Cassandra Voices

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  • The Israeli Project

    So, Israel. Is it a good thing? Was it a justifiable demand for a ‘homeland’ by a horribly persecuted people? Is it a land grab, dressed up in religious and ethnic cod history? Is it a cynical manipulation of a dream by U.K. colonial, later U.S. imperial, self-interests?

    Or could it have been what Jewish socialist writer Isaac Deutchser called, a totsieg, a ‘victorious rush into the grave’ spearheaded by Zionists, determined to have Palestine no matter what the cost, be the terrible truth?

    Of course, OF COURSE, by any standard even approaching decency the Jewish people should be able to live in security and safety. After what the world has done to them as a people, safety and security should be the bare minimum.

    As it should be for every human being. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine.

    Tragically, from its inception the ‘Israeli project’, the vaunted Jewish homeland that was to solve all Jewish problems, has been racist and colonial. Predicated on apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

    Many, including many Jews, would argue Israel in its present state threatens not just the security and safety of the Palestinian people, but of the whole world.

    If, as famous Israeli historian Ilan Pappe pointed out, ‘the Zionists understood from the beginning that the only way to establish a Zionist state was to cause the Palestinians to leave’, they must have understood the dangers.

    ‘Zionsm is a racist movement seeking capital to colonise land and exploit religion’ said Pappe.

    he delegates at the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland (1897).

    Expulsion

    Palestinans ‘leaving’ was always part of the story. As Zionism’s founding fathers Herzl, put it: ‘we shall endeavour to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed—the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly’.

    The thing is most people – rich, poor or middling – don’t take kindly to being shoved off their land or out of their homes, however ‘discreetly’.

    The Zionists tried to make out Palestine was a shithole, ‘a malarial swamp’ in Lloyd George’s words. That no one wanted. Early on in the project two rabbis were dispatched to Jerusalem to report on the lay of the land: ‘The bride is beautiful’ said the surprisingly truthful rabbis, ‘but she is married to another man’.

    That man was Palestine. O well.

    Plans to establish a home in a ‘land without a people, for a people without a land’, barged ahead.

    Who cared that this vaunted ‘land without a people’ actually held one and a half million Palestinians on it?

    That far from being a ‘malarial swamp’ it was fertile, with cities, farms, orchards, waterways, harbours, schools, markets, a functioning administration, and much loved by its people.

    Jerusalem on VE Day, 8 May 1945.

    Enter the British.

    Still in full colonial mode the Brits decided having Palestine under their control could be extremely useful. The Suez Canal was close by. It was bordered by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt.

    In good old colonial divide and conquer mode, they threw their weight behind the Zionist movement now gathering members, and financial backers, throughout Europe and America.

    When the British walked into Palestine, Zionists literally walked in alongside them.

    Britain’s Governor General said: ‘our aim is to create a loyal little Jewish Ulster in Palestine. To ‘guard against a sea of hostile Arabism’.

    Lovely.

    The British government ‘gave’ Palestine to the Zionists, and heartily encouraged Jewish ‘ingathering’, while openly supporting, armed, and turning a blind eye to the vicious terrorist activities of Zionism’s infamous militias.

    ‘We have a strong presence on the ground here’ boasted one militia group, ‘the British cannot say no to us’.

    Zionist communes were encouraged and financed, to buy up thousands of acres of Palestinian land and expel the farmers. Zionist militias did what they wanted to the Palestinians, while inward migration of Jewish peoples from Russia, Eastern Europe, Europe and America increased tenfold.

    As Zionist terrorists and British soldiers bullied, harassed and belittled the Palestnians, a census of the entire territory was carried out, by the British, aided by Zionists who often entered Palestinian villages disguised as indigenous Arabs taking advantage of traditional Palestinian hospitality, which welcomed, and fed, strangers.

    Every single Palestinian village was listed and mapped, the number of men who might resist, where the stores were kept down to the number of olives and apricots on the trees. Crucially how the village could be accessed and exited from.

    Arab revolt against the British.

    Resistance

    When a Palestinian resistance movement rose up, distraught at the stealing of their land, the lack of civil rights, the blatant privileging of the Zionists, and an ever-increasing inward flow of Jewish migrants, the British, and their Zionst pals, were armed with a blueprint of every single village’s strengths and vulnerabilities.

    The uprising was put down with extreme brutality.

    By its end, three years later, all Palestinian men of fighting age had been wiped out. Thousands of Palestinians driven out, their land confiscated, their homes blown up, while Zionist militias roamed the streets triumphant.

    When the ‘catastrophe’, the Naqba came with Israel’s declaration of statehood in 1948, and the ejection of Palestinians, Palestinians were defenceless. Hundreds of thousands were forced into exile and refugee camps, carrying what they could on their backs. Their abandoned villages and orchards instantly taken over by the Zionists, or what was now the Israeli government. During the Naqba 530 villages were destroyed.

    Then, as one commentator said, the Israelis were handed a ready-made State. The only difference workers noticed when they came into their offices the next day was that their Palestinian colleagues had been expelled. From their own country.

    Having utilised their favourite colonisers trick of pitting an implanted group against the local people to further their own ends, the British buggered off, leaving an unfolding catastrophe behind them.

    Just as they did in India. In Ireland. In Sri Lanka. In huge swathes of Africa where inequality, historic injustices and bitter racial divisions poison all life and all political institutions to this day.

    Palestinian resistance, already fatally wounded by the British, was helpless as Zionist armed terrorist groups surrounded and torched entire villages, blew up Palestinian buildings, killed and displaced hundreds. Entire cities supposed to be under Palestinian control, were surrounded and bombed. All men of fighting age were removed to concentration camps.

    Lovely, hey?

    As Zionist groups – now the Israeli army – grew ever stronger, attacking and taking over village after village, David Ben Gurion wrote: ‘in each attack a decisive blow should be struck. It should result in the destruction of homes and the removal of the population’.

    Sound familiar? Gaza anyone? The West Bank? Silwan?

    Zionism’s deadly history of violence against the Palestinian people hit a peak this past ten days as the Israeli army, armed, thanks to billion dollar yearly gifts, grants and loans from the US, and in furious revenge mode after an attack by Hamas, bombs home after home in Gaza, the biggest open prison in the world, where half the population is under fifteen years of age.

    Who cares if some old granny, or a few terrified children are still in there? Blast away dear boy, blast away. This is Israel. We can do whatever we want to the Palestinians. The West has always said so.

    Fire ahead, say the Americans. We’re monitoring the situation, say the Brits. We love Israel, says Ursula von der Leyen of the EU.

    Warsaw Ghetto boy, perhaps the most iconic photograph representing children in the Holocaust.

    Sympathy for the Jewish People

    The truth is, everyone in the world with a heartbeat sympathises with the Jewish people for seemingly endless pogroms, culminating in the most terrifying pogrom of all, the Holocaust, where six million completely innocent people were burnt, shot, gassed, tortured to death.

    But the Holocaust happened in Germany. In Europe. Almost every country in Europe collaborated with the Nazis in ‘exterminating’ – that terrible word – the Jewish people.

    France, Poland, Ukraine, Italy, Belgium, the Channel Islands, Norway, Albania, Romania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, just to name a few.

    Businesses that collaborated include Coca Cola, Ford Motor Company, and IBM.

    American companies in Germany included General Motors, Standard Oil, IT&T, Singer, International Harvester, Eastman Kodak, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Westinghouse, and United Fruit.

    Hollywood studios ‘adjusted’ films to Nazi tastes.

    Financial operations were facilitated by banks such as the Bank for International Settlements, Chase and Morgan, and Union Banking Corporation

    And of course delightful German outfits like IG Farben that produced ‘Zyklon B’, the infamous insecticide used by the Nazis to gas millions of Jewish people, communists, socialists, Romanies, jazz players, gays, and ‘undesirables’.

    The Allies, horrified at what they’d found in the concentration camps, vowed to destroy IG Farben after the War.

    But the top twenty-three directors tried at Nuremberg for their involvement in developing the science behind the extermination of millions of human beings, were given risible sentences of two, three or six years.

    And, oops, before you could say ‘O what a lovely Holocaust’ IG Farben  was back in production.

    No real recompense was ever made to the Jewish people. A handful of Nazi top dogs were topped. Others fled to America, North and South or slid back into their old jobs as ‘captains of industry’. As for art ‘to this day, some tens of thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazi’s have still not been located.’ Never mind returned.

    Nobody really paid the price for the horrors perpetrated. Deadly nerve gases magically became pesticides. Companies like IG Farben became vast international corporations gifting humanity: .nerve gases, pesticides, insecticides, heroin, Zyklon B, Lindane, DDT, Agent Orange, Bovine Growth Hormone, Round Up, and GM.

    Hey ho. Business is business.

    ‘Somewhere else’

    Instead of truly understanding why and how such hatred had exploded, instead of truly recompensing victims, the idea of a Jewish homeland, of exporting the problem to ‘somewhere else’ was promoted ever more vigorously, gaining mythic status.

    Far easier to promote Valhalla on someone else’s land than deal with European Nazism.

    Exporting the problem to Palestine, which had not been implicated in the torture of a single Jew, never mind the murder of six million Jews in the most horrific ways possible, of stealing the Palestinians land, of getting rid of them by whatever means you could get away with, i,e, anything, was more heavily promoted than ever, with America, now ‘leader of the Free World’, the Zionists new best friend.

    America was more or less happy to play along with Zionism. When Israel won the Six Day War in 1967 – against three Arab nations – they  became genuinely enthusiastic. As one American Senator (Jesse Helms, 1995)put it, ‘Israel is the equivalent of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Without Israel promoting its and America’s common interests, we would be badly off indeed.’

    Did somebody say the land on which Israel, Britain and America had built this ‘aircraft carrier’, this  militaristic, ethnocentric, ethnic cleansing, colony, actually belonged to the Palestinian people?

    Em, no. O well.

    Big players play while little people, very often brown or black people, get squished.

    Funnily enough, another REALLY big player in torturing the Jewsh people, the Catholic Church, criminally responsible for placing a target on Jewish people’s backs for two thousand years – as ‘THE PEOPLE WHO KILLED JESUS!’ – seem to get a free pass.

    This vicious and untruthful slur was only rescinded by the Church in 1960!

    ‘A Sorry about that lads’ kind of apology issued forth: ‘yeah shure thousands of ye were murdered and boiled alive for killing yer man when we all knew it was actually the Romans what done it, but no hard feelings, right?’

    Ah yes Catholicism – such a lovely religion.

    Image Gerry O’Sullivan.

    Land of Milk and Honey?

    So folks is Israel a land of milk and honey, or a catastrophe? A homeland for Jewish people built on a Palestinian graveyard? An aircraft carrier for the U.S.? Or a Western ‘dagger’ plunged into the Middle East?

    Who knows where Israeli/Zionist nationalism – fueled by fear, terror, propaganda, militarism and the cynical manipulations of the Big Powers, and a bad conscience – will lead next.

    All out war in the Middle East?

    All out war in the world?

    In the meantime, one can only pray for Gaza. For Palestine. For the ordinary people of Israel not supporting the madness.

    For us all.

    Feature Image: The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem. Frank Armstrong, 2003.

  • Musician of the Month: Anne Drees

    What do you pay attention to when you listen to music? The lyrics and melody? The instrumentation and timbre? I hear the bass and rhythm. It’s challenging for me to remember lyrics. A beautiful bass enchants me, and the queen of the bass, of course, is the double bass. Still, it took me more than thirty years of making and listening to music until I finally played it myself.

    At the age of seven, I began to play the flute, and a year later, the clarinet in the local brass band in a southern German village right next to the River Rhine.

    With my first notes, I became a clarinetist in the youth brass band, in preparation for joining the adult brass band from the village a year later. Until the age of thirteen, I spent my Friday nights playing Volksmusik and marching music, as well as soundtracks from famous American movies.

    On weekends, we performed marches in other villages in the district, played music for birthdays, weddings, and funerals — all while wearing uniforms with badges on our chests. These events often involved a lot of alcohol, a repertoire of over one hundred pieces, and plenty of bonding time. I enjoyed it immensely; it felt like home!

    I believe this is where my love for the bass began. In a way, I’ve remained attached to this genre. Twenty years later in Berlin, I played the bass clarinet in a brass band.

    Sometimes More is Possible

    When I was thirteen, my family moved to a small town in northern Germany, which marked a significant cultural shift for me.

    It was also where my classical education began. I joined the youth symphony orchestra of the music school., and there I met Judith Retzlik, with whom I now play alongside Myriam Kammerlander in our band gerda vejle.

    My new clarinet teacher supported and encouraged me at every available opportunity, while a conductor showed me that sometimes more is possible than I initially thought. I began to professionalize myself, and the dream of playing the double bass started to take shape.

    However, another fifteen years passed by before the double bass finally entered my life: Driven by heartbreak, I bought a big and strong double bass with a heart in the bridge (thank you, Judith, for your encouragement), and since then, I’ve been the double bass player and sometimes a singer at gerda vejle.

    Together with Myriam and Judith, we are gerda vejle: a space for creativity, a creative home, and friendship. If you want to learn more about gerda vejle, you should read Myriam‘s text; I couldn’t have said it better.

    My role at gerda vejle is likely to provide a solid foundation for vocals, harp, and violin to rest upon. It’s wonderful to play multiple instruments that allow you to express different facets of yourself. The clarinet is my voice, and the bass is my body.

    In the early years of gerda vejle, I listened to a lot of music, mainly because I was responsible for music booking at a new large venue called silent green in Berlin. This time was intense, and there was little time for my own creativity, besides the band.

    Today I work as a systemic coach; and support individuals and groups usually from the creative industry in decision-making, change and search processes.

    Music and Motherhood

    Finding enough time for my own music-making has always been a challenge. It became even more demanding when I became a mother.

    Time became the most valuable resource. Unfortunately, it’s still the case that women, in particular, struggle to balance family and music. Creative processes and working conditions are not often child-friendly: concerts and rehearsals frequently occur in the evenings and on weekends when childcare services have already closed.

    Moreover, creative work demands full concentration and commitment, which can be challenging to maintain with children. This needs to change.

    Gerda Vejle at Vico, Dublin.

    The Oceanic Feeling and Baths in the Ocean!

    Just a few years ago, I learned from a friend about the concept that describes the feeling I had always been searching for. When I discovered it, it made me the happiest person, not only in life but especially in music: the oceanic feeling. I yearn to lose myself, vibrate, connect, and resonate—a physical experience that I find when I play and listen to music.

     In September, 2023, gerda vejle travelled to Ireland, and I became both an ocean swimmer and a resonating double bass player. The oceanic feeling was very close. Hopefully, there’s more of that to come in the future.

    Looking ahead, I hope that we, gerda vejle, will finally manage to record our music. Do any of you know a talented female producer? If so, please get in touch with us.

  • The Restaurant Experience

    The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’

    Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in reciprocal exchanges of objects serving for daily consumption.’

    The restaurant emerged as a distinctive forum for public consumption in eighteenth century France. Prior to that it was the simple table d’hôte, where a traiteur would present a large pot to the assembled diners, who arrived at the appointed hour.

    This could present difficulties, however, if agreed conventions were lacking on how diners were to participate. On his travels in France, the agronomist Arthur Young bemoaned the greed of his dining companions in hostelries, saying, ‘the ducks were swept clean so quickly that I moved from the table without half a dinner’. In the wake of the French Revolution, an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie sought a more recherché experience.

    Originally, restaurants (deriving from the verb restaurer ‘to restore to a former state’) sold medicinal broths. In her history, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000), Rebecca Spang recalls how the restaurants of eighteenth-century Paris differentiated themselves from other eateries by offering sustenance at any time of day. Eventually they began offering more solid fare, thereby encroaching on the traiteurs.

    The strict laws regulating the division of business between the different food guilds in France at the time led to a landmark court case in which the restaurateurs carried the day. This allowed the restaurant-style of dining, ‘characterized not by commonwealth but by compartmentalization’, to emerge as the dominant form of eating out in the Western world.

    Fine Dining,

    Elitist Quality

    Today, restaurants invariably ‘plate’ each dish before presentation to the individual customer a style known as service à la russe, which replaced the more medieval display of service à la Francaise during the mid-nineteenth century.

    The elitist quality of the restaurant experience is part of its appeal. Indeed, according to Sprang, the ‘restaurant fantasy implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window’.

    Thus, a restaurant is more than merely an establishment where food is served. It involves the division of diners into parties and, generally, serves separate portions to individuals. It remains synonymous with French food, and the dominance of French cuisine is apparent in the early history of Dublin restaurants, although this has changed radically in recent decades.

    Apart from chefs, waiting staff and often indulgent investors, the most important person for a restaurant’s survival is the food critic. A bad review can sink a restaurant, while praise can bring customers flooding into the next big thing, although in recent times food criticism is being overtaken by online reviewers that are subject to manipulation.

    Grimod de La Reynière

    The First Gastronome

    A food critic may also be referred to as a gastronome. The first of this kind was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière who wrote his Almanach des Gourmands in the wake of the Revolution.

    He issued his pronouncements in the name of tradition as a member of the departed ancien regime. The son of a rich farmer-general, in his early life he displayed liberal tendencies but became disillusioned with the new order, condemning ‘everything that is despicable and vile; there in two words you have the Revolution’.

    He asserts: ‘I will never be the friend of a democrat. It is atrocious that men of letters should think as the majority do today (MacDonogh,1997).’

    According to his biographer MacDonogh, he began to write about food after being told to write about something harmless, or give up writing altogether. In this medium he ‘masked his vicious attacks behind harmless idioms’. Gastronomy became a vehicle for his reactionary views.

    An awareness of ‘good’ food revealed the true aristocrat. After the Revolution he founded what he referred to as a Jury des Degustateurs, and between 1803 and 1812 set about writing his Almanach des Gourmands. The aristocratic display of pre-Revolutionary France could re-emerge in the new forum of the public restaurant.

    De la Reynière was also alive to the possibility that he could be labelled a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’ Henceforth a glutton would be one who eats too much rather than a refined individual with an interest in talking about food.

    The gastronome in his or her most evolved form is not a professional cook. He or she is a man of letters. His or her real table is not the one where he eats but where he or she writes. It is with the flourish of the pen that he or she achieves success rather than through their knowledge of the arcane culinary arts, as ultimately the gastronome is not the one who knows the most, but the one who speaks, and writes, best.

    Garden café of the Hôtel Ritz Paris (1904), Pierre-Georges Jeanniot.

    ‘Lightning Sketches on the Table Cloth’

    Curnonsky, the pen name of the great French food critic Maurice Edmond Sailland who was elected Prince Elect of Gastronomy by Le Soir magazine in 1927 describes the role as follows:

    There are those who stare with gluttonous resentment, and those who snap impatient fingers at every passing waiter: those who flap huge newspapers in their companions’ faces, and those who shake defiant powder-puffs in their neighbours soup; those who devour bread to repletion, and those who chat so gaily, to the restaurant at large. But there are others, a chosen few who, having developed to a fine degree the study of physiognomy and, coupling this with a skilled pen or pencil, combine their talents in lightning sketches on the tablecloth.

    Pascal Ory poses the question ‘Does the chef make the gastronome or vice versa?’. Culinary evolution is largely independent of gastronomic evaluation, but without a critical audience chefs may be insensitive to diners’ tastes.

    Moreover, just as when we cook for ourselves we don’t tend to perform heroics, a cook without a responsive audience might take a more functional approach. But innovation and high standards become an imperative when the food critic is there to evaluate.

    Even if they may claim to have nothing but contempt for the breed, virtuoso chefs usually seek the validation of critical approval, and boundaries are only broken when gastronomes are there to describe them as such. More to the point, the imprimatur of the critic brings great rewards. Perhaps unfairly, the pen is often mightier than the kitchen knife.

    Notwithstanding increasing costs in a fraught business, the back breaking labour of chefing, improved takeaways, the strains of Covid and the distortion of food criticism through sites like TripAdvisor, restaurant dining endures as a sought after experience. After all, where else would anyone refer to me as “Sir”.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Bliain an Áir – ‘The year of slaughter’ 1740-41

    Bliain an Áir
    ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41

    Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs
    was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash
    descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world
    began to shift – a tiny alteration
    sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese
    no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river
    waters died. An iron frost persisted, all the spring,
    without a rain, the blooming yearly crop undone –
    in every rill and valley, sick. The factious common people
    roared in protestation; then dwindled down, masticating
    slowly, like a herd, on sour, curdled soup and sallow greens:
    a meal of nettle stems and charlock – the lush,
    green-leafed, light-golden-flowered thing that grows
    among the grass. The lark-lit summer moors
    were blank; the meadow-birds aghast. No longer
    having feed to give, the grieving poor death-rattled
    in the fields, as the little cows they tended fell.
    Like rotten sheep themselves, after supping
    dead potatoes in distress, whole parishes surrendered,
    passing out, in fever-thin delirium, to waste
    and bloody flux: a plague of desperation, day by day.
    Town and city quickly filled with remnants of the living.
    The census-takers floundered; swelling ditches overflowed.
    To put an end to expiration, the famous bishop
    brewed a broth: a medicine made up of milk
    and boiling water, with a sprinkling of chalk –
    to be dispensed among the stricken, till the ague settled down.
    Feature Image: gravestone in Coolaghmore, county Kilkenny of the Lee family, of whom three members died in 1741–42.

  • Ciaran Carson: The Dichotomy of Being

    Belfast writer, and poet, Ciaran Carson carried a black flute with silver keys on its main body, which he would screw together to play sometimes. In class. At Queen’s University, Belfast.

    He once asked me, “What would you have liked to become in life?”

    I answered: “Either a master carpenter, a mathematician, or a pianist.”

    “I agree with the master carpentry, I wanted to become one of those myself.” Ciaran replied earnestly.

    Once in a writing group – the infamous Group – he gave me a lot of advice on a poem, which was inspired by the infamous Blackbird of Belfast Lough poem, putting his own literary stamp on it. To this I responded: “Ah, but Ciaran, that wouldn’t be my poem anymore, it would be yours.”

    He considered this for a moment and said, “Maybe, maybe.” A couple of attendees came up to me afterwards and said: “You did well to challenge him there.”

    You see, Ciaran, sometimes could get inside a person’s work, kick its rafters down and plant new foundations – his own. That didn’t really endear him to some participants. I think he resented my protestation, but on reflection probably thought I was correct. A person’s writing can become a surrogacy, so they can be precious about it. If someone wrestles that babe in arms from them it creates difficulties.

    Ciaran was a dichotomy, like myself; as we all can be. Blowing warm one moment, cold the next. I recall him with his horn-rimmed glasses, tweed blazers, and pork pie hat. Like a detective from a 1950s novel, set in middle England; or possibly a character from Z-Cars.

    He amused me. I suppose I amused him sometimes, when he wasn’t bewildered by my anxious nature at that time. I felt a lot of social anxiety which I was not in control of. He too stuttered and became nervous. It jammed him up. I was jammed up in my own head, so, I related to that. I empathised by nodding.

    I thoroughly enjoyed read his interesting book Shamrock Tea.

    His take on Dante was widely embraced and commended internationally. He spoke to me one day about when he was in Italy, where learned folk indulged him, calling him Professore or Maestro! But when he got back home he was still just a “specky bastard.”’ So he mused, with a smile on his face. Such is the iron-raw vernacular of back home.

    Belfast. Image: Fellipe Lopes.

    In his poem Snow the tic-tac-toe meter and the pat-pat of the table-tennis bat, of the flicking rhythm of the flakes at his window, was successfully achieved.

    Ciaran’s mind was shaped by the conflict. How could it not be?

    I recall one Presbyterian writer at the Seamus Heaney Group aligning Ciaran with Republicanism because he was from West Belfast – even though he had the same surname as one of the founders of Ulster Edward Carson. But West Belfast was a good enough reason for him. He thought Paisley was right, the IRA needed to go around in sackcloth and ashes to atone for their sins.

    That barbaric violence, as he saw it, was only inflicted on the Unionist community. But there was little mention of redress for the Loyalist pogroms against the Nationalist community since the 1920s.

    Ciaran didn’t respond too much, but I knew the association would have encroached on him. I once had read in an Irish newspaper piece that Ciaran was asked why didn’t he join the struggle. He answered honestly: “I was too scared.”

    He had Protestants in his family background. Also, I am sure, some Republicans but that’s the dichotomy of Belfast. Grey areas. Not black and white. Not binary. Coded. Just a miasma of deeply ingrained historical decisions made, and mandated, by people who have long since passed on and probably don’t give a Frenchman’s fart now.

    The Cupar Way ‘Peace Wall’. © Daniele Idini

    He enjoyed my poetry. At times.

    There was one which I have lost now about, well, it was my take on John Masefield’s Cargoes set in Latin America during the period of the Aztecs and Montezuma. At least that’s what one of his students on the Master’s course, a Brazilian lady, told me after class one day.

    Inevitably I became persona non grata at Queen’s because I would not suck up to those with a modicum of power and who were established writers there.

    I recall one senior person looking at me one day in a one-to-one like I was a piece of cake. I wondered about his heterosexuality, felt uncomfortable, excused myself, and left. It was confusing and I did not go back. Doubtless, he verbally discredited me to his peers.

    Another established writer was angry that I got onto a post-grad course that they were running and more-or-less told me so in a sit down meeting: “There’s the door. You don’t belong here.” Because I did not worship them and their work. And I struggled with my English composition (Some change there, huh?).

    That was hard to take. I was hurt by that. I was embittered for a while, but I had experienced a lot of rejection already by that stage in my life. In truth I was in the depths of alcoholism at the time, and found it a real strain to really buckle down and focus. But I still had a creative brain, and a universal beat.

    I think Ciaran sensed that because it was his partial reference, and another’s, who got me on to that post-grad course, but that annoyed some people. Power struggles, ego, and insecurity all played a part in the mentality of the Seamus Heaney Centre.

    The last time I met Ciaran was in 2017, I was homeless, again, and limping from out of the Industrial temps’ office in Shaftesbury Square, securing some work in a bakery in East Belfast, he looked at me, and I looked back, but we both headed on our separate paths.

    I emailed him a while later but he did not respond. I had heard he was seriously ill by then. He was a heavy smoker and so was I.

    When he passed away, I wondered about the fait accompli eulogies by those in the narrow academic world in Belfast. I wondered about his dichotomous way of being.

    Ciaran wasn’t perfect – who is? But I am richer from the experience of meeting him, interacting with him, and learning from him. He was a very sound writer, read extensively, questioned, loved his music, and knew his literary onions.

    Wherever he is – I hope he’s happy.

    Ciaran Carson – 9th October, 1948 – 6th October, 2019

    Featured Image: Gerard Carson

  • The Death of Blake

    The bed had been positioned deliberately near the window so the artist had a view of the sky. The sky embodied eternity. Our creations change with every era, each century brings a new art, but the sky, on a cloudless blue day or in the grey rain, appears as it did to our most remote ancestors. The wind on their skin feels the same to us. He lay there dying, looking up through the window with the eyes of his childhood self. The sky was a glimpse at something death cannot kill. On that day, the day of his death, the sun was shining over London and the artist was filled with joy.

    His health was deteriorating and with each passing hour it seemed to his wife Catherine more rapid. Her hope of a recovery was fading. They had been married these past forty-five years and she knew him better than anyone, enough to know he was always capable of the unexpected, and for that, hope remained kindled as it waned. They had caused a stir walking around their garden in Lambeth naked together. They had shocked their neighbours, and the respectable people of the street thought them to be strange at least, others said they were patently mad. The Blakes had refused to bow to the outcry and continued with their nudism throughout the warm summer days. There was one neighbour in particular, a very old lady in the highest room of a nearby house that would sit there in her rocking chair and watch them dance among the azaleas and foxgloves with her long-ago youth flickering in her eyes. Seeing him lying there with his poorly head emerging from the blankets she smiled to remember it. He was a rebel by soul.

    Then there was the time they ate in a soup those strange mushrooms that Flaxman had brought up from the West Country in a small wooden box decorated with golden flowers. They had a psychedelic effect. The artist ate the soup, enjoyed the evening and laughed until it was time for bed. The next morning he went for a walk and when he returned full of thoughtfulness he said to his wife over cups of tea and bread and butter that ‘he wouldn’t be doing it again’ as he ‘had no need for them.’ Some years later she remembered out of the blue that he recalled the experience to her and said matter-of-factly that whatever ‘grows on God’s earth must be God’s creation.’ She had no reason to argue with his logic. She herself had enjoyed that evening very much.

    Catherine took the bowl of water and placed it on the bedside table before soaking the flannel and resting it on his forehead. The wet cold of the material opened the artist’s resting eyes and he smiled to see her and the sunshine flooding in behind her. Just the vision of her standing there, her face, filled him with happiness. She leant forward and he could see over her shoulder toward the window. He noticed a thousand colours in the dust particles in the air, each one with its own divinity, each one a galaxy. He watched carefully the movement of the dust in the beam of sunlight, slowly synchronising each angled manoeuvre until it became an entire day of his childhood. It was never difficult for him remembering being a child, how it actually felt, the lineaments of thought he once had and soaring of feeling he often experienced. And then his brother Robert died when he was still a boy which only served to intensify the clarity of his visions. He remembered everything. It was on Saturday mornings in the warm spring when his parents allowed him to go off roaming on his own that his relation with the eternal was born. Now this simple, sparse room in which he lay dying was to the artist a realm in itself. With his eyes closed he dreamt like all of us do, with his eyes open he saw worlds beyond worlds and time beyond time.

    Blinking slowly he opened his eyes and looked at Catherine’s eyes for a while. When she noticed, she held his stare. With a slight croak in his voice he began to speak.

    “Thank you.”

    “For what?”

    “For my life.” She didn’t quite know what he meant but inferred the meaning ‘I love you.’ She had never doubted it. Tears welled in their eyes. And then suddenly, seeing him lying there so ill, made her deeply sad. It was like a void, an almost violent, unexpected misery that befell her. After all those many long years of marriage she would soon find herself alone. It was only then, on that bright sunny day, that she really felt it for the first time, the potential of loneliness, and when it fell on her it fell hard and pitiful. But he was determined her future happiness reigned over their parting.

    The artist began to cough and splutter a little so she put a cup of water to his mouth which he drank from with difficulty. “Sit me up Catherine, I would like to see the river again.” There from the window he looked out at the Thames. Old father Thames was right, it had given birth, knowingly or unknowingly, to every Londoner there ever was or ever will be. “Look” he said “it shines like a bar of gold.”

    “It does at that.’ Catherine answered. They both sat there a while looking at the sunlight playing on the water, brave, complete, magically alive. He looked at it for a time and knew for certain that the pangs and pains of death could never crush his spirit. There was just no chance. It seems perhaps unreasonable now, but it was true. Blindingly, obviously true. He, she, we, are nature. The sun beam glittering in the bough of the tree like the melody of the crashing waves on the shingle, or a full bellied peregrine falcon with nothing else to do but fly, make up one whole. The artist leant his head back on the pillow and smiled.

    There was a wrap on the door. When Catherine opened it she saw it was one of the artist’s ‘disciples’ and a member of The Ancients, a young man named George Richmond. The Ancients were a group of painters that included Edward Calvert and Samuel Palmer, brought together in brotherly kinship by the love and admiration for the artist, whose life was now drawing to a sad close as he lay on the bed by the window at Fountain Court.

    “How is he?” Asked Richmond as Catherine ushered him in from the street.

    “He is gravely ill, and coming in and out of consciousness.” She began to cry. Richmond tried to give some kind words of consolation, but soon realised his words could not suffice. He rested his hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her, as he himself now feared the worse. As they entered the room, the drifting of a cloud let a sharp burst of sunlight in. The artist heard the footsteps and his head turned with open eyes as they both entered the room. He recognised the young man immediately.

    “Ah. Richmond my boy! Welcome.”

    “William. Mr. Blake.” The sight of the dying man made him tremble suddenly. Richmond was only eighteen at this time and death to him, quite rightly, was an abstraction, a fake. He sat down in a chair by the bedside and saw the artists almost pug-like face, frail, wan, and devoid of rosiness.

    “How are you feeling Mr. Blake?”

    “Ha!” The artist looked over at Richmond and smiled. “I am dying. But do not be troubled. I am travelling to that country I have always wanted to visit!” Then, surprisingly to those present, Blake began to sing. It wasn’t the singing voice of a dying man, but rather someone bursting with life. Catherine became full of delight as the artist went on singing psalms and hymns and for a time she forgot about death, and suffering. He sang ‘Jesus Christ the apple tree’ ‘Come, oh thou traveller unknown’ and ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ among others. He had always loved to sing. Always. Both Catherine and Richmond wept with joy when they sat witnessing these moments. These perhaps final moments.

    Then, as one hymn ended, the artist took a sharp intake of breath. His head rocked gently on the pillow. “Quick Catherine, get me my drawing things. I will paint a picture of you! You have been an angel to me.” He looked up at the ceiling and his eyes widened to their fullest extent, dilating with ecstasy. His mouth opened slightly in a sigh of joy. “Behold! The angels!” His mind cried out, but no words came, the only thing audible was the rhythm of his last breaths. Above him he saw his brother Robert in angelic form, bathed in white light beckoning him on, for his spirit to rise, and he saw the archangel Gabriel, smiling as old friends do. He looked at Catherine and thought ‘We will meet again.”

    And then, on that summer day, by the river of London, he died. A look of serenity came over his face, and his eyes were open, keen and eager at the last. The death mask that was made reminded The Ancient’s of one the good emperors, full of calm and wisdom. Richmond placed his thumb and middle finger on the artists eyes, and closed them gently. Catherine was still weeping as she showed Richmond out, and as a slight evening summer rain came down, Richmond himself began to cry and continued to cry through the streets and all the way home. Somewhere in those sad joyful tears with the rain wetting his head, he knew the words he would write to Palmer. So strange, in the eyes of the young man, how the artist had greeted death. The absence of fear. The way he sang.

    Feature Image: Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786) by William Blake

  • Musician of the Month: Myriam Kammerlander

    When I was five, I made myself a paper flute. I played it sitting on a stone in the Danish summer. My parents later gave me a real flute and I played it fervently until my teacher said it was time I learned some more instruments. I didn‘t consider myself a musician. I just loved to play.

    My main instrument today is the harp, but it took me a while. Living near the Alps, it should have been easy. Alpine music is full of string instruments. But I played the flute, and loved folk music which was not from Germany. I didn‘t know at that point how fine German folk music can be. I thought Volksmusik was a lot about brass, and yodeling, and mostly for loud men in leather pants.

    Growing up in the Catholic Bavarian countryside can be an ambivalent experience. Like singing in the local church band while dreaming of travelling with a circus. My first idea for a future profession was to be a woodturner, or a carpenter, which earned me comments like, girls should not work as carpenters. This was in the 1990s.

    One day, I learned about an instrument maker in the region who taught people how to build historical harps by themselves. I was thrilled. This is how it started. I participated without being able to play one note on my new harp. In my head, making it came first.

    This self-made, improvised kind of doing things is a quality I like a lot about folk music. Generally, about this thing called Kleinkunst in German, small art. In the beginning, there often is just the longing to play. A tiny stage, a handful of people, you did‘t even plan it, and suddenly, there is magic in the air. Like in a song by the Portuguese band Deolinda:

    He passed and smiled at me and all of a sudden, the ugly face of the town changed, everything was covered in flowers … what would happen if we talked to each other?

    Passou por mim e sorriu (gerda vejle):

    Travelling musician

    What qualifies you to be an artist? If you make a living of it? Or is it a particular way to be in the world? If you manage to transform the ordinary into beauty? Tell a story in a manner that opens a new perspective on the world, which others can relate to?

    For me, it has to do with connecting. Connecting people, places and perspectives. I play a harp model called Bohemian Harp. It is neither a Celtic nor a classical harp. It is an instrument of travelling people, linked to the tradition of travelling dance musicians. Especially in the nineteenth century, there were small orchestras of Bohemian harp players, often women, who though poor managed to make an autonomous living by playing music travelling from place to place.

    I too had been travelling for some time when I arrived in Berlin, a place of many perspectives and travelling existences. Studying music therapy there and later with fantastic harp player and teacher Uschi Laar, I learned something important: That music is not something you show off. Music can be something that saves you. Sometimes it is the only continuity you have. It can give voice to the unspoken, transform depth into lightness. And it has a great inclusive power.

    I then met a storyteller, Ana Rhukiz. We started a travelling duo project, performing barefoot under the open sky, in tiny villages, on smaller and bigger stages, for young and old, few and many. We connected composition and performance, art and nature. What I like about fairy tales is that they often transport a hidden wisdom over time. One piece was about making rain. Drought had fallen upon humanity because nature had been disrespected. During the piece we would say the rain spell together with the audience. Often, it would rain for real, even on a sunny day.

    The Lucky Accident

    One element of improvisation is accident. And, at the right moment, Kairos.

    Do you know Kairos? The Greek God of the lucky accident. A harp maker in Berlin told me the story of Kairos: he has just one hair and is fast. When he passes your way, you have to be lucky to grasp him at his one hair before the moment is gone.

    Meeting violinist Judith Retzlik might have been one such moment of Kairos: I had placed one single note on a black board at university saying I was a harp player looking for other musicians. Our band was completed by double bass player Anne Drees, who gave the warm grounding to our violin, harp and voices improvisation. We named ourselves gerda vejle.

    In concerts, people ask: Who of you is Gerda? And we smile and say: all of us. Gerda is an imaginative woman. She is creative. She might change her identity now and then. She loves to try out new things, be it styles or genres. She certainly is a feminist.

    Over time, gerda has grown. She was drawn to idyllic and disastrous moments at the beginning. Much of heartbreak and rebellion. More themes arouse over time. Less drama, more questions. More laughing also. We made and discovered more instruments. The nyckelharpa, the trumpet, the ukulele. We sing in many languages, merging songs, mostly unplugged. I moved to Austria for some time, the yodeling came back to me from childhood days. I am not a great yodelist. It is a fun way to give credit to something that belongs to me without taking it too seriously.

    The Layers Beneath, and Beyond

    Gerda vejle is also often asked: Are you a cover band? And in fact, we play mostly songs that already exist. In the beginning, I had the ethos that we should be making our own tunes. But nowadays I would say I proudly cover. In folk music, like in oral tradition, the origin of a tune cannot always be figured out. And many true stories have been truly told before you entered stage. What gerda vejle is doing is collecting them, retelling them, giving her own voices and character to them.

    What I learned when I studied literature and ever more working with storytellers is that very text, be it written or spoken, is woven from other texts. Likewise, music is a texture of relations and worlds. It is a vibrant body with many layers under the surface. Folk pieces never get finished. You just keep on crafting them over and over again.

    Making music feels like exploring these layers by time. I seldom seek for ideas with a plan. They are hidden in the music, and sometimes quite somewhere else.

    With the pandemic and other crises, I am asking myself more questions. What is the role art should play in a time of transformation? Which responsibility falls upon artists when there is so much confusion, and where values are challenged and resources running scarce? Should art be more political, and if so, in which way? Or could artists become people you turn to in confusion, as they often have lived through confusion and hardship themselves? For me, art is not something you add to your life when everything else is fixed. Rather, it is something that can give you another perspective to look at during bumpy times, a bit like humour.

    So, one idea I found so far: there should be lightness in the heaviness. Thus, never forget the playfulness. When I teach music, I try to remind people they can be playful. I don‘t believe in the unmusical child. I believe everyone can enjoy creativity. You have to find the language. And a way to play around the bumpiness. Make a song of it. Make it fly.

    Gerda vejle – image by Juliette Cellier

    Coming to Ireland soon: gerda vejle in concert

    Friday Sept 22th, 2023 – Clonskeagh Castle, Dublin

    Saturday Sept 23rd, 2023 – Yeats Society, Sligo

    Links:

    Music and writing: www.wanderharfe.de

    www.gerdavejle.de

    Building a Bohemian harp: www.klangwerkstatt.de

    Featured Image: TEDxDresden2016

  • Facilitating the Dirty Business of the State

    Both as a lawyer and Supreme Court judge, Louis Brandeis was an inveterate opponent of big business interests. Less well known than his other contributions, is that he a co-authored a text in the 1890 Harvard Law Review that invented a privacy right, which has steadily been eroded in criminal justice.

    Indeed, as a judge in Olmstead v US Brandeis extended the privacy right to what he termed ‘the dirty business of the state’. In that case, without judicial approval, federal agents had installed wiretaps in the basement of Olmstead’s office and in the streets near his home.

    Culminating in the recent Quirke case, in Ireland, a right to privacy in criminal proceedings has now reached a juncture of virtual nonexistence.

    In my last article I referred to Irish Supreme Court Justice Gerard Hogan’s opinion that for thirty years the Irish Courts have failed to enforce due process under Article 38 of the Irish Constitution. The Quirke case delivers us to the terminus, facilitating the dirty business of the state.

    In that case, evidence gleaned from a computer unlawfully seized from Patrick Quirke’s home was deemed admissible. Jurors in Quirke’s original trial were informed that Quirke’s computer was used for internet searches on the decomposition of human remains and limitations of forensic DNA. Quirke was found guilty of murder based on circumstantial evidence.

    Louis Brandeis 1856-1941.

    No Statutory Safeguards

    In Ireland we now enjoy no statutory safeguards, other than Judges’ Rules, whereas in the U.K. Section 76 and Section 78 of PACE (The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) are actively enforced to exclude coercive and inappropriate tricks or force, and that which impacts on the fairness of the proceedings. I know from experience that judges in the U.K. are vigilant at throwing out a case in the event of an abuse of process.

    The murmurings by the Irish government about the implementation of the Special Criminal Court recommendations is a space which should be carefully watched. Most likely, in my view, is that an institutional preference for non-jury courts will be given ever-wider jurisdiction.

    It is a sign of how we are entering an inquisitorial rather than adversarial age worldwide, not just in Ireland, which suits the interests of many of our elites. Our own, and other states, are sidestepping the Rule of Law in the interests of big business, often at the expense of the sometimes-innocent lives of others.

    Furthermore, it is noticeable that the seven judges of the Supreme Court selected to adjudicate on the Quirke case did not include the state’s leading constitutional lawyer. Gerard Hogan’s absence was his presence.

    One can only wonder why Hogan was, deliberately or otherwise, excluded. Perhaps to preserve a show of strength through unanimity? Or maybe Hogan would rather colleagues were unanimously wrong, and wanted no hand nor part in it.

    While on the High Court Peter Charleton was the architect of the nefarious JC case. His judgment in Quirke expressly reinforces that case, and fails to over-rule it as doctrinally unsound. He also sidesteps accepted breaches of EU and ECHR data protection under the privacy right. The judgment effectively subsumes a right to privacy at the expense of public order considerations, and legitimates the dirty business of the state.

    The Supreme Court could have engaged in a process of reconsideration and followed the late Adrian Hardiman’s masterful dissenting judgment in JC. They had a choice and did not.

    Hardiman’s absence is also his presence. The shade of a forgotten ancestor. His dissent is not even addressed in any satisfactory detail in Quirke. This failure to address Hardiman’s reasoning is not dissimilar to the way the State treats whistleblowers, who are demonised, ignored, trivialised or excluded. If all else fails, as in the McCabe inquiry which Charlton presided over, the State endeavours to deflect, invoking the shabby excuse of inadvertence – at least until confronted by the stark truth.

    Then, only after being caught with your legal pants down, do you cobble together a shabby deal involving a multimillion pound pay out. With a confidentiality agreement of course.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Factual Matrix

    The factual matrix of Quirke may go some way towards suggesting that it was an inadvertent mistake, but that is not a typical pattern, as various sources, including the Morris Tribunal, and Hardiman’s eviscerating judgment in JC, demonstrate that discipline – and it might be said ethics –  are barely apparent in the Irish police force: An Garda Síochana.

    It is not a case of – as I can testify – simply of incompetence, though this is undoubtedly part of the problem. It is a combination of tunnel vision, or cognitive bias, coupled with active attempts to frame those deemed to be threats, or perceived threats.

    Whistleblowers, including and especially internal ones, are a particular target, but human rights lawyers or defence counsels may also be in their line of fire.

    There is no point having the symmetrical precision contained in Charleton’s detailed judgment and in some of the majority judgments in the JC case. This is not a case about shipping or guarantees where rules can be implemented precisely with clear consequences; and where high commercial stakes demand clarity and precision, which can then be cross-checked against best practice in industry.

    The rules in criminal proceedings must be matched up with, and adapted to, social realities. A member of An Garda Síochana may describe something as inadvertence when it was a reckless or deliberate violation of constitutional rights. There is a consistent tendency to lie or cover up. That is what the Morris Tribunal and other reports demonstrate. Things have got worse not better. This was not dealt with adequately in the Report of the Fennelly Commission.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    The Path of The Law

    In one of his most celebrated contributions to legal discourse Brandeis created the so-called Brandeis Brief, which is often used in cases involving the death penalty, and others. This involves the marshalling of economic and sociological data, historical experience, and expert opinions to support legal propositions, i.e. judgments must be cross-checked against social realities.

    Therefore, in Ireland the behaviour of the police does not warrant a watering down of the strict exclusionary rule. In Ireland we require a high standard. Discretionary rules will not be applied.

    If the police are afforded the excuse of inadvertence, they will happily paper over illegality.

    Rules must be informed by social realities. It was recently alleged in the High Court that a number of officers supervised the importation of drugs, and controlled the flow of shipments to dealers. Woe betide anyone who has the temerity to stand in their way.

    Charleton by implication, and expressly, suggests that a factual inquiry into the bona fides or honesty of a police action and decision can be made in a specific context. But given the present Special Criminal Court dispensation, accepting uncorroborated police evidence, that inquiry must be very limited and conditioned by the judgement of subjective officialdom.

    The acceptance of a Garda evidence in even securing a warrant without adversarial scrutiny is unacceptable. Safeguards need to be built into the system.

    The Quirke judgment is a travesty: a neatly-ordered, precise and tidy travesty – as is Charleton’s want. We should not be facilitating the dirty business of the state but enforcing the privacy right.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Hitching the Plough to the Stars

    Paul O’Brien’s biography, Sean O’Casey, Political Activist and Writer (Cork University Press) is a timely re-assessment of an often controversial, figure whose place in the literary canon is, O’Brien argues, is insufficiently acclaimed.

    It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Druid’s production of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: ‘The Plough and The Stars’, ‘Juno and the Paycock’ and ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ which opened recently at the Galway Arts’ Festival and will tour Belfast before coming to The Abbey in September. But, with the publication of Timothy Murtagh’s new book Spectral Mansions on how the once graciously lofty Henrietta Street turned into tenements adding to the mountain of scholarship about Dublin tenement life, O’Casey’s plays, are, on that basis alone, destined for immortality.

    As enduring testimonies of the unflinching reality of Dublin tenement life, no playwright evokes and captures the life of Dublin’s tenements as does O’Casey and that is the central theme of this tour-de-force of scholarship.

    Sean O’Casey was born in 1880 into a lower middle class Protestant family – the youngest of eight children – and was raised in Lower Dorset Street, where the family enjoyed a relatively comfortable lower middle-class life until after his father’s death in 1886. His father had been employed in the Irish Church Mission and his older brothers attended the Central Model School in Marlboro Street for which a small fee was required.

    In reduced circumstances after his father death, and when O’Casey was nine, the family moved to the East Wall – a hot bed of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) and the ITGWU. His entire oeuvre dramatizes with unflinching realism and lack of sentimentality the grim realities of tenement life in Dublin, infusing his characters with compassion and humanity.

    By the 1930s, Dublin’s tenements were among the worst slums in Europe with a very high mortality rate, rampant prostitution and disease reflected in ‘The Plough and The Stars’ in the character Mossler Gogan dying of TB and the prostitute Rosie Redmond. Indeed, according to O’Brien ‘[i]n 1914 it was believed that tenement dwellers had a better chance of survival on the Western Front than in the diseased-ridden hovels of Dublin.’  Thus, O’Casey became ‘a life-long activist for the preferment of dwellers of tenements, reflecting their lives with scrupulous realism and compassion, their humanity always shone through as did their heroism and their promise.’

    Henrietta Street, Dublin.

    Excruciating Detail

    Paul O’Brien biography on O’Casey charts with intense and excruciating detail the development of O’Casey’s politics and how those politics fused and informed his writings, especially his dramatic works. In that sense, O’Brien’s book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach to O’Casey’s life.

    While O’Casey’s older brothers attended the model school in Marlboro Street, Sean, a delicate child was largely home schooled, self-taught and, for a time, taught by his older sister, a teacher. Later, O’Casey was immersed in all the key political movements of his time, the ICA, the Gaelic League, the GAA and was a big admirer of, and influenced by, Parnell.

    He mastered Irish, hence the change in his birth name from John to Sean and he studied the Classics. From early in his life, he was interested in the national movement but it was the emergent labour movement, gaining momentum under his life-long hero, James Larkin that really gripped him and the entire dynamic of his subsequent political and writing life revolved around his failure to find a synthesis between Irish Republicanism and the international struggle of the working classes.

    In other words he never could accommodated the ‘green’ of Nationalism with the ‘red’ of Labour and this unreconciled tension remained the central dilemma of his entire life and, in exploring it in minute intensity, Paul O’Brien uncloaks it as both the triumph and tragedy of O’Casey’s life too. While Paul O’Brien clearly admires his subject, he is candid about the unjustified personal animosity of O’Casey towards James Connolly. O’Brien does not shirk from revealing any of O’Casey’s flaws in judgement and personality, while never losing sight of his overall genius.

    Imbrications between the cause of the working classes in Dublin and accelerating nationalism were unavoidable after Parnell and were so fused as to often be indistinguishable; the overlaps were everywhere, not least in the Irish Citizen Army (ICS) of which O’Casey was a member until he finally severed all ties in 1914. He also derided the Irish Volunteers which emerged in the South, in parallel with the formation of the Ulster Volunteers in response to the Home Rule Bill of 1912.

    James Larkin.

    James Larkin

    James Larkin arrived in Dublin in 1907 and inspired O’Casey to use ‘words as weapons against exploiters of the Dublin poor.’ O’Casey first gave vent to his rage in Larkin’s paper The Irish Worker. Later, in his biographies, O’Casey lacerated the corruption of Dublin Corporation.

    From an early age, O’Casey’s love of literature was manifest. The hope that Irish life would be transformed died with the early and tragic death of Parnell in October 1891. In the aftermath, the prospect of peaceful evolution along the lines of Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia receded.

    O’Casey saw Larkin as the greatest Irishman since Parnell. ‘The Plough and The Stars’, O’Casey’s most controversial play premiered in the Abbey in 1926 and was well received on its first night. But on the second night, a combination of 1916 widows and Republicans escalated into full blown riots with added moral consternation at the prostitute Rosie Redmond awaiting clients and the un-named figure in the window, identifiably Patrick Pearse extolling the sanctity of bloodshed.

    The first two acts of the play are set in 1915 looking forward to the liberation of Ireland, but the second two acts are set during the 1916 Easter Rising.

    In the evolution of his political ideals, O’Casey had a number of influences aside from Parnell; the writings of James Fintan Lalor (1809-1849) and John Mitchell (1915-1875) influence him. The 1913 Lockout in Dublin was a watershed moment for O’Casey.

    Parnell had provided a vision for Ireland with no conflict between the Protestant religion and the principles of freedom which had a democratic and libertarian pulse, rooted in Constitutionalism. But contemporary conditions would sweep O’Casey away from family and Protestant traditions.

    A Dublin Tram conductor and an Abbey actor introduced him to rawer politics. This, combined with the ICA and the ITGWU provided different currents on O’Casey’s development. In terms of his literary work, Dion Boucicault remained a strong influence in how he used songs and comedy to lighten the tragedy of his own writings. (O’Casey wrote many, long forgotten, ballads)  While Boucicault’s plays are traditional melodramas there is also a ‘political ambivalence that challenges the stereotypical image of the stage Irishman; ‘Arrah-Na-Pogue’ and ‘Peep O’Day’ are about the 1798 rebellion. Boucicault created a more trustworthy image of the Irish, replacing the racial stereotype in English literature which was finally killed off by George Bernard Shaw in Larry Doyle in ‘John Bull’s Other Ireland.’ O’Casey draws on the techniques of Boucicault, Shakespeare’s history plays and on Shaw to create a unique synthesis of his own. O’Brien argues that O’Casey’s conclusions are ‘open-ended.’

    Dion Boucicault.

    The Boer War

    Defining nationhood was intensified by anti-British sentiments after the Boer War, the centenary celebrations of 1798 and the Jubilee celebrations in 1889.

    O’Casey imbibed the sentiments of the Gaelic League like many other Protestants. The plough and the stars was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, and O’Brien identifies O’Casey’s problem was to ‘hitch the plough to the stars.’

    He joined the Gaelic league in 1901 and took up hurling. He became an apprentice bricklayer and worked for a number of years on the Great Northern Railway Line. In 1908, he became secretary to the Drumcondra branch of the Gaelic League and spent ten years promoting Irish language and culture but increasingly he saw the chief enemy as the crushing force of capitalism, and, as he matured, he rejected romantic nationalism.

    James Connolly was able to unite nationalism and socialism, but O’Casey could never fuse them into a cohesive theory remaining haunted by the voice of the urban poor. O’Casey resigned from the IRB in 1913 when they refused to take the workers’ side in the Great Lockout.

    He ditched the Gaelic League for Larkin and the momentum behind Larkin radical labour movement became the driving force for his plays. This transition is reflected in his earlier plays The Harvest Festival, The Stars Turn Red and Red Roses For Me which deal with the labour history of the 1913-1914 Lockout. After the failure of the Great Lockout O’Casey’s views were crystallised into the view that the ‘struggle was not one of English Imperialism versus Irish Republicanism but between international capitalism and the workers of the world’ and this is reflected uncompromisingly in his plays.

    In 1914, Larkin went to America to organise the international workers of the world and was jailed for criminal anarchy. The Ulster Covenant saw 4,000 Ulster volunteers sign up and the respondent Irish Volunteers were despised by O’Casey who saw it as dominated by ‘overfed aristocrats’.

    He clashed with Tom Kettle and Pearse and wrongly accused them of not supporting workers. In 1914, along with Larkin, he drafted a new constitution for the ICA but the problems of aligning the red of Labour with the green of nationalism persisted for O’Casey.

    Countess Constance Markiewicz.

    ‘a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’

    When Connolly expressed his vision for the re-conquest of Ireland in a pamphlet in 1915, O’Casey saw it as Connolly lowering the red flag in favour of the green and made a sudden and final split with the ICA. The Countess Markievicz joined the Irish Volunteers and the ICA.

    O’Casey was intensely hostile to her ‘hauteur’: ‘she whirled into a meeting and whirled out again a spluttering Catherine Wheel of irresponsibility.’ His motion, however, to expel her from the ICA failed. According to O’Brien ‘he rushed headlong into one dispute after another, damaging himself and alienating his friends.’

    O’Casey published a book on the ICA in 1919 but, according to O’Brien it lacks balance and is saturated with vitriol and opinions. His core argument was that nationalism gained and labour lost as a result of the ICA’s involvement with 1916. ‘O’Casey was alone is seeing Irish history from a working-class perspective when, after 1916, The Labour movement was subsumed into the struggle for independence.’

    When Connolly joined the Volunteers in 1916 it completed the fusion with the ICA. 220 members of the ICA rose on Easter Monday 1916, but 1,200 Irish Volunteers did. As O’Brien points out, Connolly had little choice but to fight on nationalist terms in 1916.

    Connolly had grasped the importance of a united front where O’Casey failed. O’Casey never acknowledged Connolly’s attempts to unite Labour and Nationalism but in later years he did acknowledge Connolly’s standing in the Labour movement but ‘he never lost an opportunity to denigrate Connolly in favour of Larkin.’

    O’Casey became ‘a disgruntled outside, a hurler on the ditch, shouting the odds as history passed him by.’ Many critics put O’Casey’s vitriol against 1916 in ‘The Plough and the Stars’ down to ‘survivor’s guilt.’ The summary execution of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a socialist and passivist abhorred him. He felt successful revolution on nationalist terms only empowered the new Irish ruling classes – the very people who had reduced the Dublin poor to abject poverty.

    O’Casey was in sympathy with the views of Ernie O’Malley who resented the legendary status that emerged in the aftermath of the 1916 martyrs as they were twisted and idealised by a new state to consolidate its position. O’Brien argues that ultimately O’Casey neither deified or vilified the 1916 heroes but rather projected the realities of the new Free State that emerged, and, in that, he saw it as advancing commerce over the plight of the poor.

    In ‘The Plough and The Stars’ he ‘inverted the nationalist myth … and summoned his characters from the margins of history and placed them in the spotlight.’

    ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ was influenced by Ernie O’Malley’s views in the character of Davoren, an opportunistic carpetbagger who capitalised in the new Free State which the play mocks. The rhetoric of romantic nationalism is ridiculed and critiqued.

    In all of O’Casey’s plays his characters are overwhelmed by events outside of their control. Unlike ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ his plays ‘The Cooing of the Doves’ and ‘Kathleen Listens In’ supports the pro-treaty side. Kathleen also counters the glorification of dead heroes and martyrdom.

    Bertolt Brecht.

    Influenced by Brecht

    ‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Abbey 1924) fuses tragedy and comedy: Captain Boyle, a figure broken by poverty and drink is still a sympathetic character. The life of the tenements is always pitched against the life outside and many saw the play as a condemnation of all war.

    Juno too has been seen as an attack on the Republican movement. The character Juno is Brecht’s Mother Courage of Dublin with her strength and humanity. O’Casey was influenced by Brecht, Ibsen and other experimental dramatist.  In common with Shaw and Joyce, he despised the cult of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as symbol of Ireland. In a feminist twist, Juno does leave her abusive husband and goes off to make a new life with her unwed pregnant daughter.

    O’Casey moved to London in 1926 to receive the Hawthornden prize and produce the London production of Juno. He met and fell in love with actress Eileen Carey and he married her and the couple moved to Devon where they went on to have three children.

    Yeats refused to produce The Silver Tassie at the Abbey in 1928 causing an irrevocable breach between the Abbey and its most successful playwright. When Juno opened in London O’Casey was a minor celebrity and controversially hobnobbed with a succession of high society grandees, especially with Lord and Lady Londonderry, even spending a week at their residence, Mount Stewart, on the Ards Peninsula in 1934.

    They were the direct descendants of Lord Castlereagh, ruthless executioner of the United Irishmen in 1798. He rubbed shoulders with figures as controversial as Oswald Mosely. On the other hand, his Communist activities led him to clashes with George Orwell who, in 1949 supplied O’Casey’s name as part of a secret list of about a hundred writers, artists and intellectuals who should not become ‘cheerleaders in Britian’s fight against communism’ to British intelligence (see issue 3, History Ireland, Autumn 1998).

    O’Casey’s was unable to deal objectively with the Stalinist pogroms and took the Russian side against Hungary in the uprising of 1956. For all his human lapses, O’Casey emerges largely as mostly being on the right side of history and was an ardent supporter of Noel Browne. His later plays too were polemics against Nazism and Fascism. He was bitterly disappointed by the failures of his expressionist plays, ‘The Silver Tassie’ and ‘Within the Gates’.

    Dublin, 1916.

    An Exhaustive Feat

    Paul O’Brien’s book, with some occasional unavoidable repetition is an exhaustive feat of research and scholarship that should become an indispensable handbook to all aficionados, practitioners, academics and teachers of Irish drama. In addition to existing scholarship, O’Brien opens a new window of insight into O’Casey’s passion, commitment and motivations while never eschewing his human flaws.

    This is also an indispensable history of the development of the Irish labour and nationalist movements and their fraught and intricate interface in the aftermath of Parnell and into the early twentieth century; through The Easter Rising, The War of Independence, The Civil War and its aftermath.

    As a writer, O’Casey developed his own unique style and never failed to move with the modernism of Ibsen, the Expressionism of Ernst Toller – the German anti-Nazi playwright – Brecht and Shaw who were early influences. He disliked pessimistic theatre but made an exception with Beckett. Paul O’Brien makes a compelling case that O’Casey’s expressionist and modernist plays are overlooked. His book certainly inspires a fresh look at O’Casey overall oeuvre.

    With ‘The Dublin Trilogy’ currently enjoying a successful run as part of the decade of centenaries his place in the pantheon of Irish dramatists seems assured, and, as the history of Dublin tenement life continues to burgeon, his plays are set to endure as visceral, dramatic slices of that life. Perhaps the most astute accolade O’Brien accords O’Casey is to observe that; ‘he was one of the most sensual writers of his era’ where ‘sexual love is always presented as positive, joyful and life affirming’ and that was the common humanity that placed the characters of Dublin’s tenements on a par, as O’Brien suggests, with ‘Maud Gonne, the Countess and their aristocratic circle.’

    Paul O’Brien richly deserves the accolade of O’Casey’s biographer, Dr Christopher Murray, Emeritus Professor of Drama at UCD who greeted, ‘An extraordinary achievement bringing O’Casey centre-stage again with supreme skill. Bravo!’

    Sean O’Casey Political Activist and Writer by Paul O’Brien is published by Cork University Press in hardback at €49. It is 297 pages with a Foreword by Shivaun O’Casey. There are an additional 100 pages of notes, bibliography and index.

    Feature Image: Study of Seán O’Casey by Dublin artist Reginald Gray, for The New York Times (1966)

  • The Secret Garden

    The leaves of Greenwich Park were the soul of Autumn as I walked slowly up the hill to the secret garden in the quiet rain. I opened the gate and entered to find there was no one there. Maybe there was nobody in the whole park. A red squirrel went on eating in the middle of the wet lawn, untroubled by my presence. Above me sat the Observatory on its perch, a great seat of learning. An opportunity for humankind to understand the universe. Once upon a time you could see the stars from here on a clear night, but not now. Not since industry. Not since work.

    I opened a can of beer and lit up and made my way on through the drizzle wet, and felt lonely but not sad, this feeling of rain, delving sublime, richer than silk indigo was Inigo in ideas, deeper than feeling, in my own world almost auto stick, non-verbal, who are the same as us and yet not the same. One with everything, if only those little beauties could understand. I can’t. I went over and sat on the damp bench at the picnic table, content to be alone, for now at least. I had the plants and the trees and rain for company and that was all I needed. It’s a good time to think about people, when there’s no-one there.

    I don’t remember how long I spent in the secret garden. The time pieces of Greenwich had all floated clocks among the rainclouds tick-tock until sun’s return. The great orange ball at the top of the Observatory was obscured by mist. I noticed the clouds after that and drank deeply and rolled the cherry on the edge of the wooden bench, the place was damp so nothing could set fire. I put my hood up and felt the unmistakeable tingling of comfort. My eyes were good, and ears, and legs and arms and heart, nothing appeared to be dying. Nothing at all, not even the hiding sun.

    It felt good to finish the can of beer and crush the empty can in my fist. Especially as I had another one in my bag. Plenty I believe the word to be. It can be a good thing, better than drought. The trick to life is appreciation, in knowing when enough is enough, but knowing what enough is, has always been hard for me, because the memory of the shit never goes, so let the good times roll. There is a great beauty in this world of ours, remember, the world that created us, against all the naysayers. Yes, it’s beauty I made sure before I died.

    The squirrel has gone and I am alone with the half Red Stripe. Keep on smoking, careful not to get it wet as the rain isn’t easing. Under the picnic table with the paper and the tobacco and then the filter and finally the lick and flip. The new lighter is a good feeling and works first time producing a burst of smoke in the downpour. Maybe shelter soon but not just yet. I can hear the rain on my rain proof hood like music. Sit a while.

    I’ll leave this place before the rain lifts. I stand up and then rattle the can. I spy a bin and move towards it to leave my mark. I look around and think the place was worth visiting in all seasons, in all weathers. I am a little drunk, it was a long night, a good night, but genuinely, peaceful reader, nothing I can’t handle yet, my body holds out still as fifty approaches like an old friend I have fallen out with. The things that can’t be avoided must be confronted, who said that? Good mothers probably.

    And so on up to the top of the park and the General Wolfe statue who must have defeated the French in Canada. Let’s build a statue to remember wars won. Then it will have meaning, if it is remembered. But only then. I can see the days of Nelson from where I stand, and the days of Raleigh on the riverbank and we can see what happened when we hear the toothpaste advert from the other side of oceans, in a different accent of course. Why all the war, all the carnage, all the misery and death? Something to do I suppose. “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”

    I can see all of London, but better to stay in the park and nature and rain. Different company. Maybe a teenager is being stabbed out there but maybe not, it doesn’t happen every second or every minute. Not enough for the politicians to get involved. Ten million people and a couple of hundred slaughtered youth on the street, lying in pools of their own blood. Nothing to see here, nothing to see here. Nothing to see.

    I turn and make my way past the pavilion and into the Flower Garden. Good name. The Flower Garden. Rain is letting up now. They had a good drink today. Strange thing, that nature has no control over itself, it spreads where it can when it has a chance, and now beyond where was once impossible. I spy the Observatory again over the brow. Let’s build monuments to war and keep the deers in the enclosure, they’ll be safe there. Good idea. One of them looks over at me through the fence. Through the misty rain. It’s free in its own world. Like me. Maybe a prisoner could be free if he had the right mind. If he was in control of his imagination, then where would he be?

    The Flower Garden is beautiful. The rain has returned so I put my hood back up. I remember I was here one hot summers day in nineteen eighty-five. Wouldn’t it be a thing to have dates for those childhood days of summer. They are now lost in time, they are time. The only time we know. The pinnacle of childhood, using imagination on everything. I look at the tree that has changed less than me since then. It is magnificent then and now. The tree, nature’s gifted form, blown about by the winds but always rooted. Only disaster and time can kill it. Like us. The rain is back for sure. I put my hood up and leave through the gate on Maze Hill. Back into the world, for now.

    Feature Image: Royal Observatory, Greenwich