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Brexit, like the bank bailout, shows how little democratic control we really have in the global economy

Unarmed and drinking lemonade with colleagues in Mullinahone off-duty, the first garda murdered was shot in the face, probably mistaken for his brother, in 1922

Economic migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers and asylum-seekers-turned-refugees

Not entirely due to its own efforts, Aosdána has often been more associated with controversy and letters-page hullaballoos than its members’ artistic fruits – perhaps most darkly in 1997, after writer Francis Stuart’s horrific remark on Channel 4 that “the Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it”. Back then, at the annual Aosdána Assembly, Máire Mhac an tSaoi (backed by her voluble late husband Conor Cruise O’Brien from the public benches), failed to effect Stuart’s expulsion from the organisation, before promptly resigning herself. Another rash of negative press broke out in 2014, some of it snippy about the comparative obscurity of many members (and the non-membership of many renowned Irish artists).  Some was in the spirit of “what do Aosdána do to earn their annual €2.7 million?” – although the famed Cnuas is no king’s ransom.  Some pieces were error-riddled and uninformed; others convulsed by loathing of Aosdána’s exclusive, self-electing nature and its easily-ridiculed bardic pretensions and the orotundity of its Gaelic nomenclature. This was the case with Village’s Kevin Kiely piece. Mannix Flynn made rather technical arguments about democratic deficits in Aosdána’s selection of its Saoithe (or “wise ones”). Most disconcertingly, an FoI request from the Sunday Times led to a great deal of personal and financial information being released by the Arts Council (with some members given a chance to redact), although in the end, very little was published. Aosdána’s very gestation is deeply contested.  Brian Kennedy’s surprisingly engaging Arts Council-funded history of the Arts Council, ‘Dreams and Responsibilities’ (1990) recounts how, back in 1980, when most artists worked part-time or in penury (despite Charles J Haughey artists’ tax exemption under the 1969 Finance Act), an Arts Council report moved Haughey to consult his arts advisor, the late Anthony Cronin.  According to Kennedy, the first suggestion came from the Arts Council, then headed by Colm Ó Briain, to extend the old Ciste Cholmcille annuity for destitute artists to deserving working artists. Haughey told the Arts Council he wanted established artists to be spared demeaning annual applications for assistance.  Ó Briain proposed to Cronin a rolling-funding scheme called An Torc for 100 creative artists; Cronin suggested 150.  Haughey took ownership and ran with it. Kennedy contends the Arts Council then developed the proposal into “an affiliation of artists” to honour those who “had made an outstanding contribution to the arts”, and to help them devote their energies fully to their art.  Free from political interference, the new Aosdána (the name suggested by Arts Council member Máire de Paor) would be self-governing through its elected administrative body, the Toscaireacht; while distinguished members could be selected as Saoithe (wise ones), with a symbolic golden torc conferred upon each Saoi by the serving President of Ireland.  While election to Aosdána is a life-time honour, the Cnuas (now €17,180 annually) for five years is means-tested (members must currently earn less than €25,000 from their art, so total allowed tax-free earnings is a decent €42,180); while the Cnuas is unique in that, unlike any other Arts Council grant, Cnuas-holders must relinquish other state benefits and any gainful employment other than artistic. Yet it is not a pension, and must be-reapplied for every five years.  About 150 now receive it; while the membership limit has expanded to 250 (247 currently filled) The Arts Council approved Aosdána in September 1980. Haughey launched it in March 1981, and the first invited 89 members were soon baptised – for Ó Briain “the culmination of six year’s work” by the Arts Council.  Yet these were volatile political times. In 1982, newspaper articles appeared suggesting Haughey wanted to eject Ó Briain from the Arts Council.  Kennedy claims Cronin approached Arts Council Chairman James White to express this, but White refused; asserting the Arts Council’s independence, which was ultimately rewarded with a healthy 25% increase in government funding.  A FG-Labour government took over in December 1982, and in April 1983, Aosdána was inaugurated at its first General Assembly, attended by Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, along with Haughey and Jack Lynch.  Three weeks later Ó Briain resigned as Arts Council director. Ó Briain stands by all this, but muses that “this narrative was ultimately overtaken by the ‘grand political vision’… you have to realise there was a real atmosphere of fear at the time”.  He doesn’t refer to widespread rumours, around the febrile time when FF TD Jim Gibbons was violently assaulted by Haughey supporters the night of the `Club of 22’  leadership challenge in October 1982, that Haughey once threatened to arrive in that way of his and personally shut down the Arts Council. Cronin always hotly contested Kennedy’s account. Soon after his book was published, there was an infamous conference where displayed copies had printed corrections affixed with an elastic band – instantly christened the “intellectual condom”. Then it emerged that unsold copies had been shredded by the Arts Council during Haughey’s last term as Taoiseach. The Arts Council’s stated reason was to save space in its roomy Merrion Square offices.  In 1993, the new Arts Council chairman, Ciaran Benson immediately ordered it reprinted in full, and it is now online. Somehow this legacy writhes at the bottom of the current imbroglio between the Arts Council and Aosdána.  The Arts Council still maintains it established Aosdána; but while the role of Registrar was traditionally occupied by the sitting Arts Council Director; it is now delegated to an “acting Registrar” Arts Council employee, with a part-time assistant.  Many Aosdána members hold that Cronin and Haughey forged its basic architecture, then nested it with the Arts Council for administrative and Cnuas-disbursal purposes, and that the Arts Council suffers from “institutional amnesia”. Within the arts, it didn’t help that in 2008 (when Aosdána members Theo Dorgan and Colm Tóibín sat on the Council), the annual Cnuas leapt from €13,000 to €17,180; with a corresponding rise in the artistic-earnings threshold, which made many more members eligible.  When the Crash finally slammed through Ireland, most artists’ incomes were savaged; meaning

Theresa May was born in 1956, in Eastbourne, England, only child of Hubert Brasier and Zaidee Mary May. May’s grandmother Violet chose the name Zaidee, because she was highly religious and Zaidee is the name of Abraham’s wife in the Old Testament. Her father was a Church of England clergyman who served as Vicar of Wheatley, not to be confused with ‘Vicar of Dibley’, a British sitcom from the 1990s in which Dawn French came to serve in an eccentrically conservative church community. May’s grandfather served in India and had been a regimental sergeant major but two of her grandmothers were in domestic service and her great-grandfather was a butler in service, genealogy that overwhelmingly middle-class Theresa plays down. She attended a state primary, an independent convent school. According to ambivalent sources from the time she was a closet hair-puller, but excelled at geography, knowing all the tribes and capitals of the Commonwealth. She learned from ‘Ladybird’ books about the special history of England and its place in the hearts of people around the world, though she has recently conceded she doesn’t read much history. Twice a week she was allowed to watch ‘Blue Peter’, where Val Singleton was a particular favourite though she was always in bed by eight as the Reverend liked to watch ‘Z Cars’ and there was a danger of bad language. It was idyllic. Doves cooing in the trees over the duck-filled village pond at Wheatley and Morris dancing on the green. But halcyon days could not last forever. She moved up to Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School, a state school in the village of Wheatley, which became the ominous-sounding Wheatley Park Comprehensive School during her time there. Standards dropped. Talk in the common room was reportedly turning to Communism and wife-swapping. May was a shy girl but no fool. She mustered all her girlish indignation and resolved she would become prime minister and restore the grammar school regime and the standards that went with it. This was at a time when immigration was taking hold all over Britain. May was naturally aware of the threat to the English way of life. The young Theresa Brasier, as she was then, threw herself into village life, taking part in a pantomime that was produced by her father and working in the bakery on Saturdays to earn pocket money to spend on bullseyes and – always the fashionable one – bellbottoms. She kept a Bay City Rollers outfit under her mattress and wore it once at a barn dance. In later years she has worn it to meetings with Nicola Sturgeon. Friends recall a tall, clothes-conscious young woman on lime-green platform shoes who from an early age spoke of her ambition to be the first woman prime minister. She was an obsessive fan of boring and abrasive batsman-cricketer Geoffrey Boycott and at one time her father reluctantly had to have austere words with her about this. Principally on the back of her excellence at Geography she advanced to Oxford University where, in 1976, in her third year, she was introduced to Phillip May at a Conservative Association disco by Benazir Bhutto, later Pakistani prime minister. Phillip was president of the Oxford Union, a hotbed of people with strong views, some of them left wing. Theresa and Phillip were learning fast that this had to be subverted. Margaret Thatcher was on the rise and they were both really into Geoffrey Howe. May had her first Pimms, by 1979 Phillip and Theresa were holding hands, visiting local reservoirs to check the water levels on Sunday afternoons, and in 1980 they wed. The next year tragedy struck: the Rev Hubert Brasier was driving his Morris Marina to a nearby church where he was due to conduct the evening Sunday service when he was in collision with a Range Rover on the A40 outside Oxford. The vicar, 64, died of head and spine injuries a few hours later. A report of the inquest at the time told how he had been trying to cross the busy A40. He “edged forward from the central reservation into the path of a Range Rover”. The Range Rover, with a driver and two passengers, tried to brake in time but collided at high speed with the front wing of the Marina. Mr Brasier was rushed to hospital but it was too late. May went to work in the City, initially starting work at the Bank of England and later rising to become head of the European Affairs Unit of the Association for Payment Clearing Services. She used to tell interesting stories about clearing. Next she had failed attempts at election to the House of Commons in 1992 and 1994 but was successfully chosen as MP for Maidenhead in the 1997 general election. From 1999 to 2010, May held a number of roles in the Shadow Cabinets of William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. Even though a woman, she was at least as fascinating a character as they were, so they made her Chairman of the Conservative Party from 2002 to 2003. In the early days at Westminster she became known for her exuberant choice of footwear – her kitten heels became famous in political circles in the noughties, while she named a lifetime subscription to Vogue as the luxury item she would take to a desert island. It is her toughness which has become her political hallmark. She likes to talk of herself as a bloody difficult woman. “I am a bloody difficult woman”, she repeats. Her patent furrowed eyebrows remind most English people of their crossest relation and cabinet ministers always accept what she says when she does them. Another favourite is her rictus smile, which she deploys in difficult situations as a substitute for wisdom. She has coped with being one of only a small number of women in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party for 17 years and has been prepared to tell her party some hard truths