (1968): The tragedy of the commons. Science, New Series, 162 (3859), S.1243-1248, doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1724745
[ii] Helfrich S. (2009): Gemeingüter sind nicht, sie werden gemacht. In: Ostrom E. (2009): Was mehr wird, wenn wir teilen. München: oekom, S.11-19. (Helfrich 2009, p.13)
[iii] Mitchell, F. and Ryan, M., Reading the Irish landscape (Dublin, 1997), p.8.
[iv] Reader, J., The untold history of the potato (London, 2009). p.14
[v] Salaman, R., The history and social influence of the potato (Cambridge, 1949). p.215
[vi] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..
[vii] Lucas, A. T., ‘Irish food before the Famine’, Gwerin 3 (1962)
[viii]Daly, M. ‘Farming and the Famine’, in O´ Grada, Famine 150 commemorative lecture series., p.39.
[ix] Sen, A., Identity and violence: the delusions of destiny (New York, 2006), p.105.
[x] Crotty, R., Irish agricultural production (Cork, 1966), p.63.
[xi] Mokyr, J., Why Ireland starved: an analytical and quantitative history of the Irish economy 18401850 (New York, 1985), p.291.
[xvi] Brown, I., The writings of Ivor Browne: steps along the road: the evolution of a slow learner (Cork, 2013), p 90.
[xvii] Fennell, R. ‘The domestic market for Irish agricultural produce’, in Baillie and Sheehy, Irish agriculture in a changing world, (Dublin, 1968). p. 106.
Shortsleeve Conor was born in Lisbon, but started playing in Aberdeen when I was a 21-year-old pizza chef. One Sunday, after finishing the close, the team headed over to a pub nearby called the Prince of Wales. We walked through the double doors to be met by the most joyous music I’d ever experienced. Fiddles, banjos, guitars, loud chattering, singing, tin whistles, flutes, pints pouring and a saxophone. I fell in love with trad and folk music right then.
My family is Irish, though I grew up in the U.K. on the Wirral, so I already knew the music but hadn’t really experienced it. I was at that time a DJ playing house and disco. Now I decided folk music was something I wanted to pursue. The next week I brought my guitar to the session and asked if I could join in. Everyone was really nice and I think I sang Raglan Road or something. I listened to lots of the Dubliners, the Pogues, Margaret Barry, Hamish Imlach and the Fureys around that time.
There was a fella who played in the session called Sandy Cheyne, who I now know is an artist and brilliant banjo picker. He soon showed me it was more useful to play a five-string than a guitar in this environment, because there are so many of the latter to compete with.
He encouraged me to adapt old Scottish tunes to be played on the five-string banjo. Sandy had a huge influence on my musical direction. I started listening to all sorts of country music and learnt about the roots it had in Scottish and Irish.
I listened to lots of on musicians like Bob Dylan, Dock Boggs, Ola Belle Reed, Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, Nathan Abshire and too many other names to mention. But it was the trad session approach to music which had the biggest influence on me.
I learned how to entertain a crowd, often using humour in the songs. It also showed me how to be vulnerable with my writing. Things I like to talk about in my songs are non-traditional relationships, mental health issues, class politics and the end of the world. Also love. Lots about love.
I moved to Lisbon to study in 2021 and did what I always did when I moved to a new place: looked for the music. Funnily enough the only Irish trad session in town was a five-minute walk from my new home.
By then I had a few songs under my belt and wanted to take them to some open mics. I was then introduced to a musician called the Mighty String at the city’s oldest open mic in a nice venue called Camones. We decided to do some terracing – where you busk to tables at restaurants – and became mates. He sat me down one day and told me I need a new name. Conor Riordan was too difficult to pronounce over there and he’d always noticed I wore short sleeve t-shirts. Shortsleeve Conor was born.
I’m a really lucky person. When things are not meant to work out they usually do. So when I moved to Lisbon I wasn’t expecting there to be a blossoming folk music scene I could jump straight into. But I soon made a great group of friends, who all happened to be excellent musicians.
I’m also really lucky that I didn’t have to pursue the Shortsleeve project too hard. Gigs just seemed to happen and the response was generally encouraging. But there was always one problem question: “Have you got any of your music online?” I didn’t and I didn’t really have a plan to. But I had a friend who had just decided to start a record label to capture this special moment in the city’s cultural history.
Cheap Wine Records was founded by Lee Squires with the ambition of promoting Lisbon’s folk music scene. It also aims to nurture future talent, showcasing their work so they can tour and go on to bigger things. Shortsleeve Conor was one of the first projects, so again I was very lucky.
The album – ‘Whatever that means’ – was put together at Estudio Roma 49 in Lisbon, with my friends and fellow musicians coming together to make it happen. The same goes for the production, marketing and funding. This community-led approach to the music made me feel right at home. It’s the same mindset as being back in the Prince of Wales, sitting in a circle playing tunes over a few pints. Only now I was blessed with a hot Portuguese sun, instead of the freezing North Sea winds.
I’m writing this the day the Doomsday Clock moved 90 seconds closer to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot going on in the world to be happy about. But being from northern England I have to find what’s funny in everything. It takes the edge off. That’s why in my writing I contrast the rise of fascism with not being able to get a parking space in my song Pink Champagne. That’s why my song about being in an abusive relationship is so upbeat.
I like to write about these things, but to add some humour into them. It helps because I also really struggle to express how I feel, which can be really frustrating when I’m in a relationship. I’m only at my most vulnerable when I’m telling an audience how I feel about someone who should have heard it first. I really try to leave nothing to the imagination with lyrics.
Now my album is out I don’t really know what to do. I hope to use it to travel with my music and meet new people. When we started this record project the Mighty String asked me to write down what my long-term goal was for the album. I said I’d like for it to be well appreciated in a small but enthusiastic audience so I could disappear into anonymity without worrying about it too much and become a furniture painter or something. Then in forty years I’d like for it to be rediscovered and for it become a country classic so I can go on tour with it globally in my seventies.
When it comes to veteran rock journalists, few could lay more genuine claim to the title than Allan Jones. After joining Melody Maker as cub reporter in 1974, with no previous writing experience, but an application letter which concluded: ‘Melody Maker needs a bullet up its arse. I’m the gun – pull the trigger’, he rose to editing the magazine ten year later. On leaving the fabled inky at the height of the excesses of Brit Pop – about which he was less than enthusiastic – he founded and edited Uncut, providing a British-based forum for the emerging Americana/New Country scene. Now in semi-retirement, he has produced two volumes of rock’n’roll anecdotage – 2017’s Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, and the recently published Too Late To Stop Now. Des Traynor caught up with him to discuss these and sundry other matters at last year’s Kilkenny Rhythm’n’Roots Festival(a.k.a. ‘the best little weekend music festival in Ireland – and the known universe’), now celebrating its 25th anniversary.
It seems like there are more lengthy pieces in this book than the last one?
Yeah, partly due to the circumstances in which it was written. The first book they were interested more in a compilation of the stories as they were already written, and I didn’t really think of elaborating on them. I just packed the book with as many stories as possible, which meant that a lot of them had to be shorter than they could have been. I started writing stories for the second one just at the beginning of the first lockdown. As I explained in the book, I thought people would be using their time productively – you know, learning the harpsichord or how to juggle or a foreign language, whatever.
You didn’t want to emerge empty-handed?
Yes, I mean, I could quite happily have spent lockdown getting stoned and watching Netflix, there’s loads of movies. I’ve got a link to the BFI player. So, endless hours of viewing available, and a vast record collection I could reacquaint myself with – but when I started writing the stories there was no inhibition in terms of words, so I tended to let the stories dictate the length they would be.
Were you always confident about your own abilities as a writer and critic, or did you feel like maybe you were a bit out of your depth when you started?
I had loads of opinions. I wouldn’t call them well-informed in a lot of instances, but they were opinions and I wasn’t shy about sharing them. That came out of an Art School background. If there was one thing that Art School taught me, it was that you had to stand up for your work and your opinions, and be unfazed by criticism. So I hadn’t realised that at the time, but it did give me a lot of confidence, more bravado and bluff really.
But you could do the work?
It was very simple. I wasn’t stupid. I’d read Melody Maker for years. I’d recognised the basic template of writing a 2000 word feature on somebody who’d just had a chart hit. You went in, you established the fact that they had a new single, let them tell you how it was different from the last single, how it was a step forward, how it was a new vision for the band or whatever. That usually took about five minutes. To liven things up, you’d hope that one of the band’s chart rivals had a new single out. So you’d ask them for an opinion on that, hopefully it would be a bit controversial, they’d slag it, which would give Ray Coleman the chance to put a big headline on the cover: ‘Sweet slam Rubettes’, or ‘Shawaddywaddy slam Glitter’. And all they would say, basically, was ‘I’m not really keen on it’, or ‘It’s not very good’. But that was enough: that stirred up a bit of controversy.
The other thing I learned to get a band talking was to tell them that you’d heard a rumour that one of them was leaving, or doing a solo album. And sometimes they’d go: ‘How did you know that?’ ‘Oh, just a wild guess.’ But it would get them talking about band dynamics. But I found that, a band like Mud for instance, who were really sweet guys, they were used to churning out these interviews, very pat answers. They weren’t really engaged with the interview process. But if you stopped for a drink with them, after they got this contractual obligation out of the way, I’d start asking them about their early days: anecdotes galore! Fucking brilliant stuff! Les Gray: really a very funny man. So I started to introduce some of those anecdotes to change the shape of the copy that was expected. At first they’d just get cut out, ‘Stick to the news story that you’ve been sent to do.’ So I just started to fracture that as much as I could. And although I hadn’t read Lester Bangs or people like that, I had read Tom Wolfe, and I’d read Hunter S. Thompson. I had an idea of what the new journalism was: contravening traditional journalistic rules about not involving yourself in the story. So I started introducing myself as a character. At first, they were the bits that would be cut. But as I became more successful at that kind of integration, the opportunities opened up. I mean, at that time, I would accept anything they asked me to do. I’d never written before, and I had to learn how to write well and quickly. So ‘I’ll do anybody, just send me out, I’ll do it. I’ll come back and I’ll write it up and see where we go from there.’ And once as the readers’ responses started to come in…
Lou Reed in 1977.
You hit it off with Lou Reed?
How extraordinary was that? I could have wept. I was such a huge, huge Velvets’ fan.
Why do you think he took a shine to you?
When I walked in, with some presence of mind, I pressed record on my tape recorder. And for twenty minutes there was just this torrent of abuse. His first words to me were, ‘Do you know your head is too big for your body?’ And ‘What toilet did Melody Maker find you in, faggot?’ It was effortless on his part. It just went off. But I was just laughing. This was the Lou Reed I wanted. I could feel the piece writing itself. And I thought even if he tells me to fuck off when he’s finished this tirade, I’m gonna have enough to write something.
I then took a breath. And I just said something like, ‘Are you doing this because this is what you think I expected Lou Reed to be like? Or is this you being Lou Reed? Or are you just turning it on because, you know, you think this is how the public want to see you?’ And he thought about that, and he said, ‘Sit down’. So I sat down, and he said, ‘Drink?’, and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, the first of two that we got through that day. I think, because I had a sense of humour, and I wasn’t intimidated by him, he just liked it. And I wasn’t deferential to him, and I think he liked that as well.
And at the end of the interview, when the chief of press came in, Lou said, ‘By the way, book Allan into the hotel I’m staying in in Sweden. You’re coming on the road with me.’ And I thought he’d forget about it, but come the next Tuesday, there was a fucking limo outside my flat, drove me to the airport, got on a flight to Stockholm, there was a car waiting at Stockholm airport, took me straight to the hotel, and Lou is waiting in the lobby, saying, ‘Where have you been?’
What about Van Morrison, whose music you obviously love, but all your encounters with him were ‘difficult’.
Well, the first one especially, it was backstage at Knebworth, not ideal. He’d just come off stage, in a sulky mood. In the end, I just said, ‘Fuck it, man. If you’re not gonna chat, you know, we’re wasting time. I’ve got things to do, you’ve got things to do, I’m gonna leave.’ I was fuming, absolutely fuming. But I must say it never dented my admiration or love for his work. His work transcends any personal faults that he has, and to this day it does.
He is a paranoid fucker.
He’s always been like that. People who know him better than I would will trace it back to the way he was treated in the early part of his career. So comprehensively ripped off that he just hates the music business, which has offered him such success. So I can understand that level of bitterness. But five minutes in the presence of virtually anything that Van’s recorded, and any kind of negative thoughts that I have about him as a person immediately evaporate. I saw four gigs over three months, that they played just after COVID, at the Palladium, Hampton Court, a small Dingwall’s gig he did, and then at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. And he was just incredible each time, absolutely astonishing.
Do you think that there’s a lot of compromise in reviewing now, that rock journalism has become an extension of PR?
Well, I think that is true to a certain extent: it’s certainly not the kind of confrontational journalism that I became attached to. Also, the idea that the writer as a character becomes involved in the story isn’t much encouraged, it seems to me, from current reading of Mojo or Uncut. There seems to be a greater deference to artists these days.
Are there any younger writers now that you particularly like?
I don’t read so much that I could say. But here’s a point that addresses your thinking about the PR nature of it, and the way the writing has changed since my days. I can read a whole issue of Uncut, and if it didn’t have byline names on the page, I wouldn’t really know who had written it. They really are quite interchangeable. There is a template that everybody adheres to. It’s not compromising the features, which are good in themselves. But what I miss is an individual, indeed, an idiosyncratic, voice. It’s just not there. However, there’s a writer in Uncut called Damian Love, who I really, really like – probably because his taste and mine are really similar. And another writer who doesn’t appear as much as he should in Uncut, because he’s got a separate career as a political commentator and broadcaster is Andrew Mueller, who has written a couple of very, very good books – one about his life as a political foreign correspondent, and the other a memoir of his career as a music journalist, including coming over from Australia.
I really enjoyed the books, not just in terms of subject matter, but because they are so funny, especially the way you often describe things in exaggerated terms.
Well, I think that came out of not having any musical training and not knowing anything about musical theory. So I can’t break down a piece of music into something well informed about the actual musical content like, you know, Richard Williams was able to do, in the old Melody Maker.
Did you ever try learning an instrument, or playing?
No. At school – first year, comprehensive – we had to do music as a subject, and apparently to get good grades in that exam you had to play an instrument. And it wasn’t the kind of school where you wanted to be seen carrying a violin. So I thought: what comes in something square that looks like it’s a suitcase? So I ended up supposedly learning the trumpet. But when I went to the first lesson and I just couldn’t a noise out of the fucking thing. I was just blowing and blowing, I believe so hard that I burst a blood vessel in my nose and had to be taken to hospital. So I never went back for the second lesson.
The end of your musical career.
Indeed.
And with that ripping yarn, so characteristic of the man, he’s off for a fun-filled afternoon with his old mucker, B.P. Fallon.
I sat for a while by the gap in the wall
Found a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball
Heard the cards being dealt and the rosary called
And a fiddle playing “Sean Dun Na Ngall” lyrics from ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’ by Shane MacGowan.
I wasn’t close to Shane – celebrity brings an understandable reserve – but he was someone I hung out with in latter years, travelled alongside, and helped take care for a short time.
I have also been told he gave a typically back-handed compliment to an article I wrote describing his last trip to London for the launch of an exhibition of his art work: “God he’s a windbag, but then so was James Joyce.” Needless to say, I am still chuffed. Alas, he was rather less enamoured by my amateurish songwriting – which I recall later in this piece. This at least provides some reassurance that he wouldn’t give a compliment unless he meant it.
Shane MacGowan‘s funeral mass on Friday, December 8 might have re-awakened a Catholic faith in its most ardent opponents, while conservatives regard it as scandalous. Who else could have summoned leading mourners into dancing joyously before the altar, after a sublime ceremony that merged tradition with frivolity, and formality with raucousness? In death, as in life…
Holy Mary Mother of God / pray for us sinners / now until the hour of our death…
In Shane’s mind, Mary was a powerful female icon. A warrior woman, ‘Calming her people’. He was capable of reconciling – as only a poet can – anger at the Church over covering up paedophilia, and what he viewed as a betrayal of the Irish Revolution, with a simple Catholic faith.
As with many second-generation Irish emigrants, Catholicism seemed intrinsic to his identity. Importantly, this was a choice rather than an imposition. However, while his heart throbbed with a paradoxically profane Catholicism, this was not to the exclusion of other faiths and traditions. The array of deities, daemons and angels festooning his mantlepiece suggested syncretic beliefs. Spiritual nourishment was maintained by a steady supply of pre-blessed Eucharists, ferried up from Nenagh. Shane could always get his hands on the best stuff.
Importantly, once the wild touring years with The Pogues had drawn to a close, he decided to move to Ireland to take up residence in his mother Therese’s (née Lynch) ancestral cottage in Carney Commons, County Tipperary.
Having been born in Kent, he could easily have lived out his days in England, mournfully recalling the old country, but Shane remained ‘Loyal, true and faithful’; coming home like a Fenian prisoner ‘From dying in foreign nations’. Even the demise of The Pogues can partly be attributed to his insistent Irishness: creative differences emerged when others in the band, many of them with no Irish background, proposed moving beyond an Irish sound, as the documentary If I Should Fall From the Grace of God – The Shane MacGowan Story reveals.
He returned, as he saw it, to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger was in full roar, restricting the pre-modern society he had encountered as a youth to the margins. It’s fair to say he struggled to reconcile himself to a brash, individualistic and increasingly homogenous society, but never departed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfEuXYpMIYc
Patrician and Spailpín
The Romantic poet W.B. Yeats and the Punk singer Shane MacGowan might be viewed as being at opposite points on a spectrum of Irishness: one epitomising a patrician Anglo-Irish literary tradition; the other a performer representing what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’
Thus, when declaring his will in ‘The Tower‘ (1928), Yeats portentously claimed to be one of the ‘people of [Edmund] Burke and of [Henry] Grattan’. He also scorned ‘Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter’ and the ‘base born products of base beds’ in his valedictory ‘Under Ben Bulben‘ (1928).
In contrast, Shane MacGowan explicitly portrays ‘the slaves that were spat on’ from the Tower in his song – based on personal experience – about rent boys, ‘The Old Main Drag’ where the protagonist is ‘spat on, and shat on and raped and abused’. His oeuvre positively celebrates intoxication and fornication, although he was in many respects even more of a romantic, as tracks such as ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘The Song with No Name’ attest.
I heard Shane express his dislike of the Anglo-Irish poet – although he did record a version of Yeats’s anti-war poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. He preferred the aesthetic of Brendan Behan in particular.
There is, nonetheless, a striking parallel. Both poets while living in London a century apart, consciously embraced their Irishness, which helped each of them develop distinctive voices. Yeats would no longer simply be a Romantic poet in the mould of Wordsworth: he forged a distinctively Irish Romantic tradition. Likewise, MacGowan would no longer be another Punk singer in the shadow of Johnny Rotten: he became an Irish Punk balladeer, and an inspiration to a rising generation of distinctively Irish song-writers.
In his autobiography, Yeats describes walking homesick through Fleet Street in the 1880s and hearing a little tinkle of water, whereupon he saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball on its jet that reminded him of lake water. ‘From that sudden remembrance’, he wrote, ‘came my poem “Inisfree,” my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.’
A body of water provides the title for perhaps MacGowan’s most poetic song, ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which features an aging Irishman dwelling on his youth in County Tipperary after many years of living in London. The rusty tin can and the old hurley ball is Shane recalling his own childhood. It’s a song that also conveys homesickness, joining Shane MacGowan’s soul to the great river of Ireland flowing through Tipperary – where his ashes are to be scattered – just as places in Sligo will forever be identified with Yeats.
Perhaps one day tourists will flock to The MacGowan county, just as they travel from far and wide to The Yeats County.
Protest Song
A few years ago a good friend of Shane’s and I took a song we had composed to him. It was a naive protest song about the government’s inaction on public transport that appropriated a melody from another song about trains popularised by Johnny Cash, called City of New Orleans. I added a few verses in a different key and thought perhaps it could work.
I continue to maintain that my friend’s decision to bellow it a capela was fatal to its reception. A little guitar might have taken the edge off it. In any case, Shane became apoplectic, demanding he stop singing, and immediately identified the source of the melody.
I guess you don’t become one of the leading lyricists in the world without having finely honed critical faculties. Having trawled my hard drive I can find no evidence of the recording I made of it, which is probably for the best!
It would have been nice to sing more songs with Shane, but he seemed depressed a lot of the time, and expressed frustration at a writer’s block that was inhibiting him. At least when we were travelling to London there were a few sing-songs, but it was clear then that the isolation and inactivity of the Covid years had taken a toll.
The scene before the funeral mass of Shane MacGowan in Nenagh.
Regrets
I hung on Shane’s every word, but he wasn’t the easiest of company. At times, I felt awkward about not being able to make out exactly what he was saying. A self-preservation instinct may also have inhibited me from being drawn too closely into his orbit. The atmosphere could be heavy and a bit self-destructive if you weren’t careful.
It wasn’t that he was drunk all the time. As he once put it, tongue-in-cheek, on the Late Late Show when he was interviewed by Pat Kenny: “in England I’d be regarded as an alcoholic but in Ireland I am a sissy drinker”.
He always seemed to have a drink in front of him, but was a sipper, abiding by certain rules agreed with Victoria. As she alluded to in her remarkable eulogy at the funeral, there are lessons on addiction to be drawn from Shane’s example.
Being drunk – playing the fool – might also have been part of Shane’s public persona. Exhibiting intoxication could also mask the insecurities of a savant or autodidact, who was expelled from school in his early teens. His reading and creativity were haphazard and unsystematic, and worn lightly. I suspect he would have been intimidated by haughty scholars interrogating his work.
Shane spent most of his final months in hospital, but I didn’t feel up to visiting him as my own father had passed away in the same hospital the year before. Anyway, I had the impression that a steady stream of friends and admirers were at hand.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
The music I am performing at the moment mostly came from three different sets of songs that I began writing in 2018. The first batch I wrote when I was living in a small cabin my dad built near my family home in Donegal.
At the time, I felt the songs come to me and I just wrote them down. I never experienced songwriting like that before. I did write in my early twenties, but It felt different with these songs.
Since then, another batch of songs came to me in 2020 just after Covid hit. I realised that each set of songs felt that they had their own colours. The early batch felt black with bits of white. So I refer to them as the black and white songs. The songs that arrived in May of 2020 are mostly orange and my most recent songs have mostly been pink. I’ve got lots of pink songs.
Sharing Music
I never meant to share my music with others in the way that I am now. I was quite wary of doing so for a long time. If I shared them it was just for the fun of playing and experimenting with friends.
There are two acts that currently inspire me to write and perform my music to others – Rónán Ó Snodaigh and Shakalak.
At the moment I feel particularly moved by live music and feel very lucky that my favourite acts are Irish. When I go and see Rónán or Shakalak perform I want to go straight home afterwards and make something new to share. They make me feel like strengthening my inner voice and using it more.
Their example shows how transformative live music can be and each time I’ve heard them perform I feel that I have learnt something new about myself or about the world we’re in. They remind me that music can bring us closer together. That we are all going through similar things in different ways, and we can relate to each other through our art. They continuously inspire me to bring what I have inside of me out into the world.
Returning to Dublin
When I came to Dublin in 2018 – having spent two years in Donegal – I began playing my music at open mic nights in the city. This helped me to integrate back into city life. I didn’t realise it would take a while for Dublin to feel like a home again.
Playing in venues helped me connect with others and so began the feeling of community. One of the most valuable rewards of playing music has been witnessing the community that comes with it and watching that community grow. I have got to meet so many beautiful people and feel genuinely supported and encouraged by them.
During Covid – whenever it was possible to do so – I began to play my orange tunes with a talented and intuitive drummer, Jason McNamara. Last year I was granted an Agility Award and with it I wrote more pink tunes.
It was strange for me to sit down and say “ok, I need to write some songs” because prior to this the songs came about very naturally. It worked out though, and I’m currently enjoying hearing these songs grow legs and arms and gain a life of their own on the stage.
Self-Expression
Rather than pursuing music as a career, I have always just been interested in music as a way to express myself. It’s an art form for me. I feel I get to see myself grow through making art in ways that I might not find the space for in day-to-day life.
Performing live is what I enjoy most. I did a small bit of work in theatre in the past and loved that a play would be this live, living and breathing thing for a little while.
It existed just for the people who showed up to see it and then it would be gone. I often feel that my music was written as if it were made for the theatre stage.
For years I have played music on the street for fun, and for experience. There, I learned how to project my voice; perform with confidence; receive a compliment; to be rejected; experiment with other artists; and connect with all kinds of people. A lot of my own music would have debuted on the streets of Dublin.
Image: Daniele Idini
On the Liffey
Once Covid ended I started to make changes that meant I was playing my music to others quite frequently. In 2022 I was offered a beautiful gig that runs in the summer called ‘Music under the bridges’ by a company called City Kayaking.
The gig usually starts under Capel Street Bridge where a group of people on kayaks gather to listen to a musician sitting on a little dingy under the bridge. The setting is just beautiful and different every time. Nature dictates the stage. Sometimes bringing sunlight that hits off the water and projects on to the arches. Sometimes you might catch a seal listening in. It’s magic no matter what the weather is like.
The very kind and lovely thing about this company is that they hire artists to play their original music, which meant that I was suddenly playing my music to an audience on a weekly basis.
From playing on the Liffey, things seemed to progress like a rolling stone. Next, I found myself playing at mini festivals and events in the city and beyond.
I started to meet more artists and felt inspired to continue to create and find more ways to spend my time playing music in my days.
At the beginning of this year I was introduced to the opportunity of playing music in nursing homes which I still do now on a regular basis. I was delighted to stumble into this area. It’s really grounding and the exchange with the people there can be very rewarding.
At the moment I am considering some projects for 2024. I have a little studio in the city centre that I work away in. I haven’t recorded a lot of music yet since I’ve been more interested in performing live, but It seems it might be a next step for me.
There’s talk of collaborating with an artist to make a music video for my song ‘Paper Thin Woman’ which would be magic! I’m starting to play with a wonderful bass player now as well as Jason on drums. This is new and exciting territory for me. I look forward to the adventure ahead!
I grew up in Walthamstow, London listening to my Dad play finger-picking folk covers on the guitar and banjo and to my Mum’s very small record collection which we would play on repeat and dance around to in the lounge. I especially remember The Seven Drunken Nights by the Dubliners which me and my sister found an absolute gas to sing along to. I didn’t learn to play instruments as a child, I wasn’t allowed to play my Dad’s and he never taught me per se, but hearing him sing and play and look so happy put the music in my bones.
In 2002 I went to drama school and went on to sing in plenty of theatre shows during my acting career. One of the highlights was a cute children’s show for which Kerry Andrew wrote the music. She has been a dear friend and collaborator ever since.
In 2013 I went on a world tour of 1927’s production of The Animals and Children Took To The Streets. It was an amazing show, a fabulous experience as we toured twenty-one countries in eleven months. But I was bored creatively. I felt like a puppet performing someone else’s work and my soul was calling for more. So I decided to write a song in every country with no expectation of the outcome. At the end of that tour I decided to leave acting and focus on music. I took a three month songwriting sabbatical, picked up a guitar and taught myself how to play and went to release my first EP “Catch Me” in 2015 which contains five songs written on the world tour. This is the title track written in midsummer in St Petersburg.
I then went on to learn piano and built a band around the music and released my first album ‘Glenaphuca”, which spoke of my call to Ireland to embrace the Irish part of my heritage. This is the first song on that album.
Right now, on the first day of November 2023, I sit on the cusp of the launch of my sophomore album “HOME”, which is out in two weeks. It has been a deep dive into healing the legacy of pain and shame that I inherited from my female ancestors here in Cork. The album sheds light on a dark past of institutional incarceration, delicately transformed into a collection of beautiful songs. It is my intention that “HOME” holds the power to heal the wounds of the past and inspire future generations to live without fear.
The songs are a mixture of ethereal folk ballads, rousing anthemic tunes, traditional folk song from Ireland and the UK, a touch of blues and a stirring a-Capella choral finale called Ancestors. I was so lucky to have my pals Kerry Andrew, Ben See, Sarah Dacey, Essa Flett, Justin Ground, Brén Ó Rúaidh, Ellis Kerkhoven and MaJiKer sing this song with me.
I’m about to go on tour in Ireland with the album starting at Whelan’s in Dublin, which I am super excited about, then onto Cill Rialiagin Kerry, before returning home to Cork for two fabulous dates at Sirius Arts Centre and The Oar.
In the new year I will head back to my studio to start birthing the third album. I love winter. I find the stillness and darkness supportive of creative work. In my songwriting phases I like to section my day into little bursts of activity, something like; thirty minutes of songwriting, thirty minutes of classical guitar, fifteen minutes of piano scales, dance for three songs, fifteen minutes of clearing out old audio, then another thirty minutes of songwriting, play five songs, go for a walk, thirty minutes of songwriting and repeat.
If I have a song coming through, I could easily spend the whole day working on it and do nothing else, but a regular practice keeps me steady and in flow. And when a song is coming through I just have to honour that or else I may miss it. It is like catching a wave. So I could literally be swimming in the sea and a song lands in me, so I’d have to jump out and get it down on my voice memos.
Next year I hope to get a bit more independent and capable at recording my own material at home. I’m looking forward to that a lot. And I’ve just bought a lush Stratocaster which I’m gonna throw my fingers into next year.
As we witness the barbaric bombing of Gaza by Israel, and as the deaths and horrific injuries of civilian men, women and children rise exponentially, it is necessary to ask: who (apart from the Israeli government) is behind this murderous campaign?
Over decades the United States has liked to portray itself as an honest broker in an intractable conflict between Muslims and Jews, or Palestinians and Israelis.
Nerguizian emphasizes that the current deployment is ‘not intended to be used in an offensive role.’ However, he acknowledges that this could change quickly if Israel finds itself in a ‘total, 360-degree conflict’.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank illegal Israeli settlers have increased their attacks on isolated defenceless Palestinian villages, murdering one farmer collecting his olive harvest and leaving leaflets on cars and bloodied dolls at schools, warning Palestiniansto leave or be killed. We appear to be witnessing a third wave of expulsions, following in the footsteps of 1948 and 1967.
Indeed, even the New York Times is reporting that attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are surging. At least 115 have been killed, more than 2,000 have been injured and nearly 1,000 others have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of violence and intimidation by Israeli forces and settlers since Hamas’s attacked Israel on October 7, according the United Nations.
America does not only give Israel political cover in the United Nations, it is also continuing to supply them with weapons of mass destruction. Along with the British and the French, the United States appears to be playing a more active role in this conflict.
With stalemate in Ukraine, it seems that the U.S.-led NATO alliance is determined not to see an ally lose in Gaza. We can only speculate as to why this is happening, but Joe Biden has repeatedly stated ‘If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to protect our interests in the region’. Israel’s war on Gaza acts as a veiled threat to any nation considering joining a fledgling multi-polar world order.
Many Israelis want to expel Gazans into the Sinai in Egypt and West Bank residents into Jordan to complete the Zionist dream of conquering all of Palestine and expelling its inhabitants.
The current Israeli government that includes far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir may not stop at that, as the illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights and Lebanese Sheba Farms testifies to the endurance of a Greater Israel project, coveting lands much larger than those currently occupied.
Palestinians, however, will not go meekly into the night. Many would rather die than allow another Nakba to take place.
While parents write their children’s names on their bodies so they can be identified in the event of their being slaughtered by American munitions, and as people collect body parts of the dismembered dead around the blast sites, we can only imagine the despair felt by 2.2 million people hopelessly corralled into an area of just 365 square kilometres.
It seems as if Israel is hoping to occupy Northern Gaza and then expel the refugees into Egypt in a campaign of ethnic cleansing seemingly supported by the U.S., its main NATO allies and the European Commission.
Of course, it was Britain that created the problem with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, along with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 between Britain and France envisaging the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
The current turmoil in the Middle East may be traced to the British and French policy of divide and conquer, a tactic subsequently employed by the U.S..
Perhaps, it is not the words of their enemies but the silence of their friends that Gazans may remember after the deluge – at least those lucky enough to survive.
When the day becomes the night and the sky becomes the sea, when the clock strikes heavy and there’s no time for tea; and in our darkest hour, before my final rhyme, she will come back home to Wonderland and turn back the hands of time. The Cheshire Cat.
There are very good reasons why bathrooms are located at a remove from the dinner table: one should never defecate in the place where one eats. A barrister reminded me of this old adage one evening at dinner after I had bemoaned Ireland’s corrupt medico-legal system wherein plaintiffs (or more often their solicitors) pay their GPs handsomely to write medical reports for insurance claims. I’m sure my barrister friend would agree, however, that when the dining room has depreciated into the vandalised shell of an old tenement; it will inevitably become prone to unhygienic and antisocial usage.
No doubt it will surprise some to read of a GP complaining about General Practice and biting the proverbial hand that feeds. However, my position within the establishment is ‘as safe as houses’ after my criticism of Covid policy and the role many of my colleagues played during the pandemic. This led to me closing my practice in North Dublin, having resigned my appointment to the Medical Council in 2020.
I was subsequently placed under investigation for attending a public rally against lockdowns, and soon (three years later) the Medical Council is to decide upon my punishment, and that of the other doctors who failed in their duty to promote, unquestioningly, Government policy. Apparently, we were more influential and more of a danger to people than the Taoiseach or the TDs and judges in attendance at ‘Golf Gate’, ‘Party Gate’ and ‘Concert Gate’ etc.
Today I have little invested in General Practice. In truth I have come to see it as a social ill rather than an overall benefit to society. I knew it was unwell prior to Covid, I had taken up my Ministerial appointment to the Council in 2018 in the vain hope of changing it. My experience and the silence of so many colleagues during the Covid years, suggests to me that the illness may be terminal. Its pathology is genetic and runs much deeper than the financial incentive brought to bear on General Practice throughout the pandemic.
Myself and other Covid policy critics, have little left to lose, other than our licences, and a shared sense of disappointment in our profession. Realistically, I feel that disappointment could only be lifted by an unlikely paradigm shift; as such it will probably stay with us until the end. Having adhered to the Covid guidelines, yet being entirely guilty of the ‘crimes’, hopefully we will hold onto our licences and continue to be able to make a living. There are no guarantees. The establishment remains angered by dissent, and can be brutally vindictive when it wishes.
Medicine is sometimes described as something of an ego trip. I have to admit that on occasion it has become one for me, but not in the manner you might think. What I mean by ego trip is that lately, should I glance at headlines on the shelves, or overhear the radio as I push my trolley down the supermarket aisles, I find myself nodding and even chuckling quietly to myself.
The truth in respect of the Covid years remains as politically toxic as any virus. Occasionally however, it leaks into the air in flatulent forms of ‘I told you so’. I’m not alone in this mad little trip, the few doctors who spoke up against; nursing home deaths, masks, lockdowns and compulsory vaccines, also share in this little Pyrrhic victory.
We continue to be gagged, pursued by a certain cabal who pull the strings from within the medical establishment. Excess deaths, missed cancers, suicides and vaccine related injuries cannot remain concealed indefinitely. To coin a hopeful phrase from the current ascendancy ‘tiocfaidh ár lá’. Given the hitherto impossibility of their day ever coming (as it might at the next General Election); so too might we hope that ‘our day will come’.
In the Rare Auld Times
I have been practising as a GP for more than twenty years, and regardless of current trends in a more progressive parlance, I don’t mind expressing a fondness for things like community, traditions, or even the old-fashioned notion of ‘the Family Doctor’. Some things are not ‘old fashioned’ at all. That’s just a term that is applied in the pejorative, for particular motives.
In the olden-days (whenever they were), a reference to ‘years as a Doctor’, might have scooped some credibility from the idea that the longer one has practised at something, the better one performs in the role. Like poker or potty-training, practice means you are more likely to win, and less likely to ruin the carpet.
Today, with the exception of less technologically dependent skills, like piano or pottery, the longer one has practised, the more likely one is to be outdated; married to ‘old fashioned’ or ‘primitive’ methods.
Technology has become synonymous with progress towards the good. For many people, it has made the GP as redundant as the old notion of growing your own vegetables. In today’s world of instant food and information, people rarely visit the GP to dig up an ‘expert opinion’. Everybody’s got one of those – either in their head or at their fingertips. Many patients have already self-diagnosed, long before they’ve reached the waiting room. What they need is a signature, a scan, a test, a vaccine, or the usual panacea of the antibiotic. Augmentin has become a household brand-name, all too often (I am told) it is ‘the only one that works’.
It is an important and relatively recent development in medicine that there is no longer a distinction between what we ‘want’ and what we ‘need’. The distinction remains a valid one, but there are few people we can trust to make it for us. Most antibiotics prescribed in General Practice are prescribed inappropriately, and more often, solely on the basis of demand.
The internet has turned medicine into something of an amateur sport, one that everyone has a duty to participate in. I often hear people in the shops or passers-by on the pavement, applying diagnoses and medical terminology as though they were talking about cooking. Most people, with a rudimentary education, presume to know as much about a particular disease as the average GP. Often (but not always) the presumption is not too far off the mark.
The General Practitioner, despite his oxymoronic designation as a ‘specialist’, has become a somewhat self-conscious ‘jack of all trades’; anxious to avoid complaints and keep his dwindling supply of private customers happy as Larry. Being an expert on nothing, he can be challenged on almost everything, except maybe golf or football?
He does, however, remain slightly relevant to the average family as a sort of ‘medical handyman’; useful in the confirmation of a diagnosis, the issuing of prescriptions, or stamping forms. He’s not a real plumber or electrician, of course, but he can usually put you in touch with one and ‘get the ball rolling’ so to speak.
The erosion of his standing within society may have added to his insecurity. Lately he must increasingly rely upon the government to validate his existence and to mandate the attendance and the dependence of his flock.
By Trade I was a Cooper
Present company excluded, GPs are (generally speaking) not stupid people, we are at least educated, and some (among the old-fashioned ones at least) might even supplement their phone usage with an occasional book.
Many in the profession are not oblivious to the technological annexation of the lands that once belonged to the General Practitioner. Video and phone consultations are a cheaper and more accessible alternative to a waiting-room full of germs and viral pathogens. These types of consultations were becoming the ‘new-norm’, long before the current ‘new-norm’ replaced the older one.
Impending social irrelevance is a bitter pill for any professional, but we humans are a resilient lot. When plastics and Tupperware made the tinkering of the travelling community redundant, they wisely moved into tarmacadam and power tools.
Equally, General Practice must evolve as it struggles with its own increasing redundancy. During the pandemic, when the government invited GPs to an orgy of self-validation; saving the nation with a dirty cloth-mask and a syringe full of experimental vaccine; few of my colleagues asked any questions at all.
Few resisted the temptation of becoming a ‘hero without a cape’. Fewer still were impervious to the largess and financial incentive, associated with logic-defying Covid Policies. Even the then Taoiseach Dr Varadkar, cashed in on the kudos. He rejoined the Medical Register, and flew to Halting Sites to test the travelling community. What a tragedy it took a pandemic for a Taoiseach to fly to a halting site.
On the Corruption of the Youth
Lately, when I work at the out-of-hours service in Dublin, I do so in the company of a junior Doctor; a GP registrar whom I am supposed to supervise and teach for the duration of my shift. They are fortunate enough when assigned to me, as I hardly know enough to practise medicine, never mind teach it to anyone.
When I chat with these ‘newbies’ I am always surprised at the level of uncertainty they express in respect of their approaching identity as a fully qualified GP. In real terms what does that actually mean anymore? Most of them tell me they are seeking a ‘work life balance’, something very much at odds with the stubbornly persistent notion of what a family Doctor actually is, or perhaps was. A doctor who knows his patients and their families by name? Someone with a small efficient surgery in the heart of a community; a clinic where wounds are sutured, and lumps and bumps are removed or biopsied? Someone who does house calls, and stays for a cup of tea after the final palliative visit to the mum or dad who has just passed away?
Or is the modern GP a youthful, tech-savvy doctor in a hospital scrub top? Someone who works three days per week at a large office block with a shiny glass frontage? A reticent and cautious professional type, who refers the dying to the palliative care team, house calls to the out of hours service, and anything requiring intervention to the relevant ‘specialist’ at the hospital?
The former is an endangered species, confined to the fringes of rural Ireland.
The latter, the GP who works on contract at the busy clinic with the impenetrable waiting list, and the unfriendly receptionist, he or she has become the aspiration and practical or empirical reality.
Woke up one morning, looked out the window and I struggled for something to say, but you, you left me, just when I needed you most. Randy VanWarmer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u06A-77TN4
Not so long ago, my daughter interrupted some sage medical advice I was attempting to cast at her feet, by cooly stating: ‘Dad, who needs a GP when you have a smartphone?’ Her generation is an increasingly rare occurrence in the waiting room. Young adults have replaced most of what’s on offer at the GP, with a faster and cheaper consultation with Siri, Google, or Chat GPT.
Pharmacists issue medical advice, along with; contraceptives, skin care, and a host of over the counter remedies for common ills. Alcohol, Red Bull, illicit drugs, and street-Xanax are self-applied to a real epidemic, currently plaguing a generation. That hidden disease of mental illness and drug dependence is managed by parents and barely registers on the busy radar of Irish General Practice.
Young adults and teenagers have voted with their feet, unless they need a cert for school or for social welfare payments. The disengagement of young people (if they were ever engaged in the first place) is perhaps one of the sadder realities of General Practice. Arguably they are the cohort most in need of help in coping with; the porn, the drugs, the pressure, and the paradox of choice they must navigate alone, with a smartphone.
At one extreme we have the absence (or abstention) of young people, at the other extreme we have the professional neglect of elderly people within the Nursing Homes. The space between these two demographics, contains some of the abysmal failures of General Practice as it exists today and that is to say nothing of the unique needs of a diverse immigrant population, one that GP’s are neither trained nor even encouraged to understand.
What if the pharmacist could stamp forms or if patients could vouch for their own sick leave? Or if they could simply refer themselves for a routine blood test, or an appointment to see a consultant (as private patients often do); General Practice would be about as socially relevant as tits on a bull. If a couple of antibiotics were available over the counter (as they are in many countries), the meteor would impact and the dinosaurs would shuffle on towards oblivion.
Arguably there is precious little that an average GP can or will do in the community that a competent Nurse could not accomplish quickly and efficiently. Today, almost all minor surgical procedures are referred into queues at the major hospitals. In north Dublin the Out of Hours Service will neither suture a wound nor syringe an ear, which seem to be risky interventions in these litigious times. Almost everything nowadays is referred to a ‘real doctor’ at the hospital.
Ironically, the burgeoning bureaucracy of forms is not the bane of General Practice, it has become the umbilicus. A newly qualified GP can be as competent as he likes in respect of medicine yet, if he does not know how to use the practice software, to tick boxes and lodge claims for a myriad of HSE chronic-care payments, he or she is essentially unemployable.
The traditional mythology surrounding General Practice, the institution’s relationship with the HSE, all mean that like the banks, it is ‘too big to fail’. For example, the training body responsible for the production of new GPs (the ICGP) has complex ties with, and is paid by the HSE.
Like a recruiting agency, it supplies them with Doctors, who fill unattractive hospital posts around the country, as part of their ‘training’. These trainee GPs are also farmed out to provide free labour for select GPs around the country, whilst both the trainee and the ICGP are paid by the HSE. The ICGP is one of those illustrious quangos we Irish are in love with; a ‘registered charity’ with freebies for friends and financial investments as far afield as Saudi Arabia. Colleges and ‘non-profit’ medical organisations like the ICGP and the RCSI., pay no taxes, they share the spoils out in the form of benevolence, salaries and expense accounts.
The entire system of medical training in Ireland is defined by deeply embedded and legitimate forms of nepotism and corruption. Beaumont Hospital freely provides almost everything from patients and teachers to the toilet paper, for the Royal College of Surgeons. The College is a private medical school and it charges students up to €58 thousand per year in tuition for the six year course, three years of which are conducted at Beaumont Hospital. Bizarrely (or perhaps not) this private medical college is sustained by the largest ‘public’ hospital in the country.
Consultant Professors of this and that, can hardly find time to attend to surgeries or public clinics. They are often busy down the hall, at another theatre, lecturing to Saudi Princes and Emirs from Kuwait.
The RCSI (another registered charity), owns and operates a second Private Medical School in Bahrain, where it offers private medical training to Canadian and American Medical Students, for around €44 thousand per annum for the six year degree.
The Taoiseach’s leaking of contractual negotiations between the HSE and one of the rival GP organisations, is merely the tip of just one iceberg that has recently floated by. Off to melt away in warmer waters; like the long-forgotten intrigues and scandals at the IMO another quango who’s last CEO retired amid a teacup of controversy with a pension of ten million euro.
Medicine in Ireland, particularly medical training might well be described as a fermenting vat of rot. We have no swamp; the water is too putrid for any genuine forms of life, reptilian or otherwise.
The drugs don’t work, they just make you worse… Richard Ashcroft
The vast majority of medicines consumed in Ireland are prescriptions issued by General Practitioners. The Pharmaceutical industry from the local Pharmacist to Pfizer itself, depends on GPs for those scripts. A need that is more prescient and influential than those of any particular patient cohort.
This year, circa two billion euro in Exchequer funding was paid to a few pharma companies in return for drugs covered by the medical card scheme. That sum could be more than halved if a National Formulary of prescription drugs was put up for tender each year, as is the case in other countries like New Zealand for example.
Pharmaceutical lobbying, however, discreetly maintains the status quo. In Ireland corporate lobbying will hardly be investigated by a mainstream media, dependent upon corporate payments for advertising revenues and the salaries of A-list celebrities. The general acceptance of corporate influence over the state broadcaster suggests that most Irish people think ‘lobbying’ is something that might pertain to Wimbledon or tennis.
A prescription is often the most efficient way to end a consultation, it does not cost the Doctor a thought because they do not cost him a penny. In Irish Nursing Homes most residents have an extended shopping list of pointless medications, the phenomenon is referred to as ‘polypharmacy’. Many of the frail and emaciated are taking statins, in order to keep their cholesterol down; it’s a little bit like putting famine victims on diet pills. Sleeping pills, sedatives and expensive food supplements to compensate for an unpalatable diet of gruel are the norm for many.
As a consequence of being interlaced with a political and pharmaceutical agenda, and in abeyance to a certain type of mythology associated with the family doctor; Government underwrites General Practice to the extent that it consumes as much, if not more exchequer funding, than the entire Public Hospital system. Last year it cost four billion Euro to pay for GPs and Medical Card Prescriptions, an increase of 49% since 2016.
General Practice is a little bit like a religion in that it is sustained by some established patriarchal ideals. The notion of ‘doctor knows best’ or ‘just what the doctor ordered’ etc., is possibly more embedded in post-colonial or post Catholic societies.
Following the collapse of the Church in Ireland, the GP has become something of alocum tenens, for the parish priest. His is an ‘evidenced based’ religion, one that promises a healthy life; in place of the immodest and unsubstantiated offer of an everlasting one.
Despite a paucity of practical reasons for its preservation, General Practice is nonetheless sustained by popular demand, as a kind of impractical luxury. Like paying rent for a Lamborghini when a bicycle would be overkill. It is difficult to know whether the costly underwriting is motivated by the mythology; or whether it is mandated by the institution or the many others who gorge themselves upon a Health budget that knows no limits.
Church & State
The political preservation of General Practice is accomplished in several ways. You can be as sick as you like, but you will only get paid once the GP signs the IB1 form. Ironically if you are in hospital, a hospital Doctor will give you an IB1 form that you must then bring to your GP and pay for the pleasure of his or her signature.
GPs are responsible for the care of every elderly resident within the depressing environs of the Nursing Home Sector. In Ireland a Nursing Home can neither open nor operate without the supervision of a registered GP, a supervision that is at best light-touch, but is heavily paid for.
Illness benefit, driving licences, passports, nursing homes, access to the public hospital system, to the Emergency Department etc etc., are all stamped and signed by General Practice. These are the lands that belong to a post-colonial landlord, one who operates behind the general facade of a liberated Ireland.
Pharmaceutical companies have an ever increasing need for community GPs to push an agenda of pharmaceutical dependence upon the entire population. Arguably this agenda has gone unchecked for over half a century. Pharma companies provide jobs in Ireland and advertising revenues for the mainstream media, they should never be questioned; and so the executive board of the HPRA is dominated by ex-pharma employees.
Opiate dependence is barely a scratch on the surface; antidepressants, benzodiazepines, Lyrica, statins, antibiotics and polypharmacy in the elderly are more disturbing realities. Each of them are lucrative social tragedies, rarely spoken of in public. Like excess mortality or vaccine-related injuries they are confined to the realm of ‘conspiracy’.
Learned and encouraged helplessness within Irish society in respect of basic health, fear mongering by pharma and state agencies in the guise of various ‘health promotion’ campaigns, means that there will always be the need for a Doctor in the community; one who is almost as skilled as a Nurse, but has all the power and influence of a mafia boss.
I just checked in to see what condition my condition was in. Kenny Rogers
Thirty years ago when I began to study medicine there was this crazy notion that Doctors would ‘cure’ or ‘fight’ disease, whenever possible. That same general expectation of ‘cure’ has all but disappeared from the everyday language of modern medicine. It is no longer expected of the GP to cure, or even to attempt to do so. Long-term illness and ‘chronic management schemes’ have become the ‘ne plus ultra’.
Ironically, apart from cancer, the biggest killers in Ireland are indeed curable diseases; heart disease, type 2 Diabetes, vascular disease, obesity, depression etc. In recent years all of these conditions have evolved to be considered solely in the context of ‘chronic disease management’, associated with chronically diseased payments.
The gaping irony hardly registers. When I mention it to the trainees they return a blank confused expression, as though I were suggesting something possible and impossible at the same time. There is no space within the establishment to discuss the question as to how or why GPs have become facilitators instead of healers? This is another conversation generally confined to the realm of conspiracy.
In Ireland today illness is managed, no differently to a business, wherein profit is the bottom line. Tellingly, amid the mind-boggling array of payment types issued from the HSE to GPs, there is not a single payment or financial incentive in respect of ‘curing’ anything at all, never mind any of the curable diseases that actually kill most people.
In New Zealand, where I completed my GP training some years ago, GPs were actually paid a bonus if their prescribing of antibiotics remained below the national average. Most disease was treated (and often cured) within the community setting. In Irish General Practice ‘cure’ has become an anathema and disease has become our raison d’être.
Image Daniele Idini.
Halcyon Days
Any real or practical value that the GP brings to public health is (or was once) contingent upon the fading reality of the somewhat old-fashioned ‘Family Doctor’. That GP was (and occasionally is) part of a community of people living in close physical (as opposed to digital) proximity. People who are mutually dependent upon each other and the community, in small but positive ways. In the modern world of sprawling high-density estates, the notion of collective, integrative and supportive communities, is becoming little more than a sound-bite that estate agents use to sell houses.
There was once a time when the GP knew all or most of his patients very well. That knowledge was an essential and fundamental clinical tool, as important as the stethoscope, and impossible to replicate through any amount of technology. It was that intimate knowledge that would often determine an intervention, and whether a referral to the specialist was immediately necessary, or necessary at all.
Outside of the paperwork, most presentations in General Practice are motivated by some form of anxiety or worry. Intimate knowledge in respect of the family and the individual often allows the GP to distinguish between anxiety and pathophysiology.
Sometimes he might have got it wrong, but more often, he or she was in the right place. This lack of distinction or inability to distinguish between anxiety and physical pathology, is one of the things that annually overwhelms the health service. It is almost never discussed and is expressed regularly in the unintelligent language of a: ‘shortage of hospital beds’ and a ‘shortage of doctors’. We may not have a shortage of Doctors, rather than a genuine shortage of doctors who know their patients well, or know their patients at all.
The Doctor’s sometimes sage advice was an imperfect thing, derived from his unique knowledge of the person, from a love of learning and an understanding of science. He was also the victim and the enforcer of a particular zeitgeist and strict social paradigm; that aspect of medicine has never changed.
Although it remains a rather lucrative enterprise to have one’s HSE-income, and share it with no one; single handed practice is taxed with an unhealthy level of responsibility. No newly qualified GP would dream of setting up alone in today’s Ireland. Few, if any, single-handed practitioners could provide the type of service that people now expect. Sole practice was the first limb of the cat to vanish. The once ubiquitous ‘walk-in’ surgery once had a financial incentive, supposedly socialist medicine however is strictly by an appointment, generally for sometime next week.
Working for the Man
Presently in Ireland a couple of large corporate entities are hoovering up what remains of the small suburban practices or those rural practices with profitable lists of Medical Card holders. These companies will buy a practice and keep the principal GP on as a paid employee in order to control his Medical Card list.
For the most part, newly emerging GPs know nothing of the ‘halcyon days’, and are generally happy to start working for ‘the man’. They cannot be accused of selling their souls to the devil. In contemporary General Practice there is no place for old-fashioned things like souls, despite the overabundance of devils.
Such corporations pay 12.5% in corporation tax; yet when I had my own practice I paid 52%; the profit margins are a no-brainer. They will then harvest the greatest possible return from the various Medical Card payments, and chronic disease schemes. They can afford to pay GPs good salaries, and hire a minimum number to do the husbandry. This type of corporate General Practice is entirely unregulated in respect of the service it provides (or doesn’t provide) for patients.
These profit driven behemoths are presumed to function in the same way as the traditional Family Doctor. For the most part they are left to their own devices, sucking up a maximum amount of HSE payments and returning a token level of care. They conceal the inadequate service behind a rigid appointment system that keeps patients waiting, the workload at sustainable level, and profit margins as high as possible.
For all their faults these centres are the inevitable future for General Practice, they are what people think they want, and what politicians are eager to give them.
To interface with this industrial model, patients must increasingly learn to translate all of their pain into the unaccommodating language of medical pathology; human beings and their emotional realities become invisible and entirely medicalised. Deeper truths behind the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that are an increasing part of everyday life for all of us, evade this more sophisticated model of Primary Care. The emergent mystery becomes just another number on another waiting list.
Of Human Bondage
In my early twenties after reading Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, I thought about becoming a Doctor. I didn’t especially want to help people, but I wanted to be in a position whereby I could help them if I wished.
I might have wanted to ‘help people’ in some vague way, but I wanted to help myself first. For a time I probably translated this notion into the more noble expression that many of my colleagues prefer to cling to. It is refreshing to hear honest medical motives expressed in the more acceptable language of a ‘work life balance’.
Maugham’s novel is about all kinds of bondage, the one I wished to liberate myself from was poverty. Medicine has at least afforded me that compensation for the small price of my soul and at times my sanity. I never imagined that I would come to see the career itself as a kind of bondage; a darkening cave wherein we can no longer see the chains or the flickering shadows on the wall.
Many Doctors know there is no need for the antibiotic, no need for the hospital referral, the scope or the scan, and yet we increasingly act according to our own benefit, or that of our employers. Convenience and fear of complaint are the other silent incentives.
In Ireland and abroad, private obstetric care is more likely to result in a caesarean section, and a child with private health insurance is more likely to end up with grommets or a tonsillectomy. Medicine has always been an uncomfortable marriage between profit and compassion. Lately it seems that profit has separated, and is suing for divorce as well as damages.
Image Daniele Idini.
Hope Deferred?
Perhaps the only thing worth saving in General Practice – the most beautiful and essential thing – is the thing that has almost disappeared; the unique nature of the relationship between the family Doctor and the families who attend him or her.
That ‘thing’ is something many people may have once enjoyed and may still enjoy with some ‘old-fashioned’ GPs. It is the thing that saved many lives during the Pandemic, more so than; masks, vaccines or spending ten euro on a pint and a sandwich.
Any future validity for General Practice would be contingent upon training GPs properly, educating them (and patients) to participate in that old partnership in an honest and meaningful way. For the moment however, the relationship is broken. The modern GP is not trusted in the manner that the family doctor once was, and he is wary of his patients or views them solely as a means to a private end. The problem is a million light years away from medical schools, training bodies or public health campaigns, all of whom have their heads in the trough.
Before former Health Minister Mary Harney reformed the Medical Council in 2007, into a weapon for the indignant and a cosy club for political appointments; the family doctor might have been a man or woman with an honest opinion in respect of your health.
An opinion that you could take or leave as you saw fit. Presently, Doctors are not trained to be honest or even candid with patients, quite the contrary in fact. Candidness was something that was permitted years ago. Often (but not always), it was a good and a welcome kind of honesty. The GP had the ‘power’ to tell you that you were ‘too fat’, ‘overly anxious’ or that you didn’t need to be immediately referred for a battery of tests or scans on demand. The GP was frank, candid and honest, and was even expected to be so. Some Doctors and GPs were lazy in their old-fashioned power, and things were sometimes missed, like cancers and physical disease. People were sometimes abused with insensitive words or beaten with the religious paradigm of the day.
Today it is increasingly rare (if not impossible) to encounter a GP who would be willing to run the gauntlet of refusing a test or having a frank conversation with the newly emancipated patient turned consumer. Training bodies and the Medical Council indirectly insist upon an obsequious dishonesty as the gold standard. They advise Doctors to give ‘back pocket’ prescriptions, a euphemism for the unnecessary antibiotic on demand. Happy customers are presumed to equate with healthy patients. The universal goal is a consumer, pleased with the product they have purchased, or recently become entitled to.
A GP might be sanctioned for using the word ‘fat’ inappropriately, and yet he or she will be rewarded in various ways should he provide an inappropriate prescription for a trendy weight loss injection; a diabetic drug currently in short supply as it is being over prescribed in the community for cosmetic purposes.
As an institution, General Practice thrives upon; ignorance, compliance and government subsidy. Most consultations in primary care amount to a waste of time in respect of public health or genuine pathology. An increasing majority attend the GP simply because they have to, or because they have been encouraged or allowed themselves to become prescription drug addicts.
Sometimes, disease becomes an identity; a form of socially sanctioned escape from an unpleasant and painful life. Illness is very often the veil that is worn to conceal a deeper unhappiness. Often, chronic illness becomes a persona with a social and financial incentive, one that can be as alluring and addictive as any drug.
In my own experience far too many ‘sick’ people are simply very unhappy. General Practice in its current form is utterly ill-equipped to deal with, or even to recognise the unhappiness or anxiety that is its principal presentation.
Increasingly, during my years in clinical practice, I found that telling a patient that they are ‘normal’ or that they have ‘normal results’ can cause a kind of disappointment. For some people, telling them they are normal is like denying their pain, barring them from Kafka’s Castle, refusing them a diagnosis and an entry into the legitimate world of the sick.
Image: Daniele Idini
To Italy
“Are you the farmer? We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”
‘Withnail and I’
In many countries the expensive appendage of General Practice has already disappeared. Outside of the catchment area of ‘old victorian ways’, one attends an accident-clinic in the event of an accident, and almost everything else is self-referred to a specialist; a hospital consultant with rooms in the nearby town or city.
In places like Northern Italy, the Middle East, the U.S. and many more, people do not need a magic letter from a GP to get to see a ‘real doctor’. One simply makes an appointment at the consultant clinic, the receptionist will assign the headache to the neurologist, or the gastritis to the gastroenterologist and so on. Sick children are brought to see paediatricians, those wishing to become more beautiful attend the plastic/cosmetic surgeon, and old people are brought to see a geriatrician before being dropped off at the nursing home. Friendly secretaries will triage and normally arrange a bed over the phone. The first consultation usually occurs with the patient in a bed on the hospital ward. The bill is sent to the state or the insurer.
I am not suggesting for a moment that this is a better system, it is a system that was the principal cause of the horrific scenes in Lombardy during the Pandemic. Covid killed too many elderly people, that much is true, but it was the condition and organisation of the Italian health service in Northern Italy that allowed Covid to become the catastrophe that dominated the television networks.
If we think about it, cholera and a few other diseases (rather than starvation) were responsible for half of all the deaths during the Irish Famine (1847-1851). Now, imagine the hue and cry that would emerge if some renowned British Epidemiologist tried to suggest that half of the total number of Famine victims did not die of the Famine, but died instead from a coincidental ‘pandemic’ of Asiatic Cholera? What remains of the IRA would undoubtedly issue a fatwa.
Apparently when it comes to the Great Famine, we are quite capable of recognising that social conditions (poverty/famine) created the environment where disease festered and then killed exponentially. We don’t blame Cholera for the Famine, we blame the famine for Cholera. It was the Famine that created the conditions for Cholera to thrive, and it was English policy that created the conditions for the Famine itself.
Equally, the Covid virus was not the principal cause of the terrible scenes in Northern Italy. It was the absence of community medicine that created the conditions necessary for the tragedy to unfold in the horrific manner that it did.
There is, and was, no system of community medicine throughout much of Northern Italy when Covid arrived. In Lombardy; frail, elderly people with Covid, had no one to call, other than consultants and specialists, who then flooded their hospitals with Covid and transformed them into the geriatric hotbeds of disease and mortality that provided the horror show, and fuelled the fear-frenzy. That same frenzy soon transformed Covid from a cohort specific disease, into a pandemic that requires universal vaccination, lockdowns and allegedly kills almost everyone it touches.
At home the Italian mistakes were coarsely imitated by the Irish Government as they cleared the public hospitals and transferred a mass of untested, convalescing hospital patients, into all available beds in the Nursing Homes. They introduced Covid into the sector en masse, firmly and strictly locked it in, and thereby caused (or at least facilitated) a wave of death that has yet to be investigated.
In 2016, Lombardy — home to more than 10 million people — saw only 90 medical school graduates go on to pursue specialised studies toward becoming general practitioners. They received annual scholarships of 11,000 euros (nearly $13,000), less than half those secured by people preparing for specialties like cardiology. The numbers have grown in recent years, but not enough to replace retiring general practitioners, medical associations say.
The point I am making here, is that despite the fact that General Practice might well be an overall pathology in Ireland; that is not to say that the institution does not accomplish some purely accidental good. A broken clock will tell the right time twice a day.
Many Irish lives were inadvertently saved by the fact that patients had a relationship with a Doctor (their Family Doctor). One whom they could call and who would tell them what they should or should not do.
Despite the fact that medical advice from the oracle of General Practice amounted to little more than: ‘stay at home and suffer on’; it was the simple fact of having a relationship with a contactable GP that reassured and ultimately saved lives.
Needless to say, (proportionally at least) far more lives were saved by GPs like Dr Pat Morrissey in Adare, and several others – some of whom who became part of a covert network who insisted (despite threats from the IMC president) upon doing more for very sick patients – than simply telling them to ‘stay at home until they turned blue’.
Public health officials were quick to see the value of this old-relationship and offered GPs an unvouched blank cheque, to the tune of €30 per reassuring phone call. However, beyond a phone consultation, Irish GPs by and large did not provide any interventional ‘care’ for those whom they advised to ‘stay at home’.
Nonetheless they saved lives and avoided an Italian-type tragedy simply because those lives had access to a Doctor within their own community. During Covid, it did not matter if GPs were wilfully useless; it only mattered that people had access by phone, by video-link or smoke signal. They were not entirely alone.
The miracle of science was with them, and they stayed in the safest place, far away from established medicine. Whilst Covid patients were in contact with their GP, they were cared for at home by their families. This was not the case in Northern Italy where even a token degree of Community Medicine was non-existent. A passage from the NYT article states the following:
When the first wave hit, Milan — a city of more than 1.3 million — had only five doctors expert in public health and hygiene, said Roberto Carlo Rossi, president of Milan’s Doctors’ and Dentists’ Guild. They were responsible for setting up a testing and contact tracing regimen.
Where most Irish GPs did in fact care for patients in practical terms, was in the Nursing Home. We were the responsible physicians and were the only ones allowed in.
As a consequence of our careless ‘care’, combined with political ineptitude; over a thousand died alone, and in truly horrible conditions, all within a matter of months. During that time Covid payments in respect of their care were doubled, trebled and quadrupled, in spite of the death rate and the abject failure to deliver what might be described (in third world terminology) as ‘the very basics’.
The survival of honest medicine may depend upon an old-fashioned relationship with a different type of Doctor. One who is often found to be ‘non-compliant’ at Medical Council Hearings. Yet, to paraphrase an old philosopher: ‘there may be a different court, one that is higher than the Courts of men; one where a great many of the judgements of this world, will doubtlessly be overturned.’
The Empire Windrush sails tonight, she’s got a one-way ticket, and she’s half way home
In June 1948, The Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in England to the sound of a brass band and hundreds of cheering residents. On board were 802 people, the majority of whom were returning from the Caribbean. Returning, because earlier in the year John ‘Johnny’ Smythe – the father of Dubwiser’s Eddy and John – was charged with accompanying troops from the Caribbean back home after their fight in World War II.
When, on the outward journey, The Windrush arrived at Jamaica, due to severe unemployment and a struggling economy, hundreds of young men could not be given the jobs they richly deserved. The Jamaican Labour officer appealed to Britain for assistance and the Colonial Office contacted Johnny, the senior officer in charge, and asked for him to assess the situation, come up with recommendations and report back. He interviewed the men, categorised them according to their qualifications and abilities and recommend to the Colonial Office that they return to the UK and seek employment.
Anchored off Jamaica, it’s hard to know if Johnny had any awareness of being at the fulcrum of history. He probably just wanted to help the men under his charge out of a dilemma and seized the opportunity.
Two of our fathers sailed on this ship, at different times and in different directions, and they both agreed on two things. First, that it was a beaten-up old rust bucket. The engine regularly conked out and the anchor would have to be dropped for repairs. Secondly that the camaraderie on board was second to none.
The old German boat now acted as a colonial bus service, stopping at every port to take on and put off people, supplies and anything else that could be crammed in. Every corner of Britain’s crumbling empire was represented, every culture, food, language and philosophy. After the misery of the war, it was a chance for ordinary people from all over the world to meet, rejoice, and plan for a better future.
From the lion mountain he came like a storm, Johnny came from Sierra Leone, an African in uniform
Some years before becoming the unwitting catalyst of the Windrush generation. Johnny answered the call from the ‘motherland’ who, after taking a beating from the Luftwaffe, swallowed their pride and sent a call out to the colonies for help. As a ‘Krio’ (descendant of freed slaves) in Sierra Leone Johnny knew what it was like to be an outsider in his own country, so he coped better than some with a sudden immersion into Scotland in winter and RAF training.
Shot to the right, shot to the left from ‘Johnny’ by Dubwiser.
He ended up as a navigator on Stirling bombers. The only black man in his squadron, he became a talisman for the others. Life expectancy was very short and during the latter part of 1943. On average planes were shot down every five to seven missions.
In November 1943, Johnny was shot down, badly wounded, captured, brutally interrogated by his captors, hospitalised and further interrogated in Frankfurt before being sent to a POW camp.
There, he joined the escape committee, but never tried to escape, as he pointed out that a six foot four inch black man wouldn’t get very far in North Eastern Germany. After eighteen months in the camp, on a morning in 1945 he and the other inmates awoke to find the guards gone and the gates wide open. Russians appeared two days later and they were liberated.
340 years ago, Colston was a slaver-oh, they covered it up, but still we know, now the truth is rolling down the road
Like it or not, statues have power. They point in a direction, usually the one which the commissioners wanted to point in. Bristol was littered for hundreds of years with the name of it’s ‘greatest son’ Edward Colston. Known still in our lifetimes as ‘a great philanthropist’ who, childless, left a lot of his colossal wealth to the city of Bristol.
We aren’t interested in the argument that that was ‘a great gesture’, worthy, indeed of place names and a statue in the city centre. The money was not his to give. The wealth that he created came from the slavery of 80,000 souls. He made the people smugglers who ply their bloody trade across the Mediterranean and the English Channel, look like amateurs. This man was a mass murderer. He gained a fortune and a statue, and in return he reaped genocide.
On the June 7, 2020 Jonas’s son Josh received a message on his phone: There was a big protest happening down at Bristol city centre. He hurried down there in time to see a huge crowd dragging the statue of Colston down towards the cut. He sent his father a photo, who had the sense of a long loud cheer going up across the country. As in so many things, young people were leading the way. Resistance to everything Colston stood for had been building in Bristol over a long period. His time had come and now he lies, battered and bruised, in a museum where he belongs.
A gal from the Caribbean… What an amazing woman!
After the great and ignominious, it’s useful to return to the small. Alexandrine (Spider’s mum) was a small woman, but like so many of the Windrush generation, she was strong. Eight years after the Empire Windrush sank in the Mediterranean, she was invited to come to England after passing a test demonstrating her skills in sewing, cooking and auxiliary nursing.
She left everything, her whole life in Dominica and came half-way across the globe to a country that was becoming less and less welcoming to ‘her kind’. But she knew what she had to do and she saw something in London, a glimpse of a larger potential world, if not for her, then perhaps for her children?
So, she worked, raised her children, worked some more and she kept going, kept doing, through thick and thin. In Dominica her skills as a calligrapher were noticed by Catholic nuns and in England she also learned to type.
In time Alexandrine managed to get a post as a pastry chef at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As the years went by she ensured many others in her circle of family and friends could also get work there, each according to their abilities. She made it her mission to help those who were in turn helping others.
After a generation of work, play, child and grandchild rearing and making what was agreed to be the best curry goat and black pudding in East London, Alexandrine returned to Dominica at the age of forty-four.
From there she sent pictures of herself smiling broadly under a coconut or banana palm and returned to the U.K. every year in the Autumn (to avoid hurricane season) with bags of produce and stories from back home. The beauty of a life well lived is unparalleled. Across Britain, this story is being retold by mother after aunty after grandma. This is our small and unsung legacy, inspiring us to live our best life.
She did, she did, she did and she keep on doing From ‘Amazing’ by Dubwiser.
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast. William Shakespeare, Richard III
I anticipated the takeover of the vast majority of the publishing industry by fourth or fifth-wave feminism. It has been in the mix for five years or so, and it dominates this arena; and not just mainstream publishing, but most alternative avenues too, as far as I can see.
These mindsets want fluffiness. Cats. And Tote bags with witty slogans in an interesting font. There are writers whom they laud and publish; and their work, at best, to quote an agricultural analogy (Not just Beckett), is fair to middling.
Writers are reaffirmed by their agents et al and subsequently develop and own this logic of, ‘I am being published; therefore, I am good.’ But by whose metric? Your own? Qualitative? Profit and dross.
Many seem more interested in being revered as ‘a writer’ than creating Art. This is the cult of personality – a celebrity projection of the ultimate performer, different from the norm. They believe they are special. The core issue is, I believe, that the celebrity culture now at work in the book industry places an over-emphasis on persona and mythos as persona – a literary, bookish cult – whether it be hyped-up media or others, at the behest of Art.
One is reminded of the lines from Bukowski’s The Genuis of the Crowd, ‘Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone’; and ‘Not being able to create Art, they will not understand Art’.
Peering into some of these marketed texts, I do not see a lot of literary merit among the prose. Pallid, wane, and an emotionally-led, safe register is my takeaway. More like Young Adult books than adult fiction. The age of banality is upon us.
Charles Bukowski
Every sentence should fight for its place…
I suspect that this is part of a wider, individualistic desire, for fame, fortune, and glory. To be looked upon and admired. Put on a pedestal. To have the fine robes of a writer bestowed upon and wrapped around you. Speculated upon in your sartorial elegance.
I hear them on the radio and see them on the TV, these writers of ephemera, here one day, gone the next. Until the next one comes along.
It’s a Warholian, factory process of endless, emotionally-led drones pumping out emotionally-led, dry, grey mush. The sentences are short and adverbs are plentiful, John loves Trudie. Trudie really loathes John. Fred absolutely dislikes Stewart. Or, DCI Kelly DI Slater, investigates…
These novels are tumbling dice and have little or no truck with pushing the literary envelope. They lie prone on the racks and shelves in stores and in the minds of their reader. Would you not rather have something that inspires you to shout from the rooftops? I relate to this! This sentence here is bloody brilliant! Look, the prose is literally leaping off the page. It burns!
The reality that they fail to recognise this is disheartening.
When was the last time Middlemarch was talked about? Dickens? Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?
To quote Howard Jacobson, ‘The problem isn’t with the novel, it is with the reader.’ In an age of frenetic online activity and electronic meandering there is a distinct lack of originality. A absence of creative juice. And a dearth of creative reading.
Challenging books…
Aspersions cast on, for example, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which many have not read, are immature, and rooted in a jealousy that the text holds a higher position in the literary pantheon than their offering(s). Disingenuous assaults are derived from manifest insecurity.
They scoff at bigger, therefore harder, and difficult – but they would not come it and say it – literary texts. Due to the social embarrassment that this may cause and what might be inferred. They do not like to be embarrassed socially. This has its roots in a more organic state of grace.
They do not desire to read ‘challenging’ books, preferring a certain reading homogeneity and inevitable selective stasis. They do not care for a rampant display of maleness. The kind of masculinity on show, say, in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is scorned and discredited. Man as Dog is the ravenously portrayed symbolism.
But freedom of expression should be allowed. Even in Miller’s canine-like, Parisian existence. If a man is de-fanged, de-barked, and thus emasculated, where is he to go? To be banished into exile? To become prohibited? Becoming chthonic beings like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Subterranean, knuckle-draggers whose jobs(s) are to fertilise and provide financial support. If that is even the case in these attitudes.
We are in an interesting meridian. I wonder would Tropic of Cancer be published today?
The demographic target for the marketers is predominately female, but it does not commandeer in totality and speak for all things literary.
Their mandate is revenue – at all costs. No matter if the book is well-written. If it has a plot, narration or thought-provoking, relatable characters. They are only interested in appeasing the god of Profit.
James Joyce 1882-1941.
Art and Persona
Entering a Joycean reverie of Leopold Bloom allowing ‘his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again.’
In the proverbial outhouse, we recognises our shit stinks, like everyone else’s. Are you a writer at all times? In bed, a writer? Asleep, a writer? At stool a writer? Walking down the street?
I have to inform you that, you are not a cut above. Your Art should be your Art and you should stay the hell out of it, if it’s Art you are creating. You deny your organic, biological self but continually project the ideal that you are indeed a writer, and all must lay down prostrate before you and worship at your altar.
That is the central tenet here, the separation of one’s Art and persona; both are not one and the same. They are mutually exclusive. They should be de-compartmentalised. Art is an exposition; a creative process and it emerges predominantly from, boffins say, the right hemisphereof the brain.
It comes down onto the page and then it’s gone; albeit it remains as text. Except the marketers wants to conflate the two. Look at this Kurtz-like, mysterious figure, look at the chatter around them. If there is none, we will create it ourselves.
Beat those jungle rhythms. Not letting the work speak for itself. The vehicle of the plot. An ensemble cast of characters. Dialogue. You know, the three basics of the novel. The holy trinity.
Writing as surrogacy: a biological denial forfeited into writing projects and projections of the writing, literary mother who gives birth to ingenuity and creativity.
There is a certain emotional naiveté at work here.
Being noted as special is an inherent part of being desired to be seen as a writer. It locks into an awakening narcissism so succinctly.
Gatekeepers
As agents, they behave like Amazonian women and gatekeepers. If you do not play into their modal form(s), you will be truncated below the waist and stung with arrows.
I recently undertook a couple of counselling courses. On a Level 4 Diploma, in-house, I was the only male left in a classroom of a dozen or so females including the two female tutors. One of them, I believe, was a feminist and was going to put the squeeze to get rid of me, a male. She succeeded.
I believe there are other feminist cabals that spring up in offices and colleges and publishing houses, and if you don’t like cats and cutesy stuff, and you’re a manly man, with a hint of aggression, possibly, towards them, or unconsciously dominate with your masculinity, in any way, you are a danger. And will be ostracised.
It’s a form of sexism of course – in, on, their own terms. They circle their wagons. They have vested interests – their own cultish mentalities. Dance by firelight.
But what they forget is that if it were not for men, as writer and academic, Camille Paglia relayed: ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.’
Paglia had it down too when she relayed that a lot of angry women who had been hurt by men were now in positions of power wanted revenge, and to make all men suffer because of their experiences.
A bit like Estella and Miss Havisham at the beginning of Great Expectations, who emasculate Pip and desire to see him become passive. They want masculinity to be humiliated, suffer, and become truncated below the belt. They want men to be their inferiors, servants, and in the end, inert eunuchs.
What a cadre of selfishness, rank hypocrisy, and flaccid tribalism.
This Jungian projection of man in the female mind as an unconscious symbol of taker, abuser, and destroyer is a possibility.
In Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. If object A exerts a force on object B, object B also exerts an equal and opposite force on object A. In other words, forces result from interactions.
Men work in the dirt. They mix concrete. They lift and lay blocks. They raise buildings. They work on boats. Rigs. Implement dangerous jobs. Men write too. And some men write, craft, brilliantly. They should be respected. Not all men are dangerous predators. It is a dual thing. Let’s value compromise, equality and respect.
