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    No fat cheque for factcheck

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    In 2015, I moved to New York City from Dublin and passed much of the year paying maniacal attention to American news media. I fixated on a wide range of output, people, processes, and interaction between journalists. One difference was more immediately apparent to me than others. The arc bending towards justice as facilitated by journalism seemed to be shorter in the US. Resignations precipitated by good and revelatory work actually happened, normally promptly, and acknowledgment of fault or duplicity tended to be forthcoming and formal from both the public and private sectors. An express, media-wide obsession with validity and accuracy was new to me. The opaque crosstalk and untruths of the 2016 presidential race added immensely to the regular burden on US reporters, editors, and fact-checkers, who collectively upped their game in response. Fact-checker was not a designation I had encountered at home. Did it exist there? Does it exist in a different guise? It exists, as it happens, in the form of an Irish reporter with TheJournal.ie, Dan Mac Guill. Mac Guill has been running FactCheck, a dedicated fact-checking vertical at the website, since February 2016. In the last six months, as mounting anxiety with regard to truth and veracity addles the world at large, Mac Guill’s work in Ireland has come into sharper focus. Not before time. The 2016 general election brought about the introduction of The Journal’s fact-checking service, for reasons broadly similar to those outlined above. It was the idea of website editor Susan Daly. Daly said that, faced with “weeks of campaign hyperbole, PR stunts and political fisticuffs”, there was a need decisively, under one banner, to interrogate the integrity of what was being declared. “From the perspective of the newsroom, it was invigorating to set the agenda, rather than have to slavishly follow the campaign trail alone, reacting to every latest ‘he said/she said’ sideshow”, Daly said. Election promises were obvious fodder for FactCheck, but the potential for debunking other claims made in radio debates, television appearances, and election literature rapidly became clear. Mac Guill and his colleagues admired prominent overseas fact-checking operations like Politfact, Factcheck.org, and the work of Libération and the ‘Les Décodeurs’ section at at Le Monde, which, together, provided a guiding precedent. Heartened by the reader response to his contribution during the campaign, Mac Guill persisted with the mission, and Daly made a decision to give the project a permanent footing. The organisation has since become party to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. Mac Guill, who started at The Journal in 2014, has been working remotely since the beginning of 2015. He is exceptionally remote — based outside Washington DC — but, in step with staffers of most modern newsrooms, spends compensatory amounts of time in conversation with his colleagues online. He publishes between two and three stories through Factcheck each week. In a year, more than 160 claims were fact-checked by the service, covering everything from reported side effects of the HPV vaccine, to the size of the gender pay-gap, to deaths allegedly caused by air pollution, to whether Trump can be legally banned from Ireland, to the quantity of detox beds in the country, to whether “Irish slaves” built the White House. Mac Guill busies himself with high-profile claims made in established settings. Readers’ tips account for more than a third of claims checked. The 6.1 News and Tonight with Vincent Browne also tend to be bountiful sources. A preponderance of Mac Guill’s day is spent consuming Irish news, but regional reporting can evade him, and readers have gamely picked up that slack. What else qualifies? There are no hard and fast rules to follow, but a quibble with a friend in a pub isn’t going to be looked into, Mac Guill said, and he doesn’t really have the time to take on rumours. In recent months, Mac Guill has noticed a marked increase in interest in the project. Increased preoccupation with ideas like “fake news”, “alternative facts”, and “post-truth”, issuing forth from the Trump administration, predominantly, has led to greater scrutiny of news media everywhere. “Interest in Ireland is intensifying”, he said, “even if consumers of news aren’t coming into contact with the emergence of that [fake news] specifically”. Fake news, rather than being a useful label, has been abused to the point of obsolescence, according to Mac Guill, who works off the following definition: “provocation of disgust and biases with online virality as an aim, and advertising revenue as a final goal”. And it is true that, in Ireland, nothing falls squarely into the category of the now-infamous Denver Post, or other fictional outlets that publish made-up stories, or Facebook accounts propagating seductive or inflammatory myths. Were there, they might not manage the same mileage in Ireland, in Mac Guill’s view. He has said he believes Irish consumers of news to be “highly informed, scrupulous, skeptical, and keen”. On an overcast day in October of last year, Minister for Social Protection, Leo Varadkar, waited until the Ceann Comhairle had quietened a number of rowdy opponents in the Dáíl chamber before continuing. “What I’ve said is that jobseeker’s [payment] rates for young people in Northern Ireland are much lower than they are in the Republic of Ireland”, said Varadkar, keeping his customary cool. “Deputy Brady has said that’s untrue. I would welcome someone to do a fact check on that — perhaps on TheJournal.ie — and we’ll see how that comes out”. While unusual, particularly because the request pertained to his own assertion, it is something of a testament to Mac Guill’s public service that it took just eight months for FactCheck to be deemed serious and credible enough by a government minister to raise during a parliamentary debate. Of course, Varadkar’s claim was true. I asked Mac Guill whether the extension of the remit to cover other indiscretions —such as bias, error, or plagiarism —  would be a logical progression, or was tempting to him in any way. Cordially and professionally, he

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    Our pastoral heritage influences everything

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    I recall a vivid simile used by Professor Tom Bartlett when I was a student in UCD. He likened Irish history to a pint of Guinness, “with black representing ownership of the land, and the white froth, including all the political movements, everything else”. Old habits die hard. An obsession with property endures. By the year 2004 Ireland’s rate of private home ownership was the highest in the OECD at around 82%, a proportion that only declined (to 69% in 2014) after the property crash around 2008. Perhaps the evolution reflects the differing approaches of immigrants, many accustomed to rental for life. Now we witness another property boom and renewed scarcity of rental accommodation, which we can trace to the predilections of our peasant forbearers. A nationality derives characteristics from its relationship to the land it inhabits, and draws sustenance from. Over recent centuries, in Ireland as elsewhere, mass urbanisation has occurred skewed to Dublin, but we build our cities on historical foundations. There are two defining, and intertwining, legacies of the Irish approach to land that have seeped into the broader culture. The first is the impact of English colonisation on ownership, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent partial de-colonisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second is the dominance of pastoral agriculture, especially cattle, particularly since the late nineteenth century. It is wrong to assume that cattle-farming has always been the dominant form of agriculture in Ireland. Since the first human settlement emphasis has swung back and forth between tillage and pasture. Moreover, the introduction of the wonder crop of the potato in the seventeenth century created a novel opportunity for subsistence on small holdings, and brought poor land into cultivation for the first time. What is clear is that the impact of Irish agriculture, especially grazing, on Nature has been profound and long-standing. According to Frank Mitchell in ‘Reading the Irish Landscape’: “from about five thousand years ago when the first tree-felling axes made woodland clearance possible man’s hands have borne down ever more heavily on the Irish landscape”. This left a mere twelve per cent woodland coverage by the 1400s, well before the most intense period of English colonisation. Today among EU countries only Luxembourg has a lower coverage, and much of our woodland is in the form of sitka spruce plantations that offer little scope for biodiversity. The sixteenth and seventeenth century ‘plantations’ entrapped an overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry, denuded of a departed upper stratum of Gaelic society to restrain its fecundity, in a Malthusian grip of population growth. Describing the acquisition of annual leases by peasants who had previously held land in common under the Old Irish system Seán O’Faoláin said: “The thirst for security is, above all things, the great obsession of the peasant mind. And, in a long view, a deceptive obsession”. Security of tenure under the new dispensation was illusory as land became an asset rather than a collective patrimony. Trade conditions shifted in the nineteenth century and cattle began to enjoy a comparative advantage over tillage because the British had found cheaper sources of grain after the Napoleonic wars. In effect the cheap availability of labour from an Irish peasantry, a substantial proportion living at a subsistence level, became an unwelcome anachronism. The Great Famine was a catalyst for change that brought about the dominance of cattle agriculture under the native so-called Strong Farmer. The key point about this form of agriculture was (and is) that profitability depends on low labour input. Over the long term this conduced to population decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. As the country did not enjoy an Industrial Revolution, except in the north-east corner, this shift from growing food for direct human consumption to raising animals, mostly for meat, on grass led to unprecedented population decline. Ireland is perhaps the only substantial country in the world that has witnessed such a decline since the 1840s when the population reached up to nine million. Today it stands at just over six million on the entire island. In the same period the global population has increased seven-fold! The struggle for Irish Independence was taken up by Strong Farmers, who emerged with enlarged holdings after land clearances, to become the dominant faction of an overwhelming Catholic ‘Nation’ at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a succession of legislative measures – especially Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903 – the British administration sought to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’, allowing tenants to obtain freeholds over much of the country. This allowed their sons and daughters to set about dominating local government, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and later Sinn Féin. They entered the professions, established a Catholic university and eventually won an independent state in 1922, wedded to a conservative pastoral outlook on land. The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan (in office from 1922-32), was of that caste, and duly aligned national well-being with the economic fortunes of his class. The overwhelmingly pastoralist Strong Farmers continued to sell commodities onto the Imperial market, and the aspiration of idealists like Robert Barton, the first Director of Agriculture (1919-21), for a reversion to labour-intensive tillage was not realised after independence in 1922. Except, that is, for a period in the 1930s and 1940s when national survival demanded increased focus on growing crops for direct human consumption. The narrow interests of that group have informed our laws and values since the inception of the state, spreading from rural Ireland into an increasingly urbanized society. As O’Faoláin put it: “we have seen the common folk of Ireland rise like the beanstalk out of the Revolution of 1922 and, for a generation, their behaviour was often very unpleasant to watch”. The arrival of mechanisation in the Green Revolution after World War II put tillage at a further disadvantage as, despite enjoying among the highest global yields, on account of the effect of the Gulf Stream, heavy precipitation and high humidity makes Irish-grown cereals, apart from oats, unsuited

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    Trump: the text

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    Jacques Derrida had a reputation for being one of the world’s most obscure philosophers, but if he had been alive during the rise of Trump, I think he would have had a lot to share. In his 1994 work ‘Spectres of Marx’, Derrida attacked the clichéd view that the collapse of the communist state meant the consignment of Marxism to the dustbin of history. Our current “new world disorder”, he quipped, of “neo-capitalism”, has not managed “to rid itself of Marx’s ghosts”. However, Marxism now exists in different flavours. Derrida was heavily influenced by another French philosopher Blanchot who spoke of the “multiple forms” of Marx. Though the wheels have fallen off the old Marxist express train, the machinery of neo-capitalist globalisation is still haunted, Derrida claimed, by the spirit of Marx. Given that Trump has threatened to slap import tariffs on corporations, such as Ford Motors, for moving their factories to Mexico, might Derrida have found the Marxist ghost, lurking? Trump it would appear is protecting workers from losing their jobs, as well as confronting the greed of the corporate capitalists seeking to exploit low-wage foreign workers. Yet Trump – a critic would reply – is also one of the most famous stars of modern neo-capitalism with vast property holdings in the US, and around the world. Derrida might have retorted that it is this very mix of contradictory ideologies that explained Trump’s unlikely rise: a bold defence of workers’ rights – the ghost of left-wing revolution, from a person who is the very culmination of neo-liberalism. The Economist magazine says Donald Trump favours proposals loved by the right and backs ideas favoured by the left. “He sounds European”, it concludes. Derrida called this Marxism of the Right. In short Trump’s business and political career is itself a destruction of traditional, but now antiquated left/right political distinctions. But in breaking these ideological differences, Trump has married the best of both worlds – the adulation of the struggling workers left behind by an exploitative capitalism, and a self-promoted reputation as a savvy player in the high-stakes world of international capitalism, who (Trumps claims) might be able to bring jobs, formerly outsourced by American corporations, back to America. As to whether Derrida, given his sympathy for immigrants and critique of the free market, would have found anything favourable to say about the anti-immigrant Trump as channelling the ghost of Marx, Derrida might have recalled that there is no hegemonic reading of Marx – nor for that matter a hegemonic reading of Trump (given his numerous conflicting opinions over the years). Derrida, in fact, might have added another reading of Trump based on passages from ‘Spectre of Marx’: the celebrity businessmen is actually not really human, instead exemplifying – in Derrida’s take on Marxism – the weird neo-capitalist creature who emerged from the hyper-globalist market place. Derrida vividly described this monster: “[T]he inert thickness of its ligneous body and autonomy is no more than the mask of automatism. A mask, indeed a visor that may be hiding no living gaze beneath the helmet. The automaton mimes the living. The Thing is neither dead nor alive, it is dead and alive at the same time. It survives. At once cunning, inventive, and machine-like, ingenious and unpredictable, this war machine is a theatrical machine”. In brief Trump is a kind of zombie or robot. Derrida would, in support of this assertion, cite this psychological profile of Trump, which described Trump’s eyes as affectless, what we would call cold, or eerily blank. Derrida might have also enjoyed the phrase “no living gaze beneath the helmet” – a nice allusion to Trump’s large unnatural hair thing, while all the other images and tropes also seem entirely a propos, in describing Trump’s maniacal energy, weird unpredictability, and baroque public image. Fascinated by these contradictory and bizarre aspects of Trump, we can imagine Derrida announcing to the world that he will write a new study: ‘Trump: the Text’. By Thomas White

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    The father of Irish Civil Rights

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    There is a good reason to regard the labour historian C Desmond Greaves (1913-1988) as the intellectual progenitor of the 1960s Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement, for it was he who pioneered the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to undermine Ulster Unionist majoritarianism. Greaves is best known in Ireland for his biographies of James Connolly, Liam Mellows and Sean O’Casey. Because his political activity on Ireland took place in British Labour circles, it is not so well known here. Perhaps also because he was a communist party (CP) member, as in the days of the Cold War people were reluctant to credit communists with any progressive development. Desmond Greaves joined the British CP in 1934 when a student at Liverpool University at a time when, with fascism advancing on the continent, many of Britain’s young intelligentsia moved to the left.  He was always more interested in questions of imperialism and national independence than of socialism. He held the view that leftwingers should champion democratic issues and if possible give a lead on them. This he saw the socialist James Connolly as doing when he allied with the radical democrats of the IRB in the Easter Rising to establish an independent Irish State. He identified early on with Ireland, where he had family roots, and devoted most of his political life to trying to undo Partition. Logically, there were only two ways this could be done. One was the IRA way of physical force. This was undesirable in principle because of the violence and division it would cause, but it was also impractical because the British army, with NATO behind it, could never be defeated militarily. The other way was to create political conditions in Northern Ireland whereby over time Unionists/Protestants would rediscover the political implications of the common Irishness they share with their Nationalist/Catholic fellow countrymen. Hence civil rights: to establish equality of treatment and parity of esteem between the two Northern communities. If the rational basis of the Unionism of many Unionists was to be top-dog over Catholics, getting rid of top-doggery, which only a successful campaign for civil rights and equality could do, would lay the basis for a gradual coming-together, even if it took two or three generations. The post-War British Labour Government was wholly behind Ulster Unionism because of its backing of Britain’s efforts in World War II.  This was shown by Labour’s passing the 1949 Ireland Act, which provided that there could be no change in the constitutional position of the North without the consent of the Stormont Parliament. Twenty years later, when the Civil Rights Movement got off the ground, Ulster Unionism was so discredited in British Labour circles that there was substantial backbench opinion pressing Harold Wilson’s Government to tackle anti-Catholic discrimination in the North. This change was largely due to the work of Greaves and the Connolly Association, which campaigned in British Labour and Liberal circles from 1955 onwards to expose the woeful civil liberties situation under the majority Unionist regime at Stormont. Founded in 1938, the Connolly Association is the oldest political organisation of the Irish community in Britain. It is still active there. Greaves edited its monthly journal, the Irish Democrat, from 1951 until his death in 1988. From 1958 until 1961 I was active in the Association while studying and working in London. I was its full-time organiser for a while. Its main campaign at the time was to try to get Labour MPs to demand the release of the couple of hundred Republicans who were interned without charge or trial, some for years on end, in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Prison under the Stormont regime’s Special Powers Act. This was following the IRA’s 1950s Border campaign. The British Government hid behind the parliamentary convention that MPs could not raise anything in the House of Commons relating to powers devolved to Stormont, which included justice and policing.  This was a happy way of ensuring that sleeping dogs lay undisturbed. Greaves discovered that a number of the Belfast internees were members of British trade unions operating in Ireland.  We were invited as speakers to trade union branches in London, Manchester, Glasgow and other cities to tell their astonished members how some of their fellow trade unionists were being imprisoned for years without charge or trial in a part of the UK about which they knew nothing.  By 1961 over half the Parliamentary Labour Party had signed a series of telegrams to Unionist Premier Lord Brookeborough calling for the release of the internees, which duly happened. This anti-Unionist campaign in Britain continued during the 1960s. The Connolly Association was affiliated to influential bodies like the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which helped leverage its message. Greaves established good relations with the old Northern Nationalist Party and in particular Cahir Healy MP. When Patricia and Conn McCluskey set up the Dungannon-based Campaign for Social Justice in 1964 and began detailed documentation of anti-Catholic discrimination, the Association spread its material in British Labour and Trade Union circles. When Gerry Fitt was elected MP for West Belfast in 1966, it was the Association that organised his first public meetings in London. Greaves had considerable personal influence on those who set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967.  Two ideological influences went into NICRA’s formation. One was the Republican ‘politicisers’ of the Belfast Wolfe Tone Society, of whom the late Jack Bennett and Fred Heatley were on the original NICRA executive. Greaves used to stay with Bennett, who wrote the influential ‘Claud Gordon’ column in the Sunday Press, when he visited Belfast. The other was the leftwing trade unionists, mostly of Protestant background, of the Belfast Trades Council and the Draughtsmen’s Union in the Belfast shipyard. Betty Sinclair, who was the full-time Trades Council secretary and Noel Harris of the Draughtsmen, were leading NICRA figures whom Greaves knew through the Northern Ireland Communist Party. In 1968, in face of Unionist resistance to the civil right

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    Climate change is not your fault

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    Often we hear of how terrible climate change is, how it will cause the death of millions, mass extinctions, desertification and the end of life as we know it. But what are the roots of our common crisis, on our common home? Is it really all our fault, or, as environmental historian Stefania Barca asks, was all that progress “a free lunch, stolen from someone else’s table”? The Anthropocene? Over 97% of climate scientists have shown that climate change is man-made. Indeed, many 21st century scientists and ecologists say we have entered a new, man-made geological epoch that irreversibly changes the face of our planet – ‘the Anthropocene’. In this narrative, mankind’s Industrial Revolution was an ‘unbound Prometheus’. We – note the collective we – stole fire from the Gods to create a new progressive world for all. But such arrogant self-worship drew upon us their vengeful wrath. Humans – naturally greedy, exploitative, and born of original sin – created the climate crisis. However, as historians enter conversations about climate change and integrate social and environmental stories into the Industrial Revolution narrative, a more complex picture arises. If you listen, the dominant climate change narrative sounds not only Abrahamic, but suspiciously similar to the words of our own Brian Lenihan after the 2008 crash. The then finance Minister infamously told the country, “we all partied”: therefore we all must pay. Climate change is similarly presented as universal unavoidable human folly, obscuring the role of an exploitative, capitalist economic system built to see social and environmental harm as “unforeseen negative externalities”. From the enclosure movement, to the slave trade, to colonisation and the subjugation of the poor into dangerous and underpaid work, the Industrial Revolution was built on unaccounted for human and environmental cost. That Revolution depended on fossil fuels. ‘We All Partied’ Today, renewable energy is presented as unreliable, inefficient and heavily reliant on Government subsidies. Yet climate-change historian Andreas Malm shows that throughout the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution was driven by the water-run mill house which peppered the English countryside, running off its plentiful rivers and streams. Fossil fuels were an erratic, expensive fuel, rejected for causing serious respiratory and environmental damage to workforces and communities. In the 1830s, however, something strange happened. Steam power gained supremacy in spite of water meeting all economic concerns – being cheap, abundant, powerful, efficient and technologically potent. What could have happened? First, because water moves, for millennia it has been enshrined in legal systems as subject to res communas, or communal law. The same communal law applies to all mobile renewable resources granted to us by a generous earth – sea, wind, tide, sunlight. Water is a property that belongs to no person, its use bestowed to all. To use water, mill-owners had to cooperate with one another for the profitable use of plentiful reservoirs. In an economic system that centred on the self-interested individual, water knew no boundaries, respected no deeds, no private-property rights. In contrast, fossil fuels for steam power could be sequestered for exclusive use, cut up, carted away, stored and kept. The resulting excess did not affect profits, only the lungs and land of workers. Mill-owners were unwilling to embrace co-operative, profit-sharing business, even if it was in their own interests. Second, to complement divisible, piecemeal fossil fuels you need a workforce that can similarly be cut up, carted and stored away. Before fossil fuels, workers in remote country areas where rivers and streams were plentiful were loath to work in dark and dangerous mills without good remuneration. Millowners, unwilling to lose profit, sought unpaid labour in the form of orphan apprentices. Because mills were often located in remote, local areas, however, it was easier for workers to collectivise. Apprentice girls were soon “breathing defiance” despite beatings and solitary confinement. Unionised workers meant less profit for those at the top of the pyramid. Millowners therefore promoted cartable, storable fossil fuels and helped industry move to cities where there was already an “industrious”, docile and fluid workforce; broken-in bodies resigned to the discipline of the master of the mill. In his history of the Anthropocene narrative, Andreas Malm shows fossil fuels are a “power device”, a political choice naturalised through the barrel of a gun. Once, mills had to be made fireproof because workers burnt them. Nature, and the class forced to mould and exploit it, were violently cut from the progressive narrative of the Industrial Revolution. From Anthropocene to Capitalistocene Our alienation from Nature is not the natural result of anything, not the result of inherent human greed and cruelty. Our alienation is deliberate and tied to an existing system where the culpability for harm, whether the banking crisis or deaths in Rana Plaza, is dissipated through complex legal networks. Culpability is sucked away from its source and spread out to fix upon the bodies of front-line workers who bear the brunt of the blame and the brunt of the damage – environmentally, physically, financially. Classic environmentalism has a flavour of Malthusian misanthropy. It implies that individualistic moralistic acts alone are necessary to solve what is actually the result of an economic framework that deliberately obscures blame and traps the most vulnerable. Climate change only exists because there are places and people that we allow to decay in order to preserve the current exploitative economic framework. These people and places are what Naomi Klein calls “sacrifice zones”. In fact, we are living in a ‘Capitalistocene’, argues sociologist Jason W Moore, built on sacrificing the majority of human and environmental life for the wants of the few: “The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production”. In a recent study by Richard Heede, just 90 entities, including ExxonMobile, Norway’s Statoil and BP, are responsible for the purported ‘Anthropocene’ change of the last 200 years. The extreme volatility of our earth’s climate is no accident. As 350.org campaigner Bill McKibben says, “It

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    Protectionism dressed as free trade

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    Donald Trump is pulling out of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP). He is also likely to abandon the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). You would be forgiven for thinking that organised labour in Ireland might be pleased about this. After all, we have engaged in several campaigns in opposition to TTIP. To be clear: we do not mourn the probable passing of TTIP, but Donald Trump is tearing it up for all the wrong reasons and, what’s more, he wants to replace it with something that may be even worse. To understand where we’re coming from, let me first refresh your memory as to why we opposed TTIP in the first instance. This point is not moot given that TTIP is still alive; CETA, its sister agreement, continues to progress; and our opposition to TTIP is the context in which we oppose Trump’s new vision. We opposed TTIP because, despite what its cheerleaders might say, it is not a ‘free trade agreement’ in any meaningful sense. Rather, TTIP (along with TPP and NAFTA) are, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, investor rights agreements for US corporations. It’s no coincidence that these giant agreements (beginning with NAFTA in 1994) come about just as the emerging economies of the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) begin to gain some leverage within the World Trade Organisation. Competition from these regional powers is intolerable to the US superpower, and so its government embarks on a mission to set up a parallel global trading and investment system specifically aimed at strangling these emergent challenges. NAFTA is designed to isolate Brazil, TPP to isolate China and TTIP to isolate Russia. Both the TPP and TTIP have negative effects on India. Immediately, then, it is obvious that these agreements are not interested in facilitating open, free trade. In fact, their main purpose is to protect wealthy, powerful US incumbents. They are protectionist agreements. ‘Moving the beans’ Part of the key to understanding this is to realise what percentage of what is called ‘global trade’ is actually just intra-firm transfer, and helps to facilitate some very large -scale tax avoidance operations. That is to say, one arm of company ‘X’ shifting goods over to another arm of company ‘X’ and happening to cross a border in the process (a grocer moving a tin of beans from one shelf to another is often used as an analogy). An OECD working paper from 2011 states that, in 2009, intra-firm transfers accounted for 48% of US goods imports and 30% of US goods exports. 58% of US imports from OECD countries were made up of intra-firm transfers. The working paper concedes that the actual figures are likely to be higher as the data do not capture various forms of intra-industry transfers in which very closely related (though not identical) firms transfer goods among themselves. So, it’s likely that in more than half the cases we refer to as ‘international trade with the US’ we are talking about multinational corporations shifting goods around internally in their organisations. Tactical advantages and buying elections We should consider why it is that multinational corporations split up their operations and locate parts of themselves in various places around the globe. The idea is that, as long as there are no penalties for shifting capital across borders, these corporations can locate the various sections of their enterprise in the places most advantageously set up to receive those particular parts. For example, a company may locate manufacturing in a low-wage, high-repression environment where it relies on the state to bust unions through violence. It might locate waste disposal in West Africa, having ensured there are no environmental regulations to contend with. It might choose to pay its tax in Ireland, where it can be sure Government will mobilise state resources to defend its low corporate-tax rate against external upwards pressure. It might also locate its research and development somewhere where it can rely on the taxpayer to fund it through subsidies to universities’ science departments. Finally, it might use the population of the United States as its consumer base: it can rely on the US government to bailout the financial system when it collapses, meaning that US citizens can continue to consume on credit. In order to ensure this state-support these corporations buy elections for pro-business candidates. Market distortion There is risk involved in globalising a business though. All of a sudden, the corporation has to contend with numerous different electorates, regulatory systems, leaders and so on, who may disrupt business activities. In order to mitigate this risk, the corporation designs these investor right agreements that transfer power away from the state and into their hands. The agreements do away with tariffs – economic barriers to entry that enrich the state – and replace them with (as in TTIP) extremely strict patent protections – economic barriers to entry that enrich incumbent private enterprise. They also include detailed rules of origin which offer preferential treatment to US incumbents and prevent BRIC competitors from entering the market. These are not free trade measures, they are highly protectionist measures aimed at protecting US incumbents from competition and state interference. These measures demonstrate a contempt for the principles of the free market – they are market distortions on a grand scale. These are not conspiracy theories. Of course agreements like TTIP have to contain complex regulations and much of the detail has to be agreed upon behind closed doors in order to allow for serious negotiation. Unregulated free trade is not a good alternative. Regulation is good – what’s important is making sure that the regulation included in these agreements is the right regulation for workers, the environment and wider society. A one-stop-shop for corporate exploitation In the most recent American election, two major candidates ran on anti-TTIP/TPP/NAFTA platforms: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, neither received any significant corporate financial support. Sanders was crowd-funded through micro-donations from individuals, while Trump

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    Protecting ancient buildings in Ireland: a new initiative

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    On 8 February 2017 the inaugural meeting of SPAB Ireland (The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Ireland) took place. In the audience were the bulwarks of Irish architectural heritage; the Irish Georgian Society, the Irish Landmark Trust, An Taisce, the Dublin Civic Trust. But the demographic for SPAB were better than for any of these organisations. The first meeting in Trinity was overflowing. Its convenors are graduates who have recently completed SPAB Scholarships in the UK, with the aim of extending SPAB to Ireland. The first meeting in Trinity was overflowing. SPAB is a charity founded in 1877 by William Morris. Though best known in his lifetime as a poet and social campaigner, he posthumously became better known for his designs, particularly of textiles. It was founded in response to the highly destructive, if well-intentioned, ‘restoration’ of medieval buildings popular with many Victorian architects, exemplified in Ireland by the overdone Dublin Cathedrals. Today SPAB claims to be the largest, oldest and most technically expert national pressure group fighting to save old buildings from decay, demolition and damage. To this day the 1877 manifesto remains the basis for the Society’s work. Village spoke to Rachel Morley, Tríona Byrne and Oliver Wilson, SPAB convenors, about the future of SPAB Ireland. According to Morley, SPAB has a statutory role as adviser to local planning authorities in Britain. “We must be notified of listed building applications that involve total or partial demolition. We are also informed by those religious bodies that have an exemption from the secular system, of certain types of proposal for listed places of worship. In addition, our casework includes campaigning to protect historic buildings at risk”. That sounds like a lot of the work carried out in Ireland by An Taisce though of course An Taisce’s remit is environmental and planning-focused too, and by the Heritage Council on a narrower and professional basis. Morley says that “Ultimately, SPAB Ireland would like to become formal consultees for applications to demolish or partially demolish listed buildings and applications for any works to, say, pre 1720 buildings”. Morley claims to be a bit of an oddball. While studying Process and Chemical Engineering at UCC, “I fell in love with old buildings – the architecture, the history, the materials, the decay mechanisms and conservation and people’s relationships with old buildings. I went on to study Applied Building Conservation and Repair at TCD. As this course wound up, I desperately wanted to learn more about plaster conservation – learn practical skills. I moved to England and spent twelve months funded by the Heritage Lottery undertaking a training internship in architectural stone and plaster conservation with the Institute of Conservation. I spent several glorious years travelling across England and Europe repairing plasterwork of all periods. I am currently work with the Churches Conservation Trust and am responsible for the repair of 129 redundant Anglican churches across the southeast of England. I am endlessly fascinated and inspired by churches”. Morley got involved in SPAB in her early twenties while living on the Welsh borders. “It was beautiful, but I was lonely. I wanted to meet like-minded people and I wanted to explore the buildings that surrounded me. SPAB has several regional groups – groups of members who arrange local events, lectures and tours to ensure members throughout the country are engaged with the Society. I joined the local committee and for two years arranged these events. In 2014 I was lucky enough to be elected to the Guardians’ Committee which is responsible for upholding the ethos and traditions of the Society and plays a leading role in the Society’s listed building casework and in historic buildings policy discussions”. Wilson is an architect, originally from Donegal: “I got the conservation bug quite early, in my late teens I got involved with The Journeymen, a group of craftspeople (led by Séan Brogan) who did craft demonstrations around Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim. I did my ‘part 2’ thesis on Ramelton and after that I worked with Dedalus Architecture (Duncan McLaren), a small but principled conservation practice in Donegal. While there I got a place on the SPAB scholarship in 2015 and since that I’ve been working with Andrew Townsend Architects”. He’s passionate about conservation and outlines SPAB’s philosophy: “The idea is that a building should be allowed to age gracefully, we love when an old building looks old and see the patina of age as something which should always be retained. Take for instance an old wall that has gone bulged and wobbly and is perhaps on the brink of collapse: rather than take it down and rebuild in the new, the stonework could be stitched together and repaired it in situ, stabilising the wall whilst retaining its wobbliness and telltales of its age”. Byrne is a structural engineer working in conservation in Dublin. “In 2016, I completed the SPAB scholarship programme, which involved travelling all over the UK for nine months visiting hundreds of building conservation projects and meeting the people involved – craftspeople, contractors, professionals and anyone involved in the project in any way”. Byrne says that during her scholarship, I kept thinking about how great it would be to have something like the SPAB in Ireland. Whenever I met the other Irish SPAB members, we always spoke about it. I knew I wanted to return to Ireland after my scholarship (as long as I could find a job!), and with Eoin based in Ireland too, we decided it was a good time to try and establish SPAB in Ireland. Byrne too favours minimal intervention as a philosophy: “SPAB favours a conservationist approach – if there is nothing wrong with a building, why do anything? Often, restoration replaces the history and character of a building, as well as patina of age, with an essentially new building, ‘sanitising’ the old building in the process of restoration”. As to the future of SPAB and its relations with other worthy bodies, Morley says: “There are many great organisations

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