Cassandra Voices

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  • Thought Leadership Required for Climate and Biodiversity Crisis

    The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.

    Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.

    As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.

    Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.

    There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.

    A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.

    Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.

    ‘Futile Nobility’

    Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.

    Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.

    For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]

    There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:

    we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]

    Selling Copy

    Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.

    Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.

    Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]

    Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.

    For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]

    What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.

    I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.

    Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?

    Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi]  Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii]  and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.

    Eco-thinkers

    ‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’

    As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.

    We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.

    With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.

    Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.

    As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.

    And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.

    Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.

    For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.

    [i] Tyrrell, T. 2013, Gaia: Death of a beautiful idea. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029401-800-gaia-the-death-of-a-beautiful-idea/

    [ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/

    [iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses

    [iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data

    [v] Clarkson, J. 2019 27 Sep 2019. The e world may be getting hotter, Greta Thunberg… but having a meltdown isn’t going to help https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10022396/greta-thunberg-meltdown-wont-help-world/

    [vi] Ward, E. He’s loud. He’s controversial. And he knows he’s right. Style Weekly. https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/hes-loud-hes-controversial-and-he-knows-hes-right/Content?oid=1382305

    [vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590

    [viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

    [ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year

    [x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals

    [xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report

    [xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue

    [xiii] Government of Ireland (2019). Climate Action Plan 2019. https://www.dccae.gov.ie/en-ie/climate-action/publications/Pages/Climate-Action-Plan.aspx

    [xiv] Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (2019). National Biodiversity Action Plan 2017-2021 https://www.npws.ie/sites/default/files/publications/pdf/National%20Biodiversity%20Action%20Plan%20English.pdf

  • Occupied Territories Bill: Government Defies Dáil Majority Leaving the Jaber Family to their Fate

    On a crisp, sunny morning in Hebron in January of this year my friend Atta Jaber tells me: ‘The settlers have what they wanted and Randina sits on a chair.’

    Atta resembles a Kerry farmer, one in particular comes to mind: the late Sam Brown from Maharees in West Kerry. He is sinewy, with a mahogany-coloured face, and a mischievous twinkle in dark Arabic eyes, revealing a profound gentleness of soul.

    Atta is also a farmer, whose family land of fifty-eight dunums (one acre is the equivalent of four dunam) spans both sides of Route 60, outside Hebron in the West Bank. This land is his vocation and passion, and the overwhelming source of the family’s food.

    His wife Randina used to work on the land from 5am every morning. He confides: ‘Randina has green fingers and made everything grow!’

    Today, Atta’s farm house has only four metres of land surrounding it and some eight dunums at the bottom of a steep hill. The white plastic chairs outside the back door are still there for chat, tea and cigarettes in the sun. But the soul of the Jabers has been uprooted. Randina sits on a chair now for long periods of time. The state of Israel has confiscated forty-eight of the fifty-six dunums of which they own the title deeds.

    I first met Atta in early January, 2010, while volunteering with EAPPI in Hebron. We received a call from him saying settlers had arrived in three large buses, and were on his land with picks and shovels, guns slung over their shoulders.

    As ever with settler incursions and attacks, they were accompanied by heavily armed Israeli military personnel. In randomly banging their picks and shovels into the ground, they were making a statement: Atta’s land was now their land. One teenage settler shouted out to say I was a Nazi.

    Later, while discussing what happened, Atta rhetorically asked: ‘Why did Randina marry me? What kind of a life does she have here with me?’

    The family home had been occupied by either settlers or the Israeli army on three separate occasions by 2010. During one period, the family was permitted to remain in a part of their home, while the military occupied the rest.

    In the intervening years the settlers continued to display a sense of entitlement over the land, which they claim Abraham gave to the Jewish people. Year after year they ripped out the Jaber family’s irrigation pipes; then they trampled on the crops.

    Atta and Randina would repair and re-plant, again and again and again. The land was the source of their food after all.

    In the last two years three members of Jaber’s family have seen their homes on the land bulldozed and demolished. One of Atta’s brothers now rents an apartment in Hebron city. His food and income has disappeared.

    Forty-eight of the original fifty-six dunams have been seized by the state of Israel. Parts of the remaining Jaber land can only be accessed with an Israeli permit. The last time they worked that part they required a permit for access. They went ahead and planted the ground, and continued to water it, but were then denied a permit when it came to the harvest. The produce was seized by settlers, which could have easily found its way onto an Irish dinner plate.

    The remaining eight dunams accessible to the Jabers lies at the bottom of a hill. Randina has developed asthma and is unable to walk the route. That illness also means she cannot be prescribed other medication to ease a damaged soul. Randina sits silently and for long periods now, and as Atta says goodbye he adds: ‘I stand beside her.’

    As I am leaving, Atta then tells me he is returning home to tend to his newly planted cauliflower crop on the remaining eight dunums. I said I hoped they would become really, really big cauliflowers. What more could I say? I wish I could help him get his land back, but only the combined will of the governments of the world have the power to bring that about.

    Atta and Randina have a deep and enduring love for one another, but the land sustaining their bodies and souls has been brutally seized by the state of Israel.

    This is the human impact of illegal settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, and not an isolated case. Since the U.N. Declaration in 1949 establishing the state of Israel, dividing Palestine in half, Palestinians were left with 22% of their former land.[i] That proportion of historic Palestine was allocated by the U.N. to other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt – the areas of Gaza and the West Bank. These lands, and more, were conquered by Israel during the Six-Day-War of 1967, but were not incorporated into Israel proper.

    Under the Oslo Accords of 1993, Palestinian land was further divided into Areas A, B and C. A part of the West Bank, known as Area C, is now under full Israeli military and civil control. This comprises 60% of the original 22% of land allocated to the indigenous population. Area B is under Palestinian administrative control, but Israeli military occupation.

    Accordingly, advocating for a ‘Two-State Solution’ is now empty rhetoric. The land is being taken, inch-by-inch, and the governments of the world do nothing to prevent Israel’s ongoing violation of international law and human rights.

    Yet according to the Geneva Convention an occupying state cannot move its citizens into the land it occupies. [ii] There are now over six-hundred thousand Israeli citizens living on the Palestinian West Bank.[iii] Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to annex settlements in the West Bank into the state of Israel.[iv]

    An effective non-violent response is urgently needed.

    The Seanad and Dáil recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018.[v] Despite a resounding 75 to 45 majority, with all Opposition Parties voting in favour, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the controversial ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This procedure has been employed in recent times to block a number of Private Member’s Bills. It is clearly undemocratic and potentially unconstitutional.

    Its use also exposes tacit support for Israel’s breach of International Law and human rights. This is consistent with the Irish State’s failure to exchange diplomatic accreditation with the State of Palestine, despite the Dáil and Seanad voting unanimously for recognition in 2014.

    Yet this failure of democracy in Ireland pales in comparison with the tyrannical treatment meted out to Atta Jaber and his family.

     

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    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

    [i] See: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/the_west_bank_including_east_jerusalem_and_the_gaza_strip_jan_2019.pdf

    [ii] GENEVA CONVENTION (IV) RELATIVE TO THE PROTECTION OF CIVILIAN PERSONS IN TIME OF WAR (GENEVA CONVENTION IV) Article 49, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/COM/380-600056?OpenDocument or

    https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/Geneva%20Convention%20IV.pdf

    [iii] ‘Btselem’, ‘Statistics on Settlements and Settler Population’, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Updated January 19th, 2019, https://www.btselem.org/settlements/statistics

    [iv] Oliver Holmes, ‘Netanyahu vows to annex Jewish settlements in occupied West Bank’, April 19th, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/07/netanyahu-vows-to-annexe-jewish-settlements-in-occupied-west-bank,

    [v] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2018/6/

  • Irish Media’s Business Model Brings Climate Inaction

    Following a global trend since the arrival of the Internet, mainstream Irish media, including the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, is increasingly required to sell itself. The days of someone reading a daily newspapers cover-to-cover are fading into nostalgic memories. Now editors feel obliged to dangle click-bait, and even fake news, often through social media feeds, with content increasingly accessed on smartphones.

    The result is diminished intellectual content, with greater emphasis on sports, titillating lifestyle stories, and consumer surveys. Moreover, advertising paymasters, generally multinational companies, often appear insulated from probing investigations; in Ireland’s case leading to a reliance on foreign-owned publications to break stories.

    Journalism should not be placed on a pedestal, or equated with a secular priesthood: any writer has conflicts of interest, biases and personal foibles. Nor are business people bereft of ethical considerations. The point is about how the interests of the public informant and salesperson are balanced across a media spectrum, and the danger inherent to any democracy when media is run on a purely commercial basis, identifying its interests with other businesses. This now appears to be the case with the three main Irish players: the national broadcaster RTÉ, Independent News and Media and the Irish Times newspaper (which last year purchased the only other indigenous national daily, the Irish Examiner).

    It is also apparent that the current Irish government’s ‘pro-business’ policies align with the interests of leading providers. This brings broadly sympathetic coverage, evident especially in the uncritical ‘reporting’ of strategic leaks, and publication of generally flattering images of leading politicians, especially media-conscious Taoiseach Varadkar.

    The close relationship between mainstream Irish media and the government came into sharp focus last year when unmarked government advertorials appeared across indigenous print media.[i] This now has serious implications for reporting on the environment, including man-made climate change and the Extinction Crisis.

    Climate Inaction

    On June 16th the Irish government launched a Climate Action Plan that gained essentially positive press coverage, emphasising how seriously the government was taking the issue. For example, the headline in the Irish Times the following day read: ‘Climate action plan promises ‘radical’ change.’

    Environmental NGOs, however, reacted very differently to the Plan. An Taisce said it fell ‘well short of the kind of radical, transformational document our recently declared national ‘climate and biodiversity emergency’ warrants.’[ii]

    Friends of the Earth offered a more favourable assessment describing the machinery for delivery as ‘the biggest innovation in Irish climate policy in 20 years.’ They cautioned, however, that the ‘plan gets us to the starting line on climate action. It will take consistent political leadership to ensure it is implemented on time…’[iii]

    Elsewhere, The Environmental Pillar, a coalition of over thirty national environment groups, lambasted a ‘general lack of clarity, ambition and urgency in the new Climate Action Plan to Tackle Climate Breakdown’, or reverse biodiversity decline.[iv]

    Finally, the Irish Wildlife Trust in its press release bluntly stated: ‘There is no indication that the government is willing to rethink agricultural expansion plans which are as odds with environment goals.’[v]

    Importantly, agriculture (essentially livestock agriculture) and transport (mostly of the private motor car variety) are projected to remain the main sources of Irish greenhouse gas emissions (currently combining to comprise over 50% of the total – rising both in absolute terms and proportionately. See table below).

    Climate Deception

    The Plan does little to address the Irish population’s disproportionate contribution to a climate change (the third highest per capita in the EU[vi]) that is already giving rise to extreme weather events close to our shores, and increasing frequency of storms here too. It also all but ignores a potentially irreversible Extinction Crisis facing the natural world, including in Ireland.

    Since then the government has blocked the passage of a cross-party Climate Emergency Bill, using a previously arcane and potentially unconstitutional ‘money messages’ parliamentary procedure. The Bill would have denied any further licences being granted for the purpose of oil or gas exploration in the country. This is certainly not evidence of the kind of “consistent political leadership” sought by Friends of the Earth, who, on reflection, more recently acknowledged that the ‘actual measures in the Plan don’t add up to bringing Irish emissions down far enough fast enough.’[vii]

    In essence, the Irish Times, among others,[viii] helped generate positivity in the Plan’s wake. This is apparent in the opening paragraph to an editorial the following day:

    The appropriately broad scope of the Government’s Climate Action Plan must be acknowledged. A scan of the plan’s headings shows that this administration, however belatedly, has fully grasped that global heating is negatively impacting every aspect of our life and that a plethora of policies and behaviours require urgent changes.[ix]

    Over the following days, opinion writers debated aspects of the plan, but none, it seems, was permitted to excoriate it.

    The greenwashing is best illustrated by a photograph featuring the following day in the Irish Times of the full Cabinet of Ministers arriving in the Phoenix Park to launch the Plan on an electric bus.[x] Yet this is one of just 13 State-owned electric vehicles among 6,573 listed, and came after the National Transport Authority recently announced the purchase of a further 200 diesel buses,[xi] for use nationwide. In Dublin nitrogen dioxide levels from diesel engines are already in breach of EU standards in a range of locations,[xii] seriously imperilling human health.

    The EPA’s recent emissions’ projections[xiii] make for stark reading:

    Mt CO2 eq 2017 2020 2025 2030 Growth 2018-2030
    Agriculture 20.21  20.32  20.66  20.85  3.2%
    Transport 12.00  12.68  12.48  11.86  -1.2%
    Energy Industries 11.74  11.95  13.66  8.62  -26.5%
    Residential 5.74  6.42  5.66  4.55  -20.7%
    Manufacturing Combustion 4.66  3.86  3.70  3.44  -26.2%
    Industrial Processes 2.23  2.39  2.67  3.01  34.6%
    Commercial and Public Services 1.97  1.31  1.15  0.97  -50.9%
    F-Gases 1.23  0.98  0.90  0.78  -35.9%
    Waste 0.93  0.58  0.49  0.44  -52.2%
    TOTAL 60.74  60.53  61.43  54.55  -10.2%

    The highest-emitting sector, agriculture, is predicted to increase its share to almost forty-per-cent of the total by 2030, while emissions from transport flatline. There is no evidence that the government’s Plan will alter these trajectories.

    Climate Opportunism

    In fact, climate change is being sold as an opportunity to roll out a fleet of electric cars, especially once the implementation of Bus Connects – really a road-widening exercise – ensures Dublin becomes even more of a U.S.-style motor-city.

    Foreign manufacture of electric vehicles externalises environmental and human impacts, including the mining of cobalt in Congo for lithium batteries.[xiv]

    Considering the success of the Luas, light rail seems a superior option to develop in our urban areas than noisy, uncomfortable and polluting buses. With a comparable population to Dublin, Prague has an extensive tram network offering a rapid, regular and comfortable service.

    A sensible climate action plan for urban areas could offer scope for a new generation of electric vehicles, including electric bikes, scooters and vehicles for the elderly – perhaps even involving state assistance to manufacturing enterprises. The motor car, as currently conceived, is not simply a major polluter, it is also unnecessarily large and poses serious dangers to other road users, as well as leading to social atomisation.

    Moreover, as long as fossil fuels generate electric power (under the Plan coal-burning Moneypoint power station is to be phased out in 2025,[xv] conveniently beyond the lifespan of this or the next government), electric vehicles could actually generate higher emissions than diesel equivalents, as one German study shows.[xvi]

    Another lacuna to the Plan is a failure to discuss reducing air travel between Dublin-London, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum, making it the busiest air corridor in Europe.[xvii] This might involve improving ferry services out of Dublin and, at the very least, providing a rail service from the Dublin city centre to the Port. It could even involve cooperating with the U.K. government to achieve improvements in the rail service out of Holyhead, potentially making sail-rail journey times competitive with air travel alternative.[xviii]

    Furthermore, the tired argument about maintaining the status quo in agriculture, the worst-offending sector, to the benefit of a narrowing elite, and underpinned by billions in subsidies, is based on a common misconception that Irish livestock ‘production’ diminishes impacts from livestock agriculture occurring elsewhere.

    This is the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument. In fact, recent analysis by An Taisce of U.N. figures[xix] shows Irish agricultural products to be responsible for among the highest emissions in Europe. Any plan purporting to diminish Ireland’s contribution to climate change is a waste of paper without proposals for radical reform of Irish agriculture. Emphasis, and subsidies, should shift to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables for the home market thereby reducing fossil fuel dependency, increasing employment and potentially raising the nation’s health.

    The so-called ‘Paper of Record’

    The Irish Times should not be considered a ‘paper of record’, or an unbiased conduit of ‘facts’, as it advertises itself. Although managed as a trust, a significant salary overhang and investments extraneous to news-gathering and commentary, including www.myhome.ie, have seen it develop into what is an overwhelmingly commercial concern. This approach may be a necessity for the survival of a medium-sized newspaper in the digital era, but it has important, generally unacknowledged, consequences for Irish democracy.

    It should be emphasised that many Irish Times journalists display diligence and integrity, and stories are still broken, but since Paul O’Neill became editor in 2017, the paper has become noticeably more business-friendly, and deferential to the current government.

    One leading columnist, Stephen Collins, is particularly partisan in his support for the dominant economic consensus of steady growth and rising rents administered by a political duopoly.[xx] Left-wing analysis of Irish politics and society is only given an intermittent platform, especially since Vincent Brown’s retirement, and with Fintan O’Toole mainly devoted to international commentary.

    Notably, Dan Flinter, chairman of the Irish Times Trust since 2013, holds a range of external directorships, where potential conflicts of interest could arise. For example, he is a non-executive director of Dairygold Co-Op, and chairman of its Remuneration Committee and a member of the Acquisitions and Investments Committee.[xxi] Ongoing expansion of the dairy sector since the lifting of EU milk quotas in 2015 has been the leading cause of the agricultural sector’s (and the country’s) rising emissions.

    A worldwide environmental crisis is upon us, and many, particularly young, Irish people are focused on the country’s global responsibilities. Meaningfully addressing the gathering storm – in Ireland’s case by shifting agricultural priorities (and subsidies) away from livestock production and phasing out the motor car in urban areas – would work, however, to the detriment of vested interests that advertise heavily in Irish media.[xxii] Such an approach would also be anathema to the dominant paradigm of economic growth-without-end, oblivious to environmental impact.

    The government’s Climate Action Plan seems to have been designed to assuage the justifiable fears, and desire for real action, among wide sections of the population, but it is really a greenwashing exercise, as the responses of leading environmental NGOs show.

    Unforgivably, the Irish Times misrepresented the Plan as a ‘radical’ document, despite its obvious deficiencies. This is a betrayal of a loyal readership, and honourable journalists working there. Irish democracy is being undermined by an institution which many of us grew up believing was one of its cornerstones, on an issue of crucial global importance.

    [i] Kevin Doyle, ‘Varadkar orders review of Project Ireland €1.5m publicity campaign amid controversy’, Irish Independent, March 1st, 2018. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/varadkar-orders-review-of-project-ireland-1-5m-publicity-campaign-amid-controversy-36660463.html

    [ii] Press Release. ‘New Gov’t Climate Plan offers much improved rhetoric: but An Taisce cautions that “winning slowly will be the same as losing”’ June 18th, 2019, An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland. http://www.antaisce.org/articles/new-gov%E2%80%99t-climate-plan-offers-much-improved-rhetoric-but-an-taisce-cautions-that-%E2%80%9Cwinning

    [iii] Press Release, ‘Promised mechanisms to ensure delivery and oversight are biggest innovation in Government climate plan’, Friends of the Earth Ireland, 17th of June, 2019,  https://www.foe.ie/news/2019/06/17/promised-mechanisms-to-ensure-delivery-and-oversight-are-biggest-innovation-in-government-climate-plan/

    [iv] Press Release, ‘All-of-Gov Climate Plan falls far short on biodiversity measures’, Environmental Pillar, 17th of June, 2019, https://environmentalpillar.ie/all-of-gov-climate-plan-falls-far-short-on-biodiversity-measures/

    [v] ‘PRESS RELEASE: Nature largely missing from the government Climate Action Plan’, Irish Wildlife Trust, 18th of June, 2019, https://iwt.ie/press-release-nature-largely-missing-from-the-government-climate-action-plan/

    [vi] Conall Ó Fátharta ‘Ireland’s Emissions the Third Highest in the EU’, November 23rd, 2016 Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/irelands-co2-emissions-third-highest-in-eu-431895.html

    [vii] Untitled, ‘End of Term Climate Report: ‘Little Leo is falling in with the wrong crowd’, Friends of the Earth, 9th of July, 2019, https://www.foe.ie/news/2019/07/09/end-of-term-climate-report-little-leo-is-falling-in-with-the-wrong-crowd/

    [viii] Broadsheet.ie offers a summary of the newspapers headlines the following day: https://www.broadsheet.ie/2019/06/17/de-tuesday-papers-321/

    [ix] Untitled, ‘Irish Times view on the Climate Action Plan: activity must match ambition’, June 18th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/editorial/irish-times-view-on-the-climate-action-plan-activity-must-match-ambition-1.3928552

    [x] Miriam Lord, ‘Miriam Lord: From emission agnostics to climate apostles’, June 17th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/miriam-lord-from-emission-agnostics-to-climate-apostles-1.3930031?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fmiriam-lord-from-emission-agnostics-to-climate-apostles-1.3930031.

    [xi] Juno McEnroe, ‘Only 13 of 6,700 State vehicles are electric’, July 1st, Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/only-13of-6700-state-vehicles-are-electric-933924.html

    [xii] Cormac Fitzgerald, ‘Levels of dangerous air pollutant NO2 possibly exceeding limits on M50 and on Dublin street’, thejournal.ie, July 9th, 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/pollution-traffic-4715146-Jul2019/

    [xiii] ‘EPA’S GREENHOUSE GAS PROJECTIONS SHOW THAT IRELAND HAS MORE TO DO TO MEET ITS 2030 TARGETS’, Environmental Protection Agency, June 6th, 2019. https://www.epa.ie/mobile/news/name,66072,en.html?fbclid=IwAR3cGLpPKV9k4fTIVE8EMCJ_DPqG4bK_Ked5xWObMD5pzt_j63_wGQK7R24 accessed 9/6/19.

    [xiv] Untitled, ‘CBS News finds children mining cobalt for batteries in the Congo’, March 5th, 2018, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democratic-republic-congo-cbs-news-investigation/?fbclid=IwAR1uNxopb2YEdfPIUyQvoTtfBVWn-o7OKTvAHuPH_IgV4HfVnmAeSzFE9_Q

    [xv] Government of Ireland, ‘Climate Action Plan – To Tackle Climate Breakdown’, June 16th, 2019, p.23. https://dccae.gov.ie/documents/Climate%20Action%20Plan%202019.pdf

    [xvi] Commentary, ‘Electric Vehicles in Germany Emit More Carbon Dioxide Than Diesel Vehicles’, June 10th, 2019, Institute for Energy Research, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/electric-vehicles-in-germany-emit-more-carbon-dioxide-than-diesel-vehicles/?fbclid=IwAR3PGVCkKRWjp12WtvqFMCgqKpOYhh4f001QxrRt6OEeUJ7S0eLQI5DkLys.

    [xvii] Untitled, ‘Dublin-Heathrow Busiest International Route In Europe’, 21st of January, 2019, Roots Online, https://www.routesonline.com/airports/2412/dublin-airport/news/276780/dublin-heathrow-busiest-international-route-in-europe/

    [xviii] Ruadhan Mac Eoin, ‘A User’s Guide to ‘Sail-Rail’ with Bicycle and Opportunities on the Dublin-London Route’, April 30th 2019, Cassandra Voices, http://cassandravoices.com/environment/off-the-rails-sail-rail-with-bicycle-from-dublin-to-london-with-some-observations-on-opportunities-for-improvement/

    [xix] Press Release, ‘Bombshell for Irish Beef’, An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland, February 10th, 2019, http://www.antaisce.org/articles/bombshell-for-irish-beef.

    [xx] For example: Stephen Collins, ‘Politics of centre ground has served Ireland well’, May 2nd, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/stephen-collins-politics-of-centre-ground-has-served-ireland-well-1.3877455

    [xxi] Dairygold Annual Report, 2018. https://www.dairygold.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Dairygold-Annual-Report-2018.pdf

    [xxii] As regards the motor car industry, see Stephen Court, ‘Drivetime’, Cassandra Voices, 31st of May, 2018. ‘http://cassandravoices.com/environment/drive-time-the-irish-medias-message/

  • Palestine – To Exist is to Resist

    I have just returned from Hebron in the West Bank, a city where nearly sixty Palestinians have been extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces since the end of September 2015.

    On my last stint in Hebron, West Bank, while doing check point duty one morning one of my team mates overheard two very small children chatting:

    One said: ‘Will we throw some stones?’ To which the other child replied: ‘No, it’s the first day back at school.’

    That is how normal the fight for freedom from military occupation has become for Palestinian children, even if they are under age ten.

    We saw four small children, aged about ten, throwing stones at Qitoun checkpoint at 7.15 am, like 4 mice attacking an elephant. The response from the Israeli soldiers was to put on their gas masks, adjust their weapons and attack the children with sound bombs and canisters of tear gas.

    This new tear gas used by the Israeli forces pierces your eyes so badly you cannot open them. It scrapes across your throat so that you cough and cough. And all of this ensures that you cannot run away from it because you cannot see where you are going, and, even if you could see, you cannot breathe to move. Ten tear gas canisters landed in playgrounds of schools that morning. A little boy aged about four, with a Smurfs school bag on his back, and protected by his seven-year-old brother coughed and choked considerably longer than the other children. He was innocent, and the victim of the collective punishment that is systematically meted out to Palestinians by the Israeli state.

    That evening I arrived in Jaffa, Tel Aviv for a few days break, still coughing badly from the tear gas, and an Israeli man in a shop tells me that Israelis have had ‘enough’!

    And I’m thinking – you have no idea what ‘enough’ really means.

    ‘Enough’ is when you lock up seven hundred Palestinian children a year, from aged twelve to eighteen; when you arbitrarily arrest many of them at night from their beds.

    I have seen many children detained and arrested. The strongest memory I have is of one little boy, who looked about eleven, being detained. His little dark eyes locked hard on to my eyes. We looked at each other for a long time, he fearfully, pleading with hope in his eyes, and me with desperation and helplessness.

    ‘Enough’ is when you handcuff and blindfold children and abuse them while they lie on the floor of the military jeep, while you take them to prison. ‘Enough’ is when you ensure they will not see their parents until the day of military court, which can be four to eight days later.

    ‘Enough’ is when you beat them and put them in solitary confinement, you threaten that their family members will be arrested or that their home will be demolished or that you will sexually abuse them, if they do not confess. You force them to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and this forms the basis on which the majority of Palestinian children are convicted in children’s court

    ‘Enough’ is when you ensure those children from twelve-years-of-age will not see a lawyer until a few minutes before their court case. You accuse the majority of throwing stones and you convict them in over 99% of cases with only 0.02% having a full evidentiary trial.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see that these children are brought into the military court in lines of four with chains on their feet joining them together.  I have heard the sounds of those chains clanking – twelve-year-olds with legs inn shackles in case they might escape from the fourth largest army in the world.

    The little child’s sad eyes pierce through the distraught eyes of their parents who have to sit in the back row of the military court, and who are not allowed to touch or hug their little ones. The public conversation that usually takes place between child and parent consists of: ‘Are you ok? Have you enough to eat?’; while he responds: ‘Are you all ok at home? What did the soldiers do after I left?’’

    And then the case is over in two minutes – cut and paste – same as all the other cases. Then the children are taken back to jail with their leg shackles clanking.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see from your child’s eyes that he has now completely lost his childhood.

    And none of this happens with Israeli settler children who are living in illegal settlements in the centre of Hebron.

    And you expect you will beat Palestinians into submission? Have you no idea that you are creating a university of learners who will react?

    This is life under Israeli military occupation in Hebron, West Bank. Enough.

    The Seanad and Dail recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018. 

    Despite the fact that it was passed by a 75 to 45 vote majority, and that all opposition parties voted for it in the Dail and in the Seanad, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This is a little used procedure that Fine Gael have employed to block a number of Private Member’s Bills in the last months. This is undemocratic and a blatant political action to support Israel in its breach of International Law.  This move is in line with the non-recognition of the State of Palestine by Official Ireland, even though the elected members of the Dail and the Seanad voted unanimously to recognise the state of Palestine in 2014.

    Gerry O’Sullivan in Palestine with children.

    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

  • The Secret Model – Subtle Complaints

    Entering the dragon’s den

    I arrive twenty minutes late for a casting, but it doesn’t really matter. Only three other girls have found their way into the casting room so far; ‘girls’ being a euphemism – the youngest person in the room is a women in her early twenties. At a fashion casting we are never ‘women’, always ‘girls’ – most likely because no grown-up woman would tolerate the treatment we endure on a daily basis.

    I sit down on one of the few cheap chairs propped up at the back of the room, next to the other girls. Most idly scroll on their phones, knowing they have time on their hands, because this is not a regular casting. This is a casting with the dragon.

    The dragon, among the most feared casting directors in the fashion world, is responsible for the booking of models for clients like Calvin Klein, Balenciaga and Jil Sander. She got into hot water in 2017, when it came to public attention that before Paris Fashion Week she had locked one hundred and fifty models in a dark stairwell while she went out for lunch.[i]

    Though not well received, the conduct was insufficiently reprehensible for her to lose a seat on fashion’s Mount Olympus once and for all. A rap on the knuckle and the incident was soon forgiven, though certainly not forgotten by the models left in the cold stairwell for up to three hours – a duration the dragon still denies.

    At the end of the room someone has pushed together some tables, forming a long line. Behind the tables there’s an abundance of sweating assistants typing into their MacBooks. But I am not paying attention to them, as I cannot take my eyes off the dragon, seated at the left hand side of the table. In front of her – weirdly reminding me of the feasts in Harry Potter – there lies a pile of greasy McDonalds paper bags.

    It seems sickly ironic that a woman who hires other women based on the suitability of their bodies (preferably size XXS) is unashamedly spooning an Oreo McFlurry into her mouth in front of us. Now the windowless room is beginning to fill with the smell of grease, but the dragon takes no notice of this, or of us, lurking in the back of the room.

    At this stage she seems to be enjoying herself, wise-cracking with her assistants,. The room is starting to fill up with other I models. I recognize a few of them; some I know from previous castings, others I have seen in campaigns or in magazines. There are insufficient chairs for everyone, models start to crouch on the floor. The casting was supposed to begin forty minutes ago.

    Stale sweat and make-up stains

    Suddenly there is movement. One of the assistants gets up and asks the first five girls to put their names down on a list. We are led to a small toilet and handed undergarments to put on. The assistant tells us to be quick, blushing as she says so. With few words we strip down in front of each other. We are used to it.

    My dress, black, cheaply-made nylon – the sort you might pick up at the checkout of a drug store – has undoubtedly been worn before, smelling of stale sweat and caked in make-up stains.

    The assistant returns. ‘Low ponytail’, she says, and orders us to line up – as if we are being chosen for a game of dodge ball. We walk back into the room. The McDonalds paper bags have magically disappeared. Instead there’s a list in front of the dragon. She calls my name.

    It feels odd standing in front of her; her name – taken in vain more often than not – being a staple in fashion industry gossip. Even odder is how charming she becomes once you are in front of her, and no longer a nameless model, but an actual person. Almost like a human being?

    Why we put up with it…

    I now wonder when I first became habituated to the absurdity that is the fashion industry. I remember how glamorous it all seemed at the outset – like a high school clique that I desperately wanted to be a part of – and once I had made it, I was even more desperate to remain a part of it.

    It took a while for me to realise that it is not all glamour and champagne. It demands countless hours at airports, sleepless nights in lousy hotel rooms, and blue lips from icy shooting locations.

    Latterly I no longer feel as exclusive as I once did. The features that made it so exciting to begin with are now annoying routines: constantly having your hair done becomes irritating; sitting still for hours while you are made-up causes back pain; waiting for what seem like eternities during lighting tests makes it all become a blur.

    I wonder if all so-called dream jobs crash against reality at some point. Or is it only models who are not supposed to talk about the negative sides of their profession, and who must pretend every day is glorious and lock away their mental problems?

    An insider gag is that we all want to quit, and yet here we remain. While the lows may be really low, it seems the highs are too addictive to let go of. It is all too alluring to earn a regular person’s monthly salary in the space of a day; too tempting to visit places you would otherwise never reach; too fascinating to abandon the dream.

    How can anyone who travels the world and meets people we all grew up seeing on TV complain? It seems tasteless to moan about non-sensical work conditions, when life could be so much harder.

    Most of the time models keep quiet. The only safe space for venting our annoyances seems to lie within the industry itself. Though competitors, fellow models are often the only allies we have. Every model understands the pressures, stresses, body dismorphia, loneliness and petty jealousies.

    We exchange knowing looks before pulling out phones to broadcast our fabulous life on social media. We are models after all, so we must maintain the fantasy.

    They probably all want to quit

    The casting is over within five minutes. The dragon is precious with her own time – it is ours that is of no value to her. She orders me walk in a straight line, scribbling down something on a sheet of paper. She asks me to walk again. And again. I walk up and down the room three times, the eyes of everyone in attendance following my every step.

    The dragon makes no comment, she just watches. When I am finished she asks the next girl to do the same walk, I stand with the others and watch. After the five of us have done our walk she calls me up again and takes some pictures with a 2007-esque bubble gum-coloured digital camera.

    I have met her before, at another casting in another city. She pretends to remember me when I tell her, though fails to look me in the eyes. Yet I can feel her gaze all over my body, scanning every flaw, comparing ‘it’ to the countless (and to her nameless) other bodies she has surveyed before.

    I am ordered to look left, right, chin up, chin down, profile, smile, smile with teeth, smile with less teeth, sit-down, fetch. When she has finished the examination she moves on without addressing me again. As I turn, her assistant waves me over to her. She has an amateurish spreadsheet in front of her with a set of questions.

    ‘Would you walk topless?’

    ‘Would you wear fur?’

    ‘Would you wear leather?’

    I wonder if anyone ever dares to say no to any of these questions. If so I have never heard of it. We didn’t make it this far to limit our chances by refusing anything we are offered. She ticks every category next to my name.

    Then I am free to go. I hurry back into the toilet, handing my disgusting gown over to the next girl, waiting alongside the others in the tiny room, like battery chickens at a factory farm.

    As my eyes adjust to the sunshine outside, it all seems surreal – that there are some of the most beautiful girls of Paris stuffed into a back room in a nameless shop in a nameless street. They probably all want to quit.

    ‘Roxanne Smith’ is a pseudonym, if you have stories you wish to share in confidence contact us at admin@cassandravoices.com.

    [i]Landon Peoples, ‘The Plot Thickens In The Casting Directors Vs. Models Case’, March 2nd, 2017, Refinery29, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/03/143463/balenciaga-james-scully-models-casting-drama, accessed 27/4/19.

  • HEY POCKY WAY

    In the year of our Lord 2019, what remained engrained was an émigré from the hoi omphaloi of confusion and strife. The Easter in question came late on the calendar but much like the highly controversial transubstantiation, the bitter end of Holy Week started as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. In other words, all at once.

    Living in the mountains one can’t escape the effects of a full moon and my particular suburb of the Vatican that is Ireland has finally ended its unconscionable 90 year Good Friday booze ban. So there I am in the supermarket, and U2 with whom despite a vast disparity in our respective net assets, I’ve been periodically privileged to mingle, were piping over the sound system. I noticed there was a sale on vodka. So I mixed a pitcher of Bloody Mary and let the games begin. Think Joaquin Phoenix playing his role as the emperor Commodus in that movie he stole from Russell Crowe called Gladiator shouting ‘AM I NOT MERCIFUL?’

    So, I whipped up a polenta, mostly because I was craving grits and I’ll let you in on a little secret… they are and always have been one and the same. Irresistible on my second drink, just ask anyone I’ve shamelessly hit on, I stirred the pot and began to twang melancholy as Dolly, “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.”

    Dancing barefoot in one’s own living room provides all the benefits of a Pilates course or an extramarital affair with none of that nasty documentable collateral damage and I am nothing if not prudent in my pursuits. The solitude of sleep did not elude me, furthermore it elucidated a dream from my childhood.

    Hours before church I awoke with a lurch to the bleat of an atypical fauna for the sauna that is my beloved Big Easy. A live goat was yoked to a wagon loaded with lovingly hand decorated eggs and sticky store-bought jelly beans. From the centre of this embarrassment of riches, the obligatory bunny leaned toward me like a chocolate Tower of Pisa. Its stature notably stunted by the harsh amputation of what had been fine upstanding ears. Still partially wrapped in jewel toned tin foil, the spoiled candy was a solemn crime scene yet somehow reassuring in that its carnage by friendly fire was an annual event.

    This animal sacrifice was no trespass by a neighbouring spaniel, fancy treats foraged while we ate our porridge. No indeed, it was none other than the predictable ritual of our pedigreed bitch. The eternally fertile Irish Setter, Kathleen Haggerty O’Shane, whose thirteen pups had been hijacked under cover of darkness was addicted. Probably on account of those bags of Oreo cookies I shared with her on a regular basis.

    It was not our habit to bet if she’d get the rabbit, just when. Only then did we pause in alarm for the second act. Not charming at all in fact, while the goat, who had taken this opportunity to escape, was being confiscated by local authorities, our impeccably bred show dog’s finale included an overwhelming urge to purge her decadent sins with a roiling encore of blood and semi-digested chocolate-soiled tin regurgitated across the floor. Cave Canem.

    Years pass and now I’m an extra-cold Cava sippin’ lass livin’ ass backwards but six hours ahead of the time zone I left behind. The import tax on Champagne resigns me to Spanish bubbles for washing away my troubles with a lava-like curry. I write in a hurry because no matter how bold, the past becomes a blur and then you’re just old. It’s late and I’d hate to mention how many Mardi Gras I might’ve seen. It’s not the naughty nights that get you, but more the mournings.

    Cancer snuffed another friend on Friday. Felt like a power failure and I can’t find the phone number to report the fault. Alternatively, I’m thinking Lent put a dent in my drinking year. At least the feast of Easter promises a queer quench for that wrenching thirst.

    Easter is called Pâque in French and in Louisiana’s patois, especially around Ascension Parish like Lafayette, ‘pâque-ing’ is a verb that refers to a sort of seasonal combat. Kissing cousins bang boiled eggs that, in anticipation, were dyed on Good Friday. We bang’em until one breaks. See, that’s the loser and beware because next time, it could be you.

    If you were from Orleans Parish like me, at this stage you’d break into a funk tune by The Mighty Meters, ‘HEY POCKY WAY.’ The illustrious musician, Dr. John, explains: ‘This talk was the Indians’ own Creole language, part French, part Spanish, part Choctaw, part Yoruba, and part mystery to an outsider like me. What the first one said basically was, ‘Where yaatt, bro?’ or the like. And the second one said, ‘Everything’s oaks and herbs’ – which means everything’s cool because they had smoke lots of herbs. If the second one responded ‘No om bah way,’ then y’all had problems…

    Saw my first lambing, leaning on a doorjamb here in Wicklow. Don’t forget Joaquin, bein’ a prophet of PETA, wouldn’t have watched the wool I’d always worn being born in the dappled light of a chapel-like barn. It’s the darndest thing to recall my Crescent City slicker’s eyes finally falling on a supersized old poster of Bertie Ahern looking unconcerned. Ain’t no harm in nailing him way up there in the rarefied air, with spare farming gear. After all, Christ rhymes with heist.

    Libations risen from Malin to Mizen Head, the grateful dead will come back one day and like pearls before swine, even porcupines and protestants will line up in designer tops. The corks popped should sop every drop of the popish black pool while the so-called cool twine their way like vines exhausted by Pentecost. When the last ground seems lost, between you, me and Jesus, even he knew it’s no use hanging around.

    Amazingly, I awoke safe under a duvet in bed. Miraculous, mostly because my mandatory mid-century modern spiral staircase whose perilous design challenges both the sensual and sober, lends that compulsory edge for this over-examined life I’ve yet to deem not worth living.

    It’s dawn and smoking the last cigarette in the house, a prayer comes into my head… ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to …’ Never mind that. Take me to the river. Considering the difference between the words slaughter and laughter is a single  ‘S’, a letter of the alphabet which also sits, like a little snake, at the beginning of the word ‘sacrifice’, my advice to you is : Never let’em get your goat.

  • Forest

    Nightfalls.
    Creatures are on the move,
    Leaping, dancing, diving, digging, loving
    that’s the art of living, that’s the art of dying.
    Machines are slowing down
    Cars, trains, ships, aeroplanes
    I’m coming in now to land, from all those names
    the Pacific, the Wild Atlantic way,
    the Mediterranean, the Indian and Arctic Oceans
    the South China Sea, Caribbean, the Arabian Sea.
    Now I see it – the Irish Sea,
    the sea by my city where I was born
    Cities seems old when we are young,
    And young when we are old
    There’s always something left over from the past
    Which can turn out to be the future
    Reaching the exit doors to those bittersweet parties, it’s often like life
    People don’t really meet until they have to say goodbye.

    I want to wake up to something new
    I want to wake up to something old
    I want to go with you, I want to run with you
    Away from the city, away from the chatter
    And into the green land, into the primal wildness
    To every place we ever dreamed
    And every place we never dreamed

    ***

    To the trees, the trees, the trees, the trees, the trees
    the trees, the trees, the trees, the trees, the trees
    I throw my life to the trees, to the earth, to the breeze
    Come into the forest and relish the trees
    Lie down next to me
    Open up to this evolving polyphony
    Sycamores, Silver Birch, Oak and Yew
    Baobab, Jacaranda, Sequoia
    Hazel, Ash, the Weeping Willow
    Holly, Hawthorn, the Sumaúma queen
    Oh let us breathe
    These are my prayers in layers
    In words that burn all the thumping time

    Why do we walk deeper into the forest?
    Why do we walk deeper into the forest?
    I don’t know what nature is
    I don’t know what nature is
    So I’ll sing, yes I’ll sing it
    The plays, plots and ploys of living
    The plays, plots and ploys of dying
    There are so many days that have not yet broken
    There are so many days that have not yet opened
    I was rushing towards somewhere I always want to be
    I was rushing towards somewhere I always wanted to see
    Let us walk deeper into the forest
    Out here there are big trees
    Out here there are small trees
    Out here there are strange trees
    Out here
    These lands are lush and I was lost
    Big space is here and everything is clear

    ***

    Times of mass extinctions and the great shame
    I’m staying with the trouble
    I’m staying with the trouble
    Madness, machines, riverines
    Erething above ground in this book of breathings
    Sham or shunner in kicking time
    Neither beginning nor ending
    We are in the middle of things
    We are in the middle of things
    I exist only when I sing
    I exist only when I sing
    We are not insane, we are not insane
    We are not insane, we are not insane

    Why do you walk deeper into the forest?
    Why do you walk deeper into the forest?
    To dream, to dream
    This contaminating diversity reeling of cacophony
    “It is not down in any map; true places never are”
    The water of this face has flowed
    Let us go back into the trees
    Let us go back into the water
    Do you hear what I’m seeing?
    Listen to the sound
    Listen to the river
    Listen to the trees
    Listen

    ***

    Adrift
    in these ruins, we are all stories
    in the sticky jungle, there is no time, only dark thrilling space
    something in us is born, something in us remains,
    in the depths of dreams, and up there
    I say: “hello moon … hello sun and stars”
    childhood memories are returning
    did we reach that place?
    oh melancholy me, remnants of the gods, moods, sounds, shadows, oblivion
    a subterranean woman is at work: tunneling, mining, undermining
    I can see her with my theatre eye
    there are rooms filled with chords and sonatas
    there are fields filled with flowers and grasshoppers
    there is a girl who wanted confirmation and a boy who was afraid
    never before has there been such an open sea
    never before did I see so many trees
    the endlessness of the forest swallowed up my consciousness
    take me, eat me, drink me, drown me
    we are all strangers now
    we are all tyrants now
    we are all shamans now
    we are all charlatans now
    it’s all good. the animals are here.

    The Loafing Heroes: https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com/

  • Musician of the Month – Bartholomew Ryan of The Loafing Heroes

    ‘Descend the stairs, bend your legs, melting one by one. / Open your mouth to the snake in the sand, swallowing you one by one.’ So begins the first single from our latest album. It’s one of my treasured moments in the meandering Loafing Heroes journey: in how it came about, how it was constructed, the unfolding of its words and arrangement, and how it sounds on the record.

    “Stairs” sums up much of what I dream about with this music, its vision and where I’m at – then and now. Because, really, however much I say this is the end of a project, or that it is the beginning of a new one; we are really, always, in a way, wrenched into the middle of things, into the middle of life.

    Feeling heartbroken at the end of a relationship, trying to come to terms with the death of a loved one, suddenly hearing by accident a special song from a moment in your life, or catching a smell that brings you somewhere, smothering you with longing, nostalgia, a great sadness or joy – these all throw me into the middle of things, into the middle of life.

    We are suddenly tuning in again – or rather – we may feel that we are spectacularly out of tune with the regular speed of day-to-day, calculative life, and in tune for a moment with another world that is alarmingly alive.

    Months can go by when no new song emerges, as an energy once bubbling over deserts you, and you think, well, that’s the end of that. Or, perhaps you say that I must find a way to begin again, do something new. And then it comes.

    Sometimes all it takes is to hear someone speak, watch a concert, see someone dance, or travel in the countryside away from the chatter of the city. In my case, the intervention came in the form of a visiting friend called Jonathan.

    Along the great river

    After a lifetime thinking about it, I had been travelling along the great river Amazon for almost 3000km, listening to the mesmerizing cacophony, seeing the green, green, green of all the jungle, and following the trail of an extraordinary human called Roger Casement. After making it back to Europe, I went straight on a tour with the band to Ireland for two weeks, and then finally returned to my apartment in Lisbon.

    I just wanted to be alone for a few days after being in such close quarters with people on the road. But Jonathan was staying at my place and he was still there. He was full of beans and delighted to see me, and yet he could quickly see that I was a little moody and withdrawn.

    But that wouldn’t stop him. He knew that I hadn’t written a song in at least six months. So that evening, we forced ourselves to play a game. He offered me three words – ‘hair’, ‘software’ and ‘snake’; a chord to begin; and thirty minutes to come up with something. That’s how the song ‘Stairs’ came about.

    I was thrown into the middle of things – I found myself diving, drowning and then submerged in the interlude, and suddenly I was singing about my hair being on fire and my skin turning to water. It was exhilarating, liberating, revealing. For me, that is what making music is all about. And if you can connect that creation and performance with someone else – then it really is alive.

    Jaime McGill of The Loafing Heroes Image © Sebastian Urzendowsky.

    Beginnings, endings, interludes

    I began The Loafing Heroes back when I was living in Denmark doing a Phd on Kierkegaard, where I met a wandering soul called Jamie from Arizona. We started making music together and recording the first Loafing Heroes songs.

    Four years later, I was living in Berlin pursuing a career as a philosophy lecturer wondering where to go next with the music. The spirit of The Loafing Heroes is that it morphs with the people that have come in and out over the years. This allows diverse flavours and colours to emerge and fade away along the trail.

    We recorded three albums in Berlin: Unterwegs (2009), Chula (2010) and Planets (2011). With Jonathan – yes the same one (from Berlin), another Jaime (this one from Nebraska), and Noni (from Dublin).

    My dear friend and gifted songwriter Michael Hall whom we all affectionately called Big Bear produced the first album (Unterwegs) and was present throughout the album. He died tragically in 2013, yet his ghost continues to haunt and inspire us.

    After four years, we all found ourselves going in different directions. I headed down to Lisbon to begin a research project on the enchanting poet of multiplicity – Fernando Pessoa; Jonathan formed another band called Fenster that have gone on to record some really special experimental pop music; Noni set off to work on solar energy in Rwanda; while Jaime remained for the time being in Berlin, but would remain committed and connected to The Loafing Heroes. She plays the bass clarinet – one of the trademark sounds of the band over the last ten years – and has recorded on all of our six albums.

    The three other albums were recorded while based in Lisbon (Crossing the Threshold [2014], The Baron in the Trees [2016] and Meandertales [2019]). I met Portuguese novelist João Tordo on my first night in the city, and he became a new loafing hero, and played double bass on the two albums before Meandertales.

    I glimpsed Judith with a violin on her back one night at The Lisbon Players Theatre, and soon she was playing with us too. From Germany, Judith actually makes her own violins and violas, and has played on all three of the last albums.

    Judith Retzlik of the Loafing Heroes, Image © Emiliano Perillo.

    Other musicians and friends have weaved in and out, but before Judith left Lisbon to return to Germany she introduced me to Giulia with a plan for her to join. From Italy, Giulia is now at the centre of the band, playing autoharp, piano, percussion, concertina, and singing and writing songs on the last two albums.

    To complete this crooked cosmopolitan tale, four of our albums have been produced and mixed by our very talented, generous comrade and friend from Greece – Tadklimp.

    Giulia Gallina of the Loafing Heroes. Image © Lucia Borro

    Chaosmos

    Many of the songs have evolved from various strange places; on the one hand, from travelling through vast expansive landscapes; and, on the other, hiding away in dark melancholy, verging on paralysis, in the interiors of a room that can sometimes seem like a shrinking capsule.

    Loafing is always essential in an age of increasing speed, technological overload, psychological detachment and environmental collapse – as we humans exhaust everything under the sun.

    Let’s slow down. Let’s wander. Let’s see and think anew, and laugh. Let’s channel and imbibe energy not into potency, possibility and power; but rather as actual, as here and now, in everything that exists. Energy as a passive ‘is’.

    These twelve new songs (constructed by Giulia, Judith, Jaime and I), from our new album under the title Meandertales, encompass the distorted fairytale and dream-folk that throw us into the middle of life. In the totality and disintegration of chaosmos, in this loafing musical endeavor, I work and play to transform my energetic pessimism into a subversive joy.

    Forthcoming Shows
    Friday, 12th of April: Clonskeagh Castle, Dublin, Ireland.
    Saturday, 13th of April, Bello Bar, Dublin, Ireland. (IRISH ALBUM LAUNCH)
    Sunday, 14th of April, Pot Duggans, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, Ireland.
    Tuesday, 16th of April, Tech Amergin, Waterville, Co. Kerry, Ireland.
    Friday, 19th of April,MUSICBOX, Lisbon, Portugal. (PORTUGUESE ALBUM LAUNCH)    ,

    Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon (http://www.ifilnova.pt/pages/bartholomew-ryan) and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes (http://www.theloafingheroes.com)

    Feature Image: Otwin Biernat

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

     

  • Old School

    I felt him sliver under my shirt as she belted me in with a quicksilver click. The shoulder strap muffled my mouth and eclipsed an eye. Mom sipped her coffee, singing along to the song on the radio, ‘One less egg to fry … ’ Only half of what lay ahead was in sight, but one wide eye watched her cigarette ashes take flight and land in one hundred percent humidity on the dashboard. Sticky plastic sword in hand, I grappled with an apple for breakfast in our Volkswagen, spieling, ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ all the way uptown. The Beetle was a shade of blue I think you’d call Tiffany.

    The epiphany that something sublime writhed round my collarbone, that I hadn’t come alone occurred before lunchtime. Frank and furtive, Alfred recoiled pretzel-like in the well of my tender clavicle, his tiny tongue darting at everyone in my kindergarten. Fraulein’s wrists regrettably garbled into a sort of swastika, as she hissed, ‘It won’t be long now.’ The kids thronged to see me prove the venomous Frau wrong. To her dismay, I displayed his length, with all the strength of my Lilliputian limbs. Adamant even, that while he had not a leg to stand on, my king snake, Alfred the Great’s congenital regalia exhibited double genitalia. I was only bested by Mom’s suggestion I stroll my two-penised pet in the yard. I’d hardly let go when he stole away, and you know, I bet she planned the hole thing.

    ‘Roll’ simpered the director. I’d been pimped and primped, as per the script. It was cool to skip school and spend all day in a pool of hot light. The blazing burlesque began with the future governor grilling me over an antique desk. He gave me the third degree and being only four, I took The Fifth. If the camera had closed in tightly on Edwin Edwards, it might’ve seen the politician took pains to burn book learning into my brain. The necessary votes were sustained, note not without substantial commercial gain. The campaign to elect the high roller hit a nerve. As 50th Governor of Louisiana he served an unheard of four terms during a legendary sixteen years. I fear that’s longer than he spent pent up in federal prison for conspiracy, money laundering, racketeering, extortion and fraud. The ‘Silver Zipper’ is still lauded to this day for his rebuke of the KKK’s David Duke, ‘We’ve both been wizards under the sheets.’ This is my ode to a sweltering state still sheltered by Napoleonic Code.

    A child is a sponge, able to absorb the plethora of Playboy and Cosmopolitan’s iconic chronicles accumulating on the coffee table. These juicy pages, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare’s complete works and other tearjerkers make for a berserk library. Wary I’d acquired precocious social skills, my father enrolled me in an experimental public school program where pupils deemed pliable were thrilled to be drilled under controlled conditions. Seditious teaching techniques were scrutinized, I expect for their effect on us like fruit flies in an elite Petrie dish. We learned Latin in togas, and outside in the arena, laughing like hyenas, lay the hoi polloi. We graduated to the vulgar gate of a junior high school, massive and without barriers to entry, except for the metal detectors at the door. The Creole elite monopolized the air-conditioned gym, while the Latinos rolled in the leafy shade of live oak trees outside. One hot day, I pushed a fellow, pell-mell, out of a second floor window, garnering for myself an enduring infamy as a ruffian, a femme fatale, gone feral. Maintaining my new found tough talking notoriety mortified my mother. Veering around in her Volvo, she voiced her vexation that my vocabulary had evolved.

    Mom resolved to commit me for a stint at a sporty Spartan school, just south of Bayou Sauvage. Not for fauves, was this amply proportioned concentration camp on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, presided over by a megalomaniac vegan grammarian on mega-doses of vitamin C. At lunch break, saving me for last, Mr. Bentham spanked the bad boys’ backsides, swinging that baseball bat in a tiny room at the top of a tower, underpinned by bunkers where a curious curriculum was cobbled together by his wife. It operated like a panopticon, from which he took a jocular view through his binoculars. Noontime came soon enough, confined with the solitary Dr and his most contrary students. Stockholm syndrome smarts, but art transmogrifies the purge of pubescence, and it seems there’s really no scourge for true incandescence.

    The time was right to wear black and white. I was in like Flynn with the Dominicans. The inquisitive sisters came from Dublin’s Cabra convent, to cope with girls who hoped to propagate with Jesuit-made men. Something about that sub-tropically pugnacious khaki uniform issued by Saint Ignatius drove me right up the nearest palm tree. So much better was it built than our off-kilter tweedy chastity belts, I confess to cross-dressing. Borrowed one from a boy named Boyle. The nuns were sore. Defrocked my puerile attire at the door, but not before Harry Connick Jr picked me out. Don’t doubt he had sonic pitch way before he got hitched. Back then, the seminarian parked his bike on my porch. We sat scorching on the swing, talking about most anything from Buddha to the birds and the bees. Pleased as rum punch, Harry had that hunch to go hear the now dearly departed Hunter S. Thompson at Tulane University. Perverse Promethean. Slurred convictions. Should we blur fact with friction? Bless the good doctor’s heart, before I tested his best thesis, Hunter self-canonised. Rest in pieces.

    Image (c) Mike Skinner.

    Without a real care in the world, I twirled my pencil and stared at the exchange student’s daring hairdo. It was an iron curtain beehive and I didn’t behave. I connived to perform a vivisection, a dissection on something alive. Why stab a frog when you can go whole hog on the foreigner? Who knew she had haemophilia? My heresy hastened a schism with Superior Sister Delia. Habitual offenders get sequestered until the end of the semester. Clearly the clergy weren’t big on surgery, and saw me as the straw that broke the Carmelite’s back. Sacked in March, I was informed the Archdiocese would have one girl less.

    Yes, knowing the New Testament by heart, I had a strong start at my next school. When they mentioned the Second Coming I didn’t dumb down. A class clown, I waywardly won the award for Wit and asked the valedictorian to the prom. A ticking bomb squad, we patrolled the bars in a police car. Arguably an all-nighter, it was getting lighter when I limped in to the parents. An errant heir, in their purview, I’d scantly measured my curfew, and was out of control, ergo, out on my ear. No clocks to tick-tock, no loud locks to click, nor bones to pick. Newly emancipated, it went undebated, I dinner dated and drank Chablis insatiably.

    The class voted me Best Personality. There was no award for promiscuous thighs, but the guys prophesied when my dimples were done I’d contemplate a wimple. Be a nun, take the cloth. In a slothful simulation, one day I’ll mirror the moth. Before it’s too late, negate earthly aggravation, and commune with the moon for celestial navigation.

    Did the university need another Margaret Mead, who can’t stand the ant in Anthropology? Documentaries about Mbuti Pygmies put a bee in my bonnet, and I wrote sonnets about insects being my bugaboo. Through Totem and Taboo, I found Freud, the human zoo and allow me to assure you in our age, the cage is online.

    Flunking math, my path went west, for the best PhD at a mountain monastery. Those Jesuits wouldn’t quit till I’d got the gist of Psychology. One day my professor tidied his toupee, promising that with a little private practice he could improve my score by 69. I dodged the codger’s inclination to roger. Not a priest in the least, he’d hoisted his own petard, ignited by my vapid paper, ‘The Southern Belle: An Exaggerated Sex Role and its Indications for Therapy’.

    God gave me sisters, but I relate to baroque A-listers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Mexico’s Tenth Muse was a philosophical feminist who knew foolish men were led by a thread through love’s labyrinth. Not full of papal bull, through a plague this phoenix flew till she too was dead. Would Wicklow Head’s Pharos light the shipwreck of my lustrated soul’s intellect? Erudite. An Anchorite. Can I join that club? A Petrarchan archetype parked at the pub, gallivanting like Dante. A dilettante, my Ezra Pound of flesh extracted, exacting in the end. Outspoken. Unbroken. A bar nun.

    I hear after the hurricane hit New Orleans, some of the Dominican mendicants came back to their convent in Ireland. I hear too, albino crawfish are indigenous to our bit of the Liffey. The river runs under this old school house where I live, and shiver about how much there is to know. So I claw my way to the water’s edge on dodgy days and see no smart salmon but I crane for cunning crustaceans. Trust the clever are forever caught up in what we’re taught, lest our thoughts paint palimpsests. Suggest we cut class but keep an eye out for that old snake in the grass.

    Featured Image (c) Sonny Carter.

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  • ‘Don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’

    Picture this scene. Next to a Martello tower, a grimy concrete shelter below which a motley crew, ranging from whooping lads to fragile ladies, make their way, often daily, into the ocean at Seapoint, Dublin. Some swim significant distances – measured in buoys and other landmarks – others simply ‘take the waters’. There are New Irish here, while native Dubliners mix easily with country friends, in the collective gasp before wading in.

    I have visited the sea most days so far this winter. It is the dread of the cold, not the cold itself that holds the most fear. Once enclosed by the water my limbs thrash a course, and I am no longer conscious of the temperature. That is as long as I go in every day. If I leave it for any length, the cold will sting, even in the summer months.

    Is this a sport I wonder? There is no zero sum game of winners and losers. No match reports. No fandom. But there is conviviality, life affirmation, fitness and even a boost to the immune system I have been told. But something deeper motivates my immersions, and any health benefits are tangential.

    I am dreading the months of January, February and March. It is hard to contemplate temperatures that will have dropped a further three or four degrees to eight degrees.[i] Remarkably, the average sea temperatures in December is higher than in May, when the difference between air and water could be fifteen degrees. This month the water is often warmer than the air, although you lose heat a lot quicker without your clothes on.

    Also this month the solstice coincides with a full moon. I have no idea if this has a symbolic significance. What I do know is that swimming with a crowd during a full moon is great craic. I have attended these lantern-lit gatherings for the past two months, and am hoping to brave it again on the 21st. One trick to stave off hypothermia is to bring along a hot water bottle to pour over extremities afterwards, making sure to avoid giving yourself a scalding.

    I have just started wearing protective gloves – which I found on the street – into the water. It makes quite a difference to my hands on the twenty-five minute cycle home. I am thinking of acquiring booties that I see other people wear, but that would involve a financial investment in this lowest maintenance of sports. Really all you need are togs, towel and a good dollop of madness.

    I take pleasure in seeing an array of birdlife by the seashore: there are the usual suspects of gulls and cormorants – which I now see are colonising the River Dodder near where I live as fish numbers decline in the sea – but also Brent Geese along with Waders some of which make their way from Iceland, so I guess they find our waters positively balmy! It is shocking to hear that shards of plastic are affecting these migrants’ welfare.[ii]

    Most days I take a picture from the same spot overlooking the Poolbeg stacks. I do wonder about posting these on social media, but I have available to me the superb technology of a telephone, which takes fine pictures of sky, sea and land converging. Obviously in the process I am selling the platform of an irresponsible multinational, but cannot the same be said of any author whose book is on display in a chain store? I just want to convey the beauty of my city and its hinterland, and how we should treasure the wildlife, and examine carefully issues like the emissions coming from that eerie incinerator by the stacks.

    This summer my mother died. Losing a parent is generally a seismic life experience. I think my dedication to the swimming has had something to do with that. Cycling to and from Seapoint I pass by places I associate with her. It is sad, but I don’t want to avoid it.

    When my mother went into a hospice I immediately returned from the UK where I had been working. The following day she said: ‘don’t let me stop you from going for a swim’, much to our amusement. Two days later she passed away.

    The other landmark near where I swim is Dun Laoghaire pier. It is so much a part of the geography of this place that it seems timeless, but it was built on the initiative of a private citizen, Richard Toucher, a Norwegian sailor who settled in Dublin, passing away in 1841. He provided, at great personal expense, most of the granite for the building of the harbour. This philanthropic enterprise saved many lives, and now provides a bit of shelter as we swim at Seapoint, where it can still get quite choppy.

    This is an extract from one of his letters:

    I write not for fame, but for utility. It is my aim rather to be understood than admired. To elegance of composition I aspire not. But I have some nautical experience…and…the idea of an Asylum Port at Dunleary is ever first in my thoughts.

    The Merchants, Ship Owners and Ship-Masters of Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport, Harrington and Parton, are also preparing a petition to be presented to His Grace The Duke of Richmond, praying his aid and support for the erection of this much wanted pier at Dunleary. This I am not astonished at, when I reflect how many of their relatives have been lost on the coast of our Bay, the numbers of widows and fatherless children that are left to bemoan that this pier had not long since been built, which would have saved to them what was in this life most valuable.

    For his troubles Richard Toucher died a bankrupt.[iii] We recall his great legacy today, this Cassandra Voice, who devoted his fortune to the continuing benefit of others.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

    [i] ‘Dublin Sea Temperature’, Global Sea Temperature, https://www.seatemperature.org/europe/ireland/dublin.htm, accessed 13/12/18.

    [ii] Tim O’Brien, ‘Plastic shards from Dún Laoghaire spill found in Donabate’, Irish Times, 12th of November, 2018.

    [iii] Tom Conlon, ‘Richard Toutcher – the case for a memorial’, Dún Laoghaire Harbour Bicentenary, January 23rd, 2018. http://dlharbour200.ie/richard-toutcher-the-case-for-a-memorial/, accessed 13/11/18.