Cassandra Voices

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  • The Big House: Censorship of the Medical Profession in Ireland

    ’From my experience of my patients on the front line since March 2020, I estimate that between 1% and 10% of the Irish population have suffered from a serious traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal ideation as a direct result of the government instigated media propaganda and lockdown, which works out at between 48 000 and 480 000 people of this country. This must be seen as a national tragedy, if not a massive crime against the Irish people, perhaps the worst since the great famine..’
    Dr Gerry Waters submission to the High Court, prior to his suspension from the medical register, April 2021 as quoted in the British Medical Journal.

    Looking out upon a ‘snot-green’ sea, I wonder how our ancestors explained the emergence of the craggy rocks and pools. Today we might smile at the idea that the ebb and flow of the tide being the work of ‘spirits’ or gods of sand and stone. Yet perhaps there is a ‘spirit’ of our time? The zeitgeist; a shared belief-system that interprets our world and is the ultimate arbiter of truth itself?  Perhaps it is this ‘spirit’ that future generations might equally recognise as a thing that is drenched in myth and fallacy?

    Lately it seems that truth, like the tide, is constantly shifting. Our mute and collective response to Covid-19 policies suggests we have indeed entered a ‘Post-Truth’ era, where truth has gone the way of video and record stores, to become almost entirely subscription based.

    I was once of the belief that science served to shape and guide public opinion. I have lately come to feel that when science does not align itself with public opinion, it is dismissed as the ramblings of a madman.

    In recent years the most basic scientific principles, even the simple notion of ‘cause and effect’ have been temporarily suspended. Presently, science is in the service of the zeitgeist. It no longer informs public opinion, instead it is used as a drunk might see a lamp post; more for support than illumination.

    Newton’s Third Law…

    During and prior to Covid, Europe and Ireland, enjoyed several years of what economists call ‘quantitative easing’. In layman’s terms this means printing lots of money in order to keep people content, or at least to keep them spending.

    The world is apparently a better place when we are all spending freely. Economists call this ‘economic growth.’ Strangely the cause and effect of this simple expedient is entirely lost on most people. The countless billions that have been pumped into European economies in recent years, now means that money is worth less, which is generally referred to as inflation.

    At home, in addition to inflation, our Covid-related crises: deaths in nursing homes, suicides, mental health, missed cancer diagnoses, along with enormous political blunders, were all effectively obscured by a bonfire of some fifty billion euro.

    The light of that conflagration was bright enough to relegate our home-grown crises into the shadows of relative obscurity.

    The idea that we are experiencing inflation as a consequence of two years of fiscal dissipation is, either roundly ignored or blamed upon other crises.  One does not hear such a strange assertion on RTÉ, which itself received a significant share of that fiscal dissipation for its ‘public service’ broadcasting.

    We hear nothing about the government’s responsibility for social destruction and economic waste. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine must have come as a relief. Now the priority is that ‘Putin must go’, an idea seemingly oblivious to the fact that much of the world might have to go down with him.

    All in this together?

    As Minister for Health for the initial phase of our Covid crisis, Simon Harris stated notoriously: “Remember this is coronavirus Covid-19 – that means there have been 18 other coronaviruses and I don’t think they have actually successfully found a vaccine for any.” Less comically, both he and members of NPHET are still protected from any review into nursing home deaths.

    Nor are the main opposition parties, including Sinn Fein, blameless in respect of the temporary madness. I suspect that when they inevitably get hold of the piggy bank they are unlikely to call for any kind of revision to the narrative. We were ‘all in this together’ after all.

    Nonetheless, as inflation continues and war escalates, the appetite for truth will surely grow, albeit at a remove from the big glasshouse on Nutley Lane.

    When it is safe to speak and ask honest questions, and once the capacity for relating cause and effect returns, calls for a review of the past two years of policy might yet begin in earnest.

    Any colour as long as its black..

    Some truths seem to persist for longer than others. Scientific truths endure not because they are more precious than myth, but simply because they are (or they remain) largely inescapable.

    During the Covid years, scientific truths succumbed to a form of relativism. Thus, one could have any scientific ‘truth’, as long as it was consistent with the fear-frenzy and the dominant narrative that Covid was the only challenge our government ought to address.

    In contrast, unpopular truths became the subject of a formal and informal censorship. Science has become strangely ‘right wing’ in its obedience to pharmaceutical companies and its lack of tolerance for essential questions and contrary facts. Yet Karl Popper once argued; ‘the demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever.’

    In the presence of industry-led censorship, neither science nor democracy functions properly. Yet many people still believe that the scientific discourse is free. Sadly, unscientific views on masks, lockdowns and administering genetic vaccinations to children and pregnant women are (for the moment at least) considered to accord perfectly with the scientific evidence.

    Entire national policies were based upon a flawed epidemiology of Covid. That epidemiology was described almost everywhere in the context of ‘deaths per million’, despite Covid being from its inception a disease with a cohort-specific mortality.

    Indeed, mortality itself was defined in the context of deaths ‘with’ Covid-19 as opposed to ‘from’ Covid-19. PCR testing remains the gold standard in determining a ‘Covid case’ as opposed to detecting traces of virus in an asymptomatic individual who has recently been exposed to the virus.

    In response to Covid-19, foundational principles of science and epidemiology were turned on their heads to satiate a politically profitable narrative. Such contortions are unsustainable in the long term.

    The majority desperately feared Covid, and so an aggressive cold virus – dangerous to the elderly and infirm – became a disease almost entirely inflated by a politically inflated fear.

    Science was annexed to supply an array of ‘facts’ to substantiate this fear and pursue the enormous wave of Covid ‘research’ funding from a strange marriage between Big Pharma and the State. Fearmongers were given seemingly unlimited time on TV and radio. In contrast, ‘contrarians’ were issued with legal threats and ongoing investigations.

    Latter Day Inquisition

    It is worth bearing in mind that science has generally co-existed with unscientific ideas. Thus, religion and science have jousted for centuries. However, when governments depend upon science to justify draconian laws and unprecedented spending; to question ‘the science’ becomes a direct challenge to the government itself.

    When governments depended on the Church for legitimacy, for anyone to question its religious tenets was a dangerous heresy, rooted out by Inquisition if necessary.

    In respect of the medical profession the government has a powerful tool to silence doctors, which is the Irish Medical Council (IMC). The Medical Regulator acts as ‘Grand Inquisitor’, answerable only to the Minister for Health.

    During the Covid crisis, anyone in my profession who openly criticised the Science associated with policy, was immediately condemned as a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

    These ‘misinformed medics’ represented, (and in most cases still represent) a ‘clear and present danger’ to public health. They were heretics were to be rooted out; removed from society like a cancerous prostate gland.

    The danger we pose is not towards public health, but rather towards the public’s understanding of the issue. The social operation is ongoing, and the IMC remains its enthusiastic surgeon.

    Enemies of the People

    It is not an easy thing for a doctor who spends the best part of his or her working life trying to solve people’s immediate problems, to be suddenly turned into a kind of pathology, and confined to the world of the anti-vaxxer and right-wing conspiracy theorist.

    Yet that is the fate of any doctor who voiced criticism of Covid-policy. We remain under formal investigations, heading towards the end-game of sanctions and potential strike-offs. The personal struggles behind these investigations are given no public attention.

    The necessity of belonging, to a society, to a fraternity of peers, even continuing to belong to one’s own family, all become tenuous when one is considered a pariah. For some, including myself, the isolation has led to a breakdown of sorts. My own ‘crash’ came in the form of simply running out of gas: facing up to the fact that my ‘gas’ is considered as a form of flatulence by most of my colleagues.

    I have worked hard at keeping my family together, and that has been as much as I can handle, finding solace in bee keeping and a polytunnel. For other colleagues and their families, the consequences have been far more devastating.

    In the mid-nineteenth century the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that surgeons were spreading disease by not washing their hands between operations. He was ostracised for his conspiratorial assertion. Ridiculed and vilified, he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

    Irish communities draw their strengths from being close knit, but this can lead to a damaging conformity, as our history with the Catholic Church readily demonstrates. Neighbours and friends soon learn who the ‘anti-vax’ doctor is. A whisper at the school gate or a snub in the supermarket may not qualify as an assault, yet it can be just as hurtful to the spouse or daughter of a ‘dangerous’ doctor.

    There are, and were, many Irish doctors who publicly and privately rejected much of our conflicting and often, frankly, comical Covid policies. Too many to list here.

    However, the pressures brought to bear from without, and the enormous financial incentives for the majority of GPs, were sufficient to ensure that serious questions, or even discussion, in respect of policies, was cancelled from the outset. Some GPs have their bicycle clubs sponsored by Pfizer and were most keen not to bite the hand that feeds.

    https://twitter.com/theRiverField/status/1254488307054120960

    Whistleblower

    I occupy a rather unpleasant space as one of the first to speak out against ‘scientific’ polices that led to upwards of a thousand deaths in Irish nursing homes over a period of a few months in early 2020.

    I stood at bedside and watched my patients die, whilst a spouse or loved one sat crying in the car park or staring through the window outside. I struggled to obtain medicines, oxygen and PPE.  Many, if not most, deaths were the consequence of a policy of dumping untested hospital patients into nursing homes to make way for a Covid-19 ‘tsunami’ that ultimately manifested in empty makeshift hospitals and tic-toc videos of dancing medics.

    An enduring myth in respect of those who died in the nursing homes is that that the ‘tragedy’ occurred everywhere equally. Yet throughout Europe, during the first wave, the highest per capita death toll in care homes occurred in Ireland. We hold the dubious record of being second highest in the world after Canada.

    Those who complained about these deaths to the regulator, became the subject of investigation by the regulator, while those responsible are feted as heroes.

    In March of 2020, I attempted to ‘whistle blow’ on the unfolding catastrophe of incompetence, and deprivation within the nursing homes. I resigned my Ministerial appointment in the hope that the Medical Council might investigate what might be considered as criminal manslaughter.

    Yet they chose to ignore the dead and investigated me instead. In the media I found myself being dismissed as a ‘far right’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘anti-vaxxer’.

    Far right is funny, as I am proudly left and liberal in my thinking. Anti-vaxxer is even funnier, as I have given more vaccines than I have had hot dinners. But ‘funny’ is perhaps the wrong word because it conceals some of the hurt endured by own family.

    In one article in the Independent I was described as among those doctors giving ‘horse de-wormer’ to Covid patients.

    Propaganda is a powerful tool. The wild accusations came late in the pandemic and seemed designed to highlight the ‘ridiculous’ things going on outside of the general medical adherence to ‘official guidelines’.

    Dr Gerry Waters

    Other Doctors who went much further than I could have gone have suffered more than insult and isolation. They and their loved ones are more courageous, and deserving of a voice that will be heard as soon as science is liberated from the shackles of dominant interests.

    One such man is Dr Gerry Waters who adamantly refused to administer Covid-19 vaccinations to his non-vulnerable patients, and refused to refer patients for farcical PCR testing. From the start of the pandemic, he fully comprehended, who is, and who is not at risk from Covid-19.

    He recognised that masking and injecting children was ethically and scientifically wrong, and fully understood that the essential impartiality of science had been hijacked by politics and media. In a partial validation of Dr Waters’ fears, the Irish public have smelled a rat, and to date, less than 25% of eligible children have taken the vaccine. Our rather expensive over-stock (some 4 million doses) is presently being donated to Mexico and elsewhere. A mere €25 million to be added to the bonfire.

    Dr Waters stayed true to his conviction that, beyond protecting the elderly, Covid lockdown policy was socially destructive and itself seriously pathogenic.

    Doubtless, he was of the same view as a friend of mine, a former dean of medical studies at RCSI, who told me: ‘we would have been far better off, had we done nothing at all.’ Imagine what could have been done to improve the country with the billions that were wasted?

    Some Doctors in Ireland remain convinced that many people, old and young, could be alive today were it not for the inept response and draconian measures. Effectively, what began as a rallying cry to ‘protect the vulnerable’, culminated in policies that effectively threw them under the bus. Instructively, suicide statistics and missed diagnoses, for the Covid period have yet to be released.

    After speaking the truth as he saw it, Dr Waters was rapidly investigated, tried, and subsequently suspended from the medical register; deprived of a livelihood and compelled (it would seem) to live out the remainder of his days in ignominy.

    https://twitter.com/BillyRalph/status/1458052402372923392

    Resigning from my Practice

    I am somewhat pleased that I managed to avoid administering this genetic vaccine. I contend to this day that many or most GPs in Ireland haven’t the faintest clue as to what a genetic vaccine actually is, never mind how they work and what are the potential risks involved. Unlike Dr Waters I took the less courageous step of simply resigning my post, before vaccinations became part of public policy.

    For a time, I had been able to separate my practice of medicine from my convictions. Indeed, I have been doing that for years. I suspect most doctors operate with this contradiction most days, at least when we write prescriptions for medicines that many people don’t require.

    At the start of the pandemic in 2020 I could work within the guidelines; refer for testing; visit my nursing home; wear a silly mask in the supermarket. As long as I showed that I was formally participating in the farce, I was relatively safe from the regulator.

    However soon after resigning, they placed me under investigation, although they could find nothing to hang me with; except my opinion, contradicting NPHET and Professor Luke O’Neill, and a vocal stance in respect of the nursing home dead.

    A lot of people, including many of my former patients were unhappy to see me closing the practice. Yet, regardless of my practical adherence to policy, my position as an advocate of only vaccinating the vulnerable, became untenable.

    Every week I would hear from nurses, teachers, students and employees who were being threatened with dismissal unless they received the vaccine. I have never witnessed such a blatant assault on human rights. I shudder to this day when I recall how so many people were coerced and intimidated by the government, and by members of my profession.

    Formal resignation from the HSE was my only option, as long as I wished to continue working as a GP. Private GPs are not contractually obligated to vaccinate anyone. I could manage by doing private work for a friend, and out of hours work at an on-call centre.

    Formal Censorship

    To state that the IMC was satisfied with silencing whistle-blowers or making an example of Dr Waters would be a gross understatement. Almost every doctor in Ireland who refuted policy and did not resign from their post, was either fired or placed under investigation.

    Thus, Martin Feely a respected surgeon and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, was forced to resign; Dr Pat Morrisey a principled and dedicated GP in Adare was both fired from the board of Shannon Doc, and placed under ongoing investigation by the Medical Council.

    Offending doctors received written warnings from the then President of the Council, and others were placed under investigation for failing in their new duty to: ‘promote public health guidelines.’

    One legacy of our colonial administration is a very efficient tax system, another is the efficient censorship of heretical opinions.

    After two years as a member of the IMC I am entirely convinced that it is neither fit for purpose, nor does it have a practical leg to stand on when it comes to regulation. For the most part it makes its own work as it presides over a ‘General Register’ with little or no regulation at all.

    Thus, untrained specialists are invited to come to Ireland from almost anywhere in Europe, and practice wherever and however they see fit, without specialist training; a situation that supplies regional and rural hospitals with ‘affordable’ specialists.

    The public must suck up the consequences and the IMC keeps itself busy with the inevitable mistakes and complaints. For unqualified and untrained specialists, the back door into Ireland is through the front door of the IMC.

    How to burn a heretic..

    The most difficult consequence for a doctor who is placed under investigation by the IMC is without a doubt the process of investigation itself. I recognise this as a ‘gamekeeper who has turned poacher’.  Much of my time at the IMC was spent on the Council’s Preliminary Complaints Committee, tasked with conducting the initial investigation into complaints against doctors.

    Once entangled in the Kafkaesque web of a formal inquiry, there is no escape until the investigation is completed. In many cases this takes several years. Formal letters are sent back and forth, requesting clarifications and further information, which must be formally replied to.

    One cannot leave the country to work or volunteer abroad. One cannot easily change job, as any new or prospective employers must be informed that an investigation is ongoing. One’s professional life is essentially frozen beneath a question-mark.

    Doctors who were openly critical of the Covid response, have been under investigation for over two years now. The IMC has chosen (with the notable exception of Dr Waters) to prolong these dissections for as long as possible.

    It seems that what is important for both the government and the Council is that doctors critical of policy should remain under investigation for as long as possible. Anything he or she might say or do, any comment made whilst under investigation, can readily become part of the investigation itself.

    Moreover, to refuse to engage fully with an investigation, to refuse to reply to the regular formal correspondence, is itself grounds for an immediate suspension.

    The absurd basis of the investigation into me, is that I made an appearance at a public demonstration in 2020 and ‘may not have sanitised my hands between hand-shakes.’

    To my knowledge, all of the GPs under investigation are locked into the process based on equally frivolous grounds. The pretext for investigation is unimportant, the investigations are sufficiently punitive and sufficiently censorious, hence their protracted duration.

    Heads Above the Parapet

    Perhaps the main reason for my now coming out of ‘hiding’, to tap impotently upon my keyboard, has been recent correspondence from the IMC. Some doctors have recently been informed that the investigations will now proceed to the next level of ‘formal hearings.’

    After the IMC has finished its investigation process, it can then decide either to close the case, or proceed to a full Fitness to Practice Hearing. In this instance the doctor in question must appear before the Council’s court room, and plead a case for their continued right to earn a living. As these cases relate to a doctor’s opinion rather than any clinical practice, medical insurers have declined to pay for legal representation, and the doctor must pay for his own legal counsel.

    There is a rich irony here, in that most if not all of the doctors under investigation, have themselves lodged formal complaints with the IMC in respect of registered doctors on NPHET, for ‘unscientific policies’ or financial conflicts of interest.

    For example, several Doctors have lodged complaints against the President of the Irish College of General Practitioners in respect of his openly encouraging medical discrimination against non-vaccinated patients.

    Also, at the height of the pandemic, Leo Varadkar re-registered as a doctor, helping to ‘man the phones’ and visit halting sites to test the Travelling Community. It was all a rather vulgar PR stunt lapped up by the media with a relish normally reserved for freshly baked cake.

    However, when Dr Varadkar re-registered he became open to complaints to the IMC, along with Dr Holohan, and several other key policymakers. Without exception, not one of these complaints have been investigated. Instead, it is the doctors who lodged them who find themselves under ongoing investigations.

    At a point when Leo Varadkar was found to have been leaking sensitive and lucrative contract details to a friend in General Practice, the then President of the Medical Council was busy issuing written warnings to fellow GPs that they had an ethical duty ‘promote government policy’.

    Call for Caution

    Some doctors in Ireland felt a moral and scientific obligation to understand how Covid vaccines work prior to administering them. Many advocated caution, particularly in respect of pregnancy and young healthy children.

    My friend in Wexford is one example. A respected GP, a man of science and integrity, he vaccinated all of his elderly and vulnerable patients in keeping with HSE guidelines, but when it came to pregnant women and healthy young children he called for caution.

    He reminded colleagues of their ethical obligation to ‘first do no harm’, and made no secret of his concerns and fears. In doing so he stepped outside of the public health policy, and into the crosshairs of the IMC.

    Each IMC investigation and each insulting article in the media, along with the invective and scorn that is heaped on contrarians from within the profession itself, comes at a cost. In his case, a deep personal cost.

    The most painful barbs are the ones that are cast into one’s private life. Spouses and children are no less attached to a doctor than they are attached to any husband or wife. Even with the best will in the world no doctor can keep the ramifications of an investigation from creeping into the most intimate spaces.

    Those who objected to Covid policies are treated to daily realities that are small thorns: a neighbour looking at you with scorn; former friends crossing to the other side of the street; wives or children being subjected to insult or abuse simply because they are related to the newly christened ‘right-wing’ or ‘anti-vaxx’ doctor.

    My friend in Wexford tried hard to toe the line whilst preserving his integrity and an uncompromising commitment to the welfare of his patients. He has a family and bills to pay. Full resignation from the HSE is not a financial option for all. He tried to work within the guidelines, whilst at the same time urging caution. He continued to work, for the sake of his patients, his family, to pay his mortgage, and help his daughters get through college.

    Were he on his own and without dependants he (and probably me) might have stood tall and offered the Medical Council the two fingered salute, as Gerry Waters had courageously done.

    He (like me), tried desperately for a time to justify his position to our profession, to our colleagues, with articles, references, papers from the most esteemed of Medical Journals etc. He pointed to the lack of safety data on the vaccine during pregnancy and in children. It was to no avail. His position was akin to a lamb trying to convince a pack of wolves of the virtues of vegetarianism.

    Nonetheless, he defended his position upon an internet forum exclusive to GPs; and despite my words of caution, they tore him to pieces.

    A couple of months ago, my brave friend found himself parked in a lonely spot in Wexford. When the authorities located him, he had taken enough pills to silence the wolves forever.

    After two weeks in intensive care and a return from near death, he returned home to count his blessings, recover from his ordeal, and begin a life-long process of recovery.

    Absolute Power

    As a member of the IMC I was always intrigued at the efficacy and authority that a wealthy quango can wield. There is a sense of limitless power within the inner circle – reminiscent of a well-funded Big House – with a special relationship with the Minister.

    At the IMC there is a department devoted to briefing and monitoring the press for issues that relate to the medical profession. Before each Council meeting a member of this office addresses the Council with a summary of what is happening in the media. It runs a little bit like “…and now what it says in the papers.”

    I mention this to highlight that my friend, the Wexford GP, his near death, and the harrowing experience of his family and many of his patients, was highlighted in the national papers and the local press. Having gone missing for some days, news of his disappearance was reported in the national media.

    There can be no doubt that the Medical Council was well-briefed about his ordeal. Yet within a week or two of his discharge from hospital he (and by proxy his family) received his letter from the IMC, informing him that he has been placed under formal investigation for his failure to promote Covid vaccination policy. He now faces an impending fitness to practice hearing, whereupon it will be decided if he too will be deprived of an ability to earn a living.

    In its role as Grand Inquisitor, the Medical Council has destroyed the professional lives of many doctors, before, during and after Covid.

    In my view, Irish Medicine is as rotten as any pathology it might pretend to address. This is a rot reflecting a wider rot in our political system. Perhaps it extends deep into the zeitgeist itself.

    There is much to address in Irish medicine including inter alia our current mental health crisis, polypharmacy, corruption within the medical schools, defective specialist training schemes, deaths in nursing homes, relationship between pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, tensions between the public and private health sectors, and a general lack of regulation, but none of these seem to be of any concern to the IMC.

    When the dust settled at the end of our last national crisis, the banking regulator was ultimately recognised as being guilty of catastrophic failures in respect of its duties and obligations. I suspect that if science is ever liberated from special interests, and media is free from a particular type of agenda, history will be seen to have repeated itself yet again.

    Our teetering or collapsing system of medical care in Ireland is equally the consequence of an incompetent, and morally bankrupt, regulator.  As usual, there is no one to ‘police the police’, only a fickle public opinion, and a Minister who is as much dependent on the regulator as they are answerable to him.

    As a post-colonial society, and in the ‘spirit’ of our times, we tip the cap, with the same deference as ever to the ‘Big House’.

  • The Candidates Explain

    The Candidate Explains
    after Charlotte Nichols MP

    I didn’t know the meaning
    of “incursion” or “dealt with”
    the negative connotation until this morning.
    Didn’t realise the possible definitions
    of “parasite”, “rubbish dump”, “bad human material”.
    Didn’t know until this morning the connotations
    of “dismantle”, “pikey”, “assimilate”.
    The negative meanings of “scum”,
    “child thief”, “branding iron”.
    Didn’t know “dirty”, “asocial”, “expel”.
    The connotations of “a people involved
    in the manufacture of human freaks.”
    Didn’t know the meaning until now
    of “Rahoonery”, “pollutant”, “Pharajimos”.
    The problematic side of those over the age of five
    being taken away and civilised.
    Didn’t know the meaning of “The Devouring”,
    “The Cutting Up”, or “behind concrete walls”.
    The negative connotation of “whoever kills one,
    shall be guilty of nothing.”
    Didn’t know the meaning of “deport”
    until I saw it done this morning,
    clean as a Police Superintendent’s signature
    or a Councillor’s campaign for re-election.

    Feature Image: Constantino Idini

     

     

     

  • Musician of the Month: Bróna McVittie

    I grew up in a rambling country house with damp bubbling from the walls and ghosts lurking in the locked rooms. It was big enough for a family of five to lose themselves, each in their own space, occasionally coming together for meals, but not needing to live in each others’ pockets.

    Just beyond the garden boundary were the ruins of an old mill, a remnant of the once thriving linen industry in Ulster. We used to collect frogspawn from the boggy patches there in old jam jars.

    Just beyond the mill walls was (and still is) the Fairy Glen along which we would traipse to primary school. We were always looking out for the fairies. Mum said that if you asked them nicely they would do things for you. So I started with wee things like ‘wake me up in time for school tomorrow’. And they always did. Somehow.

    Forestbrook House.

    Link for The Fairy Glen (Gleann Na Sidhe)

    We got evicted when I was eight-years-old and we moved to a Council House in a nearby estate, the only Protestant family.

    We had a mixed reception. Some friendly and a few spuds thrown at the window to keep us in check. One day our neighbour’s son stole my Dad’s bicycle, but we found it in a field down the way not too long after.

    I don’t recall those being the happiest of days. But four years later my Dad found an old rambling country house to rent, much like the one we’d lived in previously. And we moved.

    The landlord had left an old upright piano in the house and I was instantly smitten. This was where I experienced my first musical urges. I remember being inspired by Mum and Dad’s records, anything from Dolly Parton or Judy Collins was a hit. And Mum had a very cool African record by a band called Osibisa, who I’m very pleased to discover are still going.

    Drumsesk House.

    I got piano lessons from a local eccentric. He was surely more Norman Bates than Norman himself. His mother lived upstairs, although you never saw her. He had four different rooms with pianos. One for each season. His toupee was also changeable. He was an excellent teacher and I even managed to pass a few grades with his help.

    I had started clarinet lessons in school a few years previously, and although it didn’t feel like it at the time, this musical introduction had more than a little to do with my current preoccupation.

    Mr Green taught me how to play jazz clarinet, a very important part of which was keeping the foot tapping. As part of the deal of getting a clarinet ‘for free’ I had to go on Saturdays to play with the South Ulster Youth Band in Portadown. 7am Saturday starts on the bus weren’t popular with me at the time, but looking back on it, it was a tremendous thing for a young person to be involved with.

    It wasn’t until I was almost done with secondary school, and had fallen for a local outcast, musician and romantic, who was a few years my senior and very much ‘not what my parents wanted’, that I was inspired to pick up a guitar and compose.

    I’ll never forget my best friend crying when I played her my first song on the guitar. Only two chords; taught to me by my brother. That’s all I could play, but the lyrics were by W.B. Yeats – the chorus: “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold(en) and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths, Of night and light and the half light.” And the sentiment was deeply earnest. I was in love. And there was no way to unfeel it.

    When I left high school I decided to delay a University degree and headed off to South America as part of an organised voluntary-work overseas initiative. I spent five months living in Ecuador teaching English to primary school children and working at an orphanage, a home for abandoned children and an animal reserve.

    It was an extraordinary experience and opened my eyes to worlds I’d had no notion of. After the placement finished I wandered off alone into Peru and Bolivia with no idea of what I would do or where I would go, and ended up buying my first guitar in La Paz.

    When I eventually arrived at St-Hilda’s College, Oxford I had firmly cemented my relationship with the guitar as a tool for songwriting. It wasn’t until later after graduation, when I moved to London, that I discovered the harp.

    A friend and luthier kindly lent me one of his instruments, which featured on my first album As the Crow Flies recorded under the moniker Forestbrook (after my first family home). That album is as underground today as it ever was. So it delighted me greatly when – after releasing my first solo album We Are the Wildlife a decade later – the press validated my work. Four star reviews from The Guardian, The Independent, Mojo and Uncut Magazine!? So giving up the day job hadn’t been such a bad idea.

    Bróna at St. Hilda’s.

    It had taken me a while to find my own voice. It wasn’t a sudden occurrence. I still recall Dad’s advice when I would sing a Dolly Parton song in her voice. “Careful with that vibrato! If you start that now, you’ll never be able to stop.”

    What matters most to me now is that I’m not imitating anyone. I am truly enjoying doing what I love, what feels right. But it’s not without great effort. There’s a wealth of technical knowledge, an endless sea of admin, grant applications, petitions to promoters, social media campaigns galore, and very many dull and tedious tasks that go with being a full time artist in your own right.

    As I heard Iarla Ó Lionáird recently concede during a lecture; “I think about giving up this job every single week!” And I know only too well why. If only we artists could simply enjoy doing our art.

    Link to The Woman in the Moon (The Album)

  • Musician of the Month: Niamh McKinney

    For a lot of my life I felt a fervent need to be doing something creative but I didn’t know what. Eventually I started to feel the unsated creative urge turn to intense frustration within me; a physical tension through my body, like important growth held back or suspended indefinitely. I pictured bunched vines in my arms, straining to be freed and climb. I knew I needed a creative outlet, but I didn’t know what it should be. I quashed these intense feelings, over and over, trying to reason them out of existence.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNcw0ZkADKY

    A music-lover since I was tiny (as a small child I heard a lot of traditional Irish music; as a teen I loved The Cranberries, Alanis Morrissette, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Metallica, Sinead O’Connor, Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, a little Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers to name a few… then Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, Jefferson Airplane in my late teens/early twenties), I actually went through a long period in my early twenties of denying myself the pleasure of listening to my favourite songwriters.

    It had actually become painful for me: Listening to my favourite songs was never enough – I felt I should be writing songs. It was a nagging, constant voice chanting in my ear. However, for years I stifled that urge, I told myself people who don’t play an instrument can’t write songs. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to have a creative outlet, it wasn’t as though anyone else needed it to happen from me: there are plenty of songwriters out there! But it was a need, not merely a desire.

    A ferocious hunger was building in me and I felt utterly helpless in the face of it. I convinced myself I was unable to write a song. Isn’t it strange how boxed-in our ideas can be? How stifled and thwarted we can become because of them. I gave up on listening to music, it was too painful, and I was busy in life anyway, so there were a million distractions…

    https://soundcloud.com/niamhmckinney/the-price-new-mix?si=4cdfd3f26bef4171803e71ea2e647cf8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

    One day, however, my husband (a singer and guitarist) and I decided to record “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for a laugh on his Mac: He would put down the guitar and main vocal and I’d add harmonies. After we recorded the song – amazed by the possibilities that recording with the Mac offered – I asked my husband to show me how to layer tracks and then he left me alone for a while to play around with it.

    I grabbed a notebook of poetry (I’ve written since I was a small child) and started singing words into the mic. Entire songs came out of me, already fully formed. I was astounded and elated: I put my voice to the air as though freeing a bird long-trapped and the lines of words came out as songs, as though they’d been stored inside me just waiting to be sung. No thought or effort was needed. The question as to whether they were “good” or not didn’t actually occur to me at all. The creative frustration I had been feeling for years was finally being released.

    I was euphoric. I hardly left the bedroom for three days. I wrote at least twelve songs within those three days, each one a fully-formed melody and full set of lyrics: verses, choruses, bridges – everything flowing out effortlessly.

    I felt like I was wholly myself – truly – for the first time in my life. I didn’t need anything else to come from it. Having the songs written was enough. My soul had the avenue of expression it had been hankering for – making me absolutely desperate – for years. A month after my first bout of songwriting, the third song I wrote – “Down Near the Sea” – won a thousand euros in the Allingham Festival Songwriting competition. It was a very welcome validation.

     

    Despite the fact that my husband is a musician, it took a couple of years before he began writing accompaniments for my songs, all of which I wrote and recorded a capella – often recording them as I wrote them – with layered harmonies. He brought the songs to completion. He is highly intuitive and stays utterly true to the meanings and feelings of the songs. He also has an unbelievable ability to surprise me and craft unexpected accompaniments for certain of my songs. It is endlessly satisfying, having this creative relationship as well as our marriage now.

    The two of us derive enormous pleasure from it. He has said he loves being pushed creatively by certain of my songs to challenge himself and get the accompaniment to where he wants it.  I know next to nothing about music – keys, chords, etc – so the work of creating accompaniment is down to Steve. However, I sometimes write a line of melody for the guitar to play here and there, or request a certain sound or feel here, a certain atmosphere there, and we have developed an intuitive creative rapport between us.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney.

    I write alone and in dribs and drabs: a little ribbon of melody floating to me while I unpack the dishwasher; a snippet of a lyric coming to me while I’m out running. When I feel I have the song finished or near it, I sing it for Steve and he begins to write an accompaniment for it.

    Songwriting is a gift: A gift to a soul that endlessly craves to express itself, to express the way it experiences itself, and to channel pain and sorrow – as well as joy – in a way that no other art form allows.  I am blessed to be married to a gifted musician who creates the accompaniments, the structures for my songs to be held in and elevated upon.

    There is something ethereal and mysterious about how a melody visits you, or descends to you, and entices your voice to sing it. So deliciously mysterious; the compulsion to join voice to melody, lyric to line, in order to allow the soul a kind of freedom it can access in no other way. I have been singing since I was a baby.

    Melody comes to me at odd moments, or mundane moments. I might be thinking about something else entirely and suddenly notice I am humming a tune I quite enjoy and I’ll record it into my phone. A particular lyric will ‘ask’ for a particular series of notes; the notes come and lend themselves to the words, and suddenly the marriage of words to melody have completed the expression of the feeling; they encapsulate that extremely personal experience or reflection. When it happens I experience a unique high. I consider myself lucky, to have stumbled upon relief, release: A gift.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney Bandcamp

  • The Best Neoliberal Country in Europe

    Ireland is the bloated sow that kills its young. The best little neoliberal country in Europe. From the blood of patriots, alas, a city of tents has bloomed around us.

    Strange flowers bloom in our city, folding into doorways at night, spreading through the city and out to the suburbs.

    Airy, I suppose, and if you want to look at the stars, you can sleep al fresco in a fashionable street corner on Grafton Street; snug under a sheet of newspaper

    Such a fabulous city. The edge to it now. Feral gangs roaming the streets, the glitter of knives after dark, the wretched stench, the rivers of urine. And such sights to behold. A man defecating on the pavement, a girl in her underwear, crazed on drugs, running around O’Connel Street.

    Enjoy your trip home from the city, if you have a home. You might not have it for long. A tent awaits you, like some fabulous moth flapping its wings in a cold wind, just for you.

    Good thing we got rid of the scourge of England. Our own in charge now: posh, privately educated politicians, owners of multiple properties, unctuously wringing their hands about the crises of homelessness; so hard to maintain all those properties, so very hard.

    Are we a failed state then? An outlier in Europe when you examine homelessness, the cost of living, the health service?

    Yes.

    A nasty little neoliberal country run as a business model. A human being is reduced to an economic unit to be preyed on, exploited, profited from.

    Capitalist pathologies have morphed into neoliberalism. With checks, balances, and democratic norms, it’s cyclical nature could have been sustained, but at its best it exploits and appeals to the very worst in our human nature, creating a society of individuals motivated by little other than self-interest and self-advancement, jostling for status, position, power or wealth, enslaving humans by the ego, itself an absurd societal construct .

    Everything has shifted to the right, including basic moral parameters. Democracies are failing, the right and the left are configuring.

    Here sadism and cruelty have crept out from under the nun’s mantle and into public discourse. Homeless children, like cockroaches, eat their dinner off the pavement.

    But the economy is thriving, and there’s full employment…

    The slogan “Keep the recovery going” … was as out of touch with reality as any despot surrounded by yes men. It’s a good thing a disenchanted constituency here will be soaked up by Sinn Fein.

    But profits blossom, as does the sale of luxury goods. Now we have the rich, the poor, and the working poor, who are little better than slaves.

    Vulgar extensions protrude out of gentrified neighbourhoods, gangs in the shadows waiting to smash through them.

    History teaches us again and again that the poor man will come to the rich man’s gate, and the barbarians are on the move. Civic virtues mean nothing, the good life or the practice of virtue is sneered at.

    The idea of civic-minded citizens leading a virtuous life is not a religious concept, but about creating a society based on shared collective values. There are ways to organise a society for the greatest common good that don’t require a widespread understanding of rocket science, or a Communist regime. It simply involves valuing wider social responsibilities, and relationships over the narrow morality of self-interest and self-advancement.

    Empires come and go, and simple spiritual lessons go unheeded. Monotheistic religions are a disaster, and the religious disposition may well be a pathology, but there are great riches in all spiritual traditions, blithely ignored.

    Who, once he had truly seen a flower, not just looked at it, would want temporal power or to run an empire, or would trample on someone else?  A fool perhaps. Only a fool who cannot see it.

    Survival was never about the survival of the fittest. Darwin was referring to the survival of the fittest to adapt. Atomised humans have no sense of being part of a collective species, no shared sense of a  future, or of the future of the planet that sustains them.

    And when the nuclear cloud has settled, the earthworm will perhaps continue churning joyfully through the charred ruins of the Earth. Perhaps even a flower might poke it’s head above the rubble when the human grub has gone.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini

  • Musician of the Month: John Buckley McQuaid

    THIS IS WHERE I KEEP MY DREAMS

    I was born and raised in Dublin, in a house with a piano and a garden. At the bottom of the garden, there were two beautiful chestnut trees, one taller than the other. It was here that I went when I needed to be alone. I always observed the same ritual. I would first climb the smaller of the trees and then the taller. The taller was enormously high. I didn’t dare climb the whole way to the top because the branches didn’t look strong enough to bear my weight.

    One day, my curiosity got the better of me and I gathered my courage and climbed to where I’d never climbed before. Sneakers green with chestnut bark and young heart thudding in my elated chest, I clung to the thin, uppermost branches and looked out over the world. A neighbour’s dog danced along the top of the wall between our gardens. I could see the church where I attended Sunday Mass, the school where I lived in daily fear of not being good enough and the shop where I bought acid drops, broken biscuits and, as a teenager, illegal Black Russian cigarettes.

    Years later, my father complained about the millions of leaves that the trees shed every autumn, which took him days and days to clear away.

    If you promise not to tell anybody, I’ll let you in on a secret. There is a garden at the bottom of which, two chestnut trees stand, magnificently tall and green with leaves. There is a place at the top of the larger tree where the branches look too thin to bear the weight of a curious child; from where the eye can see a church, a school, a shop and a dog that dances along the top of a wall. A place where a child went when he needed to be alone and where one day, his curiosity got the better of his fear and he climbed to where he’d never climbed before.

    This is where I keep my dreams.

    All children are born creative. This creativity can either be encouraged or suppressed. I was not allowed to paint as a child so I learned to paint with words.

    There are basically two kinds of people in the world. Those who are up to their ears in emotional issues, and do their best to get out of them. And those who are up to their ears in emotional issues, and do their best to stay in them.

    We are all here to learn.

    HUMOUR AND ART

    Humour is a wonderful way to communicate – it disarms and enables us to say many things that are otherwise unsayable or unacceptable to the listener.

    Isn’t life wonderful, ain’t it a thrill?
    Drinks on the table, chops on the grill
    And if you’re not able, we’ll give you a pill
    If life doesn’t get you, then happiness will.

    We, as a nation, have grown up in the shadow of the Confessional, where all our sins have been forgiven on a regular basis, which inspired the following lines:

    CONFESSIONS OF A CATHOLIC KID

    I used to be a Catholic
    Magnificently guilty
    The sex was good from Hollywood
    To fabulously filthy

    Forgive me Lord for I have sinned
    I promise not to sin again
    Unless of course I get the chance
    I beg forgiveness in advance

    Mea culpa, mea culpa
    Mea maxima culpa

    The main lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. Art is not a luxury but a necessity. The artist is the alchemist of our times, who turns the garbage of emotional issues into the gold of creation, reflecting the world’s absurdities. Crises are gifts that tell us who we are.

    Once I showed someone a place where I wrote every day. They remarked that the view was not very exciting, to which I replied: “I’m not looking out, I’m looking in.”

    “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Cesar A. Cruz

    Convenience is the byword and the curse of modern society.

    MAKING AN IRISH ALBUM

    Last year I released an album of original songs about Ireland, “This Is Where I Keep My Dreams”  https://johnbuckleymcquaid.lnk.to/ThisIsWhereIKeepMyDreams

    The songs were written over a period of 34 years. Not wishing to be pigeon-holed as a certain kind of performer, I waited until last year to record and release the album. The title song, the text of which opens this article, references growing up in the south Dublin suburb of Stillorgan.  The song “Prodigal Kiss” imagines Oisín Mac Cumhaill returning to the Ireland of today and taking the Luas. What might he have made of the state of Ireland today? The chorus poses the question: How did we get from the passion and ideals of 1916 to the prevalent malaise of 2022?

    And you can be sure that we’ll never forget
    The culture of vultures and dealers in debt
    The struggles and Troubles, the gold, white and green
    So much for our beautiful Nineteen-sixteen.

    The album is compassionately critical of society – especially in ‘Girls Who Lived In Hell’, a song  inspired by and dedicated to the girls who endured the Hell of the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996.

    Our country has been delivered into the hands of rogues and scoundrels, Vulture Funds, Rotating Taoiseachs and Landlord TDs, who choose to serve themselves, rather than those they are chosen by and paid to serve. Let there be a separation of Church and State. Let the Church and State pay full redress to all victims and survivors of clerical and governmental abuse. Let the churches pay property tax. Let us pass a law prohibiting TDs from being landlords and/or property speculators. Let us build a society based on compassion, justice and accountability. Let us rise up and take back what is rightfully ours at the next election. Let us stand firm in hope.

    We have so much compassion for the downtrodden of other nations, but very little when it comes to ourselves.

    HOMELESS HOTELS

    I’ll tell you a tale of the Homeless Hotels
    Those chosen to serve, have us under their spells
    We live on the streets and we scrounge for a crust
    And curse the hyenas betraying our trust

    They say that there isn’t, we know that there is
    We’re hungry and fearful and God help the kids
    They’re lost and they’re lonely and strung out on drugs
    They turn into monsters that nobody hugs

    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    Some get cake and some get crumb
    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    What on earth have we become?

    The merciless clergy abused and denied
    For ages the blameless that they crucified
    They buried them namelessly under the sod
    And offered novenas in praise of their God

    They’re burning down churches on faraway land
    We may not agree but we do understand
    We’re drinking and thinking and feeling the shame
    We don’t have the strength to be doing the same

    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    Some get cake and some get crumb
    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    What on earth have we become?

    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    Trotters trotting to the trough
    Ireland, Ireland, Ireland, Ireland
    Can’t you see? We’ve had enough!

    All lyrics by John Buckley McQuaid

    LINKS:

    VALENTINE’S DAYS – An e-book in four parts, consisting of 29 songs and 29 videos. A love story, based on actual events, which takes place in Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Aarhus):

    E-books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/valentines-days-part-1-paris/id1191539417

    THIS IS WHERE I KEEP MY DREAMS:

    GIRLS WHO LIVED IN HELL:

    PRODIGAL KISS:

    HOMELESS HOTELS:

  • The Barrington Disconnect

    Winifred Barrington, only daughter of Sir Charles Barrington, led a charmed life – far removed from the political and economic struggles of the general population in the 1920s.

    The Barrington family, who lived in what was then known as Glenstal Castle, were landed gentry and enjoyed the associated trappings. However, they were well respected as decent landlords, good employers and were not blind to the needs of the community.  

    For example, they founded Barrington’s Hospital in Limerick City – with the proviso that it be situated in the working area of the community.

    The inscription on the foundation plaque reads: This hospital was founded and erected by Joseph Barrington and his sons, Matthew, Daniel, Croker and Samuel, for the relief of the poor of their native city A.D. 1829.

    They funded many other community projects, Church of Ireland and Catholic, and in a noble gesture, supplied the site and the building stone for the erection of a new Catholic Church in the nearby village of Murroe.

    On a May afternoon in 1921, Winifred, or Winnie as she was known locally, saddled her favourite white pony and rode across the Limerick border to Newport in Co. Tipperary – accompanied, on bicycle, by Miss Coverdale – who was a house guest at Glenstal.

    On arrival in Newport, Winnie and Miss Coverdale parked their respective modes of transport and climbed aboard a military vehicle for the final leg of their fishing trip to the Mulcair River at Cimalta House, near Killascully – a few miles from Newport. They were joined in the vehicle by Major Gabbett, who was a friend of the Barrington family, Lieutenant Trengrouse and District Inspector Harry Biggs.

    Winifred (Winnie) Barrington.

    D.I. Biggs, who was stationed in Newport, was ruthless in the pursuit of his duties and employed some bizarre tactics in hunting down the Volunteers. On one occasion, after morning Mass in the village of Silvermines, he rounded up the congregation and insisted they sing ‘God Save the King’ while shots were fired over their heads. As a result of all this, he was a marked man and a prime target for the Volunteers.

    Following the fishing, and after some tea and pleasantries, the party decided to make their way back to Newport. However, their journey came to a sudden and sad finale when their vehicle was ambushed at Coolboreen. When the dust settled and the firing ceased, D.I. Biggs lay dead on the road and Winnie Barrington, who had been a front seat passenger, lay fatally wounded in the ditch.

    There were few tears shed for D.I. Biggs, but there was an enormous outpouring of grief for Winnie. Her warmth and friendliness had endeared her to the local community, and she was not averse to dancing at the crossroads in Abington.

    Her body was laid out in the castle, surrounded by flowers of the fairest and she was buried in the Church of Ireland Cemetery, Abington on Wednesday, May 16, 1921. The inscription on her headstone reads:  “Here lies all that could die of Winifred Frances Barrington, loved and only daughter of Sir Charles Barrington.”

    The tragedy cast an air of sadness over the village of Murroe. Every door remained closed with the blinds firmly shut. The bells of the Catholic Church tolled mournfully until the funeral procession passed out of sight.

    My maternal grandmother would probably have tolled the bells for Winnie’s funeral as she was clerk of the Catholic Church in Murroe – a task that would later pass to my mother. My paternal grandfather and granduncles were members of the North Tipperary IRA unit. To date, I’ve been unable to ascertain if any of them were involved in the ambush.

    The IRA Volunteers in North Tipperary regretted the tragic event, and the condolences of the ambush party were accepted, with quiet dignity, by Winnie’s parents.

    After the truce, the parish priest of Murroe refused to re-inter the bodies of two volunteers who had been killed in action and had been interred elsewhere. On hearing of the impasse, Sir Charles Barrington offered his own grave for the burial, at which point, the priest relented, and the request was granted. When the graves were opened in the church grounds they were decorated with mosses and flowers provided by the gardeners of Glenstal – on the instructions of Sir Charles.

    In 1925, he offered Glenstal Castle to the Irish Free State as an official residence for any future head of state. He was finally saying good-bye to Ireland and his splendid castle. The proposal was given serious consideration, but the Viceregal lodge at Phoenix Park was chosen instead. The Benedictine order of monks later acquired the castle – where it still remains in their good care and is now known as Glenstal Abbey.

  • Varadkar off the Hook: Questions Remain

    In response to allegations made against then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar which appeared in Village Magazine, in March 2022 I submitted a formal statement to the Garda investigative team regarding the Official Secrets Act (hencefore OSA); in particular pertaining to the responsibilities of Martin Fraser, then the most senior civil servant in the country.

    I also pointed to an usually-timed departure from precedent in Fraser’s appointment as the next ambassador to London, which is in the gift of Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

    Certain circumstantial evidence remains pertinent to any interrogation by the Oireachtas into what has occurred, namely:

    February 11, 2019: the NAGP union write a threatening letter to Fine Gael HQ warning it would be canvassing against them in upcoming local elections and the forthcoming general election.

    April 10, 2019: the confidential GP contract is couriered from the Taoiseach’s Department to then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Baldonnel airport without formal authorisation and with no conditions attached.

    April 25, 2019: an official in that Department of Health warns that ‘Unilateral publication of the Agreement, in the absence of confirmation from the IMO that it is satisfied with the final text, would represent a serious breach of trust.’

    We still do not know which civil servant authorised that initial leak.

    It beggars belief that in the seven months from the time that the revelations appeared in Village Magazine (October 2020), and the case being raised to a criminal investigation (April 2021), that the most senior civil servant in the country – with responsibilities deriving from the OSA including internal breaches – does not appear to have conducted an internal inquiry.

    Bear in mind that if a junior official leaks a confidential file it is usually career suicide, and potentially results in criminal charges.

    I therefore previously argued that it is reasonable to assume that no junior official leaked the document, and that authorisation came from Fraser himself.

    It is important to emphasise that Martin Fraser was one of three Civil Service Commissioners with certain legal powers vested in him that exceed even the Taoiseach of the day.

    The logic underpinning such formidable powers is that they are responsible for the preservation of the institutions, statute and assets of the State beyond the life of any government. Hence the concept of a ‘permanent’ government and its daunting power.

    With such power arrives commensurate responsibility. It became apparent in my dialogue with members of the Garda investigative team that Martin Fraser had not conducted an internal probe, and his role was never under investigation.

    On legal advice I withdrew my statement and was advised that the matter would return to the Oireachtas for clarification and investigation.

    The Duties of the Oireachtas

    Now that the DPP has ruled that Leo Varadkar has no case to answer the matter comes back to the Oireachtas, which ought to clarify the following points before Martin Fraser departs for London. He should be compelled to explain:

    • Why he failed to conduct an internal investigation into the leaked and confidential contract, either in the seven months before the Gardai gave it criminal status or since.
    • If Martin Fraser was indeed responsible for the release of the document, why he didn’t, as cabinet secretary, inform the cabinet. Further to this, it should be asked how and when the cabinet first learned that the contract had been leaked, and was this only through the Village Magazine article.
    • How it is that a Garda investigation spanning eighteen months seemingly never examined the role of Martin Fraser given the strong likelihood the document was released from his Department.

    This affair has set a very damaging precedent whereby the habitual violation of the OSA becomes a risk to the security of the State in the event of future leaks. The DPP decision that Leo Varadkar has no case to answer suggests that sensitive documents may now be casually disseminated.

    The Oireachtas needs to determine, once and for all, on whose authority the contract moved from the Department of Health to the Taoiseach’s Department.

    Mr Fraser should be directly questioned as to whether he authorised that step, using his higher powers as head of the civil service, and commissioner, to demand the release of the document from the then Secretary General of the Department of Health, Jim Breslin to his own Department of the Taoiseach. Mr Breslin would have been obliged to release the document to his superior in the civil service chain-of-command.

    Moreover, the DPP’s decision makes it imperative for the Oireachtas to clarify who is responsible for a breach of the OSA.

    Leo may be off the hook, but important issues surrounding the affair remain opaque. The fundamental matter to be addressed is who precisely within the civil service authorised the initial leak of the document to Leo Varadkar.

    It is quite simply bizarre that Martin Fraser – without previous diplomatic experience in the Department of Foreign Affairs – was appointed ambassador to our most sensitive and prestigious embassy at a time when a criminal probe into a leaked document remained unconcluded; in a matter over which he held overarching responsibility.

    Bernadette Gorman was a civil servant for twenty years and held statutory powers. She worked as an Inspector and a trainer of Inspectors.

    Feature Image: (c) Daniele Idini.

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  • Theatre: The Battle of Kildare Place

    There is no fiercer battle than that between sisters. The sibling tension is ever-present in ‘The Battle of Kildare Place’.

    This comedic play is a two-hander between two sisters: a corporate older one married with two children, and a ditzy, free-spirited younger one eking out a living as a proprietor of a small flower shop and architectural tour guide.

    ‘The Battle of Kildare Place’

    Cast

    Darina Gallagher

    Sinead Murphy               

     

    Director

    Costume Design

    Photography

    Graphic Design

    Creative Producer

    Written by

    		  

     

    Meadhbh

    Gráinne

     

    Michael James Ford

    Bairbre Ní Chaoimh

    Keith Jordan

    Gavin Doyle

    Colm Maher

    Emma Gilleece & Michael James Ford

     

    The personalities of the women are informed by their namesakes, two formidable Connaught Queens of lore; the real life pirate Queen Gráinne Mhaol, and the warrior Queen Meadhbh from the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley).

    The play is set in present day Dublin with Gráinne, the elder sister, played by Sinead Murphy, flying in from London for this rendezvous after an absence of three decades to discuss the potential erection of a plaque in honour of their late father.

    As he died at the height of Covid-restrictions, Meadhbh, played by Darina Gallagher, feels her father has been cruelly robbed of the send-off he deserved, with only twenty-five mourners allowed at the funeral.

    She believes his renown merits the erection a plaque for a lifetime of activism attempting to save Georgian Dublin, including the Battle of Hume Street, which the play pays tribute to in its title. Meadhbh is frozen in a state of unresolved grief with a thirst for justice for her father’s legacy, as witnessed in ‘Electra’ or ‘King Lear’.

    Gráinne implores her sister to separate the legend of the activist from the realities of the absentee father, while pointing out that bad fathering isn’t synonymous with being a bad person.

    The play is written by architectural historian Emma Gilleece and actor Michael James Ford, who is also director. Now based in Dublin, Emma grew up in Limerick city and completed a BA in English & History and an MA in History of Art & Architecture, followed by an MSc in Urban & Building Conservation.

    Michael was closely involved in the genesis of Walkabout Theatre last year in association with Colm Maher, the creative producer for Bewley’s Café Theatre.

    It came about in response to Covid-19 restrictions and the first season featured four new plays presented in historic Dublin locations.

    The team of actors, writers and directors relished the challenge of outdoor performance – competing with inclement weather, traffic noise, wildlife, buskers and rogue cyclists. Walkabout enjoyed capacity audiences and popular and critical acclaim and was subsequently nominated for an Irish Times Judges’ Special Award for “returning audiences to live performances outdoors in 2021.”

    As another example of how limited circumstances can actually foster creativity, it was Emma’s brainwave to use Kildare Place as the setting on the back of a tour she gave.

    “I was invited by the Irish Architecture Foundation to do an twentieth century architectural bus tour, as part of Open House Dublin last October, and my tour had to be along the bus company’s established tour routes with one of these being Kildare Street”, Emma explained.

    “My Open House Dublin tour touched on the vulnerability of our twentieth century building stock, and ironically there is currently planning permission sought to demolished Stephen Court on Stephen’s Green by architect Andy Devane which was part of the tour”.

    Running parallel to this battle of two sisters exploring unhealed childhood wounds is a debate regarding Georgian Dublin accommodating twentieth century insertions. Was this progress or destruction?

    Meadhbh follows in her father’s footsteps taking up the baton for preserving eighteenth and ninetheenth century Dublin, while Gráinne is more forward-looking, arguing that demolition and rebuilding is just part of the life-cycle of a city, asserting the merits of iconic buildings such as Liberty Hall, the former Central Bank and Phibsborough Shopping Centre, amongst a list of familiar divisive buildings.

    The nineteenth and twentieth century buildings of Kildare Street provide a four-sided stage. The architectural gems the audience are directed to include the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (completed in 1942), the National Museum of Ireland (1890) and Agriculture House (1974).

    Being outside makes the audience feel like they are eavesdropping on two sisters meeting on a summer’s afternoon in the city. There are laughs, but also poignant moments where you can feel the actors dive down into a well of decades’ old pain and disappointment. Can these sisters find common ground?

    The Battle of Kildare Place runs from 6 -16 July, Wednesday to Saturday at 1pm and 3pm. Tickets cost €15 and booking is at www.bewleyscafetheatre.com/events/the-battle-of-kildare-place.

    For enquiries call 086 878 4001.

    Feature Image of Darina Gallagher and Sinead Murphy by photographer Keith Jordan.
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  • Musician of the Month: Dan Trueman

    In my studio here, I have a clavichord, built by my parents in 1971, with a somewhat rococo and amusing backdrop painted by my mother (who otherwise has left us with a stunning body of mostly modernist artwork).

    I grew up with this painfully quiet clavichord, along with a gorgeous harpsichord (also built by my parents, and which I learned to tune by ear, a sign of things to come), countless recorders of various shapes and sizes (both parents were avid and accomplished players), lutes, oboes, guitars, baritone horns, and of course a piano (my older sister, annoyingly, plays pretty much all of these instruments with ease, though piano is her main instrument, so I grew up hearing that repertoire through her practice).

    Clavichord

    The basement of my childhood home on Long Island was filled with various tools, wood scraps, and other evidence of my parent’s instrument building habits (both were amateurs, by the way: during business hours, my father was a theoretical physicist, my mother a painter), and our evenings and weekends were filled with making music together with these instruments (ok, maybe that is a bit of revisionist history there, but we did make a lot of music together with these instruments as a family).

    I didn’t realize at the time that this wasn’t particularly normal. And one of the things that it marked me with is a love of musical instruments for their own sake, and a love of making music in an exploratory way with instruments at the heart of the process, performance relegated to a secondary concern. I performed, for sure, but it wasn’t the driving force behind the music making in my house, and we never performed together as a family.

    It also left me with a clear sense that the instruments themselves were things we made—not immutable, given objects—and thus were potential sites for exploration and revision.

    I loved my own instrument at the time—a somewhat tetchy violin made by the engineer Norman Pickering, himself a researcher of instrument design—though it took me a while to discover that the music I was learning with it—European Classical music—wasn’t, for the most part, what I really wanted to play (the Bach Unaccompanied Sonatas aside, really). Indeed, trying to discover the music that I do really want to play (and hear) has been the driving force behind my work ever since and has led to a number of explorations in musical instrument design itself.

    In my early 20’s, I flailed about trying to find ways to escape the confines of the Classical violin—its repertoire and technical training that leaves such a profound, embodied mark on anyone who goes deep with it—which led to predictable explorations of jazz improvisation and rock music, both of which also felt not quite right, though I learned a lot, and in particular ended up spending time with, of all things, the Flying-V 6-string fretted electric violin by Mark Wood, and an unfretted version made by my father.

    Hardanger fiddle

    Ultimately, I found the sound of the instrument unsatisfying—in spite of my best efforts, including exploring multiple other electric violins, pick-up systems, amplifiers, equalization and signal processing units, and so on—as well as the feel of the instrument—the solid-body electric violin is perversely rigid, and doesn’t seem to actually absorb any of our physical efforts.

    In the midst of these experiences, a composer friend of mine (Gavin Borchert) wrote a piece for me, for the electric violin, and he was inspired by the traditional music of Norway, in particular the Hardanger fiddle; my experience listening to the cassette tape he gave me—a recording of Anund Roheim playing music from Telemark in the 1950s—was one of those I will never forget; I remember where I was sitting, the time of day, the color of the sky, and so on, when I first heard the sounds of this magical, beguiling instrument and its mesmerizing music.

    There is so much I could say about the Hardanger fiddle, but I will focus on the sound and feel of it. Its sympathetic strings (extra strings that run underneath the fingerboard and ring along as you play) create a magical, personal, reverberant space around the player and, in contrast to the solid-body electric violin, it is so clearly responsive to our efforts, absorbing and extending them into this private space; it feels wonderful—physically—to play.

    Adapting my Classically-based technique to the instrument was far more challenging than I expected. The strings are slightly shorter, requiring ever so slightly different finger spacing, something that took months of slow practice to adapt to, especially given my own penchant for playing without vibrato, and for having the intervals ring as purely as possible.

    But even more than that, adapting my bowing technique to the instrument was particularly challenging. The Classical violin is designed to be as loud as possible, to project over an orchestra to the back of a concert hall, and it requires intense arm weight and energy to drive appropriately.

    In contrast, the Hardanger fiddle is designed to ring continuously, and it has a relatively flat bridge, so playing individual strings is difficult, and the strings are under noticeably less tension, so applying intense arm weight is counterproductive, suffocating the instrument rather than activating it. The instrument induces a more empathetic, gentle approach to playing, and I feel like I literally became a different person in transforming my physical technique to play it.

    Musical instruments have a way of bringing people together; indeed, in Norway one of the most common experiences with other fiddlers is simply sitting around, trying each others fiddles, visiting with a maker (many of whom are fiddlers themselves), and so on.

    Collaboration with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

    The instrument itself is at the heart of the matter. The Hardanger fiddle brought me together with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh back in 2000; Caoimhín was working in my father’s physics lab, and I’m forever grateful to my father for recognizing that Caoimhín and I might like to meet!

    Another experience I’ll never forget: sitting with Caoimhín that summer (next to the harpsichord my parents built, by the way), playing tunes for each other, trying each other’s instruments, and so on. Subsequent similar sessions with Caoimhín in Dublin led to the discovery that I was using the wrong bow, one that itself was suffocating the Hardanger, and we now both use beautiful bows made by Michel Jamonneau; teaching my body to work with this new bow (actually, more of an old bow, based on Baroque designs) was a whole other transformative experience, far more challenging than I anticipated.

    Before I continue on with where my explorations of the Hardanger fiddle led over the subsequent decades, I will mention that during this time I was also exploring a whole range of other musical instrument design projects: my frustration with electric violin speakers led to collaborations with Perry Cook on the design of spherical speakers, which roughly emulate the way acoustic instruments fill rooms with sound; this itself led to the design of a radical new instrument, BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array), that is a spherical speaker outfitted with digital sensors of various sorts, so you actually bow the speaker itself, the sensors then mapping your physical actions to sound through the spherical speaker (sitting in the lap!) via a computer.

    BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array).

    This led to the establishment of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), a kind of digital musical instrument design laboratory that remains in force today; which in turn led me to the development of bitKlavier, a kind of prepared digital piano that remains one of my primary projects today.

    The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk).

    All that to say that musical instrument design has been at the heart of my artistic practice from the beginning.

    A New Instrument

    Back to the Hardanger fiddle… Some 15 years after my deep dive into the Hardanger fiddle began, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the Old Time fiddler Brittany Haas. Britt plays the 5-string fiddle; the extra string is lower, and she regularly tunes the instrument up in unusual, non-standard ways, which is also common with the Hardanger fiddle—all the open strings invite a drone-based approach to playing, with lots of double-stops (two notes at a time).

    One challenge though: the Hardanger fiddle, with its shorter strings, is usually tuned up quite a bit higher than the conventional fiddle, so when Britt and I would play, all of our open strings would be different from one another! In some cases, this was fodder for creative explorations, but other times was just frustrating and awkward. We did make an album together that I’m tremendously proud of—CrissCross—but the friction between the instrument designs led me to wonder whether there might be a new instrument out there, some kind of cross between the Hardanger fiddle and the 5-string fiddle.

    A pair of Hardanger d’Amores.

    And this is how the Hardanger d’Amore was born. In early 2010, I asked the Norwegian maker Salve Håkedal if he could imagine an instrument that has the ring and feel of the Hardanger fiddle, but is tuned down to where fiddles from the rest of the world are tuned, and also has an extra low string.

    Salve immediately started sending me sketches and ideas, and several months later I traveled to his workshop in southern Norway to pick up the very first Hardanger d’Amore (initially we called it a 5+5, because of its 5 strings on top, and the 5 sympathetic strings, but later Caoimhín dubbed it the Hardanger d’Amore, given its echoes of the Viola d’Amore).

    At the time, I was living in Dublin, and when I returned with the instrument, Caoimhín came by and gave it a try; he ordered #2 the very next day. Earlier this year, Caoimhín and I both got our second d’Amores, #35 and #36, a clear indication of how excited we both are about the instrument, not to mention the other 30+ fiddlers out there who now play one as well.

    Solo Album

    Last year, in the midst of quarantine, I made a solo album of original music for Hardanger d’Amore in my home studio. I generally prefer playing with other people, and am not so interested in playing solo concerts, but the lockdown made both impossible, so I was free to lay down some tracks that I certainly would not have had we not been so isolated by the pandemic.

    The album—Fifty Five—is something of a surprise to me, and it celebrates where I grew up, amongst the instruments that my parents built and played. It also celebrates the instrument itself, trying to reveal and discover some of the nooks and crannies of the soundworld the instrument embodies.

    I recorded these tunes up close, so the listener can hear something close to what I hear, right under my ear; I find it intense and personal but also, I confess, quite beautiful.  I’m also excited about my latest project with Caoimhín, our album The Fate of Bones, which he’s written about here so I will leave it at that.

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