The Ice Moon

The shameful sacrifice of Greece to the gods of the market

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:13:50 +0000

The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity.

The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. A 32% cut in the minimum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s – the minimum wage in Greece is around €500 per month, well below a living wage in that economy. Unemployment for 15-24 year olds was 43.1% last April - it will have risen considerably since then. Overall unemployment has increased to over 20%. The ‘bail-out’ demands cuts to pensions and public service pay, wholesale privatisation of state assets – a fire-sale, since the global market is close to rock bottom – cuts to public services including health, social welfare and education. The schools are running out of books. There were (in 2010) 40% cuts in the public health budget. The whole to be supervised by people other than the Greeks. An entire disciplinary and punishment system.

The EU is bailing out of Greece.

When we casually use a term like ‘bail-out’, it is important to remember that it is not people who are being bailed out, or at least not the Greek people. The bail-out will not save a single Greek life. The opposite is the case. What is being ‘bailed-out’ is the global financial system, including the banks, hedge funds and pension funds of the other EU members states, and it is the Greek people who are being ordered to pay – in money, time, physical pain, hopelessness, and missed educational opportunities.

The relatively neutral, even Stoic, term ‘austerity’, is a gross insult to the Greek people. This is not austerity; at best it is callousness.

Every intelligent observer is agreed that cuts do not produce growth. The highest rate of Growth in the EU at present is in Poland where massive public investment is driving the economy. GDP is declining or barely moving among the ‘austerity’ nations, including the UK.

In essence, this crisis is a failure of the EU states to show solidarity in the face of an onslaught from the financial markets. At first glance this seems to be a very simple fight. In one corner you have nation states, which have the well-being of their citizens as their raison d’être; in the other you have global capitalism as represented by the financial markets, which has the wealth of a tiny few as its raison d’être. But the nation state has, for a considerable time, identified itself with those same markets. States have agreed to see themselves as economies rather than societies. More recently we have been led to believe that the market alone can provide everything the citizen needs and much more efficiently than the structures that the citizens normally rely on and which they have, over generations, erected as protections against the revenge of the market.

This is the triumph of capitalism, that it has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world.

It has led to the undoing of two hundred years of struggle between ordinary people and billionaires. Trade unions didn’t appear overnight, they were a response to exploitation. Workers are not protected in their workplace by capitalists, they are protected by the laws won by struggle against the capitalist. Old people do not die in the streets because charity has saved them; it is because two hundred years of struggle has brought us the old age pension and public health. None of this would have happened if people had identified with the super-rich of 1812.

Now we see capitalism at its most triumphant. Greek police beat Greek people in order to impose the will of the banks and hedge-funds. The EU member states, including Ireland, are the middleman, the Quislings of Capital. Rather than reach out a hand of solidarity, we say, Better them than us.

As if the global markets will choose to pass on Ireland once Greece has been destroyed. Solidarity is not just compassion for ones fellow man; it is also materialist self-interest. One for all and all for one. We stand or fall together. There is strength in unity.

Instead we have decided to sacrifice the Greek people to the market in the hope that our sacrifice will appease the gods of speculation. We condemn them to misery and poverty to keep Standard and Poor off our backs.

But we have miscalculated. Firstly, the communist left currently stands at 42% in the polls, PASOK at 8%. PASOK (the leading party in government) will vanish and a combination of real left-wing parties will win the next election. They will not bend the knee and put their heads on our block.

It seems to me now that Greece will withdraw from the Euro and default on its debt. Who knows what will happen to it then, but it can hardly be much worse than what we want from them, and at least it will be something of their own choosing. The speculators will then take a little time to consider which of the other economies to bet on. Perhaps then the Irish government will regret its lack of solidarity. Whatever happens, our behaviour and that of our EU compatriots has been shameful.

Which side are we on?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:47:38 +0000

This is how ‘austerity’ plays out in Syntagma Square, Athens. Whereas in Ireland...

Old Kenny Apologises For Ireland to the Gintry

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:32:44 +0000

In the presence of the gentry, Old Kenny the peasant, doffed his cap, crooked his knee, arranged his face in an expression of obsequious servility and said: 'Savin' yer presence, yer honours, but sure 'tis all our own fault, for we're a feckless nation an' not used at all at all to the ways of such as yer honours and when we got the few shillings, sure we went to the divil altogether, for such drinkin' an' spendin' an buyin' an' sellin' as you'd niver see in a dacent place like yer honours do have. What'll we do at all? Aren't we the terrible crowd altogether! Have pity on us, yer honours, for we're only savages, we're heathens for the drink an' buyin' up land an' houses. Our only salvation is if yer honours could see yer way to punishin' us for to make dacent people of us agin. Ochón is mo bhrón, but we're the divil's own people.'

The gentry looked on in distaste at this example of unregenerate sycophancy and hypocrisy and afterwards agreed that a nation so fatuous and servile deserved to be led by Old Kenny and his like. One gentleman repeated the old truism that ‘a people gets the government it deserves, not the government it wants’. In this case, observed another, they got both. Yet a third, this time a lady, was heard to ask the question: But didn’t somebody tell me that old Kenny was fond of saying things like ‘We are a proud people’...?

Tottenham and Beyond: neoliberal riots and the possibility of politics

Tue, 9 Aug 2011 11:09:15 +0100

One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the context of the present rioting in London is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more generously ‘disaffected youth’. All the talk from Cameron and his cohorts is of crime and punishment and ‘the full force of the law’ - as if these young people did not encounter the full force of the law on a daily basis. We are told variously that there is no political context, no political motive, no political enemy – it is ‘criminality pure and simple’. This is because violence against the police (and therefore the state) is not considered in itself to be political. It is because the envy of, the desire for and the acquisition of luxury goods such as plasma TVs and jewellery is not considered political. The political class and the commentariat cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of the people who live in areas like Tottenham where Tory cuts are closing youth centres, which suffer massive unemployment even while the City is booming, and which are the objects of legislation designed to disadvantage them even further.

On the other hand, the neoliberal state functions primarily as a way of facilitating the accumulation of wealth and hence luxury goods. The purpose of the state, neoliberal theory tells us, is to enable business and industry to function profitably and to this end it must undertake certain activities that business and industry cannot reasonably be expected to make a profit from - road building, for example, or providing a police force – although, as profit margins shrink and markets are flooded by competitors, even these sacred state functions are being ‘de-regulated’ or privatised to allow for profit-making companies to take them over. The proposed privatisation of the prison-service is an example, as is the continuous drive to open education up to exploitation by computer companies. It’s hardly worth mentioning the crazy argument that the NHS in the UK is ‘broken’ and the Tory programme of opening it up to supposedly cheaper and more efficient profit-making companies - despite the fact that all the studies show that the NHS is the most efficient and cost-effective way of delivering health care.

So capitalism is looting the public sphere. Services that citizens have for a hundred or more years considered to be public goods and not to be exploited for the profit of a few – health care, care of the elderly, education, unemployment benefit, old-age pensions, fresh water, sewers, waste disposal, roads and footpaths, urban and rural planning, the postal service, the telephone service, the police, and so on – are subject to systematic and sustained pressure aimed at breaking the link between the citizen and the service. No longer should we think of these things as ‘ours’, except in the sense that we can say a bank is ours. These things are provided to us as goods and services by companies which exercise their right to make a profit out of them – out of us really, out of our pain, our parent’s old age, our children’s childhood, our money troubles, our environment. Citizens are to be redefined as consumers of services. The sole function of the state is to regulate the activities of companies so that monopolies do not develop.

The police function as the guarantor of profit. The police are ‘ours’ only in the way the taxman is ours. The police thus find themselves increasingly (for it was ever thus) with their backs to the corporate wall facing a disinherited citizenry for whom the state is a hostile force. This makes the police political for it is a mistake to think that the looting of the public sphere by corporations and individuals is not political. Of course, nobody on the corporation side wants to call it that. They want it to be understood as common sense. The state is ‘broken’, they say, or it has ‘failed’. Only profit-making companies can do the job efficiently and give good value for money to the consumer. What they really mean is ‘We’re going to take the money and run’. When you’re down and out, feeling low, check your credit rating.

At a time when the gap between the rich and the poor is at an historic high, higher than it was in the nineteenth century when capitalism was at its peak, is it any surprise that unemployed young men from Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham or Peckham have learned these lessons well? In the event of the breakdown of the state, keep your eye on the main chance. Gold is at an all-time high now, it’s where all the smart investors are going. They take their money and run. There’s always a market for cool TVs, especially with the Olympics coming up – just up the road from Tottenham as it happens. If you’re not in you can’t win. So get in there and take what you can. In the end of the day it’s just business. From MacDonald’s to the ‘Payday loans’ and ‘we buy gold’ companies that advertise all over East and South London, the message is clear: ‘The only value we place on you is your ability to pay. Anyone who can’t afford to pay is a scrounger, a scum, a chavvy bastards, a parasite.’

In this world the police are just another form of violence – look at what they did to the anti-cuts marchers. They are the state’s weapon of choice for disciplining disaffected youth, for criminalising dissent and for protecting profit. They’re not playing the latter role very effectively in London at present, but they’re worked hard at the others, which are easier picking. The recent gaol sentence of 16 months for Charlie Gilmour for supposedly violent acts during the recent anti-cuts protest, the worst of which acts seem to have involved throwing a dustbin at Prince Charles’ Rolls Royce and swinging from a flagstaff, contrasts sharply with the fact that no policeman has ever been convicted for the death in custody of a black person. The shooting dead of a black man in a mini-cab in Ferry Lane, Tottenham is all of a piece with this repressive function. We now know that there is no evidence to support the police alibi that Mark Duggan fired first. Whether or not he was a gangster, as the police believed, the fact is they would never have shot a bank director. Nevertheless, the banker is the obverse of the coin that has Mark Duggan’s face on it. The closure of three-quarters of the youth centres in Tottenham by the present Tory government is directly linked to the supposed stability of the UK economy. The price of the banker’s home is paid by the young citizens of North and South London. Today, on RTE’s LIveline programme I heard a man who lived in London describe the rioters as ‘shopping with our money’. That works both ways. The banker shops with money that should have gone to the communities of Tottenham, Clapham, Hackney ...

That the rioters have only tentatively made that connection is not their fault. If I were the Tory government and their criers-in I would dread the day that the disaffected youth makes a more accurate assessment of their oppressor, when they will move on from the enemy in their face (the police) to the enemy behind the one-way windows and ‘iconic’ buildings. That they have repeatedly targeted the big multinational chains – Topshop, Hugo Boss, MacDonald’s, Sony, and Carpetright (Chairman Lord Harris of Peckham, Conservative Party donor and Member of House of Lords), and that there have been ‘disturbances’ in Oxford Street is significant. In the meantime they live the poor kid’s version of the neoliberal dream, shopping ‘with our money’ in all the best places, bringing home the latest in sports shoes, technology and that best of all investments, gold.

There is nothing mindless about this violence. It is intelligent, technological and well-organised. Tactically, the rioters have outfoxed the much stronger police force and the intelligence services. It is destructive of community life certainly, brutally hard on small shopkeepers and people living on or near the high streets, but is it any more destructive than permanent unemployment, hopelessness and the conviction that the state has abandoned you in favour of the Stock Exchange? That these young people have turned on the most immediate symbols of power and wealth and that they want some of it for themselves makes these riots no worse than the destruction undertaken by Thatcher or beginning under Cameron. And they are quintessentially neoliberal because these young people have absorbed the dictum that greed is good, that you take what you can, that the powerful shall inherit the earth.

Buried in there, under all the false consciousness, there is still a measure of anger deriving from the increasing humiliation of themselves and their parents and their communities. It is accompanied by a certainty that the toffs of the Tory party, the owners of multinational corporations and the police are their enemies. The structure of the thing may not be very clear to them, but they feel its effects. Their lives are looted. They have nothing to lose.

But if this brave and powerful speaker from Hackney has her way they may find a better analysis. ‘Get real black people,’ she says, ‘if we’re fighting for a fucking cause we’re fighting for a fucking cause’. She knows that the riots are political, but it’s the wrong politics at the moment. They’re fighting for the wrong cause. Writer Darcus Howe says so too (this video may be taken down by Youtube, so share if you can) but, with more experience, he calls it an insurrection.

[As I write London is quieter but the action has moved to Manchester (from which many of London’s police reinforcements have been drawn!), Birmingham and Bristol, and a police station in Nottingham has been fire-bombed.]

A note on the Police
Since publishing this article a number of people have suggested to me that the police behaved with commendable restraint on this occasion. This may well be the case, and I’m inclined to think it is. However, the behaviour of individual policemen and women or the behaviour of the police on certain occasions for tactical reasons does not detract from the structural function which is to be the repressive arm of the state. This structural function is best exemplified, not in situations that the police identify as ‘criminality’ (however dubious that identification) but in cases where what is in question is political dissent – groups or movements that challenge the state in one way or another. The recent ‘rat an anarchist’ campaign by the MET, rapidly retracted when it was pointed out that political beliefs were not illegal and there was no proscribed anarchist party, is an example of this repressive function.

This article has also appeared on the following sites (under the Creative Commons Licence):
Critical Legal Thinking
Irish Left Review
Politico
Libcom
The New Significance
2nd Light
Anarchist News
Burbuja
Caffènerobollente (r)esisto
Scoopit
Greek Left Review
Neoliberalism.org

And in translation at the following sites:
Revisto Punkto (Portuguese)
Jiyan (Turkish)
Masa (Croatian)
Translated By You (Russian)
Alasbarricadas.org (Spanish)
Kaosenlared.org (Spanish)
Jaime.cz (Czech)

Please explore the above sites, all of which seek to provide an analysis of politics which is outside of, and in opposition to, the standard narrative encountered in the media and from the main political parties.

Slaves and slavery: The Economy of the Magdalene Laundry and The Industrial School

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:22:25 +0100

I have been thinking about the present scandals enveloping the Catholic Church in Ireland. People say, ‘How could they do it, men and women of God?’, or ‘How could they believe in the Gospel’, etc. The bafflement is understandable since the Church has always represented itself as a form of institutionalised love.

However, if you try to understand the Church as an economic entity it makes much more sense. We’re all familiar with the historical reality of the Church as the possessor of vast estates, even principalities. In the Middle Ages the Pope was a prince governing vast swathes of Italy and negotiating and fighting as a prince. But his power and pomp was supported by an even bigger tax-collection network that extended across the Christianised world, together with a system of feudal proprietorships that included all church lands in every country where the church existed. Thus, Marx describes Henry VIII’s Reformation, involving as it did the expropriation of Church lands in England, as the ‘colossal spoliation of the church property’.

Now, the existence of wealth presupposes a limited class, an elite, that will benefit from it, and another myth that the church has assiduously cultivated is that the Church is open to everyone. Nevertheless, the powers in the Church have always been drawn from the wealthiest classes. In fact the class system in society as a whole is well-reflected in the church. Popes, for example, came from the nobility until recent years, when they tend to come from the upper middle class, perhaps reflecting a downgrading of the credit-worthiness of the office! For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, the Church was attractive to second and third sons and unmarried daughters of the upper classes, because it was a way of maintaining their status, privileges and wealth that did not involve having to inherit. Below the rank of bishop, the clerical positions went by class with the poorest supplying the kitchen-nuns and farm-monks. Convents, for example, ever the best arbiters of class and status, demanded a ‘dowry’ of anyone girl entering the convent. A large dowry meant you could expect an education and to rise through the ranks even perhaps as far as the rank of Reverend Mother. No dowry at all meant you would spend your days scrubbing floors.

So, if we see the Catholic Church as a structure founded upon the creation of wealth and the maintenance of class-structures, then the Magdalene laundries and Industrial Schools come neatly into focus in their economic reality.

The Magdalene laundries, for example, took children and young women and used their labour to produce wealth for the convents (and therefore the Church), but also serviced the economic needs of other parts of the church. They washed and repaired clothes, church vestments, altar cloths etc. From time to time they also had contracts with the state – in one operation, for example, they laundered the clothes from Mountjoy Prison.

Ireland’s social services were sub-contracted to the Churches until very recently. Ireland was an economic wilderness for most of the twentieth century, sending vast numbers of its young people to emigrate. It also had the highest birth-rate in Europe. The surplus children of large poor families were absorbed into the system of slave-labour or indentured servitude operated by the church through the church-run industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries. The state was prepared to pay for this service (as Conor McCabe points out in his book, Ireland was neoliberal before the word was invented) and so these institutions had another stable revenue stream in the form of child-support from the state.

The horrific evidence of sexual and physical abuse tends to dominate talk of these institutions. But in some ways this tends to obscure the abuse of slavery or servitude itself, even though it is insisted upon by the survivors who habitually describe themselves as having been slaves. While the physical and sexual abuse was widespread, the slavery or servitude was universal. Every poor boy or girl who found himself or herself in the tender care of Mother Church became a slave or an indentured servant, whether it was because of her parents’ inability to support them, because a social worker or a judge or a doctor consigned them there, or simply by being born within the walls of a Magdalene laundry. The ‘Maggies’ were slaves and could expect to spend their useful working lives inside. At least the boys could expect to be rejected by the system in due course, probably because they were physically more dangerous as they got older and therefore less useful as workers. It seems too, that the boys received more of an education, again reflecting the reality of society as a whole where poor girls could expect to become domestic servants either as workers or wives. Thus I tend to use the term ‘indentured servitude’ for what the boys experienced. There was little difference as it was experienced day to day.

Seen in this light it is clear that the abuse was a by-product of the slavery itself. We know very well how black slaves were treated by their masters. When you own a person body and soul you are entitled to use the body as you desire. There were decent slave owners who treated their slaves with restraint, just as there were nuns and priests and brothers who did not brutalise the children in their care. Nevertheless, in both cases the rights of property were paramount. There seems also to have been, in some industrial schools and laundries, a by-trade in sexual abuse, whereby the children were lent out at weekends or for holiday period to people paid for the service either in money or influence. And of course, it goes without saying that all the systems of power that surround predatory sexuality and repressed sexuality developed in these institutions. After all, having lost every right as citizens, these children only had their bodies to trade for kindness or nourishment. But this entire apparatus is familiar to us already from the institution of slavery. The ancient insult in calling a person a ‘slave’ stems precisely from the fact that a slave, by definition, could never hold any of himself back, not even his thoughts, because there is nothing like grinding labour and abuse to take possession of a free mind.

These Church institutions, then, are best understood as slave-owning factories and plantations, useful in the generation of wealth for the Catholic Church in an Ireland where there was very little wealth to spare. They developed at a time when the Church as a whole was still mired in feudal systems even though the world had moved on to industrialisation. They thrived in Ireland where, for the first half of the twentieth century, the economy still had remnants of feudalism - our biggest export by far was live cattle to England, the old colonial master. They are no longer useful now because the Church, having seen its business outmoded and its brand rejected, and having identified aid organisations as the only growth sector, is attempting to transform itself into a sort of rapid reaction force for world poverty.

I expect that the enquiries still underway here will do a very good job of revealing the extent of the physical and sexual abuse. They will emphasise the failure of ‘governance’ and responsibility that these institutions involved. They will tell of the Church’s sorrow for its sins and its humble desire for forgiveness from its flock. But they will not interrogate the economic system that is the Church, they will not describe the Magdalene Laundries and Industrial Schools as institutionalised slavery or indentured servitude. They will not say that The Holy Roman and Catholic Church was the last slave-owning institution in Ireland.

Postscript: On the terms ‘slave’ and ‘indentured servant’
Originally I used the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘indentured servant’ to distinguish between the more or less permanent state of imprisonment experienced by some inmates, mainly girls (slavery) of the institutions and the fact that boys, in particular, tended to be released at some point in their teens (indentured servitude). I was aware that it was not particularly accurate.

However, since publication, Philip Casey, who knows a thing or two on the subject (he is writing a book on ‘Irish slavery and servitude, provisionally titled Unfamiliar’) has pointed out a very important distinction.

He writes:
Indenture usually involved an agreement between master and servant, unless it was 'enforced' indenture, in which case the agreement was between the kidnapper and the master. In any event, indenture usually lasted no more than seven years, so I'd go for slavery as a description.

Now, while indentured servitude sometimes involved a level of mistreatment or cruelty and was often resented by the person indentured, it cannot be compared to the condition of, say, boys in industrial schools, who were usually committed there by the state and who could spend their childhood there until the age of 16. A farm labourer, of course, would ‘indenture’ at a ‘hiring fair’ for room and board and little or no wages for seven years only out of necessity, nevertheless there is an element of choice involved. The contract is, at least in legal terms, freely entered into. In no sense could a girl or a boy committed to one of the Church institutions be said to have chosen the life of misery they faced. While a servant entering an indenture would have the experience of a community that frequently had to resort to such contracts (which were the norm, for example, for apprentices or domestic servants or farm-labourers) to forewarn him/her of the conditions to be faced, the wall of deception and hypocrisy that surrounded the Church institutions prevented all but a few from understanding the reality. Equally, the level of abuse suffered by indentured servants in the worst cases is hardly comparable to the gross sadism and sexual slavery perpetrated on Irish children by the religious congregations and their allies.

The concept of ‘forced indenture’ is a tempting one, particularly as indentures sometimes were entered into by masters of orphanages for the labour of orphans in their care. However, I reject that as being inadequate to the matter in question. Such an indenture was still limited by contract.

In some cases the Catholic Church and the Irish State have sought to portray, in particular, the girls and women of the Magdalene Laundries as ‘employees’ in something akin to indentured servitude. As ‘employees’, the state has suggested, these people were paid a wage and were freely present in the laundries - this despite the fact that the laundries were not subject to the Factory Acts, inspected by the appropriate inspectors or open to unionisation. I utterly reject that description and would like to make it clear that my use of the term indentured servitude was never intended to suggest that I saw any merit in the argument.

Accordingly I append this postscript, by way of a correction. Slavery is the term that best describes the experience of the boys and girls, women and men who spent all or part of their lives in these hellholes. I have decided not to alter the original text but to leave it stand with this correction precisely because the distinction is so important.

Objectivity
I note with interest that the Papal Nunciature in Ireland has called for ‘objectivity’ in the assessment of the situation. No doubt they are troubled by the vehemence of some of the survivors who tell their stories on the national airwaves without sparing the details. I imagine they would prefer if the survivors took their redress money, attended counselling and kept their mouths shut. Rather than bothering much about the rape and torture of children, they are, I suspect, mainly intent on defending their comfy relationship to the state here. As Gramsci observed, the Church ‘is prepared to fight only to defend its own corporative freedoms (those of the Church as the Church, as an ecclesiastical organisation).'

Some poems from Ghost Estate

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 13:17:32 +0100

Here are some sample poems from my new collection Ghost Estate, which can be bought here at Salmon Poetry. I’ve tried to pick poems that illustrate some of the themes of the book, so they don’t necessarily look like an organic whole. I hope that in the book itself one poem flows into the next reasonably naturally.

I’ve written a short piece on the book here and you can find a review of the book on the Irish Times here. If you’d like to contact me about the poems or the book - or just to have a chat - see my contact page here or click on the email link below . I welcome responses of any kind.

Ghost estate

women inherit
the ghost estate
their unborn children
play invisible games
of hide & seek
in the scaffold frames
if you lived here
you’d be home by now

they fear winter
& the missing lights
on the unmade road
& who they will get
for neighbours
if anyone comes anymore
if you lived here
you’d be home by now

the saurian cranes
& concrete mixers
the rain greying into
the hard-core
& the wind
in the empty windows
if you lived here
you’d be home by now

the heart is open plan
wired for alarm
but we never thought
we’d end like this
the whole country
a builder’s tip
if you lived here
you’d be home by now

it’s all over now
but to fill in the holes
nowhere to go
& out on the edge
where the boys drive
too fast for the road
that old sign says
first phase sold out

§

From: In Memoriam David Marcus
In the blink of an eye

glass in the air
a heartbeat
to let things settle
we closed our eyes

there were chimneys
in the dust
& railroad tracks
commonplace things

we swept the street
ordered glass & worried
about the future
as we do now

§

Flight
for Rui Zink

I missed the flight
because of the terror alert
that has terrified everyone

I had some liquid in my pocket
that they thought
might be explosive

just the artificial tears
I have begun to use
because they come easier

& less painfully
& while I waited for my tears
to be decommissioned

the other passengers said
who would think of taking
tears on a journey

during the war on terror
& where did I think I was going
& who would I use them on

§

The sexuality of women in cinemas
for Mick Hannigan

they are attentive
but not to me
their hair trembles
at the touch of light
like a field
of gossamer
their steel shoulders
tentative

packets rustle
but not skirts
not plackets
their touch-screen lips
their sympathy
they are transported
abandoning themselves
but not to me

§

Dark matter

he contained more matter
than can be accounted for
without him the mass
of the universe is impossible
the hole in your heart boy

into the dark fell
women & animals
grace & pardon
love & affection

on a black night
his invisible face was a light
a new calculus
where nothing mattered

I saw him yesterday
hunched in the doorway
of Square Deal
a bottle of sherry
in a brown paper bag
his face closed to the west
that day’s dying sun

§

Fast asleep

night is no fastness
the siege machines on a thundery plain
far below
nor impotent nor swift to fall

I dreamed of my mother last night
her mouth gagged
still she said come into my coffin
I kissed her wet cheek

§

The chronicles of the nettle
after the Italian of Maria Luisa Spaziani

the white roofs not snow but
dust or lime or flour
here in the interstices of the tiles
the nettles salute me

my emblem my tsarina
a rose refuses to grow there
neither lily nor acacia
violet or tuberose.

as in a game my warrior
shall we inaugurate
a new convention
a new mythology

§

The transplant

under our striped quilt
you are sleeping
your head off
no one has
perfected the art
of head transplant
I should wake you
while there is still time
I love your sleepy head

§

Hedgehog

this is the time
when hedgehogs
snuffle in nightdress
for slugs
or beer
or woodlice
prickly footballs
the dog rolls
their crake
is saurian
we found one
sniffing crisps
in a crisp-bag
the salt-addict
of the spine clan
we saw one
stalking the lawn
on his own ground-plan
demanding harmony
with menaces
the phantom beetler
the hunter gatherer
the awkward customer
the morning star
the hedge-urchin
all points & purpose
& once we found
one asleep
in a compost heap
innocence itself
a stash
of hypodermics
in a jute sack

§

From: 5 Places in County Cork
In Lisavaird*

the poets holed up
for the last stand
writing their testaments
bitching

behind the earthworks
the food ran out
& then the paper
& someone poisoned the well

the last of the whiskey
went on the naming ceremony
the poet’s fort
they’re eating each other in there now

* In Irish Lisavaird is Lios an Bháird, the poet’s fort

§

Earthquake 2

the days are shorter
today than yesterday
& it has nothing
to do with winter
the world is spinning
faster than before
the conservation
of angular momentum
transforms a catastrophe
in a shallow sea
into a universal truth
the days are shorter
today than yesterday

Lunch

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:48:53 +0100

for lunch
today
black soul
on the bone

Regeneration is Ongoing - The Death of Rachel Peavoy and Ireland’s Economic Collapse

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:53:25 +0100

The death of Rachel Peavoy in Shangan Flats, Dublin, on the night of January 10th 2011, a bitterly cold night in the coldest winter in living memory, stands in so many ways as a metaphor for Ireland itself. She died, according to the pathologist, of hypothermia. There is no avoiding that judgement. According to her neighbour, Linda Mcloughlin, the Shangan flats were ‘colder inside than out’. Another friend, Michelle Quigley, testified that when she visited Rachel some days before her death they had to sit with their coats on and covered by a duvet. The heating had been turned off because, according to the City Council, Shangan Flats were scheduled for ‘regeneration’.

The City Councils of Ireland cannot afford to heat entire flat complexes to save one woman’s life. Accountability and transparency are against it. What would happen if such waste were referred to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General? What would the IMF say? For the next generation or two we must concentrate on keeping life in the ailing state. That demands sacrifices from all of us because we are all guilty of the greed that ruined the country. It is our original sin. Politicians, ex-bankers, journalists and economists say it is so. Any attempt at special pleading on behalf of the Rachel Peavoys of the world will be met with a chilly reception. We must all share the pain according to our place in the system and Rachel Peavoy’s place was at the bottom. This is why she died. Because further up the line central heating and warm clothes are sine qua non and at the top, where the ex-bankers, politicians and economists live the temperature indoors is completely unremarkable.

In her young life Rachel Peavoy struggled ineffectively against her fate. Firstly, she took her children to the safety of her parents’ house. They did not die that night when the temperatures in Dublin hovered around -10C. Secondly, she repeatedly contacted the City Council but had been told ‘the heating would not be turned back on as a number of flats around her had been vacated and were empty and because regeneration was ongoing.’ She lived, in a sense, in the mirror image of a ghost estate – surrounded by rooms that had been lived in but were now both ‘vacated’ and ‘empty’. Finally, she contacted her local parliamentary representative – Mr Noel Ahern, then still a TD, Fianna Fáil, brother of Bertie the ex-Taoiseach. His response is not recorded. Rachel Peavoy tried every legal means available to her to save her life. Had she tried illegal means she might have ended up in prison where, whatever else may be said about it, there is adequate heating. Conditions in women’s prisons in Ireland are relatively humane.

But it’s not fair to blame the City Council when one considers that Ireland is but a small piece in the great jigsaw of capitalist catastrophe. Where could we find the money to heat the Shangan Flats? Everybody knows that Irish banks have been ‘frozen out of interbank lending markets due to concerns about their future’ and this has resulted in pain for shareholders of the banks. The Fianna Fáil party has also been frozen out of power and has suffered the pain of electoral defeat. But even before the electoral deep-freeze they were keen to point out that they shared the people’s pain. By the time Rachel Peavoy died, for example, the Taoiseach’s salary had already dropped by €72,000 in two years (bringing it to a cool €214,000). Lorenzo Bini Smaghi of the European Central Bank even saw justice in all this pain. The people of Ireland, he said, must share the pain of investors because they voted for the government that caused it. It is not surprising then that a single mother should die alone in Shangan Flats in the coldest winter because the heating was turned off. It might even be regarded as an example of Mr Bini Smaghi’s justice, although none of the reports of her death mention whether she voted for Fianna Fáil, or if she voted for them whether she considered they might have some role to play in the heating situation, or even if she voted at all.

In the context of the bank collapse and the IMF/ECB intervention and all the pain that we must all suffer in order to save our beloved country, Rachel Peavoy gave her young life for the cause of Ireland. Unfortunately she cannot be accorded the usual martyrdom status because that would make the state the enemy. Like a cancer in the body politic we would be attacking ourselves. And so we have the dispute at the inquest about whether the windows of the flat were open and whether Tramadol made her sleepy. The implication is that Rachel Peavoy was reckless – weren’t we all reckless and don’t we now have to pay for it. She took drugs (albeit a mild over-the-counter pain-killer, and in the recommended dosage) and she left the windows open. Why she opened the windows of her flat on such a bitterly cold night is not questioned and no credence is given to the statement by her friend Jacqueline Johnson that she opened the windows on the morning she found Rachel because the place smelled bad. This narrative of Ireland’s recklessness has been seized upon by politicians, ex-bankers, journalists and visiting emissaries from solvent countries like a life-ring in a cess-pond. It has the feel of Greek tragedy about it - we made mistakes and must be punished.

In this tragic narrative the Furies are represented by the implacable markets, and our great mistake, our hamartia, which Aristotle defines as ‘an injury to others’ and which later commentators came to call the ‘fatal flaw’, is to have become greedy. It must be remembered, however, that the hamartia is usually committed in ignorance of its evil nature or the likely consequences. It may even be committed against the best advice. Think of Oedipus who, in desperately avoiding the terrible crime that has been foretold for him by the oracle at Delphi, commits that very crime in ignorance if not innocence. Oedipus was a good man, but he misunderstood the role of oracles. We too have failed to understand that oracles are agents in our tragedy rather than disinterested commentators. Oedipus was blinded for his hamartia. Rachel Peavoy was frozen to death for ours.

The end of tragedy, according to Aristotle, to whom we still turn in these matters, is catharsis. But our catharsis will be long in coming and our children’s children will share the punishment. We are to consider that our play holds the stage for something close to geological time. The curtain will not fall in our lifetimes.

Significantly, catharsis has its etymological roots in the ‘purging’ of menstrual blood. Is that why Rachel Peavoy took Tramadol? Was her pain, her fear, her hypothermia part of Ireland’s catharsis? Did she innocently take Tramadol and did this hamartia make her immune to the creeping insidious effects of hypothermia as we were immune to the insidious by-products of prosperity while high on that very prosperity? Had she not taken Tramadol would the City Council’s decision not to turn on the heating be an acceptable cost-saving measure? Is this our future? From now on analgesics will be contra-indicated for economic catharsis. If in pain consult your financial adviser.

But ours is a tragedy of endless plots and sub-plots – it’s not all death by hypothermia. Consider the chorus of Children with Crippling Diseases. Dr Orla Killeen, consultant paediatric rheumatologist at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin, recently informed the public that approximately 200 children with juvenile arthritis are on a waiting list of 15 months. This is the pain that they all talk about – though they are never specific. This, according to Mr Bini Smaghi of the European Central Bank, is a just retribution for belonging to a population that voted for Fianna Fáil. Of course the children didn’t vote. Instead the sins of their parents, or friends and acquaintances of their parents, or at least people who live in their constituencies, are visited upon them in the form of swollen twisted joints, crooked bones, feverish nights and drugs with horrendous side-effects. These are the Furies indeed. I wonder if Mr Bini Smaghi considers fifteen months to be an appropriate tariff?

In the meantime, the signs from our exporters are hopeful. The multinationals continue to channel profits through this country and our government has declared that keeping corporation tax low for them is a national priority. If we were to ask for more they might pitch their enterprises into the Atlantic and run away. Besides, the corporations are our only friends now. We’ve had a change of government even though there has been no discernible change of policy. And we never saved the banks despite all the pain; if, as seems likely, Rachel Peavoy died to save the banks, she died in vain. They tell us that the people of Ireland are resilient and we have faced much worse circumstances – they may be thinking of historic events such as The Great Famine. The Irish people have a long tradition of struggle against oppression, they say – though they forget that the struggle involved killing as many of the oppressors and their business associates as we could lay hands on. They are pressing our case with the oppressors, they say, and may gain a relief on the interest rate. It should be written on Rachel Peavoy’s grave: she died but they got 1% on the rate. In the meantime we must all bear our fair share of the pain. Regeneration, of course, is ongoing.

This article has also been translated into Spanish at Cuadrivio

The Raggy Boy is Gone – Death of Patrick Galvin

Tue, 10 May 2011 16:47:38 +0100

I first encountered Patrick Galvin’s work in Sean Lucy’s introductory Five Irish Poets. I must have bought it in the year of its publication (1970) or shortly afterwards because I certainly had it while I was still at school. It sat on my shelf alongside The Collected Poems of WB Yeats and Leonard Cohen’s Spice Box Of the Earth, the trio forming my small collection of poetry. I was a country boy and I couldn’t afford many books.

Studying ‘poetry’ at school, I had no way to understand Paddy’s work except through my heart and my gut, but I recognised the particular form of Hiberno-English that I spoke myself, I recognised the remnants of songs and the surreal imagery of my own fears and the poetry of lost causes and the lost cause of poetry. I also sensed that this was something that came from more cultures than one and that borrowed and took inspiration from sources that were not available to a boy from East Cork. I feel I have spent the intervening forty years trying to work out how he did it, knowing all the time that it came naturally to him. It sent shivers down my spine. It made a teenage boy who wanted, more than anything else, to be a poet tremble with the magic of words that almost but not quite came out of the shadows of his own house:

In Patrick Street
In Grattan Street
In Ireland Rising Liberty Street
The Kings are out.

Along the Mall
The Union Quay
In every street along the Lee
The Kings are out.

With knives of ice
And dressed to kill
The wine flows down from Summer Hill
Christ! Be on your guard tonight
The Kings are out.

from ‘Roxy’s – The Kings Are Out’

Of the five poets in that little anthology, all of whom were from Cork, Paddy Galvin’s was the electric work. Several years later, in University College Cork, I heard him read. I didn’t know it then but he had a brief career as a folksinger, and he had written plays and worked on the stage, and his delivery had all the hallmarks of someone who knew that the voice is another instrument. The combination of voice and work was astonishing, alive, heretical and inspiring.

It would be many years before I actually met him. By then he had settled in Cork where he and Mary Johnston, his wife, helped found The Munster Literature Centre. They created an atmosphere that brought writers together and the Centre and festivals they founded are noticeably ‘writer-centred’, going out of their way to create a special experience for visiting writers in a friendly atmosphere. In hard times, as hard as those we are now experiencing, they insisted on paying writers what they could. In this regard, their socialist principles shone through. The Munster Literature Centre thrives still and there are now more events and festivals than ever. Thanks in no small part to Paddy and Mary, there is a vibrant writing ‘scene’ and we’re all still talking to each other!

Sean Lucy said of him, in that Five Irish Poets anthology, that he made his native landscape ‘merge into the terrors and intensities of an apocalyptic vision’ and that his work was ‘the mask of a dream’. He forgot to mention, or maybe in Ireland of 1970 it wasn’t politic to mention, that Paddy’s work was always political and in this he inspired younger Munster poets to be political too:

The windows opened and the rifles cracked
Fire and gold rode through the streets

For Liberty, Equality and Death.

And we maintain
The right of the Irish people
To the unfettered control...

Of Liberty, Equality and Death.

from ‘Day of Rebellion’

Paddy was also a songwriter. I remember quite clearly the surprise I felt when I discovered that what I had always assumed was an old left-wing song was actually written by him. The song was ‘James Connolly’. I knew it in at least three recordings, my favourite at the time being that of Liam Weldon (an interesting and tragic figure) who had it on his album Dark Horse On the Wind. It sounded as if it came directly out of the execution of the great labour leader in 1916, but it was Paddy’s song. Here he sings it himself in a recording that has only recently been made available on Youtube.

I now have many of Paddy’s books on my shelf. I’ve heard him read so many times. But that first encounter with him has stayed with me and haunts my own work. I find it hard to believe his voice has fallen silent.

***

Born in Cork in 1927, Patrick Galvin was the author of numerous plays and seven volumes of poetry. A selection of his work may be read here at Poetry International Web. Fiery, iconoclastic, socialist and anti-establishment and informed by the experience of a politicised working-class childhood in Cork City, as well as by surrealism and his interest in Lorca, his work has always resisted categorisation and certainly seems closer to European or South American writing than anything else produced in Ireland. It has been translated into many languages and was particularly influential on a younger generation of writers from Munster. He was a member of Aosdána.
Patrick Galvin led a remarkably varied life. Born into a political home he spent time incarcerated in an industrial school before joining the RAF at the age of sixteen in 1943. His postings included Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He saw the effects of carpet bombing in European cities at first hand. He spent several years in Spain where he became interested in Spanish writing.

Gifted with a fine and distinctive voice, at one time he made a living as a singer-songwriter, and folksong collector and was encouraged by Seamus Ennis. He recorded several volumes of folksongs and his song James Connolly has been covered by most of the major singers of Irish traditional music, perhaps most notably by Frank Harte, Christy Moore and Liam Weldon. Here he is heard singing the song himself at a house party in New York in 1981 He was a popular and impressive reader of his own work.

He was a co-founder of The Munster Literature Centre and one of the founders of the Dún Laoghaire Poetry Now festival.

He published a three-part fictionalized autobiography: Song for a Poor Boy (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1991); and Song for a Raggy Boy (Raven Arts Press, 1992) and Song for a Fly Boy, which was published with the first two as The Raggy Boy Trilogy (Dublin, New Island Books, 2002) and adapted Song For A Raggy Boy, which, among other things chronicles his time in industrial school, for filming by director Aisling Walsh. The film starred Aidan Quinn. His plays were produced all over the world, including in Canada, New York, Australia and London and recorded by RTÉ and the BBC.

I can’t write now
Because the coffin is too narrow
And there’s no light.
I’m trying to send this
Through a medium
But you know what they’re like –
Table-tapping bastards
Reeking of ectoplasm.
If you manage to receive this
I’d be glad if you’d print it.
There’s no point in asking you
To send me a copy –
I don’t even know my address.

from ‘Message To The Editor’

I am indebted to the following sources:

Patrick Galvin at Poetry International Web
Patrick Galvin at The Munster Literature Centre
Patrick Galvin at Irish Writers Online
Song for A Raggy Boy at the International Movie Database

Ghost Estate: Some thoughts on the writing of a book of poems

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:26:13 +0000

After all this time, the writing of poetry is still the most mysterious thing to me. Prose has its magical moments when the language jives with the plot or character, but a novel is substantially nuts and bolts, a plot hammered into shape, a struggle to control the characters which are forever trying to escape, and there is a daily duty that begins at seven o’clock no matter what the season that’s almost as banal and bourgeois as the banal moments in any other job. But how the lines of a poem fall together and take the shape that I think of as a poem is serendipity to me. Plato had something to say on the subject and he took a dim view of it. The poets cannot account for their inspiration, he said, yet they claim to be sayers of truth. I don’t know about that, not being very convinced of the existence of truth in any shape or form. But I do agree that our words don’t spring from reason but from some other faculty and, as Plato himself charged, it feeds and waters the passions rather than drying them up. Plato, of course, also took a dim view of the passions, but that’s his business and none of mine.

It’s been seven years now since Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me came out. It’s a long time between collections of poetry. But I tend to accumulate poems slowly, and, in addition, this collection, at almost 150 pages, contains a lot of poems. I thought, since I didn’t have a blog (sic) last time round, I might write something here – the thoughts that come to me while I’m waiting for the actual book. It’s a happy time, but it’s also a time when I wake up at four o’clock in the morning worrying.

The tools of the trade
Over the years my writing has adapted to cicumstances – a growing difficulty with hand-writing (see this tongue-in-cheek piece and this Irish Times article), the arrival of laptops, writing novels and short fiction, the arrival of online publishing etc. My habit is to open a document on my laptop and call it something like New Poems 2005. Each new year I copy that document and update the year. So I’m working, at any given time, on perhaps twenty or thirty poems and scraps of poems and phrases and ideas that may or may not turn into something that I would regard as a poem. At the same time I’m working prose fiction.

I’ve tried other tools – one sequence ‘A white bird over Ischia’, was written on the notepad software on an iPod. Several parts of it were literally written on a ferry to Procida in the Bay of Naples. The peculiarly awkward process of typing on the tiny screen of an iPod is reflected in the structure of the poem, a series of short observations in numbered sections. I think the iPod would be the perfect instrument for composing haiku.

Then, over the years, each document gradually accrues near-finished poems, as well as all the other material that has gone into or been taken out of them. When I regard a poem as more or less arrived, I move it out into a separate document which usually has a provisional title for the next collection. For many years Ghost Estate had the working title Black Ice (after the Stan Brakhage film). I continue to work on those poems until I am as happy as I ever am - usually the finishing touches occur just before I send the collection to a publisher. At the same time I’m working on a novel or short stories as well as what I laughingly call my ‘blog’ (what you’re reading now) and anything else that comes along.

The effect of all this heterogenous activity is that there is, from my point of view, a fluidity between poems and also between the poems and my fiction. Some ideas and even lines occur in both the fiction and the poetry. The poem ‘Naples, Island Ferry’, for example, is closely based on the opening of one of my stories, and both are based on a real event, a real day stepping off the ferry to Procida. The dedication in the poem is to a friend who lives there, the man who met me that day. Briefly the poem was also the opening of a chapter in a novel I was working on that came to nothing. The poem ‘Child’ is from an unfinished novel where it was a short paragraph – with a little tinkering prose becomes a poem – perhaps it always was. Other lines have migrated in one direction or another. They turn up as refugees in stories, or refugees from stories to poems or novels. Wherever they emerge they are welcome. As far as my writing is concerned, the borders are open.

A brief digression to the pissoir
I’ve often worried about the intensity of poetry and why it’s not often found in prose. What makes a poem a poem? I’m reminded of Duchamp’s Fountain, a pissoir (except made and found in the USA), and which can be accepted as art only on the basis that Duchamp pointed to it and said it was art. Or perhaps he was saying this object proves there is no art, or art is not special, etc. Much the same can be said of poetry. The location of the pissoir or poem (in a gallery, in a book) the orientation and setting (short lines, for example, in the case of poem, or upside down in the case of the pissoir) demand that the piece be considered in a certain way, as art or poem, even if the viewer/reader is unwilling to think of it as such and even if the classification is rejected, or even intended to be rejected. This tension between the reader’s expectations and the reality of the object lends it a special intensity. So, in a sense, shifting poems between poetry collections and novels or stories, and vice verse, demands that we reconsider the value of the setting. Is poetry no longer poetry if it is a paragraph in a novel?

No puncturing
I began, many years ago now, to force myself to do without punctation. I thought of it as a discipline, a way of simplifying the language and the lines. With my first books I put the punctuation back in, though there was less of it in the second than the first, because I was convinced no publisher would accept it. In Ghost Estate there is punctuation only in the final sequence of prose poems ‘Travel in an Italy of the mind’. I tried to do without it there too but it ended up making no sense. Even José Saramago, whose prose style I revere, occasionally inserts a full-stop if only out of a sense of joie-de-vivre.

This lack of punctuation forces a certain kind of line on me. Typically it’s short, variable in length and a unit of sense in it’s own right (at least to me). Exceptions tend to be deliberate and usually designed to unsettle the reader in some way. I only very occasionally depart from that practice, usually because a line contains a list, or because I want to get a rhyme or half-rhyme in. There are no laws, unless the gentle laws of my own making.

One of the consequences of not punctuating a poem is that there are, from time to time, lines that could belong with the sentence above or the sentence below. I call them ‘rocking lines’ – in that they can be tipped backwards or forwards into either sentence as the reader wishes. I like this kind of ambiguity. In my universe ambiguity is potential, a thought that occasions me a great deal of humility. There are always vastly more meanings than there are writers.

Publication
I’m lazy as regards publishing my poems. For many years now I have almost exclusively sent them to The SHOp, a wonderful poetry magazine, published from a hillside in West Cork but travelling all over the world. The publishers are John and Hilary Wakeman, who have become good friends over the years. They never scruple to reject a poem, but most of my poems that have appeared in print, were published there. I detest the long waiting times associated with submitting poems, and in the end of the day, the book is the thing.

I like online publishing a lot. For many years I sent poems to a site published by the Italian writer and academic Luca Paci. As far as I know it is now defunct. Irish Left Review has published some of the more political poems, especially the title poem, which first appeared there and also in the Irish Times. The advantage of outlets like ILR and the Irish Times is that they reach readers who do not normally buy or even read poetry.

The beginnings
When I look back to the early working documents, MS Word files that are dated 2004 and 2005, I realise that the poems that make up ‘Eight observations about hope’ were the earliest drafts I was working on. Even then I could sense the hollowness of what was happening in Ireland. I claim no particular prescience in that. The dogs in the street, famously knowing in Ireland, were talking about the crazy price of houses. My mother-in-law, then almost 90, used to say, ‘Who’s going to live in all them?’ (nobody, as we now know). Everybody was talking about the clientelism and the corruption and the dodgy politics and the crazy lending the banks were doing. There was a terrible despair at the eternal return of Fianna Fáil. There were even opinion polls ten years ago that showed that a majority of people saw the lunacy of what was happening. Of course we didn’t know about derivatives, and sub-prime lending, and senior bondholders, but we didn’t need to. Quite simply, anybody with a brain in his head knew it couldn’t last. Only the extent of the crash took us by surprise. It overturned everything we believed about our lords and masters – we simply and grossly underestimated their stupidity.

So it’s not surprising that a sequence of eight cynical observations on the futility of hope should be among my earliest scribblings. It was the zeitgeist.

Another poem I was working on back in 2004, was one dedicated to my friend David Marcus. At the time he was ill and his health was deteriorating and I began by writing down two shared memories. The first was the funeral of his uncle Gerald Goldberg in the old Jewish graveyard at Curraghkippane. I didn’t know that I’d be attending David’s own funeral before long. But here’s that first memory in its final form:

Jewish graveyard,wintry light
down in the valley
they are lighting fires
the smoke follows
the lie of the land

everything is slightly uncertain
in a certain light

who listens to eulogies
though they may be well done
& occasionally necessary

we are asked to remember the dead
by every stone in the road

The funny thing is that David, a brilliant editor where fiction was concerned, and a fine writer himself, simply didn’t think poetry could be poetry unless it rhymed! He’d have appreciated the thought that I should dedicate a poem to him, but privately he’d have shaken his head over what he liked to call ‘modern poetry’.

Now that I retype that poem here, I realise, with considerable surprise, that uncertainty is something of a motif in the book - particularly in a poem like ‘On formally undecidable propositions’, which is not surprising since that’s the full title of a mathematical theorem colloquially known as The Uncertainty Priniciple, but the word ‘uncertain’ occurs specifically in four poems, and various other formulations recur throughout such as these lines from ‘Earthquake 2’

In too many sense I know
& do not know

And when Salmon sent me the beautiful cover image it revealed another recurring motif that I hadn’t been aware of – locks, keys, doors, gates. Another surprise. I usually make these discoveries in reviews. In many ways, once the final proofs have been returned and the book is essentially on its way to the printer, it becomes a different thing. It is a child who has emigrated. When it comes back in its new clothes I will have to try to understand it all over again. I will be no more relevant to the book than any other reader. As Roland Barthes wrote, the writer is always the past of the book.

Why they will die II

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:34:18 +0000

I’ve written here about all the fake talk of ‘pain’ that, according to our lords and masters, the ‘tax-payers’ will have to suffer. My point was that tax-payers will take a hit in their pockets, but those who pay little or not tax will suffer actual pain, actual death. You may think I exaggerate. This is a civilised country, you say. We have a decent medical service with wonderful doctors nurses and ancillary staff. Nobody would die here simply because the IMF wants us to cut public expenditure. Read on, and remember, if you vote for Fine Gael their plan is to cut even deeper.

Two interesting reports from IMF Ireland

‘Rachel Peavoy, of 224 Shangan Road, Ballymun, Dublin 9, was found dead in her ‘perilously cold’ flat on January 11, 2010. The pathologist found Ms Peavoy had suffered hypothermia. The inquest at Dublin City Coroner’s Court was told that the single mother of two boys died after the city council refused to address the issue of heating in her flat. The inquest heard how she had contacted Dublin City Council in relation to the matter but was told the heating would not be turned back on as a number of flats around her had been vacated and were empty and because regeneration was ongoing.’
Irish Examiner, Tuesday, February 1, 2011

‘Children with a potentially lifelong, crippling condition are waiting more than a year to see a specialist because of a shortage of resources.

Dr Orla Killeen, consultant paediatric rheumatologist at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin, said between 150 and 200 children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) are on a waiting list for 15-16 months awaiting a new appointment.   In addition, approximately 30 children regarded as urgent cases face a three to four-month wait.   The inpatient rehabilitation programme at Crumlin has also collapsed because of a lack of key members on its required multidisciplinary team.   The crisis in paediatric rheumatology has actually worsened since Dr Killeen advised the hospital one year ago that her service could no longer offer children with juvenile arthritis the full range of services necessary to treat their condition because of failure to fund core members of the specialist team.   Since then, the hospital’s inpatient rehabilitation programme has collapsed.”

Irish Examiner, Tuesday, February 14, 2011

Fintan O’Toole’s Own Cultural Revolution

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:32:28 +0000

Review: Enough is Enough, Fintan O’Toole, Faber, £12.99

Suppose you were swept to power on the back of a massive popular vote – say something like 80%, the kind of number that usually has the USA and its client states jumping up and down and calling you a leftist narco-terrorist. It is now the morning after the week long celebration in which you toured Ireland thanking the people for placing their trust in you and promising that you would never let them down. Today, you issue a set of practical proposals. What would they be? Nationalise the banks properly (not much left to nationalise), renegotiate a Norwegian or Venezuelan style contract for oil and gas, cap salaries, create a programme of public works, reorganise the democratic system to make it actually democratic, change the taxation regime to provide better redistribution, provide a proper public health system, fund the education system properly, renegotiate senior debt in the banks and so on. Add in a number of fixes that fit the moment – debt forgiveness for mortgage holders, perhaps? It’s not exactly a revolution, yet it’s a similar programme to those underway in, say, Bolivia, Venezuela or Nepal, with adjustments for the relative wealth of the populations. Chavez’s greatest achievements are in public health and education, redistribution of wealth and reorganisation of the democratic system so as to empower the powerless. Nobody is talking about storming the Winter Palace (or what it stands for), because the Winter Palace is gone. As Foucault pointed out, power is not located in a single place anymore, and it mainly reveals itself in the production of what he called ‘rituals of truth’. That Chavez is becoming a dictator is one of those ‘truths’, another is that ‘capitalism is all there is, get used to it’, yet another is that we can all invest in our dodgy pension companies and come out with enough money to retire to the Bahamas. This kind of ‘truth’ has, in our case, led to the bank bail-out and the social welfare cuts, to name but a few consequences. The greatest challenge facing the left in this century is combating these ‘rituals of truth’.
You, elected on your landslide, must begin with your own truth. But where to start?

The dilemma you face is captured nicely in a paragraph of a recent New Left Review essay by Slavoy Zizek (free to download here). Writing about Morales and Chavez and the Maoist government in Nepal, he said:

Their situation is ‘objectively’ hopeless: the whole drift of history is basically against them, they cannot rely on any ‘objective tendencies’ pushing in their way, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. But, nonetheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? And are we—today’s left—not all in exactly the same situation?

There is, of course, something admirable in ‘doing what we can in a desperate situation’, but it may not live up to our hopes and dreams. Lenin faced the same dilemma when he realized, late in his life, that there would never be a world socialist revolution and that the USSR could not survive in a world so hostile to the very idea of a communist state. Castro, one imagines, has confronted the same bitter sense of isolation. What would the history of socialism be if the capitalist states had adopted a live and let live approach?

But the tail-end of Zizek’s remark is fascinating too. Having removed the old Marxist argument that the tendency of history favoured a proletarian revolution and having declared that the leftist leaders’ situation is ‘objectively’ hopeless, he then turns that ‘objectively’ on its head. ‘Nonetheless does this not give them a unique freedom?’ Freedom to do what? Freedom to invent their own way. Freedom to be new. Freedom to be flexible. We too, as Zizek says, are ‘all in exactly the same situation’.

Fintan O’Toole is one of a handful of brave Irish journalists who have gone against the great tide of neoliberalism that washed into this country with the arrival of the Progessive Democrats. He was fortunate to work for a newspaper that owed no allegiance to any press barons, although, since the arrival of ex-PD Geraldine Kennedy, he found himself working in an office that syndicated the likes of Charles Krauthammer, cheerleader for USA imperialism and George Bush apologist. He has stood against the progressive degradation of all our national institutions, our public assets, our rights as citizens. Not everyone on the left has agreed with the stands he’s taken – the Lisbon Treaty vote is one example, his analysis of the housing problem another. Nevertheless, even when we have disagreed with him we have recognised a thoughtful intelligent man struggling to understand the same issues we struggled with ourselves. In recent years he has become, for many, one of a handful of voices of good sense against the so-called ‘common sense’ of our political masters and their media monkeys. His Ship of Fools anatomised the jobbery, corruption and stupidity of our political class, a valuable contribution to public debate in an accessible style – and, coincidentally, hugely popular. In this book he makes the synchrony of interests of the Fianna Fáil party and those of the banks, the ‘toxic intertwining of interests’, as he calls it, central to his call for a new kind of politics. ‘A mere change of government’, he argues will not create a new politics, all that will happen is that ‘a clapped out populist right-of-centre party’ will be replaced by ‘a fresher hungrier right-of-centre populist party’.

Now he takes a further brave step, one not often undertaken by critics of the system, presenting us with his programme for ‘how to build a new republic’. If Fintan O’Toole were elected tomorrow (there is a Facebook page that claims if it can get 100,000 signatures he will run for Mayor of Dublin) this is the programme we would be reading about. What does it amount to? As Zizek might have it, he is improvising, doing what he can in a desperate situation. What will he do with his unique freedom?

The book is divided into two section: Five Myths and Five Decencies. The first part provides O’Toole’s analysis of what is wrong, not just with the economy, but with Irish society in general. More accurately, it is his reflection on how the ills of Irish society – the ‘five underlying truths of Irish politics’ – have screwed up the economy and Politics – the myths of The Republic, of Representation, of Parliamentary Democracy, of Charity, and of Wealth. The second part – the Five Decencies – is a call for a return to the Republic, one that Wolfe Tone or James Connolly would have been proud of. Inevitably it is the weaker of the two sections.

O’Toole forensically dissects each of the five myths. We have never had a republic by any acceptable definition. What we’ve had instead is a mixture of political corruption and conservatism that paid scant attention to the famous republican triplet of liberty, equality and fraternity. Our democratic system is democratic in name only. In reality, our representatives spend their time grafting in their constituencies in order to be re-elected (this is what a TD means when he says that he works hard). Parliamentary democracy is a sham. The executive which should be ‘accountable to the Dáil’, according to the constitution, instead rules the Dáil with an iron fist, and blithely ignores it when it wants to. The myth that the Christian Brothers and the nuns brought us education and health when the government wouldn’t give it to us, is dealt with in detail. O’Toole shows how the church resisted government provision of education and health at every turn.

Finally, he demolishes the myth that Ireland is a wealthy nation, supposedly wealthier than Germany, for example. The difference between GDP and GNP (frequently adverted to on this site) accounts for the idea that Ireland is a rich country. A simple glance at the kind of things ordinary people can count on in Germany or France or the UK will show that our lives are far poorer by comparison – free health care, a decent transport system, well-funded education, elder care, public investment in streets, beaches, parks, pools, gymnasiums, etc. But the ghost profits generated by trans-national corporations and laundered through Ireland make us seem very rich indeed. Unfortunately very little of it stays here.

Together with a strong critique of the illusions by which the Irish state sustains itself there is a journalist’s penchant for the telling historical detail, anecdote or statistic. For example, here’s a paragraph from the chapter on The Myth of The Republic:

It’s also worth looking back on an MRBI poll, conducted for an RTÉ Today Tonight programme in November 1991. To the proposition that ‘there is a Golden Circle of people in Ireland who are using power to make money for themselves’, a massive 89 per cent agreed. Eighty-one per cent agreed that the people in this Golden Circle were made up in equal measure of business people and politicians. Seventy-six per cent thought the scandals that were then beginning to emerge were ‘part and parcel’ of the Irish Economic system rather than one-off events. Eighty-three per cent thought that the then current scandals were merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’, while 84 per cent said business people involved in corrupt dealings and fraud got off more lightly than other criminals.
(Note: The inconsistency in the use of figures and words for numbers is in the original.)

This startling prescience (‘the then current scandals were merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’’) is something that we have all forgotten. We now declare ourselves surprised or even shocked by the level of corruption and stupidity of government, but in 1991 we knew all about it. Did we forget it during the Celtic Tiger years, or did pollsters simply stop asking our opinion? There is more of this. He instances bills such as The Central Bank Bill, guillotined in 2009 because the debate, which began at midday, had run up against lunchtime. The entire bill, the most important of the entire Dáil term, together with forty six complex amendments, was dealt with in an hour, Only thirteen amendments were put to the house, the rest were deemed passed because of the pressure of hunger. No minister from the department of Finance was present. And so on. In many ways this ground was covered in Ship Of Fools, maybe not the same information, but the same case. He remakes it here because he wants to argue that each of these myths has a corrosive effect on civil society.

The central argument of the second half of the book is, in a way, the point of the whole exercise. We need, O’Toole argues, to completely rethink our society. He turns a critical eye on fondly cherished platitudes (where would be without the Brothers, at least we’re a republic, etc) in order to make us see that it is all a sham designed for the protection of power and wealth and the concentration of that power and wealth in as few hands as possible. A similar critique could be directed at most western democracies (the British myth of fairness, the French myth of intellectualism, etc.) but that need not concern us here. This book is about Ireland. There is no comfort to be gained from observing that other countries are corrupt in different ways and none at all from measuring our level of corruption against theirs (measurement is such a neoliberal reaction to difference!). The fact is our state has failed, and failed spectacularly. We now have an opportunity to make a new start.

So what is the programme? Inevitably, because O’Toole is a literary and cultural critic, as well as a political one, the programme doesn’t read like any party manifesto. It goes deeper. In a sense it involves the complete re-education of the population, O’Toole’s own Cultural Revolution. And because he nails his colours to the mast of a nebulous ship called The Republic, judging probably correctly that Irish people are more likely to rally to that cry than the cry of Socialism, there is a sense of idealism rather than materialism at work. Even the idea of ‘decencies’ sounds vaguely bourgeois and effete. The question arises: What do people want now? I have a feeling that they’d be happier with the Bolsheviks than the Mensheviks just at the moment. People might recoil at the execution of bank CEOs and politicians this morning, but the day after tomorrow they’d be getting on with moving into the newly nationalised ghost estate and opening a savings account in the National Bank. So calling for ‘decencies’ seems somehow to undershoot the popular mood.

Equally, it is arguable that short of violence a cultural revolution on this profound scale would take years of re-education. But the virtue of the moment is that people learn faster in time of trauma – a point ably made, though from the perspective, in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – and Irish society is now undergoing a traumatic self-evaluation. If, O’Toole seems to be suggesting, we can all be turned into raving neoliberals overnight, the process can also be reversed overnight.

So what are these five decencies that could save us from ourselves? Security (e.g. Pensions, Housing); Healthcare; Education; Equality; Citizenship, which O’Toole glosses as a kind of Republican stoicism which he calls austerity – one thinks here of Wordsworth’s crie de coeur for Republicanism in ‘England 1802’:

The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore:
Plain living and high thinking are no more:

Each of the ‘decencies’ that O’Toole advocates is necessary and valuable. There are caveats, however. For example, on education, he falls into the trap of justifying necessary educational change on economic grounds. This is the neoliberal stance – everything is the economy – which sees education as the production of so-called ‘human capital’, rather than the liberation of critical minds. Of course he’s right about our education system being weighted in favour of the children of better educated and wealthier parents, and Ireland badly needs measures that will allow the children of poorer or less well-educated parents to break through the barriers, but it is not sufficient justification for such measures to talk about the multipliers for the economy that can be gained from such initiatives.

Certainly Ireland would be a better place if O’Toole’s decencies prevailed. However, there is an essential ingredient missing – and this problem pervades the entire analysis. The problem is that none of it will happen unless we reverse the entire course the state has been on since 1922. To achieve even an O’Toole level of justice and equality we need a socialist state. There is a strong sense that this book advocates fiddling with the details, when in reality the whole edifice needs to be swept away. I suspect that O’Toole made a deliberate choice – to avoid the ‘S’ word. And it may well be argued that shattering the five myths and installing the five decencies is his attempt ‘to improvise, do what he can in a desperate situation’, that in fact the fulfillment of his project would be a form of socialism. But avoiding the ‘S’ word leads to other flaws. Also missing is any sense that Ireland’s peculiar problems are merely local variations of the malaise that is Global Capitalism. Surely Ireland cannot claim to have uniquely corrupt, stupid or incompetent politicians when we consider that Silvio Berlusconi survived this week’s votes of no confidence.

Another example of this skewed analysis is O’Toole’s take on the housing surplus. For O’Toole, Irish people are peculiarly attracted to property ownership as a result of their peasant antecedents. Never mind that the desire to own ones own home sprang from a time when most Irish people rented their miserable bedsits and flats from gouging landlords at exorbitant rents, and that those landlords haven’t gone away. Never mind that other European countries have a higher a incidence of home ownership. Never mind that rental properties in Ireland compare very badly in terms of quality and space with say, a McInerney scheme built house of the 1970s. For O’Toole, Irish people are possessed by the kind of land hunger that destroyed The Bull McCabe. See this link for a more measured take on the issue.

This is a useful book as a contribution to the dismantling of the present system, but it simply doesn’t go far enough or deep enough. Hugely impressed by his grasp of the detail, I remain unconvinced by his solution. Nevertheless, as we move into the (first?) election of 2011, and faced with the prospect of a centre-left+right coalition, I’d happily take Fintan O’Toole’s Ireland rather than the bleak neoliberal one envisaged by Fine Gael. Were he to be elected tomorrow on that landslide I mentioned, and were he to prosecute the programme with his usual energy, I am certain Ireland would be a much better, healthier, happier and wealthier place.

This review also appeared on:
Irish Left Review
WilliamBowles
MRzine

A Citizen’s Manifesto for the 2011 election

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:39:59 +0000

For each of the past two elections I have published my Citizen’s Manifesto. The idea is that anyone could print it off and hand it to either of the government parties if they come to the door. Here’s my new version for 2011. It’s a substantial modification since the last election – a certain amount of water has run under the bridge since then.

I give the manifesto in two formats - a PDF version in case you’re entirely of my point of view – and at the bottom of this page, as text that you can copy and paste into your own word processor to add to, or subtract from, according to your own views.

I would love to know what kind of reaction you get. Please email me and let me know. You’ll find my email address on the contact page. Good luck!

Citizen’s Manifesto
PDF Version

CITIZEN’S MANIFESTO 2011

Why I will not vote for either Fianna Fáil or The Green Party

1. Fianna Fáil is the most corrupt party in the history of this state. It has turned our republic into a marketplace where everything is for sale, including public office. You will not buy my vote.
2. Fianna Fáil is a right-wing party that has consistently favoured its rich friends and has turned The People into The Customers of their own republic. I am a citizen not a customer and I will never vote for a right wing party.
3. Fianna Fáil, together with its subaltern allies in The Greens, have produced a budget that will crucify the poor, the sick, the disabled, but will make the rich richer. The country despises you for that, and so do I. I will only vote for a party that favours the redistribution of wealth.
4. Fianna Fáil has been responsible for the sell-off of most our state assets, including Telecom, Aer Lingus, our fishing grounds and our oil and gas reverves. Time alone has prevented you from selling everything to your cronies on the cheap. I will never vote for a party that advocates the selling of state assets.
5. For purely part-political gain, Fianna Fáil has driven the continuous attack on public services and public servants. I will never vote for a party that is anti-public service.
6. Fianna Fáil toadied to the Bush regime and permitted young men and women to be transported to torture through Irish airports, as well as allowing invasion and occupation troops to pass through Shannon to an illegal war. Not out of cowardice alone did you do this, but also because you have a craven desire to be liked by rich Americans. I will only vote for parties that will end the Shannon military stopover.
7. Fianna Fáil bankrupted the state by stupid economics, in particular by the bank bailout. Despite the intelligence your supporters in the media credit you with, the rest of the world thinks you’re stupid, and so do I.
8. Fianna Fáil wasted the surplus that you gained by making your friends rich, so that when you had made the country bankrupt again, as you had done so often before, there was nothing left. Now you want the poor to pay for the cupidity, stupidity and corruption of your friends.
9. Fianna Fáil has built roads instead of public transport, ignored disabled access to public buildings, made it more costly to get on and off the island and to move around inside it.
10. Fianna Fáil has presided over the gradual destruction of what we have of a public health system, and you are allowing your friends to build private hospitals on public land. I will never vote for a party that favours a private health system.
11. Fianna Fáil has encouraged racism as a despicable policy to garner votes.
12. The Green Party knew full-well that all of this was true and entered government with Fianna Fáil, and kept them in power because they themselves craved power. I will never again vote for the Green Party.

The Istanbul Declaration of the European Writers’ Parliament

Thu, 2 Dec 2010 22:12:44 +0000

Many of us travelling to the European Writers’ Parliament, convened in Istanbul for that city’s Capital of Culture year, were puzzled. Taking its lineage from previous gatherings of writers (during the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the occasion of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, etc), it seemed to us that this parliament lacked a focus. We would not be called upon to utter a declaration against fascism or to defend a fellow writer against a death sentence.

We arrived in Istanbul in a cloud of controversy. VS Naipaul, invited as a guest speaker for the opening, had been ‘uninvited’ – or if we are to believe the official story, had voluntarily withdrawn – due to a raging controversy in the Turkish media. The newspapers were quoting the writer and poet Hilmi Yavuz to the effect that Naipaul had no business in Turkey. ‘I don’t have a personal problem with Naipaul,” Yavuz told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review . ‘I have a problem with the mentality. I don’t care what the world thinks about me. As a Turkish intellectual, my mission is to illuminate my own society. He might have received the Nobel prize, but it does not give him the right to insult the Muslim world.’ Cihan Aktas told the Guardian: ‘The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling. I cannot attend the event given all of this.’ Aktas did, in fact, attend and I sat in commission with her. Her contribution was interesting but gave no indication of her wide reading among the canon of radical European intellectuals, from Negri to Ranciere.

Therefore there were 99 (not 100!) writers from 33 countries, still a substantial gathering covering most of the fields that writers engage in besides the actual work of writing. There were writers who were editors, translators, teachers, journalists. Many belonged in more than two categories.

The eruption of the Naipaul controversy and its reflection in the Turkish and world press brought home to us the significance of our presence. We were, in fact, called upon to take a position in a radicalized environment. Freedom of speech there is a matter of life and death. Whereas, in many ways, writers are marginalized, or willingly marginalise themselves, in the West, their utterances largely ignored unless the adopt an extremist position like Naipaul’s, in Turkey and the Islamic world they act as public intellectuals, representing the political in their work, using their profile to engage with political ideas on all sides of the argument. When they do so, they put themselves in very real danger. Our duty was to align ourselves with them, and with freedom of speech – not too difficult for a gathering of people who already believed in these values, and most of whom would be travelling home in a few days to countries where such values prevailed however imperfectly, and for the time being at least. In due course this duty would become central to the Istanbul Declaration. The first paragraph of the declaration would state:

‘The freedom of all types of cultural and literary acts is vital. Every direct or indirect barrier preventing freedom of expression should be abolished. Powerful institutional and civil society support should be mobilized to prevent violence and threats to freedom of expression.’

Easily said in Ireland, but in Istanbul it involved considerable heated discussion and editing. The initial weaker draft was withdrawn. Equally, direct references to Articles 301and 312 of the Turkish Penal Code (among several that limit freedom of expression) were withdrawn, avowedly because the Turkish Government changed the numbers regularly, but possibly because a reference to them might put the Turkish signatories in danger of prosecution – something we outsiders could not countenance in our name. Turkey is, of course, a secular state, but one in which the Islamic governing party is in constant conflict with old-guard Kemalist forces, among whom, generally, one numbers the Armed Forces. It is important to remember that the prosecutions are not only directed against the writers, editors and translators who have allegedly violated the various articles, but are also strategic or tactical actions in which the accused stands proxy for powerful political and corporate forces. The Pamuk case, for example, in which he was cited for mentioning the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, as well as the Armenian Genocide, was, at a tactical level, an action between the anti-EU old-guard and the pro-EU reformists, the aim being to make an EU application impossible because of the high-profile violation of human rights involved.

So, we European Writers not from Turkey stepped gingerly into a complexity that we could only measure by trying to explain the complexity of our own politics. The Irish ‘bail-out’, for example, was a subject of much enquiry. The complex history of Fianna Fáil, the divisions rooted in the Civil War, the arrival of the ideological Progressive Democrats, and Berlin-to-Bostonism, the tent at the Galway races, the complex decline of the Left and its tentative new beginnings in the present, could only be the tip of the iceberg of explanation. Another subject of interest to the better-informed delegates was our new blasphemy legislation. Attempting to explain ourselves we learn about the complexity of others. We remained conscious, or were gently reminded, of the dangers of Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said. We tried to be sensitive while simultaneously lending support. To what extant were we successful? The declaration itself can be the only test. I attach a link at the end of this article.

The Parliament was unusual for gatherings of writers, poets, translators and editors, in that almost all the participants had been invited because they were intellectually and politically engaged in one way or another in their home countries. Lunch-time conversations centred around cultural, literary and political ideas. The breath of the cultural field was impressive. Hari Kunzru, representing England (or possibly the UK?), an Indian born, left-wing novelist, speaking at the opening ceremony, set the tone by attacking Turkish censorship, questioning our assumptions about identity and multiculturalism and the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’. Vikram Seth challenged the very idea of Europe. Cultural boundaries were transgressed in ever more delightful ways. Rui Zink, the Portuguese novelist, children’s writer, journalist and author of brilliant graphic novels whose anarchist father and grandfather were imprisoned by the Salazar regime. Fatima Sharafeddine, a children’s author, Lebanese born, representing Belgium, where she lives, writing in Classical Arabic, one of whose books (Neilín agus an Cat) has been translated for the publisher Futa Fata. Mehmet Yashin, born in Nicosia, Cyprus, writing in Turkish and living in Cambridge. Eva Moreda, from Spain, writing in Galician and teaching at the Open University in London. Kaya Genç, from Turkey, writing his dissertation on Oscar Wilde and Conrad. And so on.

The idea for the European Writers’ Parliament grew out of a proposal by the late José Saramago and Orhan Pamuk. Saramago was to have given the guest of honour speech at the Opening Ceremony. Pamuk wasn’t there, I never heard why. Undoubtedly, had Saramago given the key-note address things would have been different, but it is difficult to imagine what Naipaul would have said that would not have provoked a riot. In any case, I regret those three absences, Saramago above all.

My Commission
Prior to departure from Ireland we three ‘delegates’ (nobody knows how or why we were chosen) – Jamie O’Neill, Glenn Meade and myself – were, like everyone else, asked to opt for particular ‘commissions’. I opted for ‘Literature In The Digital Age’. In the event, it was probably the most focused group of the four. The commission divided between what I would characterize as ‘the futurists’ and a small, group of left-wing critics or sceptics. The futurists were either entirely for or entirely against everything digital, but in either case they saw it as the complete disappearance of all barriers, boundaries between literary forms and genres, the disintegration of literature as we know it and the development of something entirely new. Sometimes this was expressed in the vaguest possible terms (‘Some day we will write novels on clouds’, as one writer suggested), and at other times in quite precise form. One writer suggested that some day young people (they tend to envisage ‘young people’ doing these things) will read texts in which key words are hyperlinked to images, cartoons, animations or games that will enhance the experience of reading the text. It didn’t take long for an anti-digital futurist to point out that this would over-determine the text and abolish imagination. All of the futurists were quite clear that the internet represented freedom of expression and was the future repository of all information and the death of the printed text, regardless of whether they thought it a good or bad thing. They tended also to be concerned with author’s rights, in particular, copyright, which they saw going the same way as musicians’ rights (an unmitigated bad thing in their view).

The ‘leftists’ adopted a more nuanced position. Ola Larsmo from Sweden, and representing Swedish PEN, noted firstly that technologies do not replace earlier technologies – he called it the x+1 theory and contrasted it with the Dinosaur Theory (digitisation would make books disappear). TV didn’t replace radio, for example. The book would continue to exist but would have to share readership with the eBook. He cautioned against the dangers of censorship, and proposed that writers do not need the level of copyright that exists for corporations (pointing out that he could not even draw a pair of mouse-ears without infringing Disney’s rights) and that we should campaign to have copyright rolled back to where it was in the 1970s, rather than striving for ever more stringent copyright law. Kaya Genç, from Turkey, objected to what he regarded as the obsessive concern for copyright. He called for a commons of literature, literature as a liberatory and resistant action. He cited the WWII resistance magazine Combat as the model. In Combat all work was anonymous. I objected to the idea that the internet was in any way free, given that we knew it was subject to totalitarian government and corporate surveillance, a form of censorship that was relatively invisible by comparison with censorship of the book, and suggested that the eventual declaration should include our opposition to all forms of digital censorship. Pat Kane (Scotland) deepened our understanding of such censorship but kept a foot in both camps by maintaining that the internet was a potential neo-communist vehicle for sharing information. Kane, a radical thinker, activist and musician (and writer to boot!) was one of the few members of the commission who had actually written directly about the internet. His website Thoughtland, is stimulating reading.

While convinced that we had divided in such a way that a true summary of our commission’s discussion could never be included in the Declaration, we were shocked to discover, on emerging from the first session, that the other groups were even more divided. The Naipaul issue, for example, had provoked furious debate. The question of the ‘boundaries of European literature’, first addressed by Vikram Seth (Indian by birth and citizenship, but a delegate for England) at the opening ceremony, had provoked wide-ranging argument which would eventually find its way into the first draft as the simple expression ‘There is no Europe’! Needless to say it was eliminated in revision, however the debate would be reflected in almost every paragraph of the declaration, in such sentences as: ‘Political, ethnic, religious and national boundaries should not present an obstacle to the writer. We support cultural diversity and exchange.’

Link to The Istanbul Declaration

Pat Kane’s Thoughtland

Ola Larsmo on The Temptations of Dinosaur Theory

Kaya Genç’s Musée Des Beaux Arts

Fatima Sharafeddine

Mehmet Yashin

Why they will die

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 13:15:54 +0000

Every time we hear a minister, an economist or a journalist talking about the economic catastrophe, we hear them talk about the pain to be suffered by the tax-payer. We should listen carefully to the language our masters use, because language has a way of turning things into reality.

Tax-payers will pay for the catastrophe, they tell us. Or punters even. ‘The punters will end up paying for this’.

The truth is that people who will pay for this will be citizens and non-citizens. People (as opposed to tax-payers) will pay for this government’s stupidity and corruption, and the people who pay the most and the hardest will not be tax-payers, or will be people who pay very little tax.

The hardest hit people will be those whose incomes are below the tax threshold – they will quite simply pay with actual physical pain, with hypothermia, with hunger, with depression, with loneliness, with lost opportunity, with the sight of their children’s future disappearing. They will pay when they can’t get medical treatment. They will pay when they can’t afford to heat the house. They will pay when their children are hungry. They will pay when their children go to school hungry, cold and hopeless. They will pay with emigration.

They will die for an imaginary Ireland – or for the imaginary Ireland envisaged by Fianna Fail, the Progressive Democrats, the Greens, the IMF, our EU partners – a country without a heart or a soul but with a credit-rating to die for.

They will die because cancer care will be cut back. They will die because the queues at hospital waiting rooms are lengthening. They will die because their communities are run by drug barons. They will die because they can’t get warm anymore, even though when they were younger they never seemed to feel the cold.

They will not die for patriotism. They will not give their lives for a better Ireland. They will die for a capitalist shambles that values anonymous millionaires but sets no value by a seventy five year old retired bricklayer whose back is gone and whose heart is not the best. They will die for a corrupt political party.

Therefore their pain and their deaths are hopeless, pointless, obscene. They will be the numberless victims of stupidity and corruption. What could be worse than that?
So never talk to me about tax-payers. Talk about people. Talk about citizens. I will only vote for people who use those two words – the people, the citizen.

A New Proclamation

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:54:27 +0000

A NEW PROCLAMATION

Poblacht na h Éireann™

The Temporary Government 
To the people of Anglo-Ireland™

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of Mammon and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of subservience, we declare the name of this country to be Anglo-Ireland™, and through us, Anglo-Ireland™ summons her children to aid her banks and abandon their old illusions about so-called freedom.

Having organised and trained her economists through her secret capitalist indoctrination system, and through her open propaganda organisations, the Irish Media and the subaltern intellectuals, having patiently turned citizens into punters and made of a society a mere economy, having resolutely waited until the people couldn’t tell the difference, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on the control of the press and the power of capital to manipulate public opinion, she abandons whatever pretence she had to being a republic and opts instead to become a local branch of the IMF.
We declare the nonsense about right of the people of Anglo-Ireland™ to the ownership of Anglo-Ireland™ to be so much hot air, ditto the unfettered control of Irish destinies insofar as it ever existed. The long usurpation of these rights by the governing elite has extinguished them completely, nor can these rights ever be reignited except by the destruction of that governing elite, which I wouldn’t hold my breath for. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their willingness to follow the gentry, even so far as to give over their independence from imperialism to their own gombeens and shoneens, proof positive that we are a nation of slaves or fools. Now, standing by that fundamental abrogation of the rights of the People and reasserting the rights of profit before the rights of the people, we hereby proclaim Anglo-Irish Republic Incorporated™ to be a banking, real estate and auctioneering business, and we pledge the lives of our one-time citizens (now punters or tax-payers™) as collateral for the debts of their masters. Anglo-Ireland™ calls on the poor, the old, the infirm, the young, the students, the workers, the unemployed, the public servants, the householders, the small businesses, the small farmers, the fishermen, the tradesmen and women, to pledge their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children to saving the corporate elite and the Fianna Fáil party whose long sacrifice in the name of holding onto power has finally borne fruit in this declaration.

Anglo-Ireland Incorporated™ guarantees the freedom of capital, the right to make profit out of other people’s suffering, and declares its resolve to pursue the prosperity of the rich at the expense of the poor with special emphasis on the benefits of emigration, balancing the obvious benefits of keeping our children at home against the equally obvious savings to be made by exporting our demographic problems to other nations, and proud of the differences carefully fostered by Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, which have divided a minority from the majority and given us one of the biggest rich-poor gaps in the world.
Until we are forced by time into a general election, the Temporary Government™, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the corporations and IBEC, determined to put down by force of arms if necessary, as already demonstrated, any attempt by the people to reassert any of the rights they mistakenly thought they had.

We place the cause of the Anglo-Ireland Incorporated™ under the protection of the The ECB, the EC and the IMF, whose blessing we invoke upon our banks and businesses, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will endanger it by doing anything precipitous such as resigning his Dáil seat. In this extreme hour the Irish Nation™ must, by its squalor and passivity and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the standard of living of the few, prove itself worthy of the august austerity to which it is called.

I have been watching The Pipe, by Risteard Ó Domhnaill

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:49:53 +0000

Risteard Ó Dohmnaill’s film The Pipe encapsulates the balance of power in this shambolic republic – on the one hand the not inconsiderable determination and strength both personal and communal of ordinary people, and on the other the massive force of the state as expressed by the police, the judiciary, the army, the navy, the transnational corporation, private security firms, government and much of the mainstream media. At one point the small farmers of Rossport and environs were being filmed by private security companies, observed from police helicopters and prevented from protesting by hundreds of Gardaí while their friends in the inshore fishery were being prevented from lifting their pots by the Irish Navy and private security firms – at a cost to the citizens of Ireland of over €14 million by 2010. The resources deployed against this brave community were and are shameful. Had the government refused to use police violence and to permit the illegal activities of the company’s agents, or had they even enforced the environmental protection laws, Shell would long ago have come to amicable agreement with the community.

The film itself is a beautiful piece of work. When I saw it recently at the Cork Film Festival it played to a sell-out house and when the director stayed behind for a question-and-answer session more than half the audience remained in place. Of course, the material is there – but not everyone could have risen to the challenge of documenting it.

The camera remains close during the protest sequences so that the audience feels intimately involved in the violence at the receiving end – the cameraman is jostled repeatedly. Many of the Gardaí are well-known and their names are heard repeatedly. Various protesters ask them to behave decently, to remember that they are part of the community too, not to threaten them or manhandle them, not to use violence. The outstanding moment for me was when a Garda officer, a superintendent perhaps, walked up and down in front of an unarmed crowd of peaceful sit-down protestors and told them through a megaphone that neither he nor his officers would be bullied. Behind him the police with their batons drawn.

There is straightforward beauty too. The aerial sequences sweeping over Killary Harbour are stunning, likely in their own right to bring tourists to Mayo. Ó Domhnaill makes a simple point very well here: this is a truly beautiful, wild and unspoilt place. Shell is driving its pipeline through a protected ecosystem and changing the lives of the people who live there and depend upon it. The imagery moves from shots of still waters, sunset, ebbing and falling tides, waves breaking on pristine sand, to the same places now with giant platforms in the water, machinery on the beaches, trenches, fast boats tearing up and down at high speeds, enormous pipe-laying vessels anchored in the mist. The rupture in nature is paralleled by a rupture in community life. People whose daily lives revolved around the land, the shore, the sea now spend their time at community meetings arguing about strategy, manning roadblocks and protests, travelling to the European Court. Their houses are under surveillance. Their movements are tracked. People tramp across the common land that has been their right for generations. Shell assiduously sows division. Some fishermen are bought off. It’s hard to blame them. Fishermen have been beggared by our government’s neglect, they need all the money they can get. There is dissent about strategy, some people arguing for compromise (or the appearance of compromise) others standing out for the principle. The film does not shirk the fact that this struggle is searingly painful for the people of Mayo and, in particular, for the people of Rossport.

The role of the Navy is an interesting one. ‘The grey Fella’, as fishermen refer to the ships, are traditionally seen as friendly (unless you’re drift-netting illegally), and are, of course, always looked to in time of distress. Pat ‘The Chief’ O’Donnell greets the naval vessel with civility from his own boat and remarks that it is customary to do so. And he feels strongly that all of the mariners involved in the conflict – the merchant sailors of the pipe-laying ship, the navy and the fishermen share, or should share, a common bond because they are seamen. No such bond is recognised by the master of the pipe-layer and the life-saving role of the navy is turned on its head. The vessel is deployed as a simple threat, as the strong arm of capital, the enforcer against the fishermen of the coast, an extension of the repressive power of the state employed in the protection of interests more valuable than a mere fishing boat or the livelihood of the fishermen. Indeed Pat The Chief’s boat was eventually sunk by masked men, while he himself was held down, though these events occurred after the making of the film, and in April 2009, Willie Corduff was severely beaten by agents of Shell, probably Integrated Risk Management Services, the security company.

The central characters – they are so dramatic and eloquent that I think ‘character’ is a better description than ‘personality’ – Pat ‘The Chief’ O’Donnell and Willie Corduff carry the narrative. Theirs is the viewpoint of the film. We see them going about their daily lives in the places they love. Willie Corduff is a farmer. We see him picking cockles on the beach that will shortly be destroyed and virtually privatised by Shell and the security companies. Pat ‘The Chief’ works his pots on the line that Shell’s pipeline will take. The two central confrontations of the film revolve around these men – Willie Corduff was one of the Rossport Five who went to prison for their protest, their committal sought by Shell. Pat ‘The Chief’ manoeuvred his small fishing boat to block the activities of the pipe-laying ship. He too was arrested. The most radical voice in the community, the local school teacher Maura Harrington went on hunger strike.

For an audience unused to seeing the Garda as a violent body, some of the most shocking scenes concerned the attempt to prevent the company from accessing the site of the proposed oil refinery at Bellanaboy. The brutality with which these largely elderly (though far from frail) people were handled by members of the Gardaí brought gasps from the audience. Many of the people present were used to seeing this force applied to ‘radical groups’ who ‘infiltrate peaceful protests’ with the express intention of ‘provoking violent reaction’. They did not expect to see an elderly man batoned about the legs and head, or another picked up and thrown over a ditch. In this respect, the film made a clear point in a very accessible way: the forces of law and order are deployed by the state in the interests of capital, not of the people. Despite the applause, the audience leaving the theatre were subdued – a tribute to the power of the film and its challenge to how we organise society. But the broader question was left unanswered by the film. What political analysis is required to understand these forces? The most political of the Rossport group was Maura Harrington. Her views on tactics are covered but not her more political statements. I believe there is always a balance to be achieved between spreading a story to as wide a public as possible and challenging that same public to think critically. I feel Ó Domhnaill erred on the side of the former. It is, I suppose, a relatively minor criticism of a powerful film, but I would have preferred to see more of the politicians and their comments and something of the incestuous relationship between the Irish state and the multinationals.

To be fair, the film does not fall into the usual ‘Human Rights Film’ trap of identifying the victim and valorising their victim status. We do not feel sorry for the people of Rossport. We feel shocked by the behaviour of the state acting in our name against our fellow-citizens. There are no victims in Rossport. There are, instead, sturdy people fighting against an oppressive alliance of state and capital to be able to walk the fields and work the searoads that they call home. It is a political action and Ó Domhnaill makes this plain in the film. His interest is in the resistance, not the suffering.

First published on Irish Left Review

The stupid economy versus the smart economy

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 08:41:49 +0000

The smart economy fetish has invaded the minds of our politicians and CEOs in the last few years. None of them seems to be entirely sure what it means, but they’re all certain that it’s a good thing, that we’re headed there, that it suits the particular genius of Irish people and a lot of other mallarkey. We’re all going to be innovating away like crazy over the next few years, inventing new ways of doing everything from lighting a turf fire to self-injecting artificial red blood cells into our veins.

There are many things to be said about the smart economy fetish. First of all, if we examine the hard facts, all the evidence suggests that the regime here is much more likely, once it sets its mind to it, to come up with a stupid economy. A very stupid economy, in fact. A very stupid economy is what we created when we had plenty of money and the economic theories (sic) that the regime subscribes to were in the ascendent. Now that we have no money and the economic theories have been shown to be tautologous balderdash, it seems unlikely that the regime will come up with something more intelligent. They simply don’t have the practice.

Now the smart economy fetish, like a lot of fetishes, is empowered by euphoria. Simply by telling us that we’re a creative nation and mentioning things that are smart (innovation funds, R&D intensive SMEs - a veritable rash of acronyms always follows ‘smart talk’ etc). In addition, according to the Taoiseach, ‘The multinational community will be incentivised to intensify innovative, high-value activity and technological convergence which will provide quality jobs’ - or, to put it another way, they’ll give even more money (which we don’t have) to multinationals to set up here. I love the idea of a ‘multi-national community’ - by which the Taoiseach means the crowd of profit hungry sharks that circle the waters of the globe in search of non-union workers and governments prepared to keep them in their places.

The key euphoric words are ‘innovate’, ‘thriving’ ‘enterprise’, ‘research and development’, ‘dynamic’, ‘future’, ‘exemplary’, ‘intensify’, ‘forward’, ‘first class’, ‘best practice’ etc. There’s a beautiful sentence in the Taoiseach’s paper on the subject (from which the above quotation on multinationals also comes) that encapsulates the way this language is self-inflating: ‘The Smart Economy has, at its core, an exemplary research, innovation and commercialisation ecosystem.’ The he idea that these these buzz-words somehow inhabit an ‘eco-system’ wraps it all up nicely for the Green Party. The key verb is ‘has’. This implies that the smart economy has somehow already been willed into existence. The paper does not say ‘will have’, ‘might have’, ‘could have’ or ‘should have’. It already exists because... because... well, because we’re so excited about it. The paper was written in 2008 and since then the action plan has come to appear increasingly fatuous:

• Meeting the Short-term Challenge – Securing the Enterprise Economy and Restoring Competitiveness
• Building the Ideas Economy – Creating ‘The Innovation Island’
• Enhancing the Environment and Securing Energy Supplies
• Investing in Critical Infrastructure
• Providing Efficient and Effective Public Services and Smart Regulation

None of this is ever going to happen. There’ll be no building on this island for many a year, and we’re certainly not going to build a whole new ‘innovative island’, unless it’ll be an offshore investment for the bank CEOs who need someplace to hide their bonuses.

It is important to note that the government means us to read the word ‘smart’ in its North American sense of ‘intelligent’ as opposed to the Irish sense of ‘cheeky’ or ‘shallow’ or the older English sense of ‘wound or hurt’. But who is going to believe that such an incredibly stupid and craven government as we are blessed with is capable of engendering an intelligent economy? All the evidence suggests that this crowd are only capable of stupid economies. That’s what we’ve got so far. That’s what we’ll get as long as they’re in power.

José Saramago – An Appreciation

Thu, 9 Sep 2010 10:06:00 +0100

One of the many startling things about José Saramago was that he was an overtly political writer in a literary world in which being political does not pay. Remarkably, at the age of 85 he began a highly controversial blog and these occasional pieces, collected in The Notebook (Verso, 2010) – squibs, memoranda, appreciations of friends, and diatribes against a wide range of targets including the Vatican and the church (‘parasites on civil society’), Bush (‘a liar emeritus’), Berlusconi (‘absolute lord and master of Italy’), Sarkozy (‘the irresponsible’), racism, anti-immigrant policies, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and the right-wing government of Portugal – are a fascinatingly direct insight into the mind of a literary Nobel prizewinner who no longer cared very much what effect his opinions could have on his own standing, but who wanted passionately to cut through the fake discourse, the lies that he called the ‘other truth’, that allow our modern form of semi-democracy to flourish:

‘[T]he lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity’s wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes.’

He had never been a stranger to controversy. In particular, his signature at the end of a letter attacking Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon (along with those of Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Eduardo Galeano, Arundhati Roy and Harold Pinter among others) expressly condemned Israel for it’s treatment of the Palestinians. It made him both loved and hated. Taken together with his many pro-Palestinian statements, the Israeli lobby rightly decided he was hostile to Israel and wrongly, as usual, made accusations of anti-Semitism, although the usual charge of ‘Holocaust denier’ could not be applied because he had edited a book on Adolf Eichmann and his part in the Shoah. However, his own statement in The Notebook makes his position perfectly clear:

‘Critical as I have always been of the oppression and repression of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state, my main argument in condemning them was and continues to be on a moral plane: the unspeakable sufferings inflicted on the Jews throughout history, and most especially as part of what is called the final solution, ought to afford the Israelis of today (or of the past 60 years, to be precise) the best possible reason not to commit their very own tyrannies on Palestinian land. What Israel needs above all else is a moral revolution. Firm in this conviction, I would never deny the Holocaust. I only wish to extend the concept to the outrage, humiliation, and violation of every kind to which the Palestinian people have been subjected.’

In fact, his condemnation of Israeli politics is no more trenchant than his condemnation of other states and leaders, or his attacks on what, in an attempt to hide its uglier name (Capitalism) is euphemistically called the ‘market economy’ and its own peculiar political expression – neoliberal democracy:

‘In other, clearer words, then, what I'm saying is that people do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control. And if I talk about the market in this way it is only because today, and more with each day that passes, it is this that is the instrument par excellence of authentic, unitary, simple power, global economic and financial power, which is not democratic because the people never elected it, and finally which is not democratic because it does not have the people's happiness as its aim.’ (The Notebook)

Elsewhere he said (in Christopher Rollason’s translation):

‘We've had this shift from the ideal of full employment to job insecurity and junk contracts (or, euphemistically, 'social mobility'), without realising what was going on: all of society has been anaesthetised. Was this some stupid government's idea? No, it was the idea of the economic powers.’ (http://yatrarollason.info/files/SaramagoandOrwell.pdf)

He was critical of the Left too. He lost faith in Fidel Castro who had been a close friend, and stated in 2003 that ‘he has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams’. He condemned the FARC as a murder gang, leading James Petras to accuse him of ‘bizarre historical amnesia’. He was particularly scathing about the European Left of which he said, ‘The Left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in’. ‘No communist party,’ he wrote, ‘beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I said.’

To balance these oppositional stances The Notebook contains affectionate tributes to beloved friends and respected public or artistic figures - Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Amado, Antonio Machado, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Eduardo Galeano, Mahmoud Darwish, Borges, Judge Baltasar Garzón, Roberto Saviano, Javier Ortiz, Dario Fo and Pedro Almodóvar. Writing about the incident where Hugo Chavez presented the newly elected Barack Obama with a copy of Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America, for example, Saramago says ‘whoever wants to be informed about what has happened in America, that whole Transcontinental stretch of America from the 15th century onward, can only stand to gain from reading Eduardo Galeano’. (The subtext to the incident, by the way, which perhaps may have occurred to Saramago though he doesn’t mention it, is that no one in their right mind could ever imagine anyone presenting anything other than a health and safety guide to eating pretzels to the previous incumbent.) There are warm pieces on Sub-Comandante Marcos, the Disappeared of Argentina, as well as more light-hearted glances at subjects like poetry, Portuguese water-dogs, journeys, flowers, and places, especially the beautiful city of Lisbon.

So who was José Saramago? Born in 1922, his family were landless peasants in the province of Ribatejo: ‘A Berber grandfather from North Africa, another grandfather a swineherd, a wonderfully beautiful grandmother; serious and handsome parents, a flower in a picture - what other genealogy would I care for? and what better tree would I lean against?’ (from his Nobel Lecture). When he was two years old his parents moved to Lisbon and his father found work as a policeman. He went to a technical school and qualified as a mechanic. Later he would work as a translator, a journalist and a newspaper editor (controversial, of course) before becoming a full-time writer. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 when Salazar was dictator and membership of the party was illegal, and he remained a challenging, awkward, polemical but committed member until his death. ‘We are correct,’ he wrote, ‘and being correct helps those who propose a better world before it is too late.’ In the USA his communism damaged his reputation somewhat* – and the sales of his books – and it was divisive in Portugal where it sat awkwardly with Portuguese pride in his Nobel Prize, but in other parts of the world it was understood and welcomed, among readers of the European Left, and more particularly in South America where it was especially appreciated by the vast Lusophone population of Brazil.

This child of almost illiterate peasants would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. In his speech he described his grandfather Jeronimo as ‘the wisest man I ever knew’ who, lying under one of the fig trees in his garden, could ‘could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words’. ‘Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.’ The prize – by now we expect it – caused huge controversy because of his politics. ‘Nobel Writer, A Communist, Defends Work’ wrote the New York Times in surprise and possibly horror.

His novels are realist fables in which ordinary people – farmers, clerks, a doctor’s wife – play important and even heroic parts. In All The Names a clerk in the public records office (a positively Derridean archive!) heroically attempts to correct an error and in doing so falls in love; in Blindness, a doctor’s wife provides the victims of a plague of sightlessness with their only hope of salvation (to each according to his needs…). The Gospel According to Jesus Christ enraged the Vatican (‘a substantially anti-religious vision’) by imagining a randy, neurotic Jesus and because it contained an enormous list of the ‘best’ ways of getting to heaven – bloody martyrdom. The Portuguese government removed his name from a list of novels eligible for a European Literary prize because of it. His plots are always surprising. Blindness, fictionalising Debord’s The Society of The Spectacle, centres on an outbreak of ‘white blindness’ which passes like a swine ‘flu from person to person, but which is really intended ‘to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths’. In The Stone Raft the Iberian peninsula mysteriously breaks free from the continent of Europe and floats off into the Atlantic. In Seeing a majority of voters in an unnamed country return blank voting papers precipitating a political crisis. By 2005, Saramago was 83 and Death With Interruptions imagines what would happen if, for no known reason, it became impossible to die.

Alas, death called for José Saramago shortly after his breakfast on the morning of the 18th June, 2010.

This piece was previously published on Irish Left Review and Three Monkeys Online.

* Thanks to Christopher Rollason who took the trouble to correct me in my assertion that Saramago's communism damaged his reputation in the USA. He writes: 'I am not sure if the remark about the USA is fair, since Saramago has certainly had a higher profile (and higher sales) there than most recent non-Anglophone writers'. Christopher's blog is here. It contains some personal photos of Saramago (and also, by the way, some evocative photos of the remaining Parisian arcades that formed the focus of Walter Benjamin's wonderful The Arcades Project)

The cartoon is by William Medeiros
(http://www.toonpool.com/cartoons/Jose%20Saramago_2355)

Writers and 'doing the state some service'

Tue, 7 Sep 2010 21:52:30 +0100

I recently posted a satirical response to An Taoiseach’s call for poets to do the state some service, and I would now like to return to the question in a more direct way. The call was widely reported because it coincided with the installation of Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry, most notably it was echoed by journalist Enda O’Doherty in an Irish Times piece entitled ‘Why Shouldn’t Poets Do The State Some Service?’

The line was first spoken by Othello, of course, a Moorish general serving, effectively, as a mercenary to the State of Venice, the merchant state supreme of the time. Having murdered his wife Desdemona in a fit of jealousy, and now, made cognisant of the trick played on him by his trusty lieutenant who gulled him into thinking Desdemona unfaithful, he realises that he has ‘thrown away a pearl richer than all his tribe’. Charles Haughey quoted the speech in his resignation as Taoiseach in 1992 and I suspect it is by this route, rather than the Shakespearian one, that it entered the cognitive field of Fianna Fáil. No doubt they think Charlie coined it, ever a man for the good line. Perhaps they did not know the end of the speech, usually rendered thus:
… In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus.
(Stabs himself)

As far as Charlie is concerned, of course, the malignant, turbaned and circumcised Turk was all extraneous material, though important in its time, but he must certainly have felt as though he were gutting himself. His Fianna Fáil compatriots look back on Charlie as an embarrassing phenomenon, the very model of the hard man, the cunning devil, the cute whoor that the Party is forever hoping to find in its ranks when the time is needed, but one who perhaps went too far, or who was found out, and, besides, one who never recovered the majority won by his predecessor. Bertie Aherne was a hero in the same mould, also a failure in terms of majorities, Brian Cowen an attempt to lose the cute whoor side. Ironically, Othello is an absolute mismatch for this archetypal Fianna Fáil character – courageous, absolutely honest, completely loyal to the state and to his wife, easily fooled, at home only among soldiers. Iago, on the other hand, has everything – Iago the cunning, ruthless, lying, devious, jealous, brutal, crude, party man. We see him at his best in the pub where he has everyone singing along to his party-pieces, laughing till they cry at his jokes, but always wary of him too.

But leaving aside the original source of the phrase, why should the poet not do the state some service? The answer depends entirely on the definition of the term “service”. It is clear from the Taoiseach's reference to “Brand Ireland” that he has in mind something like an extension of the function of advertising agencies. He wants us to stop moaning about Ireland. He means much the same thing as the reader means when she says (mine anyway), “not another dark book please”. He wants us to celebrate the good things about this country, which for Fianna Fáil is a long list that includes hurling and Gaelic football, the West of Ireland, the pub singsong, the community spirit, the Ploughing Championships, horse racing, the Clancy Brothers, poems we learned at school, the Church, the peace process, the welcome on the mat, the War of Independence, the Celtic Tiger and the low rate of corporation tax. The ideal collection of poems would cover all of the above and whatever you're having yourself. Novels, of course, will be complicated by the necessity for conflict, but could reasonably be expected to be about either (A) the War of Independence (B) country life or (C) the Celtic Tiger. Thematically there is tragedy in the heroic struggle for freedom followed by the internecine strife of the Civil War, the model of community spirit provided by the meitheal, the power and glory of the merchant princes – what more could you want?

But at a deeper level the Taoiseach's call demands that the writer give assent to the system of which the Taoiseach himself is a part. What is the system? Firstly, it is a form of capitalism known nowadays as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is best exemplified by the United States of America (where poor people, if they have a job, try to have two or three) and, what comes as a surprise to most people here, Ireland. It is characterised by a determination to reduce the state's involvement in health care, elder care, education, transport, waste disposal, communications and just about every other field in which we expect the state to participate. It achieves this small government, as it is laughingly called, by the simple expedient of selling everything at a knockdown rate. Here in Ireland Eircom is the classic example. Hand-in-hand with this commitment to the redaction of the public sphere goes a valorisation of character traits that are normally despised in ordinary human intercourse – cunning, deviousness, ruthlessness, gambling, exploitation, conspicuous consumption and reckless waste, boastful flamboyance, pretension and gross over-accumulation. When I speak of valorisation I'm thinking of the kind of language used by that most Celtic Tigerish of advertisements – The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards (alas, the advertisement is no longer available, or at least a diligent search on the Internet did not turn it up):

'In business everything starts with the Entrepreneur; they imagine, they create, they fan the sparks of imagination turning ideas into reality. In short, they make it happen. If you’d like to salute and reward one of these unique individuals, if you’d like to see them acclaimed in the Irish Times, if you’d like to watch their achievements being televised by RTE, if in fact you’d like to be Ireland’s Entrepreneur of the Year, then make it happen. Call Ernst & Young on 014750575 for a nomination form, that’s 014750575 to salute, support and reward our outstanding entrepreneurs.'

The emptying out of language represented by “they imagine, they create”, “fanning the sparks of imagination”, “turning ideas into reality”, is appropriately matched by the inflation of already empty clichés – “salute and reward”, “unique individuals”, “make it happen”. But the kind of locker room self-congratulation represented here (‘watch their achievements being televised on RTÉ) is exactly what An Taoiseach wants us to emulate – in a poetic way of course.

Now the Ernst & Young entrepreneur competition is a worldwide one, and recently they asked their winners what the role of government should be, and the Turkish winner put it succinctly: “the duty of the government is to create a climate which is suitable for businesses”. This view is probably a widely held, though not a universal one in the Irish business community. Many business people would agree with their non-entrepreneurial fellow-citizens who tend to have a more comprehensive view of the role of government. They expect the state to protect them from assault or theft, to keep them from destitution, to guard such rights as the people have abrogated to themselves, to provide certain services that are regarded almost universally as a public good (medical care, education, transport, communications etc), to act to the good of communities, and to enact laws that will ensure or increase the probability of all these things. Providing a climate that is suitable for business is at best a secondary consideration, though few people object to it once the other important things have been dealt with as the most urgent priorities.

Government, on the other hand, or at least our government, begins with the business end. Everything in the state must be made suitable for business – hence the elaborate preparations for the selling off of state assets like Aer Lingus, Eircom and shortly Bord Gáis and all the others, together with increasingly opening up areas like education and health care to exploitation (just think about the drive to replace blackboards with ‘interactive whiteboards’ – the business of supplying schools with them, the business of supplying the software and the upgrades, the maintenance business, the virus protection business, the cost of software updates, upgrading the hardware, etc Blackboards are relatively inert, from a business point of view, but nevertheless effective.). This is what the entrepreneur demands. This is the kind of society envisaged by the government. Does Brian Cowen agree? The very vehemence with which he would deny such a charge indicates that he regards such values as reprehensible, yet the mealy-mouthed defence of privatisation goes on daily in the media with politicians trotting up to the microphone to suggest, one way or another, that every human interaction is capable of being turned to profit by someone – and that is the only way out now for a country they have already reduced to beggary. Nevertheless, his request for poets to ‘connect’ with ‘Ireland as a brand’ is an attempt to co-opt those poets into a system that he genuinely believes in. During his stewardship Ireland developed the second largest rich-poor gap in the world in the world. The truth is that, distasteful as he may find the term capitalism, it’s what he wants writers to support. Many writers simply reject the values of capitalism, others accept them but find them distasteful and still others will be happy to put their shoulder to the wheel. Nevertheless, most would reject the idea that the role of the writer or artist is to help make a tiny minority of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

Journalist Enda O’Doherty took up the call in a rambling and not very logical piece for The Irish Times. He approvingly quoted An Taoiseach: “Ireland is a brand. Our country, her landscape and her culture, are known the world over. We must connect with that brand now and use it to give us the competitive advantage in a globalised world that is increasingly the same.” Irish writers , O’Doherty suggests, would be churlish to refuse this call to arms. After all, writers had always accepted the necessity for political patronage – look at the example of Duke Ercole who made the little city of Ferrara a cultural centre for the renaissance. Now, Ferrara is indeed one of Italy’s most beautiful cities, an undiscovered pearl in many ways, and Ercole was a great patron of the arts (albeit one who succeeded to the throne in true Fianna Fáil fashion, by beheading the heir apparent, his nephew), but several hundred years of history have seen the erosion of monarchical power and the virtual disappearance of the patronage model. Nobody, except perhaps Enda O’Doherty, seems to want it back. His argument seems to be that artists didn’t mind toadying to the rich and powerful in the 15th century, so why should they mind it now? To which we reply, that the duke’s subjects in general considered it necessary to toady to him in those days, but the development of political consciousness and, in particular, republicanism has seen off the Duke Ercoles of this world and good riddance. Nobody needs to toady to the rich nowadays, nor do we want to return to that position.

His second example seems to be even more irrelevant, if such a thing is possible. He cites Eamon De Valera’s speech about maidens and athletic young men and crossroads dancing. He fails to apply the reference except to say that Dev’s imagery represented a brand. However, writers in the Ireland of the time rejected that cosy image of the joys of rural living. One need only consider Kavanagh’s ‘Great Hunger’ as a riposte to the prevailing image of Ireland to see that writers have never considered themselves as the cultural wing of the establishment. Nor did the political establishment welcome his vision – the Gardaí seized all copies of the magazine in which it first appeared. In those days poetry made things happen.

A glance at the list of Irish writers we consider ‘great’ will show that none of them considered themselves to be cheerleaders for the capitalist class or the reigning politics – Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O’Casey, Clarke, Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien – aside from the more obviously engaged writers such as Peadar O’Donnell or Sean O Faoláin – all crossed swords with the political and economic powers of their time. O’ Brien’s At Swim Two Birds and An Béal Bocht, for example, are savage satires on the very image that O’Doherty characterises as the 1940s Brand Ireland. It is not until the arrival of Seamus Heaney that the anti-establishment link is broken.

Writers and artists are widely regarded as serious people (and most of them are) and many are now asking themselves the simple question: Why is it that when the country had money it didn’t matter what we wrote, but now that the arse has fallen out of Brand Ireland we’re suddenly expected to sing off the same hymn-sheet as the IDA? Or to put it another way: Why is it that during the boom years it was fine to be studiously apolitical, but during the bust we have to come out as fighting capitalists?

Enda O’Doherty observed that during the hey-day of the Celtic Tiger ‘many Irish poets, writers and artists were at best ambivalent about the track the nation was on. Indeed, some appeared to take extravagant pleasure in being mortally offended by the vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality of their fellow citizens.’ Leaving aside the trivial sarcasm of ‘extravagant pleasure’ and ‘mortally offended’, the fact is that much of the art and literature that came out of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years took no notice at all of the ‘vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality’ that was going on – most of it, it must be said, by people whose boots we are not fit to polish. What’s more, if it had, nobody would have taken issue with it. Books only matter to those who need them, and Ireland’s politicians and entrepreneurs, by and large, have no need of books. They’re busy people, they don’t know where the time goes, their families are always asking for quality time, there’s so little down-time and there’s golf and everything that goes with it, and even at that, sure when do we get the time to play a round nowadays? I have yet to meet an entrepreneur in a bookshop, though I meet swimming instructors, caretakers, civil servants, carpenters, farmers, waiters, teachers, secretaries and almost every other profession and trade – but maybe the entrepreneurs order online.

I agree with Fintan O’Toole’s argument – the traditional one – that books about the past are really about the present – but with this caveat, that they are indirect and safe ways of engaging with social questions and that the strategy was formulated in times and places where censorship was brutal and immediate. They are not necessary now. A list of the ‘big’ Irish novels of the past decade must include The Master – based on the life of Henry James; The Sea, set mainly in the thirties or forties; Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Aeneas McNulty and A Long Long Way, both set during the War of Independence; only John McGahern’s magnificent That They May face The Rising Sun is set in present day Ireland, and that is an elegy to a lost way of life. Another list might include Anne Enright’s The Gathering (mainly about childhood trauma, but set in the present) or Colm McCann’s Let The Great World Spin (set in New York). Only Sebastian Barry’s books can be considered political, and those politics are largely reactionary and relate to the old nationalist obsession with the Irishmen who fought England’s wars. These books, each excellent in its own way, had vast sales and international success. They did not take extravagant pleasure in being mortally offended by the vulgarity, materialism, philistinism and vacuous triviality of their fellow-citizens. None of them was likely to start a hare in political circles, none was controversial, except in the sense that The Sea and The Gathering were surprise winners of the Man Booker Prize, itself virtually a measure of what is palatable to the middle ground. O’Doherty’s swipe at artists, but mainly poets, is on the level of The Sun or the News Of the World – though the latter might at least have taken the trouble to tap a few writers’ phones to find out what they have to say in private. Writers have not been carping about philistinism, not, at least, until An Taoiseach asked them to write for Brand Ireland.
At his installation, and seemingly in reply to An Taoiseach, Harry Clifton declared that poetry needed to be defended against ‘the university ideologue, the modulariser, the smurfitiser, the harvardiser’, a sentence glossed thus by O’Doherty:
‘What seems to be suggested is that poetry – and perhaps, by extension, literature as a whole – does not require interpreters or commentators; that it can do without being taught in the university; and that culture does not need to be endowed by wealthy individuals or institutions’

But Clifton, who has himself taught in universities could never have intended such a shallow interpretation, nor indeed is what he said difficult to understand: he specified the idealogue, the administrative division of poetry into modules, the business school argument that culture can be monetised, the tendency to confine the arts to elite colleges. This is the view that sees the arts – and education and all cultural endeavours – as an element in so-called ‘human capital’, a kind of repository of social goods that can be banked and turned to profit by those who make such profits, mainly as a way of attracting inward investment. This is where O’Doherty, flummoxed for an argument in favour of elitism, monetisation, the reduction of poetry to administrative value and its subjection to political ideology takes flight to the 15th century and the exemplary rule of the usurper Ercole of Ferrara – ‘if taken to its logical conclusion it would impoverish us all. Poets, in traditional aristocratic societies, etc.’ This nostalgia for the days of aristocracy where poets knew their places and whom to thank for their ‘uncallused hands’ is more indicative of what O’Doherty believes to be the true role of the artist rather than the waffle in the concluding paragraph about holding ‘his nose, [and giving] the gift of his person to the commonality’. Though it may be remarked in passing that giving the gift of your person to the commonality is usually referred to as prostitution.

So who should we write for? The impression might easily be gained from O’Doherty and An Taoiseach that Irish writers should mainly write for tourists and CEOs of companies planning to locate here, or for businesses in Ireland that might profit from them, or for politicians who might be able to give copies of our books to visiting dignitaries. I think we might be unanimous for once and tick ‘None of the above’. Not only do we not write for them, but we would all, I think, be astonished if any of them bought, much less, read anything we had ever written (this is especially true of us poets who take a baleful view of the prospect of selling more than a couple of hundred copies). Nor do we write for The Arts Council, not even to receive grants from them, nor have they ever asked us to do so. The vexed question of ‘the audience for literature’ or ‘the readership’ is something I have mentioned before. I have taken the view that each of us, in fact, writes for an imaginary perfect reader of our own creation, one who has read everything we have read, and everything we have written. This will not do for An Taoiseach or Enda O’Doherty, however. We should have our eye not just on the market, but on how that market might be manipulated into thinking happy thoughts about a country ruled by the most reckless, least accountable and most compromised government in Europe, one furthermore, ruled by the same party for most of its existence. Our role, in the view of An Taoiseach and Enda O’Doherty is to puff up this country that has been turned into a banana republic by its rulers. On the other hand, writers might be justified in thinking that such a course would be dishonest and would break faith with their communities which expect of writers, for entirely traditional reasons, some kind of truth whether personal, political or philosophical. The truth about Ireland is that the country is fucked. People expect, on the one hand, that writers will, in their own way, now or in time to come, reflect that reality in the ways and styles that they are capable of, and on the other hand that they will lift their spirits. The more courageous among them believe that the truth, no matter how grim, is catharsis in its own right. They do not expect us to become copywriters for Fianna Fáil or the IDA, especially now when people feel betrayed by those organisations, and if any writer should become such a lowly thing they will be punished for breaking faith in a way that will make the contempt of the elite seem like a slap on the hand.

So, how best can poets and writers do the state some service? Firstly, it must be said that the state is not equivalent to the people, much as O’Doherty and his ilk would like to conflate the two – writers are unlikely to make such an elementary error of category – and in our present circumstances the state is merely the damned in waiting. The people, if its courage holds, will pass final judgement on it as soon as it presents itself for trial. Writers, as citizens, have that same prerogative. They too will vote, if they can find anyone worth voting for in their constituency. In the meantime they can best serve the people of Ireland by trying to tell the truth about what has happened. One way or another, sooner or later, that is what writers try hardest to do. Finally, I would argue, that writers have a duty, as citizens of a republic, to engage in any way they can with the politics of the situation. I have argued this at length elsewhere. I will not repeat myself here.