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    Green Party’s Catherine Martin on life, politics and everything.

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    What’s your geographical and professional background? I am originally from Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, but moved to Dublin over 20 years ago. I have worked as an English and Music teacher in St Tiernan’s Community School in Dundrum for the past 16 years. How long have you been in the Greens and how did you first get involved? My husband and I joined the Green Party shortly after the birth of our first child, Turlough, in 2007. I got involved for the sake of his future and the future of all of our children. They were, to me, the only party looking to the long-term. Are you on the practical or radical wing? I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. I believe in practical, long-term sustainable solutions, but I also think we really have to change the way we think and do politics before we can implement the solutions. What motivates you? Looking at things in an innovative way, seeking solutions, and my children of course! What is your political priority? To provide a voice for real equality of access to quality education for all. How would you reform education? We don’t just need more investment in education we need innovation and creativity and a more user-friendly system for all. We need to formally incorporate wellbeing into the curriculum so that the way we teach our children is more individualised for each student. Teachers are under-resourced and over-stretched and that needs to change too. What instrument do you play? I sing and I also play the piano. How would you get more women into politics? Show them it is possible to effect change and reform systems, and make it possible to have quality family time. How comfortable are you debating the fiscal space? It’s another complex label for something reasonably straightforward. To the detriment of other issues, it dominated the first week or so of a short general election campaign. What simple changes could best be made to health policy? The simplest and most effective change would be to integrate effective mental-healthcare services into mainstream health and education policies. What is your environmental priority? We have to strive to meet our 2030 emissions reductions targets. If we don’t it will cost us a lot of money – nobody is spelling this out. The previous government would sooner incur fines than come up with solutions. What are the biggest local issues in your constituency? Equal access to quality education and childcare are huge issues for families and people are genuinely stressed, worried and losing sleep over these issues. Providing effective crime-prevention is also a big concern for many. What is your political philosophy? Everything is interconnected. We need to bear this in mind when tackling problems and providing solutions. How would you describe yourself on a left-right or liberal-conservative scale? I am not into political labels. Actions speak louder than labels. Do you believe in equality and if so which type eg opportunity, wealth or outcome? I strongly believe in equality of opportunity. Nobody should be at a disadvantage in life because of where they were born, their socio-economic circumstances, their gender or race, and so on. I think that’s the Government’s duty to the next generation: to ensure equality of opportunity. How many hours a week have you been devoting to Council work? Every hour that was feasibly possible! Did the Greens do a good job in government? Yes and no. The Greens were tasked with dealing with an economic collapse that was not of their making. It would have been very easy to walk away from that saying it wasn’t our fault, but they didn’t, and they knew they’d take a hit for it. Balancing the books was never going to be easy, but every budget that the Greens were involved in was progressive, at least, which can’t be said of the outgoing Government. Many of the Greens’ achievements that were tangibly good were lost with poor communicative messaging. What lessons have they learnt? To be extremely cautious about going into Government again and be absolutely insistent on a dividend of delivery of green policies. To communicate in a clearer way that the green message is one of social justice. How would they do it differently a) in a future government and b) if negotiating a role in government in the 2016 Dáil? We will insist on a progressive policy platform, one that looks to the long term, and exploits the green economic transition that will happen in the next 50 years. The party has learned lessons from its time in Government, and we will tread carefully if the opportunity arises again. How much of the Green vote was for the Greens and how much for the environment and oppositionalism?  I think there were two elements to the Green vote: a vote for the party itself and a vote for the environment. There has been a Green voice missing from the Dáil for the last five years. Nobody was raising environmental issues. They wanted that Green voice back in the Dáil, and they trusted the Green Party to be that voice. I also believe the vote was due to the hard work we have been doing in our communities across the length and breadth of the country. What would the Greens do about quality of life? Our first priority would undoubtedly be ensuring that every citizen has access to a warm, comfortable, affordable home. This would involve an ambitious state-backed building scheme to deliver the housing stock needed. We would also ramp up the home retrofitting scheme that was introduced during our time in Government, so that the elderly or at risk can have their homes insulated. Another priority would be childcare. These are critical issues that need to be addressed. great sense of happiness, relief and satisfaction that the hard has paid off. Many of them worked alongside me for the past 5 years. I personally feel a tinge of sadness that both my parents did not

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    Braced for Brexit

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    Back in the 1960s I once stood on the plinth of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London, between Landseer’s lions, at a Connolly Association rally against anti-Catholic discrimination by the Northern Ireland Stormont regime. Lots of people were waving tricolours. Forty years later I spoke again in the same spot, at an anti-EU rally organised by the Democracy Movement, one of Britain’s EU-critical bodies, before a sea of little Union Jacks. I smiled to myself. Here were the English discovering the drawbacks of being ruled by foreigners, by people they did not elect, and how EU laws had come to have primacy over those of their own Parliament. They were reacting against losing their democracy and national independence. British Euroscepticism is largely English nationalism. The political psychology of the governing élites in England and Ireland is very different, not least in their attitudes to the EU. The lack of self-confidence of the Irish élite is shown by their continual anxiety to be seen as ‘good Europeans”’. Hence for example Enda Kenny’s boast that our recent modest economic improvement has “restored our reputation in Europe”. I was at the EU summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, a few days after Irish voters rejected the EU’s Treaty of Nice in 2001. The then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was virtually beating his breast there as he explained apologetically to the international media how Irish voters were mistaken, but they would have a chance to change their minds in a second referendum – which of course duly happened. By contrast England’s governing élite has the psychology of a ruling power. For centuries they backed the second strongest powers of Europe against the strongest, thereby preventing any one power dominating the continent. When the EU came along after World War II they joined it in the hope of either prising France and Germany apart or else of being co-opted by the Franco-Germans as an equal partner to run ‘Europe’ as a triumvirate. Both hopes have proved illusory. Hence English disillusion with the EU. They never shared the Euro-federalist visions of the continentals – something that former Commission President Jacques Delors expressed when he said in 1993: “We’re not here to make a single market – that doesn’t interest me – but to make a political union”. Prime Minister Cameron wants to stick with the EU. But most of his party and large swathes of British public opinion see the EU as a low-growth economic area mired in recession, with a dysfunctional currency and high unemployment. They want to regain their freedom of action, especially over trade, by leaving. They want to develop trade and investment links with the five continents and the far-flung English-speaking world. The obvious power imbalance between the two sides would make it extraordinary if the “Leave” people were to prevail over the “Remain-Ins” in the Brexit referendum. On the one side are the British Government, the American Government, the German and 25 other EU Governments, Wall Street, the CBI, the TUC, the British Labour Party, the Brussels Commission, the European Movement, most EU-based High Finance and Transnational Corporations, plus in Ireland all the parties in the Oireachtas. On the other side is a diverse and sometimes quarrelsome range of groups and individuals on the Left, Right and Centre of British affairs, united only by their desire to get back their right to make their own laws, control their own borders and that their Government should decide independently its relations with other countries. It would be unrealistic though to think that a “Remain-in” vote in June will decisively settle the matter. It is likely merely to delay the inevitable divorce, for the interests of the continentals and the island Britons are just too fundamentally opposed. And what of the Celtic fringe? Contrary to the received wisdom there could well be a substantial “Leave” vote in those areas too. If the UK as a whole votes to leave, will Scotland want to break away from the rest of the UK in order to remain in the EU, abolish sterling and adopt the euro – that being a requirement for all newly acceding States to the EU? It is very doubtful. The Irish media have not yet picked up on one big downside for Irish people of the deal David Cameron concluded in Brussels before he launched his referendum. This is the implication of the EU agreement that if the UK votes to remain, new immigrants to the UK are liable to have lower social benefits for some years than those already there. It will be impossible under EU law to differentiate between Irish immigrants on the one hand and non-Irish ones on the other. This means that new Irish immigrants to Britain or the North must face cuts in social bene ts too if the “Remain” side wins. This proposal will not affect Irish people already settled in the UK, but solidarity with their fellow countrymen and women should still cause lots of them to vote Leave. If a booming British economy, freed of EU regulation, becomes the Singapore of Europe outside the EU, which is perfectly possible, it can only benefit Ireland economically. Lurid scenarios are being painted of the consequences of Britain leaving the EU while Ireland remains in it. If Brexit happens some uncertainty is inevitable for a year or two, but it will not be the end of the world. Free trade will continue between Ireland and the UK under all realistic “Leave” scenarios, so there will be no customs posts on the North-South border within Ireland, no passport controls or anything like that. Such claims are simply scaremongering, part of “Project Fear”. What of Northern Ireland in the event of Brexit? Over the past decade the UK has paid over £150 billion to the EU budget – far more than it has got back. It sends £350 million to Brussels every week. This is some ten times the Northern Ireland schools budget. EU subsidies to the North in the form of

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    We’re deluding ourselves – note my words

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    If you’re looking for a chirpy, upbeat assessment of how humanity will, in the nick of time, get its clappy act together to tackle dangerous climate change, then Kevin Anderson is probably not the person you need to talk to. Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester and deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Anderson is one of the world’s best known and most in uential – and outspoken – climate specialists. On a recent working visit to Ireland, he ripped into any complacent notion that the Paris Agreement signed up to by almost 200 nations, including Ireland, last December meant that we could all relax a little in the knowledge that our politicians, guided by the best scientific advice, are nally getting on top of this crisis. Some of his most devastating critique is reserved for the IPCC itself or, more specifically, the wishful thinking that underpins many of its model projections. He fleshed this out late last year in a commentary piece published in Nature Geoscience, where he took apart some egregiously fanciful assumptions. “The complete set of 400 IPCC scenarios for a 50% or better chance of 2°C assume either an ability to travel back in time or the successful and large-scale uptake of speculative negative emission technologies. A significant proportion of the scenarios are dependent on both time travel and geo-engineering”, wrote Anderson. He repeated this point forcefully during his presentation at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, to the obvious discomfort of the representative of Ireland’s Environment Protection Agency, who found himself trying to explain how completely untested technologies could, somehow, be massively deployed to remove upwards of ten billiontonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air every year, liquefy it and pipe it into vast underground storage where it would have to remain securely for at least the next 1,000 years. Village sat down with Professor Anderson for an in-depth interview in Dublin. First question: what about our recent steps, such as the new Climate Act – does Anderson think Ireland is grasping the nettle of climate change? “I think certainly not; what Ireland has signed up to in the recent Paris Agreement, and particularly when you think that Ireland is one of the wealthier countries in the world, isn’t anywhere near what is necessary to meet its (Paris) commitments”. While the same can be said for the UK and much of Europe, Anderson stresses that “Ireland is a particularly wealthy nation, and it has wonderful renewable (energy) potential; it also has a very educated workforce. It has all that is necessary to make the rapid transition to a low-carbon energy system and indeed a much-lower-carbon agriculture system – at the moment, it is choosing to do very little in that direction”. So what about the view propounded by Irish politicians from Enda Kenny to Simon Coveney, that climate action is something we can kick down the road for another five or ten years, while concentrating on economic development instead? “That view completely, and I would say, deliberately misunderstands the science”, he retorts. “It’s the emissions that we put into the atmosphere now that really matters…these build up every single day in the atmosphere”. As for the oft-quoted argument that Ireland’s emissions are a small fraction of the global total, Anderson replies that every sector, from aviation and shipping to countries large and small, makes the argument that it only contributes a small share of the global total, but every percent is equally important. He is scathing of Ireland’s major expansion of its ruminant-based agriculture sector, believing the argument that if we don’t produce vast amount of beef and dairy products here, someone elsewhere will do it less efficiently, is bogus. “The climate does not care about (emissions) efficiency, it only cares about absolute levels of emissions, so if you are going to look at Ireland you have to look at these absolute levels”. Measuring ‘efficiency’ of CO2 per kilo of beef or ton of dairy produce is not, he argues, the right way to think about it. “If you are really concerned about feeding the world, then you measure it in terms of the CO2 per useful calorie you produce – that will almost certainly mean you will have to move away from the types of agriculture that have innately very high green-house-gas emissions”. Anderson describes the types of measurements being deployed to promote the ‘Origin Green’ image of Irish agriculture as “inappropriate and misleading”. A staunch public defender of agricultural emissions is retired UCD meteorologist, Professor Ray Bates, who has repeatedly argued against an ‘over-alarmist’ response to climate change that might, in some way, curtail our beef and diary sectors. Bates’ principal argument is that ‘climate sensitivity’ to CO2 may be on the lower end of the scale. Anderson is unimpressed. “I think it would be a foolish mistake to go down the ‘let’s keep our ngers crossed that climate sensitivity is on the low end’ dead-end, despite the fact that by far and away the majority of scientists think it’s likely to be on the middle to the upper end of the (sensitivity) spectrum”. What’s at stake, after all, is the habitability of the entire planet, and who would want to leave that to the toss of a coin?”. Anderson knows only too well the appetite among politicians, policy-makers and parts of the media for people who are prepared to down-play the risks and urgency, but believes that only by acting now in line with the scientific advice can potentially disastrous and irreversible damages be avoided. Quite how close we already are to the point of no return, no one can say for certain, but there is growing consensus that +1.5C, rather than +2C, should be the upper limit before really dire consequences become locked in. The findings emerging from climate science pose “fundamental questions about how we have framed modern society, the whole concept of economic growth, of progress – all of the things that have served us very

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    Hardiman: Brilliant Libertarian With Some Deep-Rooted Prejudices

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    In recent weeks much ink has been dispensed and many moving tributes have been made to the late great Adrian Hardiman. The obituaries and commentary have been universally laudatory both personally and professionally. Certainly he was a great and unique human being. An unquenchable light has been dimmed and a degree of joy and colour sadly taken from the world. He was also a man of the utmost personal integrity, which is not to say that his principles were always right. As someone who got to know him very well over the last few years in particular and as someone who had several public and indeed private disagreements with aspects of his philosophy, I believe I am in a reasonably good position to provide a more nuanced assessment of his curate’s egg ideology: sometimes very right indeed sometimes perverse and utterly wrong. It must be stressed at the outset that to be in his company was a privilege. He was not a narrow technical lawyer or indeed very much I think interested in the discipline of law save as a mechanism for doing what he thought was right and was more comfortable discussing history or literature, particularly Joyce. In this respect we were kindred spirits and we would frequently talk about the loss of learning from our culture, the absence of a historical intelligence among the younger generation and the increasingly technocratic, proceduralist and mechanical lawyering caste and how it often does great damage, acting without moral purpose. He was a tremendous raconteur: a storyteller and a weaver of tales in the traditional Irish sense and a man of the utmost sociability with a pronounced ability to talk to almost anybody about almost anything. His intellect was dazzling and he was inordinately proud particular in public debate of showing it off to full effect. Sometimes this made him a target for unfair criticism. I had often heard captious criticism that he was merely the orator grand or a caricature Falstaffian rhetorician but that was utterly wrong and a great disservice to the man who ultimately was a superb scholar. His eagerly awaited work on Joyce should tame many cynics. Moreover, quite unlike his other judicial colleagues his judgments brim with wit and erudition and mosaic together many different fields of knowledge. He was relentlessly curious. Those who trivialised his intellectual abilities were often themselves either narrow technocratic lawyers or people of the conservative orthodox Catholic social right who vehemently disagreed with aspects of his libertarian views. Many disapproved also of his edgy and exotic libertarian lifestyle and used it as a pretext to intellectually criticise him. Hardiman was no fuddy duddy, no mother superior, no blueshirt, no moral conservative. As I discovered to my own advantage he was not a man inclined to judge people at face value, and gave many a second chance. He never took intellectual disagreement for personal rebuke. He was also a man of heightened perception and intuition and very free and helpful in advice he provided. After we completed a directions hearing in the Gilligan litigation with respect to the Proceeds of Crime Act 1996 he came up to me. It was our first substantive professional encounter as I had only recently started practising in Dublin. He was bemused I had secured the brief and gave me a card from Louis Copeland tailors noting that although I was fortunate to secure this brief with the “awful polyester suit” (it was no such thing) I was wearing, I would in all likelihood secure no others. He could of course be far too candid as col- leagues and friends who were the victim of his public declamations would attest. In a lecture he gave to my class to The Kings Inns on his judgment upholding Portmarnock golf club’s discrimination against women members he regaled the assembled multitude with a digression on whether a lesbian rugby team would be compelled to accept him as a member. Apart from the late Christopher Hitchens he was the most politically incorrect person I have ever met and in this respect also we were kindred spirits as the suppression of speech and the sanitisation of our discourse is under constant threat from the thought police. In private he was softly spoken and solicitous of the welfare of anyone whose company he shared. After he had curtailed and limited a somewhat dull talk I gave at a Presumption of Innocence conference in DIT by guillotining it mercilessly he very solicitously and politely approached my UK Innocence colleague Michael Naughton and me and entreated us to join him. “I know a quiet little place (he was increas- ingly fond of quiet places perhaps due to the enormous scrutiny upon him)”, he whispered. When we adjourned he remembered that I drink red wine and my colleague a Guinness drinker before promptly ordering three straight whiskeys, for himself! The initial and overarching starting point of his judicial philosophy is that Adrian Hardiman was an arch libertarian and a neoliberal before that term was properly invented. In this he was consistent. First, he was an economic liberal and free-marketer who believed in limited governmental intervention in the market. This attitude dictated his perspective on social and economic rights with which he fundamentally disagreed Coupled with a faith in the political process, perhaps drawn from his dalliances with electoral politics, it fostered his belief that courts have no business deriving social and economic rights or intervening in government decisions on resource allocation. As I will make clearer this perspective is utterly short-sighted and contributes untold damage to our social fabric. Hardiman laboured with undue deference to the theatre of political debate. It was honed during his student debating days but the clubby and optimistic earnestness of the L and H society bespoke little of the characteristic mismanagement and parochialism of our political class. The deference was a significant error of judgment. The upside of libertarianism (a tangential egalitarianism) mandated that if someone was victimised by the machinery

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    Telling the story of Easter 1916

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    Patrick Pearse loved his students not wisely but too well, if you know what I mean – what with writing poems about kissing them on the mouth and relocating his school from the healthy hustle-bustle of Ranelagh to dark woodlands in Rathfarnham. Oh, and his students didn’t necessarily reciprocate the affection: a teenage James Joyce dropped out of Pearse’s UCD Irish-language lessons because the teacher was an ideological bore. That’s just a sample of the titbits you’d pick up from Colm Tóibín’s long essay on 1916 in the London Review of Books, arguably this season’s archetypal commemorative/explanatory text from Ireland’s media/ intellectual establishment. Whether you regard it as barrel-scraping to discredit the Rising or an exemplary eye for the telling detail is a matter of taste – if you’re like me, you might reckon it’s a bit of both – but one can’t help but notice the contrast between Tóibín’s forensic litany of Fenian foibles and failings and his breezy flypast of, say, World War I. In the writer’s brief telling, the war was on the verge of Bringing Us All Together, something Pearse and the boyos couldn’t abide and wouldn’t permit: “Britain was merely the supposed enemy. The population of the two countries spoke the same language after all, and had the same education system. Many Irish people moved back and forth between Ireland and England seeking work; many in Ireland also had family in England. While most in the south of Ireland actively or tacitly supported Home Rule, Home Rule was postponed until the war ended. It looked as though the two islands were going to join forces in the war effort. (More than 200,000 Irishmen eventually volunteered in the First World War. Although conscription was threatened in Ireland, it was never actually introduced.)” Recall that Tóibín is addressing, in part, an international audience that may be getting its first substantial account of the Rising, that his article is billed as “Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916”; this audience will hear nothing from him of the consequences for Home Rule of the Ulster crisis, of Irish carnage in the war, nor of the massive, life-saving popular movement that arose in part from the Rising to resist conscription in Ireland, conscription that was not merely ‘threatened’, but introduced in legislation. Some contexts are, it seems, more worthy of contextualising than others. As the brilliant blogger Richard McAleavey writes: “Questions about whether Pádraig Pearse, say, was a fanatic, or a repressed paedophile even, are intended to psychopathologise any kind of radical political action or thought. They are intended to draw attention away from consideration of the real material conditions and political considerations that produced the Rising, lest they might be used to draw the wrong kind of parallels in the present”. Material conditions? In 17,000 words, Colm Tóibín’s only mention of Dublin’s infamous slums is in a quote from arch-revisionist historian David Fitzpatrick, who says the rebels must have staged the ght in the midst of the city’s poor to ensure maximum casualties among them – as though it were the rebels who loaded the shells into the Helga’s guns, or the rebels who went house to house in North King Street murdering young men. These and other aspects of, shall we say, imperial ‘agency’ have been largely neglected throughout recent commemoration and coverage, in favour of relentless scrutiny of the Rising’s leaders. Just below the achingly familiar debate about the Easter Rising – was it an act of visionary heroism or an act of perverse terrorism? – there lurks a more interesting series of questions about its relationship to what came after. And those are the questions that can lead us beyond dry argument and actually help us understand who commemorates what in the Ireland of 2016, and how those commemorations have played out and continue to play out in the state and corporate media. Thus you can be on either side of the heroism/terrorism split and still hold (tightly or otherwise) any of the following views: (1) the state(s) in which we reside today can be understood as a direct and roughly intentional outcome of the Rising and its guiding lights; OR (2) Ireland over the last century has been a fumbling, contingent, contradictory and ultimately limited effort to fulfil the Republic of 1916; OR (3) the Irish revolution launched at Easter 1916 was firmly defeated in the Treaty and thereafter by an elite that concealed its continuity with the ancien régime behind reluctant memorials to supposed revolutionary heroes. (There are other positional alternatives and variations on all points of the political spectrum but these seem to me to be the major tendencies.) Official and media Ireland prefers to hold and host tiresome debates about the Rising itself (Kevin Myers? Bob Geldof? Really?) rather than any really clear exploration of where we live today in relation to it. Positions number 1 and 2 are generally implied rather than directly stated, with a little frisson of excitement when the likes of Michael D. Higgins suggests that the truth may lean further towards 2 than 1 – a sort of “a lot done, more to do” view of a Republic that still awaits its full and complete child-cherishing achievement. In mainstream media, position 3 – that there was a successful counter-revolution – is almost unthinkable, or at least unspeakable, residing outside the realm of acceptable discussion. And yet it seems to me that it lurks with influence on both the right and left wings of Irish politics. The more or less overt Redmondism of John Bruton and other conservatives – often more Redmondite than Redmond himself – contains an implied celebration of the ‘restoration’ of constitutionalism in Ireland, coloured by regret over militant republicanism’s recrudescence in the Northern Troubles, but not reliant on that regret for its critique of the rebels of 1916-21. The left-wing, pro-Rising version of position 3, alleging that there was a successful counter-revolution in Ireland, is more openly and interestingly embraced. Important gures on

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    The Irish Times won its struggle for trust on the Centenary

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    The Irish Times has had a mixed 1916 commemoration. Even its own audiences seem hardwired to expect a certain bias from the newspaper of reference, but one particular decision – or probably a non-decision no one ever thought to check for unfortunate implications – certainly didn’t help. For its 1916 anniversary issue the paper produced a replica cover from 100 years ago, but decided to cut the original banner headline: ‘Sinn Fein Rebellion In Ireland’. The page-two explanation – that broadsheets aren’t what they used to be, and the resized 2016 dimensions (half the size of the 1916 original) meant the original would no longer t in its entirety and, although it had been shrunk somewhat, any further reduction in print size would render it unreadable, and something had to go… convinced some, but left others unimpressed. If space was the only issue, then why leave two mastheads on the front page, one modern and one vintage? Assuming the plausible explanation that it was a design decision, and nothing more, the online row it generated speaks much about the perceived trust issues the paper has with its audience. Irish Times journalists are prone to complain that their paper is often held to a higher standard than others, and that may be the case, but it is also a backhanded compliment. Its readers expect more from it, and are therefore more inclined to complain when it does not live up to expectations. The Irish imes garners complaints because what the Irish Times says matters to its in a way that most other newspapers do not. Being an opinion leader comes with a price. Twitter media accounts come in two avours. There are those that engage, joining in conversations with followers over the stories of the day, even on occasion adding their contributions to the joke of the day on the medium, and there are those that broadcast, casting their bread upon the waters for others to consume, but never acknowledging that the audience is talking back. Irish Times’ editor Kevin O’Sullivan falls into the latter category. His twitter stream is a list of links to articles he finds it worth highlighting, mostly from his own publication, occasionally from farther afield. While it is assumed that O’Sullivan curates his own Twitter account, he does not engage with his followers online, or share his thoughts on the news of the day, beyond a brief “interesting” or “scintillating” appended to a story link. And since he does not share his thoughts in detail, the only insight into the thinking of the man helming the paper of record derives from the stories he deems worthy of sharing. Irish Times 1916 coverage, as highlighted by its editor in the period from Patrick’s Day to the end of Easter Week, was colourful and varied, with thinkpieces by regular and occasional columnists (Fintan O’Toole on Shaw and Casement; Niall O’Dowd on the American input to rebellion; though oddly, no one expurgating the German contribution). Beyond this, the Irish Times chose to reproduce a letter from Francis Sheehy-Skef ngton to Thomas MacDonagh making a case for pacifism, an offbeat Q&A by cynical Frank McNally: “To question the Rising is to be found guilty of unIrish activity”, Eunan O’Halpin was mean about the Proclamation (“a speech not a Proclamation”), atheist Donald Clarke goaded that it didn’t need to be atheistic, and Miriam Lord wished fervently that we could hold an Easter party every year. Diarmuid Ferriter appeared here and there with as usual more good history than acute insight. Some ideas that sounded like cringe-inducing embarrassments, such as the new proclamations created by schoolkids, generated genuine wonder. What does it say of a modern nation if children are calling for an end to homelessness while ministers hide behind constitutional guarantees of private property? On the new-media side, a particular highlight must be the Irish Times’ Women’s Podcast on Margaret Skinnider, volunteer, sniper, school- teacher, trade unionist, and would-be hotel bomber (of the Shelbourne – the newspaper’s readers may have pondered that it might as well have been the Irish Times itself). The Irish Times has even produced a book called unexcitingly the ‘Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising’. And then there was its own 2016 Proclamation, with dodgy prose: “First among our values is the belief that every citizen must have both [sic] the legal, civic [sic] and political rights necessary for full citizenship”, but a progressive core: “we commit our governments to a continuing process of reducing inequality”. If schoolchildren came out with a simple vision of an Ireland where no one is homeless, the Irish Times’ editorial proclamation for 2016, attempting to cherish all its children equally, had the look of a family Christmas tree, with everyone adding their favourite bauble to the decorations until it became top-heavy, over-owing with good wishes, inclusiveness, and a feelgood spirit that made it look like an out-of-shape heavyweight next to the Spartan declaration of a century ago. Perhaps a little like the Irish Times itself. Gerard Cunningham

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    Hands off civil society

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    The UN’s Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, has called civil society “the oxygen of democracy” but its space is shrinking. This may be jargon, but it is inspired by a serious threat to democracy – the undermining of basic rights: freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the right to peaceful assembly. Civicus grandly describes itself as the ‘World Alliance for Citizen Participation’. It is more down to earth when highlighting failures to address this shrinking civil society space. In recent months environmental and land-rights activists have been assassinated in Honduras and South Africa. Civil society organisations in Egypt are being prevented from receiving funds from foreign sources. In India the police have repeatedly sought the arrest of a couple who criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his role as Gujarat chief minister during the Gujarat riots in 2002 in which at least 790 muslims (and 250 Hindus) died. The police have confiscated their passports and blocked their bank accounts and their homes have been raided. A woman human-rights defender has been arbitrarily detained in Bahrain with her 15-month-old son. A new law in Jordan is imposing arbitrary conditions on the formation of civil society organisations. An activist opposing a hydropower dam in Cambodia has been given a suspended sentence. That is disturbing and unacceptable. However, some will argue that only happens elsewhere. But civil society space is shrinking in Ireland too: different means, same intent. Civil society organisations here are strangled with cuts and encumbered with ever greater levels of bureaucracy such as charity regulation, lobbying legislation and tendering demands; and are spending too high a proportion of their time reporting on endless indicators. For example our long-standing local not-for-profit development companies providing programmes to tackle unemployment and social exclusion suffered reductions in funding from €84.7m in 2008 to €48m in 2014 and have been required to submit detailed competitive tenders. Most got through the process but some didn’t. Those that did are now bogged down in an indicator-dominated programme. The environmental pillar of social partnership has been under severe pressure due to reductions in funding arising from cutbacks in the environment fund and Department of Finance obstruction. The Minister for the Environment implied he was considering removing An Taisce, the largest environmental NGO, which has been critical of him, from the list of bodies consulted over big planning applications. Organisations are bound into service-provision contracts that preclude criticism of the state. The structures for engagement with the State have been dismantled. There is an evident hostility to and a demonisation of protest and dissent. We can’t stand aloof in Ireland from this global attack on democracy and ostensibly valued freedoms. Locally, as internationally, those in power do not want these organisations giving voice to and mobilising dissent to a model of development that impoverishes, generates inequality and destroys the planet we live on. Civicus are seeking to foster greater coordination between civil society organisations to face down these threats. Civicus and Human Rights Watch hosted a meeting of regional and international civil society organisations to explore the agenda for a campaign on these issues. They identified the need to develop a new positive narrative about the contribution of civil society to national life. This seemingly basic step was prioritised in the face of what was described as ongoing stigmatisation and vilification of civil society organisations. A second step was to inform the general public about the nature, causes, and extent of restrictions on civil society activists and organisations. A third step was to broaden the debate beyond advocacy organisations and those working on civil and political rights. They noted that restrictions are increasingly applied to anti-poverty and development-focused organisations. Civicus are seeking inputs on how best to develop this global campaign. The International Civil Society Centre is the “global action platform” for international civil society organisations (ICSOs). It works to support the “world’s leading ICSOs in maximising their impact for a sustainable and more equitable world”. It is also initiating a process of consultation on a ‘Civic Charter’ which it will launch in October 2016 as a means of building international solidarity for civil society organisations. Some key directions have been suggested, including the need for new ideas for collective advocacy to reverse repressive legislation targeting civil society organisations, the adoption of progressive institutional frameworks for civil society engagement with Governments, and the recruitment of eminent persons to demand the release of unjustly imprisoned civil society activists. Civil society in Ireland should prioritise the re-appropriation of civil society space. It must participate in these global campaigns and aim to get international demands tailored to address how civil society is specifically being eroded here. As we face increasingly intractable inequalities and irreversible climate change it is a political imperative. Niall Crowley

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    Independence in a Vassal State

    by

    In his 1976 poem, ‘A Part of Speech’, Joseph Brodsky says Russian narratives of the future and of history are informed by language, not facts. “… and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece of ripened memory which is twice as hole-ridden as real cheese”. Current events in Ireland import his observations to our own milieu. March and April mark the peak of the Centennial celebrations season in Ireland – the months of remembering, interpreting and occasionally re-writing the already troubled historical narratives of the nation to reflect the distant 1916 Easter Rising. The ripened memory is hole-ridden by interpretations and narrations, though the factual history of the event could easily be explained in simple timelines. Thus the focus of many analysts has drifted from the original Easter Rebellion to the future. The culmination of this was a rather simple, yet far-reaching, observation by President Michael D Higgins that modern Ireland is a society that has yet to achieve the core perceived objectives of the Rising: the story of Ireland is still being told. This notion of Irish sovereign incompleteness, one hundred years from the Rising, is an important and complex one. To some, extracting relevance from the Rising means projecting historical myopia into an evolving future: the ideal of national independence defined by physical boundaries. Nationalist rhetoric, historically apt, but backward-looking, has been one of the significant themes in the Centenary. For others, including myself, relevance is less about the ideals of the original Rebellion, and more about the nature of the Irish state and its elites within the context of the modern reality, framed forcefully by the memory of the Global Financial Crisis. Put simply, irrespective of the wishes of the 1916 leaders and the generations of Irish national leaders who followed them today’s Ireland is, economically-speaking, a vassal state, dependent on fortunes, choices and policies determined well beyond our shores. Perhaps the saddest part of this truth is that this state of affairs is the direct outcome of the willful co-opting of Irish elites by our external masters: the technocracies of Europe and the Multinational Corporations. As in 1916, today Ireland has little control over its own destiny. And just as in 1916, there is only a small minority of the Irish people willing to confront this reality. No matter what the Irish President declares about the ‘Irish story’ being a continuing saga, we are subjects of the world order that our leaders, aided by the silent majority of us, have not the will to alter. Still less the capacity. Over the hundred years that separate the Easter Rebellion and today, Ireland has travelled an impressive path of economic growth – a path that is still new but which is celebrated today as our major achievement. However, attributing the economic success of today to the struggle for independence in the past is a false narrative. Apart from the fact that on average Irish citizens were doing well before the Rising, asserting Ireland’s economic independence from the UK required a period of painful and exceptionally protracted misery that stretched from the Rebellion into the early 1970s. When we finally did get growth to ourish, we squandered its fruits. And though we have growth it has not yielded independence. The economic renaissance after 1973, attributed to TK Whitaker-promoted economic openness and FDI-focused development, did not mark meaningful economic sovereignty for the country. Rather it represented a shift in Irish economic dependency from reluctant participation in UK-centric trade, investment and labour markets to an enthusiastic embrace of the EU as an opportunity for the beggarthy-neighbour model of tax arbitrage policies and to comprehensive prostration to corporate markets, first represented by the ‘civilised’ foreign direct investors, lately – by the blackmail-wielding bondholders and vultures. The overall outcome was belated prosperity, but also atrophying leadership. Economic growth came with policy de a- tion through Social Partnership, the perceived and real demands of FDI, and reliance on the importation of social, cultural and economic ideas (and institutions) from the EU. A nation once subjugated to the UK found itself subjugated to a virulent blend of nationalism and religion and, finally, to yet another set of hegemonies.By the end of the 1990s, the Irish model of commerce, traditionally defined by the triumvirate of the local councilor, local priest and local bank manager presiding over economic resources gave way to the Social Partnership model where those three agents were supplemented by a motley crew of social and business groups and state bureaucrats whose sole preoccupation was to make sure that the wishes of the MNCs and Brussels were not trampled by mere local selfishness. The fruits of 100 years of striving for independence is an economic culture of dependency. Which, in cold and impersonal language of economic statistics, looks like this: In 2014, Ireland spent more than the EU and euro-area average as a percentage of GNP – 0.87-0.88% – on social housing, against the Euro area’s roughly 0.72%. In return, we got a spiralling homelessness crisis and a ratcheting length and duration of social housing queues. We posted the second highest GDP per capita figure, based on EU purchasing power parity, but only average (for the euro area) levels of actual real individual consumption. We got the fastest growing economy in the EU, with OECD-topping investment figures. But we also have average or below average growth rates in construction spending (+3.1% in the first nine months of 2015 compared to the same period of 2014) and our companies’ investments in machinery and equipment was down almost 18%. In fact, January- September 2015, total investment growth, excluding intellectual property – domain of smoke and mirrors generated by the tax-shifting MNCs – was down 9.5%, just as official total investment figures for the economy were up 26.8%. Consider the following simple exercise. We used to believe that the true state of the Irish economy was described by our Gross National Product (GNP) because, unlike GDP, it ‘accounts’ for profit

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