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The spark of any human venture is imagination. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) in his ‘In Defence of Poetry’ distinguishes this from reason, the “enumeration of qualities already known”; whereas “imagination is the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole… Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance”. Too often governments, corporations and individuals lack that ignition. Reason in abundance is evident, yes, but imagination is rarely nurtured and often frowned on. We strive to proceed from point A to B, failing to recognise the possibilities in the remainder of the alphabet. Ireland in particular stands accused. Scientific reasoning, for all its astounding capacity, is founded on imagining a possibility beyond contemporary restraints. So it was that Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century first envisioned a route to India and then produced a vessel, the caravel, allowing them to sail windward. It is said that necessity is the mother of invention but really imagination charts the course. The Portuguese voyages represented the triumph of the Renaissance mind over the mediaeval. In his autobiography, Laurens van der Post relates a story told to him by CG Jung “that if one wanted to fix a precise moment at which the Renaissance began, it would be the day when the Italian poet Petrarch decided to defy superstition and climb a mountain in the Alps, just for the sake of reaching its summit”. A poetic imagination can guide Irish people to the heights of their capabilities, removing what is left of the Catholic-industrial-complex. But there will be obstacles and dead-ends. For example, I believe as a start we must move beyond the wisdom of the likes of Ireland’s leading public intellectual, Fintan O’Toole. His insights can only take us so far: like Virgil in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ who guides Dante the pilgrim through Hell and Purgatory as far as the border of Paradise. The genius of imagination is not restricted to mechanical invention or improvements to organisations but also underpins the empathy that makes us identify with others and extend compassion. Shelley writes that for a man to be ‘greatly good’ he “must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must be his own”. Throughout the twentieth century we saw a failure of what the philosopher Jonathan Glover calls “moral imagination”; we still see individuals sheltering in the comfort of command centres from which they unleash death and destruction. From this vantage war became like a computer game that obscures the real horror, and yet bewilderment greets the ferocity and depravity in response. Through their faculty of imagination Shelley identifies poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world who forge social sympathies. In agreement the legal scholar Edward J Erbile writes: “Ancient law often took the form of poetry. Laws were expressed in incantatory rhythms. The oldest Greek and Latin words were also the eldest words for law. For example carmen or carminis in Latin means ‘song’ or ‘statute’”. Shelley also hails the intuitive capacity of the poet who, “not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present thing ought to be ordered, but beholds the future in the present (not that they can foresee the future)”. He claims that “all the great historians were poets” and that “poetry is ever to be found to co-exist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man”. Seen in this light, poetry is a vital commodity in any culture, foregrounding and guiding other artistic endeavours, channelling empathy, and forging justice. Poetry is not restricted to composition of metrical verse: any writer or artist should aspire to it. Shelley embodied a revolutionary altruism, visiting Ireland where he wrote a pamphlet in 1812, ‘An Address to the Irish People’, urging non-violent resistance to colonialism: “In no case employ violence, the way to liberty and happiness is never to transgress the rules of virtue and justice. Liberty and happiness are founded upon virtue and justice. If you destroy the one you destroy the other”. He would have deplored the Easter Rising and anticipated the loss of liberty that emerged after the independent state’s violent birth pangs. But Shelley was perhaps too idealistic in assuming that poetry conflates with justice in the objective sense handed down in the Western tradition. Poetry has its dark uses. Audiences were mesmerised by the flow of Hitler’s speeches. Stalin and Radovan Karadzic both composed verse. Another published poet Enoch Powell summoned the vivid if crass metaphor of ‘rivers of blood’ in his opposition to multicultural Britain. Nonetheless, the best poetry articulates the highest human ideals. This generates practical and immediate imperatives, considering the weight of Nietzsche’s erosion of Enlightenment values and the huge challenges in this, the Anthropocene, age. We must learn how to live in the natural world and avert runaway Climate Change, as well as address hideous human inequalities. We demand new poetic legislators. That Irish people assume our country is of little relevance to the wider world is a failure of imagination. Since the arrival of literacy (alongside Christianity) this small, remote island has nourished visionary poets in a wide variety of disciplines from the monks who animated the Book of Kells, to the satire of Swift to the iconoclasm of Joyce and the asceticism of Beckett that have, as Shelley suggested in his Address to the Irish People, been a beacon to the world. Even the Easter Rising, for all its flaws, was among other things the realisation of the poetry of Pearse, Plunkett and McDonagh. James Joyce playfully mused: “Is this country destined some day to resume its ancient position as the Hellas of the north? Is the Celtic spirit, like the Slavic one (which it resembles in many respects), destined in the future to enrich the consciousness of

Ireland is awakening to the environmental impact of its livestock industry. Village has been to the fore in focusing on this unpalatable subject while the newspapers ignored it. RTE has been more craven still in its favouritism towards a livestock industry, often lovingly referred to as ‘our farmers’. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It is likely that editors and producers fear offending advertisers. I submitted numerous articles to the Irish Times on the subject. Ironically the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times proved more receptive. Belatedly the Irish Times has covered the issue and ran a series by Conor Purcell, a climate scientist in UCD earlier this year focusing on livestock emissions. More recently on April 2nd they ran a forensic article by some-time Village- writer John Gibbons entitled: ‘Meat is Madness: why it leads to global warming and obesity’ which joined the dots between the environmental and public-health impacts of meat production. Nonetheless the public is still largely in the dark as to the manifest unfairness of ‘meatonomics’ in Ireland – where landowners receive endowments as rural communities flounder. One positive that could flow from the Brexit debate is that focus will be drawn to the perversion of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was designed to protect farmers but now leads to concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few, and continued rural depopulation. The Irish media still avert their gaze from the meat-‘processing’ industry, a sinister euphemism that confounds the reality of millions of animals being slaughtered each year. This bears out Ruth Harrison’s observation that: “If one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people”. As far as I am aware no Irish newspaper has ever sent a reporter in to explore what happens in an abattoir or concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO). It is only when a case reaches the courts that it will enter the public domain. One such was reported in the Irish Times in February 2015 in which pig farmer Rory O’Brien was given a jail sentence of 18 months. Judge Sean O Donnabháin said: “This is cruelty on an industrial scale by one of the biggest pig farmers in the country. On a continuous basis he knowingly and without regard acted in this way”. Inside the rat-infested piggery, animals were left to starve causing them to to eat one another the court was told. O’Brien’s farm, which closed in 2011, held over 2000 pigs. That implicates a lot of breakfast rolls. Millions of animals are slaughtered in Ireland each year but no journalist to my knowledge has braved the killing floor. The excellent indigenous documentary film ‘Foul’ (2006) by Andrew Legge explored the poultry industry but it is usually left to the Guardian to investigate what is happening in our, Irish, killing industries. Without journalistic coverage here we must draw on accounts of industrial slaughter elsewhere. Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book ‘Fast Food Nation’ paints a lurid picture that is unlikely to be different in Ireland: “On the kill floor, what I see no longer unfolds in a logical manner. It’s one strange image after another. A worker with a power saw slices cattle into halves as though they were two-by-fours, and then the halves as though they were twoby- fours, and then the halves swing by me into the cooler … Dozens of cattle, stripped of their skins, dangle on chains from their hind legs. My host stops and asks how I feel, if I want to go any further. This is where some people get sick”. He continues: “The kill floor is hot and humid. It stinks of manure. Cattle have a body temperature of about 101 degrees, and there are a lot of them in the room. Carcasses swing so far along the rail that you have to keep an eye on them constantly, dodge them, watch your step, or one will slam you onto the bloody concrete. It happens to workers all the time”.               Yet more scenes that recall Dante’s hell are revealed as he presses further inside: “I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizard-brand knives peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. We wade through blood that’s ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned”. Schlosser also encounters bestial working conditions usually undertaken by immigrant, unionised labour. “For eight and a half hours, a worker called a ‘sticker’ does nothing but stand in a river of blood, being drenched in blood, slitting the neck of a steer every ten seconds or so, severing its carotid artery. He uses a long knife and he must hit exactly the right spot to kill the animal humanely”. In the last circle of this inferno he meets the ‘knocker’, the man who welcomes cattle to the building: “Cattle walk down a narrow chute and pause in front of him, blocked by a gate, and then he shoots them in the head with a captive bolt stunner – a compressed-air gun attached to the ceiling by a long hose – which fires a steel bolt that knocks the cattle unconscious. The animals keep strolling up, oblivious to what comes next, and he stand over them and shoots. For eight and a half hours, he just shoots. As I stand there, he misses a few times and he shoots

Poets are banished from Plato’s ‘Republic’ where the philosopher king is the sole guardian of Truth. Their lyrical distortion is identified as a revolutionary threat to the singular established idea. This was recognised by James Joyce who wrote: “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality”. Joseph Stalin was unnervingly conscious of the capacity of poets to undermine Communist ideology, describing them as “engineers of the soul”. He treated some such as Mikhail Bulgakov as a cat would a trapped mouse, to be disposed of when he felt bored. Others including Anna Akhmatova were harassed and not allowed to work. Nevertheless as a determined witness she wrote: “Terror fingers all things in the dark, / Leads moonlight to the axe. / There’s an ominous knock behind the wall: / A ghost a thief or a rat”. Eventually she was compelled by the imprisonment of her son to produce patriotic verse, but she was freed from constraints after the death of Stalin in 1953. Another Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam argued that a civilisation should be measured by the number who read poetry. He died in a gulag in 1940. Poetry eschews convention and draws vitality from rebellion. Yet paradoxically adherence to form seems essential for the mystery to be effectively conveyed. Where an ideology, whether Nazism, Communism or Irish Catholicism, becomes ascendant poets are usually censored and persecuted. But in this capitalistic age, the poet is often corrupted by market conditions, and imagination is not given free rein in a Zeitgeist of high rationality where authenticity and irony are prized above form and transcendence. Poetry is located beyond poems and is the source of literature. It is also vital to the evolution of language. Walter Benjamin provides a broad definition of language, arguing that: “all communication of mental meanings is language, communication in words being only a particular case of human language and of the justice, poetry or whatever underlying it or founded on it”. Poetry is found in film and, notably, music. Indeed the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler observed: “One must beware of overestimating orchestral music and considering it the only high art. Music without words gained its great importance and its full extent only under capitalism”. In this respect it is revealing that the same word in Old English was used for song and poem: leoð; another word was giedd, which means “riddle, poem, tale, song”. It appears that poetry and music evolved together and it is only in the early modern period that we see a significant rupture. But it is often to the detriment of classical varieties of both, which are increasingly marginalised and growing inaccessible to a general audience. We find in WB Yeats a strict adherence to a form that give his words a musical ring. Although it is believed he was actually tone deaf, he used a metronome to measure metre and usually adhered strictly to rhyming sequences. His method, allied with intense sensitivity, brought great popularity, and he revolted against an empire to sing his nation into existence. In his parting poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’ he urges:”Irish poets learn your trade / Sing whatever is well made”. Contrary to the stereotype, the poet is no dilettante, far from it. As Yeats asserts in ‘Adam’s Curse’: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught”. It is the trick of great poetry to sound as if it has rolled off the tongue, but the apparent simplicity is the product of hard application. We might recall Pascal’s apology for not having the time to write a shorter letter. The initial inspiration, or donné, for a poem gives way to the slow labour of moulding coherence, like a potter shaping clay on a wheel into a recognisable object. Slightly melodramatically Yeats says: “Better go down on the marrow bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones / Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; / For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these”. And the reward is only to “be thought an idler by the noisy set”. That is not to say that poetry simplifies, quite the contrary, as the poet and critic Kathleen Raine asserts: “With the greatest poetry the mystery only increases with our knowledge”. Unfortunately in Ireland, as elsewhere, poetry is today largely removed from a popular audience. Seamus Heaney received widespread acclaim and a Nobel Prize in 1995 but his verse while rich in metaphor and word play does not flow like the greatest poetry: hardly a line of his has entered popular speech. There is also a suspicion that as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-94) he was not at heart a rebel, and grew comfortable with his accolades. Recall that Yeats thrived on the tension of being an outsider: a Protestant, (usually) liberal in a conservative Catholic Ireland; an Irishman pining for Sligo in London; a Fenian when the Irish Parliamentary Party dominated Irish politics. A rousing anger is rarely heard in Heaney; though the collection ‘North’ (1975) is an exception, written at the height of the Troubles. In Ocean’s Love to Ireland he writes: “Speaking broad Devonshire / Raleigh has backed the maid to a tree / As Ireland is backed to England / And drives inland”. The words have a frisson often missing from his oeuvre; perhaps he recoiled from a capacity to foment violence contenting himself with often obscure metaphor and personal recollection. But by generally removing himself from workaday politics did he also hold back from challenging Ireland’s conservatism to the extent that Yeats had? Led by TS Eliot, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the retreat of poetry from a popular audience. A morass of formless post-modern experimentation has followed, that usually alienates the listener. However, poetry reasserted itself in a different form with the advent