Cassandra Voices

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  • Poem: ‘Fothering the Sheep’

    Fothering the sheep

    Only minus seven this morning
    but the gate latches are frozen solid.
    ‘We’ll need a kettleful to unfreeze them.’
    There’s more snow forecast and a gale warning.

    ‘We need to get hay up to the sheep
    before it blows in.’ The cart’s struggling.
    The sheep are gathered, waiting. ‘They’re patient,
    I’ll give them that.’ The snow’s firm, packed deep.

    ‘Nay, don’t all push at once! You’ll get your share.’
    Sheep surge forward, eyes fixed on the hay.
    The lads flick it up. It falls in bundles on the snow.
    Strewing the hay shows the sheep they care.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • ‘The Deep and Inveterate Root of Social Evil’

     

    It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy … if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head
    Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers

    What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes?
    Charles Trevelyan

    At the end of March last year, during what proved a marvellously sunny spring, a horticulturalist friend imparted the rudiments of potato cultivation. Granted, I wasn’t a complete novice. I knew about chitting (allowing seed potato to sprout in an egg box on a sunny windowsill) before planting, and banking (piling earth on a potato plant as it grows), but his instructions elevated my gardening to another level. An area knotted with grass and weeds would be transformed into neat potato hillocks – or ‘lazy beds’ – within a few hours, breaking that ground up for further cultivation in subsequent years.

    First, my guide carefully measured the length and width of each bed, using string attached to an iron stake to mark the boundaries, thereby giving each plant space to thrive. Next, he layered a bag of manure along the length of each row, sprinkling potash on top, and placing chitted potatoes at even intervals atop.

    Then began the real work, mainly using what he referred to as a Fermanagh spade with a long thin blade that lifted the sod on each side over the potatoes, sealing them off and creating a small ditch between each row. The cherry on top was a sprinkling of pine needles to cover the gaps and keep the weeds at bay.

    Initially the effort required to lift and turn the sod defeated me. My height seemed an unshakable impediment until, after much grumbling, I grew accustomed to lowering the spade sufficiently to use a thigh to make the lift. After another lesson I was equipped to dig my own beds, allowing me to go forth and evangelise about how easy it is to grow the tuber.

    Beyond occasionally removing nettles and thistles, I expended no further labour on the potato beds over the course of spring and summer. A potato’s vigorous growth in Irish conditions easily outpaces any weed and requires no watering. Then, after just over three months, my ‘earlies’ were ready, and, as any grower will smugly volunteer, there’s nothing quite like the taste of your own, not to mention the joy of letting everyone know about it.

    In growing potatoes, it felt as if I was partaking of an ancient ritual. Yet the potato plant solanum tuberosum is an exotic, native to the Americas, probably introduced to Ireland by Basque fishermen, rather than Sir Walter Raleigh, in the early seventeenth century. Potatoes are a very modern phenomenon in Ireland.

    Nonetheless, it is a remarkably fecund crop in Irish conditions. Thus, before the Great Famine, an acre of potatoes could amply feed a family of six, as well as sustaining pigs and fowl. Indeed, prior to the famine half of all potatoes were fed to domestic animals, which were primarily used to pay the rent, with little meat consumed on their farms. At that time, an acre of grain was reported to produce about 4,200 pounds of saleable produce, while an acre of potatoes yielded as much as 72,100 pounds of food for subsistence.

    Such abundance seems miraculous, but as Virgil’s Georgics warns us: ‘The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.’  Over-reliance on any subsistence crop brings great danger, and the dependence of the Irish poor on the potato was extreme. Indeed, an entire rural economy, benefitting a largely absentee landlord class, was built around it.

    The wars of the seventeenth century led the Irish peasantry to take advantage of its unique nutritional profile – unlike wheat it contains all eight essential amino acids – and suitability for small scale storage, but not largescale export. In retrospect, Henry Hobhouse opined that ‘of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazy bed, was in the end the most damaging.’[i] In the meantime it allowed the Irish population to scale heights in the mid-nineteenth that still haven’t been returned to.

    Peasant Funeral in the Mam Turk Mountains of Connemara, Ireland.

    Modernity

    In Rot: A History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan explores the modernity of Ireland’s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans in 1845. He details how ‘[p]otatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work large, export-orientated farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds.’

    Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Scanlan asserts that ‘[t]he staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potato failed.’

    In their impoverishment, ‘[t]he Irish poor made complex wagers on their rent and potato yields, hoping to find any marginal advantage. They knew that changes in a day’s trading price of crops and livestock in London might ruin them.’ Scanlon therefore argues that ‘the Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.’ He suggests that Ireland’s rural economy had many features of a squalid modern slum, where faith in luck, supernatural or otherwise, prevailed, just as ‘pyramid schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation’ are evident today.

    An early nineteenth century German visitor to Ireland, Johann Kohl, had never seen anything like Irish poverty, wherein ‘Irish labourers had no national dress, no institutions of peasant life that could contest the power of their landlords.’ This was a society in terminal decline, stemming in particular from the departure of its remaining tribal leaders in the early seventeenth century Flight of the Earls. This permitted the seizure and plantation of the entire country, heralding a steep cultural decline, including the gradual loss of the native tongue.

    The Great Famine would provide the coup de grâce that shattered the bonds of social life and civility. That is not to say societal collapse was inevitable – the famine of 1741 actually had a higher proportionate death toll, but its ill-effects did not linger in the same way. By 1845, however, a seemingly inexorably rising population was placing intense pressure on scarce land. Most of this remained in the possession of landlords, who cared little for their tenants and were often seeking to convert small, intensively cultivated plots into extensive pasture, in conjunction with a rising class of indigenous ‘strong’ farmers.

    Ireland’s social segregation, especially in the wake of the Act of Union – reflected in and reinforced by sectarian divisions – was the underlying cause of the country’s vulnerability to famine. There was certainly sufficient food to feed the population – only in 1847 did grain imports exceed imports – but most produce was destined for the English market.

    It’s hard to imagine a disaster on a similar scale occurring in England at that time, or any major European country for that matter, where landowners maintained a more paternalistic relationship with their tenants. Notably, the proposal by the leading nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell, himself a landlord, to embargo food exports for the duration of the Famine was greeted with derision in Westminster.

    Signs of such scarcity in a more urbanised country would surely have caused a major political upheaval, as in the case of the French Revolution which has been described as an extended bread riot. Ireland did experience a Young Irelander rebellion in 1848, but the starving populace were unable to summon a coherent resistance.

    The Blame Game

    A colonial discourse had long been evident in English accounts of the Irish, going back at least to Giraldis Cambrensis in the late twelfth century. These are akin to the ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes that emerged in Western accounts of the Islamic world, and depicted the Irish as lazy, dishonest, prone to violence and thus requiring civilising.

    By the mid-nineteenth such stereotypes were joined by the discourse of political economy, positing that ‘the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world.’ Edmund Burke argued that God would not look kindly on ‘breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature.’

    Irish reliance on the potato as their primary foodstuff was considered an affront to this spirit of capitalism. Many blamed the potato for Paddy’s laziness, ‘whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.’  The economist Robert Malthus maintained that until they starved, they would not learn.

    The leading civil servant for Ireland over the course of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was ‘some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principle article of national food.’

    The sanctity of the market would have an important bearing on the nature of famine relief. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, then Prime Minister Lord Russell said would impel them ‘to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.’ Extensive public work schemes therefore substituted for direct aid to the starving, who were forced to expend what little energy they possessed building roads to nowhere.

    Most insidiously in 1847 an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief was introduced by William Henry Gregory (ironically the future husband of Lady Gregory the co-founder of the Abbey), an M.P. for Galway. The ‘Gregory Clause’ caused thousands to lose their land in order to avail of the meagre relief available, forcing many into emigration aboard coffin ships.

    As a result of the failure of the crop and these cruel policies up to a million starved or died of disease, and another million emigrated. Unlike after the 1741 famine, the population would not increase, as often their land was converted to pasture, which by then had become more profitable than tillage.

    Old lazy beds.

    Potato Myths

    In Rot, Scanlan refers to numerous sources claiming the Irish peasantry ate on average between 12 pounds and 14 pounds (c.6kg) of potatoes per day. He takes issue with the veracity of these accounts, however, arguing that ‘the idea of a heroic Irish appetite for potatoes revealed a thriving British colonial vision of Ireland.’

    He admonishes ‘credulous’ historians – including this one – for uncritically accepting reports that the Irish poor seemed unusually healthy compared to the British working class ‘a view that indulges in one of the most durable colonial myths that of the strapping and noble savage.’ He asks pertinently: ‘why reject only the insults and believe only the claims that flatter the Irish.’

    Scanlan’s argument that the level of potato consumption was purposely exaggerated appears valid: he adduces evidence to the effect that eating such gargantuan quantities would have caused digestive difficulties. Nonetheless, in years of plenty at least, the rural Irish were surely healthier than their British working class counterparts, who were already consuming a diet high in sugar and refined wheat, deficient in protein and lacking fresh fruit and vegetables. In a rural setting highly nutritious wild foodstuffs would have been foraged or hunted. Moreover, most Irish children were not by then forced into hard labour inside factories, and, moreover, there were no ‘satanic mills’ in the countryside diminishing air quality.

    Scanlan also effectively dismisses the notion that there was anything peculiarly noxious about the much-maligned lumper potato, which prevailed over other varieties at the time of the famine, arguing ‘[h]ad the blight not struck, another people’s potato would have taken its place, and the Lumper might have to be considered a treat.’

    ‘The weakness of potato crops,’ he writes, ‘was not the individual variety of potato planted or the mode of planting, but the genetic liabilities of using sets, rather than seeds.’

    A starving Irish family from Carraroe, County Galway, during the Great Famine in Ireland.

    Legacy

    Dependency on the potato plant was a product of war. Its cultivation then allowed unprecedented numbers to inhabit rural Ireland. What was really lacking in that culture was the application of demographic brakes, as the population continued to expand despite decreasing access to land. This is perhaps best attributed to the absence of an indigenous political and cultural leadership from the seventeenth century. A form of social atomisation seems to have occurred, where the individual family unit took precedence over the wider tribe or tuath.

    The arrival of the potato plant to these shores is responsible for the size of the Irish diaspora around the world. Far fewer would have survived the conflagrations of the seventeenth century without it, and the rural population would not have expanded in similar fashion on a grain-based diet.

    The mostly callous response of the British government to the Famine probably ensured that Ireland could never be comfortably integrated into the United Kingdom. Yet conversely it also accelerated Ireland’s absorption into the Anglophone world. This paradox yielded a distinctive national literature in English. Also, ironically independence was achieved primarily by the descendants of the petit-bourgeois strong farmers that saw their holdings expand in the wake of the Famine. Kevin O’Higgins’ description of his colleagues as ‘the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution,’ makes sense in this light.

    Despite largely being ignored in mainstream discourse today, the cultural legacy of the Great Famine lingers. It may be identified in an unhealthy relationship to sex, and the absence of a gastronomic culture, and also, arguably, in a prevailing sense of futility that still pervades rural Ireland.

    Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot is an important contribution to scholarship on the Great Famine, maintaining a dialogue with an unhappy past we often occlude. Perhaps those of us still living here suffer from a form of survivor guilt that prevents us from adequately engaging with its legacy.

    The attention Scanlan points to the “complex wagers” pursued by Irish peasants in unstable markets is a particularly useful insight, presenting an agency that is usually denied to passive victims. This may also inform our understanding of modern Ireland, where the political class display all the skill of the middleman in attracting foreign capital, but rely increasingly on insecure taxation income from this source – a bit like our ancestors relying on the remarkable fecundity of the potato.

    [i] Hobhouse, H. Seeds of change: six plants that changed mankind (London, 1985), 253..

  • Poem: There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    slinging hammocks of intent between each step,
    hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses.

    No one knows.
    Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain.

    Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts
    indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu.

    No one.  Not even the off-duty gendarme
    whose breath caught in the branches of his lungs

    when he glimpsed its paws’ dry prints
    on Rue De Verneuil after rain.

    A physician at Hôtel-Dieu
    treated a man who claimed the creature styled

    his hair with an upward rough-tongued lick;
    a couple on Pont De Carrousel who swore

    they were undone declaiming love,
    as if their hearts were removed to make one.

    An ophthalmologist looked behind fiery eyes
    the day Notre-Dame succumbed

    to its blood against the sky,
    and the dense fur of melanistic night.

    Feature Image: Denishan Joseph

  • Podcast: ‘Turkey’s Phrase of the Year: Gözaltina aliniyorum’

     

    The Turkish phrase Gözaltına alınıyorum translates simply as: ‘I’m being taken into custody.’ This was selected by the independent media outlet T24 as the phrase of the year for 2025. Had it not been that, in my view, it just as easily could have been Türkiye’de yargı bağımsızdır, meaning ‘the judiciary in Turkey is independent,’ a line repeated endlessly, like a tongue-twister, by Ministers and MPs from Erdoğan’s ruling party, the AKP. And yes, I’m being ironic.

    On March 19, Turkey woke up to a morning marked by an operation aimed at eliminating the possibility of a change in power through elections, and declaring open war on institutional opposition.

    The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and the opposition’s presidential hopeful, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody along with dozens of IMM employees and close members of his team. Shortly afterward, university students organized and gathered in front of Istanbul University main campus, marching toward Saraçhane, which is the location of the Istanbul mayoral headquarters, just a couple of kilometers away.

    Then more people joined. And more.

    Emergency bans on unauthorized demonstrations and marches were imposed at lightning speed. Metro and bus services were cancelled by government decree to block access to the area. The police presence and traffic checkpoints increased rapidly. Even these hastily implemented measures – designed specifically to prevent people from gathering in front of the IMM headquarters – failed to stop hundreds of thousands from filling the streets within hours.

    In the days that followed, people maintained a vigil through the nights, both at Çağlayan Courthouse, where Mayor İmamoğlu was taken, and in front of the municipality building. They refused to leave the Squares.

    While all this was unfolding, people like me – those watching from afar living abroad – fell into a grimly familiar ritual. Every morning around 6am, opening X (Twiiter) meant watching your entire timeline fill, within seconds, with posts like:

    “I’m being taken into custody.”

    “Police raided my home at dawn. I’m being taken into custody.”

    “The police came to my apartment in Şişli around 4:30 a.m. Please take care of my dog. I think I’m being taken into custody.”

    There were dozens of such tweets. Some days, without exaggeration, hundreds.

    Turkey Isn’t Outside the West. It Helped Build It

    Fast forward to today. Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with over 400 others, has been held in pretrial detention for nine months. Those detained include sixteen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP); his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan; his election campaign adviser, Necati Özkan; his drivers, Recep Cebeci and Zekai Kıratlı (whose names do not even appear in the 4,000-page indictment); his assistant, Kadriye Kasapoğlu; district mayor Murat Çalık, a two-time cancer survivor currently undergoing treatment; and hundreds of others I cannot possibly list here.

    As I write these lines, social media is once again flooded with news of fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. The municipality’s deputy secretary general, the head of the fire department, Remzi Albayrak, and dozens of others have been taken into custody as part of the ongoing operations against İmamoğlu and his circle.

    All of these individuals are accused of forming a criminal organization, corruption, causing public financial loss, and terrorism – charges that, over time, have increasingly been reframed as espionage, alongside several other alleged crimes.

    According to legal professionals and academics, these accusations are laid out in an indictment of roughly 4,000 pages that does not read as if it were prepared with professional rigour. The document has been widely criticized for being grossly inflated, riddled with technical errors, filled with repetitive sections, reliant almost exclusively on anonymous “secret witness” testimony, and strikingly devoid of concrete or substantiated evidence. More troubling still, some of the more than 400 people currently in detention are not even named in the indictment, yet they remain behind bars.

    Very recently, the European Court of Human Rights decided to fast-track Ekrem İmamoğlu’s case, specifically his application concerning unlawful detention. The application was filed by his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan who is himself currently in detention.

    Yet the European Court of Human Rights, along with international institutions more broadly, is increasingly portrayed by the Erdoğan government, now in its twenty-third year in power, as anti-national, foreign-backed, and unpatriotic. In official rhetoric, these institutions are cast as insufficiently “domestic” and allegedly hostile to Turkey’s national interests.

    This framing follows a familiar authoritarian script, but reality is more complicated, and far less convenient. Turkey is not an outsider to the Western political and legal order. It helped build it.

    Turkey is a founding signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Council of Europe, making it legally bound by both the Convention’s provisions and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is also a party to the core United Nations human rights treaties.

    What, then, is the purpose of this fabricated, anti-Western, exclusionary narrative?

    ‘Down With Tyranny, Long Live Freedom!’

    The aim is to crush resistance, normalize sweeping losses of rights, freedoms, and prosperity, and impose a “new Turkey” modelled on a hybrid of Central Asian authoritarianism, Russian-style rule, and the institutional failures of parts of the post-colonial Middle East.

    This vision is fundamentally incompatible with Turkey’s realities: its diverse socio-cultural fabric and, more importantly, its socio-political legacy of more than two centuries of struggle for democracy and modernization.

    That legacy dates back to 1839, a decisive turning point in Ottoman history, when decades-long, Western-oriented reform efforts were institutionalized through the Tanzimat Edict. These reforms eventually led to the establishment of the first parliament and the first civilian constitution in 1876.

    With the Tanzimat Edict, Ottoman subjects were recognized as equal citizens for the first time. Egalitarian reforms in areas such as taxation and military service aimed to ensure that non-Muslims, alongside Turkish Muslim citizens, bore the same duties and responsibilities toward the state.

    The reforms also sought to guarantee the security of life, property, and honour for all citizens; to ensure property could be lawfully inherited; to establish transparency in judicial proceedings; and to prohibit executions without due process.

    These principles were not merely rhetorical. Concrete regulations gave them legal force, and the constitution that followed formally limited and distributed the powers of the sultan.

    In 1858, homosexuality was decriminalized, making the Ottoman Empire the second state in the world, after France in 1791, to take such a remarkable step.

    The path toward building a republic grounded in parliamentary democracy and equal citizenship, however, was never linear. As in France, Italy, or Japan, and many other democracies, progress came through reversals and ruptures. The Ottoman Empire’s first constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved, only to be reinstated three decades later. As borders across Europe were redrawn through wars and upheaval, this turbulent process culminated in the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

    Like other nations, Turks did not abandon the desire for a better future or the struggle required to build it. Today, however, all of this is under threat.

    President Erdoğan has amassed more power than many Ottoman sultans and continues to seek more. Research by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg shows that Turkey’s democracy score stood at 0.17 in the early 1900s, rose to 0.53 in the early years of the republic, reached 0.74 in 2002 when Erdoğan’s AKP first came to power, and has since fallen back to 0.18.

    It is no coincidence that a slogan more than a century old has returned to the streets: Kahrolsun istibdat, yaşasın hürriyet! meaning  ‘Down with tyranny, long live freedom.’ It has been one of the most frequently chanted slogans at the Saraçhane demonstrations following İmamoğlu’s imprisonment.

    For more than two decades, Turkey’s media has been monopolized by oligarchs handpicked by Erdoğan. As a result, the voices of ordinary, hardworking, middle class Turks have been largely silenced, especially abroad. Deliberate policies have severed society’s connection with the outside world, suppressed public expression, and helped cement an image of Turkey as a failed democracy which is a perception many in the West has accepted uncritically.

    The Syrian war, and the years-long influx of refugees have reinforced this distorted view. Since 2012, Turkey has become nearly inseparable from Syria in the Western imagination, as if the country had absorbed another nation entirely. Over more than a decade, this association has come at steep economic, political, and moral costs, leaving Turkey and Syria almost interchangeable in the minds of outsiders.

    It is precisely these deliberately erased realities of Turkey that I want to bring back into focus in this article.

    Through its constitution, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, and until roughly a decade ago, it functioned as one, at least since 1950, around the same time many Western democracies were consolidating. Eastern Europe, by contrast, remained under authoritarian rule until the 1990s. Since 2017, however, Turkey has gradually morphed into an electoral autocracy, with steadily eroding rights and freedoms.

    Yet Turkish society itself is not defined by these trends. Erdoğan is attempting to impose a regime change against the will of the people.

    Even before the unlawful detention of İmamoğlu and hundreds of others, a 2024 PEW Research survey showed that 67 percent of Turks were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy. Among those under 35, that figure rises to 75 percent. Eighty percent of respondents support direct, electoral democracy, while 62 percent reject the idea of indefinite rule by a strongman.

    In another striking example, 56 percent of people in Turkey believe that religious texts – given the country’s Muslim-majority population, in this case the Quran – should have no influence over the constitution or laws. This figure is several times higher than in other Muslim-majority countries, where comparable research could be conducted.

    For context, the same survey analyzed thirty-six countries, including Tunisia, which experienced a brief period of parliamentary democracy between 2011 and 2021 and today scores slightly higher than Turkey on democracy indices. Yet Tunisia is excluded from the section of the study that examines the role of the Quran in politics simply because even asking such questions is socially unacceptable there, despite Tunisia being one of the West’s preferred points of comparison with Turkey. By comparison, the equivalent figures are 51 percent in the United States, 57 percent in Poland (referring to the Bible), 54 percent in Israel (Jewish scripture), and just 12 percent in India (Hindu scripture).

    Only 17 percent of people in Turkey believe religious texts should influence national laws. By contrast, the figure is 66 percent in Indonesia (home to Bali, often perceived as a globally famous, relatively secular tourist destination), 22 percent in our complex, love-hate neighbor Greece, and 28 percent in the United States.

    Why does this matter?

    The overwhelming majority of Turks, regardless of religiosity or whether they vote for Erdoğan and the AKP, support Turkey’s constitutional definition as a secular, parliamentary, democratic republic. They want these founding principles to remain intact, and they are deeply dissatisfied with the current system of governance.

    A new constitutional amendment is expected soon. Just as previous amendments were justified with buzzwords like “military oversight,” “judiciary status quo,” or “democratization,” the government is likely to use the cultural rights demands of Turkey’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, as a pretext for a full constitutional overhaul. In reality, these issues could be addressed through minor, targeted adjustments without rewriting the constitution.

    In the near future, many will try to tell you otherwise. Please, don’t believe them.

  • Musician of the Month: Nyah Faie

    My first memory of music is of being very young, maybe three years old, held in my father’s arms while we danced in our living room. There was a large sound system filling the space, and I remember being completely absorbed by it. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling then, but I remember a deep sense of being alive, as if nothing else existed beyond that moment.

    That feeling has stayed with me throughout my life. When I’m listening to music, making it, or dancing to it, everything else seems to fall away. These are the moments when I feel entirely present, almost touching a deeper sense of the meaning of life. Looking back now, I can see how that early experience quietly shaped the direction of my life, even when I wasn’t consciously aware of it.

    I grew up dancing and spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the dance studio, moving to R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary music. R&B in particular left a strong imprint on me. I was drawn to its emotional depth and the way it centred storytelling through the voice, supported by bass, rhythm, and live instrumentation. Although my own music doesn’t sit within that genre, those elements, emotion, rhythm, and narrative, continue to influence how I create.

    Music has always felt like home to me. At different points in my life, it has also been a form of escape from my humanity, yet simultaneously a place of deep connection to something greater. In my early adulthood, I spent years on dance floors and in warehouses, dancing in front of large sound systems and allowing the music to move through my body on a cellular level. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what I was seeking, but I can see now that music was helping me, almost like fanning the embers of my heart, to keep going, to keep seeking something greater than what society has imposed on us as a species. It offered connection, presence, and a sense of meaning during periods when I lacked true direction.

    I recognised my voice as my instrument from a young age, but it wasn’t something I felt encouraged to share. Over time, I became shy and hesitant, and singing became a private ritual. I sang in the shower or when I was alone in the house, treating those moments as something sacred. Singing moved me deeply, it stirred my emotions, often bringing salty tears and a sense of release, yet I carried a fear that perhaps I was one of those people who loved to sing but couldn’t sing at all. That uncertainty kept my voice hidden for many, many years.

    A significant turning point came when I spent time with the Shipibo tribe in the Amazon, healing a chronic pain condition I had lived with for many years. I was deeply moved by their connection to nature spirits, and I was enchanted by the healing songs sung in ceremony. I had the direct experience of feeling their songs recalibrate my being. Shortly after, my voice began to open in a new way, and I started channelling songs in my personal ceremonies at home while working with the medicine of cacao. For the past six years, I have devoted myself to creating space for these songs to emerge. I don’t experience this as songwriting in a conventional sense; the songs arrive through listening moment by moment. There is an emptying out of myself completely, and from that place, sound emerges.

    In 2019, I had a moment of deep recognition during meditation, where I cried for hours, realising that music was a huge part of what I was being called to explore in my life, and that I had been unconsciously turning away from that calling. From that point on, my relationship with music shifted from something I simply loved into something I felt deeply devoted to.

    Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio, creating music shaped by grief, loss, and profound heartbreak. These experiences have been painful, but they have also deepened my commitment to the work. During periods of isolation and suffering, music became my altar, the place where I could lay everything down and remain connected to something larger than myself.

    My current work moves along two parallel paths. One is more shamanic in nature, rooted in channelling and ceremony. The other sits within emotional, hypnotic techno. While these expressions sometimes overlap, they exist as distinct projects, each reflecting a different aspect of my inner world. I don’t usually begin with a clear idea; the music unfolds through intuition, moment by moment.

    Nature plays an important role in my sound. I’m often drawn to incorporating elemental textures — wind, birds, water, and other natural sounds — creating environments that feel immersive and alive. I see my music as a landscape that invites listeners inward, into a deeper relationship with themselves.

    I’ve played the piano by ear since childhood and have always resisted formal musical structures, preferring to feel my way through sound. At the moment, I’m writing a series of piano-based songs that began during moments of strong emotion. It’s a slow and patient process, one I’m learning to trust. This year also marked an important milestone with the release of several techno tracks on Linee Sonore record label, alongside a number of self-released shamanic pieces. More music is in progress, with further releases planned throughout 2026.

    As an artist, I feel I am becoming more honest and transparent. Music is the clearest expression of who I am, intimate with my own heart. I don’t create with a specific outcome in mind. My intention is simply to listen and to follow what feels true.

    Ultimately, I hope my music invites people into a deeper sense of presence. I hope it allows them to feel both their humanness and their divinity at the same time, even if only for a moment, and offers a pause from the pressures of everyday life. If my art can help someone feel more connected, more embodied, or more at peace, then it has fulfilled its legacy.

    Nyah has been holding sacred containers and trainings since 2018, offering immersive spaces that explore sacred movement arts, sacramental medicines such as cacao and saffron, deep self-inquiry, and sound-based ceremony.

     

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nyah__nymphaea/

  • Fiction: The Cliff

     

    “It’s been two days. We gotta to do something. It’s gonna go rotten.”
    “I know. I’m thinking.”
    “About what we talked about?”
    “What?”
    “Get on the Great Ocean Road. Out past Martyrs Bay.”
    “Yeah. I know the place. Near the twelve apostles.”
    “We were there with Jessie that time, remember?”
    “Yeah, I remember. Alright. Let’s do it then. Get some sleep, we’re leaving here at two.”
    “In the morning?”
    “Course in the fucking morning.”
    “How long will it take to get there?”
    “We’ll get there before sun up.”
    ‘I’ll get the weights.’
    “On ya.”
    Wilko and Daz settled it that night. How to get rid of the body. They had bought half a kilo of speed from Jock Cooper up in Melbourne and things had gone wrong. In the fight, Daz shot Jock dead and now they had him wrapped in carpet and duct tape in the boot of Wilko’s blue Ford Cortina. They had never killed anyone before and both had a dread feeling about their circumstance. They were consumed with dark emotion. At this point they were the only ones that knew about the murder. No-one had heard the gun shot. The next farm house was four miles away. Anyway, the sound of gunshots out there wasn’t uncommon even if someone had. Shooting kangaroos was one of Wilko’s jobs. In short, no one was looking for them, yet. They hadn’t left Wilko’s farm since the killing. They had been living with the body for two days, wondering what to do.
    The adrenaline rush of the kill surprised them by its force. The weight of becoming a killer threatened to overwhelm Daz, but the two days he had spent with the body had given him time to meditate on their situation. The fury that led to the murder was now partly subdued by a lack of remorse. Daz had pulled the trigger, but their history was intertwined closely, and to betray each other would be to betray their childhood selves. A notion beyond their imaginings. They were in it together and they knew it. They both understood that if they didn’t keep cool heads they were done for. And now, after two days, the time had come to act. There had been a heavy rain storm that day and the area around Woodend was drenched through. There was a chill wind in the evening air.
    ‘Fucking cold.’ Said Wilko as he put on an extra sweater and zipped up his coat.
    “Chat.”
    Perhaps that’s why the country exists in the first place, so the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish didn’t have to suffer the winters any longer. Wilko looked out the kitchen window as it was being battered by the rain.
    “We’ve fucking gone and done it now.” He said to Daz.
    “If you haven’t got anything useful to say don’t say it. Alright? Now get ta fucking sleep. We’ve got work to do. If we don’t get it right it’s thirty-five years in the slammer. So, I’m only going to say this once. You be careful hey. Or I’ll fucking kill ya.” Daz turned out the light and soon after began snoring, but Wilko stayed by the window watching the rain. He was too alive to sleep. The game was on. Wilko looked over at Daz sleeping and burned a cigarette, each draw he took carefully and deliberately. Looking carefully, he became fascinated by his sleeping friend. Wilko was scared of Daz at times. Ever since they were kids there had been a hierarchy. Daz was both older and stronger and those two factors clinched it. If it had to be called, Wilko was probably the cleverer of the two but there wasn’t much in it. Neither of them had a handle on science, or God for that matter, they were men who were characterized by action rather than thought. And that, if the truth be known, was how they found themselves in the situation they were now in.

    *

    The alarm clock went off at precisely 2.00 am and Daz was up and dressed in seconds. He splashed a bit of water on his face from the sink and lit a cigarette, trying to prepare his mind and body for the grim task ahead.
    “Oi. Get up ya fucking bludger, we gotta go. Get a move on!” And Daz kicked the edge of Wilko’s cot. As Wilko rose up quickly in the bed something went wrong.
    “Ah fuck!” Wilko let out a low, doleful whine.
    “Come on, what are ya waitin for?”
    “Me fucking neck mate. I’ve pulled a fucking muscle in me neck. Ah ya cunt.” Wilko sat up and almost screamed with pain but managed to suppress it with a chuntering kind of sigh.
    “Oh, this is fucking all I need. Where’s the fucking beer? I need a fucking beer. My neck’s fucking crook mate. Ah fuck.” Daz went over to the fridge and pulled out a six pack of beers. As if his mind refused to believe it, he tried to move his neck in a normal way and there it was again. The intense pain of a pulled neck muscle.
    “Come on get ready. No drinking in the car though. We gotta keep our heads down and out of any copper’s sight.”
    “What about me neck?”
    “Fuck ya neck mate!” Came suddenly, shouting. We gotta get rid of him. You hear me? I’m not fucking joking. Get your shit together, we’re leaving. Now.”
    A forlorn looking Wilko stood up, clasping his neck, and followed Daz out of the farm house and towards the truck. The rain was coming down hard when they opened the farmhouse door. Wilko looked up into the rain as he stepped off the porch to wake himself up and the pulled muscle gave him a shooting pain that rattled his whole body. He grimaced and left his hand firmly by his throat to remind him of the pain he had suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. The rain pounded them as they walked towards the car, and there was an audible ‘fuck me’ from Daz as he put the key in the door and turned it. Wilko could now only move the top half of his body in a robotic way. If he needed to look in a certain direction he had to move his whole torso towards the object, keeping his head and neck as rigid as possible. As Wilko sat down and shut the car door he turned too quickly and again an intense shooting pain bounced from his neck muscle to his brain. He grimaced and found himself unable to muster words. He felt acutely miserable. He put on his seat belt slowly, taking great care not to turn his head. He still had sleep in his eyes. ‘Drive slow and safe, I can’t move me neck.’ Daz turned the key in the ignition but even the engine starting wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of the drumming rain on the car. The headlights came on and they started moving cautiously along the country lane in the wild storm. Before long they turned on to the main road that would take them south towards the twelve apostles, the great rising stones that awaited them in the fortress of the swirling sea. That would be the three of them. Daz, Wilko and the dead, now decomposing body of Jock Cooper in the boot.
    One of the bonuses of trying to dispose of a dead body in Australia is its vast emptiness. It has half the population of Spain spread over a continent almost the size of Europe. The only problem was that driving that late at night might arouse suspicion, in the unlikely event of them passing the police. There had been no sign of the law as they reached the Great Ocean Road. They glimpsed the Southern Ocean, singing in the moonlight. Wilko had one hand on his neck as he lit a smoke and opened the window a few inches, only to feel the rain speckling his face.
    ‘What do we do if we get pulled?’ Asked Wilko.
    “Stay calm. I’ll tell them I just found out me mums had a fall and we’re on our way to the hospital. I’ve done it before. It’s about the performance.”
    ‘Bit of an actor hey? Fair play. So, what’s the name of the hospital?”
    Daz didn’t know.
    “Fuck’s sake.” Wilko said in a disappointed, worried way and looked out the window, suddenly mesmerised by the glimmering ocean light. As Wilko turned naturally to take in the view, pain pulsed through his neck and he leant forward with a sigh. They both fell into a melancholy silence.
    The one thing they knew to be well careful of was the potholes. Ruin the suspension or burst a tyre out in the wilderness in a storm and you were done. It was still pitch black when they reached the Great Ocean Road and the pelting rain turned the Ford Cortina into a kind of bongo. There was almost no one out there. Every ten minutes or so they would be passed by the rolling headlights of a car, with their eyes peeled for the coppers.
    “How much further d’ya’reckon?” Said Wilko.
    “Get the map out, it’s in the glove compartment. We’re coming up to Lorne.”
    “Righty-o.”
    As Wilko studied the map in the passenger seat, a sign flew past in the rainy lights that said ‘THE TWELVE APOSTLES 145 KMS’. They both thought about the body in the boot of car, driving on in silence with the storm making the music about them, Wilko with his head down to the map and Daz with his hands high up on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road ahead, unblinking. They would be there at the cliff in a few hour’s tops.
    “We’ll get there well before sun up.” Daz reiterated. ‘Rain’s slowing us down.’ Forgetting about his neck momentarily, Wilko turned to look at Daz and felt a fierce shooting pain shot through his neck again. Now, the agony rendered him silent, and he slowly closed his eyes, wondering whether it was all worth it. Life. Was it worth the suffering. Daz looked at him and knew he wasn’t faking. Then there was a flash of sheet lightening as Daz turned his eyes back on the road and in the illumination, he suddenly saw a fully grown female kangaroo bouncing across the road in the headlights.
    “Fuck,” Shouted Daz and he hit the brakes. Never swerve a roo was a thing his dad had taught him from his earliest years. As the pain in his neck subsided Wilko opened his eyes to the sound of screeching wheels, and the first thing he saw was the Kangaroo smashing into the windscreen with an almighty bang.
    “Cunt!” Shouted Daz in the death flash. After the great thud there was the sound of shattering glass, then the airbags, and then the halting tyres on the tarmac. Finally, the falling rain from the womb of the car. Inside silence. The vehicle was still on the road as they came to a complete standstill with the dead Kangaroo up on the bonnet, dead in the broken windscreen. Time passed before they began to stir. They came to their senses almost simultaneously.
    “Fuck a duck.” Said Wilko. Daz laughed a mad laugh. Wilko turned his painful neck to look at him and Wilko registered the bright red and scarlet in Daz’s face as he laughed, as the insignia of a maniac. The body of the Kangaroo was half inside the car and Daz could see its dead eyes staring vacantly between the air bags.
    “Fuck.” Came the groaning Wilko, he now had whiplash on top of the pulled muscle. Daz pushed the airbag away the best he could, opened the door and stepped out into the rain. He retched a little and spat out bile but there was no puking. His heart was beating fast, getting wetter by the second in the downpour. The sight of the dead Kangaroo on the bonnet increased the mania in his laughter. He was feeling the overwhelming sense of providence that surviving death can invoke. He did a little dance in celebration with his arms in the air. Then he heard Wilko’s voice screaming out of the darkness.
    “What are doing ya mad cunt?! Remember what we’ve got in the boot? What if someone sees us hey?! Get in the car. Fuck’s sake. Come on. Get in the fucking car! Let’s go.”
    Daz looked up and down the rain soaked, night time highway. There was nothing out there, except the great swaying trees and the night. This was the boundless country. They both became lost in thought as they tried to keep calm. Using all their strength they took hold of each end of the dead kangaroo, lifted it off the bonnet and dropped it on the grass by the side of the road. They both stared down at the dead animal, their silence revealing the quick flow of their thoughts. They got back in the car and drove away.
    The night sky over the sea, illuminated by the hiding moon, glowed in the grey mist. The seaward clouds cloaked the galaxy from sight, returning their minds to the here and now, to life, the thing that matters only. They were alone on the road. The coast was theirs, the marvellous world around them, brimming at oceans edge. The headlights of the car were being studied by the birds in the sky riding down the dark road, swinging down above the electric headlight beams to investigate this unnatural thing stalking the marsh. The two men in the car drove on in silence. They had survived. The storm came rolling over them, the rain beat down on the windscreen, and nature, the sea, the sky, the rain and the wind, went on behaving as though they didn’t exist. They tingled to be alive.
    Rain was seeping through the broken windscreen as the front left wheel hit a pothole and they bumped and lurched violently making Wilko’s neck spasm in agony. He muttered to himself. He took the pain. He knew it was nothing compared to what was to come if they didn’t get rid of the body. Their minds now had a steely focus. Once the body was in the sea their trouble would end. Their worries would be over. Jock Cooper hadn’t even been reported missing. Nothing on the news. The police were nowhere to be seen. If the body was swept away by the ocean and devoured by the bottom feeders, they would be home and dry with only their consciences to trouble them, which wasn’t any real danger at all.
    The rain quietened and the forest gave way to barren scrub. They both looked up out of the windows and saw the parting of the clouds revealing the glowing white disc of the moon. Wilko slowed the car and dimmed the headlights. When he was sure there was nothing in their way he turned them off. In the far distance the faint outline of the twelve apostles signalled their destination approaching. The giant cylindrical rocks worn through eons by the punishing waves seemed strange and lonely. They had been forged by time, and birthed by the undying sea.
    “Fuckin’ bonza.” Said Daz. It was the first time he had smiled in a while. They took a moment to appreciate the spectacular view, surely one of the rarest on the entire continent, and then trundled on down the vacated road, towards the cliff.
    They took the last turning and slowed the car to a crawl. The headlights were off but there was still enough moon light to navigate. They parked the car next to a grass knoll about fifty metres away from the edge. Daz turned the engine and lights off and they sat there for a few moments in the hope the rain would pass.
    “Where did you put the weights?”
    “I already tied ‘em on. Don’t worry we’re strong enough. Come on. Let’s get a move on.”
    They got out of the car and were greeted by a sweeping drizzle, not the heavy battering rain of before. Wilko opened the boot wide and they both looked down at the rolled carpet, with a pair of black shoes visible at the end. Daz took out a Stanley knife and began to saw at the duct tape. Soon the carpet opened and the lifeless corpse of Jock Cooper was revealed, his eyes open, with an eerie, surprised expression on his face. They both were able to ignore it, because of contempt. Daz was tempted to spit on the body but held himself back. “Focus. Focus.” He said to himself, and himself alone.
    “What are we going to do with the carpet?”
    “Cut it up and burn it.”
    “Right-O.”
    “Get his legs.” Wilko reached down, obeying the order. Daz threaded his arms under those of Jock Cooper and they headed out towards the cliff with their heads tilted down. The wind was whipping up strong enough to give them the feeling it was raining from the ground.
    The cliff was giant. Not as high as the Cliffs of Moher, or the cliffs of Dover, but high enough to put the fear of God into them both. Both of them were scared to look over the precipice. As they approached the edge, the wind came up again and rain began to beat down harder than ever. Maybe nature was trying to stop them. Maybe the wind and the rain did know after all. That’s what Wilko thought as he trudged to the edge with the body, slipping on the muddy, rain sodden grass. It was Daz who was terrified of heights though, but he was the one who did the killing and he was the one who had the idea to throw the body off the cliff and into the sea.
    “Nearly there!’ Shouted Daz through the howling wind and rain. Their hair and their clothes were already soaked through after a quick two minutes. There was a slight incline rising up towards the precipice and as they reached it Wilko lost his grip on Jock Cooper’s legs and they fell, splatting into the muddy earth.
    “Fuck’s sake!” Shouted Daz, his voice carrying on the wind. “Careful ya fucking dumb cunt!’
    “Don’t crack the shits, I’m fuckin trying alright!!”
    “Fuck I got blood on me daks.”
    “Burn ‘em later.”
    “Ah me fucking neck! Cunt.” Wilko had dropped the dead legs hard into the mud, the pain in the muscle in his neck was too much to bear.
    “Come on, lift! We’re nearly there!” Shouted Daz. Wilko straightened up his back as the rain beat down on him and the pain subsided enough to grab the dead legs and lift them back up. On they went in the dark and rain.
    The wind was coming at them so hard they had their heads bent down towards it like they were pushing in a rugby scrum. The wrath of the storm had no mercy. When they were about ten metres from the very edge, they both lay down and began to roll the body. The wind felt less fierce on the ground but they could feel the wet cold mud and grass soaking through their shirts. As the dead body rolled over, the dead arms of Jock Cooper kept getting stuck underneath the weight of his body. The eyes were now closed as if he were sleeping drunk, getting rolled into the bed after a long night.
    The wind abated as they got the body to the very edge of the cliff.
    “Alright!” Shouted Daz. “After three, push as hard as you can!! One, Two…. Three!!” And they both simultaneously launched the dead body off the edge of the cliff into the crashing sea below. They both lay there motionless for almost a minute, experiencing an emotion not unlike a mountaineer at a summit. They had no words. It was done.
    “Look over the edge.” Said Daz.
    “Get fucked! You look over.”
    “Fuck that mate.” The wind was blowing so hard it felt like it was pushing them towards the precipice.
    “Let’s get the fuck outta here.” Said Daz, keeping his vertigo hidden. They felt the rain again and crawled backwards on their bellies before they stood up, turned and started running back to the car through the night tempest, shouting and cheering and jumping for joy as they went. Daz had taken his shirt off and was swinging the waterlogged garment around his head, laughing the relief of the prisoner freed. They jumped into the car, turned the engine on and sped away down the back roads and country lanes that led to Melbourne.
    The body of Jock Cooper fell lifeless from the edge of the cliff. Down it dropped. Fifteen metres below was a ledge the size of a living room. And there the body landed with a quiet thud, made silent by the storm. It bounced slightly forward coming to rest at the edge of the promontory, his left-hand peeking slightly over the edge as if it were a man clinging to the side of his bed. And there it stayed on the ledge, twenty metres above the sea.

    *

    Almost two weeks went by. Early in the morning Noel Manning and his son Joshua got in their trawler and headed up the coast towards the Twelve Apostles to see what the fishing was like, as they had a couple of times a week for the past few months, concentrating their work in the waters to the west. It was a calm, beautiful sunny morning and the white horses were resting. They went at a steady pace of eight knots, with the nets strung out behind them. They sailed a couple of kilometres from the coast most of way and then turned starboard to see what they could find in shallower waters. Noel turned the engine off and they bobbed a hundred and fifty metres or so from the land. Joshua’s keen eyes spotted it first by chance as he glanced up at a flock of seagulls swooping to feed on the cliff. He saw what he correctly thought to be a human hand, dangling.
    “Dad. Can ya see that?”
    “What?”
    “Up there on the cliff. Is that a hand?”
    “You’re havin me on.”
    “Look.” Noel went in to the cabin and fetched a pair of binoculars that he used for birdwatching. He stood there on the deck and pressed his face against the eyepieces. It took a few moments to get the binoculars in focus against the edge of the cliff and he tracked the ledge from right to left. He paused as his eyes and brain joined. He put the binoculars down a couple of inches and then back to his eyes in disbelief. A human hand and a denim shirt cuff dangling over the grassy lip.
    “Alright I’m turning the boat around. Get on to the police.’ He told his son.
    That afternoon a police helicopter swooped in and identified a body on the ledge and before nightfall it had been recovered. Daz and Wilko had stripped the body so it took a while to identify the body, but Jock Cooper was a well-known face around Melbourne and had been reported missing less than a week after his disappearance by his girlfriend Tammy. The cadaver had been partly eaten away by scavenging birds and his remains were a disgusting sight to behold. Tammy had to identify the body and was left a traumatised landlady in Alice Springs.
    The forensic team discovered the bullet hole almost immediately and a murder investigation was underway that night. Almost two weeks had passed by but the crick in Wilko’s neck was still giving him jip. He was still holding his neck in his hand as Daz switched the TV on and slumped down on the sofa next to Wilko with a can of VB and a lit cigarette. It was a news story saying the remains of Jock Cooper had been found on the ledge of a cliff near the Twelve Apostles in Victoria. When Wilko and Daz said ‘cunt’ in unison, there was a kind of musicality to the syllable.

    – –

    Feature Image: Richard Mikalsen

     

  • The Oxford Covid Debate

    On November 19 the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) hosted one of the first genuine debates on Covid policies. The nature of the debate, the issues discussed and the responses since, are all revealing as to where the last five years have brought public engagement on difficult topics – and how painful that time has been.

    CAF invited to the debate two speakers who had at the time been critical of Covid policies from a left-wing perspective: Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, and co-signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration) and myself, Toby Green, a Professor of African history; along with two speakers who had been critical of the critics: UCL Clinical Professor of Intensive Care Medicine Hugh Montgomery (who at one time famously claimed people not amending their routines had ‘blood on their hands’) and Guardian journalist and medical historian Mark Honigsbaum. The chair, reproductive biologist and an advocate for public-facing science Güneş Taylor had a tough job on her hands, which she performed with aplomb.

    Several things are important to note about the discussion. First is that there were some clear areas of agreement. Britain certainly got the issue of school closures wrong, along with the rest of the world. The fraught nature of the Covid crisis was exacerbated by the failure to prepare adequately for medical emergencies in the West through building spare capacity in health services rather than using a ‘just-in-time’ model based on neoliberal economics. The shutting down of debate was widely agreed to have been a serious problem, and to have exacerbated mistrust in government and the crisis of misinformation (or information saturation); moreover the systematic failure in previous decades to have proper debates about social values related to death, and how society should in fact approach end of life in an ageing population, contributed to the discourse collapse.

    What was also encouraging in the debate was that there was some evidence of ability to listen and change opinion. Hugh Montgomery said that he had changed his mind on some topics over the evening. I too was also touched by his discussion and that of a nurse in the audience of the genuine fear and stress felt by medical staff at the outset of the crisis.

    All participants agreed on the social cost of the lockdown measures. Almost inevitably, however, this was where the differences were ignited. Did those catastrophic costs make them unjustifiable? Mark Honigsbaum thought they had become inevitable once China began to build its quarantine camps, citing the oft-quoted projection of Imperial College modeller Neil Ferguson that locking down a week earlier would have saved 20,000 lives in the U.K. alone – a quote repeated the very next day on the publication of Baroness Hallett’s Covid Inquiry report in the U.K.. In spite of strong disagreements on this, what was striking was also the breadth of the debate, even on lockdowns: where did lockdowns sit on the scale of values as compared to our debts to the young, the kind of society we wish to live in, and the immense rupture which Covid had brought to people’s digital habits and mental health – already acknowledged as a serious problem for the young prior to lockdowns and digital ‘learning’?

    If, as I pointed out, evidence suggested that over the long haul of an eighteen-month pandemic, fatality rates were very similar in lockdown and non-lockdown cases, what was the lockdown for? If it offered to buy a limited window of time to bring in PPE equipment and protect frontline medical staff, this could perhaps for a short time be justified (and here too there was some agreement). Nevertheless, it remains my view that had we invested sufficiently in primary healthcare pre-Covid there would not have been the same sense of panic, and such a dramatic suspension of basic civil liberties would have been unnecessary.

    What was encouraging about the debate itself was its breadth. Though at times the participants diverged into their 2020 camps, there were broader discussions about social change, the current systemic and social crisis, and the young – all the kinds of discussion that were systematically shut down in 2020. This itself was positive, and while in his Substack summary of the event Honigsbaum reverted to the lockdown for-and-against discussion, which had been just a part of what was debated that night, this breadth of debate and evidence of listening was something that, as one of the participants said later, restored their faith in humanity.

    What was also fascinating about the event was the audience, which was almost entirely anti-lockdown, as Honigsbaum noted in his ‘post-match report’. As indeed he also said, it was also difficult to find anyone to debate the pro-lockdown position. Therefore, he must be thanked for agreeing to participate. It is also hard, it seems, to get those who aggressively supported the measures to attend and engage in a post-mortem. Is this because people hate being proven wrong in such a massive way? Or is it because they still hunker down in an algorithmic silo contending that debating an issue will give succour to the ‘far right’ (by which, unless they are really disturbed, they cannot mean Sunetra Gupta and me)? Whether it is for both reasons is for the reader to decide.

    At this stage, sadly, it seems that one person’s far right is another person’s far left on so many issues – and this itself is symptomatic of the systemic social crisis we now face in the West. What is clear is that, as I said in my closing remarks, unless we are prepared to listen better to each other, and discuss the moral and political crisis we are living through openly and without judgement, all of us will pay the price.

    In conclusion, I provide the answers I prepared for Güneş Taylor’s questions for the Oxford debate – most of which, in some form or other, I tried to get across.

    Opening comments  in response to the title of ‘What did Britain get right and wrong during the Covid-19 pandemic?’

    One thing we got wrong: this is pretty hard to choose, to be honest, as I think so many things were got wrong. I would emphasise especially here the jettisoning of previous pandemic plans which led to many of the subsequent crises – and corruption in contracts, as responses were being made up on the back of an envelope. Many figures who worked extremely hard on those previous plans, such as Lucy Easthope and Robert Dingwall, have emphasised the extent to which they were ignored. I would also mention the inhumane cruelty of isolating care home residents in the last months of their lives and depriving them of contact with their families – where the life expectancy of someone entering a care home is about one year. This is as cruel as you can be.

    My focus will be on something broader here, as I will zoom in on more details later: the lack of debate. The shutting down of debate by public service broadcasters and social media platforms was nothing short of a catastrophe. It has contributed to many of the subsequent catastrophes. In particular, the lack of trust in government and media today – which links to the increasing appeal of Populism. So, I want to thank my fellow panellists this evening for being here and enabling this event to happen. We may have strong disagreements, but we are willing to air them in public, to try to understand each other’s perspectives, and thereby to understand what happened so much better. It’s quite shocking that this appears to be the first such event that has taken place in the U.K., and that it has taken five years to have it.

    It was also pretty hard to think of one thing that we got right in the U.K., but eventually I did remember one. It was the decision not to lock down in the December of 2021 during the Omicron wave. There was a huge amount of pressure, and The Guardian reported that we might have two million cases a day by New Year. In the end, the peak was at a little over 200,000, so this was an exaggeration of 1000% – not the first time this happened during the pandemic; with the misrepresentation of PCR testing as a diagnostic tool rather than a laboratory test giving the impression things were much worse than they were. And afterwards, many media “experts” such as Jeremy Vine intoned that they “had not realised” that “people adapted their behaviour automatically” at times of health crises – even though this was precisely what Sweden had said, under Anders Tegnell, in the spring of 2020, when deciding not to lock down.

    As it was things were already bad. On a call with a practising G.P. that winter, he told me that he was the only emergency G.P. in a city the size of Oxford, because everyone else had been called in for the booster rollout.

    A student put it to me like this: “If we lock down again, it’s going to mean more weeks doing my classes on the stairs.” The enormously regressive impacts – as a 2022 Sutton Trust study showed – of education lockdowns meant that advances in educational outcomes among the poorer sectors of the population had been reversed by ten years. We also cannot easily estimate the health costs of taking these measures, including pathological loneliness, and missed diagnoses.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What measures were taken e.g. masks, vaccine passports etc? Did they ‘work’? How were Covid deaths measured? Could more lives have been saved through earlier and longer lockdowns? 

    There is no evidence that more lives would have been saved by earlier and longer lockdowns. A new book by Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo, In Covid’s Wake, shows no discernible difference in Covid mortality pre-vaccine between U.S. States which locked down and those which did not. Meanwhile, excess deaths in Sweden were among the lowest in the OECD between 2020 and 2022, comparable with its much-lauded neighbours. [Editor’s Note: according to this 2023 OECD report: Notably, Sweden, which was under the spotlight at the beginning of the pandemic, saw excess mortality among 65+ age group below the OECD average in 2020 and negative in 2021 and 2022, as well as overall.]

    And this is the key statistic, overall societal deaths, for the precise reason that measurement of who died ’from’ or ‘with’ Covid is so unreliable. In April 2020, the WHO changed the definition of death from Covid to someone who had a positive PCR within 28 days or just the suspicion of Covid. Peru changed its means of measuring Covid deaths after 18 months, for instance, which suddenly gave it far and away the world’s worst per capita mortality figure; in Italy it was the reverse, and in November 2021 the Italian ministry of health revised figures to show the numbers who had died without any comorbidities as dying “of Covid”, which was very small (under 4000). Indeed, at one point Priti Patel went on TV to try to argue that Covid mortality was lower than stated because of the comorbidities – and this was probably true, since Neil Ferguson himself had said quite early in the pandemic that a third of those who died of Covid would probably have died within the next year anyway.

    In effect, politicians became prisoners of statistics. This also led to the focus on vaccines and vaccine passports, even after the Associate Editor of the BMJ Peter Doshi  reported in the BMJ in October 2020 that the vaccines were not being studied to determine whether they would interrupt transmission, so could not guarantee a sterilising vaccine. Given the history of vaccination and its connection to colonial power in Africa and racialised experimentations in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, vaccine passports were nothing short of racist and discriminatory – and scientifically illegitimate, given the fact this was not a sterilising vaccine, and never could have been.

    This global perspective points to another issue, which is the absurdity of focussing on lockdowns when so many other variables are at stake: health spending per capita, socioeconomic wealth, obesity, age pyramids of populations, other health priorities, and so on. Given the huge range of health variables, and global socioeconomic conditions, it really is extraordinary that a medieval policy – developed when the humoural theory of medicine was still in vogue – was rolled out again, and assumed to be fit for the entire world for eighteen months to two years. Cui bono? The billionaire class!

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What was the cost of the measures taken? What have been the global ramifications of the pandemic and pandemic response? Its effect on healthcare, economy, civil liberties?

    The cost was a catastrophe, which no one wants to talk about. I remember an email which Sunetra Gupta and I received in April 2021 during the Delta Wave in India from a Human Rights lawyer working for a trade union in India – saying that literally millions of informal sector workers were starving by the roadside in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone. In the Philippines, children were not allowed to leave their homes for eighteen months – enormous increases in child abuse were reported.

    We often hear that all this was “caused by Covid”. But it wasn’t: it was caused by Covid measures. In November 2023, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) stated that ‘50 million more people in Africa fell into extreme poverty as a result of Covid’. This is nonsense: the African continent registered less than 260,000 Covid deaths, and over 100,000 were in South Africa alone. Mortality was very low compared to other endemic diseases – as some predicted right from the start on a continent where the median age is around nineteen.

    But now, Africa is entering Structural Adjustment 2.0 according to the New Internationalist. This has been caused by inflation, and collapse of the informal and service sectors during 2020-1. Well documented mass food price increases had already been reported by the World Food Programme and Reuters by October 2020, long before the war in Ukraine – although that certainly hasn’t helped. The result is, OXFAM reports, that over half of Low Income Countries are reducing health and education spending in the next five years. That isn’t going to offer any help in “preventing the next pandemic”.

    We saw two years of school closures in countries like Honduras, India, and Uganda. There were 4.5 million schoolchildren alone removed from schooling in Uganda, leading to catastrophic increases in teenage marriage and forced labour. We also have a whole lost generations in India, as documented in Collateral Global’s film The Children of Nowhere.

    We saw a massive spike in gender-based violence, a ‘shadow pandemic’ as the UN Women’s Commissioner described it – with twenty years of progress in sexual health wiped out by the closure of clinics; the abused incarcerated with abusers; huge increases in prostitution; and the shuttering of informal markets which are the main source of income for many women in the Global South.

    We also saw a version of this in the West. Enormously elevated time was spent by adolescents online, which has led to increased consumption of violent pornography with devastating consequences.

    So, closer to home we can see the haemorrhaging of trust in public institutions and government In the UK. There have been huge protests around, for instance, Keir Starmer’s policy of cutting winter fuel payments to many pensioners, saving around £1.5 billion. Yet we have had no debate around the £310-£410 billion spent on Covid policies, with bewildering figures such as £37 billion (the entire UK transport budget) allocated to track and trace – which the U.K. government’s own National Audit office estimates reduced cases by just 2-5%.

    Covid spending achieved very little, but it has meant that there is “No money left”. The worst of all – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be in this room – is the generalised collapse in hope and optimism for the future, as we can see all about us. It is this which is degenerating into polarisation, and social fragmentation.

    How should this experience shape our future responses to pandemics? E.g. Could the Great Barrington Declaration’s ‘focused protection’ strategy be applied to future pandemic preparedness? What lessons can history teach us about balancing public health, personal freedom and societal impact?

    In terms of how the experience should shape future policy, we held a conference funded by Collateral Global at King’s in 2023, which came up with some important recommendations signed by 25 scholars from across the Global South. I am going to share them here:

    :- The centrality of public investment in healthcare – especially primary healthcare and infrastructure – and in social welfare, to expand at times of need. The “just in time” model does not work for healthcare or social welfare, and is not “efficient” – this requires rethinking the privatisation of so many features of the state, as countries like Nicaragua and Sweden showed. In the end it was private pharmaceutical companies that profited. Astra Zeneca (branded as “the Oxford vaccine”) wasn’t supposed to be for profit but they altered that policy later on.

    :- Proportionality and the disaggregation of risk: people at Low risk of diseases in one country will not be the same in another – we need community-based healthcare, as the WHO’s 1978 Alma Ata declaration demanded, not top-down centralisation derived from a corporate management structure.

    :- The importance of an open and accurate flow of information: censorship quickly becomes misinformation and actively works against the public good.

    :- Attendance to socio-economic factors and the social determinants of disease: what works for residents of North Oxford does not work for residents of Peckham or Oldham – let alone for Lagos or Kinshasa.

    :- Awareness of the complexity of supply chains and the impacts that disruption can have in access to healthcare – transport restrictions can be catastrophic when they are required to get people to hospitals for regular medication, or to bring in medical equipment manufactured elsewhere.

    :- Awareness of how policies that aggravate inequality will exacerbate ill-health – as all previous research indicated, and as the Covid policies showed – with the biggest transfer of wealth in history from the poor to the rich, and subsequent prolonged increases in excess deaths in many countries long past the end of the pandemic.

    And this highlights the absurdity that those who opposed these measures such as Sunetra Gupta and myself were painted as “right-wing”, when the left has always favoured the opposite policy – the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

  • Review: Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide

    Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory of just 151 km2, has been rendered internally displaced persons.

    Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, Edited by Yousef M Aljamal, Norma Hashim, Noor Nabulsi, and Zoe Jannuzi (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a collection of twenty-seven testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza enduring the genocide. An immediate response upon reading through the chapter titles is: to what extent have we become desensitised as spectators or activists? And, moreover, what is the link, or disconnect, between this wider perception of a genocide occurring and a person living through it?

    It begs the question, when reading through the testimonies, after more than two years how much can our mind take before the experiences themselves, narrated by survivors, merely become background noise? With the daily recounting of Israel’s kill toll being reduced to statistical data – a roll call similar to the reporting of Covid cases that gradually desensitised the listener – can our minds link back to the human tragedy?

    Of course we should. For the chapter titles speak of a shattered, mundane reality. Birthdays morph into atrocities. Education is ruptured by bombs. A woman is widowed by targeted assassination. A husband is killed while searching for food. Entire families are wiped out. The details are so mundane, so quotidian, yet genocide is an immense, unforgivable laceration in both its experience and the memory if it. That memory should, and must, extend to the rest of us. Narratives can combat desensitisation, as long as we know what to prioritise.

    In the foreword to the book, Ahmad Alnaouq writes:

    Everyone on Gaza is now a citizen journalist, determined more than ever to confront and challenge the Western media narrative – the demonising and dehumanising of the Palestinians, the lack of agency recognised, and the distortion of truth.

    This collection of testimonies directly challenges the Western hegemonic narrative which, even while reporting the official genocide kill toll, still finds ways of sanitising bloodshed and diminishing the humanity of Palestinian survivors. The kill toll is represented in two ways – as a statistic that either supports sporadic calls for accountability or offered in support of Israel “finishing the job.”

    Yousef Al-Jamal references the Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer, who was killed by Israel in 2023, and for whom storytelling was an integral component of Palestinian history.

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    ‘For centuries,’ AL-Jamal writes, ‘Palestinians have tended the rich oral history of Palestine, preserving cultural heritage, including folktales and stories about the land.’ This collection of narratives from the Gaza genocide is a contribution to Palestine’s oral history, and one that, due to its international dissemination, cannot be destroyed by Israel.

    The personal narratives in this book speak of a disrupted simplicity, but not a disrupted normality. This includes death or killing, displacement, hunger, the tribulations of living and enduring life under a highly militarised genocide. We find the disruption of education and attempts to teach, as well as the full spectrum of forced displacement including of a Nakba survivor, along with attempts to rebuild a semblance of normality even as Israel destroys Gaza’s infrastructure. Even before the genocide, Palestinians in Gaza faced immense hardships and restrictions which were normalised into manageable deprivation, even by international institutions.

    For many Palestinians, as evidenced by several contributors to this anthology, the large scale killing meant that families were welcoming other relatives into their midst. At times it was orphaned children, as was the case with Aisha Osama Abu Ajwa, a mother of four children who began taking care of two children whose parents were killed when Israel bombed an entire residential block. In her description of forced displacement, Abu Ajwa writes, ‘The children witnessed dozens of martyrs’ bodies strewn on the ground. They cried intensely, while blood covered the streets.’

    ‘I hope war ends soon. Eight months of continuous killing exhausts us,’ writes Fidaa Fathi Abu Yousef, whose son was killed while riding a bike just 800m away from the family home.

    Another recurring horror is Palestinians fleeing to supposedly safe zones, while Israel bombs move in the direction the displaced are heading, leaving not only a trail of displacement but bloodshed. The killing of Palestinian children, as described by the narrators of this genocide, encompass all ages. The visibility of Israel killing children is magnified when the writers note the dead children’s ages. Thus removed from the general term, the children take on meaningful identities; allowing the reader to recognise how Israel has attempted to obliterate Palestinians through its killing of the younger generations. Children killed on their birthday, children killed while sleeping, the tragedy is portrayed through the eyes of the living, bereaved and those unable to process their loss due to a perpetual quest for survival.

    Their attempt to persist in living instead of perishing at times makes the writing of these recollections and experiences become slightly devoid of emotion. Emotion almost becomes a luxury when surviving a genocide, but the almost matter-of-fact narratives in this collection make grief all the more important, not only to grasp but experience. Israel has not only wiped entire families out and lacerated others beyond repair, it has also obliterated entire psychological processes that are necessary when experiencing traumatic events. In the midst of a genocide, Palestinians are unable to experience the grieving process.

    Incessant worry about family members displaced in different locations around Gaza is another hardship Palestinians must endure. Without means of communication for the most part, relatives receive no news of each other. ‘Gaza is small, yet we have not seen each other since the war began. We have not reunited. I know nothing of my sons. My life’s dream is to reunite with them in one home before my death,’ Yusra Salem Abu Awad states in her narrative.

    The script flips to a twelve-year-old boy, Youssef Qawash, writing about how he has lost his father and uncle in a bombing and not knowing whether his father’s remains will ever be discovered. ‘My uncles have searched in Deir al-Balah and Maghazi, but no one knows where my father is buried,’ Qawash ponders, noting that his father might still be buried under the rubble of destroyed houses.

    Ireland and Palestine: A Crucial Vote Awaits

    The ramifications of starvation are reflected in Najlaa Al-Kafarna’s story. Her husband was killed while searching for food for the family on the third day of the genocide, which was their second day of forced displacement. Six other relatives were also massacred in their search for food. Her special needs son, Muhammad, is malnourished and lacks medication and physical therapy sessions.

    Throughout most of the narratives in the book, the cry for food recurs. So does the lack of basic necessities, and the wearing of the same clothes through different seasons. We find the rationing of flour, and the shelling of a school while forcibly displaced Palestinians are baking bread. The deprivation is exacerbated by employment being almost non-existent during the genocide. Profound mental health issues as a result of ongoing trauma (Palestinians cannot speak of post-traumatic stress disorder) are also a common experience.

    ‘This war is larger than the 1948 Nakba. I am 91 years old,’ Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif says. Aged fifteen, he experienced the first Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and he notes the differences between the specific targeting of Zionist paramilitaries in 1948, and the widespread destruction of the current genocide in Gaza. One of the few remaining survivors of the Nakba, he narrates his experience of displacement in 1948 and how his family settled in Gaza in the Nuseirat camp. ‘My testament to my children and grandchildren is to never leave Gaza. We cannot leave Gaza, and we cannot migrate again,’ Abu Seif asserts, noting the miscalculation in 1948 of an eventual return and of leaving to save their lives.

    Narrating the Israeli colonial aggressions he has experienced throughout his life, he describes the genocide as ‘a war of extermination and destruction of humans and nature.’ The description is far more tangible than the word genocide will ever be, particularly now that the international community has diluted its meaning to preserve Israel’s impunity. A destruction of humans and nature is something that anyone anywhere in the world can easily envisage. This narrative brings the consequences of destruction, as well as fear, to the reader’s mind.

    The entirety of this anthology also serves to highlight what a vibrant society Palestinians in Gaza had created before the genocide. Education stands out in particular as one of their achievements. Indeed the tenacity to attempt to study and teach throughout the genocide is remarkable. Ambitions are currently stilted, but dreams are still cherished, An awareness of the many hurdles to overcome in order to create a healthy society post-genocide is also to the fore in many narratives in this collection. As the UNSC hands over the rebuilding of Gaza to the U.S. administration, thus prolonging the genocide, these testimonies will stand in opposition to the U.S.-Israeli narrative. More importantly, they are a sliver of testimony from Palestinians that neither the U.S. nor Israel, have the power to annihilate.

    Feature Image: Ahsanul Haque Z

  • Musician of the Month: Ciara O’Donnell

    Ciara O’Donnell is an artist performing under the name of Domhan. She creates music inspired by her love of the Irish Celtic spirit, shamanism and Eastern spirituality. She is also a member of Irish band Bog Bodies a heavy folk rock outfit unearthing ancient Irish tribal tones and rich melody through an archaeological lens. Ciara is from the West of Ireland and is inspired by world influences and reverent, magical modes of music.

    Image: Josephine Doyle / Síoraí Photogrpahy.

    My most profound early musical influences began aged of five when I was an Irish dancer and learning Irish music. At that point I was a huge fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, fascinated by how each country portrayed their culture through music and performance, using varying tones, scales, instrumentation, costume and language.

    I was blown away during the 1994 Eurovision when the act ‘Riverdance’ appeared during the interval. My whole body went into shivers hearing the etheric quality of the singers’ entrance.

    It opened a portal of remembrance in me to an Otherworld, something my logical mind knew nothing of until that point. Then came the dancers, the rhythm and percussion; the dance between light and dark; light shoe and heavy shoe; jumping toward sky and pulling up energy from the earth. I began to understand something deeper, an ancient memory and ritual of expression had been triggered.

    My soul was understanding the true meaning of dance, music, creation and a traditional influence merged with contemporary culture. A sound of the past, but fresh to a modern era. The music was a journey to a beyond timeline.

    I was only aged five and couldn’t intellectualise it, or understand fully what its meaning was to me. All I knew was that I was obsessed.

    From that point on I watched the Eurovision religiously every year, but nothing hit me in quite the same way, although I still loved absorbing new learnings through this cultural lens.

    I then began obsessively re-watching on video the full ‘Riverdance’ show in full. My mind opened further through encountering its mysticism, and the power of a hands free Irish dance adopting innovative Irish traditional and a new pulsating other-worldly influence. I had never heard anything like it.

    I am forever influenced by Bill Whelan’s fusion of World music, rooted in the Celtic spirit. Nothing up to that point did it better than the innovative sound of Riverdance, sampling Irish traditional music with Eastern European influence, Spanish flamenco, Jazz, Persian and Indian scales. I was blown away by its power to evoke so much through melody.

    As a teen I experienced another shiver moment after being given a compilation CD with the song ‘Return to Innocence” by Enigma.

    Once again I had never heard anything like it. This song hit something deep inside my core, and again this piece was on repeat, as I encountered a world music sound that had something else: a prayer, a majesty, a life, an essence.

    This became my spur to create music with a spirit in it, a memory, a life, a prayer an essence through sound and form.

    Now I work on music with the artist name “Domhan” meaning ‘World’ in Gaelic Irish. World music and tonality has been a huge influence, in how it enlivens and enriches memory and allows the musical ear to be drawn by an energy of evocation.. Sound is not just sound in some World music. It can be a prayer. A profound expression of something other.

    An evocation such as this has become my life’s dream. I aspire to create music that glimmers with the mystical, offering a connection to that unseen place from which creativity arrives.

    My muse is a vision of a balanced world that once was and that could be – just as I heard in the prayer song “return to innocence’.

    My songs from Domhan are like prayers returning us to a vision of a harmony and balance with nature within, in deep connectivity with country, nation, tribe, land and planet. To be inspired from this place, and perhaps inspire from this place.

    In working on this I feel a guidance in how it wishes to be expressed, trusting my own lens and passion for Celtic Mythology, the Heart and the power of feeling and imagining.

    I have released a single called ‘Trócaire Brighid’ and EP called ‘Spirit Works’ as my debut pieces. I am currently working on a ‘Journey’ album, inspired by the elemental spirits of Water, Wind, Fire and Earth, journeying musically through their landscapes and essences.

    With Bog Bodies

    My band ‘Bog Bodies’ has also released an album called ‘Reclaim the Ritual’, weaving ancient Celtic memory, archaeological references with a tribal folk rock sound. We have been performing this album at major festivals since then, and are excited to be releasing a new album next year.

    My aspiration for the future is to make music more frequently. Music that feels like it is a gateway to the Otherworld, that helps remember another time and uplift true nature within. It’s only real because I believe it to be, and so there it is.

    Feature Image: Josephine Doyle / Síoraí Photography.

  • Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist

    Sé Merry Doyle’s latest documentary, Theocracy – the Emigrant’s Artist, serves as an excellent introduction to the stirring painting of Bernard Canavan. It offers an intimate portrait of a man whose distressing backstory has yielded extraordinary works of art that amplify our understanding of an appalling system that held sway for so long in Ireland. The film is to be screened at the Cork Film Festival on November 10.

    Bernard, like Shane MacGowan, is an artist who speaks, through his lived experience, for what Joe Cleary has described as the ‘spailpín [lit. ‘journeyman’] culture’ of ‘hard labour and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss … nurtured by two languages.’

    “Disembarkation”

    There is an added ingredient here. Bernard Canavan was born in Ireland in 1944, but that wasn’t his birth name. As a newborn, he was cruelly removed from the care of his young parents and placed in an orphanage. That his mother and her then-boyfriend had decided to marry didn’t matter. An infant born out of wedlock was viewed as the personification of sin.

    This was an all-too-familiar experience under what can accurately be described as a theocracy governing Ireland after independence. This was a fusion of devout Catholicism with a set of post-colonial Victorian values that emerged in the wake of the Great Famine. This made Ireland a dark place for many decades. Indeed, Ronan Sheehan refers to a ‘theology of incarceration’ governing most aspects of life at that time, realising W. B. Yeats’s concern about an emerging Ireland where ‘men were born to pray and save.’

    ‘Gods love for mothers and their infants’

    In the orphanage, punishment of sin formed only a part of what was also a business enterprise. Children were commodified, offered for adoption or experimented on by pharmaceutical companies.

    Fortunately, as a young child Bernard was rescued by a woman called Margaret Canavan, who was born into an Irish family living in Argentina. After her father’s death, she retuned to Ireland and settled in Edgworthstown, County Longford. This midlands town is the scene of some of Bernard’s most captivating work.

    There, he grew up under a nurturing mother who protected him from the brutality of the education system, and instilled a lifelong love of reading. This autodidact earned a scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, later studying politics, philosophy and economics at Worcester College.

    The film includes a memorable visit to the midlands town, where Bernard confronts memories of the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of the cattle boat and a new life in England. The men would face the harshness of the building sites and lodging houses, the world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’.

    Whatever you say, say Nothing’

    Bernard’s has long campaigned against the injustices that thousands of children suffered in Irish orphanages. In an emotive scene, Bernard visits Hampstead Heath where a man called Peter Tyrell set himself alight in 1967. As a young lad Peter endured rape and abuse in Letterfrack Industrial School and eventually succumbed to the trauma. The only clue as to his identity was a torn postcard addressed to the Irish civil rights activist and Senator, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had corresponded – and who had made efforts to bring his case to light.

    A highlight of the film is where Bernard makes an emotional return to the place of his incarceration, Saint Patrick’s Guild, ‘The House of Shame.’ There, he bears witness to what happened to him, speaking for other unfortunates who suffered a similar fate, most of whom have not had an opportunity to tell their tales.

    ‘In the Free State’

    Eventually, Bernard emigrated to England, returning briefly to Ireland in the 1960s to work as a marketing executive in Dublin. After two years, however, he returned to England, taking up residence in London, where he still lives. There, he worked on a freelance basis for a variety of underground papers and magazines, producing illustrations, cartoon strips and political satire for the likes of OZ, Peace News and International Times.

    Great credit is due to Sé Merry Doyle for making this film on a shoestring budget. It makes one wonder why so much of Ireland’s interesting cultural output is still occurring on the margins or abroad, unaided and underfunded. Our theocratic model appears to have been replaced by a neoliberal logic of profit and loss, where the work of an artist such as Bernard Canavan becomes a slightly awkward memory.

    Feature Image: “The Innocent”