Archives

Equality of outcome, sustainability, accountability. Village does wear its values on its sleeve. Media are in the business of communicating values. What makes Village different, however, is both being explicit about its values and the particular values it espouses. Values matter and the manner in which we address values is central to any ambition for social change. The issue merits a lot more attention among those who seek such change. The Common Cause Foundation in England has led a rethink on the centrality of values to effective work on environmental, global-justice, anti-poverty and many of the big issues facing civilisation. Its recent publication, ‘Perceptions Matter’ highlights some startling conclusions that should be further informing this work. The research was based on a survey of a thousand people in Britain. People were asked what they valued in life. The researchers looked at groups of ‘compassion’ values like ‘helpfulness’, ‘equality’ and ‘protection of nature’; and “selfish” values such as ‘wealth’, ‘public image’ and ‘success’. It found that 74% of respondents afford greater importance to compassionate values than to selfish values, irrespective of age, gender, region, or political persuasion. That has to be a more than promising start for social change in Britain. It is the second finding that is the most striking and much less promising. It found that 77% of respondents believe that their fellow citizens hold selfish values to be more important, and compassionate values to be less important, than is actually the case. People who hold this inaccurate belief about other people’s values, the research found, feel significantly less positive about getting involved in action for change, feel a high level of social alienation, and feel less responsible for their communities. How does the apparent majority holding values of equality and sustainability end up alienated to the extent that they don’t give expression to these values? This must be a concern for those in civil society espousing progress. How does a majority get to feel that its values don’t fit in? Yes…it does go back to the fact that we are repeatedly told by the media, by politicians, and even by our educational institutions that these ‘selfish’ values are dominant in and most important to our society. The Common Cause survey supports this explanation. It asked people what values they felt were encouraged by key types of institution: arts and culture, schools and universities, the media, Government and business. It found that people believe that each of these institutions discourage “compassionate” values, and encourage “selfish” values. That is why it is important to wear our values on our sleeves. Take a bow, Village. Values matter. Values motivate what we do and think, as individuals. Values shape what organisations prioritise, and the way they go about their business. The values that dominate in a society or in an organisation block or enable the change we seek for a more equal, sustainable and accountable world. Civil society seeking such a world needs to be more attuned to activating the values it espouses and to better understanding how values work. Earlier publications by the Common Cause Foundation have shown how important it is to explicitly engage people’s values such as equality, sustainability and accountability. Social change is not about trying to change people’s values it is about triggering values they already hold. They tell us that values are universal. If we look across different cultures and countries, we will find the same set of values. They identify a list of some sixty repeatedly occurring values. The Common Cause Foundation suggest that values are like muscles, the more we engage them the stronger they become. When our media, politics, and education system extensively engage values of self-interest, the stronger they become. The challenge to civil society becomes to expose and challenge this and to set about engaging people’s values of equality, sustainability and accountability to the same effective and extensive extent. This is a challenge, a cultural battle really, that we have not yet adequately taken up. The Values Lab has recently been established in Ireland to bring this focus on values into an Irish setting. It has set out to support and mentor organisations and networks to identify, engage and give expression to the values that enable them to more effectively address equality and human rights issues in their work. This is a useful start. However, we need to see more civil society organisations developing a focus on values in their work for social change, more media outlets being explicit about their values, and a greater challenge to the values that block and distract from achieving equality, sustainability and accountability in Irish society.

Sinn Féin’s commitment at its Ard Fheis last month to campaigning vigorously against ‘Brexit’ in the UK’s June referendum is a denial of its Republican credentials. Its rhetoric of seeking to turn the EU into a “Social Europe” – with all of the weight of Ireland’s less than 1% EU Council vote? – is derisory. Since Provisional Sinn Féin was set up in 1970 it has opposed handing over Irish sovereignty to the EU in every referendum from that on the original EEC Accession Treaty in 1972, through the referendums on the Single European Act 1987, the Maastricht Treaty 1992, the Amsterdam Treaty 1998, the Nice Treaty 2001 and 2002, the Lisbon Treaty 2008 and 2009, up to the Fiscal Stability Treaty of 2012. Opposition to EU integration and supranationalism was central to Sinn Féin’s political stance for forty years, alongside its support for the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ in the North. That Sinn Féin should embrace the EU at a time when that entity is in disarray and getting more such, what with the euro-currency crisis, the migration crisis and the Brexit crisis, and losing popular support across the continent by the day, adds to the irony of this change. It would seem that this policy turnabout stems at bottom from the party leadership’s search for political respectability, whether in the eyes of Ireland’s political Establishment and media, or to please the American and British Governments that have backed the Good Friday Agreement and to whom Brexit is anathema. It is over a decade now since the Sinn Féin leadership announced that its policy on the EU was one of “critical engagement”. This spindoctor’s phrase could mean whatever one wanted it to mean. It implied that Sinn Féin was at once critical of the EU while supporting it at the same time. And it kept the party members happy, especially in the South. However the Brexit referendum has forced the leadership off the fence. It is mainly the Northerners that have pushed this significant change. “We must not have a Little Englander mentality”, Martin McGuinness told his Ard Fheis. “The future of Ireland, North and South, is in the EU”, he says. One factor influencing the Northerners has been the millions of EU funding that have gone into the ‘peace process’ there, for local community groups, the employment of ex-prisoners and the like. As Britain is a major net contributor to the EU budget, all money for EU projects in the UK is effectively British taxpayers’ money being recycled through Brussels. But as Northern Sinn Féin MEP Martina Anderson told the European Parliament recently: “The EU has supported the Irish peace process and projects aimed at reducing the impact of the border through INTERREG and Peace funding, with examples like the footbridge uniting Pettigo in Co Donegal and Tullyhammon in Fermanagh…There are thousands of my constituents with no faith in a British Government replacing these funds post-Brexit”. At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis there was much talk of the desirability of an “agreed” united Ireland and the need for cross-community reconciliation in the North, while at the same time a practical opportunity to influence Unionist attitudes towards Irish reunification was being thrown away. It is obvious now that the only way to bring about a United Ireland over time is to win a section of current Unionist opinion to that position, however long that may take, so as to bring about eventually a majority in the North for ending Partition. For if the Unionists are Irish, as they are, that should in principle be possible. By opposing Brexit, which mainstream Unionism in the form of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party supports, Northern Sinn Féin can now lapse comfortably back into the usual Catholic- Protestant, Nationalist-Unionist confrontation in the referendum, despite the rhetoric of cross-community reconciliation. It would truly have been an historical development if Sinn Féin had sided with such Unionists as the DUP against the mainstream policy of the British Government and Prime Minister Cameron by supporting Brexit. This would have opened further opportunities for a more progressive direction by Unionism over time. Instead Unionists are likely now to look even more cynically at Sinn Féin in view of the convolutions of their EU policy. Another consequence of Sinn Féin embracing the EU at its Ard Fheis is that it removes the most significant policy difference between it and the other Dáil parties, and in particular Fianna Fáil. It thereby clears the way for a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin coalition down the road, in which Sinn Féin would be the smaller not the bigger party. For if the choice for voters is between Fianna Fáil ‘Lite’ – a pro-EU Sinn Féin – and Fianna Fáil ‘Heavy’, most of them will surely go for the genuine article. For Sinn Féin to advocate Brexit would have been tricky in presentational terms, but it could have been done. It would not be so tricky however if the Sinn Féin leadership had carried out a sustained campaign of education in the party’s own ranks and amongst the wider Irish public on the anti-democratic and anti-national character of the EU over the years, building on its record of referendum opposition to successive EU Treaties. The leadership shrank from tackling that. It contented itself with rhetoric about “a Republic of equals”, “an agreed Ireland” and talk of “leading the Left”, while rarely mentioning Irish independence, which has always been the central value of Irish Republicanism and national democracy. National unity is both logically and politically a subordinate value to national independence. Ireland was a united country under British rule in the 19th century. It could be united again under supranational EU rule today. Unity in independence is however a different matter and is unattainable in the EU. Sinn Féin wants free water, but imposing charges for water is an EU policy. It wants more spending on health and other public services, but supplementary budgets to pay for such must have EU approval under the Stability