When I was ten years old a blind man by the name of Mr. John Mitchell taught me how to play the piano accordion. I learned how to read and write music over the next two years and I could play a good selection of waltz’s and marches. The Centenary March, The Boston Burglar, You and I are a few I can remember. It’s a tricky instrument to play, with the bass keys on the left the piano keyboard on the right and the pulling and pushing it in and out. You feel a bit like Silas Marner at his loom when everything is trundling along together. With each new tune you learn you go through the process of feeling that this is impossible; this is barely possible; this is okay; I can do this without thinking about it.
I find the process of committing something to muscle memory fascinating. It was around this time my mother, who is an excellent singer, decided she would learn to play guitar to accompany herself. She bought a wine sunburst acoustic guitar and attended a weekly class, keeping a folder of songs with chords written in over the lyrics and diagrams of the chord fingerings.
I can still remember the first time I took it out of it’s case and began to learn these shapes from the diagrams, G… C, that was all that was needed for the first line of the first song in the folder – My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. When I sang that first line and changed the chord under the melody something switched on inside me that has never switched off ever since. My mind was blown. I could feel the vibrations of the chords and it felt like every cell in my body was resolving as the chords changed supporting the melody. From that moment on the accordion gathered dust and what could only be described as an obsession with the guitar began.
All I wanted was more chords and more songs to play. Every day I would play through the folder of songs until my fingers were raw and I would have to wait in frustration until the following day to play more. My mother became disheartened with her progress when she could hear me flying through the chord changes and she was still struggling. The simple fact was I was practicing fifty times as much as she was. There’s no big mystery or gift involved in learning to play an instrument, it’s just a matter of whether you are obsessed with it or not.
I’m not as obsessed with huge amounts of practice anymore. I just target specific pieces that I am working on or gigging at the time and rehearse those for a couple of hours. I find that it’s just as important to prepare mentally for a show or recording as it is to physically prepare. I had to develop relaxation techniques and routines to calm my body and mind before and during performances. When I say develop I mean tailor my own personal program, the actual techniques themselves have all been around for centuries. I use a combination of yoga postures to ground my body and connect with my breathing coupled with the practice of positive visualization.
There are so many things that can go wrong that could spoil a gig or a recording, if you start worrying about them you will drive yourself crazy. So stick to the positive outcomes only. Of course it pays to have all your equipment in good order and your chops down.
I am currently the guitarist in the Dublin based band Shakalak. In this outfit I get to play fun electric guitar lines over a fusion of electro-poetry. It’s a very creative group and our songwriting process is organic and spontaneous. At our rehearsals we allocate time for creation, sometimes nothing of interest will arise and other times we write an absolute hit, start to finish in twenty minutes.
All of us in the band have our own solo projects and we tip away at these concurrently. I am almost finished writing my second solo album and I am working on the pre-production of these songs at the moment. I am not trying to consciously target any specific genre with these new songs.
Are they cool? I don’t really know what “cool” is anymore. There are so many different types of cool now it’s a mine field. I am just following my gut instinct and playing what I want to hear at the moment. Hopefully they will resonate with some people and I will step on a cool bomb every so often. I am really enjoying playing and singing these new tracks so that makes me happy. I went through a fallow period a few years ago and it feels wonderful to be back in love with writing songs. It’s easy to lose your confidence and mojo for writing. I have psyched myself out of the game a few times at this stage. You just have to keep showing up at the office and something will eventually happen. These are the glory days.
Northern Ireland has already conducted a statutory inquiryinto how Covid was managed. In contrast, the Republic is set to have a ‘review’ without statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend. This despite the Republic having had both a relatively high fatality rate and punitive restrictions that don’t appear to have worked. Maybe there is something to be learned from the Orangemen?
In a seminal 1913 article entitled ‘The North Began’, the renowned scholar Eoin MacNeill opined that the rest of the island of Ireland could learn from the approach then adopted by Ulster Unionists in setting up the Ulster Volunteer Force. Ultimately, this led to the creation of the Irish Volunteers, ostensibly to protect Home Rule, then supposedly imminent, but which also contributed to the emergence of the Irish Republican Army after the Easter Rising of 1916.
MacNeill’s argument comes to mind with the recent announcement of a limited ‘Review’ into how Covid-19 was managed in the Southern Irish state – and also regarding how the experience of life during Covid differed from the North, especially for Dubliners, who were significantly disadvantaged.
Who can forget – amid frenzied reports of hospitals being overrun in Italy and China by a new infection – this state going into lockdown as a ‘temporary’ precaution? A mantra quickly adopted was to ‘flatten the curve’ referring to the Rate of Infection, with every citizen encouraged to adhere to ‘social distancing’ rules until the health system was ready to absorb the expected surge.
Having cut ICU beds after the Crash, the twenty-six county state was poorly placed by comparison with most of its E.U. counterparts to deal with expected surges.
The Irish ‘Plan’
Yet, for once, the Irish state did have a properly planned response (‘Ireland’s National Action Plan in response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Update 16th March 2020’) – having previously modelled responses to pandemic scenarios. Essentially, it was envisaged that third level institutes would be closed – as occurred – with field hospitals opened in these large, idle facilities. It was, on paper at least, a great plan.
With any ‘Irish Plan’, there were two distinct pathways to follow. The first involved attempting to follow the ‘Zero Covid’ approach adopted by New Zealand, which sought to keep Covid off their islands altogether by requiring international passengers to remains for a specified period in quarantine facilities prior to any stay in the country. Then there was the so-called ‘Swedish Model’, which emphasized protection of the vulnerable, while minimising restrictions on personal liberties.
Instructively the Irish plan was based on an assumption that ‘6% of people may become more seriously infected and will require hospital care.’
It is now clear that this figure was much exaggerated, based on flawed Chinese data, and generated undue fear. Moreover, early statistics on Covid hospital admissions seem to have included patients who tested positive for the virus, but were admitted for something else, as well as those who caught the virus while in hospital being treated for another condition.
Many of those hospitalised ‘with Covid’ may have been asymptomatic, due to the sensitivity of the PCR test. As an important article in the New York Times from August 2020 put it: ‘Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.’
Sweden
In these circumstances, the Swedish Model was harshly criticized as uncaring, and it was said that the disease would spread like wildfire. Yet, in hindsight, it seems to have been the lesser of evils.
Alas, there is still no consensus as to the cumulative total of fatalities that occurred in the different European states. Nonetheless, even sources that seem less favourable to the Swedish approach, such as the ‘Worldometer’ table on Wikipedia, rate their death toll as lower than Ireland’s per capita, despite a significantly older population. There were 1,860 Reported Deaths per million happening there, as opposed to the 1,980 here. (Original source: https://www.worldometers.info/ coronavirus/?utm_campaign= homeAdvegas1. See Wikipedia table, ‘Statistics by country and territory’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ COVID-19_pandemic_in_Europe).
Another metric provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranks the Scandinavian nation lowest for overall cumulative excess deaths among a number of countries studied from 2020-22, at 6.8 per cent. By comparison Australia had 18 per cent, the U.K. 24.5 per cent, and the U.S.A. a rate of 54.1 per cent.
In retrospect, it is plausible that the ‘Irish Plan’ might have co-existed with either the Zero or Swedish approaches. Based on what was known at the time, it may have been worth trying a Zero approach initially. It probably would not have worked – not just because of a porous border with the North or membership of the European Union – but also because it seems that Covid-19 was already circulating in Europe as early as March, 2019.
Normalisation of House-Arrest
Intelligent leadership adapts to changing circumstance, and so, with the likely failure of the Zero-Covid approach, the Swedish model could – and should – have been adopted by the autumn of 2020. Had the Irish authorities adhered to their own plan, by that time, the universities would have been functioning as field hospitals. Yet that’s not what happened.
Instead, ‘temporary’ lockdowns, introduced in March 2020, were gradually normalised into a weird form of house arrest. Rather than lasting a few weeks, these ‘temporary’ measures would dominate our lives for almost two years. It was an unprecedented, draconian suppression of civil liberties, which became more tyrannical and absurd as time passed by.
The ‘new normal’ was to live within two kilometres of home, later extended to some five kilometres. All social activities were banned, bar a clap in one’s garden to thank ‘front-line’ staff. Meanwhile, Irish care homes – where air is often stuffy and poor quality – were left to fester with full occupancy, as sick elderly patients were released from hospitals. Consequently, the level of mortality that occurred in these institutions was second only to that of Canada during the first wave.
That the Taoiseach at the time of outbreak, Leo Varadkar, had previously been a medical doctor, was an initial source of hope that we would be guided by competent leadership.
Empty hospitals, however, such as Baggot Street and St. Bricin’s in Dublin, continued to lie idle. Elected representatives, including Varadkar, effectively devolved leadership to NPHET (the National Public Health Emergency Team for Covid-19). which was composed almost entirely of career civil servants – arguably with little ‘skin in the game’ if businesses were shut down – but whose pronouncements came to be treated with the same reverence as was once accorded to the Catholic hierarchy. Throughout that period their evaluations decided our destinies in ways that often seemed ridiculous.
Image: Daniele Idini
Science becomes religion
Holohan’s decision to appoint Professor Philip Nolan – ‘The pair had known each other for years’ – to oversee disease modelling ought to have prompted concern. Nolan was then President of Maynooth University, his ‘research was in physiology – specifically the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.’
With limited apparent research background or expertise in infectious diseases, Nolan’s wayward models – and bizarre commentary on antigen testing – informed Irish government decisions throughout the pandemic.
According to the authors of Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic (2022), ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: this was a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source in that publication described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’
Science became the new religion. Yet the measures often seemed scientifically questionable. Thus, in line with WHO guidance a positive PCR test within twenty-eight days of someone dying was listed as a Covid fatality – even if that poor individual had died in a car crash!
Meanwhile, ‘stay safe’ became ‘stay sane’ for many of us who watched scarce resources dwindle, as the normal conduct of business was prevented. Sadly, little adaption to challenging circumstance occurred in line with ‘the science’.
Who can forget the moral panic that ensued in the summer of 2020? Thus, tabloid photographers cunningly used long range lenses to foreshorten the view of people at beaches. Despite people sitting apart, it looked as if they were on top of one another. Subsequently, in January 2021 it emerged that not one case of transmission could be traced to the beach ‘outrages’ when assessed by the U.K. authorities.
‘The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty’?
The Irish state was set-up a century ago to prevent the coercion of Irish citizens. Notably, the fourth paragraph of the 1916 Proclamation asserts:
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Ergo the social contract on which this Republic is based ought to protect personal freedoms, within bounds. Yet, instead we had unprecedented and clearly disproportionate restrictions imposed on us by our own government. It seems that being ‘the best in the class’ mattered most of all to Irish politicians in terms of accepting dictates from European masters.
EU leadership?
Meanwhile, disastrously, leadership at the European level was sorely lacking: Rather than providing positive guidance to adapt to the reality that Covid was effectively endemic by the winter of 2020, the European Union supported lockdowns, a milder model of that first trialled in that great bastion of liberal democracy: the People’s Republic of China.
Hence the Germans banned outdoor markets – even though outdoor trade should have been encouraged. Meanwhile, only at the last minute did the Austrian government abandon the idea of forcing injections on recalcitrant civilians. Thus, it seems logical that there should be a proper inquiry into how Covid was handled at the E.U. level, as well as in each member state.
The unwillingness of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to release communications with vaccine manufacturers, including text messages with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla, also raises serious questions regarding transparency.
In Ireland, the utter incompetence of Boris Johnson in the U.K. provided lasting cover. He was memorably, if somewhat bizarrely, compared to a rogue shopping trolley creating chaos about the place.
A regular refrain on Irish media, and in private conversations, was that ‘at least we’re not as bad as the Brits’. Thus, instead of finding ways to enable the maximum amount of people to live their lives as normally as possible, officialdom largely adopted a ‘no can do’ approach. At times, it almost seemed as if the state broadcaster was intent on terrorising the population into submission.
Irish Constitution
In such a challenging period, thoughts of God might may have come to mind. In line with the sentiments expressed in the 1916 Proclamation, Article 44of the Irish Constitution of 1937 protects practice of faith from obstruction.
Unlike care homes, churches and temples are typically tall spacious venues with plenty of fresh air. There was little scientific basis for banning people from attending such places, provided certain measures were adopted – including ensuring adequate ventilation, personal space, and adapting rituals pertaining to communion and hand shaking.
In my view, the state was obliged to vindicate these rights. After all, what is the point of a constitutional right if serious efforts are not made to adhere to it in challenging circumstances?
Instead, essential freedoms were extinguished at the stroke of a pen. Thus, by early 2021, twelve months into the pandemic, what were effectively inmates of the twenty-six counties were being subjected to the most stringent restrictions on personal freedoms in Europe.
Lockdown gains?
It may be recalled that during Covid, there was talk about ‘building back better’; that society would become more compassionate; that we would have a notably better health system afterwards Today, little of that seems evident.
The impact of shutting down the construction trade for long periods should also not be overlooked. Homeless figures are now at an all-time high – amid huge levels of emigration, much of this in response to the state’s desultory attitude towards housing. All of this despite Ireland being the least densely populated state in the E.U., and supposedly among the richest.
Nonetheless, in both Cork city and Dún Laoghaire, earnest efforts were made during Covid to adapt and advance neighbourhoods by way of enhancing their public domains – thus facilitating local trade and improving amenities.
What then was the experience of Dublin City? As the main place of work for the country’s civil servants, the city centre was all the more quiet for their absence. While the country was undergoing the most severe of lockdowns in Europe, Dubliners were, to all intents and purposes, singled out for the most repressive regime of all.
Along with ‘front-line workers’, anyone involved in agriculture or food production during Covid was effectively exempt from restrictions on movement. Hence, it was the urban populations who were particularly hampered in the course of their normal lives – while many of their rural counterparts experienced much less difference, apart, obviously, from children being kept at home from school.
Despite it being well-established by 2021 that it was safe for people to socialise outside, March that year saw ordinary decent Dubliners being harassed by police for drinking outside in parks by the River Dodder – instead of gathering inside, where infection would more likely occur.
A few stretches of cycleways were added along Werburgh and Nassau Streets – with unsightly plastic bollards inserted there and elsewhere. Public toilets were provided in an ugly kiosk outside the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre – despite purpose-built public toilets being sited only sixty metres away inside Stephen’s Green, that the Office of Public Works keeps locked-up.
The only serious civic gain during that time was the pedestrianisation of Capel Street, and a small amount of pedestrian pavement being widened elsewhere.
Decline of Dublin
Otherwise, Dublin’s city centre clearly stagnated. A small vignette: throughout the entirety of Dublin 1, there is only one public glass recycling bank sited at Shamrock Street in Ballybough. That is obviously disastrous in terms of under-provision for such a densely populated area.
Coincidentally, every year, the Irish Times reports on the IBAL Litter Survey which repeatedly finds Dublin’s north inner city to be the worst in the state. Yet, during the ‘Covid Years’, City Council management actually moved to close down this one glass recycling facility! Fortunately it was saved in September 2022 – but only after intervention by councillors, (Alas, no reports in the Irish Times about any of that.)
Meanwhile, cops on the beat became far less visible around the inner city. There were regular reports of gang fights occurring around the quays as a thuggish culture festered, culminating in the notorious Dublin Riots of October 2023.
A lasting perception of inadequate personal safety has eroded public confidence, which has resulted in people avoiding town – further undermining the commercial viability of many of the businesses based therein.
Thus, the city centre is clearly now in crisis; once bedrock establishments of the city’s premier core around Stephen’s Green, such as Shanahan’s on the Green and Café en Seine, have either closed down or have seen profits halved.
The commissioning of a report last year by the government regarding O’Connell Street – while doing little else obvious otherwise – does not inspire confidence.
The prospect of an accountable elected City Mayor with powers has long been held out by central government as a logical solution for the city’s management. Yet just like the airport railway that has been repeatedly promised since the early 1970s, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Failure to adapt
Ultimately, the initial response by responsible citizens to adhere to extraordinary state rules in a time of crisis was abused beyond belief. On this, the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman was proven right: nothing becomes so permanent as a ‘temporary’ government programme.
Any hopes of the state responding to Covid in a progressive manner gradually evaporated. Official guidance regarding mandatory facemasks was never properly updated – despite clear evidence that the effectiveness of basic blue ‘surgical’ masks was minimal, at best. Had people been made aware of the efficacy of different mask types – albeit a secondary consideration to good ventilation – it would have enabled citizens to better manage their risk exposure.
Meanwhile, the arrival of low-cost, antigen Covid tests for home use offered an obvious way forward. People would have a quick way of identifying whether they would pass on the virus – and could act accordingly. Remarkably, however, NPHET’s Philip Nolan pronounced on Twitter that these were being offered by ‘snake-oil salesmen’!
Fortunately, outside eyes were watching. Harvard epidemiologist, Professor Michael Mina, brought some sense to proceedings by tweeting back at Nolan ‘For an advisor to your government – you don’t appear to know what you are talking about’, adding, ‘The comment adds nothing of benefit and further sows confusion. You should be ashamed of your demeanour here.’
Regime Media
So much media space was bought by the state by way of advertisements, it was Herculean. Unsurprisingly, counter-arguments were not encouraged, as few outlets were prepared to question the official line.
When Astra Zenica was taken off the marketentirely early last year, arising from ‘rare but serious’ side-effects, media coverage was muted. Meanwhile, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine has also been withdrawn from the market in the United States – but yet again, there seems to have been little reportage here on the magic shot being discontinued.
So, where were the brave journalists questioning what was happening at the time, or now for that matter? Aside from photos of naughty social occasions that leaked onto the internet, commercial media organs essentially competed with one other to be the first to publicize official edicts. There is little reason to suspect any difference in future. Other than a few honourable exceptions, it seems what we have in this country is a propaganda apparatus, as opposed to a free media.
The pronouncements of NPHET were all that mattered. Nine euros was sanctioned as the minimal spend when eating out – presumably because Covid was waiting for an eight euro offer?
All the time, people delayed necessary health checks and procedures – initially ‘to flatten the curve’ – and so critical conditions may have gone untreated. Others put on weight through inactivity.
There was also the undoubted impact on many people’s mental health, as after a few months, the grim reality of forced isolation, without-end-in-sight, pushed many towards the edge. At least in part, such factors may explain Ireland’s highly elevated mortality in the wake of Covid. All this underlines the need for a robust inquiry into the state’s management of that period.
Any Accountability?
It seems to me that the cumulative effects of Ireland’s Covid response surely did more harm than good. Now, if this state is to do its job properly in future – if we are to learn anything from that dystopian time – it is essential to conduct a transparent and rigorous assessment of the response.
The effects of that period were pronounced and are, to some extent, ongoing. For example, it is notable that the number of recipients of sick benefit in England and Wales has increased by 38% since Covid. How does that tally with the experience here? Lacking powers to compel witnesses and documents, how can the state’s Covid ‘Review’ properly assess impacts of its response during that time?
I fear nothing will be learned from this Review, as it lacks the necessary powers. Yet where are the elected representatives who should be demanding the proper statutory inquiry that is necessary?
Without such a process, if we ever encounter a similar challenge, it is worrying that the state’s agents – ‘the permanent government’ of civil servants – may fail to have due regard to fundamental constitutional rights.
Game On (for some)
Memorably, with restrictions on sports, almost all facilities were shut down – despite most activities being held outdoor. Notably, golf and hill-walking were prohibited – even though these presented the least threat of exposure to an airborne virus.
As time went on, some allowances were made for certain sporting bodies – such as the GAA. Again, Dublin benefited least, as that body’s membership is disproportionately rural.
By year two, the emergence of a two-tier state seemed fairly clear, with the GAA allowed to have over 40,000 spectators from Mayo and Tyrone attend the All-Ireland Football final in Croke Park on September 11, 2021 – at a time when many businesses in that part of Dublin were closed down.
The decision-making process that allowed the match to take place was notable, as the ‘new’ freedoms were only announced retrospectively – with a press statement issued on September 9th stating: ‘From 6 September, indoor events can take place with 60% of the venue’s maximum capacity, provided all the people attending are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 in the past 6 months’. Did the GAA know something that the rest of us didn’t when arranging the fixture?
Meanwhile, a retirement gathering in RTE featuring some of the best known presenters on the station, was found to have involved five breaches in relation to Covid 19 advice, protocols and regulations.
Memorably, an apparent sense of entitlement also extended to then E.U. Commissioner Phil Hogan, who was forced to resign in August 2020 after being caught breaking the rules by playing golf and having supper afterwards. And with that, went the best opportunity Ireland had to influence E.U. affairs at its most senior level.
Even a year later, little seemed to have been learned, when it emerged that the former Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, had held a party on July 21 for around fifty attendees in the garden of the Merrion Hotel. But that was all happily resolved when the Government Press Office released a statement a fortnight later stating that the Attorney General was of the view that it was permissible for outdoor gatherings of up to 200 people.
How can such carry-on occur in a proper democracy? It seems that rules could be retrospectively interpreted differently if required.
Justice for the Plebs
Yet the leniency shown to ‘the few’ sharply contrasts with the dogged pursuit of ‘the many’. For the outrageous crime of spreading the Lord’s Word, in December 2022 three Evangelical Christian street preachers were prosecuted for holding an outdoor event beyond five kilometres of their homes the previous year. Consequently, those three men each now have criminal records – having never had them before.
Only this week, in February 2025, the trial date has been set in April for the prosecution of the so-called‘Dubai Two’ who allegedly broke quarantine rules during that period. Thus. two young mothers face the prospect of a month in jail and a €2,000 fine.
Where is the Republic that ‘guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’ as per the 1916 Proclamation?
Vaccine vs Liberty?
Based on that experience, it is impossible to ever again trust the state to ‘suspend’ civil liberties. What reward was there for compliance?
So then, if the vaccines were so effective, why then were we again subjected to lockdowns after much of the population had been vaccinated? Either the vaccines worked, and subsequent lockdowns should not have occurred – or else the vaccines were not so effective, and the emphasis put on mass inoculation was incorrect. This argument needs to be addressed.
Even with the high rates of vaccination and diminished threat, as late as January 2022, members of NPHET were contemplating force injecting the small minority outstanding.
All of this points to the need for public confidence to be restored – by way of a robust evaluation as to how matters were managed. It is now five years since Covid began, and three since it ended; people’s memories will be getting hazy.
RTÉ: Rewarding Failure?
And what of the media apparatus that helped ensure compliance in the population? The year after Covid ended, the wheels came off the wagon of RTÉ, when it emerged that there had been serious problems with the finances and management at the state-owned company.
Memorably the then Director General Dee Forbes resigned in June, 2023. Around the same time, Ryan Tubridy’s ‘secret’ payments subsequently came to light.
Nonetheless, it appears that the Covid period provided cover for questionable practices, both within that organisation and in other state agencies.
But this was small beer compared to the €725 million fixed upon the Exchequer only last year by the government to ensure RTÉ’s continued operation until 2028. That cash could be used to build up to 1,500 houses, potentially reducing the state’s homeless population by almost a third. Instead, it is being shovelled into an economic albatross that loyally served the government, when the people required rigorous journalism.
How can we expect accountability at the state broadcaster when cash is shoveled in so easily?
So then, whatever happened to the assertion in the 1916 Proclamation about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’?
Looking North
Thus, it is interesting to look North, as they took a somewhat different approach. It’s a different jurisdiction, but with a broadly similar social make-up.
In the main, similar restrictions were adopted, with schools and pubs closed for much of the period. It was far from perfect in terms of coping with the crisis, with criticisms at the time, and since, as stated in evidence. Restrictions on social assemblies were clearly detested in some quarters, most memorably by a vocalVan Morrison.
Yet, over time, a different approach gradually emerged. For example, in the first year, as occurred with crowd events in the south, the Orangemen called off their summer marches to prevent contagion. This was a sensible approach, given the knowledge at that time – and arguably more notable given that body has not always been associated with responsible approaches.
But by the second summer, however, the Orangemen allowed outdoor, localised events to go on. Again, this was consistent with an evidence-based response. Simply put, the Orangemen got it right in terms of their Covid response!
Last summer a suitably robust Inquiry was conducted in the North into how the state there had responded – with the BBC reportingthat it had heard ‘devastating evidence with multiple failings across several departments.’ Hardly a ringing endorsement for that state’s response, which made for uncomfortable listening for many of those involved. Yet, the process may prove cathartic if mistakes are not to be repeated.
As part of that inquiry, elected representatives were asked to turn over all text and WhatsApp messages from the period. Unfortunately, Sinn Féin politicians had apparently deleted the most relevant ones. In contrast, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) disclosed their texts. One member, Edwin Poots, appeared to have regarded Covid as a ‘Catholic’ disease – but, in fairness, he seems to have been an outlier.
Obvious need for a statutory Covid Inquiry in the ‘Republic’
What could be learned from a comparable Covid inquiry in the South? Certainly, it would be very useful to gauge how the state implemented its emergency plan; how it adapted to new data; and how it will respond should a similar scenario ever again arise. MacNeill’s 1913 article resonates yet again; much can be learned from the approach adopted in Ulster.
Instead, a culture of non-transparency that developed during Covid seems to have been normalised throughout the Southern government. Rather than a statutory Covid inquiry with accountability prioritised, it appears the so-called Republic are now to be governed according to secret pacts made with elected independent representatives.
To borrow a description from Theobald Wolfe Tone, the last regime was ‘execrable’; and yet, there is every reason to fear the new administration may be even worse.
Alas, it is hard to see how a non-statutory ‘review’ without powers to compel witnesses or documents will find much that is not already part of the establishment’s narrative.
Without adequate explanations, as an inquiry could allow, my faith in this state has been shattered. Simply put, once entrusted with special powers, the government made a bad situation bloody awful.
God forbid, if a proper inquiry was to occur, perhaps we might learn that at most crucial junctures, this state and at least some of its agents see themselves as beyond accountability – and are happy to force citizens to carry the cost of demented policies.
Should this state ever again try to enforce measures such as those during Covid, I for one will be looking North to see how the Orange brethren respond. In the absence of accountable government here, I have learned to respect those who at least seem to prize their own civil liberties.
It happens. After four years of marriage, I’m madly in love…just not with my husband. I feel like Diane Lane in Unfaithful, guilt-ridden, and giddy as I face my new reality. I am a terrible wife…but…I was becoming a fantastic girlfriend.
You may deem me a horror, but the truth is never a fairytale. Only weddings are, and mine was no exception. In Camelot fashion, I rode to church in a horse and buggy. I should have known something was wrong when looking out the lace-framed carriage window I thought, “I could escape through the woods in this thing.” To say we have one soul mate, one person we marry until death is to commit to madness. However sour that sounds, I still believe in love. I believe in Rocky and Adrian, couples who meet and mate for life. There are swans out there, and then there’s me.
As my horse clickety clacks through the trail to church, I thought of where we met. My soon-to-be husband and I were waiters for an elite caterer who specialized in spoiling the rich and famous of New York. On any given night, we served an array of society members, rich bitches, charming bastards, and boring bankers. They all had the same nose, the same stifling perfumes, the same board-certified plastic surgeons. There were exceptions, rare guests that made even the most jaded waiters’ hearts skip a beat. There was Princess Dianna, who graced The New York State Theater with a presence that was otherworldly and English garden. Then there was our homegrown prince, John Kennedy Junior. He was intelligent, handsome, rugged — a bona fide American hunk. The only son of the late President John F. Kennedy was often alone, then later in the company of his wife Carolyn. She was stunning and stepped into the Kennedy dynasty as if the glass slippers were hers all along. Whether they were holding hands or mingling separately at a party, they were always in sync. I thought of how secretly jealous I was of them, of their inexplicable beauty, and the life of ease they were born into. I thought of all the splendor we lavished on John and Carolyn, and how ironic and lovely that we were finally having our splash of an event.
My future husband Robert was kind, respectful, and a planner. Everyone loved him and encouraged our flirtations. “Robert is one of the most emotionally mature men I’ve ever met,” said a co-worker. On the surface she was right. He was grounded, and generous – the opposite of the selfish tools I had experienced. But a deeper dive into his psyche revealed a gully of childhood trauma. I came to learn, in graphic detail, how his father had taken his own life when Robert was just a boy. And how his unspeakable death released a brutal barrage of white water on his family – for just as one wave of unrest was cresting, another would hit.
Initially, I found Robert timid, but as our dating progressed, the sheer goodness of his nature won me over. On the morning after our second date, I was treated to a romantic poem left on my voicemail. It was impressive as Robert was a trained actor who sidelined his dream for steady work teaching. Though flattered by his gesture, I was puzzled by his spontaneous outburst. What had I done to deserve this? I perceived that our spark was not the brightest. He didn’t ask me many questions. So…was it my looks? Right face, right time? I didn’t care. He needed a place to put his love, and I needed a safe place to land.
Our relationship progressed as he spoiled me with thoughtful gifts and a steady stream of attention. After three and a half months of dating, I moved into his place. I never thought of marriage as my life goal, I had already turned down proposals from two different men. But I was at that age where dormant domesticity busts through DNA, like weeds in cracked concrete. For there I was, a few months later, saying yes to this man who fell to one knee on a foggy night in July and asked me to marry him.
Four years later, I wasn’t just breaking my vows, I was pulverizing them beyond recognition. Like all first-time offenders, I felt culpable but soon grew accustomed to my crime. My brain became an IV, slowly dripping rationalizations to assuage my conscience, conveniently removing all traces of guilt from my heart. The merit of my sins softened, as I recalled the things my husband and I had and hadn’t done. We HAD sex, TWICE…on our two-week honeymoon in Italy. I never got kissed under that Bridge of Sighs, I got a sweater. It was a really nice sweater. Every time I wore it, I remembered Venice – the churches we lit candles in, the canals we floated over, the arches we never made out under.
I’m not a modern girl. I never had one of those razor-chopped haircuts, I had cookbooks. On any given night you’d find me making dinner for Robert like an old-school Italian wife. Yet here I am, standing barefoot on my lover’s kitchen countertop and I’m not even cooking. I’m five feet off the floor at his insistence; “Take off your shoes and climb up,” he says. “Changes your perspective. Right?” I must have nodded yes, but in my head, I’m thinking, “My husband would never let me do this. He barely lets me in the house after he mops!” I met Jack at a master acting class in Manhattan. The teacher was a famous Beverly Hills guru. He was part Scientologist, part psychic. If you had a chink in your armor, he sniffed it out with vampiric accuracy. Once, when sitting in the hot seat after my scene, he noted the following, “You’re a passionate woman. But you exist in a passionless relationship, yes?” I take a breath before I answer, “Oh my husband’s…very supportive.” I’m barely exhaling as the guru stares through me. He needs no words, for the truth he sought was shifting in my eyes of a thousand lies. I panic, knowing I’m caught. But like a dog suddenly surrendering a steak bone, the guru lets me go and turns his attention back to show biz. He tells me to straighten my curly hair and rise above the middle-class vibe I’m projecting. The guru makes it clear that being middle-class is akin to poison and kills the spirit of an artist like slow-moving arsenic.
About 2 weeks after the start of the first class, I’m slated to work with an actor named Cal. Now Cal was a loose cannon who pulled an actual gun on a woman in rehearsal, but I didn’t care. He was interesting and I was primed for artistic arousal. But word had it that bat shit, crazy Cal booked an acting job and wouldn’t be coming to class anymore. The director of my scene needed someone to take his place and chose Jack as my new partner. I admit, I was disappointed to miss out on loose cannon Cal. I could have used a gun to the head, and the only thing Jack was pulling out of his pocket was wax for his surfboard. No, he wasn’t a surfer, but he looked the part. One day during a lull between scenes, Jack reaches a row behind him, extending his hand to me. In a hushed tone he said, “Hey, it’s you and me.” I was thrown by the warmth of his gesture and the excitement in his voice. His friendly spirit and enthusiasm didn’t match the story that played in my mind. I had seen him outside of class many times pacing downtown Manhattan like a caged cougar in search of his soul.
Jack was cocky, opinionated, an artistic bully at times, a 360 of my pragmatic husband. He confessed crazy things; like how he made 200 grand one year and had nothing to show for it but the pants on his ass. When I asked him where the money went he said calmly, “Jeans?” He was gentle, yet rough. He threw me off balance yet managed to keep me standing…barely. Once, during rehearsal, he got so pushy, that I almost quit. I couldn’t handle being terrible in my scene with this guy. How could I convince the guru I was more than middle class? In our scene, Jack was supposed to kiss me, and when he did it was forced, mechanical, the worst kiss I ever had. I’m supposed to be attracted to this? How could I desire a guy I wasn’t even sure I liked?
One day after rehearsal, I find myself walking with Jack to the subway. I would later discover that his train was nowhere near mine. He had walked me out of his way just for the sake of my company. In Manhattan terms, it was a trek from our director’s Lower East Side apartment to my Brooklyn-bound F train. “F stands for failure,” I say with a laugh. But Jack’s dead serious and starts rapidly firing questions: What was my childhood like? My father? Mother? What were the parts I played, and wanted to play? As I answer his questions, I wonder why this man with a resume that dwarfed mine, was interested in my meaningless credits and boring Jersey life. “Hey, I grew up in New Jersey too, a town away from you, young lady!” he says with a cheeky smile. I’m five years older than him, but I love that he’s made me younger. As we wait for the train, we discover that we even shared the strange dentist at one point. Learning these trivial commonalities should have dimmed his light, but it only sharpened his luster. For me, he became the boy next door – the one I never met and would never be allowed to love.
Jack knew I was married from my first confession in class and told me about the young woman he’d been dating. We both had significant others, and I rationalized that our friendship was safe. Our master class had been extended, so our weekly meetings progressed to impromptu hangouts. After lunch one afternoon, we find ourselves amid a torrential downpour. As we take cover under a storefront awning, I’m grateful he’s inches behind me, unable to see my burning red face. The air is thick with the obvious, our relationship was NOT safe. It’s downright dangerous, and I don’t fucking care. For the rain had passed, and when I turned around, I saw this man, the one I thought I detested – and like lightning strikes a steel rod in “The Omen,” I was smitten.
Trying to describe why I loved him is like making a case for lasagna. It’s just lasagna, and It’s delicious. I’m not a high-risk person. I never wanted to climb K2. I’m the type of person who’d get to base camp and say, “I’m cold. Let’s go!” Even standing on his kitchen countertop was freaking me out. Now I’d been to his apartment before but class was over. I was now coming to his apartment on purpose. Nothing had happened, but we knew we were headed. We went as far as making plans to spend the weekend together. I considered backing out, but when I called him the night before, his enthusiasm for my visit won me over. “Morana…I feel like it’s December 24th.” That’s what he said. I couldn’t back out now. How could I bail on a man who just called me Christmas Eve?
Months before our tryst, I went on an auditioning warpath, rising at ungodly hours to stand in packed performer lines in mid-town Manhattan. After weeks, I finally got cast in a summer stock production of “Bells Are Ringing.” It was a throwback musical conceived for Judy Holliday – a comedic film star of the 40s and 50s. It was her Broadway bust-out vehicle; a story about a quirky woman named Ella who worked at an answering service. Ella gets so involved with her answering service clients that she falls in love with one of them. Now I didn’t get cast as Ella, but as her best friend, Gwen and I’m fine with it. I was quite frankly too fucked up to carry an entire show. So I welcome the second banana distraction, for it took me from Brooklyn to Vermont, away from my husband and my burgeoning affair.
After three weeks of intense rehearsal, “Bells” is up and running. Our cast is wiped out and excited to have off two days in a row. Now I could have stayed in Vermont, gone to a cheddar cheese tasting, a blueberry patch, or just slept. But when two of my male cast mates said they were missing their boyfriends and driving back to the city, I jumped at the chance to ride along. I was missing my boyfriend too. My fellow actors drop me off at 42nd Street. It’s midnight and I quickly put on my Jackie O. sunglasses, because I’m a proper adulterer now. After the slowest cab ride on Earth, I arrive at Jack’s. I’m standing in front of his apartment door poised to enter. I know it’s open because he never locks it. An emotional epidural of jubilation and terror shoots through my spine. I feel my lower half may melt. If my husband in Brooklyn finds out I’m in town, I’m fucked — and not in a good way. How would I justify my sudden arrival in New York? Our marriage had become combative and lackluster. If I got caught, I’d have to kill myself before Robert killed me. Maybe I’d turn around and taxi back to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. In light of my sins, it seemed fitting to walk into oncoming traffic. I consider it but know it won’t work. The “BQE” as we affectionately call it is so congested that with my luck, I’d never get hit…So I knock.
As he opens the door, I move to embrace him…” Wait! Lemme look at you.” he says. Seconds pass as his eyes travel the length of my body. Then like a kid in a candy store, he says, “Okay!” My overnight bag drops as I plunge my face into his chest, sucking one glorious whiff of the cigarettes and cologne on his freshly laundered shirt. I’m finally home, and this is so fucked up.
I wasn’t the only one taking a risk this weekend, Jack was too. If caught, he’d face the wrath of a freight train, a locomotion of shame he couldn’t handle. His girlfriend was rabidly jealous, suspicious of every stray hair on his bathroom floor that did not match hers. Jack and I had stayed respectful. But on the very last day of class, he kissed me for real backstage, behind a curtain. It was spontaneous and special until he made a huge mistake. He told his girlfriend. She went ballistic, calling him every name in the book, throwing comparisons to her philandering father, and then threatening to tell my husband and destroy my marriage.
I was not ready to be kicked to the curb. If my marriage was going to end, it would end on my watch, not with tantrums from a 20-something. I get it. I’m horrible. She’s the innocent victim, Anne Archer, and I’m bunny-boiling, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. But I hated her for threatening to invade my life. I had crossed the line, but not with her…Jack did. And by throwing that kiss under the bus, he was running me over too. For what? Relief of his guilty conscience? I was furious, but mostly at myself and my lousy luck. Out of all the men in the universe to have an affair with, I had picked the ONE guy with scruples!
Cussing him out would have been futile. He made a mistake and couldn’t un-ring the bell. The person who should have been an angry, suspicious, freak-out mess – was Robert. Weeks prior, I had my brush with getting caught. Robert was a neat freak. Everything in our apartment had a place. Disarray equaled discontent. He came from spaghetti on the walls abuse, and anything that came into our apartment was put away – immediately. This included my class prop bag. It contained my costume, wax paper from an eaten Italian sandwich, and all objects used in my scene. At the bottom of the bag was also a handwritten note from Jack. We agreed to do this corny exercise where we wrote each other notes in character. It was my idea, and I wrote him a whopper of a love letter. My note to him was an in-your-face, admission of lust. Jack’s note was different. It was simple, and sophisticated and concluded with the poem “What If You Slept” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
I was home no longer than 20 minutes before I realized Robert had unpacked for me. It wasn’t a favor; it was a violation. My prop bag was empty, not even a crumb from my Italian sandwich remained. That’s how thorough he was. I shook my head in disbelief and then remembered the note. It was not in the bag.
“If something’s going on, you need to stop it.” That is what he said. I had fast-tracked it to the kitchen, like a zombie on speed. Now I’m standing here – caught like a kid, my right arm, elbow-deep in the garbage. He spoke low-voiced and parental. I remained silent and took my scolding like a pro as I let Jack’s note fall back in the garbage. We didn’t have sex that night. We never did. I lay there pretending to be asleep, then waited patiently for his first snore. Robert slept like a marine on watch, so I had to creep back into the kitchen without waking him. As I open the cabinet to the garbage can, I find remnants of Robert’s dinner splashed on my love note. I blot it off delicately, careful not to smear his handwriting. I flatten the wrinkled note as best I can. I could hide it, I thought, or ram it down Robert’s throat while he slept.
Something in me turned that night, for what should have scared me straight, sent me crooked. It was not on purpose, or out of revenge. I gathered it was just my nature, bending me back towards the separation I’d always felt as a child. Why was I like this? I thought as I pumped my legs on a swing set. And where would this weirdness, “the left-out-ness” of my personality would take me? I felt akin to my guru, who shared stories of his grunt years as a butcher in the meatpacking district. I felt how he stood there, in a bloody apron and gut-splattered shoes, a reluctant Sweeney Todd, watching beatnik actors and would-be famous directors walk by his meat locker window.
My pedicure was barely dry as I fly out of the Korean nail salon. I was slinking around the Upper East Side like a jewel thief passing time while I waited for Jack’s return. Closing his door with my wet nails, I feel my dream happening now, not in the past of our combined mistakes, or the future of whatever may never be. The brick walls of his apartment are warm like him – framed posters of all the movies he loves surround me. I soak in everything – his candles, his books, his oddness. With his return, we catch up on our uneventful day. And then I feel something bad is about to happen, like that moment before you throw up. He looks at me with the sobering awful truth in his eyes, “Meeting you was the BEST and WORST day of my life. Best because I met you, worst because you’re married.” In less than 24 hours, the laughter, the lovemaking, and the friendship will end. I’m back to the middle class, to second banana status in a dated musical in Burlington, Vermont.
I want to stay in his place forever, but he won’t let me. “It’s not that I love her more, I’ve just been loving her longer.” That’s what he said. He was telling the truth, and I knew it. Now I’m the vampire reading his mind. He loves me. That’s the worst part. She’d just gotten there first. “Congratulations,” I say to myself. “You are the unfortunate recipient of less time in.”
He was moving to California with his girlfriend. I was going back to Robert in Brooklyn, but not just yet. The curtain was closing on our silly little musical. Thank God, because I was starting to hate this show. But I loved my review: “Isabella Morana is the only actor in Bells Are Ringing, that plays an authentic New Yorker.” You see theatrically, I’m authentic, real-life…totally fake! I hadn’t the guts to leave my marriage or the wherewithal to stay and make it work.
My husband visits me in Vermont for the last few performances. We’re staying in one of those generic motels, the kind where even the soap isn’t interesting enough to steal. I’m sitting on a flowery bedspread while my husband putters around our room. We were set on doing some crunchy granola stuff that day. Maybe we’d visit a covered bridge, a maple syrup factory, an open hole in the ground — who cares! I needed our day occupied, away from the awkwardness that had become us.
I turn on the television while my husband changes his clothes. My summer top smells like Jack, but I refuse to change it. I want another whiff of him. I’m an adamant, adulterous, high-rolling bitch now. If Robert smells Merit Lights and men’s cologne on me, I’d blame my cast-mates. Chorus boys are notorious smokers. It was believable. I switched stations to the Mets who were losing, so I’m grateful for the break-in: “We interrupt this program for this special report. John Kennedy Junior’s small plane, The Piper Saratoga, is missing over the coast of the Atlantic. Kennedy was flying with his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. They left Essex County airport and were scheduled to land in Martha’s Vineyard, before continuing to a wedding in Hyannis Port.”
July 17th, 1999 was not the glamour year Prince sang about. It was hot, weird, and getting weirder. I see too much open water and an empty blue sky on every channel. Helicopters and the Coast Guard are all out and looking for John. “But why are they searching the ocean,” I think. “They should be searching Central Park because that’s where he rollerblades!” Pictures start flashing on CBS: a shirtless Kennedy skating down Columbus Avenue, another shirtless shot – John playing frisbee on the back lawn of The Met Museum. Robert stops what he’s doing to watch with me. I read his thoughts before he speaks. He’s got this habit of regaling stories I already know; how he did private home catering for the Kennedys, how friendly and real they were, and on and on. His comments on the impending tragedy made me want to scream, “I’m the tragedy. I’d rather be him…MISSING…Free from explanations of my whereabouts, but wholly at peace in the knowledge that I…AM…Free.”
Turn off the television. Let’s drive to the county fair. We’ll drown our sorrows in maple syrup. We would, but we’re glued to the set. John, Carolyn, and his sister-in-law Lauren are still missing, and the photos keep coming. Only now it’s the two of them: John and Carolyn leaving their apartment, at their wedding, walking into a gala, out of a gala. I notice how in almost every John is kissing her from behind, and how effortlessly his arm drapes around her shoulders. He was always turning her to the camera as if he were treating the world to the elusive beauty that was his bride. That’s what I’m missing, I think — someone who resembled ease, who wanted ME more than the IDEA of me. With every flashing picture of John, I realize the man I married was the opposite of ease. I chose wrong, and like the current disaster unfolding before me on national television, it was in fact, preventable.
After two days of scouring the Atlantic Ocean, it surfaces…a piece of luggage with Lauren Bessette’s name. Then more pieces, bits of a rubber tire, some carry-ons, and finally the bodies; all three, upside down in the water, still strapped to their seats. The autopsy reveals that John, Carolyn, and Lauren all died on impact, a minor comfort in a sea of sorrow. For years I’ve read accounts of every flight instructor, pilot, and disaster specialist. I became a non-expert, “expert” in all things crash-related. I had to know what happened. If I couldn’t figure out my disaster, I’d solve someone else’s. I’d find that fateful ejection lever that leads to the end. There were many details, and countless contributing factors that led to the crash: the traffic they hit, their late departure, the weather, and the moon. But in the end, it didn’t matter, for this domino effect of unfortunate events kept pointing back to one thing…John. He didn’t have the experience to be flying in that weather, on that low moonlit night. He fell victim to something called spatial disorientation. It happens to pilots who are visually trained, but not instrument-rated. John knew this and planned for a daylight departure, but the traffic Lauren and Carolyn hit in Manhattan would push them into a twilight departure. A flight instructor at the airport who knew John was inexperienced at night, offers to co-pilot. But John refuses saying, “I want to do it on my own.” John would be flying solo in the dark, relying solely on his senses. But instead of landing safely in Hyannis Port on that hazy July night, his senses send him 1000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean. He couldn’t tell Earth from sky and neither could I.
The wedding of Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey was postponed that day. I can’t imagine how that bride and groom felt when the celebratory atmosphere became funereal. How could they reconcile that the happiest day of their lives would be forever laced with what-ifs?
I pictured the Piper Saratoga going down in that ocean as if it were my life. The pictures of that plane in pieces morphed into memories of my engagement night. I recalled how Robert knelt in the sand, on a small beach in Martha’s Vineyard with a poem, his nerves, and a tiny black box. I recalled the wild waves thudding the sand with the sounds of the upcoming storm. I laughed, remembering how uncharacteristically lit my future husband was — a combination of too many cocktails and proposal butterflies. And how utterly responsible his drunk ass was, as he handed me the keys to our rental car, “You’re driving,” he said. I remembered how blindly I drove into that dense fog, relying on nothing but my impaired vision to guide me. With my high beams on, I still couldn’t see. I was guessing. Instead of my senses guiding me safely down the road to our quaint hotel, they send me the wrong way, down a one-way street…right into the warning lights of a police car. I was caught, but not arrested, for Robert came to my rescue, taking my left hand and proudly displaying my sparkly new ring. “Please, let us go officer. See? We’re engaged.”
July 19th, 1999 – The National Safety Board concluded that there was no instrument or navigational failure on the Piper Saratoga that night. John’s disorientation sent the plane into a spin, a graveyard spiral of epoch proportions, due to the pilot’s error. I had found my lever, in an answer that yielded no relief. The death of my relationship will always be synonymous with July 19th, 1999. You might say I was lucky, to never get caught, to land safely in the comfort of my slickness. I did it. I decimated my wedding vows. I did this to a man who was kind to me. That day, I knew my marriage was over. It took me six more years to leave the party.
It was just after opening time when Murphy walked into the bar. He wasn’t welcome at any time of the day really. The Fat Landlord’s lazy wife, a picture of early morning sourness probably let the nuisance in, but who cared? It certainly wasn’t me. She was a miserable, cold unfriendly woman affectionately known as Choc Ice Lil. She rarely spoke, and never ever smiled.
The bar itself was an ancient Edwardian masterpiece of metropolitan public house architecture. It was a pub by day, and a venue at night. Once a collection of snugs, billiard and dining areas it now consisted of two vast rooms, separated by a large square bar. Pulsing lights, throbbing speakers and yard upon yard of dangling wires now disgraced its crumbling ornate pilasters and fine baroque ceiling.
Murphy paused in the sunlit open doorway scanning the long empty space before him. To describe him as a scrawny necked wreck would have been a kindness. Murphy had spent years living on the streets before ever I knew him, and it showed. Loose skinned and old enough to have lost several teeth he was as decrepit as the pub was.
A long shadow of him now stretched across the greasy red carpet giving the remarkable impression that he was at least nine feet tall, which he wasn’t. Framed in dazzling sunlight the strange illusion of a giant Murphy cast across the empty bar was very soon extinguished. Instantly snuffed as the brown heavy door with head shaped dents in its leaded panes, bearing hints of dried blood closed silently behind him.
The emptiness was an illusion too. As Murphy’s eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the natural order of the light inside, he would see that the early morning bar was not quite so vacant after all.
I was there.
I’d been working till past three in the morning the previous night, doing the sound desk for an astonishingly amateurish death metal band called Bugger Babies. Enthusiastic and young its members took themselves far more seriously than their dreadful racket could ever warrant. I was back by opening time, slightly shaky and enjoying the nutritious charge of a breakfast Bloody Mary. Extra Tabasco pepper to clean the mouth and put fire in my belly. I was waiting as usual for our very own host, The Fat Landlord to surface from his morning slumbers and pay me my money for the night.
So I was there, unnoticed and unpaid in the musty corner facing the damaged door, and The Lion Tamer was there as well.
I think his name was Dave. He was the doorman/bouncer in the bar and I’d actually known him for several years, but like most regulars he carried a moniker. Names in the bar were given, not told. He perched on a tall barstool like a giant daddy long legs. His tiny kneecaps pointing in opposite directions as his open legs splayed against the dark panels of the square wooden bar.
Murphy was halfway across the floor before he even noticed there were people on either flank. He paused, and a slight nervous twitch showed upon his face before he broke into an exaggerated jaunty saunter towards the bar. Then, launching himself onto a nearby barstool, sideways to me, and facing The Lion Tamer, Murphy licked his skinny lips and stared.
The Lion Tamer was a tall, solid, gawky looking man of well over six foot. His long spider legs and monkey arms were wrapped with sinewy muscles, like the intertwining strings of a sailors’ hairy rope. His feet and hands were unfeasibly large. The hands were a mass of gristle and scar tissue. Flattened knuckles and broken digits pointed crookedly in several directions, as if he’d been typing all day and his fingers had frozen in mid sentence.
His huge feet were encased in dull black boots that looked like two leather ammunition boxes, and would anchor his towering frame to the floor. But it was his face that made him unusual. It was ordinary, even quite benign looking at times. Stuck on the front of a too small head. A face without mark or blemish. When he wasn’t being the doorman at various cheap clubs like ours he was a bare knuckle boxer in late night warehouse fights, and he must have been good at it.
The Lion Tamer had a trick he used to show to the punters, especially those who he thought he might have a bit of trouble with later. He would line three coins carefully along the back of his hand. Then he would quickly flick them into the air and snatch each one of them individually with the same hand before they fell to the ground. It was a neat trick, and it carried its own unsubtle message. The Lion Tamer wanted you to know something. He wanted you to know that in the length of time it takes for a coin to fall to the floor, he could punch you three times.
Murphy continued to stare. Apart from occasionally running his dry tongue round his lips again he did not move at all. He sat with his long bony spine completely straight and perfectly aligned to the square legs of the wooden barstool. It was like he was an extension of it. Murphy and the barstool, fused into one immovable staring object. I don’t know why Murphy stared at The Lion Tamer like that. It was odd.
I mean anyone at all who drank in the bar could tell you The Lion Tamer didn’t really like Murphy all that much. It was even more confusing because Murphy tended only to stare at people who gave him things, and who he trusted would be obliging enough to do so again. In fact it seemed to me to be his own unique and favourite way of asking for anything. Murphy would just sidle up to someone, touch their arm and then stare dolefully until they couldn’t stand it anymore. Eventually they might give in and offer him something, usually something he could immediately consume, but sometimes more, if he was lucky.
Murphy was always in the bar on a Sunday lunchtime. That was when they put out bowls of sea food, cockles and stuff on the bar, free to help yourself. Murphy would help himself alright if he could. He had a particular thing for the shell on prawns. He actually liked eating the heads as well. It was fascinatingly disgusting to watch him cracking the hard pink exterior with his few remaining teeth and sucking the rich fishy stew from inside. He couldn’t get enough of them, but it did nothing for his halitosis.
Some people spoke to him but I didn’t. I couldn’t see the point really. I found him interesting enough and I saw him alright when I could. You could say we sort of shared the same living space even. Murphy came and went as he pleased though, and in truth I wasn’t really all that bothered about him. It certainly wasn’t possible for me to engage him in any viable, intelligent conversation as such, and I didn’t pretend to try.
So there I sat watching from the gloomy corner. Waiting to be paid and struggling to guess what on earth Murphy thought The Lion Tamer was possibly going to give him. Whatever it was, from where I was sitting I couldn’t imagine it being anything less substantial than a swift and hefty kick up the arse.
The Lion Tamer was not very well known for his bonhomie as it goes. He was now showing some pretty clear, and menacing signs that he didn’t really want Murphy to keep on staring at him like that. Murphy on the other hand showed no sign that he understood any of this at all and just continued his relentless staring down of The Lion Tamer.
Finally he could take no more. Just as he was running his red tongue slowly round his narrow lips again, The Lion Tamer suddenly leaned over and poked his own one out. Murphy looked genuinely shocked. His tongue paused in its circular journey round his lips but now protruded from them foolishly, and in a similar gesture to that of The Lion Tamers’.
There for a few long seconds they sat, eyes locked and poking their tongues out at each other. Murphy’s eyes wide open with surprise and The Lion Tamers’ half closed, and narrowed with intent. I sensed that Murphy was about to attempt a rapid exit from the bar sometime very soon and I was poised and ready to grab him when he did.
Just then there was an all too familiar tap tap, tap tap sound fast approaching the bar in staccato quickstep. The bar room door suddenly flung open at the same time as a painful, high pitched screeched “Helloooo” assaulted our ears like a dentists screaming drill. The Tightrope Walker entered, spinning coquettishly into the bar. Her six inch pencil thin stilettos, silenced now by the aged Axminster were certainly no less obvious.
Tightrope skeetered across the floor, like a marionette on a gyroscope. Brassy, blonde and now in her late forties Tightrope was a woman who would take no prisoners. From the moment she arrived anywhere it was immediately and sometimes painfully apparent to everyone else in the building that she had. She would have it no other way. Age and the drink had left but a vague imprint of the earlier sex grenade she had undoubtedly been. She was however, still explosive. Tightrope could hurl herself confidently into any congregation, like an immortal suicide bomber. Burning shards of her barbed wit sliced easily through any crowd she encountered, cutting them all to size without mercy or care.
She could still draw men to her in an instant alright though, like flies to a cow’s arse, and she could shrivel a dick just as quick. She would cavort, cajole, flirt and entice. Thrilling and daring her gawping spectators to join her in her own hedonistic whirl of imminent self destruct, only to cast them casually to the ground. Tightrope would remain of course, teetering but intact in the limelight.
Whenever Tightrope was around and wanted to play you knew for certain sure that someone somewhere was going to take a tumble.
So Tightrope burst exuberantly into our small gathering, Choc Ice, The Lion Tamer, Murphy and me. Her eyes immediately lit upon Murphy. Surprisingly, and despite her hard exterior she did have quite a soft spot for him. I could never quite understand this one and Tightrope wasn’t the only woman who used to dote on Murphy. In fact he seemed to attract quite a few women, but if you ever found your face too close to him, you’d find he stank a bit. I’ve been told it’s a maternal thing. Somehow Murphy was some kind of surrogate for the children they never had. I found that thought quite disgusting myself.
Tightrope certainly had some maternal affection for Murphy, which quite frankly baffled me. Anyway, whatever the reason, Tightrope made a direct beeline for him and poured herself onto his neck with that awful mawkish, “Awwwwww,” usually reserved for babies and cuddly toys. She then planted a long squeaking kiss on the top of his beaming head as a sort of bonus.
Now this was all fine and dandy, even if a little peculiar to my mind. There was just one complicating factor that promised to add that little bit more excitement to the mornings’ entertainment. The complicating factor being that Tightrope was currently The Lion Tamers’ girlfriend, and The Lion Tamer was a very, very jealous man.
I’m sure that Murphy didn’t realise any of this at all. He simply wouldn’t be capable of understanding how The Lion Tamer might think or feel about anything. The personal lives of people in the bar were meaningless to him. But even if he could read The Lion Tamer’s mind, the idea that Murphy could pose the merest waft of a threat to him about anything at all was just wrong.
But then jealousy is a funny thing.
The Lion Tamer had a very strong sense of propriety actually. He had his own very rigid code of ethics which he stuck to like they were The Ten Commandments. Only he had just three. He told them to me late one night when we were having a drink together, hours after the bar had closed and all good folk were long abed.
In his slow, deep ponderous voice he leaned ever so slightly drunk into my face and said,
“There are three things you must never never do to me. You must never rob me. You must never lie to me, and you must never, never never ever, talk to me while I’m eating”
So there we all were. Murphy, The Lion Tamer, Choc Ice, Tightrope and me. Me still waiting for the Fat Landlord to pay me my money and getting a bit hungry now. So I decided to have another filling Bloody Mary, but this time with a packet of crisps. I was beginning to enjoy this. The whole ridiculous spectacle of The Lion Tamer wriggling around on his stool fuming like a stovepipe was just too good to miss.
Tightrope cooed and fawned over Murphy, completely indifferent to The Lion Tamers presence. I noticed a small blood vessel pulsing on the top of his shaven head which reminded me a little of the valve on the top of a pressure cooker. Eventually he cracked and standing up said, “Oi! What about me then?” This was met, or rather ignored by Tightrope plonking yet another kiss on Murphy’s head. She then responded with something to the effect that The Lion Tamer should immediately buy her a drink and that he was also a bastard, which he duly did.
Tightrope was very good at getting men to buy her drinks as it goes. Like the Lion Tamer she had her very own special bar room trick for the boys.
Tightrope would go into a bar somewhere and spot a group of chaps out on the town. She’d teeter past and “accidentally” spill one of their drinks onto the floor. She would squeal and say she was very sorry. She would buy him another drink. It was her birthday. She didn’t normally get to go out very much. Then she’d add she might be just that, tiny tiny, weeny bit tipsy. All this followed up with plenty of eyelash flutter and a quick totter on the high heels. Her womanly bosom would squash against his manly chest of course, and her hand would steady herself casually upon his bum. Ten times out of ten her mark would be buying her the drink. “Oooh thanks darling, a large Vodka and Tonic please, ice and a slice dear.”
She knew how to spot them alright. Rumour had it that that’s how she met The Lion Tamer in the first place.
So there was Tightrope, standing next to Murphy with her drink in one hand and the other one casually stroking the back of his neck. She continued to fawn like an adolescent schoolgirl over Murphy as wafts of steam continued to rise from The Lion Tamers’ ears. While all this was going on Murphy still had his back to me and was completely hypnotised by the soft caresses on the back of his neck. Then it happened.
Murphy ceased gazing adoringly at Tightrope for a moment and looked over towards The Lion Tamer. Since the arrival of Tightrope he’d taken over Murphy’s previous activity of staring and momentarily their eyes locked again. For some reason this appeared to trigger something in The Lion Tamer, and he began to rise slowly to his feet.
The whole bar jumped into the air as there came a terrific rumpus and banging on the small side door leading into the bar. The one that nobody used anymore. It was unusual in that the handle was on the opposite side to where you’d expect it to be, but it still opened inwards as all doors do.
Whoever was on the other side seemed to be frantically pulling at the handle towards them, while simultaneously kicking the door forwards in the opposite direction.
We couldn’t see any of this of course. The entrance was sealed off from the bar by a heavy blackout curtain. This stretched in a curve from the door to a cast iron support pillar standing by the bar itself. Anyone entering there would find themselves in a small darkened closet area completely surrounded by a blackout curtain, which incidentally opened on the bar side for exit and entry.
Eventually we heard the door burst open and the sound of our visitor tripping on the step and hurtling themselves heavy footed and rapidly across the floor. A single dull clang announced their precise moment of contact with the iron pillar. We then saw a great flurry of the curtain as the person behind it made their way back from the bar where there was an exit, towards the opposite wall where there wasn’t.
Once there we witnessed what appeared to be a fight going on behind the curtain before the hapless visitor blindly felt their way back towards the bar and eventual escape. A further short flurry of curtain followed before a large sweaty head, topped with a pork pie hat burst breathlessly through. Red faced from his exertions and red nosed from the drink, he had an impossible grin and mad eyebrows. It was Coco the Clown.
Swinging a bulging Bag for Life as if it were a counter balance the rest of Coco swiftly followed. What came next in fact was a short obese man in said pork pie hat wearing cheap pinstripe trousers an inch too short and a grotesque green checked jacket. An orange T shirt proclaiming,” SAVE THE WHALE” in large bold letters across his chest and, “A SEAT ON THE BUS” written underneath, completed today’s ensemble. One thing you could say about Coco was that he didn’t have good fashion sense.
Another thing you could say about him was that he had stupid feet, and he fairly flapped his way into the bar.
I thought The Lion Tamer had incongruous kippers but Coco’s were in another class entirely. It was a wonder he didn’t fall over his feet more often they were that big.
Coco was a wonder on the dance floor, and he often had significant amounts of it all to himself. I’m told he used to be a very good swimmer as well. Anyway, his feet seemed to have paddled himself right up shit creek here and Coco’s entrance could not have been worse timed.
Blowing effeminate kisses to Murphy he pranced smilingly into the company. Now The Lion Tamer didn’t like that sort of thing at all and he already had another beef going with Coco anyway. The jigging vein on his head, which was already going like the clappers suddenly accelerated into a near perfect Fandango. Even Coco couldn’t fail to be aware of the penetrating glare emanating from the opposite corner of the bar for long. Eventually he stopped popping silly little kisses at Murphy and looked up, square into The Lion Tamers fierce, unwelcome gaze.
Now apart from his red nose Coco had quite a pallid complexion at the best of times. Watching his face drain instantly from a light pastry to an urn ash grey was something I’d never seen before.
Coco, among other things was a leading member of that noble band of cowboy builders that grace our green and gullible land. He could turn his hand to almost anything. He could mix concrete, do a bit of brickwork, carpenter, even put in the electrics, and he made a complete pig’s ear of the lot. In fact it wasn’t his appearance that earned him the name Coco the Clown at all. It was his remarkable skill in bollocksing up just about every job he was ever given.
Typically he’d turn up ok the first day and do a fairly good job. The second day he’d be gone by lunchtime to buy tools or something. You can forget the third. On the fourth he’d turn up at eleven and need a sub to pay his rent. Then you wouldn’t see him until he was broke again.
The job goes on so long that it never actually gets finished. Eventually someone else has to come in to complete the work and repair any damages the idiot has managed to do.
How anyone could be stupid and trusting enough to employ Coco to do anything at all was frankly beyond me. But this of course was why The Lion Tamer was not at all so very pleased to see him today. The fact he’d come in smiling didn’t help one bit.
Somehow Coco had recently managed to blag a few days’ work doing a bit of plastering round The Lion Tamers house. Typically of course, he had left quite a bit of mess on his nice new carpet. The Lion Tamer wasn’t very happy about this at all. Only yesterday he had to retrieve Coco mid drink from the bar and politely suggest to him that he might like to straightaway come back and clean it all up again. Well, Coco miserably got hold of an old carpet sweeper from somewhere and once back at the Lion Tamers’ he began to push it along, sweeping up his scattered bits of rubble and plaster.
Still dreaming of his unfinished pint no doubt he was pushing along as fast as he could when he felt the rollers stiffen. Undeterred and too bone idle to actually stop and clear them of plaster he carried on, pushing even harder than before. Pausing to wipe unearned sweat from his brow Coco briefly glanced behind him. It was then that he discovered why it had been such hard work pushing the sweeper. Somehow during the course of his slovenly labours a piece of Stanley blade had got stuck in the roller. Coco had just cut a six foot slice straight up the middle of The Lion Tamers brand new bit of Persian.
So there we all were, Murphy, The Lion Tamer, Tightrope, Choc Ice, Coco and me. The Lion Tamer positioned three coins carefully along the back of his hand. Raising one crooked finger into the air he beckoned poor Coco towards him. His smile upturned now Coco slowly removed his hat and gently placed that and his shopping bag on the nearest table.
Then, shaking like old Shylock he took his more than several pounds of flesh up for negotiation with The Lion Tamer. I reckoned his best bet now was to rely on his solid reputation as a professional idiot, and hope to gain some sort of staff discount or something. With a bit of luck there could still be plenty of him left. In truth though I had the near certain feeling that I was about to witness one of life’s great clichés, the tears of a clown.
Tightrope had sensibly turned her back on the proceedings and was repeatedly pumping pound coins into the fruit machine. Choc Ice was totally absorbed smearing bacteria round a dirty glass with a manky tea towel, and would see nothing. Murphy didn’t know his own good fortune. I could see Coco pleading desperately with The Lion Tamer but his face remained stony and unmoved. A long silent pause filled the room with an unbearable tension when suddenly he flicked three coins high into the air.
Pandemonium finally broke out. A great shout of, “Oi! You thieving little git!” bellowed across the bar.
It was Coco.
Spotting an opportunity Murphy had slipped unnoticed off his stool and made his way over to Coco’s bag on the table. Caught red handed, he was having a right proper rummage through everything he could find.
Coco came running furiously round the bar, faster in fact than his oversized feet would allow. His bulbous nose crashed into the carpet as Murphy fairly scampered off towards the gents toilets to escape. This seemed to lighten The Lion Tamers mood somewhat and he fairly roared with laughter.
Breathless with rage Coco clambered to his feet and looked inside his bag. “Flipping hell” he yelled. “He’s only gone and had me bleedin’ prawns away!”
The Lion Tamer slapped his thighs and roared again. “He’s had you. He’s had you alright”, was all he managed to say between triumphant blasts of laughter. Coco, with his nose even redder than before, stood glaring angrily at the toilet door.
I knew Murphy wasn’t hiding in the Jacks.
There’s a door back there leading into a small enclosed yard where the empty barrels and rubbish are kept. I’d taken a few crates out earlier for Choc Ice so I knew it was left slightly open. I also knew Murphy had used that particular exit many times before.
He was no spring chicken alright but Murphy would have been out, over the wall and far away by the time Coco had even counted his missing prawns.
The Great Prawn Robbery would be told and laughed about in the bar for weeks to come. The Lion Tamer finally managed to declare he’d never really liked Murphy all that much before, but he’d gone right up in his estimation now. Wiping tears from his eyes, and evidently in a better mood than before, he made Coco an offer he couldn’t possibly refuse.
The Lion Tamer had just got hold of an allotment. Coco was to dig it all over and paint the little shed as compensation for the carpet. Furthermore, he was to buy Murphy his own large bag of prawns every Sunday lunchtime until The Lion Tamer told him otherwise.
Justice of sorts being served The Lion Tamer turned his attention back towards Tightrope. She in turn informed him he should immediately buy her a drink, and that he was also a bastard. Planting a kiss on his head she added reassuringly he couldn’t really help it, and that she loved him anyway.
A crestfallen Coco was putting on his hat in readiness for his second trip to the fishmongers and I was losing hope of seeing any money that day. It was nearly lunchtime now and The Fat Landlord had still not surfaced. I decided to go back to bed for the rest of the day and try again later.
It was only a short walk from the bar back to my flat. There was some instinct or smell or something that told me I was not alone. I was being followed. I had a strange sensation of something running past me, just out of sight as I cut across the play area.
It happened on the stairwell on the way up to my flat as well and there was a short familiar snap sound like a large mousetrap going off. I was glad when I put the key in the door and got safe inside. I knew what was coming next.
I walked the few short steps into the front room. The curtains were closed and there on the sofa, staring into the unlit gloom was Murphy.
Our eyes briefly met and I made my way into the kitchen to get a can from the cupboard. I’d barely begun to open it before Murphy suddenly leaped off the sofa and came running top speed into the room.
I could feel him writhing and weaving himself round and round between my legs. I emptied the contents into his dirty old bowl and placed it on the floor by his saucer of milk. Then, for the first time ever, I actually spoke to him. Bending down, I scratched behind his ear and looked deep into his eyes and said,
This is a special episode of our Cassandra Voices podcast, where host Luke Sheehan travelled to Amsterdam to interview the Irish critic, art historian and Joycean named Patrick Healy.
In a suburb of Tokyo, sometime in the future, a Japanese scholar of Irish literature is studying an obscure text. He has heard of it through a Joycean friend. The work is Beyond the Pale, an immersion into the mind of a character not unlike its author, Patrick Healy, who was an Irish critic and philosopher who spent much of his life in Amsterdam. The whole heavy volume of Beyond the Pale sits before him. It is a little daunting.
Who is Patrick Healy? The Japanese scholar has been finding out, bit by bit. Reliable information is hard to find.
Some of this is by design. Some of it because of the cruelty (or at least indifference) of the writer’s early fate. Healy was a gifted child, but born to an unmarried mother in postwar Ireland, and thus was sent to foster families and to the care of various “Sisters” of the church.
The Japanese scholar has been able to locate a separate, early text published by Healy back in 1985, called Up in the Air and Down. It is a short novella, a stream of consciousness spoken from the point of view of a child living through such a reality. Near the start of this work he reads:
I didn’t have a mummy or daddy because they died just like one of the cats who was Snowy’s mammy and now I remember I cried because the cat would never come back (p.10).
The Japanese scholar likes this detail of the cat. However, he already knows this account of the parents may be an untruth told to the boy narrator, if the character can be said to closely match the real Healy. He finds more of this apparent attempt to placate and to steer the boy’s thinking on the next page:
Sister was my mammy now and so were all the big girls and I was lucky because I had lots of mammies and daddies and Sister said that some little boys and girls have only one and I had lots and I should be very happy and that these two nice people who were going to be my mummy and daddy are waiting for their new boy and I wasn’t to be afraid and they lived far away but we would see them soon, but I wanted to go back and play and why was Sister taking me away and not being my mammy anymore, maybe Sister was going to heaven too, and I was afraid. (ps. 10-11)
The short book ends with the boy narrator affirming his existence in the celestial terms of his day, showing his need for play and exploration:
I am not a secret because God knows who I am even when I play with the yo-yo that goes Up in the Air and Down. (p.55)
All of this is important because the huge, late-life opus the Japanese Joycean will now begin to study is likewise framed around a life in 20th century Ireland. A growing up given form by a dislocation of parenthood, and an attempt to seize upon a renewed existence in young adulthood, through language and music and sensation.
The Japanese scholar knows that the Irish cultural output of books and films addressing the plight of “fallen” women who were separated from their offspring and often pressed into misery and forced labour in laundries and convents has been substantial. Yet here it is: a little-known testament by someone who emerged from such circumstances and sought to form his own mind, rather than let it be formed negatively by them. Not directly concerned with the young boy’s voice, it instead forms an internal, semi-conscious portrait of the man who emerged, grasping life through an adoration of words and ideas.
The Japanese scholar begins to read Beyond the Pale, and he can hear the melodies of Healy’s voice, which he already knows from his epic recording of Finnegan’s Wake. It thrills him that this Joyce-evoking book begins with an unexpected burst of Japanese words: as the “story” (if it is a story) meanders out into existence, we encounter a young Irish lad being tutored in Japanese by a “Viscount Taffe”, who seems to be simultaneously preparing a beef consommé; a consommé “devoutly to be wished.”
Unlike this hypothetical Japanese scholar, in the summer of 2024 I had the opportunity to meet Patrick Healy, in Amsterdam, where he was completing work on Beyond the Pale in a cavernous apartment looking like the workshop of an ancient Egyptian priest. Confined there during Amsterdam’s hard lockdowns, he had begun to submerge more deeply in his memories. This was something of an intimidating foray into his world for me, at first. I had heard stories, including from my own father, and other intellectually-minded people of their generation, about this brilliant and erudite figure. Perhaps more than a little rogueish, he would sit in Bewley’s in 1980s Dublin and mesmerise them all with his sophistry. The reputation for seduction and for cunning behaviour was reinforced for the Healy of that long ago time by many. Yet his life in the meantime, hard to unwind and with very little detail available, made more sense through the encounter with him and with his work. He had invented a career for himself unlike those of his peers: as a scholar he spent significant time in Germany and German archives, mastering that language, eventually settling in Holland where he taught at the university of Delft. HIs links to Ireland were kept in tenuous health over the years. He was a very close friend of the barrister and historian Frank Callanan, also a personal friend, who had sadly passed away unexpectedly in 2021.
Healy—who once performed a read through and recording of Finnegan’s Wake in the early 90s, getting through the whole thing in four days—has a famously fine voice.
Selections from our affable 3-day conversation in Amsterdam follow here. After, you may access the bonus episodeto hear more of Patrick reading at length from Beyond the Pale. Don’t worry about the Ariadne’s thread of the story, if there is one. Just try to hear the Irish soul that is alive in his voice. This is, I feel, the best way to savor the hidden currents and magical word play that Healy has worked into his text.
My Mother (at the Time) – Bonus Episode
Available to all our Patreon supporters.https://t.co/5yBxikDm7w
Here below are two testimonials from writer and journalist Bridget Hourican and human rights lawyer David Langwallner
Bridget Hourican
I’ve been haunted by a poem of Patrick Healy’s called ‘Stoic Fire’ since I read it maybe ten years ago. The title, and as I recall it, the poem itself, is a kind of oxymoron because fire is passionate, a conflagration, and stoicism is dispassionate, quietly enduring. I think stoic fire describes Patrick.
He is poet, visual artist, art critic, translator, philosopher of aesthetics and novelist. Before he was all those, he was – I’m told reliably by everyone who was there then – the best debater in UCD and Trinity (he attended both). His heckles were legendary, his voice astonishing. Reviewing his translation of Karl Kraus’s epic play ‘Last Days of Mankind’, Eileen Battersby shrewdly noted that ‘Healy’s musicality and feel for the rhythms of speech… possibly explains why his Kraus is so vibrant’. Perhaps the greatest use of his voice is his recording of Finnegans Wake, which my late husband, Frank Callanan told me, he listened to right through one night with Margaret O’Callaghan, and it left them shattered, delirious, in tears, ecstatic. I believe this was one of the things that spurred Frank to write his book on Joyce.
Luke Sheehan introduced me to podcasts, more or less. Before he (or anyone) was making podcasts, he was seeking out unusual and arcane material and people. He would come back and recount his findings in ways that were unanticipated, circuitous, marvellously detailed (by marvellous I mean the detail was not where you would expect it) and funny, always very funny. Luke is also poet, critic and short-story writer but I’ve always thought his great gift was for oral narratives (or as we now call them, podcasts).
Although I know both of them, I’m not quite sure how Luke tracked Patrick down and got him on the record, but what a fabulous thing that he has done this, and that we have Patrick’s voice telling his story and exploring his ideas, in this immensely subtle and moving curation by Luke. I noticed, very early on when I was with Frank, that every time he mentioned Patrick’s name, someone would whip round and demand with fierce urgency ‘Patrick Healy? where is he?’ It is like Luke to have acted on his own fierce urgency and brought us this.
David Langwallner
I am very pleased that Luke Sheehan is doing this podcast on Patrick Healey. From the late 1970’s through the late 1980’s often in great penury he was one of the most outstanding cultural figures in Dublin. A winner of The Irish Times debating competition as he stresses as an individual where he became the kind of fool to the King Lears of his contemporaries. Mostly dead.
He is the greatest conversationalist and cafe side philosopher I have ever encountered and that includes the jurist Ronald Dworkin.
He is man of Olympian intellect and great personal grace charm and civility which the Dutch through his architecture Professorship have recognized. The loss was Irelands. He was also a great mentor to me and when he played Oscar Wilde to my playing Edwards Carson in a reenactment of the trial of Oscar Wilde strange to say now with David Norris and Alice Glynn as expert witnesses he queues to the graduate memorial building extended the full extent of Westmoreland street.
In this trial Oscar won and so has Patrick!
Since then an interest we very much share in common and crucial to our times he has become an expert in the Viennese intellectuals of the Weimar Repubic most noticeable Karl Krauss.
He is the last of great old Dublin Joycean in fact and one hopes his new book gets the attention he richly deserves.
Christopher Tolkien, referring to his father, defined what J.R.R. called his ‘secondary world.’ He said ‘it is a world that cannot be seen, it cannot be found, it exists only in the mind.’[i] He goes on to say for many people when they first realise the existence of this place, this secondary world, they find the experience to be a very delightful thing.
This desire for a secondary world, if not perhaps intrinsic to every individual, is intrinsic to humankind. That is to say this relationship with the secondary world goes back to ornate prehistoric burial sites. It is ghosts and banshees; it is gods and elves. It is found in the art of Blake and the science of dreams. The Hellenic culture, among the most advanced societies of the ancient world, created a secondary world on top of an actual mountain, which they then honoured and worshipped. The volcanoes, the rivers, the sky, the sea, the wine, each aspect of the tangible world endowed with its own God, its own secondary being. Consequently, belief in this secondary world manufactured the temples. This poses the question: what would the world be like if no one ever had conceived of a secondary world? We can say if this were the case there never would have been the burning of a witch, and certainly no heavens and hells beyond. Is our world, our universe even, not sufficient at times for our complicated brains? Newton was an alchemist, and Einstein sourced many of his breakthroughs from his imagination, which suggests a scientist of pure reason can also be subject to fantasy.
Did the secondary world begin with the people who sat around the first fires? Jung thought so, but in reality we can’t know – we would have to ask them, or at least study their behaviour to know for certain. As with all history where there is no evidence at all, there is only the sound of the wind. Where there is scant evidence, we are obliged to speculate and theorise. In this spirit of conjecture, I would suggest the secondary world is a form of reality. It would be useful to make a distinction at this point between what can be solely attributed to the imagination, and neurological shifts that can occur under the influence of drugs and hallucinogens in particular. The world of the imagination, where William Blake should be interpreted, does not in of itself need intoxicants. It is its own entity. This leads to another question: is what is imagined in the mind real, or is it unverifiable? When does the imaginary become reality? If I imagine a story and then write it down, I have worked to bring the imaginary into the world of reality. But what if I just keep it in my mind? Does this mean it wouldn’t be real? What is real in one person’s mind that cannot be detected by others, is of course often interpreted as madness.
To William Blake, the secondary world could be thought of as the real first world, that is the world perceived through the senses, because he perceived the secondary world with his senses. When he was a boy, he witnessed the spirit of his brother Robert rise out of his dead body at their house in Soho and stated categorically the apparition was clapping for joy. He watched angels illuminating the boughs at Peckham Rye. Did Blake have a condition akin to synaesthesia? What modern medical prognosis can we make? Perhaps the most scientific explanation would be that to some people the secondary world is reality itself. We can however say with absolute certainty that Blake would have dismissed any scientific analysis of the imagination. Reason cannot bound the imagination.
Is there a relationship between the unconscious and the imagination in association with the secondary world? According to the basics of psychoanalysis, the unconscious mind is always unconscious, but it can be perceived through dreams. Is there a connection between Freud and Jung through Blake’s oeuvre? Not conspicuously. Blake, or indeed any artist, should not be attempted to be understood through the lens of science. It would be like turning Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto into a formula. It strikes me that no one has ever even attempted to turn the source of art into an equation for good reason.
Tolkien’s secondary world lives within our imagination. Perhaps his greatest gift was the extraordinary way he was able to make this secondary world so believable for so many. Remember, there is moon and starlight, as well as cheese and salted pork and tobacco and pipes, in the imaginary world he invented. In this instance the primary world has been superimposed on the secondary world, or the other way around.
In medieval England there was the ‘land of Cockaigne’ an imaginary land of plenty. According to one source ‘Cockaigne was a ‘medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labour and the daily struggle for meagre food.’[ii] This may provide an insight into the function of the secondary world. Necessary escapism. Or as Tolkien put it, escapism in it’s true meaning, ‘as of a man getting out of prison.’ This also may provide an answer as to why the desire for the secondary world is not universal, simply because there are many among us who do not wish to escape the primary world. They are more than happy where they are, but this is not to say those who seek the secondary world are somehow inherently unhappy. It can be invoked simply for the joy of the thing, like a magic trick. Think of Alice in Wonderland, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This brings up the subject of our agency through our imaginations and the effect this has upon the world itself and ourselves. Scrying, palm reading, divination, horoscopes and so on. These are attempts to impose our own agency into the supernatural world that evidentially doesn’t exist. The secondary world is distinct from hocus pocus and bogus truth claims, but its claim to existence does, however, hinge on the power of the imagination.
William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Terence McKenna and memorably Aldous Huxley experimented with Ayahuasca, all giving vivid accounts of a world that hides behind a veil. This other plain, or higher state of consciousness is not what Tolkien meant by the secondary world. The secondary world is not drug-induced. It is a state that can be accessed by all people. It is the sober world of the imagination, of fantasy, that being the secondary world in our senses, in the reality we have evolved.
It is a mistake to compartmentalise the secondary world solely into the world of fantasy but that the secondary world is a function of fiction is valid. In other words, if it is based on real events, it is biographical. As mentioned, Einstein’s major breakthroughs in science were sourced from his imagination and this is also partly true of Newton. But when Einstein imagined the movements of space time as he looked at the church clock from the window of a tram, had he entered the secondary world, or was he simply using his imagination? Perhaps we can deem the secondary world as a desire for fiction and escapism rather than fact and truth, but fiction is perhaps the best way we have to understand truth. And here lies the riddle.
Arguably, the imagination has an evolutionary function. To imagine a possible attack by wolves or bears out in the forest was likely extremely useful. It may in fact be the reason we dominate the animal kingdom. Our imaginations work in tandem wit reason in the battle for survival. It is the duality and relationship between imagination and reason which must be explored when trying to understand the secondary world, which, once discovered, remains a very delightful thing.
Featured Image: ‘Beatrice’ by William Blake from Illustrations to Dante – The Divine Comedy (1824).
[i] JRR Tolkien – A study of the maker of Middle Earth
In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:
At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!
I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.
Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.
Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,
‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?
I have eaten them.
In a pinch.
Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.
Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.
I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.
Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.
There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?
Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.
In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.
When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…
I don’t accept.
It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.
It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.
The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.
You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.
Late last year HHJ Gumpert KC – one of the judges in the formidable fortress that is Woolwich Crown Court the flagship anti-terrorism court in the U.K. – kindly secured for me a visit to the ICC out of court time. The tour was given by a former member of the team he led in the Congolese prosecutions.
The ICC issued its first judgment in 2012 when it found Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes related to his abuse of child soldiers. Lubanga was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Gumpert also successfully prosecuted Dominic Ongwen, who was sentenced to twenty-five years for myriad crimes.
The Rome Statute, which entered into force on 1 July 2002, established the International Criminal Court, though Israel voted against it, after murmurings on the transfer of populations that is the resettlement programme. The court works on the principle of ineffectiveness, where national courts have been derelict. It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction, and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.
On 17 March 2023, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia for alleged child abductions in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin was charged for actions against Ukraine, which although not a party to it, has accepted the authority of the court since 2014. Should Putin travel to a state party to it, local authorities can arrest him. Later in 2023, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs retaliated by placing several ICC officials on its wanted list. On November 21 last year, when I was in Gompert’s court in Woolwich, warrants were formally issued for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu.
It occurs to me that an informal journalistic war crimes court was initiated by Christopher Hitchen, whose book The Trial Against Henry Kissinger (2001) accused Henry Kissinger of war crimes. This led to a Parisian judge issuing an arrest warrant and Kissinger hopscotching it back to the safety of Fox News. So, Netanyahu will no doubt control his foreign trips, and Ireland is clearly out of the question. Mr Putin does not seem to need to travel to enemy states.
The process to establish the ICC district may be “triggered” by any one of three sources: (1) a state party, (2) the Security Council, or (3) a prosecutor.
So, there is huge independence in that there is a self-originating prosecutor jurisdiction. though he needs the approval of Pre-Trial Chamber to initiate the investigation. The factors listed in Article 53 are a reasonable basis for a prosecution. These include whether the case would be admissible, or whether there are substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice (the latter stipulates balancing against the gravity of the crime and the interests of the victims).
During my visit there was much talk about thePolicy paper on case selection and prioritisation published in September 2016, indicating that the ICC would focus on environmental crimes when selecting cases. According to this document, the Office will consider prosecuting Rome Statute crimes that result in, inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land.
Richard A. Falk coined the phrase Ecocideas a Crime Against Humanity in 1974. In my view we should also include Economicide, when one deals with the illegal dispossession of land. What about bringing banksters or hedge fund managers (including through NAMA) to justice? And what about no longer drawing a distinction between the Kinahan gang and Goldman Sachs? Or is it time bring a case against Bill Gates or Elon Musk?
It should be born in mind that, alas, having someone prosecuted by the ICC is a tricky exercise. The Israelis clearly breached international law when they bundled Adolf Eichmann onto a plane in Argentina in 1960. How do you get Netanyahu to court? Or Putin? Or what if one indicted Trump or Bannon? A real danger is that the present U.S. administration will directly or indirectly withdraw funding for the court, even though the U.S. is not a signatory. They might even undermine American officials for working against the interests of Israel, or any of its allies in this dangerous world.
The core concept of Crimes Against Humanity had its first incarnation during the Nuremberg Tribunal, but its inception may derive from the discourse in Sophocles ‘Antigone’ as to whether an immoral law is a law. In that play – the Rosetta stone of modern natural law – the heroine Antigone observes to the harsh, positivist Creon, King of Thebes, who will not allow her brother, who has fought against him, to be buried with the proper rites, that natural law has been breached.
Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who neither dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth…
From the great Roman statesman Cicero’s perspective, an unjust law is not a law: ‘Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but laws.’
Most famous of all, early Christian lawyers, St Augustine of Hippo said: ‘lex iniusta non-Est lex’ – an unjust law is not a law.
Radbruchs’s Formula
A crucial juristic figure was the German Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949), both a law professor and a government minister during the Weimar Republic. In Radbruchs’s Formula he argued that where statute law was incompatible with positivist law to an intolerable degree, and where it negated the principle of equality, which is central to justice, it could be disregarded.
[P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice to so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice…where there is not even an attempt at justice. Where equality, the core of justice, is deliberately betrayed in positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law.
For him justice (Gerechtigkeit) was linked to human rights. Thus, in Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie he contended that there was a law which was above statute: ‘However one may like to describe it: the law of God, the law of nature, the law of reason.’
It is important to note that his views were followed in various German cases after the War and was part of the discourse that led to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Historically much later, in the 1992 cases of Strelitz, Kessler and Krenz, former East German Border Guards were convicted of offences despite section 27/2 of the East German Border Act that indicated that the protection of the border outweighed the right to life. The German Supreme Court in endorsing Radbruch indicated that:
[A] justification available at the time of the act can be disregarded due to its violation of superior law if it shows an evident and gross violation of basic principles of justice and humanity… The contradiction of the positive law to justice must be of such unbearable proportions that the law must yield to justice as incorrect law.
A group of Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley close by Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina that were forced out of their homes and villages by Croat forces in 1993. Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev.
Ethnic Cleansing
The Nuremberg Court and The European Convention on Human Rights were set up with the idea that the cataclysms of the past must never happen again. Sadly more have come to pass. In Bosnia we witnessed the arrival of a modern variant: ethnic cleansing. In 1992, the United Nations General Assembly deemed ethnic cleansing to be a form of genocide stating that it was:
Gravely concerned about the deterioration of the situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina owing to intensified aggressive acts by the Serbian and Montenegrin forces to acquire more territories by force, characterised by a consistent pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights…. controlled areas of concentration camps and detention centres, in pursuit of the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide.
In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judged that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was genocide though the Court had no authority to determine whether it amounted to war crimes and Crimes against Humanity. A kind of fore runner of the ICC though ad hoc.
The court concluded by seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces had committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them, solely on the basis of their identity.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia, was the most senior political figure to stand trial at the ICTY. He was charged with having committed genocide. The formal accusation accused him of planning, preparing and executing the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim national, ethnical, racial or religious groups, as such, in named territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He died during his trial, on 11 March 2006, and no verdict was returned. Ten years later, Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and Crimes against Humanity, ten of the eleven charges in total, and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment.
Morality of the Law
The natural lawyer Lon Fuller, in supporting Radbruch, argues that the German courts were correct in striking down the Nazi laws and that a legal system must have certain characteristics if it is to command the fidelity of a right-thinking person. Fuller, in The Morality of Law, (1964) argues that Nazi law did not have coherence and goodness and instances the use of retroactive legislation, such as the Rohm purge of 1934. Further, for Fuller, the Nazi laws were deeply immoral for a variety of procedural reasons. They were not published, they were vague, and they could not be interpreted in a congruent fashion.
We are now entering such a dangerous universe. In camera, unpublished surveillance laws are violating privacy, and retroactive and overly broad legislation erode free expression. The anti-immigration hysteria and the rise of the far right may lead to de facto ethnic cleansing. The control of the world by transnational corporations has occurred through violations of privacy, data mining and economic crime.
The real concern in northern Europe and in Brussels also is around how AI will not be controlled by a corporate economy. Why is that? Considerations of profit will ensure, as the former head of AI in Google recently argued, that within thirty years there is a ten to twenty percent chance of human liquidation. It trespasses in an unbridled way on boundaries.
The question of compensation and reparation also arose in our discussion at the ICC, and I mentioned that the Innocence Project in all its conferences has a separate stream for the exonerated. So does the ICC. Thus, surely it is time the Irish government finally to deliver on its Magdalene Laundry promises, and compensate those disposed by banksters? Fat chance.
The concept of obligations ergo omnes needs to be extended to new challenges. The ICC needs to be supported to extend its jurisdiction. They seem beleaguered but to quote Halldor Laxness they are at least Independent People. Independent People are important. Thus bankers were jailed in his native land Iceland when Independent People prevailed.
Feature Image: The premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC moved into this building in December 2015.
The afternoon of Christmas Eve, just as it’s beginning to get dark, Mum opens the black oak sideboard in the hall.
We crowd around, the little ones shoving and pushing. Frantic to see the treasures inside.
The whole house already smells of Christmas – the ham simmered overnight in its blanket of floury paste, now stripped and baking in the oven with bay leaves, cloves and onions. The Christmas tree, fetched by Dad with two of the bigger ones earlier in the day, waiting for its decorations in the dining room, smells of forest and cut wood. A wobbling stack of ivy pulled off the granite walls in the garden for winding through the bannisters, sprigs of holly for tucking behind pictures, sits by the stairs.
Mum lifts the fairy lights up from their bed of tissue paper, dried needles from last year’s tree rustling in the hollows in their cardboard Mickey Mouse box. The tissue paper, re-used year after year, feels like soft cloth.
It’s Eldest Brother’s job to check each bulb inside its plastic casing. ‘Gently’ says Mum.
The lights never work first time.
Eldest Brother, breathing hard, protruding tongue clasped between teeth, his go to concentration mode, says it’s a closed circuit. It can’t work until all the bulbs are A.1. I’ve no idea what closed circuit means. But I like the sound of the words. Closed circuit. A One.
The little ones, jigging with impatience, carol: ‘Put them on the tree!’
Eldest Brother hunts through tissue paper for spare bulbs. Miraculously two appear. Sellotaped to a piece of card and stowed safely away by Mum last Christmas.
The spare bulbs work! The little ones go silent as Eldest Brother gingerly carries the lights over to the tree. A bump against Dad’s chair and they all go off again. No!
Everyone has ideas where the lights should go. Up higher! You’ve missed the bottom branches! The yellow ones are hidden!
‘Too many bloody Indians’, Eldest Brother complains.
Mum is now taking out the glass balls and bag of tinsel. One ball has smashed, its jagged edges sticking up like a broken eggshell.
Next the cardboard box marked Calor Gas tied with yellow satin ribbon. Inside are the crib figures wrapped in more tissue. A larger cardboard box, decorated with ivy, a painted yellow star inexpertly fixed over the centre, awaits. The figures, sent by Mum’s cousin in Germany, are very beautiful. A young Madonna, a baby Jesus with a detachable gold crown and upraised arms in a crib made of briars, old man Joseph grasping a shepherd’s crook fixed through a hole in his fisted hand, forever getting lost as the little ones take it out to play with. ‘Where’s Joseph’s crook?’ There’s a lying down brown cow, a standing grey donkey. The three kings bearing gifts must be hidden behind the box until after Christmas and its their turn to arrive.
After Christmas? An unimaginable concept.
The little ones argue over who gets to put Baby Jesus into his manger. The bigger little one thumps the smaller one in the back: ‘You did it last year.’
Howls of outrage.
‘Look’ says Mum, ‘here comes the music box.’
Also from Mum’s cousin in Germany, the music box is a wooden cylinder painted gold and indigo. Wound up, it solemnly twirls, plucking out Silent Night, sending kneeling angels holding golden trumpets, around and around.
‘Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!’ goes Eldest Brother. ‘What?’ ‘German for Silent Night’, says Middle sister. Eldest Brother claps his heels together and does a Nazi salute. All the big ones laugh. But I feel afraid. Everything about Hitler, the Nazis, the War, the terrible camps, frightens me. Could it all happen here? A tank appear at the end of our road?
The little ones jostle to wind the music box up, send the angels twirling.
Mum holds up ‘Flying Santa on a Goose’. Bought in Woolworths by one of the big ones he immediately stole the show. Looped from the light over the dinner table, Santa, a skinny rakish version, sits astride a goose with articulated, real feather wings that go up and down as he sails backwards and forwards over the heaped plates, the crackers, the red wine, the silver candelabras – until OOPS! he’s sailed too close to the lighted candles. A strong smell of burning. The goose feathers, Santa’s beard, are singed! Dismay from the little ones: Santa. The big ones shout with laughter. Mum laughs so she gets tears in her eyes.
Finally here’s the Christmas fairy. She’s from Mum’s childhood and has her own box. The little ones are a bit frightened of her. She looks like one of those dolls that might snap awake at midnight and do stuff.
A perfect china face, china arms and legs, a soft fabric body. Real, pale blonde hair, a small pursed mouth, blue eyes, a tiny patch of rouge on each cheek. She is wearing an ankle length dress made of real satin trimmed with lace.
Eldest Brother, standing on one of the dining room chairs, ties her to the top of the tree using the yellow satin ribbon that holds the crib box together. We crowd around the tree: ‘A little bit to the left!’ ‘No a little bit more to the right!’ Eldest Brother gets fed up: ‘She’s fine.’
Christmas fairy, a little lopsided, looks down disapprovingly.
It’s dark. Dad comes in. He’s smiling a lot. His hat on the back of his head. Even before the front door closes the young artist who took him out drinking is speeding away from the house in a battered cream estate.
Dad walks unsteadily around the hall, arms out: ‘My darlings’. Mum goes: ‘Oh for heaven’s sake’. Dad can’t stop smiling: ‘All my ducklings.’ He puts a hand on my shoulder. He avoids Mum’s eye. ‘I shink maybe I’ll go up to bed’. ‘Good idea’, Mum says in a voice that means Goodbye and Good riddance. ‘Happy Crissmass’ Dad says, standing swaying at the bottom of the stairs, waving a bony hand. ‘Go on’ Mum says.
None of us says anything. We don’t mind Dad being drunk. But we don’t want Mum to be cross. Not on Christmas Eve. One of the big ones goes down to the kitchen.
When all the glass balls, small ones and big ones, have been hung on the tree, the tinsel draped and the crib set up with the music box beside it, the big ones say they’re going to make supper in the kitchen. There’s ‘too much going on in the dining room’. The big ones have made Mum sit down and have a sherry while they cook. The bottle says ‘Dry Sherry’. No matter how many ways I try to think it , I can’t work it out: how can a liquid be dry?
We’re allowed our first slices of ham. It’s delicious! Sweet and warm and juicy and chewy all at the same time. I wonder how long can eating and happiness last?
*****
It’s Christmas morning! We’re all awake before it’s light. Mum and Dad have left a long, grey, hand knitted stocking at the end of every bed. The bulging stockings, knitted by Granny, spend the rest of the year in the sideboard. They all have that special Christmas smell.
We reef open the Santa presents – a potatoe gun, bubbles, a false nose and moustache set, a board game with a wooden spinning top. At the bottom, always, a tangerine.
We stand outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom door. ‘When can we go down?’ Sleepy voices from inside call out: ‘Go back to bed. It’s not even six o’clock.’.
By eight Mum and Dad have come down. Big Sister has started breakfast. Everyone is hungry. Us young ones because we’ve already been awake for hours. Mum and Dad and the big ones because they’ve been at midnight mass, wrapped presents and sneaked them into our rooms in the Santa stockings.
The big presents are still all under the tree. Dad says we have to line up, outside the dining room door, littlest first, . He puts the Messiah on the gramophone, the hundred voices swelling up and filling the house, Hallelujah! Halleluhah! Ha,le,eh,eh,luh,jah! He tells us Handel cried when he first heard it performed. In Dublin. We only half listen. All we want to do is get inside.
One, Two, THREE – and Mum opens the door.
We thunder in.
Mum and Dad stand either side of the tree, calling out our names. There are the big presents under the tree from them first. Then presents from Granny. Then smaller presents from uncles and aunts. The big ones get presents from girlfriends and boyfriends.
Silence as presents are ripped open. Shouts of delight. Everyone makes a pile in separate areas.
By the time the excitement has started to die down the big ones are bringing in breakfast. Because it’s Christmas they’ve cooked extra, piling the rashers and sausages, the black and white puddings, the tomatoes, onto the big oval dish. They bring the eggs and the toast in separately. It’s always the best breakfast of the year. Mum and Dad, at either end of the dining table, give each other a quick look: first stage of Christmas successfully completed.
The preparations for the big Christmas dinner start immediately after breakfast is cleared away. Chopping onions, squeezing sausages out of their skins to make the stuffing for the turkey. Scrubbing and peeling the enamel basin full of potatoes. Making the bread sauce. Getting the plum pudding onto the stove for one last boil. Cleaning the brussels sprouts. Scrubbing the carrots. Checking the trifle in the pantry has properly set. Shoving fistfuls of stuffing into the turkey’s yawning cavities.
Next a small party of us are off with Mum and Dad to visit the maternity hospital where Mum’s father was once Master. The matron, large and spotless, has coffee, sherry, Christmas cake, mince pies laid out. Fig rolls and squash for us younger ones. She treats Mum like a beloved, special daughter. Mum looks beautiful in her green tweed suit, the gold watch brooch she won for a Point to Point on the lapel.
Every year Mum brings in ‘layettes’ for the new-borns whose own Mums don’t have much money. Mum and the sewing lady who comes to the house to ‘turn’ sheets, make clothes, re-line old jackets, ‘turn’ cuffs, make a few every time the sewing lady comes. They’re set aside in the sewing chest of drawers, ready for Christmas.
Mum and Dad both have sherry. Then coffee. We have mince pies, burning our tongues on the scalding fruit.
‘Why are they called ‘mince’pies’?’ we ask Dad in the car on the way home. Dad says it goes back to the 16th Century. They used to be made with real meat. Even, sometimes, tripe. ‘No’ we scream, making getting sick noises. Dad, who can persuade us to eat almost anything, hasn’t succeeded in getting anyone to eat tripe. It’s good for you! Every so often Dad buys some in the butchers and cooks it up in a saucepan of milk with half an onion. Mum says it smells horrible. I say it looks like floor cloths. Mum says it smells even worse than floor cloths. Nobody will taste a mouthful.
‘Dad. No! Yuck!’.
By the time we get back to the house the older ones have Frank Sinatra on the gramophone and the house is filled with the smell of Christmas dinner cooking. We younger ones bring our presents up to the drawing room where Eldest Brother has lit the huge Christmas fire – long curved black turves, chopped logs that smell of Sundays in the country.
Dad goes to collect Granny, Mum’s mother, to bring her over for the big feast. We sit her in Mum’s chair by the fire.
We hear screaming downstairs. A plate smashing. Big Sister and Mum have got into a fight. Dad goes down to calm things. We hear raised voices. A door slams. My brother laughs: ‘Madame having one of her fits’. He means Big Sister. Granny pretends not to hear. Dad comes back: ‘Help is needed’ he says. The middle ones, groaning, get up and go down.
Finally the call comes: Dinner’s ready!
We force ourselves not to charge down the stairs shouting and jostling, remembering Granny and how old she is. Her arm feels like a dry stick inside her soft woollen sleeve. Dad, holding out a crooked arm, says he will ‘escort’ her.
The dining room is beautiful. The sideboard and the table are lit with candles, decorated with ivy and holly, a circle of crackers in the centre, the sideboard crowded with huge glistening turkey, the ham, bowls of heaped mashed potatoe, a dish of roast potatoes, bowls of brussels sprouts and carrots, silver boats of bread sauce, the gravy boats, a dish of cranberry sauce.
All the best cutlery is out. The best china. The nicest glasses. The best napkins.
Dad carves. There’s quiet as everyone waits. Another wait for gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce to be passed around. You look at your plate, so beautiful with the meats and stuffing and roast potatoes, vegetables, gravy and sauces.
Everyone has to wait until the last person is sitting down, before you can begin.
Yes!
Pieces of delicious turkey meat dipped in gravy, roast potatoes cooked in turkey juices, mashed potatoe with butter dripping down the sides, ham with cranberry sauce, stuffing. Every mouthful is delicious. The turkey bought from a farmer Dad knows in Meath. The ham ordered from the pork butcher in town. The potatoes, brussels sprouts and carrots from Dad’s garden.
The grown-ups and the big ones have wine. Granny, no higher at the table than the little ones, a shrinking doll in satin and pearls and silvered hair, raises her glass, smiling. To Christmas! shout the big ones.
My brother, carving knife and fork raised, calls out: ‘Who’s for seconds?’ The adults decline as we smaller ones line up. My brother always gives himself the best bits when he carves, and seconds never taste as good as firsts, still, I can’t resist. ‘No thirds’ Mum says, ‘that’s just greedy’.
More Christmas please, more!
A rest and then, puddings.
The dinner plates are cleared. The plum pudding is carried in. Then the trifle. Dad pours a glass of brandy over the plum pudding and holds a match to it. Blue flames dance and curl around its moist sides. We all want to get bits with the blue flames still going but they flicker out as the plate lands. Brandy butter runs down the hot sides. There’s trifle for those who don’t like plum pudding. Or for greedy ones – like me ! – who want both.
For the grown ups there’s a special wine Dad has bought for Mum – a desert wine. ‘Do they make wines in the desert?’ The big ones laugh. ‘Of course not!’ ‘It means a wine you have with your pudding, silly.’
Finally it’s time to pull the crackers. You cross your arms in front of you and share a cracker with the person either side. You pull like mad because you want to get the toy, the hat and the joke. Even though the grown-ups say they’re always rubbish, everyone pulls hard. There’s a little explosion, the smell pop guns make, a scattering of rolled up paper hats, toys and jokes. One of the littles sitting beside my brother screams. ‘He got TWO!’ Dad finds another cracker and pulls it with them, making sure they win.
We all hope to get good joke and make everyone laugh:
‘What did the stamp say to the envelope? Stick with me and we’ll go places’.
‘How did the human cannonball lose his job? He got fired’.
‘What is the nearest thing to Silver? The Lone Ranger’s bottom.’
The grown-ups, now in great form, laugh like anything. We young ones all want to own the fish that middle sister got in her cracker. It’s made of red, see-through cellophane. When you lay it on your outstretched palm both ends curl upwards – as if the fish was alive.
Finally it’s time to clear up.
When the last dishes, cup, plates, have been carried into the kitchen and washed, the meats, puddings, turkey, ham, trifle put away in the pantry, everyone gathers upstairs in the drawing room where Dad has stoked the fire up into a fresh blaze.
Granny is going to stay the night. She tells us stories about growing up in Chile. About how Mum and her brother used to ride out on their ponies, for miles and miles. How Mum was afraid of nothing. Mum looks stern. We know, though she never says, she doesn’t like Granny. We don’t really know why. Big Sister says Granny was very bossy when Mum was young. We can’t picture it. Tiny ancient little Granny was so bossy she made Mum cross? Forever? It doesn’t make sense.
Dad suggests we all play the ‘truth’ game. Mum says no, that game always ends in trouble. We take out the new Cluedo. Eldest Brother wins: Colonel Mustard. In the study. With the rope. Mum says, ‘that game is going to give them nightmares’, but she’s not cross.
*****
It’s January by the time the tree has to come down. The soft, early dark light of December has been replaced with the harsh grey blue light of January. There have been fights. Big sister has broken up with her boyfriend. ‘Oh do blow your nose,’ Mum says, which makes Big sister howl even more loudly and rush out of the room.
The tree has to be taken out of its bucket filled with stones and pulled out through the back door and down into the garden.
Middle sister says how come there is always one ball left on the tree no matter what? The ball this year, a small purple one, clatters across the tiles as Eldest Brother drags the tree out, leaving a trail of pine needles. Mum says, ‘Someone get the hoover’. ‘Hey Someone! Get the hoover would you!’ says Middle sister. ‘Don’t you be cheeky’, says Mum .
In the garden my brother hacks off the Christmas tree branches with a small red handled hatchet, piling the lopped branches up in a rough stack. ‘Stand back’ he says and throws on a cupful of paraffin. Whumpf! The hacked branches, the armless tree, spitting and crackling go up in a shaking blue haze. I see Mum looking out the window. Suspicious. Her face saying: What did that boy throw on the fire to make it blaze like that? I thought I’d told him not to.
Inside everything has been packed away into the sideboard – the Mickey Mouse Christmas lights, the crib figures from Germany, the singing angels from Germany, Flying Santa on a goose with his singed beard, the plastic bag of tinsel, the glass balls, the long grey hand knitted stockings.
All back into the dark of the sideboard until next Christmas.
Middle sister has taken out the hoover. Pine needles go rushing up the metal tube in a storm of clicking. Like dried out, dead insects.
*****
Dad is in bed. He’s not feeling well.
Christmas is over.
How could any of us have known it was to be the last Christmas? The last happiness?
How could any of us have imagined it was the beginning of the end?
Part I of this series examined Mario Draghi’s recent proposals for reforming the E.U.’s economic model. It explained how one key tool was missing from his new industrial policy toolkit. That missing tool was public enterprise. Here in part II, we take a closer look at commercial State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Particularly regarding their role at times of market failure, and how they can be used to channel investment into promising new sectors, with positive spillovers.
The role of SOEs as drivers of Irish industrial policy may seem like a thing of the past, or at least very much peripheral to Ireland’s tax-driven industrial strategy. However, a new debate is starting to take root. Although long overdue, it should be welcomed, particularly when we consider different options for how the €14 billion Apple tax receipts should be invested.
Note the government’s proposal to use some of the funds for their shared equity scheme is exactly the opposite of what’s needed.
A New Debate or a New Departure?
As part of their pre-election campaigning the various Irish parties of the broad left offered different public enterprise solutions for various challenges.
For instance, both People Before Profit and Labour called for the establishment of a new construction related SOE. There are differences in how each proposed it would operate in practice. Part III takes a closer look at these. It will also briefly touch on the Spanish government’s recent announcement that it’s to establish a new housing SOE, and ICTU’s call for the creation of ‘a new housing semi-state- Housing Ireland.’
Sinn Féin in their election manifesto called for existing SOEs like the ESB to drastically increase the number of craft apprenticeship places they offer (electricians, plumbers, etc), to help address shortages of key skills and improve workforce planning. They’ve also called for €2.5 billion of the Apple money to be used by the state to take equity stakes in joint energy ventures undertaken by the ESB and private providers.
The Social Democrats, for their part, called for an increase to Bord na Móna’s capacity to deliver large renewable energy projects (onshore and offshore wind). They also had Dr Rory Hearne elected as one of their new TDs, so it’s possible his previous research on a new national home-building agency could influence party policy in this respect.
So, it’s clear that we’re noticing something of a shift away from a narrow (and reductive?) focus on tax and spend; toward a more ambitious and positive conception of the role of the state in helping to shape markets, and drive socio-economic outcomes.
President Michael D. Higgins in a speech last year celebrating the 20th of anniversary of TASC highlighted the ‘dearth of progressive or heterodox policy debates’ over the last few decades. Something he rightly attributed to the ‘dominance of neoliberalism’ and its ‘economic orthodoxies’.
Mainstream (neoclassical) economic theory says remarkably little about SOEs. This is despite their scale, scope, and importance in the history of economic development and industrialisation. In an Irish context, they have traditionally entered public consciousness at times of some proposed privatisation, or in reflection on the failures of past privatisations.
It’s time our thinking evolved. Michéal Martin said the Irish left ‘doesn’t get our enterprise economy’. The problem is that there are many people who feel they aren’t ‘getting’ much out of it. Perhaps it’s time we put the ‘public’ back into enterprise.
So, what’s the purpose of the state directly entering commercial activities via SOEs? The most common rationale is correcting market failure, and the OECD/EU provide several theoretical reasons:
The private sector’s not providing sufficient goods/services, which are deemed necessary.
The need to provide public goods (housing, health, education) which a free-market system won’t provide adequately.
The decision to become involved in an activity where the private sector overproduces certain undesirable good with negative externalities (e.g. pollution, carbon emissions)
Other supportive arguments include the countercyclical function they can serve in terms of investment expenditures/employment during a downturn. Their ability to promote industrialisation by launching new industries that may have significant start-up costs and the requirement for long-term investments. Their use as vehicles for innovation, knowledge dissemination, and technological spillovers. Lastly, for national security reasons and to contend with monopolistic sectors.
There’s no one size fits all model when it comes to SOEs. In practice there’s significant variation observed. There are commercial and non-commercial SOEs. They can be owned at the national level (e.g. Government Ministry), the sub-national level (municipal/local authority) or through some other entity (e.g. a sovereign wealth/development fund or a Central Bank).
There’s different levels of ownership and control observed, ranging from full state ownership to a more limited shareholding. Some have shares privately held, with others having some equity traded publicly. The degree of control also varies from those directly answerable to a Minister/Department, to those subject in more indirect control. Part III returns to the variation in organisational structure in an Irish context.
Despite the large-scale privatisations that have occurred with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, the relative importance of state ownership has increased in recent decades (OECD 2023). Data-driven research over the last quarter of a century has been somewhat limited, but we are currently seeing something of a resurgence.
This is partly being driven by the ‘renewed interest’ in SOEs amongst policymakers (World Bank 2023). But also, by a multilateral institutional realisation that the footprint of the state in commercial activities is far larger than previously thought (figure 1).
As the OECD (2023) notes, the number of SOEs in the list of top 500 global companies has tripled, and at the end of 2022 ‘the public sector held almost 11% of global market capitalisation of listed companies, amounting to $10.6 trillion, with public sector ownership in some markets amounting to over 30% of listed equity’.
SOEs in the 21st Century
SOEs are major actors in most economies holding assets of $45 trillion, equivalent to 50% of world GDP (IMF 2020). They’re also active across a wide range of sectors (figure 2). China’s sharp rise (see part 1) has supported the ongoing re-evaluation of the state’s role in the economy. But in the West the Financial Crisis (2008), Covid-19 and the energy crisis, which all saw partial/full nationalisations, government backed recapitalisations and a host of other state subsidies, has also fed into the ongoing re-evaluation.
In 2009 the Harvard International Review argued that there was ‘no reason to believe’ that the SOEs of the 21st century would be like their counterparts from the 1980s/1990s. Criticisms of that period centred on the favouritism shown by the state, governance issues, inefficiencies, and so on.
This assessment proved to be prophetic as extensive OECD research (2021) found that the ‘noteworthy trend’ has been that ‘states are operating increasingly like professional investors.’ That is, most had a commitment to ‘competitive neutrality’ meaning favouritism was not shown toward SOEs, and competition law and public procurement law were used to create a level playing field.
They also noted for corporate governance it was now ‘common practice’ to have auditing and accounting standards (International Financial Reporting Standards) equivalent to stock market listed companies.
MacCarthaigh (2008) in a review of Irish SOEs found that performance indicators were used extensively, with their use having increased significantly from previous years. Financial results and profitability were the focus, but other societal performance metrics like environmental and corporate social responsibility were also observed.
Notwithstanding the recent work by multilateral institutions, academic research on SOEs over the last quarter of a century has been somewhat limited. The results of extant studies are also relatively mixed and lacking consensus. Table 1 provides an overview of some studies that have been carried out.
SOEs have been studied across a range of issues, including: profitability performance vs private firms; level of innovation vs private firms; general performance following privatisation; effects on economic growth etc.
There are some studies which found private firms tend to perform better in terms of profitability, with others finding no such evidence following privatisation, or that this brings higher costs in the provision of formerly public goods. Some found SOEs to be more innovative than their private sector counterparts.
One study, examining their effect on economic growth, found that it was neither negative nor positive per se. Rather, their effect was conditioned by the institutional environment they operated within, meaning in the presence of good quality institutions their effect was positive, and in the presence of poor-quality institutions their effect was negative.
This reminds me of something a former professor of mine once said. The answer to any question in economics is always – ‘it depends’! SOEs are not some kind of magic bullet. How they perform will depend on a range of factors. These factors can also apply to private firms.
Factors like whether its organisational structure is sound. The presence of sound management and a board with a strategic vision, which are in alignment with its shareholder goals;[1] a good understanding of the market conditions they are operating within etc.
Where they have differed in the past is that private firms could be quicker to exit a market when it was no longer competitively viable.[2] The case of Irish Steel – nationalised to save jobs – is a good case in point. It continued well past its sell by date, despite no longer being economically viable.
But SOEs like private firms can adapt to a changed environment. For example, Bord na Móna went from being a major peat harvester to making good progress in renewable energy.[3]
Lastly, it must be noted that SOEs may not be solely driven by maximising profit, measured via financial metrics (gross/net profit margin; return on equity (ROE); return on assets (ROA), etc).
As commercial enterprises they will still need to make a profit, but they often have a so-called double bottom line, meaning they also look to maximise a second objective, such as capital investment, social impact, environmental performance, etc.
So, comparing their profitability to private firms which are explicitly profit maximising is not necessarily a fair comparison. Next, we’ll take a brief look at specific Irish SOEs in historical perspective.
Table 1
Authors & year
Research area/concern
Findings
Comment/limitations/ implications
Shirley & Walsh
(2000)
Reviewed 52 studies (1980s to 1990s) which examined the difference in performance between SOEs and private corporations.
They reported that there were only five studies indicating that SOEs outperformed private corporations
Only monitored firms in monopolistic utility sectors
Omran
(2004)
Examined the performance of 54 newly privatized Egyptian firms against a matching number of SOEs (1994-98)
His analyses showed that privatized firms did not exhibit significant improvements in their performance relative to SOEs. These findings questioned the benefits of Egyptian privatization
Cautioned that ‘changing ownership’ has no instant magical effect on performance, and greater consideration should be given to market structure or the power of competition
Anderson (2007)
Examined the impact of privatisation in Latin America (Ecuador), in relation to natural monopolies and public goods
The privatisation of SOEs in involved in the provision of public goods can head to lower output and higher costs in the long run
Noted that for Ecuador to develop the public sector still needed to play a significant role in developing human capital and physical infrastructure
Mazucatto (2013)
Examines the role of the state/public funding in the US economy’s success. Tackles the myth of neoclassical economics which juxtaposes a supposedly bureaucratic state versus a dynamic, innovative private sector
The role of government as both a risk-taking funder of innovation and a market creator is widely understood. Public/state-funded investments in innovation and technology has been the driver of success, rather than free market doctrine
Correctly recognises that governments form an essential role in the innovation chain. Points out that state has not only fixed market failures, but has also actively shaped and created markets. Sometimes successfully sometimes not.
Benassi & Landoni
(2018)
Deals with the role of SOEs in innovation processes through two case studies (STMicroelectronics in the semiconductor and Thales Alenia Space in the space industry
Illustrates how SOEs can contribute to innovation by exploring new opportunities and recombining different sources of knowledge. Highlights the conditions under which success can be realised.
Highlights how these SOEs succeeded through a continuous wave of agreements, mergers and acquisitions. This has bearing for some of the proposals Mario Draghi has made (see part 1)
Asian Development Bank (2019)
Using a large sample of firms with cross sectional data, compares SOEs to private firms across various financial performance measures
Found that SOEs ‘be less profitable than privately owned enterprises’.
Argues SOEs should shift to profit maximising behaviour, although this runs counter to the double bottom line they often have
Lee et al
(2021)
Examined the innovation performance of SOEs vs private corporations in Asian middle-income countries (2012-15)
The authors note ‘somewhat surprisingly’ they found that SOEs in the study population tended to innovate more than private firms
Noted the scarce data availability for empirical comparisons, meaning survey data was used instead
Szarzec et al (2021)
Examined the effect of SOEs on economic growth in 30 European countries (2010-16)
Impact of SOEs on economic growth is not good or bad per se, but conditioned on the level of institutional quality.
SOEs are positive on economic growth in a good quality institutional environment, and negative for poor quality institutional environments
Castelnovo (2022)
Analyses the innovation performance of more than 2000 SOEs vs private firms, using patent applications as a proxy for innovation value
Results suggest that cross-industry heterogeneity exists. Overall, SOEs innovative performance is comparable or even superior to that of private firms
Paper restricts attention to developed countries (EU Member States). Therefore, its findings cannot be generalized to developing countries
Poolbeg Generating Station Ringsend, Dublin.
Irish SOEs in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
In the wake of the financial crisis (2008-10) a report for the Department of Enterprise noted that there was renewed global interest in SOEs in ‘promoting economic development’, and their ‘significant contribution to the economic and social development of Ireland since independence’ (FORFÁS 2011).
At the time there were calls by ICTU to establish a strategic investment bank ‘to address the collapse in domestic demand’, to help support infrastructure investment and address the loss of jobs.[4] Such calls went unheeded. Instead, we got the below value sale of An Bord Gais and the attempted privatisation of our water services.
Let’s briefly consider some of our current and former SOEs in historical perspective (see below), before considering some of the impacts of privatisation.
the ESB,
the Irish Shipping Company,
the National Building Agency,
Telecom Éireann,
ICC Bank,
Aer Lingus
ESB
At the time of independence/partition agriculture was Ireland’s main industrial sector. Yet most farms had no electricity or light, severely hampering profitability, productivity, and incomes (Schoen 2002). The ESB in helping to electrify the state had an immediate impact on economic, social, and industrial development, and average sector level income.
Today it remains a large employer (supporting 0.5% of total employment). It’s a major capital investor (€6.7bn in the period 2018-23) and continues to provide strong returns to the state in the form of taxes, payroll, purchases, and dividends (€2.7bn in 2023).
The Irish Shipping Company
The outbreak of WW2 threatened supply chains as many private shipping operators were unable to service Ireland. According to the old Department of Industry and Commerce, in 1939 only 5% of the total tonnage required for the Irish import and export trade was provided by Irish-owned vessels. During World War II, the U.S. initially refused to enter the warzone around Irish waters, meaning they couldn’t transport directly to Ireland.
Other ships moved to the British register leaving a crisis in the availability of ships for transporting imported/exported goods. The establishment of the Irish Shipping Company was vital for the continued importation of energy supplies, as well as supporting exporting businesses in maintaining their trade routes, incomes, and employment. It was also considered essential to the preservation of Irish neutrality.
National Building Agency
The shift toward trade liberalisation and our FDI-led model in the 1960s was at first impeded by a lack of housing, as neither the private sector nor local authorities could meet demand. The National Building Agency was established for ‘facilitating industrial expansion through the provision of houses and ancillary services.’
It soon undertook multiple large-scale developments and won plaudits from across the aisle. Even Fine Gael’s arch-conservative T.D. Oliver J Flanagan stated: ‘In my own constituency the NBA have provided what I consider to be the best type of houses that I have ever seen erected, in record time and to a plan and a design second to none.’[5]
It was noted during one debate of the period how it had worked closely with the IDA, and after a decade in existence it had constructed multiple large scale developments, having ‘brought new techniques to Irish workers’, and ‘coordinated very well with the trade union movement’. The NBA was also an early pioneer in modular built structures and underfloor heating.
Telecom Eireann
The onset of the Celtic Tiger has multiple explanatory factors, but one often neglected was the quality of our telecommunications network infrastructure (Harris 2005). Thanks to the heavy capital investment of Telecom Eireann, by the early 1990s the network was amongst the most digitalised and modern in the world, and essential to attracting emerging ICT and financial services industries.
At its height it provided employment to 18,000 workers, and by the mid-1990s the telecommunications infrastructure had become 100% digitised. It was privatised in 1999 as Eircom (now EIR).
ICC Bank
The Industrial Credit Corporation (ICC Bank), first established as a strategic industry lender, later became key to the SME sector. It made strategic equity investments in venture capital in the software sector, which was one of the successful indigenous export industries to emerge from the Celtic Tiger period (Kirby 2011).
It expanded steadily, enjoying consistent profitability, and made equity investments totalling £36.9 million. At the time of privatisation (2001) it had grown its balance sheet to €3 billion.
Aer Lingus
Aer Lingus when it was an SOE was very entrepreneurial in its diversification activities, designed to mitigate the cyclical nature of the aviation industry (Sweeney 2004). It diversified into activities like financial, computer and engineering related services.
It established successful subsidiaries like Airmotive, TEAM, Aviation Traders Engineering, Aer Turas, Pegasus and Futura, to name but a few. Aer Lingus, and its then employee Tony Ryan, can also lay claim to leasing one of the world’s first aircraft, which helped to create a global industry (aircraft leasing) in which Ireland now holds a 65% market share (PWC).
Today Ireland’s remaining SOEs continue to contribute to the Exchequer, not merely in terms of employment and taxes paid, but also in terms of the dividends they have returned to the state. For example, in the period 2013 -2020 they contributed almost €2.5bn (Table 2). To put this in perspective, that is somewhere around where the final cost of the new National Children’s hospital will land.
We can see from the foregoing the significant contribution that public enterprise has played throughout the state’s short history. And whilst there will always be those who assert that ‘the state has no business in business’, the above examples should demonstrate how erroneous that thinking is.
It should, however, be said that when it comes to economic planning on the part of the state, it has often been found wanting (Casey 2022). The relationship between SOEs and the Irish government has often lacked ‘clearly articulated policy or objectives’ meaning public debate has rarely evolved beyond ‘the issue of privatisation’ (MacCarthaigh 2008).
Table2 : Dividend payments to the exchequer from SOEs (2013-2020)
Irish Privatisation in Perspective
The importance of SOEs in Ireland has declined in relative and absolute terms since the early 1990s, through a combination of privatisation and the growth in the economy. In the 1980s SOEs employed ninety-one thousand people, accounting for 8% of total employment, falling to less than half that number and 2% of total employment by 2008.
The wave of privatisations, with the ascendency of neoliberalism, saw major state divestment in sectors like construction, transport, telecommunications, other utilities, and finance (Parker 2021). In Ireland, arguably the biggest privatisation since the foundation of the state wasn’t from the sale of a single SOE, but rather the sale of more than half of all the public housing stock (Sweeney 2004).
Ireland’s experience with privatisation largely mirrors the mixed results and disappointments seen elsewhere, as Table 3 sets out.[6] Despite promises of greater efficiency, cheaper and superior quality services/infrastructure, etc; often the reality failed to match the hype.
In certain instances, privatisation had very costly consequences for households, businesses, the state, and its competitiveness.[7] As we can see below (table 3), four of the six SOEs (TE, ICC, IS and BG) were all profitable at the time of their sale, one of which had reached record profitability, and were returning dividends to the state.
Of the two which were loss making; the Irish Shipping Company had been ‘a viable and successful state enterprise’ (Barrett 2004) before it made significant losses from speculative charter agreements, entered into by management without the approval of its shareholders (Minister for Finance/Transport).
In the case of Irish Steel, major changes in global steel markets beginning in the 1980s, meant it became a significant loss maker and was no longer commercially viable. It was sold for £1 in 1996 and the new private entity would shut its doors in 2001.
The impact of the privatisations of late 1990s/early 2000s were particularly acute. The sale of Telecom Eireann led to two leverage buyouts (think private equity) with much asset stripping and loading the company up with debt. There was then significant underinvestment meaning Ireland lagged behind EU peers in broadband connection for a long time.
This privatisation was described as the ‘the biggest own goal’ for the state, next to the blanket bank guarantee. Although some of the proceeds of the sale were used to capitalise Ireland’s first sovereign wealth fund (the National Pension Reserve Fund), this of course would later be raided to bail out the banks.
ICC bank was sold in 2001 despite being quite profitable and returning increasing dividends to the state. The proceeds of these sales were used ‘to cut direct taxes, incentivise property investment and so boosted the Crash’ (Sweeney 2018). In other words, successful public enterprise was sold off, partly used to lower taxes, and fuel the crash, and partly put aside in a new sovereign wealth fund, which would then be used to pay for the cleaning up of the mess.
Bord Gáis, which was described as ‘extremely efficient in operational terms’, was sold under pressure from the Troika, and for less than its worth. Between 1976 and 2009 it had returned €689 million in dividends to the state. At the time it was still in public ownership, Ireland had one of the lowest energy costs in the EU, a situation which has now been drastically reversed.
Table 3
SOE, lifespan & industry
Rationale for existence
Max employees
Performance prior to privatisation
Aftermath of privatisation
Telecom Éireann
(1983-99)
Communication
To roll out digital telephone switching technology along with extensive fibre optic.
18,000
· Went from loss making (-£83 million) in 1983-84, to earning profits of £94 million by 1990-91.
· In 1998 it made pre-tax profits of IR£223m, up 9%, on turnover of IR£1.35 billion.
· By the early 1990s, the Irish network was amongst the most modern and most digitalised in the world and by the mid-1990s had become 100% digitally switched.
· In 1999 it had debts of €340 million which rose to €4.27 billion by 2007 after privatisation.[8]
Underwent two leveraged buyouts (LBOs), asset stripping, loading company up with debt, significant underinvestment, Ireland lagged behind EU peers in broadband connection for a long time.
A report by ICTU noted that next to the blanket bank guarantee, the privatisation of Telecom Eireann ranked as “the biggest own goal” for the state.
Industrial Credit Corporation – ICC Bank
(1933-01)
Finance
Setup as strategic lender for industrial expansion.
Later acted as key lender to SMEs, indigenous businesses, and venture capital.
358
· Expanded steadily, enjoyed consistent profitability, and made equity investments totalling £36.9 million.
· Grew its balance sheet through its own efforts to almost £3 billion at the time of privatisation.
· Paid regular and increasing dividends to the Exchequer over the previous two decades.
· In the five years before privatisation, dividend payments amounted to £14 million, while corporation tax payments in the same period came to £10 million.
· The bank made a profit of €47 million the year before it was sold.
Return on assets (ROA) declined after privatisation, asset size increased (Reeves).
Post-crash, loss of ICC cited in support for establishing State Investment Bank (NESC 2013), (ICTU 2011).
Credit demand muted after GFC, accessing finance today for SMEs remains a challenge with 66% having difficulties.[9]
Irish Shipping Company
(1941-1984)
Transport
Setup to protect imports and exports during WW2, to promote greater self-sufficiency and protect neutrality.
300
· Liquidated following significant losses from speculative charter agreements entered into without the approval of its shareholders (Minister for Finance/Transport).
· Liquidation cost £101 million, which was £13 million more than allowing the company to keep trading.[10] Its ships were sold off.
· Prior to this mistake with the charter agreements it was “a viable and successful state enterprise” (Barrett 2004).
· It was described as having “offered good careers to many” and brought “benefits to our commercial reputation as a nation”.[11]
Claims cost of liquidation would be £50 million whereas C&AG reports for 1984, 1985 and 1986 estimated in excess of £100 million.
Irish Steel
(1947-96)
Basic Materials
Initially nationalised to “save jobs”
1,200
· Loss of competitiveness from other EU markets and declining steel prices.
· Although modest profitability in the 1950s/1960s, problems emerged in the 1970s and despite significant state investment in 1980s, and workforce changes (90s) it made a loss of £20.7 million (1993-94) and a loss of £5.8 million (1994-95).
· Serious environmental damage caused from dumping of toxic materials.
Often cited as a “white elephant” project.
Was not viable as a commercial enterprise. Firoz (2003) argues that the significant drop in steel prices in the 1990s was a major problem for producers without trade protections, strong state subsidies, and increased competition from the developing world (China).
Irish Sugar Greencore
(1933-91)
Agribusiness
Commercial and wider social reasons like promoting regional development and employment in the West
1,757 (1991)
· Experienced rapid growth and improvement in the pre-privatization period.
· Heavy investment in the 1980s and diversified into other agribusiness streams.
· Turnover in the year ending September 1990 was £271 million, which was also a record year for net profits £18.4 million.
In the decade post privatisation, its performance was not strongly associated with improved financial performance and productivity.[12]
Bord Gais Energy
(1976-13)
Energy
Established (Gas Act 1976) as owner of the national gas transmission & distribution systems, mandated with development and maintenance of the natural gas network.
1000 est. (2013)
· Under pressure from the Troika the lucrative energy supplier valued at €1.5 billion was sold for only €1.1 billion, because no reserve auction price had been set.[13]
· BGE had yielded rising profits with an EBITDA of €91 million in 2013.
· It paid dividends of €689 million between 1976 and 2009,[14] the paid €30 million (2010), €33 million (2011) and €28.3 (2012).
· It lost its profitable wind farms, plants and the right to supply gas to nearly a million customers in Ireland.
· The SOE was a heavy infrastructural investor and was described as “extremely efficient in operational terms”.[15]
Sold for less than valuation amidst much parliamentary/public criticism.
Advisers’ fees for the privatisation amounted to €27 million.
Irish electricity prices were 26% above EU average (Eurostat 2022), with Bord Gais like other suppliers having raised prices multiple times in 2022.
Conclusion
The late great Tony Benn once said there will always be those who don’t want public enterprise to survive, even where it succeeds. For instance, David Luhnow of the Wall Street Journal, recently issued sharp criticism of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for saying she wanted her country to place a greater focus on its SOEs. He said it was like the economic evidence of the last half century had been forgotten.
But what evidence does he think she has forgotten? Joseph Stiglitz recently pointed out that after forty years the numbers in: ‘growth has slowed, and the fruits of that growth went overwhelmingly to a very few at the top. As wages stagnate and the stock market soared, income and wealth flowed up rather than trickling down’.
It’s not enough for the broad left to say that neoliberalism and privatisation has failed. We need to have a coherent program to start reversing it. One element of such a strategy could be public enterprise. The point here is not that the Irish state should return to direct involvement in previous areas it operated in like agribusiness or steel production, or even that SOEs are always the best option for addressing socio-economic problems or promoting industrial development.
Rather it’s to recognise that in certain circumstances SOEs are the only actors capable of doing this when the private sector fails. It’s also to acknowledge that they can also be entrepreneurial actors, making the necessary long-term investments in transformational infrastructure, technologies and industries, when the private sector is unwilling or unable.
[1] For mismanagement and misalignment can lead to ruin, as in the case of the Irish Shipping Company, which prior to its engagement of speculative charter agreements had long been a profitable and successful company.
[2] Irish Steel is clearly an example of this where political pressure kept the entity alive well past its sell by date.
[3] It recently announced the biggest change of land use in modern Irish history, 125,000 acres of bog land will soon be repurposed for wind, biomass and solar energy.
[6] Other SOEs privatised but not dealt with in Table 3 include Irish Life, TSB, the Agricultural Credit Corporation, Irish National Petroleum, British and Irish Line, BOI/AIB and Aer Lingus.
[7] Poor access to broadband, housing crisis harming competitiveness, loss of dividends to the exchequer, proceeds of sale of privatisations of 2000s was used to reduce direct taxes rather than reinvestment, this helped to fuel property speculation, at time country was running surpluses, exacerbated the crash, etc.
