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General

Continuing someone else’s journey

by Sarah Campbell 30 May, 2017

Last month in Belfast the first of many commemorative events took place to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the formal founding of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, NICRA. The organisation was pivotal in bringing together all those who were discontented with the status quo in the North. Within eighteen months, a wave of protest over civil rights engulfed Northern Ireland, forcing the Westminster government to implement a series of reforms (in access to housing, voting, and disbanding the B-Specials), which in turn toppled the local government and instigated almost thirty years of direct rule. The Linen Hall Library holds the most extensive collection of primary materials on the civil rights movement, and it has dedicated itself for this year and next to discussing the movement’s impact 50 years on. In this vein, the library hosted two events in April: the first, a talk by Professor Paul Arthur, who was a student at Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s and a member of People’s Democracy. So far, his 1974 book is the only published account of the student movement in Belfast. The second event was a discussion panel on ‘Civil Rights – a missed opportunity?’ sponsored by the Connolly Association, which included speakers Professor Anthony Coughlan and Kevin McCorry. I noted three key things from both events. First, Paul Arthur spoke about the various agendas that existed within NICRA, including the student movement of which he was part. He prefaced some of this with a quote from Seamus Deane’s 1972 poem, ‘Derry’: “The unemployment in our bones Erupting on our hands in stones; The thought of violence a relief The act of violence a grief …”. For Arthur, these lines best encapsulate the ever-present wavering between militancy and constitutionalism that existed in the broader civil rights movement, a debate that has been identifiable in histories of the movement since. Professor Anthony Coughlan, in an article published for this magazine in February this year, firmly lays the blame for the explosion of violence from this period onwards at the door of People’s Democracy, a student-led group that was part of the broader civil rights movement. According to Coughlan, the People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969 “raised the sectarian temperature markedly”. This need to scapegoat and to recriminate began almost immediately with the publication of the Cameron Report commissioned by the British government, a 1969 document that Coughlan suggests is “still the best account of the early Civil Rights period”. Later historians, such as Henry Patterson and Joe Lee, have continued in the same vein. As a result, the mainstream, consensus narrative of the civil rights movement in the North, tends, unfairly, to side-line the student impact or represent it as an irrelevant irritant to the more mature, sober and minimalist activities of NICRA and to the emerging political ideologies of a newly energised nationalism. But if we look closely at the Queen’s University student newspaper, the Gown, in the years leading up to this period, we can appreciate how wide the political scope of student activism had become. These students were internationalising the situation in Northern Ireland, arguably more than NICRA was, by linking it not only to the civil rights movement in the US, but more widely to student movements for free speech and freedom to assemble in Europe, to anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Vietnam, and to gender rights. The second thing that became clear at both events is that the civil rights movement is remembered differently by different people. Arthur perceptively remarked that in his reappraisal of the movement, there was a great deal of re-remembering and mis-remembering. Issues of civil rights, past and present, remain vital to the contested political culture in Northern Ireland. Equally important are the issues of memory, legacies of conflict, and dealing with the past, which continue to threaten the stability of the government there. As the centenary commemorations of the Irish revolution (1912-23) have revealed, memory is crucial to the understanding of Northern Ireland culture precisely because it is an indicator of collective desires and self-definitions. Since 1998, society in the North has been marked by a tendency towards increasingly divided memory. Events from the start of the Troubles have been interpreted in contrasting ways and the facts themselves are often disputed. There has been very little consensus about what happened, why it happened, and crucially, how to remember what happened. Even within communities, there has been a tendency to promote one set of memories over others. The civil rights movement circulates through Northern Irish memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. Debate continues on how much discrimination existed in Northern Ireland during the Stormont years (1921-1972) as well as the movement’s relationship to the violence of the 1970s and the 1980s. Yet remembrance is also a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement – distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in museums, murals, public rituals, and textbooks – distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals. Current realities (the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that enshrined civil rights at its core, the ongoing issues since over how to deal with the past, and austerity policies implemented since 2009 that affect living standards) combine and influence the ways in which people relate and integrate the dimensions of past and present experience. A battle over the movement’s legacy has been waged within the Catholic community over the last decade, with both Sinn Féin and the SDLP claiming to be the true inheritors of the movement. How the Protestant and unionist community remember the movement has yet to be explored. In the commemorations of the civil rights movement, and the origins of the conflict that are approaching in the next number of years, it is not enough simply to ‘debunk’ or ‘explode’ the myths that are associated with the movement over the last fifty years, but

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Politics

The Furthest Exit: Bannon’s complex agenda

by Paul Eliot-Ennis 25 May, 2017

Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, was removed from the National Security Council in early April. Among the Kremlinologists who watch the Trump White House, this has been interpreted as a setback for the man whose neo-reactionary philosophy provides the guiding principles of Trumpism: Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and excited anticipation of a new American revolution. But Bannon’s ousting has also been called a disguised promotion, as he is restored to his proper role of the mostly unseen puppet-master. In the first part of this article in last month’s issue, I put Bannon in the context of the alt-right and drew the connections between him, Gamergate, Milo Yiannopoulos, 4chan and Alexander Dugin. Here I want to continue this profile of Bannon by looking at his political philosophy. Bannon subscribes to an esoteric version of history known as the ‘Fourth Turning’. Developed by amateur historians William Strauss and Neil Howe in the 1990s, the Fourth Turning applies the logic of cyclical history to the United States. Each turning represents a distinctive atmosphere that dominates a generation. Or better yet, to borrow a phrase from ‘True Detective’, a psychosphere, encompassing the social field of possibilities. In the first turning, following a period of crisis, the atmosphere is one of societal confidence built on a strong state and positively repressed individualism, known as “The High”. For Strauss and Howe, this period ran from the end of World War II to the Kennedy assassination in 1963. This is the era of the Greatest Generation and profound optimism in the American Dream. This turning was followed by “The Awakening”, where the state-individual relation was inverted. Characterised by a dismantling of the social order and the pursuit of individual autonomy, it descended, over time, into generalised confusion as society splintered. It ran up until the 1980s, and was followed by “The Unravelling” where individualism became unfettered to such an extent that societal ties became exceptionally weak. Then follows the final stage, the one Bannon believes we are entering, of “The Crisis,” where conditions require a radical re-assertion of the collective. One may wonder what the crisis was that shifted us into the Crisis. For Bannon the financial crisis of 2008 marked the moment when the individualism of the baby boomers was revealed in its full consequence: a stolen future. This is how he couches his vision when speaking to older conservative audiences, requiring that they own up to their failure and then pointing toward the rise, in line with Strauss and Howe, of a robust Millennial generation that will blast through the Crisis to get to the next High. Bannon has in mind a quite specific segment of the Millennial generation: the pick-up artists, the meme-warriors of Twitter and 4chan, and the campus-touring Milo enthusiasts. It also includes the Chad nationalists, a group of “norms” who might not explicitly position themselves on the political spectrum, but tend to be on the right. Did Chad vote for Trump? It’s implicit in his name, like some kind of metaphysical property. And it means Chad’s dad and his girlfriend and his fraternity did too. These people will quietly act to maintain Americanism, but not necessarily in a militant way. The decision might not always be theirs, however, as central to Bannon’s vision is an existential confrontation with Islam that will radicalise the entire Millennial generation away from individualism and back toward statism, since only a strong state could win such a battle. For Bannon, there is a multi-faceted project to accomplish. The State in its current decadent baby-boomer form must be dismantled. Yet this “deconstruction” (his own term) is simply a prelude to a complete regeneration of the society to be accomplished through total war. On this point, we find ourselves hoping that Trump’s personality will prove sufficiently resistant to Bannon’s apocalypticism. Some say it is General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Secretary of Defense, who will be the greatest obstacle to Bannon’s vision. Surely this makes Mattis the world’s most unlikely dove. Maybe you know all this. You have heard about Bannon the puppeteer and the raw onslaught the alt-right has engaged Western culture with. Yet the story is even murkier. Alongside the alt-right exists another position, neoreaction, and it as close as this spectrum has to a philosophical system. Trumpist populism and Bannonesque esotericism are no doubt in the ascendant, but they are always threatened by their innate anarchism. There is a sense that the game might implode, that equilibrium could be restored, that a counter-populist movement might render Trump’s reign an aberration. Neoreaction, in contrast, is content to abide its time. Developed by the elusive Curtis Yarvin, under the penname Mencius Moldbug, neoreaction binds a disdain for stagnated democratic politics with a cold formalist system of neo-monarchism. Given the inefficiencies of democracy, only a strong leader, fully free to implement a political programme, can steady the ship. Neoreaction sees itself as an antidote to the Whiggish misreading of history that traces a continuous record of human progress. Instead of the Enlightenment, neoreaction ushers in the Dark Enlightenment. The most consistent formulation of the Dark Enlightenment comes not from Moldbug, but from the British philosopher Nick Land. Land has a storied history, emerging as one of the most exciting Continental philosophers in the 1990s before abandoning academia and the west for a freelance writing career in Shanghai. Throughout, he served as an intellectual lightning rod for the hugely diverse spectrum of alt-right and neoreactionary ideas. This has involved him extolling the virtues of cryptocurrencies, human biodiversity, and singularitarianism (space prevents me from developing these), but his most important contribution, is his emphasis on the all-too-easily overlooked libertarian concept of exit. In the 1970s and 1980s, libertarians became split over whether to enter representational politics. The ‘entryist’ wing established the Libertarian Party in the United Sates as a means to introduce the idea of libertarianism into mainstream politics and out of obscurity; similar parties have cropped up in other countries. The American party was eventually bought out by the

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Culture

McLaren and Murray, fresh new faces in control of the Abbey

by Michael Smith 24 May, 2017

I enter the sempiternally dingy Abbey by the stage entrance and advance up the mid-century staircase to a poky room alive with two middle-aged but effervescent non-Irish Celts. The guy at the desk has said he sees a lot of them and they seem effortlessly in control. They’re informal, blithe, cheerful and open throughout our whistlestop chat, bantering with each other supportively, and joshing. Can you just please describe your backgrounds and records in the arts? Murray: “I’m from South Wales (McLaren thinks this is shaping up to be like a dating pitch). I‘ve worked as usher, stage technician and eventually front-of-house manager, in the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Stayed at the bottom for quite some time. Worked for 7:84 Company in Glasgow – a political touring company particularly touring rural Scotland. Ran a building, a beautiful converted church, the Tron Theatre in Glasgow as creative producer. I was the inaugural executive producer of the new National Theatre of Scotland based on a model of a theatre without a building, without walls, for eleven years”. As to what he brings that is special he says “I hope I’m an imaginative producer I have an eye to initiate and exploit and get the most out of them and I have a good all-round knowledge, love, passion for the theatre”. McLaren stops us to note that “John Tiffany, maybe the most significant theatre director of his generation (much as it pains me to say it) characterises Neil Murray as ‘the best theatre director on the planet’”. Murray intervenes to say drink had been taken. McLaren: “Neil and I have been associates for 20 years. When Murray ran the Tron theatre, I ran a touring company called Theatre Babel and we toured across the planet. Like Irish theatre, Scottish theatre is very small. He ran a venue and I ran a touring company. We kinda needed each other. When I joined National Theatre of Scotland we worked together again. In the last five years we worked together on a number of significant projects especially around the social and political changes in Edinburgh. I’m not sure what I bring to the table”. Murray intervenes to explain that he’s “primarily a very fine director of plays” and McLaren agrees “I direct and design plays”. “Coming to Dublin, we didn’t see it as an opportunity to replace what had been before but to envisage a new working model”. The Abbey describes its mission as “to create world-class theatre that actively engages with and reflects Irish society”. So what’s the vision for the Abbey, and has it changed? McLaren: “There’s nothing we could argue with. That mission statement is always going to be the case. The problem when you give a phrase like that is that it sounds like a set thing. It’s responsive to the ever-changing Irish and global society socially and economically that we find ourselves in. Murray intervenes “It doesn’t really dig into how we think the Abbey will be working and how it fits in Irish theatre and society”. McLaren resumes: “it’s a great privilege to inherit an organisation with such a remarkable past but we have to be cognisant of the fact that its best years are ahead of it. As an organisation it’s been a long time since it’s behaved and thought of itself as if it’s best years are ahead. It’s way too quick to rely on its past brilliance to justify its existence rather than what we will do next year or the year after”. But the protagonists have always said this, I note. According to McLaren they already have. Murray says, “I think the way the building’s work in terms work we’re producing ourselves and presenting with others’ work It’s a different model already. We’re saying, ‘The national theatre stage belongs to other people as well, not just the Abbey’. That is something that’s been ignored. So for example tonight, Druid: Waiting for Godot. Druid haven’t been here for over a decade. It’s a brilliant production that should be seen at the national theatre. Our programme for the year reflects that more open approach”. So will there be more co-productions? “More presentations, co-productions. A mixed economy. The days of being able to produce huge shows eight times a year: it’s not what the theatre public want – they want a faster turnaround of activity. Economically it doesn’t make sense to do that it makes sense to be lighter on your feet ,working with wider range of people and artists from Ireland and perhaps further afield. In the end the audience define what the Abbey is. Going back to values, we have to believe anything we put on the Abbey stage is hopefully world-class and reflects modern Ireland. McLaren says “We said we’d investigate the three words around national Theatre of Ireland. What does it mean to be National? For the first time ever we’re about to go to Leitrim simply because it’s about Leitrim, no other reason: because it’s there. Hitherto the company’s attitude would have been we’ll put on some matinées and ensure the good people of Leitrim will be able to see it on a Saturday afternoon or we’ll do a special gala performance. No we’re going to go and make it there and use locals to build the show. That’s the first time in the company’s history that it’s explored what it means to be truly geographically National and Irish, and the different kinds of Irishness from the diaspora through to the new Irish who don’t even speak even English: they also have a national theatre – we’re it and we have a building on Abbey St. But we’re not confined to that”. Are there dangers to co-producers of subsuming to the Abbey and losing independence? McLaren notes: “We’re there to collaborate”. Murray says it’s “The opposite. ‘Dublin by Lamplight’ by Corn Exchange, ‘The Train’ by Rough Magic and many other shows would not have

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Environment

IFA: from pipsqueaks to bullies

by John Gibbons 23 May, 2017

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Ireland’s National Farmers’ Association (NFA) was a political pariah, with then Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil’s Jack Lynch threatening to have the organisation proscribed, a move that would have placed every farmer in the NFA on the same legal footing as an IRA member. That was almost exactly 50 years ago, in April 1967, when tempers flared and relations between the NFA – forerunner to today’s politically powerful Irish Farmers Association (IFA) – and the state hit an all-time low. Just before dawn on April 24th, 1967, a series of co-ordinated Garda raids, led by Special Branch detectives and backed up by armed soldiers, descended in darkness on the homes of selected farm leaders. Later that evening, Jack Lynch was solemnly to address the nation on television and warn that if the NFA’s campaign of refusing to pay agricultural rates was not stood down, the consequences would be dire: “The restraint that the Government have shown up to now proves to any fair-minded person that the Government have no desire to see the dissolution or the disintegration of the NFA, but if it is a choice between that and the maintenance of our basic political institutions and the rule of law, the decision is clear”, he intoned. This was serious stuff. “By their speeches and actions, the NFA leaders have shown they are prepared to challenge the basic political institutions of this country. Questions of agricultural policy have become secondary”, said Lynch. Coming to the nub of the matter, he asked rhetorically if: “the right to decide major questions of agricultural policy is to be transferred from the elected representatives of the people and given over to the leaders of the NFA? For that, let there be no mistake, is what it has now come to”. The events of April 1967 had been brewing for over a year. The previous October, thousands of farmers marched from every corner of Ireland and converged on Dublin in an effort to meet Agriculture Minister, Charles J Haughey. The minister was unimpressed, famously describing the NFA as “pipsqueaks” so the main group dispersed, but a selected delegation of nine men chose to sit and protest on the steps of the Department of Agriculture. Gardaí lifted them from the steps onto the street, and there they remained, for 21 days and nights, into a chilly early November. During this period, Haughey left Agriculture, and was replaced by Neil Blaney. The deadlock was eventually broken and the nine men entered the Department of Agriculture to finally meet the new minister. The farmers’ Winter of Discontent continued, eventually boiling over with the Garda raids on April 24, 1967, during which 19 farmers were arrested and imprisoned for refusing to pay fines arising from an illegal road blockade. That morning, three farms in county Kilkenny, all owned by prominent NFA men, were targeted for simultaneous raids, including that of my father, the late Michael Gibbons, who had been one of the nine NFA men involved in the extended sit-down street protest (later nicknamed the Nine Frozen Arses). When my father refused to pay his rates bill, anything that could be physically lifted was seized by gardaí from the house and yard, including a radio set, clothes-dryer, horse-box, lawn-mower and tractor. I was three and a half at the time, but remember the morning vividly. Looking out my bedroom window at first light and seeing our front lawn and driveway swarming with what to me looked like hundreds of men in uniforms (I believe the actual number was closer to 40-50) was a sight I would never forget. Ultimately, compromises were hammered out. We eventually got our property back and life returned to normal. In a quirk of history, my father’s only brother, Jim Gibbons was, at this time, a junior minister appointed by Lynch. He would go on to serve as defence minister and end up testifying against Haughey in the bitter Arms Trial in May 1970. He would also have the distinction of being the Agriculture minister who oversaw Ireland’s accession to the EEC in June, 1973. Over the decades since this tumultuous period, as political fortunes and reputations ebbed and flowed, the one clear winner was the NFA/IFA. Instead of being proscribed, it used its own political and negotiating savvy to oversee real improvements in the lot of ordinary farmers. It is no exaggeration to say that before implementation in Ireland of the EEC’s Common Agriculture Policy, many Irish farm families lived on or below the poverty line. This background of real struggle against both hardship and political exclusion forged the mettle of what would become the most formidable lobbying organisation this country has ever produced. Like many other organisations, continuous success in its own curious way would prove to be highly corrosive over time, leading to arrogance, intolerance of other positions and overconfidence in abundance. Sure enough, this hubris led, inevitably, to nemesis when the IFA was rocked to its foundations in 2015 with the revelations that its then general secretary, Pat Smith, had received pay and perks worth some €1m for 2013 and 2014. For good measure, his golden parachute on exiting his post was valued at a cool €2m. To put these numbers into context, the typical IFA farm family gets by with an on-farm income of around €24,000 a year. Every bit as jaw-dropping for ordinary farmers was how the then IFA president, Eddie Downey was receiving the guts of €200,000 annually, or some eight times the average farmer’s income, for what is a demanding but essentially part-time job. The Downey and Smith revelations were not isolated. Predecessors in both posts had also been drawing stupendous levels of compensation, and despite their howls of innocence, the nod-and-wink network within this most political of organisations meant a wide circle of people knew exactly what was going on, but chose to say nothing, hoping perhaps for their turn to clamber aboard the IFA

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Media

National narrowcaster

by Frank Armstrong 23 May, 2017

RTÉ’s Claire Byrne show sells short epic issues like the merits of veganism. In order to fulfil adequately its anointed role, a state broadcaster must be courageous, at times running counter to prevailing sentiments.

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International

Macron: Elected, not chosen

by Paul Verdeau 22 May, 2017

In the Bible, Emmanuel is the name of the Messiah, the one who comes to save men. How ironic to see that the man who appears to save France from a far-right cataclysm bears this name. With a second round win of 66,1% against Marine Le Pen, the economic liberal candidate Emmanuel Macron of En Marche! (EM) was elected as the eighth president of France’s Fifth Republic on May 7, succeeding François Hollande, for whom he had acted as special counsellor and Minister for the Economy. However, France had never been so far from choosing someone to rule the country. Nearly half of those who voted Macron did so without supporting him. As fifteen years ago, in the 2002 presidential election, when president Jacques Chirac faced Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French people were forced into the decision to unite against the far-right. But there was a big difference: in 2017, to see Marine Le Pen in the second round of the election wasn’t a surprise. The National Front (FN), founded by Second World War collaborationists, made significant headway in the European and municipal elections in 2014, then in regional elections in 2015, and there have never been so many towns ruled by the party. Inside those towns, changes have begun: budget cuts for culture, for charity, and increases for security. One mayor even decided to re-arm local policemen. People were warned. Le Pen’s use of divisive and inflammatory language is dangerous. Perhaps prefiguring her loss she declared some days before the run-off election : “My voice was but the echo of the social violence that will explode in this country”. She was surly and dishonest in the second-round debate against Macron. TV viewers were afforded an unnerving opportunity to see how aggressive Le Pen was and how ill-versed she was on several subjects, including the monetary situation after a potential departure from EU. Not so long ago a French journalist and his cameraman were attacked by security guards after trying to ask Marine le Pen a question over allegations her security guard was paid as a parliamentary aid. The EU’s corruption watchdog accused Le Pen of using €340,000 of European funds to carry out non-Parliamentary work for the National Front. Le Pen said she wouldn’t even attend before the Paris prosecutor dealing with the matter until the election is over. Though clearly the blame does not attach directly to Le Pen, it is significant that some – apparently Russian agency – saw fit to hack and leak Macron emails on the eve of the election, and that the FN was not outraged. It may be a foretaste of darker days for democracy. They were warned and still the FN got into the second round of a presidential election, ultimately gathering more than 20% of the voters. Jean-Marie had obtained 17% in the first round. Spontaneous protests of tens of thousands of people erupted across the country the day after that vote took place. A week after the 2002 first round, a million French citizens took to the streets, turning traditional May Day workers’ rallies into anti-Le Pen protests. The far-right leader was then demolished in the second round – improving his share of the vote by less than one percentage point; this year, there were few convulsions and Marine Le Pen obtained around a third of the second-round vote. Fifteen years ago, people blamed non-voters, and divisions among leftist candidates. In 2017 the explanations are less attractive. People didn’t react, or not as much as for François Fillon, whose demise was probably largely because of ‘Penelopegate’, when he was accused of paying his wife for fictitious activities by French newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné. If Marine Le Pen had been elected on May 7, it would have been a political earthquake, but because French society changed its view on politics, at least as much as because of the actual result that symptomised it. For the first time since the end of World War II, the results of this election broke France’s ancestral duellist politics. The country that invented the word ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics, based on the position of the chairs in the Parliament after the Revolution, suddenly decided to blow away these two fragile notions. François Fillon, the candidate of the Républicains, was shot down by corruption allegations. On the Left wing, Benoît Hamon’s victory in the primary elections of the Parti socialist (PS) against former Prime minister Manuel Valls was a surprise and he carried the hopes for disappointed lefties indignant at Hollande’s economic liberalism after he turned in 2014. His goal was to create “a desirable future” and “make France’s heart beat again” and he was the only candidate, with radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to make the environment a central concern. But he got nowhere, when so many socialists, including Manuel Valls himself, decided to join Emmanuel Macron. The man who claimed to be “neither right nor left” finally killed and buried the left, or part of it. The PS have to face up to wholesale defections, and undoubtedly be torn apart during the next parliamentary elections in June. Many were frightened to see the FN in the second round for the second time, but Emmanuel Macron, definitely saw this as a blessing from God. To face a far-right leader is a great opportunity in a country where a majority of voters will, where strategy requires it, vote for political opponents to defend the democratic values of a Republic. That explains the beaming face of Macron, when he addressed his supporters on the night of his first-round, even though his score was just two percentage points bigger than Le Pen’s (24% against 21.7%), and repaired with his celebrity mates to dine at La Rotonde. It also explains how preoccupied Macron was when he knew that not all the losing candidates called their electors to vote for him. François Fillon and Benoît Hamon did, but Jean-Luc Mélenchon didn’t. Actually, he didn’t say anything and looked exhausted. In

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Politics

Trump versus the public sector

by Lughán Deane 19 May, 2017

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and beacon of the so-called ‘alt-right’, recently announced to cheers at the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that “the primary goal of the Trump administration” is “the deconstruction of the administrative state” or the dismantling of the public sector. Similarly, Trump’s oft-chanted populist campaign pledge to #DrainTheSwamp was calibrated to attract support from the small-government, anti-federal element of the American electorate. Since taking up in the Oval Office, the President’s actions (as well as his marked inactions) have demonstrated a relentless focus on the fulfilment of this promise to shrink the federal workforce, and to remove it from electoral control. Trump has gone to war with the public sector. On his first Monday as President, Trump signed an order imposing a near-total freeze on public-sector recruitment. His Presidential Memorandum also included a commitment to develop “a long-term plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through attrition”. Moreover, with one hundred days of his presidential term behind him, Trump has yet to fill a sizeable proportion of the roughly 4,000 federal appointments he is entitled to make. Where he has filled roles, Trump’s selections have been characterised by a fox-henhouse dynamic consistent with his hostility towards public-sector workers. In justification of his assault on the federal workforce, Trump relies on the standard-issue set of tired anti-public sector clichés about supposed inefficiency and laziness. His proposed solutions are as unoriginal as his critique: he wants to apply his brand of private-sector ‘The Apprentice’ logic to the federal workforce. A senior adviser in the administration recently said that “the government should be run like a great American company”. Superficially, Trump’s anti-public-sector rhetoric seems economically motivated. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, has argued that “federal employee health and retirement benefits require a level of generosity long since abandoned by most of the private sector” and demonstrate “a lack of respect for the American taxpayer”. In reality, however, Trump’s animosity towards the public sector has far less to do with economics than it has to do with core ideology. Structured, as it is, on precedent and procedure, the default setting of the bureaucracy, in the US as elsewhere, is the maintenance of order. It sits on a sort of ideological gimbal: it can remain stable in pivoting to serve worldviews either side of centre. Its procedures, in other words, can flex to reconcile small lurches to the right or left. There is, however, an inbuilt intolerance for the radical extremes: a fail-safe calibrated to trigger in the event of violent ideological swings. The federal workforce serves as a buffer – a kind of surge protector – between the people and the sometimes experimental enthusiasms of partisan politics. Trump sees the public sector as a political opponent: and he’s right to. Hillary Clinton won bureaucratic hotspots like Washington DC and Maryland with easy majorities, and 95% of political contributions made by federal employees went her way. It is not incidental that Trump tries to discredit the federal bureaucracy at every turn. Public-sector workers are accused, in slavish obedience to that age-old right-wing mythology, of being dispassionate, indifferent, cold and impersonal. When Trump and his team talk of applying private-sector logic to the public sector, they say the federal workforce needs to become more ‘responsive’, more ‘nimble’ and more ‘flexible’. These terms, however, are bywords for Trump’s desire to see a suspension of the transparent, impartial public system and its replacement by an opaque black-box system based on erratic discretion and exclusive loyalties. Nothing is more ‘nimble’ nor more ‘responsive’ than the capricious whim of a despot – think ‘off with his head’, or ‘you’re fired’. The public bureaucracy is gender-neutral and colour-blind; it is uninterested in inherited differences in status or prestige. What codes as indifference through the looking glass of right-wing propaganda is, in reality, impartiality. What Breitbart calls impersonality is actually a commitment to radical tolerance. Methodologically, the federal workforce rigorously adheres to transparent procedure: its elevation of due process is possibly its most essential feature. Far from being some unfeeling monolith, the public sector operates on core values: values antithetical to those held by the Trump administration. The anatomy of an authoritarian regime is bespoken by inner circles: by cadres, cabals and coteries. Power is pooled in the hands of a few, and guarded there by populating the executive branch via nepotism, cronyism and patronage. The ideological clash between public-sector impartiality and Trumpian discretion is perfectly, almost poetically, captured in the fact that Trump, in a brazen act of nepotism, has appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to head up a White House ‘SWAT’ team, the ‘Office of American Innovation,’ charged with “scaling proven private-sector models” in the federal government. If a public-sector bureaucracy works without passion or prejudice, then an authoritarian regime works fast and loose on grace and favour. There are palms to grease rather than forms to fill and administrative decisions are made on a provisional, ad hoc basis. Disorder is weaponised and the state becomes permanently indecipherable. Since Trump’s election, the antibodies cryogenically embedded in the public-sector system have thawed and grown active. The federal bureaucracy has emerged as a sort of entrepreneurial check on Trump’s power. Much-maligned public-sector workers have been recast as folk heroes of the resistance as they take to ‘rogue’ twitter accounts, sign dissent memos en masse or leak prodigiously to the news media (je suis Sally Yates). The IRS, remember, holds the ultimate article of kompromat – the tax returns. George Washington famously (perhaps apocryphally) remarked that the comparatively less contentious structures of the Senate should function as the saucer in which the hot tea of the House would cool. This function, however, is endangered. Whether it’s the erosion of the senatorial filibuster in the US or our own Senate’s brush with extinction, upper houses are, increasingly, being drawn down into the sinking sands of partisan politics. We have seen the public sector shift to fulfil some of this function. The

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The future of Labour

by Brendan Howlin 17 May, 2017

These are challenging times for social democracy. Last year, my party took a beating in the general election. We lost many good TDs, and saw our share of the vote fall to 6.6%. Unfortunately, this result was in some ways a foretelling of what was to follow elsewhere. Over the last six weeks, we have seen the Dutch Labour Party drop to just 5.7% of the vote following a period in Government, while Benoit Hamon, the candidate of the French Socialist party secured just 6.4% of the vote in the first round of the French presidential election. Across the developed world, social democracy is facing a crisis. Populist movements on the right and left have been gaining support – much of it at the expense of traditional parties of the centre-left. There are plenty of commentators now writing obituaries for social democracy. But we have seen times like these before. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were constructing a new economic doctrine. And social democracy was in crisis. The Irish Labour Party struggled during that decade. As did many social democratic parties across the continent. What was needed then is what is needed again now. A representation of our values; a reinvigoration of our organisation; and a radical restatement of who and what we are fighting for. We have no given right to exist as a political force. People will not vote for Labour because we are the oldest party in the state. They will not vote for us because of things we have done in the past. They will only vote for us when we show them that we are the party that wants to shape our future; to put decency, justice and equality at the heart of our republic, and indeed at the heart of our international order. Labour has always been the party of work. And casualisation of work is one of the great causes of insecurity of our age. Globalisation has changed things, and the automation of work might well accelerate that change. Casual employment and the gig economy are growing, while the idea job for life is gone in most sectors. In Ireland, job insecurity and involuntary temporary employment have increased substantially over recent years. While creating jobs is the most important factor to put this right, we need other levers too. The Liberal Democrat Leader Tim Farren said recently that the old battle between capital and labour is over. Undoubtedly he was having a dig at Jeremy Corbyn’s party but I suspect that he thinks it’s genuinely true too. He’s wrong. In fact he’s very wrong. The truth is that capital or the political right constantly finds new ways to exploit working people of all kinds. And they are clever at it too. Again to take an English example, you have the owners of zero-contact Sports Direct doubling as the owners of Newcastle United Football club. So battles that were won for workplace rights over the last hundred years now have to be won again. Young people in particular bear the brunt of the new ‘flexibility’ at work – in many cases a concept of flexibility solely owned by the employer. And that is where the Labour Party comes in. Our biggest project over the coming months is to examine the future of work. Because we are not powerless in the face of these changes. It is possible to allow freelance workers to come together and negotiate with their bosses – our legislation to do exactly that is the only opposition bill to have passed either chamber since the last election. It is possible to tell the low pay commission to make sure that everybody earns a living wage – we have been calling for exactly that. And it is possible to say that the gender pay gap must be closed – our legislation to do just that will be debated in the Seanad on May 23rd. We need to build a broad agenda around the future of work. We are going to look in detail at the idea of a universal basic income, at new forms of workplace democracy, and at radical new ways of facilitating collective bargaining. And when I say we, I don’t just mean a couple of TDs or researchers in Leinster House. I want to reach out – to trade unions and academics, to civil society groups and to other political parties. And I want to build coalitions that can take this defining area of insecurity, and resolve it. A lot of this work might not grab headlines. But it does make a difference. The legislation that allowed for the creation of sectoral employment orders was seen as a technical measure. But the resulting deal between employers and people who work in contract cleaning has seen pay across that sector rise from €9.75 an hour to €10.80 an hour by December next year. Almost 34,000 people will benefit. That’s not technical – it’s meaningful progress. The Labour Party and work have always been inextricably linked. We were formed from the trade union movement, and our links to that movement are deep and enduring. But our agenda for our future is not limited to the workplace. We will grapple with every major cause of uncertainty in our society – insecurity of employment; poverty and lack of opportunity; costs of living; climate change – all of these are factors that have broken the long cherished social contract that made clear that we would hand to our children a world better than the one we inherited. That contract must now be rewritten. At one level, I think the Irish people are generally convinced of the facts of climate change. But we have yet to incorporate into our thinking what adjustments we in Ireland might have to make to truly take our role as leaders in this area seriously. I have been arguing that there are hard choices we face – reducing emissions while our agriculture sector thrives is one;