‘I deem as heroic those who have the harder task, face it unflinchingly and live. In this world, women do that.’ – James Salter ‘I know too well those marvellous lips. By Allah, I’m not lying if I say I love sipping their finerthanwine delicious dew.’ – Hafsa Bint Al-Hajj Arrakuniyya about her lover Abu Ja’far – Twelfth century Granada ‘All lovers wear my castoff clothes and jewels and gulp down my overspilt drink. I have raced with lovers at love’s racetrack and beaten them all at my own pace.’ – Ishraqa al-Muharibiyya, pre-Islam At a time when women from Arab and Muslim cultures are facing the dual oppression of gendered racism from without and sexism from within, Radical Love #FemaleLust pushes them centre stage and celebrates their self-expression on their own terms. Frustrated with the burial of female voices across history, we found inspiration in those that rang out loud and strong across the Arab world thousands of years ago. Over 1000 years ago, women across the Arab world from Iraq to Andalusia were writing poems that read like the best Pop lyrics – succinct and sweet in their indignant pride and defiance, their passionate seduction and longing. The lust for love. Mostly from the Muslim world of the seventh to the twelfth centuries, these women challenge preconceptions of faith, class, and the female experience long ago. They capture some of what there is to relish in this swirling and confounding life and living. Whatever external restraints were placed on these women, they retained a vitality and independence of spirit, a powerful tonic to these troubling times. The lust for life. The lust for love and life was so apparent the show’s title suggested itself. To demonstrate the timelessness of the female energy so viscerally evoked in these words, an idea struck to ask female artists across the globe to use the poetry as inspiration for new work. With no more to go on than the individual poem they received in the post, 48 female artists from various cultures (half Arab or Muslim) created paintings, sculpture, photography and textile art. Moreover, they are just sublime. Radical Love #FemaleLust is a dialogue between past and present, words and visuals, and between different faiths and cultures. Most but not all the artworks will show in Dublin and the artists featured include young Spanish, Turkish, Saudi Arabian, British-Iranian and Egyptian photographers, a Palestinian calligrapher, a Jamaican painter, four Syrian artists who’ve been displaced, an Irish sculptor and an English stained-glass artist. It ran in London at the Crypt Gallery in February and at the Women of the World festival in May, and comes to Dublin’s Gallery X on 65 South William St , 10-26 November. Donations to help cover expenses incurred in bringing it to Dublin are greatly needed. All the beautiful artworks are for sale with profits split between the artists and Global Fund for Women, helping Syrian refugees. Poems showcased are from Abdullah al Udhari’s collection ‘Classical Poems by Arab Women’, recently re-published by Saqi books with a foreword by Mona Eltahawy. Radical Love #FemaleLust is curated by Róisín O’Laughlin
In the early 1980s the government decided to try to get children to drink more milk. I’m not sure that there had been a problem with children not drinking milk. As I recall, that’s all we drank. Yet it introduced a free milk scheme. The milk was to be distributed through schools and it was packaged in a sort of rough plastic bag. If it had arrived cool, by the time we were given the milk it was warm and smelled rancid. We used to have fights using the gone-off milk on the way home from school. If the policy was intended to get children to drink more milk, and not designed to alleviate the then-growing butter mountain, the policy failed. The government is still concerned about children’s diets. Since the 1980s there has been an increase in the number of children who are overweight and diagnosed with type II diabetes – the one related to poor diet. When confronted with such figures the first response should be to question the data. As we can see with Garda data on crime, even measurement of clearcut things is rarely simple. Data are based on man-made decisions, collected by humans, and so can be subject to human biases. The measure of weight using Body Mass Index (BMI) is somewhat controversial, though some of the criticism is overdone. We know for instance that muscle weighs more than fat, and so very fit people can be classed as overweight. We also know that all fat isn’t equal. Fat around the bum and thighs may not be wanted, but it’s not deadly in the way visceral fat around the organs at the belly is. Weight itself isn’t a problem, it’s what weight is associated with. But as a measure BMI broadly correlates with other measures of health, and has the advantage of being relatively easy to measure. We also do it right. Though expensive, we now measure a genuine random sample of people in Ireland, with interviewers willing to call to targeted respondents multiple times. This is rare. It’s also rare to survey over 7,000 people, which allows us to see where they live and who they are in greater detail than most other surveys would. So let’s assume that the data are broadly right, and about 60 per cent of adults are overweight or obese. The government’s concern has led to a number of policies being introduced. One is to give out free samples of healthy food in primary schools – in a Food Dudes programme. It’s the modern equivalent of the milk-in-schools scheme, and it makes the same mistakes. The fresh vegetables and fruit are not that fresh, and so children who don’t normally eat fresh fruit and vegetables will be left (even) less likely to try them again. In the recent budget Paschal Donohoe announced another policy, which has been dubbed a sugar tax. It isn’t actually a sugar tax: processed sugar is zero-rated for VAT and will continue to be. It’s a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. Sugar is seen by some as today’s tobacco. Whether it is or not is less clear. There’s no evidence that sugar has properties that are addictive in the way nicotine is, but it’s also clear that there is a link between sugar-sweetened processed foods and diseases such as diabetes. However, if we look to UK data (which we are culturally and economically closest to) we are consuming fewer calories now than in the 1980s. However, the nutritional value of the calories we are consuming may have changed. Milk consumption among US children and adolescents has halved since the 1960s, largely replaced by sugar-sweetened beverages. So even though we don’t have good time-series data for Ireland, and the Healthy Ireland survey doesn’t give us very fine grained data on what we are eating, we’re probably consuming more sugar now than in the past. So how do we deal with this? And will Paschal Donohoe’s intervention work? Taxes affect behaviour. We often don’t want them to affect behaviour – taxes on work tend to deter people from offering or taking up employment; taxes on goods may stop people from trading goods, suppressing economic activity. But what if those goods are ones we don’t really want people to consume, or certainly not in large volumes? As long ago as 1776 Adam Smith, who didn’t want taxes that distort the economy, nevertheless noted that “Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation”. Whether these taxes would work depends on their price elasticities. That is, the extent to which price changes cause changes in demand. Demand for tobacco is shown to be highly inelastic to changes in prices. Increased prices have little impact on consumption. The tax on cigarettes is now about 400% and, while smoking has reduced that is mainly because of lower take-up and people quitting for health reasons, though no doubt the price helps. It can raise a lot of revenue for the state. But even this huge tax might not affect consumption among existing smokers. In Ireland the tax introduced by Donohoe on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) is modest. He is “introducing a tax at a rate of 30 cent per litre on drinks with over 8 g of sugar per 100 ml and a reduced rate of 20 cent per litre on drinks with between 5g and 8g of sugar per 100 ml”. A can of Coke will go up by 10 cent. This is roughly a 10% tax. Will it deter people? Research by Mathew Harding and Michael Lovenheim, published in the Journal of Health Economics, on elasticity of demand suggests that sweet snacks are quite inelastic, which might mean taxes won’t affect behaviour much. However, using modelling techniques, which are themselves problematic, they found it might work: a 20% tax on high-sugar products might reduce sugar consumption by 16%. There have been
One in four Twitter followers of Philip Boucher Hayes is a fake account, the RTÉ broadcaster announced on his Twitter feed recently. Around the end of August, Boucher Hayes had noticed an uptick in new followers on Twitter, which he had monitored since. “Previously 100/150 people would follow me every week”, Boucher Hayes posted on Twitter. “Suddenly it became 800/1500 a week. Most had Irish-sounding names. None had tweeted. They were all following the same high-profile Irish accounts”. Boucher Hayes noted that many of the accounts had usernames consisting of a name followed by a series of random digits, such as @ John87654321 or @Mary12345678. This pattern, suggestive of names being mass-generated automatically, had also been seen earlier in the year among many ‘Brexit-bots’ in the UK. Although Boucher Hayes reported the increase in fake followers to Twitter, the pattern continued unchecked. “Either most of the high-profile Irish accounts have grossly inflated numbers of followers (which is admittedly a bit of a “so what?”) or someone is amassing a very large Twitter mob for some as yet unidentified purpose”, Boucher Hayes posted. “Either way it further erodes confidence in an increasingly compromised platform. Twitter doesn’t seem worried, maybe its users will be”. The same phenomenon may also account for the large numbers of fake followers identified for the @rte2fm radio account by the anonymous account of ‘Secret RTE Producer’ (@rtesecretpro), and would certainly make more sense than the national broadcaster spending licence-fee money to boost a social-media headcount. Perhaps reflecting official sensitivities, as Village was going to press, 2FM had reduced from thousands to 45 the number of accounts it was following. In recent testimony to the US congress, Twitter estimated five percent (16 million) of its accounts belong to fake users. Bots in turn can be divided into subgroupings. Spambots post URLs, hoping to encourage users to click on them, either to sell a product, or to lead users to a malicious website, which can infect their browsers and take over their laptops or phones. By contrast, influence bots seek to influence public opinion, whether by spamming hashtags, promoting artificial trends, pushing smear campaigns and death campaigns, or boosting political propaganda. “Artificial trends can bury real trends, keeping them off the public and media’s radar. Smear campaigns and death threats can both intimidate vocal opponents and dissuade would-be speakers. The link between propaganda and legitimate political speech is a fine one, of course, and in some cases is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, bots can be used to amplify the propagandist’s desired message”, noted Nathalie Marechal, a researcher with the University of California, writing in the International Journal of Communication in 2016. A 2016 study found that Twitter’s algorithms would eliminate a bot which tweeted spam links, but would not delete the associated accounts that retweeted the original post. This meant bot networks could all retweet a message hundreds of times, at the loss of only a handful of original tweeting accounts each time. Analysts at the University of Washington in Seattle studied a network which they named the Syrian Social Botnet, which worked not only by posting pro-Assad news and promoting astroturfing, but by flooding timelines with irrelevant news. A hashtag about the Syrian civil war would be flooded with irrelevant reports about other stories, for example from Hurricane Sandy, swamping the system with noise and making the hashtag useless for search purposes, a practice known as smokescreening. Another network – the Star Wars Botnet – discovered by researchers at University College London, numbering over 300,000 accounts, was so-called because the accounts each posted random snippets of text from Star Wars novels in the minutes after they were set up. A large number of the bots followed a handful of real users, and it seems to have been built for this purpose, and sold to users who wanted to inflate their follower counts and exaggerate their popularity. Bots can also be used to create page impressions, as Twitter and Facebook accounts are often used as logins by readers of news sites. This could exaggerate page views and ad impressions on websites seeking to defraud advertisers. A second botnet uncovered by the same London-based researchers numbered over 500,000 accounts, and was behind a large-scale spamming attack on Twitter in 2012. Gavin Sheridan, who worked as innovation director with Storyful, the News Corp-owned online news-verification company started by Mark Little in 2010, says it is not possible to determine who might be behind this nascent bot army until it is activated. (And indeed, now that it had been noticed, its usefulness may have been diminished to such an extent that it is never used). “I’ve read a lot of research, and I’ve seen the bot armies myself”, says Sheridan. “There were bot armies for California leaving the Union, for Texas leaving the union, there are pro-Erdogan ones in Turkey, one for Catalonia, one for Scotland leaving the UK: all bot armies in some shape or form”. “I started looking at [the Irish botnet] about two weeks ago. I wasn’t being followed by them but I noticed them following other people. A couple of people contacted me and said that they seemed to be being followed by strange accounts. There’s a couple of interesting things about these bots. One thing is the rapidity with which they are following certain users, the second thing is that they appear to have Irish-sounding names, not all of them, but a certain number, so if I look at, say, a prominent member of the Repeal the Eighth movement, I’ll see that of the last 50 followers, about half are newly set up – in the last few weeks. They have never tweeted and engage in no other activity. Some follow 50, some follow 80 accounts, that include people prominent in the Repeal the Eighth campaign. I’d have to analyse every single checking account to see if they follow people on the other side of the debate, but so far they’re also
The creation of lists and listicles titilatingly combines the writer’s self-indulgence with a gratifying boxticked clarity. The October 1 edition of the Sunday Times did this better than most, on a subject of notorious sensitivity – music, as a much-feted “101 Irish Albums We Love” list, compiled by Something Happens vocalist/Newstalk doyen Tom Dunne, ripped the bandage from the hairy arm of unending argument over objective stances on a subjective medium. Was ‘Astral Weeks’ really that good? Was the chase for the next U2 really the best thing for Irish music? Why aren’t hip-hop innovators Scary Éire, techno wild-children The Fourth Dimension or black-metal trailblazers Primordial ever on these all-timer lists? The big takeaway from this latest bout of squabbling, however, was a note of disappointment for readers under thirty: one of the country’s highest-profile disc-jocks and champions of music programming had included only one (1) single independently-released album from this decade on an otherwise comprehensive list. Just one from the current gilded age of independently-released music in Ireland. While the debate has cooled down to the usual simmer among Irish music pedants, it would be a misuse of space here not to create a companion piece to balance the conversation. And here it is: a list, though by no means definitive, of ten Irish records from this decade you should be adding to your collection (or Spotify account). The rules are simple: albums released since 2010, open-genre policy, no big-name reunions, no major-label releases, no bores. ADEBISI SHANK This Is The Second Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank (2011, Richter Collective) A day-zero event in the current chapter of independent music in Ireland, the Wexford trio’s second long-player marked their transition from fret-burning, pedal-stacking math-rock noisemakers to something more. Post-rock and its associated sub-genres set about rearranging the furniture to magic something new out of an established setup. With the beep-boop, oddlymetered intro to opener ‘International Dreambeat’, the intention was apparent: clear the living room and make way for a futuristic anime parade. The following forty minutes are unlike anything this country has produced, ever. AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR Gangs (2012, Richter Collective) North Shore four-piece And So I Watch You From Afar had also been grafting for years on sweetly melodic, yet no-less-deft tunes that packed the detail of math-rock, the dynamic & breathing space of post-rock and the velocity of metal into its ebbs and flows. A self-titled début LP saw the band begin to make themselves a space; ‘Gangs’ threw explosives in and cleared their path through. ‘Search:Party:Animal’ is a shot of concentrated adrenaline, ‘…Samara to Belfast’ oozes tension, while single ‘7 Billion People All Alive at Once’ takes a pretty, building piece of post-rock and detonates it into a grin-inducing, la-la waltz. A special record from a band that was phosphorescent LAURA SHEERAN What the World Knows (2012, self-release) While Ireland has a proud tradition in improvisation and the avant-garde, there are very few artists who have contrived to force together the sheer love of the process with a singular, driven vision for every aspect of creation, quite like Galwegian Laura Sheeran. What the World Knows gifted us our first longform glimpse of Sheeran’s internal creative world, stark and melancholic, playing with arrangement and form, but always maintaining her strong and steady voice as the eye of the storm, as best demonstrated on ‘Hurricane’. BANTUM Legion (2013, ElevenEleven) Dublin-resident Corkman Ruairí Lynch was a favourite among bloggers earlier in the decade, featuring an eclectic, yet accessible take on a wide swathe of electronica. Début long-player ‘Legion’ sanded his sound down to the grain, leaving only the swelling, full heart of a creator and the friendships behind the collaborations. Singles ‘Oh My Days’ and ‘Legion’ both heave with a wistful, yet ultimately upbeat, riff on internal monologues; the former nesting Eimear O’Donovan’s vocals amid layers of reverb and delay, the latter providing an eighties-indie glow of earnestness to warm, yet haunting electronic pop. LYNCHED Cold Old Fire (2014, self-release) Under Austerity, tone-deaf cries from mainstream music press bemoaned the lack of protest music as with previous generations, before moving along to the next shiny thing. If they’d bothered looking around, they would have found the band currently known as Lankum, recasting lost folk gems from around the world for the modern condition, and co-penning the definitive modern recession song in the album’s title track. In the process, the Dublin four-piece began their transformation into the custodians of the Irish folk tradition, a contrast from the stuffy gatekeeping of the musical friends of conservative Ireland. ILENKUS The Crossing (2014, self-release) With a keen ear for technicality and a fervour for the weight of sludgy, metallic tones, Galwegian five-piece Ilenkus have always shoved to the forefront of their music something casual observers have wrongly remarked is missing from the genre: humanity. The band’s second full-length is a brave, honest work that confronts internal and external issues, from the painful, cathartic and intricate title track, to the pointed sociopolitical barbs of ‘Over the Fire, Under the Smoke’ (sent viral that year for a one-take promo video that saw Chris Brennan perform his gutturally yowled vocals on a walk down Galway’s Shop Street). NAIVE TED The Inevitable Heel Turn (2015, self-release) By day mild-mannered social worker/music teacher Andy Connolly. By night skratchador enmascarado Naive Ted. A longtime fixture on a small but dedicated Irish turntablism scene as one-man duo Deviant and Naive Ted, Limerickbased Connolly emerged to a wider, albeit cultish, spotlight via a series of chance encounters culminating in his work ending up as entrance music on Japanese national television, accompanying Wicklow pro-wrestling superstar Fergal Devitt and his villainous Bullet Club gang. The full-length that followed was bananas, as old-school skratchology met a multi-polar range of samples before being thrown, full-force, at Steve Reich-esque experimentation and being thoroughly deconstructed accordingly. SHARDBORNE Living Bridges (2015, Out on a Limb) Metal in Ireland has always been kept alive by community efforts, from gigs and labels to
Nominative Determinism An English Tory with the damning name of Chris Pincher has been accused of making unwanted advances including by way of an unwanted neck massage, to an athlete, while wearing a bathrobe. The victim, a former Olympic rower, who divulged the disputed details is appropriately called Alex Story. Similarly rapacious, the former British pensions secretary, Stephen Crabb, was referred to the Conservatives’ unpleasant sounding ‘disciplinary panel’ after admitting he sent suggestive text messages to a teenager. If you Vote for Monkeys… When the Independent Alliance was forming, it should have worked out its policy on comprising delegations to tin-pot dictators. Stellar Fair play to Paddy McKillen jr for his voluptuous rejuvenation of the art deco Stella Cinema in Rathmines. Through his company, Press-up, he has also restored and reopened the former Dollard Printing Works, next to the Clarence Hotel on Dublin’s Wellington Quay, as high-ceilinged restaurants and bars. It’s not so long since his Dad – collaborating with Bono and the Edge – got permission to demolish the whole lot, including the Clarence Hotel and Dollard building (except for the front wall), for a new spaceship-style hotel. Oh no, Bono For some reason Bono seems to spend all day trying to pay less and less tax. He is the poster boy for raw global capitalism, though be leavens his image by his passion for charity (not to be confused with justice). The increasingly bigassed rock-constellation bought a shopping centre, not in Paradise but in Lithuania, which has paid no tax despite having made profits. The company was later transferred to zero-company-tax Guernsey. In a statement, the U2 frontman said he would be “extremely distressed if even as a passive minority investor…anything less than exemplary was done with my name anywhere near it”. Some years he outlined his approach to these things “It’s just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed.” Meanwhile Lithuania’s tax authorities have said they are preparing to examine the details of the business over concerns that it avoided profit tax. They commenced “an inspection on taxpayers based on the evaluation of risk of tax breaches. Taxpayers having offshore transactions more often score higher points of risk”, they said. Bono did not apparently contrive artificial structures to avoid paying tax as did, for example, some of the stars of the execrable ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’. However, experts in Lithuania have suggested the underlying company incorporated for the purchase of the property may have broken local rules to reduce its tax bill. More fundamentally Bono’s adventurous, and greedy, tax roving serves to boost ultra-low tax jurisdictions and elaborate structures for cheating tax. And it is these things which are so harmful, not only to ordinary people in developed countries but also to the developing world. When plutocrats like Bono “shop around” different countries for the best tax deal they fan the flames of tax competition, putting ever more pressure on countries around the world to cut their tax rates. Avoiding Tax, Responsibility and Villager’s Attention One of the ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ chaps caught up in the offshore shiftiness painted a picture of himself so inept that he had to google what tax avoidance was. Topping that, Villager had to google what ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ was. If You’re Looking for Murderous Cover-Up Look No Further Northern Ireland High Court Judge Seamus Treacy has said he will compel the PSNI’s Chief Constable to complete an investigation into the activities of the one-time so-called Glenanne Gang, based at a County Armagh farm, which has been linked to up to 120 murders almost all of whom were “upwardly mobile” Catholic civilians with no links to Irish republican paramilitaries, including those of 33 people in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings and of Miami Showband in 1975. The gang included members of the UVF, RUC and UDR. A report into its alleged activities by the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) is 80% complete but unpublished. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that the PSNI had breached the human rights of the victims’ families and it had frustrated “any possibility of an effective investigation”. Doing Dunnes Dunnes Stores cashier Mary Manning knew little about apartheid when, at the age of twenty-one, she refused to register the sale of two Outspan South African grapefruits under a directive from her union. In her memoir, ‘Striking Back – The Untold Story of an Anti-Apartheid Striker (Collins Press), Manning recounts how, on 19 July 1984, she was suspended and nine of her co-workers walked out in support. She said, “We all assumed we would shortly return to work but instead we were on that picket line for 2 years and 9 months”. The searing account of the strikers’ struggle against apartheid and the Irish Establishment will be launched on Friday 24 November at 6.30pm in the Gutter Bookshop, Temple Bar, as part of the inaugural Festival of Politics, by Joe Higgins, Socialist Party activist and former TD and MEP. Villagrrr Newsbrands journalism awards are a misnomer, as well as a smugfest. For a start, they’re not for news brands or journalists but for newspaper journalists. At a recent drawnout gala event in the Mansion House that a bitter Villager avoided, they judged seven Irish Times journalists awardworthy. No-one else got more than three. The newspaper of reference’s dominance reflects the mutual loathings of newspaper rivals, manifest in nihilistic voting strategies, more than any particular respect for the mediocre Irish Times. Encapsulating the second-rate standards, the Best Headline of the Year went to the Irish Daily Star for the banner, ‘Quarter Pounder with Sleaze’, for a cover about a 44-year-old man who exposed himself to a teenager working in McDonald’s. Village’s best ever headline, over a story about distortions of the reality of fish farming, was ‘Lice, damned lies, and statistics’. Not that Newsbrands noticed. The editor says Village isn’t even a brand. The event was sponsored by the larcenous National Lottery
2017 marks 25 years since the start of the Bosnian war which followed the breakup of the formerly Communist Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina passed a 1992 referendum for independence. Nearly half of its citizens were Bosnian Muslims. Nearly a third were Orthodox Serbs and the rest mostly Croatian Catholics. Independence was rejected by the political representatives of the Bosnian Serbs, who had boycotted the referendum though it gained international recognition. The Bosnian Serbs, led by roly-poly poet Radovan Karadžic and supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Miloševic and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), mobilised their forces inside Bosnia and Herzegovina to secure ethnic Serb territory. War and ethnic cleansing followed. Around 100,000 people were killed, 2.2 million people were displaced, and an estimated 12,000–20,000 women – mostly Bosnian Muslims – were raped. These were Crimes against Humanity. It was the worst conflict in Europe since World War II. The concept of Crimes against Humanity had its apotheosis in the Nuremberg Tribunal, of which more later, but its inception may derive from the discourse in Sophocles ‘Antigone’ as to whether an immoral law is a law. In that play, the Rosetta stone of modern natural law, the heroine Antigone observes to the harsh positivist King of Thebes Creon who will not allow her brother, who has fought against him, to be buried properly, allegedly violating the principles of the Natural Law that: “Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who neither dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth…”. Therefore Antigone asserts that the positivistic law of Creon is not a law as it is immoral; or perhaps that an immoral law is not a law; or that if a law so violates humanitarian principles it cannot be deemed a law. This, in my view, is the source of Crimes against Humanity. Later for the Roman orator, statesman and part-time Natural Lawyer, Cicero, positive laws that contravened the natural law could be struck down. Cicero indicated that a legislature which determined that theft or adultery were lawful would be not be making laws, but rather acting as a band of robbers. From Cicero’s perspective, an unjust law is not a law: “Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but laws”. Most famous of all early Christian lawyers, St Augustine of Hippo said “lex iniusta non est lex” (an unjust law is not a law). But still, immorality as such was not deemed a crime against humanity though the ground has been laid. In jurisprudential terms the last century saw a considerable revival in natural law thinking. The World Wars, the horrors of the Holocaust, the aftermath of colonialism, the nuclear age, economic instability and scientific doubt all cumulatively led to the emergence of human rights from 1945 onwards which I think has morphed into a form of secular religion and all of it related to Crimes against Humanity. A crucial juristic figure was the German Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949), both a law professor and a government minister during the Weimar Republic. It is often argued that his earlier writings were positivistic – based on the philosophical system that recognises only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics, natural law and theism. In 1932 he was a relativist in terms of the question as to whether or not moral standards existed in law. He wrote that a judge had an obligation to uphold an unjust law. However, after the Second World War he changed his mind. In his famous Radbruch’s Formula (Radbruchsche Formel) he argued that where statute law was incompatible with positivist law to an intolerable degree, and where it negated the principle of equality which is central to justice, it could be disregarded. In 1946 he wrote: “[P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice to so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice…where there is not even an attempt at justice. Where equality, the core of justice, is deliberately betrayed in positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law”. Radbruch suggested that where there is intolerance and betrayal by government, the law ceases to be valid and must yield to justice. For Radbruch justice (Gerechtigkeit) was linked to human rights. Thus in Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie he argued for “justice as moral equality – applying the same measure to all or guaranteeing human rights to all”. As legal philosopher HLA Hart indicates: “His considered reflections led him to the doctrine that the fundamental principles of humanitarian morality were part of the very concept of Recht or legality and that no positive enactment or statute, however clearly it was expressed and however clearly it conformed with the formal criteria of validity of a legal system, could be valid if it contravened basic principles of morality”. Radbruch had a broad conception of such fundamental laws. He contended that there was a law which was above statute: “However one may like to describe it: the law of God, the law of nature, the law of reason”. Such a law rendered invalid positive laws that did not conform to justice; he argued that Nazi laws did not “partake of the character of law at all; they were not just wrong law,
Did bats figure in your Hallowe’en? They neither relate much to the Bat Man super-paradigm nor to the spooky, ghoulish, symbols of death that Hallowe’en stories would have you believe. Instead they may hold the key to eternal youth. This was one of the topics discussed at the ninth Irish Bat Conference held in October. The trend for many mammals is to ‘Live fast and die young’. Small animals with a high metabolic rate (e.g. mice) tend to have short (and exciting) lives. Larger animals with a slower metabolism tend to live longer. However, bats seem to turn this rule upside down. Bats have an extremely high metabolic rate when flying, but are very long-lived – and don’t seem to suffer from age-related illnesses such as arthritis. Professor Emma Teeling and her team in UCD have been working on bats, and trying to unravel the secrets of healthy old age. One theory is that something weird is happening with bats’ telomeres. Telomeres are caps at the ends of our chromosomes, which prevent the chromosome deteriorating, or fusing with other chromosomes. They act like the bits of plastic on the ends of your shoelaces – stopping the shoelaces, or genes – from fraying. In humans, these telomeres get shorter with age. However with bats the length of the telomeres seems to shorten and lengthen – and it is not age related. Is this the bats’ secret – for eternal youth? Or perhaps it’s autophagy – where our bodies break down and clear out dysfunctional cells. Our ability to do this decreases as we age. But this doesn’t seem to happen with bats – perhaps because flight puts an oxidative stress on a bat, and they have developed a better system for clearing cellular damage. Or is it their gut micro fauna? Emma Teeling and her team have captured bats to study these processes .And the studied bats are well loved; every captured bat also gets a feed of a mealworm to make up for the temporary inconvenience of being handled by a human. And how do humans interact with bats? A presentation by Christian Voigt from Berlin spoke about the effects of human activity on bats. He looked at three types of human activity – farming, wind power generation, and lighting. Using bat detectors, he studied farmland in Germany, and found that bats prefer complex landscapes to monocultures. Small ponds and lakes were very important, as are edge structures – basically, the more types of habitat you have on your farm, the more species you will attract. Studies by Dr Danilo Russo looked at the economic value of bats to farmers. He tracked bats and found their highest feeding activity was where cows were resting. They appear to eat midges and mosquitoes which prey on the cattle, causing loss of weight to the cows and decreased milk production. As herd size increases, so does bat activity – until the herd size reaches 60. He proposed that cattle are kept near large maternity roosts, and that farmers should do all they can to encourage bats (natural pest controllers) on their lands. Russol also suggested using DNA analysis of bat droppings to look for pests before they actually turn up on the farm – the bats may be keeping the pests at bay, and looking at the droppings could provide an exciting warning system which would alert us to the presence of specific pests before they have a chance to multiply uncontrollably. The intrepid Christian Voigt tagged some Noctule bats and we watched in horror some footage of bats flying through wind turbines. In Germany 10-12 bats are killed annually per turbine, in the absence of mitigation. So, officially 250,000 German bats are killed every year – but Voigt is not persuaded. He claimed it is an underestimate, as it is based on the numbers of carcasses found per turbine. His own studies show that the problem is not just direct collision, where you find the dead bat on the ground. Rather the most common cause of death is fractures. Indirect collisions, turbulence and changes in pressure causes barotrauma, where blood fills the abdomen, thorax, or lungs and ruptures ears and eyes. The bat may survive a few days, but will ultimately die, away from the turbine. Its carcass is rarely detected by those who monitor these things. Sadly, while at least the tagged male bats seemed to avoid turbines, female bats seemed to be attracted to them, perhaps sweetly thinking they were trees. Christian Voigt flew drones at wind turbines to monitor the turbulence caused by them, and detected wind turbulence both in front of, and behind, turbines, stretching as far as 600 metres from the turbine. Given the suspiciously low level of post-construction monitoring of windfarms in Ireland, our windfarm developments could have a serious effect on our bat population. And bats are slow to reproduce. Most bats, even fit ones, have one young every one-to-two years. Light pollution – light – can have a seriously detrimental effect on wildlife. Dark Skies projects are being set up throughout the world to encourage black ways (as opposed to green ways or blue ways) – dark areas, for nature. However, light pollution can also have serious health impacts for people. High light levels in cities affect our Circadian rhythm, causing sleep disturbance, which can lead to depression. Astronomers also campaign for dark skies. Predictably, bats are particularly sensitive to light. One consequence of too much light is loss of roost. If a roost is illuminated, some species of bats may be unable to use it. Bats such as Daubenton’s, Natterer’s and Whiskered are very sensitive to light pollution. A study by Alison Fure (2006) found Daubenton’s bats sensitive to light levels as low as 1 lux. Another downside is delayed emergence from roost. Bats sample the light at their roost before coming out. If the light levels are high, they will not emerge. However, most insects are found shortly after dusk, so
I recently concluded a criminal case in the Crown Court in Manchester; a city I had not visited in over 20 years. Much has changed while I’ve been gone. It is a little less frenetic, with no Tony Wilson or Hacienda club, and a good deal more gentrified. Salford, the traditional working-class area, immortalised in the works of such working-class poets of music as John Cooper Clark and Mark E Smith, is no longer as bleak and industrial as it was 20 years ago, but has acquired a glossy riverside sheen, or rather façade. Appearances are always deceptive, and much is still very rundown indeed. Perhaps the most famous chronicler of Mancunian and Northern working-class existence is the painter LS Lowry, to whom there is dedicated a fabulous museum in the designer-revamped Salford: a huge treasure, free to the public and staffed by authentic people of the utmost friendliness. The museum is there, along with a northern version of a Daniel Libeskind structure – actually designed by James Sterling, containing the imperial war museum, northern branch; two theatres; and sundry other cultural delights. The paintings, once seen en masse in the beautiful gallery in the Lowry Centre, are indeed like the ‘matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs’ that I remember children singing about in my youth. Humanity is represented by little emaciated speckled archetypes, often scurrying around in droves near the citadels of northern capitalism, the industrial factory. The people appear as miniature figurines to highlight the backdrop as in an industrial Canaletto view of Venice. The people are all like dots of insignificance: working-class cyphers, their lives dedicated to the service of their paymasters. If you wander away from the totemic works there are, not as famous but more precise, evocations of workingclass existence. A drunken brawl, a funeral congregation in black, the Sunday best for the big occasion: dour. The celebration of shortened lives in rank conditions. These paintings are stark but full of empathy, observed calmly and with rational detachment, as indeed are some of his portraits, and he is a remarkable portrait painter, though I had not realised it. Separately, some weeks ago on a visit to Dublin I spoke to a friend, the librarian in the IFI bookstore, an oasis of modern civilisation in an ever-bleaker city. We conversed and he intimated to me that he had read a recent article by me in the Dublin Review of Books, where I noted the need for a new Orwell to chronicle how the poor die in our nefarious third-world state. No, he firmly intimated, we need not Orwell but that great chronicler of American depression-era working-class life, Upton Sinclair. In Sinclair’s most famous book ‘The Jungle’ he demonstrated sub-standard conditions of workers in the Chicago meat-packing industry and many of his works including ‘Oil’, which became the film ‘There Will be Blood’, are attacks on unbridled, greedy capitalism and what it does to the human spirit. Lowry and Sinclair are ever more relevant as we return to the present. The Marxist analysis of dead capital sucking the blood of labour is more pertinent than ever. I know the tropes and nuances are different, and that the culture has shifted. I know with Marx that identifying the problem does not solve it but recognise the communist manifesto will not work. The existence of the ordinary person in under-paid and over-worked corporatism is not unlike the heyday of Victorian capitalism, or indeed the Great Depression, with the modern version of the factory being the bleak buildings of financial services and corporate law firms. Death by overwork while serving the interest of the plutocracy has become banal in much of western society. Ordinary people console themselves often, as in a seminal painting of Lowry, in the consolations of booze, the Friday night out, the office party. Oblivion. Blowing the limited amounts of disposable income they have, which has not been hoovered up by inflated rents, and mortgages which may never be repaid. Certainly in Ireland there is little or no ‘real’ economic growth as such. Those who have wealth and property run the country like a feudal oligarchy, abusing state structures to go after anyone that poses a threat to their interests. They often mask it well. But deep-seated criminality and thuggery are intrinsic to the modus operandi of our ruling classes and the tactics of surveillance, fabricated cases and false or political prosecutions endemic to a system descending into anarchy, where vested interests are using ever more desperate and ruthless tactics of human exploitation. There is a pattern to all of this. As Arundhati Roy intimates in her monograph ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’, and her recent novel ‘The Ministry of Small Things’, the pattern is that globalised capitalism is ‘cartelising’ the world into a small number of people who control the wealth and assets, and enforce penury and degradation on the mass of the population who are deemed surplus to requirements. That word “surplus” implies disposability by any means necessary. Thrown in a river, locked up in prison, shot. Exposers of the systemic corruption such as Roy in India have been jailed for their temerity in pointing out the growth of the rotten neoliberal agenda. Lives are being destroyed or truncated and the lunatics of the corporatocracy and the insanely rich are pillaging the planet with a speed and rapacity never witnessed before. In their wake, they are destroying equality of opportunity and the ability of ordinary people to work themselves out of the poverty trap. It is not just the working class but all of us, including the educated middle class, who are suffering. So, the working middle classes are confronted with longer working hours, increased competition and migration through neoliberalism – a wholesale race to the bottom. As Roy demonstrates in her ‘Capitalism’ book droves of Indian farmers are committing suicide because of the punitive conditions imposed on them. Suicide rates are exorbitant for failed businessmen, lonely farmers and the homeless of Ireland. A
