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    Housing: ‘the carrot and the stick’

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    There’s been plenty of talk about “carrot and stick” for our housing predicament. At a property Summit last month, commentators exhumed memories from the industry boom and bust and suggested numerous ways to revive the sector. Much discussion revolved around the fact that there is no official metric for the measure of new housing output. With projected completions of fewer than 9,000 new homes this year, supply remains well short of demand. Senior Government officials suggested that the state needed more land and would get more into active land management. Others noted how state house-building has fallen off a cliff. Local authorities are building on average 300 homes per annum yet own enough zoned residential land to build more than 45,000 homes nationwide . Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) – part-funded by the state, and voluntary efforts, account for the bulk of social homes in any year, out-performing local authorities two to one. In Dublin there were 16 local authority homes built in the first six months of 2017 – AHBs completed were 174.   Part V One source of new-build social homes is so-called ‘Part V’ dwellings, built by developers and sold at a discount to local authorities. Part V requires 10% of all private residential developments of ten units or more to be sold to the state at reduced prices. The discounted site cost is calculated at ‘existing use value’, a pre-determined formula. The ‘preferred’ option is purchase of units (Part V guidelines direct Local Authorities to buy units rather than land), but land transfer can be agreed as an alternative. Indeed up to September 2015 cash in lieu of land was an option. Subsequent revisions precluded cash payments so developers can no longer buy their way out of Part V. The Rebuilding Ireland Part V target is an average of 524 units per year. However, only 514 Part V units were purchased nationwide in the past five years (see table right). 11 Local Authorities including Cork and Galway City Councils made no Part V social housing purchases in five years. On average 9 social homes have been purchased by Dublin City Council per annum. The current situation is in marked contrast to that of the preceding decade.   Part V 2002- 2011 According to the Housing Agency, between 2002 and 2012, 567,585 new homes were completed and 15,320 Part V social homes were purchased by the state. Other forms of Part V compliance, land transfers and cash in lieu, equated to the potential for an additional 4,311 social homes. Sites for 213 homes were transferred (20 hectares) and cash paid in lieu totaled €122.4m (av. €29,800 per site). The bulk of Part V compliance, 78%, was achieved by developers providing social homes at discounted prices.     Part V 2012- 2016 In the last 5 years the situation has changed dramatically. €29.6m was paid in lieu of land transfer by owners plus sites for just 3 homes (9 hectares). Out of a potential 1,510 Part V homes only 514 were delivered. The bulk of Part V compliance, 64%, was achieved by developers paying cash in lieu of land transfer. The affordable housing scheme was discontinued in 2011. Part V was revised in September 2015 to preclude cash payments, but according to official figures €11m was paid in 2015 and €4.9m in 2016 in lieu of land transfers by developers, perhaps reflecting an overhang of planning permissions extended from before the system was changed but perhaps also suggesting that old (and bad) habits die hard. The total percentage required was reduced from 20% for schemes of five or more units to 10% for schemes of ten or more units. The affordable housing scheme was discontinued in 2011. In the period 2002 to 2016, the total combined figure for cash in lieu of land transfers was €152m. Cash has been king for beleaguered local authorities. Extraordinarily, only three house sites have been transferred in five years. Figures suggest that a significant number of new homes will be built in coming years with little or no social housing element. For example in 2017 our total new housing output may be close to 9,000 homes but Part V is likely to comprise just 200 units, only 2.2% of total new housing. Given the minusculity of payments during the downturn, there is the strong uncomfortable possibility that some developers, while under the control of state agencies, sought successfully to reduce the provision of social housing. Even if there is an increase in new house-building, fewer than than 1,000 Part V social homes may be delivered by 2021. To put these figure in context, there are currently 216 new households per week availing of rent assistance (housing assistance payment) for the first time. 1000 homes would solve the problem for just five weeks worth of this backlog – by 2021!       Conclusion The reality of state land management is very different from the official narrative, even if – under media pressure – the authorities have ratcheted up their rhetoric. Official figures confirm there is little official appetite to obtain cheap land from developers and build directly, and even less inclination to pass site discounts to potential purchasers of affordable housing. Despite all the rhetoric. Owners of land-banks who agreed to buy-out part V obligations when sites were at a historic low values can expect a handsome return on their investment in a short time. Many sites will benefit from generous capital gains-tax exemptions. Legislation introduced by Minister Murphy in July 2017 to extend the lifespan of existing planning permissions ensures that lucrative Part V cash arrangements remain unaffected. There is no official affordable housing scheme and no official definition of what an affordable house is. Last July Minister Murphy confirmed that local authorities can build 2 bed dwellings directly for €191,000 ‘all in’ cost- yet Dublin City Council is purchasing Part V units from a developer in Rathgar for €480,000 per unit . At the property summit, when asked if there

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    Immingratitude

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    In December a group called ‘Identity Ireland’ made much of a do online about the relative nothing of unfurling their banner from a bridge over a motorway. The banner urged motorists to “DEFEND IRELAND”, prompting one Twitter user to quip they were “11 days too late” (referring to the Irish soccer team’s humiliating 5-1 defeat to Denmark). The further irony is that the Identity Ireland group itelf is but an Irish franchise of a European anti-immgration organisation. An organisation of foreign conception bemoaning foreign influence. While it may seem ridiculous, anti-immigration groups coming into the open like this is a new development, another symptom of sentiments more likely to find expression in the broadsheets than in the streets. This Summer, the Irish Navy ship LE Eithne rescued 700 people from the Mediterranean sea in a single day. Those souls were but droplets in a wave of refugees, cast adrift in the wake of state failure in various parts of the Middle-East. There is much anxiety across Europe about the demographic consequences of an influx of migrants. Kevin Myers uncharacterisitically said sorry for a supposed slur on an ethnic minority that ended his tenure as a columnist for the Sunday Times. Yet he is less contrite about his numerous other statements stoking anxieties about other minorities. Myers described the swell in immigration to this country, for example, as a “tidal wave”, asserting it was “the greatest threat to the existence of the Irish nation”. And this was in 2007, long before the fallout of the Arab Spring, the demise of Gadaffi, the rise of ISIS, and the consequent disastrous upsurge in refugees. Given this island’s history of invasion and colonisation, we are particularly well versed in the dangers posed by foreigners seeking to make home on these shores. We have much to protect. The value and venerability of our collective cultural inheritance is perhaps epitomised in Newgrange, or Brú na Bóinne. The construction predates Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza by 500 odd years. Despite the remarkable survival of this structure (not only intact after 5000 years, but still watertight), we are perhaps more aware of the fragility of ‘culture’ than any other European state. The wreckage of invasion remains strewn all over our society. Vikings have become synonymous with rape, pillage, and plunder – there is still something earnest in my shudder when Americans in plastic-horned helmets roar at me from the Viking Splash Tour buses! But the most poignant example of the very real humans terrorised by their raids is a short poem in the margins of a Ninth Century manuscript. A monastic scribe paused in his task to express gratitude that there was a fierce storm raging, for it meant “the fierce warriors of Norway” would not be arriving that particular night. The English invasion left deeper scars. Our legal and parliamentary systems are not derived from the ancient Brehon laws, or the old Gaelic political order. They are carbon copies of the English regime we supposedly deposed. The same is true for our system of landholding (indeed, Travellers, although the most maligned demographic in this, their own country, have a culture much more ‘Irish’ than the vast majority of the populace). The overwhelming majority of the people on this island speak English as their daily language. Think for a second how a native Irish speaker from Rosmuc might view the Anglophone population: we speak the language of the invader, we mimic their laws and power structures. Our national culture is much more English than it is Irish. So unless you’re a committed Gaeilgóir still surviving on one of the Celtic fringes of this country, in Connemara, West Kerry, or Donegal, maybe you should rethink your right to object to immigration at all. But even then, you might pause and consider this: the precise origin of the name of our greatest national monument, Brú na Bóinne, is lost to history. But it was certainly not the name given to it by those who built it. They didn’t speak Irish. Newgrange was built thousands of years before the Celts would arrive, bringing with them horses, Iron, and an Indo-European language. The Irish language arrived here the same way English did – via conquest. ‘Ah, but’, the argument goes, ‘Islam is uniquely intolerant’. Shocking scenes of unfettered depravity in Syria – beheadings, homosexuals being thrown from high buildings, women being stoned to death for transgressing Sharia law – have instilled intense anxiety about accepting immigrants from that part of the world. One of Myers very latest pronouncements is that Europe is in the midst of “an existential crisis for Judeo-Christian values”. But many of the refugees aren’t Muslim at all, many are not only Christian but Catholic – just as most Irish people still claim to be on our census. These are the Chaldeans – an ancient and distinguished branch of the Catholic Church with its own liturgy and lineage dating back to the apostles. The very existence of these particular refugees points to a glaring inconsistency in the idea that Islam is inherently a religion of intolerance. Those supposedly concerned about demography should be well aware of the Middle-East’s remarkable religious and cultural diversity. Zoroastrianism, Yazidism, Mandeanism, Samaritanism – all these ancient belief systems are still extant, despite the dominance of Islam. Where are Europe’s pre-Christian religions? Christendom didn’t suffer them to survive. Yes, the plurality of peoples and faiths in the Middle East are now under threat of extinction from a vicious, virulent strand of Wahhabism – but this is the very horror the refugees are fleeing. And what does the Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdhad cite as the root cause for this exodus of his flock? Western intervention. As surely as the slumber of reason conjures monsters, the ‘war on terror’ brings forth fresh evils. This is the terror we helped create, by continuing to allow American war planes to use Shannon Airport making an absurdity of our claim to ‘neutrality’. You can’t bomb a society

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    Gambling sells itself as normal and fun

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    My brother told me about a stag weekend he went to recently. The bus that was taking them to Galway hosted an online game where they bet on virtual horses. On arrival, the fellas announced that they had organised a poker night for the husband-to-be. The next day they went to the races. ‘Wow’, you might think, ‘gambling is a popular entertainment for young men today’. But how did gambling go from a furtive preoccupation of the older man to an apparently cheeky, funny, harmless entertainment for the young man? Gambling has a long and varied history, but it was not until the early 1900s that it became a mass activity, with the development of licensed high-street betting shops. These then expanded from individual family bookmakers into some of the commercial high-street chains of the modern betting industry. Telephone betting began in the early 1990s and in 2001 the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power was the first to move into Internet betting, before becoming first mover on the Apple App Store in 2010. In the past decade, neurological marketing research, consumer profiling, single-click betting, geo-tracking mobile technology, virtual reality, and real-time ‘in-play betting’ have led to a seamless, intensively immersive and pervasive market. Through this technology-driven marketing approach, gambling companies have achieved three objectives. First, they have fundamentally changed the public image of gambling by a marketing process known as normalisation. Second, they have diversified the range of ways in which people can gamble, expanding access to gambling touchpoints, increasing the range of what can be gambled on, and reducing the obstacles to gambling – a process we call the gamblification of life. And finally, they have waged an undeclared public relations war to ensure that successive governments don’t interfere with the soft-touch regulatory environment in which they thrive. What has it led to? An estimated 40,000 people have a gambling addiction in the Republic of Ireland. Recently, the Economist magazine calculated the per capita gambling losses by country: Ireland ranks third in the world, and first when it comes to online losses (graph below). 80% of Irish people who bet on sports events have at least one online account. Ireland has grown leading international and internationalizing gambling brands such as Paddy Power, Boylesports and most recently Quinnbet, Sean Quinn’s online gambling company launched in August 2017. In an experiment broadcast by BBC ‘Panorama’ last year, MRI imaging revealed that an addict’s brain exhibits the same neurological state whether it is anticipating a spinning roulette wheel, placing a bet, or in fact winning. This suggests that gamblers are addicted not as much to the end goal of winning as to the thrill of being involved in a betting experience. This neurological evidence for gambling allows two things to happen that are advantageous to the industry: it gives better insight into how reward centres in the brain are stimulated, and it offers clues as to how to naturalise addiction and thus limit discussion of the role that marketing plays in creating gamblers. In our research on the gambling market in Ireland, it was striking that marketing managers in the industry would repeatedly talk about gambling addiction as a neurological dysfunction, specifically in the brain’s mesolimbic reward system, that about 10% of the population are predisposed to. Portraying the other 90% of gamblers as ‘problem-free’ is therefore a useful tactic in denying that gambling may be a condition that is caused, and even fostered, by the industry.   The new vulnerability So who is the ‘problem gambler’? From a psychological perspective, there are two recognisable characteristics. First, the gambler has diminished control over the time or the money they spend, and second, their gambling results in negative consequences for them and/or for someone close to them. Contrary to our traditional view of gambling as older, working-class men in bookmakers, the majority of problem gamblers are young men, aged 18-24. Surprisingly perhaps, a higher level of academic education correlates with an increased risk of problem gambling. And perhaps unsurprisingly, 1 in 5 problem gamblers attempt suicide. And, contrary to policy rhetoric that seeks to solve problems by pointing out that people merely ‘need to know the dangers’, evidence points to a very high level of addiction within the industry – proof that those with the most knowledge of the market are not immune to it. To compound matters, problem gamblers within the male demographic are least likely to admit they have a problem, and their behaviour is often not recognised by themselves or by others as problematic, but rather as normal young male behaviour. This cocktail of factors makes it especially difficult to reveal the scale of the problem that this market creates.   Funning Risk Gambling brands position gambling as a harmless activity. This normalises its pervasiveness, frequency and intensity. Often, animations are used to appeal to young consumers, the tone is jocular, and there is never a reference to losing. The injunction to have fun is an especially important positioning tool that resonates with young men who are seen as more acceptable when they are jokey, laddish, and in good humour – an injunction which increasingly spills into other domains – we must be fun at work, we must be a fun dad, and so on. Alongside the fun archetype, the second most used archetype is that of the hipster, with major gambling brands encouraging the perception that gambling is a James Bondesque talent or skill which can be learned and developed, rather than a game of chance where the odds are stacked against you. Of course advertising is a way of enticing existing gamblers to gamble more, but it’s also a mechanism to educate the next generation of gamblers in brand awareness and preference: gamblers develop problem behaviour most often during adolescence, when they are most exposed to televised sport. Advertising frequently demonstrates not only the fun of betting, but how to bet, as in the Bet365 advertisement shown here. Sponsorship is another mechanism of normalisation, particularly in sport. For

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    EU(S)

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    Books on the European Union generate glaze-over and are certainly neither written nor read for fun dinner-party conversation, trading as they do in institution-making and bureaucracy. The EU is an incomplete experiment in international co-operation brought about by the catastrophic decline in imperialism, with its consequences for European nations, and two major world wars. But who made it what it is? Success, it is often said has many patrons, but failure is an orphan. Professor Berend’s book lucidly identifies the major patrons who have sponsored European integration and how roll of sponsors has changed over the years. The true extent of US sponsorship of integration in the years following World War II is laid bare by his detailed investigation of the archival documents. In 1948 the American Committee on United Europe was established, supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. As Professor Anthony Coughlan gleefully pointed out in Village last year, for years the CIA channelled money to the European Movement whose national chapters became the main non-governmental lobbyists for ever further integration in the different European countries and have remained so to this day. Britain, France, and even the US – initially at least, wanted to punish Germany after World War II. De Gaulle wanted to seize the industrial assets of Germany’s Ruhr and Saar to prevent a German resurgence but also to help revive France’s industrial capacity. Fear of the Soviet Union soon crystallised into a new US plan for the continent which saw the ditching of the Morgenthau plan to punish Germany. In the Spring of 1948 France was bankrupt and desperately in need of US Marshall Aid to rebuild its industrial capacity and infrastructure. The Americans made Marshall Aid conditional on French support for Western European integration. It is a lesson on how big countries use their influence. The French performed a quick about-turn on their policy of confiscating and gelding German industrial capacity. Fear of the Soviet Union destabilising Germany seems to have been the motive for the US supporting western European integration. Support for German leader Willy Brandt was also crucial and in particular his espousal of Ostpolitik, or an opening to the East, as an alternative to hard military conflict with the Soviet Bloc. British support for the EU has always been ambivalent. Churchill set the tone by advocating a United States of Europe mainly because of a fear of Soviet expansionism. He felt that Britain might not be part of it. At this stage, even with the American eclipse of its role, and the end of its Empire Britain still nurtured ideas (or delusions ) that it could be a stronger global force in the world without being part of a European political structure, in particular because of its fabled relationship with the wider English-speaking world. Eisenhower was sold on European integration and even boasted privately that it would allow America to sit back a bit with the Europeans doing their bidding – in other words being active in the world without actually rubbing up the isolationists in America the wrong way. Britain was eventually sold on the idea but again had to be pushed a bit to actually join the EU. The British reluctance about its role in Europe is probably best explained in a classic episode of the comedy series ‘Yes Minister’. The perplexed minister (Jim Hacker) expresses genuine surprise about the attitude of his senior civil servant Sir Humphrey which hints at opposition to the European idea. Sir Humphrey explains the policy to Hacker by stating that the real reason why the UK is in the EU is to break up the possibility of them (the continentals) getting together and having unity of purpose on virtually any issue. Balance-of-power preoccupations, rather than zeal, has been the leitmotiv of British involvement in the continent of Europe for hundreds of years. The irony of US support for Europe shines clear for Berend who is a professor in the University of California. By allowing Germany to return to full industrial strength America was allowing a potential rival to develop on the world stage. Henry Kissinger was the first person in the US to point this out, in a book published in 1965. He subsequently advised Nixon not to deal with Brussels but rather the nation-state governments. The French Foreign Minister in 1973 told Kissinger: “You wish to divide Europe to strengthen your mastery”. The inclusion of such spicy quotes energises Professor Berend’s book beyond a limited academic purview. The waxing and waning of the assiduousness of US sponsorship of the EU was rapidly followed by the rapid and rather desperate sponsorship of the European ideal by large European corporations whose motivations were very different. In the late 1970s and 1980s it had begun to dawn on the business elite in Europe that Europe’s economy was threatened by the extraordinary dominance of both the U.S. and Asian companies in the area of consumer electronics amongst other things. This existential fear for survival led European cormpanies to push for the creation of an enlarged and bigger regional market for their products and services within the European area. Professor Berend underlines the importance of three figures in this regard – Helmut Kohl in Germany, Francois Mitterand in France and Jacques Delors as President of the European Commission. The campaign to instigate and complete a single European market and eventually a currency were all the work of Delors; and the clearest beneficiaries were Europe’s big industrial companies who used it as an opportunity to mimic US merger and acquisition culture. Mitterand in France was critical to this success. His early domestic enthusiasm for more and bigger state enterprises was quickly jettisoned in favour of privatisation in his second term. In fairness he saw, as other European countries did, that building national champions, some of which were not long-term competitive, would not be enough to raise European industry off its knees. Currency instability, widespread immigration from the Mediterranean basin, as well as Africa, and the global

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    Marine life: out of sight, so nihilistically destroyed

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    Fish don’t vote. When Ireland’s Marine Minister Michael Creed said: “I am satisfied that I have managed to turn an extremely worrying set of proposals from the Commission into a much improved outcome for the Irish fishing industry”, there was little doubt as to whose interests the minister represented. While he added that he was “especially pleased that the quotas agreed respects the scientific advice ensuring that the fish stocks in our waters will be managed sustainably”, this may have been tongue in cheek. In 2016, Ireland came out as number one in the league table of worst offenders for the promotion of overfishing in the North East Atlantic, according to a report published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) an independent think tank. The report – ‘Landing the Blame’ set out to name-and-shame the EU member states most responsible for setting fishing quotas above the level recommended in scientific advice – the very advice in fact that Creed said he “respected”. At the time the NEF report was being compiled, Simon Coveney was our minister with responsibility for marine affairs. Coveney negotiated the largest proportional increase in fishing quotas for Ireland above scientifically advised levels in December 2015, with Ireland’s quotas exceeding scientific advice by 25%. Fish, don’t lobby, so their interests, including the fundamental right to exist at all, were not considered. According to the NEF there is a total lack of transparency about the fisheries negotiations, leading to wheeler-dealing where Irish fishermen, politicians and processors ‘celebrate’ beating the system and catching far more fish than the marine system can bear. What stands out about overfishing isn’t so much the destructive greed involved, it’s the sheer nihilistic stupidity. Research published by NEF calculated that the EU could actually increase its fish catch by two million tonnes a year, raise an extra €1.6bn in income from the marine sector, and create an additional 20,000 jobs in the industry. How? Simply by sticking rigidly to the scientific advice, which means allowing fish stocks to recover, avoiding targeting of breeding grounds for juvenile fish and, critically, eliminating trawling. By its very nature, much of what happens at sea is out of sight, and therefore largely out of mind. This is the only possible reason to explain how the industrial-scale vandalism involved in trawling isn’t regarded as a criminal offence. If you saw a plane flying over a pristine forest and carpet-bombing it, you would be rightly outraged. Yet, this extreme level of wanton wreckage of the sensitive marine habitats on the sea floor is carried out daily by trawlers right around our coasts. According to the Irish Wildlife Trust: “trawling destroys seabed habitats and catches huge numbers of other marine organisms (known as bycatch) including juvenile cod, whiting etc. Successive cod management plans have failed and we believe the only solution is to prohibit trawling in large areas of the Irish Sea.” A trawling ban within 12 miles of shore would, according to the IWT, “repair habitats, restore biodiversity, be a boon for coastal tourism (angling, diving) and ultimately provide more and bigger fish for fishermen”. Much of the seas around Ireland is already critically overfished; and bottom-trawling in particular is uniquely destructive as well as extraordinarily wasteful. When weighted nets and trawl doors are dragged along the seafloor, everything in their path is disturbed or destroyed, including seagrasses, coral reefs and rock gardens where fish hide from predators. In one study, bottom trawling for prawns threw away nine times as much bycatch as more selective fishing gear. A 2007 study on shrimp trawlers in Belize found that landing less than 20 tons of shrimp involved destroying and discarding about 76 to 190 metric tons of other marine life. Globally, marine systems are under greater stress than at any time for tens of millions of years. A lethal cocktail of pollution, overfishing, rising water temperatures and ocean acidification is pushing many systems into irreversible collapse. Any one of these threats in isolation would be serious; in combination, they risk tipping us into a world where the oceans are essentially dead, with little besides jellyfish capable of surviving and adapting to the unprecedented rate of change. Other than the occasional dolphin or clown fish, we as humans have little personal empathy with most forms of marine life. We tend to view them as cold and slimy; hardly worth bothering about at all. David Attenborough’s latest marvel, ‘Blue Planet II’, has just finished broadcasting. Hitting weekly audiences of over 17 million, it was in fact the most watched TV programme of 2017. Great storytelling, combined with breath-taking photography has brought the exotic and bizarre wonders of the seas to amazed audiences. Blue Planet II is expected to be sold to over 100 TV stations all over the world, showing this interest, even compassion, is not just a flash in the pan. Viewers watching resolute puffins engaging in perilous and exhausting three-hour roundtrips to catch fish for their young, while being harried on the return journey by raiding skuas will have a better grasp of just how tough life is, and how survival itself is balanced on a daily knifeedge for most species. Skellig Michael, off the coast of Kerry, is a rare sanctuary for puffins, among others, yet this delicate ecosystem is being constantly threatened by human intrusions, especially since the island first featured in the ‘Star Wars’ film franchise, with Heather Humphries, the unfortunately named then Heritage minister signing off on the film crew’s right to move 180 staff, plus heavy equipment, including lighting rigs, onto the island. It doesn’t take a trained ecologist to work out the impacts of having helicopters and drones swirling around this tiny island. By the time ‘Star Wars’ has finished with it, it’s likely the already endangered sea birds will have long abandoned their ancient sanctuary. Still, puffins don’t vote, so who cares? While Humphries has made a ministerial career out of selling out the natural environment to special-interest groups, ‘Blue Planet II’ lingered long

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    Adventurers in immortality and Nazism

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    The revised edition of ‘Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast’ (Kiely, Liffey Press, Dublin 2007; Areopagitica, NC 2017) coincided this year with two other biographies about Nora O’Mara and John Lodwick, close friends of Stuart’s in wartime. The challenge for the biographer is to interrogate the sources about Stuart, O’Mara, and Lodwick each of whom was lured to a war zone, and establish the truth about their psychology, actions, personality and politics. Stuart and O’Mara became lovers while working for the Propaganda Ministry (Fichte Bund) in Berlin. Stuart’s notorious broadcasts made him, according to critic Cyril Connolly, “the Irish Haw-Haw”. Lodwick, who worked for British Special Operations was a Croix de Guerre hero and novelist hailed by writers from Somerset-Maugham to Anthony Burgess. O’Mara held many aliases: Nora O’Mara, Deirdre O’Mara and Roísín Ní Mheara. She is mentioned in James O’Donnell’s ‘The Bunker’ (2001) as Rosaleen James aka ‘Mata O’Hara’ so-nicknamed by Hitler’s SS adjutant, Otto Günsche. O’Mara was in fact Phyllis Ursula James, born in 1918. Her natural father is unknown, her mother Nora James “a ladies maid of Hyde Park”. She was adopted by Sir Ian and Lady Hamilton of 1 Hyde Park Gardens, and despite a privileged education, including at a finishing school in Germany, suffered psychologically as an orphan. This is also attested to in ‘Black List, Section H.’ The Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg holds a letter from the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of 12 March 1942: “Frau O’Mara is being sent for 14 days of convalescence to Baden-Baden”. The letter suggests finding “a decent theatre engagement…and to help Frau O’Mara in case of need; it is requested to appropriate 500 RM (Reichmarks) from the Goebbels Fund”. The letter focuses on O’Mara’s status as an actress while working in the Haus des Rundfunk as a radio broadcaster alongside Stuart. O’Mara’s connections made her an insider with the Nazi regime. For example, Hitler’s personal pilot Hans Baur says he met her at a party in Goebbels’ villa in Schwanenwerder. The letter is intriguing as to how O’Mara penetrated the Reich’s higher echelons. She features in Stuart’s ‘Black List, Section H’ (King Penguin) as Susan Loyson, a distressed mother trying to get into German movies and theatre. The tempestuous O’Mara-Stuart relationship is pervasive in the book: she had two children, as did he back in Ireland from a failed marriage to Maud Gonne’s daughter, Iseult. While Stuart recanted his years in Berlin in interviews and especially ‘Black List, Section H,’ O’Mara’s loyalty to Nazism is clearly stated in two memoirs under the name Roísín Ní Mheara, ‘Cé hÍ Seo Amuigh’ (1992) and ‘I gCéin is I gCóngar’ (2006). The first caused a media scandal representing ‘neo-Nazism in Europe’ under the auspices of Gaelic-language publisher, Coiscéim. The government funders of the publisher had to answer for a text that evinced Holocaust denial like David Irving’s ‘Hitler’s War’ (1977). O’Mara’s overt anti-Semitism had first surfaced in January 1978 in her column in ‘Inniu’ denying the genocide in Bergen-Belsen. Her words are redolently vile: “there is plenty of evidence that the Germans did their serious best to solve the ‘Jewish problem’ humanely”. Stuart and O’Mara were blacklisted for being friends of pro-Nazi IRA activists Sean Russell and Frank Ryan who retain nationalist hero status. Russell died aboard a German U-boat on a mission with Ryan to Ireland during the war. Stuart was imprisoned by the French but released after a year. O’Mara’s release shortly after her arrest in Paris at the request of the post-war American and British authorities is mysterious since “MI5’s file on her was made to go away”. O’Mara’s foster-father, Sir Ian Hamilton, led the British Legion delegation in 1938 and was hosted by Hitler in Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg. Making international news, Hamilton was photographed with Hitler as had other deviant foreign nationals including the runaway king Edward VIII. The memoir states O’Mara was “born in Switzerland” but in 1938 O’Mara was listed in Berlin’s Reichstheaterkammer Jahrbuch having established her identity as ‘Irish’. Her background and lineage were fake in a milieu where the bogus Nazi obsession with Aryanism and Jewishness in particular led to many reinventions of identity. The Abwehr, the SS, and the Geheime Staatspolizei sanctioned her profile as ‘Irish’, and her shadowy activities. O’Mara appears in John Francis O’Reilly’s ‘I Was A Spy in Ireland.’ He believed her cover-story. She was “Irish looking with unusual blue eyes and a peculiar walk as if she had at one time injured her back. Good-looking, but with rather an unwashed appearance”. O’Mara was obviously a spy for the Germans among their ‘adopted’ Irish gang of anti-British, pro-IRA supporters residing in Berlin and on the payroll. They included Stuart. William Warnock, the Irish chargé d’affaires in Berlin put on the record that O’Mara “was responsible for a raid by the SS on fellow broadcaster Liam Mullally’s flat”. The fact that she was quickly declassified by MI5 and the Americans after the war points perhaps to some sort of double-agent status. Francis Stuart’s novels had been highly praised, notably by Yeats who lost out in the tug-of-love with Iseult Gonne who married Stuart. Yeats’ proposed to Iseult twice but was blankly refused and he moved on speedily to marry Georgette Hyde-Lees. Yeats admired Stuart as poet and novelist, stating “he will be our great writer”. Stuart had returned to Berlin in January 1940 on a cultural visit organised by German Academic Exchange’s Helmut Clissmann (later assigned to the SS). This gets much space in ‘Black List, Section H.’ It has the highest political resonance in the novel since he acknowledges “being branded as a Nazi by those from whom most of his readers would have to come, scarcely augured well for his future”. Stuart’s Berlin years achieved everything he wanted for his art, albeit at the price of infamy. His twenty-five novels present a unity of thematic structure about war and its reality as counter-flow to so-called peace time. The extremes of Nazi Germany fulfilled his personal and psychological needs. The politics of

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    The Shaker Hymn: There’s no redoing things

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    Independent music is odd: for a wide umbrella of music that breeds the creative freedom and cultural autonomy needed to help progress the overall artistic discourse, there’s no shortage of revivalists of various stripes, rejigging and refreshing previously well-worn sonic tropes. It’s been hard in the past to look at Corkonian psych-poppers The Shaker Hymn and not get some degree of the warm-and-fuzzies: emerging from teenage adventures in the folk and alternative genres, second album ‘Do You Think You’re Clever?’ self-released last year and veered wildly into tape-hiss, big sounds and the kind of vocal harmonies the like of Supergrass would have been envious of at the outset of Britpop. It was a mix that intrigued a lot of people, and preceded a furious touring schedule in small towns and minor venues all over the country, before the band took a breather to try other things and collect their thoughts, ready for another salvo of new material. In that context the band’s new single, Dead Trees, is a surprise. Vocalist/guitarist Caoilian Sherlock, a naturally happy-go-lucky fellow, drops the youthful distrust of the band’s postMillennial fug in favour of fire-and-brimstone doomsaying, warning of an uncertain future, in direct contrast to his fine fettle as we meet at L’Attitude on Cork’s Union Quay. Sherlock is relaxed about the response the single has met with at the band’s gigs so far this winter, a return to live activity that foreshadows an upcoming third album. “It’s been good. I forgot what it was like to do gigs. We hadn’t performed in about a year, except for one gig in Belgium where we tested out all our new songs. It’s nice. The songs are different. It seems boring to other people, but they’re longer. I guess we’ve given up the idea of trying to impress anyone else, I think. When you’re a bit younger, you try and write something to get in the charts, or something. We’ve been doing that since we were sixteen. We’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, now. The point of us being in a band is to give us that expression that comes from being together, so there’s less rules and a lot more of a democratic process going on between the four of us. The intention is to make the most exciting thing we can”. The process of creating music for record is obviously very different now from what it would have been in the days of the band’s broader influences; and in trying to bequeathe a document of where they are now the outfit have opted to keep recording their third album on tape to instill the same sense of urgency, immediacy, and the finality of limited takes into their tunes, though with permanence now underpinning the hard-won authenticity of fuzz and hiss,. “Music nerds will say, ‘oh, how exciting!’, but for those who don’t really care about the musicrecording process: we’ll be recording to tape, like they did up until the late Eighties, early Nineties. It means everything has to be done live. That’s exciting for us, ‘cause it’s a different process, there’s no sitting at the computer and redoing things. If you sound good or bad on the day, it doesn’t matter: that’s what happened, and that’s really exciting for us. We recorded two albums in three years and before that tons of EPs, so the recording process can get a bit flavourless. So for us, this is a bit of spice”, smiles Sherlock. Dead Trees itself touches on fairly hefty business, shifting creative focus from benign appraisals of the maladies of twenty-somethings in the binds of austerity and ladder-pulling, like in previous single Trophy Child, to altogether broader subject matter including the aforementioned doomerism. The question is: what prompted this turn for the thematically heavy? “Trophy Child was on our last album, and I couldn’t help but write about things that were going on around me. All my friends were going away to the UK, leaving Cork to go to Dublin, go to Australia and New Zealand, coming back, then going to South East Asia… much of that album was about that lost kind of feeling, not that I was stymied staying in Cork, but a lot of people around me were having the conversation about not knowing where to go. So a lot of the songs were about that. This time around I wanted to write from a more thematic point of view, as much as I could, but not so personal, more universal. So, I was doing a lot more travelling, as this album began to be written. I got to go to Iceland and LA, and other places I’d never seen, new landscapes, so I wanted to write something about nature, and the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t not write about the world after Trump, and Brexit. There was a heavy feeling at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, so there’s a lot of that on this new album. There’s also a lot of joy and excitement, and a feeling of ‘ooh, what’s gonna happen next?’”. The band’s recent downtime allowed Sherlock to spread his wings, solo, as Saint Caoilian, releasing his début one-man effort, ‘The Faraway’, earlier in the year. Away from a shared creative endeavour, Sherlock’s tendencies toward lovelorn pop, summoning power-pop pioneers like Big Star, are writ large all over leadoff single I’ll Be a Fool For You. It led to a busy summer of gigs, both in support of his own record and of fellow Corkonian troubadour Marlene Enright, and with accelerating momentum, there’s little stopping him from continuing this in between bursts of band activity. “I’m recording another EP this December! It’s funny, the reason Saint Caoilian came about was because I had about fifty demos at home. They weren’t going anywhere, and they weren’t necessarily Shaker Hymn songs. On top of that, I’ve been in this band since I was sixteen, you can’t expect three other people to travel all

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    Trouble Pilgrims

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    The Radiators From Space, Ireland’s first punk band, captured the subversive mood of 1979 in the groundbreaking ‘Ghostown’ album. Now they cast a long shadow over Trouble Pilgrims who have inherited band members Steve Averill and Pete Holidai. But the iconic pair of Irish rockers are not just surviving, they’re thriving. The reason for this must be the strength of their collaborators in Trouble Pilgrims. In fact, Trouble Pilgrims now are almost an Irish post-punk supergroup. The lineup includes Bren Lynott who was a member of The End and The Cathedral, and Johnny Bonnie who comes via the Skank Mooks, Those Handsome Devils and The Baby Snakes. Tony St Ledger was in The Myster Men, The Deep and Vatikan3. So there are plenty of ghosts in this album, and ghosts of hopes. The 1970s and 1980s Dublin’s scene’s glimmer of dreams. Prospects of stardom; the price – a ticket on the B+I ferry. As ex Radiator and Pogue, Philip Chevron said: “where the hand of opportunity draws a ticket in the lottery”. ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is a triumph, an essential piece of modern Irish art. It takes all of the hopes and aspirations of those Moran-ish, Baggot-y, Ivy Room-y (although that’s an oxymoron), McGonagle-y, college and Magnetic first steps of young bands and welds them together into an unholy celebration of the power of rock. While ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is a very Dublin album, it also celebrates the dust and grit, the sweat and blood, the tension and release of the blues, from the Delta to Canvey Island. It wears the ghostshirts of glam, of Bolan and Bowie and Roxy and the candyfloss pop of the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. In the key word from the opening track, it’s a carnival. Snake Oil Carnival sets the tone for the album in grand style. After an introduction featuring a cacophony of traffic, cymbals and radio drone (a riot in Chatham St music academy perhaps), Steve Rapid and Tony St Ledger combine to sizzling effect in a Doors meets Queens of the Stone Age sixties stomper. It’s almost overflowing with taut guitar whose sinewy histrionics pulse in this rock and rollercoaster. And then without warning, with the sharpest of shocks, the Carny is over. It’s breath-taking. Another outstanding track is Tony St Ledger’s, Instant Polaroid, which celebrates a Dublin character, snapping pics on O’Connell street. Capturing moments of bliss, delirious smiles, and the beauty of youth, and developing them in what must have been a lonely dark room. It’s an intensely evocative song and is delivered with the panache of early Bauhaus, the sparkle of Spizz Energi and the invention of the great post-punk bands. And that’s why ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’ is such an exultation: it captures the moment punk was a kaleidoscope of images and sounds, of personalities and dreams. It marshalled a sense of power and glory for the people who felt powerless and inglorious. Death Ballad and Queen of Heartache are a pair of Moore Street meets New York-flavoured gems. The first contains a candyfloss melody combining with barbedwire guitars. If Debbie Harry fronted the Outcasts this would be the song to record. Queen of Heartache is the Ramones twisting with the Royal Showband. Style icons hucklebucking trends, throwing shapes at the mineral bar in some maple-sprung dancefloor of dreams. It’s the song the Golden Horde shudda wrote. I am only pointing out the points of comparison that I imagine because: a) it’s fun, and b) the album refuses to be typecast or to fit into any neat compartment, and that makes it thrilling. These kicks are encapsulated when Pete Holidai grabs the mic for Animal Gang Blues. To my ears, he’s never sung truer, more convincingly, more intensely than on ‘Dark Shadows and Rust’. It’s a career-high. The song itself is a prequel to ‘Ghostown’. It’s a bloody B-movie of a song, a scare-a-thon, washed in acid guitars where Holidai is the grinderman, voicing the moral panics that stalked deprived Dublin. Scorning the hopeless souls with finger wagging and wondering where it all went wrong. The characters of the first two Radiators’ albums are here in spirit, although it documents pre-1970s Dublin. That’s one of the best things about the album. As rap did in the 1980s and early 1990s when it celebrated the tenements of New York City, Trouble Pilgrims take the same razor-sharp cinema lens to their own surroundings. Most rewardingly the Pilgrims invoke the past, but never wallow in it.

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