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    Canon – and on and on

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    The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre was established in 1904 and became the first State-subsidised theatre in the world, and ultimately one of the best brands in world theatre. Worthy, certainly; old, yes: the question is more whether it is any good, or any good bearing in mind the resources that go into it. The Abbey suffers from structural problems – physical, artistic and organisational. Director/CEO Senator Fiach MacConghail is a consummate arts-administrator-politician with uniquely strong links to Labour, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. He has streamlined the board, steadied the finances and avoided the once-vaunted Dermot-Desmond-driven mistake of moving from its historic home to Docklands. In 2012 it cleverly purchased buildings adjacent to its current home at 15-17 Eden Quay, for €1,500,000 involving a mortgage of €1,125,000. In creating the position of director, and giving it to MacConghail, a producer not a director, the Abbey board decided to establish a new senior management structure with clear lines of decision-making, authority and accountability. He runs the show with a cast of uncelebrated subordinated directors and managers and a Board headed by former High Court judge Bryan MacMahon which includes former Docklands Authority board member Domhnall Curtin and some in-house actors and directors such as Jane Brennan and playwrights such as Tom Kilroy. It is a registered charity that banks with AIB, receives legal advice from Arthur Cox and receives sponsorship from the corporate blue chips. When he took up the job MacConghail negotiated ‘bailout funding’ of €4m from the government, and, before the downturn, managed to bring the Abbey to all-time high levels of grant aid from the Arts Council. Unfortunately the accounts are not without hazard. The income and expenditure account showed an operating deficit of €1,403,554 for 2012. The Arts Council Revenue Grant provides financial life support by way of a 3-year funding agreement. €21,300,000 for the period 2011 to 2013 at €7,100,000 per annum. Out of the €7.1m: gross staff costs are €6m annually, and that without the repertory company whose loss is so bemoaned at least by the likes of former Director Ulick O’Connor. In 2012 staff numbers were 142. Box Office receipts for the Abbey and Peacock Theatres totalled €2,319,528 in 2012. The box-office takings were roughly matched by losses for the period, at €2,378,272. Fundraising is a tradition dating back to original patron Annie Horniman who bought the first Abbey building. The Abbey’s US tour in 2010 presented ‘The Plough and the Stars’ for the MacConghailean purposes of establishing The Abbey Theatre Foundation to raise funds. A tour of England in 2013 pursued a similar strategy. In 2014 there were 615 donating members whose collective contributions reached a bearish €120,636. Fundraising activities have unedifyingly diversified to offer wedding packages. A couple can even hire the Abbey’s ‘dedicated wedding co-ordinator’ to plan that big day, and guests enjoy ‘the wonderful atmosphere of the Yeats Lounge’. MacConghail started with a solid and appropriate vision, A 2006 article in the New York Times claimed MacConghail “has commissioned new work that tackles life in contemporary Ireland, and departing from previous practices, he handed those plays over to young directors who previously only dreamed of working on the Abbey’s main stage. He appointed Conor McPherson, who had said he felt snubbed by the Abbey, as the theater’s 2006 playwright in residence. And directly thumbing his nose at tradition, he declared at least a temporary ban on revivals of classic plays by Sean O’Casey and John Millington Synge, which have long been the theater’s staple fare”. It quoted then US-Ireland Alliance President Trina Vargo to the effect that MacConghail was actually returning the Abbey to its traditional role of breaking boundaries and defying the status quo, part of the theatre’s original mission as set forth by the Abbey’s founder, William Butler Yeats. But early aspiration was confounded and the big problem now is the Abbey’s directionless artistic policy, bereft of imagination and adventure. Its artistic output is once again patchy and unimaginative with exceptional crescendos – like ‘The Late Late Show’ really, a victim of its success or reputation – but more hushed and in Town. Most audiences appear merely to endure the night of theatre it serves up, with its middle-brow, middle-aged, only-half-dressed-up Southside-yielded cultural conservatives downing Carlsbergs during the interval. The Abbey rarely constitutes a big night out. Ireland’s National Theatre still purveys the shame-faced revivals alongside self-consciously ‘new plays’ that led to motions of no confidence in then artistic director, Ben Barnes in 2004 just before MacConghail took over. It still commissions plays of no impact, including a thespian-free David McWilliams one-man-show – a pity since MacConghail’s artistic obsession is relevance and he comes via the Project Arts Centre. Regular stand-offs with the Arts Council have depressingly been money rather than quality oriented, though this might be expected of a body run by arts administrators. The Abbey’s artistic weaknesses can be blamed on a series of uninspired and unwieldy boards and in-house failure to find plays that set the theatrical scene on fire. The Abbey plods on swamped by its glorious past – no golden dawn of course but two famous plays of long ago and a national canon that beat into the sensibilities of three generations of dutiful schoolchildren but never matched the literary genius, or literary impact, resistering elswehere over the century. By now the legacy, the National Theatre thing, is noteworthy for the confines it erects around the Abbey – its theatrical museum status. Certainly the theatre’s first phase was credible: it made history. When the Abbey opened for business on 27 December 1904, Yeats’s ‘On Baile’s Strand’ and Lady Gregory’s ‘Spreading the News’ proved lesser artistic fare than ‘The Well of the Saints’ whose author JM Synge would achieve international controversy with ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ in 1907. However, it was O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’ which became the ultimate Abbey Theatre party piece with its closing scene of Dublin in flames during the Rising, British ‘Tommies’, IRA snipers and

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    Compromise and coalition get results.

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    By Eoin O’ Malley. Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were very different men, with very different interests. One was a Protestant, a member of the Anglo-Irish elite, the landed gentry. He was an instinctively cautious man. The other was the son of Irish emigrants evicted from their land. He had radical ideas about land ownership. Yet together they formed a remarkable association that delivered land reform for the Irish and put Irish nationalism at the centre of British politics, ultimately leading to Irish independence. Nationalism had for some time been the preserve of the idle rich. It failed to make inroads with the Irish peasantry, who had better things to think about, such as feeding themselves. Parnell’s genius was to link land reform with nationalism. What he did was to create a coalition to advance his goals. It is rare for any one coherent group to form a majority. For any campaign to achieve any success it has to build coalitions. Being good at this will often define a politician or political movement’s success. In the aftermath of the marriage referendum some on the left though it was a great victory for the left, and could point to a possible left-wing majority in the country. The campaign for same-sex marriage worked not because it was a left-wing issue, but because it wasn’t a left-wing issue. It was one that transcended that divide. The campaign successfully built a coalition of liberals on the left and right. It would have risked defeat if it had alienated classic liberals. In the US attempts to advance the cause of gay rights have always depended on the support of liberal (in the European sense) Republicans. If the left tries to ‘own’ the issue, it excludes others on the right who regard gay rights as matter of personal freedom. This was evident in the Supreme Court judgments gay marriage where Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan, swung the vote. Fintan O’Toole observed recently that marriage equality wasn’t the human rights issue of our time. Rather “the most urgent human rights issue…is child poverty”. He’s promised to campaign on child poverty, and so we can expect countless sermons on it. Here’s a prediction: the campaign will go nowhere. It’s not that I want it to go nowhere – I hope I’m wrong. I agree with him about the identification and the urgency of the problem. Liberal democracy has created a class, that from childhood fails to empower people to recognise the value in their life. Roberto Unger claims this class suffers “death by installments”. But this campaign will suffer from two related problems. The first is what Robert Nozick observed as normative sociology: “the study of what the causes of problems ought to be”. Conservatives don’t like the welfare state and so consider it the cause of all ‘social ills’ such as school drop-out, drug dependency etc. Social democrats hate inequality, and so make the naïve assumption that it must cause all the bad stuff we see around us: school drop-out, drug dependency etc. They agree on problems. It’s just the issue of causality gets mixed up by their prejudices. An old joke comes to mind: Psychologist: ‘You should go easy on Johnny. He comes from a broken home’ Teacher: ‘I’m not surprised. Johnny could break any home’. The causes of social problems are complicated, and we often don’t have policy instruments to deal with them, but we frequently just pick what we think should be the cause. O’Toole and others are probably already certain they know the cause of childhood poverty, and even more certain it’s time for their preferred solution. In fact I suspect social democrats in Ireland feel that there are few if any serious social problems that Danish-style social democracy can’t solve. This is a problem for campaigns like this. When we have decided the cause and the solution in advance we exclude others who have identified their cause and solution in advance. Breda O’Brien responded to O’Toole, signing up to the child-poverty agenda, but citing the link highlighted in Robert Putnam’s (disappointing) new book ‘Our Kids’: social ills such as poverty, poor health, mental illness are associated with the breakdown in stable two-parent families. To succeed the campaign needs to build a broad coalition. That means two things. Making compromises, and working with people you don’t like. Neither are things that come naturally to people, especially to true believers (who are likely to lead new issues). True believers tend to have a boundless self-confidence in their position, which makes compromise difficult. And they tend to hold simple views, whose simplicity makes them perplexed that others don’t share their views. (‘Why can’t you understand if we just burned the bondholders all this would have been fine?’) But simple solutions are also easier to find fault with and so this naturally alienates people, rather than encourages finding common ground. For the child poverty campaign to work it could require the left to work with the Catholic Church, who share a lot of the same concerns, and control a lot of the structures that should be used to deal with the problem, such as schools. On the first occasion when they could have made common cause, on the cuts to the lone-parent allowance, it didn’t happen. This is because Catholics want rid of policies that they think encourage non-traditional family formation. And if it turned out that Iona had a point about traditional family formation, that there IS a causal connection between lone parent families and childhood poverty, I suspect the O’Tooles of the world would find that hard to accept. The liberal left and the conservative right would probably form a majority in the country, and so a campaign could succeed. They should start by trying to find common ground, and build slowly from there. More common ground will reveal itself when they work together. The failure of the left in many countries is the failure to find common ground with others

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    Nouthern Ireland.

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    By Anton McCabe. For years, coming up to the the marching season news in the North was dominated by controversy over parades and street violence. That still simmers. However, this summer news coverage has been dominated by allegations of corruption in the sale of NAMA properties in the North. There has been blanket coverage of Mick Wallace’s allegation in the Dáil that £7m was being diverted from a property deal to a Northern politician. This continues a recent trend in the North, where serious questions are being raised over the planning process. The GAA is seeking to build a 38,000 seat stadium at Casement Park, in the middle of a built-up residential area in West Belfast. Residents fear its size will dominate their houses: that there is insufficient parking provision: and that there are safety concerns. There are questions as to whether it is needed for sporting purposes. Antrim’s Gaelic footballers are in Division 4 of the National Football League, and Fermanagh have hammered them twice this year: Antrim hurlers are in freefall, having been relegated from the All-Ireland championship. Last year, Environment Minister Mark H Durkan granted permission. Earlier this year, a High Court Judge quashed that, saying the process was “fundamentally flawed”. The Chief Executive of Sport NI has been suspended amid the controversy, and two-thirds of the Board has resigned. Safety expert Paul Scott gave evidence to the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure that he was put under “excessive pressure” to rule the plan safe. The Casement issue has had a huge political impact. Gerry Carroll and People Before Profit have championed the residents’ case: Carroll seems certain to be elected to the Assembly next year. Another environmental controversy erupted round the destruction of a  crannóg at Drumclay, on the edge of Enniskillen. A report from the (Northern) Department of the Environment was highly critical of destruction of the  crannóg between 2010 and 2013, during the building of the Cherrymount Link Road, part of successive Northern administrations’ obsession with asphalt. The  crannóg had been occupied for 1,000 years, from the seventh to the 17th Centuries. Archaeologists discovered 4,000 objects, and the remains of more than 30 wooden houses. It was a vital piece in our understanding of the Early Christian period in Ireland. A Scheme Assessment Report drawn up by Roads Service (part of the Department of Regional Development) said: “Work for the proposed road will avoid all known archaeological sites.” Environment and Heritage Service was not consulted about this. Despite the Department’s statement, the  crannóg’s existence was known. It was on the Ordnance Survey maps from 1835. Archaeologists had known about it for years. Locals, of course, knew also. The road was driven through the site because of a simple map-reading error – which was never corrected. The contractors building the road used a machine to dig trenches through the  crannóg. This was done without archaeogical supervision – though it was supposed to be present. Part of the  crannóg collapsed because of illegal works. However, the NI Environmental Agency took no action. The Department of the Environment’s report also raised questions about the archaeologist employed by the contractors. Most dramatically the Green Party claims that Northern Ireland is potentially facing huge fines because of the Department of the Environment’s failure to meet environmental obligations. The European Commission is seeking clarification on allegations relating to a number of environmental matters including the massive illegal landfill site at Mobuoy Road in Derry and unauthorised sand extraction from Lough Neagh, Ireland’s largest lake. It is the subject of important bird and habitat directives from the European Union. Since the 1930s sand has been extracted by dredger – without planning permission or enforcement. An estimated 1.7 million tons per year is extracted, 25% of the sand used in the North’s building industry. Environment Minister Mark H Durkan issued enforcement notice to the companies involved, ordering them to cease. They have appealed, and are thus able to continue dredging. Durkan has, however, recently granted permission for an underground gold mine outside Omagh. The North’s Ombudsman had earlier ordered Planning Service to pay compensation to residents round an opencast gold mine on the site, finding there was failure to enforce planning conditions. Additionally, a whole series of environmental issues are simmering in the background: particularly fracking, and the proposed A5 dual carriageway. The Northern administration’s long-term poor environmental record is coming to resemble the South’s.

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    Villager – July 2015

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    Picking at Piketty “What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is in fact the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt, neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French State suffered for decades under this debt. The history of debt is full of iron” – Thomas Piketty interviewed in Die Zeit Villager loves Piketty and likes Germany (as they might say in an Aldi ad). But it’s a little unfair of the Frenchman not to note that there is a big difference between debt legitimately accrued and reparations. And Prussia is not Germany. Keeping up with the changing Times Villager is looking for an advertising slogan for Village. The Irish Times has some really horrible new ones starting with ‘You are what you read’. That certainly isn’t anywhere close to true, and saying so is bound to annoy readers none of whom can be that enthusiastic about the product now. It succeeds the 2013 campaign with the nice man in the dated jacket putting his hand through Kevin O’Sullivan’s wall: ‘The story of Why’. Worse still is the totally mundane audio-campaign featuring chief sports writer, Keith Duggan: “It’s a privilege to write about different sports”; and Róisín Ingle (who print ads tell us “writes about the things that speak to her; she takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary”): “When someone comes up to me and says you really made me laugh or they say I was cryin’ and everybody was looking at me. There’s something really amazing about bein’ able to do that”. And then: “Even though they’re very much about me, they’re my stories… if I’m enjoying written’ it then I kinda know that that’ll be one that’ll – touch people”. Villager is not open to being, and has not been, touched in this way. Summer love-in This year’s MacGill summer school will look at our governance and the need for longer-term planning. Was that not last year’s theme, and the year’s before that? Fair and accurate Séamus Dooley, Irish Secretary of the National Union of Journalists has asked Village to clarify the NUJ’s position on the Binchy High Court judgment on the Catherine Murphy/Denis O’Brien Dail reportage debacle. Its statement read “This is an unambiguous ruling in favour of democracy. The right of parliamentarians to speak under privilege is a cornerstone of our democracy and the right of the media to fairly and accurately report such proceedings is fundamental”. Village reported that the phrase “the right of the media to fairly and accurately report” implied that the media has no right to report “wrong-headed contributions”. Dooley points out that in fact: “On the contrary the NUJ believes in the right of the media to fully report what is said in parliament. The public has a right to know what’s said, regardless of whether it’s wrong-headed or not. It might even be argued that the public has a particular interest in knowing that a TD or senator has gone off on one and gone things totally wrong! Saying reporting should be fair and accurate is not the same as saying the comments reported upon should be fair and accurate”. Very Important, the Presidency Miriam O’Callaghan, presenter of Ireland’s flagship current affairs programme, ‘Prime Time’, has allowed it to be spread that she wants to be the next President. How compromising! And she’s told VIP magazine whose cover insinuated itself into Villager’s glance in Spar (he was looking without avail for Village), that she wants her epitaph to say that she was a good mother. This presumes she is entitled to an epitaph. Villager prefers presidents and prime-time broadcasters who at least rate the job in hand. Beit bitten The proposed sale of €20m of Old Masters paintings from the Beit collection at Russborough, Co Wicklow – in contradiction of the express wishes of the deceased Beits who bequeathed them – has been postponed, probably indefinitely, but it has yielded casualties. The Georgian Society’s representative on the Beit Foundation which promoted the sale, Robert O’Byrne, fell on his 22-carat sword to be replaced by senior counsel Jerry Healy, though the soi-disant ‘Society’ is said to be in turmoil, with President Patrick Guinness denying he had, as a release had stated, “deplored” O’Byrne’s approval of the sale. An Taisce has replaced Consuelo O’Connor, its one-time chairwoman, who also approved the sales, with Ian Lumley, its heritage officer. An Taisce is taking a case against the sales that have already gone ahead and as preemption of any attempt to revive the suspended sale of the paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger and Francesco Guardi if their mooted purchase by an Irish collector stalls. An Taisce’s ground is that the National Gallery doesn’t have authority to grant export licence – it was simply never delegated the power by the Department of Arts. Brutal Beloved former Taoiseach John Bruton of the IFSC (annual pension variously reported as €125K, €134k or €141k; first pension paid aged 35; retired from Dail aged 57) writes in the Irish Times castigating Greece’s “completely unsustainable pensions regime” (annual average pensions €9,996; average retirement age now 61). Blood out of Labour’s stone Labour sold its headquarters on Ely Place for €800,000 and has moved to the spiffy top floor of the Bloodstone building on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, built by Sean Dunne’s Mountbrook and owned by Blackstone. Labour pays rent of €212,625 a year. It will run out politically before it runs out financially, then. EqualiTU Newish ICTU General Secretary, Patricia King has told its bennial conference that the greatest friend that inequality and those who perpetrated it had was a weak trade union organisation. Ms King told the conference that the introduction of a living wage of €11.45 per hour would

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    No to free-market Europe

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    Few countries elevate rejection as far as celebrating a national “No” day. But every October 28th Greece’s Oxi Day holiday commemorates the No with which it replied to a humiliating Italian ultimatum in 1940, a refusal to acquiesce that led to invasion. Greece is also the country whose stereotype is plate-smashing. The New York Times recently ran a story recalling doughty Greek fighters in the early 1800s who blew themselves up rather than submit to the Ottoman; in the mountains of Zalongo, by legend, women flung their children off a cliff and then danced off after them rather than be sold as slaves. And yet feisty contrarianism may be just what the twin hegemonic systems of free markets and undue influence by the demands of capital, deserve in exhausting 2015. Greece’s negativity has gone global after a No vote to a referendum on whether it should approve an already lapsed offer from eurozone finance minister for a new bailout. When it comes to it most people’s view on the Greece tragedy is rooted in their psychology: do they favour the underdog and the romantic, or the powerful and the financial. Above all it is rooted in their desire for change. If you think the world, presumably symptomised by your own situation, is in good shape, you will be nervous about it; if not you may be more open to radicalism. Village tends to be critical of prevailing politics and economics and is open to radical change. But even for the cautious the weight of evidence suggests we must stop bullying the admittedly traditionally profligate Greeks. On a human level certainly Greece commands our sympathy as, five years into the debt crisis, the country has suffered a loss of 25% of its GDP and a debilitating rise in immiseration and the unemployment rate – which now stands at over 50% among young people. However, even on a basic practical level, Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, for example, says austerity is also probably shrinking Greece’s economy faster than it reduces debt, so all the suffering serves no purpose. According to the conservative IMF’s analysis, Athens’ debts are unsustainable and require large-scale relief: a 20-year grace period, or a haircut that yields a reduction in debt of more than 30% of GDP. Otherwise even if the economy managed to grow at close to its historical long-term average of 1pc a year, Greece’s debt ratio would still top 100pc of GDP in three decades. “Facts are stubborn. You can’t hide the facts because they may be exploited”, one IMF official told Reuters. If discomfiting, this analysis at least has the determining virtue of being the truth. As Village went to press the normally practical Germans were finally coming around to this truth, though confusingly they did not seem to incline to being a consensual partners to any write-off. More fundamentally for non-Greeks, the debacle has certainly undermined those who claim either global capitalism or the European project are exercises in democracy. For example if you wondering why the IMF favours the markets and keeping taxes down, when dealing with the likes of Ireland and Greece, it is important to know that IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes. The IMF will not allow Greece to raise taxes on the rich or on corporations. It interfered with Greece’s fiscal authority to insist on a change to any possible bailout to reflect this concern. A previous Greek government was forced out when it called a referendum and a change of leadership was foisted anti-democratically by the eurogroup on Italy when the Euro-technocrat Mario Monti was imposed as Prime Minister in 2011. In Ireland the process where in 2010 at a conference call with the G7 finance ministers, a haircut for Irish bank bondholders was vetoed by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, shows closer to home just how undemocratically decisions that affect all of us can be taken. How often do we see policy driven by resigned, indeed sometimes enthusiastic, deference to the markets. It is alleged you cannot buck them. Moreover, whatever government the cradle of democracy chooses it must, like all eurozone countries, defer to the decision taken in December 2011 by the European Council to adopt a new fiscal compact, imposing on all members of the eurozone a rule that “government budgets shall be balanced or in surplus”. The rule had to be transcribed into national law, and to “contain an automatic correction mechanism that shall be triggered in the event of deviation”. Decisions on Greece have been dominated by ‘the eurogroup’, an informal group not bound by treaties or other laws that actually does not consider itself bound by those long-lucubrated European treaties. The European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) is an anonymous and unelected body, passing itself off as a robotic ‘Facility’ that has acquired the power to bankrupt an entire country and effectively expel it from the euro zone. It recently issued a formal threat to call in Greece’s loans from the EFSF early. It simply has no mandate. Why should we be in thrall to a bureaucracy supporting that has now shown itself willing to support kleptocracy? In 2015 Ireland will spend over €8bn on interest alone on debt repayments. That’s roughly the same as we spend on the entire education budget. It is unsustainable, mini-boom notwithstanding. On ethical and selfish grounds, and because Ireland uniquely can see that global capitalism, represented by the extraordinary boom, crash and enforced payments to unsecured bondholders, and democratic deficits represented by our vulnerability to decisions taken elsewhere. In an interview with Die Zeit in early July French Thomas Piketty suggested that we need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II: “A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable. Just now, we’ve lost six months in the completely intransparent negotiations with Athens”. A new European institution would be required to determine the maximum allowable

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    Europeans Against the European Union. By Ronan Burtenshaw.

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    By Ronan Burtenshaw In late September 2009 I was walking through Dublin as the city prepared for the rerun of the Lisbon Treaty referendum. Outside Dublin Castle I ran into canvassers from Generation Yes, a young, liberal, pro-Europe group established early that year to campaign for the passage of the treaty. Drawing them into conversation you could feel the passion of their arguments. They were the erasmus generation – students and graduates who saw the European Union as an engine of progress for Ireland and a liberator that had broken us from our bleak, parochial past. Rather than the ‘Yes for Jobs’ vacuities many of the main political parties ran with in the campaign, Generation Yes spoke to direct experience living and working in Europe or for European businesses in Ireland. Many of its best advocates came from the tech sector and saw the EU as a vanguard project of a globalising world, breaking down borders, encouraging innovation and providing opportunity. Generation Yes played a crucial role in the landslide victory of 2009. More clearly than any other organisation involved they developed an identity for the Yes camp. The European Union represented a young, modern, idealistic cosmopolitanism. The No camp, as I remember now-Senator John Crown saying on my local radio station, were the past, “Trotskyite communists and right-wing zealots”. So, Lisbon II passed, Ireland’s political elite celebrated, and Generation Yes disappeared. But less than a year later the European Union, so long considered a benevolent actor in Irish politics, imposing human rights with a pat on the head from the continent, came to wear a quite different mask. 2010 brought the Troika. Just five years after its arrival on the scene, the creditors’ union of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has come to dominate the popular imagination of the European Union. For the peripheral states they made their home their policies have inextricably linked the project of European integration to falling living standards, crumbling welfare states and debt servitude. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that a Generation Yes for 2015 is almost impossible to imagine. A group of the same name might intervene in a referendum, it might even attempt to use a similar message, but it would have to reckon with the fact that the sickly-sweet vision of Europe it once sold has been indissolubly mixed with the bitterness of austerity. It would also have to reckon with a rival identity. Not the eurosceptic Right, a nationalist opponent it had always comfortably beaten in Ireland. But, since 2011, a rival, pro-European identity has emerged which is highly critical of the Troika and the increasingly undemocratic apparatus of the European Union. Last month, in Greece, this movement was given a name: Generation No. The vote in Greece was striking in its breakdown. The average No voter rejecting the Troika’s ultimatum was young, working-class and held increasingly left-wing views. The percentage for ‘oxi’ under 25 was 85, under 35 was 78. These were a new generation, living in conditions of over 60% unemployment, often having to stretch out their studies over many years to afford to complete them, relying on cash from their parents to survive. But also, it is a generation increasingly willing to challenge the shibboleths of our societies – to experiment in unorthodox relationships to the economy, to housing, to politics. The price of building up the reputation of the European Union as an arena of opportunity for Europe’s periphery has been the weight of frustrated expectations when this turned out not to be the case. As a result not just in Greece but in an increasing number of states it isn’t Generation Yes which represents the future but Generation No. This shift in orientation towards the European project is not down to a turn against Europe. In fact, the Greek No vote enjoyed enormous support from across the continent – marches, direct actions, statements from social movements, trade unions, NGOs, academics and intellectuals. Instead what has happened is that the European Union has been stripped back to its essence as a neoliberal economic project. Gone are the pretences of internationalism or a social element – the Greek crisis has demonstrated that bonds of solidarity stretch only as far as is profitable. To understand why this disconnect between growing internationalism of European peoples and the European Union exists, we have to explore its economic basis. The idea of a ‘social Europe’ has never been at the heart of this market-oriented project of European integration. At the same time as Jacque Delors was seducing Europe’s social democrats into this myth in the 1980s, he was trapping them into arrangements they would never agree to without it. First in 1988 the directive mandating for extensive free movement of capital and then, in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty. These arrangements provided the foundation for the euro – a currency which was to drive the stake of neoliberalism into the heart of the European Union. The money in our pockets is the most right-wing currency ever designed, with a central bank that doesn’t care about unemployment and won’t act as a lender of last resort, modelled to work only in the free-market utopias predicted to arrive at Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. It was also forged in two stages of class warfare. On its inception the policies of Agenda 2010 forced wages and conditions down for German workers to create optimal conditions for its export industry. On the occasion of its first crisis the same has been done to workers in peripheral Europe. These divisions – between core and periphery, capital and labour – are key to understanding why the European project has ended up where it has. If we are mystified by the results of the recent negotiations in Greece it is only because so many stories about the euro haven’t been told. Another hidden story takes place in the late 1990s, when German banks took on huge exposure in states like Greece by investing in high-yield bonds. For the business class this meant

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    Rugby today focuses on spectators not its amateur players. By Jim O’ Callaghan.

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      One of the many social changes that sociologists and social historians of the future will examine is the change associated with participation in competitive sport in Ireland over the past twenty years. Throughout the twentieth century rugby in Ireland was a participation sport centred on clubs throughout the 32 counties, with many clubs fielding at least 8 teams on a weekly basis. It has now become a spectator sport, with most clubs having difficulty fielding more than three teams. Although most public attention in the past centred on the performance of the first teams in those clubs, the purpose of the clubs was to facilitate men – young and not so young – who wished to play rugby for enjoyment and social interaction. In fact, the reason men played rugby was not because they wished to achieve sporting excellence but because they enjoyed the game and the associated social life. That purpose has now vanished from Irish rugby clubs. Rugby clubs in Ireland can now be more accurately assessed when viewed in a pyramid structure. Where clubs are very strong and socially active is at underage, mini-rugby level. Rugby clubs throughout the country are now extremely busy every Sunday morning with young boys and girls learning the game, coached by volunteering parents who enjoy the social engagement generated by their children’s involvement in underage rugby. Once these children reach the age of 12, the attraction and availability of the sport becomes narrower. There are very few options for girls between the ages of 12 and 18 who wish to continue playing rugby. For boys, those who go on to attend rugby-playing schools are set on a path that involves them playing for their schools, while those who don’t attend rugby playing schools and who wish to continue with the game will find it difficult to find a club where they can play rugby at a competitive level between the ages of 12 and 18. At school the level of training and commitment required of young rugby players has become enormous; in some ways suffocating. The objective in schools, unfortunately, is no longer about participation but about winning and the attainment of excellence. By 16 years of age coaches can tell whether a player may achieve excellence. They can also identify for certain those who will never achieve excellence. This marks the first stage of a filtering process that has the effect of discouraging many young players from playing the game. Traditionally, players who left rugby-playing schools continued to play in a club or university. Those clubs also attracted players who didn’t play at school but who wished to pick up the game for the first time at 18. Neither of these circumstances occurs anymore. Those who leave school and who are not destined to play rugby at a high level – even within a club – retire from the game. Those who at 18 have never played will only be treated seriously by coaches if they display unusual ability or physique. The change that has occurred is that no longer do young men want to join a club to play social rugby. The reason for this change appears to be twofold. First, participation in rugby is now achieved, or purportedly achieved, by watching a provincial team. The significant increase in attendances watching professional rugby matches is, in part, explained by the opening up of rugby to a new spectatorship. It is also explained by the fact that people who previously played club rugby at weekends now prefer to watch rather than play. ocallaghan1 Second, our society now confers much greater respect on, and emphasises, achievement and excellence rather than participation and enjoyment. It is also true to say that parts of our society denigrate participation in a senior sport that does not attain excellence. This also explains the increased interest and participation in tag rugby during summer months. People play this because it is primarily about fun. It does not expose people to the perception of mediocrity that may be associated with a 24-year-old playing junior rugby for a club. The net effect is that the number of men playing rugby after the age of 18 has now decreased considerably. The majority of those who continue playing after the age of 18 are extremely committed and believe that they can attain sporting excellence. However, the avenues are so precarious for talented players in this age group that many of them stop playing in their early and mid-20s. A talented rugby player leaving school who is offered a provincial contract has little opportunity to develop any other career to see him through most of his working life. If contracted to a province and therefore employed to lift weights, watch videos and play matches (which many do not enjoy), it is virtually impossible to train for another career. The effect is that by 23-24, a player will know whether he is destined to make it in professional rugby. Many of those who are not so destined decide at that stage not to revert to club rugby but instead to retire from the game completely. Although they may have attained excellence without recognition, many do not wish to ‘regress’ to playing club rugby. The effect of these changes upon Irish club rugby is that a very small number of men between the ages of 20 and 30 now play rugby in the clubs. Most of them are playing still in the pursuit of excellence and professional recognition. Very few now play club rugby for social interaction or enjoyment. The involvement of parents in mini rugby has grown MEMBERSHIP in many clubs but the absence of players in the 20-30 age group reveals the decreased involvement that rugby clubs have in Irish social life. The decline of adult participation in club rugby is in marked contrast to the high levels of adult participation in the GAA. Unlike the IRFU, the GAA recognises the important social role it played and continues to play

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    Five points for citizen economics

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    As politicians begin to throw around proposals for the last Budget before Fine Gael and Labour face an election, it’s worth remembering that this time is really the only window where citizens are encouraged to engage in economic debate. Even then the space of time is too short and the range of topics up for debate too narrow to make much impact. When it ends, economics is the preserve of technocrats again. That is a serious problem. Economics is the discussion of how things in our society are produced and distributed. If you leave it to experts there is a big cost for democracy. Yet, while people feel comfortable engaging in debate about politics in the Middle East or presidential elections in the United States, there is a reticence to talk about economics. Part of this is down to economics as a discipline, which has become increasingly remote from day-to-day life. The primacy of the market as a means to resolve problems has led to the rise of ‘market scientists”, who are seen as the authoritative voices on running an efficient economy. The language deployed by these experts is deliberately exclusive. Certainly they are unlikely to start explorations of economics with parables about pin factories, as Adam Smith did in ‘The Wealth of Nations’. Yet they dominate economics discourse. When economics is discussed with any substance in the mainstream press market scientists from universities, think-tanks and finance houses are given free reign to make objective statements about the common good. Research by Julien Merveille has shown that between 2008 and 2012 77% of commentators on austerity were from elite institutions. Another factor leading to the retreat of ordinary people from economic debate is the narrowing space for democracy in the economy. The democratic sphere only extends to areas where there is or could be public ownership. Outside of this decisions are made by private individuals or organisations. As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer hands, fewer economic decisions are made with public participation. This has bred a cynicism about what can be achieved by discussing economics. With capital increasingly breaking free from taxation – and mobile enough to defeat strikes – people have come to accept that social problems can only be resolved by appealing to private individuals and organisations to solve problems profitably through the market. And so we are relegated in the economy from citizens to consumers. This must be reversed if we are to build a politics in Ireland that can reclaim our society from the political establishment and the interest they serve. Joan Robinson, one of the great economists of the twentieth century, was once asked why people should study economics. She replied, “so that economists can’t fool you”. If we are to construct a movement where people are agents as opposed to pawns in the hands of power we will have to create space for a broader, more emancipatory discussion of economics. To that end here are five assertions citizens can make in the economic sphere that can help alter the direction of debates: 1. Economics is political  Mainstream economics discourse operates under the pretense that power in the economy lies only with the policy wonks and business suits. This is not true. Take the commodification of a public good with the water charges, for example. There is widespread opposition to this policy – as recent months have shown. It is possible to suggest quick-fix solutions to provide for the abolition of these charges. The amount they will take in could be accounted for by the kind of wealth and capital acquisitions taxes proposed by Unite and the ICTU’s pre-Budget submissions, for instance.  But that won’t happen. Why? Because economics is political and power concedes nothing without a demand. An organised opposition is far more important than a shovel-ready alternative. A mass water charges campaign that imposes costs on politicians for continuing on the current path can win concessions, as we have seen, and stands a chance of having those water charges overturned. Making a completing argument to End Kenny doesn’t. 2. There is more than one way of thinking about the economy In recent years students of economics across the world have been challenging the narrow nature of discourse in their universities with campaigns for what is called “post-crash economics”. Ireland could desperately use a post-crash economics movement – especially as so many go the experts invited to discuss our economy today are the same ones who advised us off a cliff in 2008. But the aim of the post-crash movement is broader than exposing the spectacular failure of mainstream economics during the recent crisis. It is to argue for diversity in the discipline. The kind of ‘market scientist’ approach I described above is a product of particular way of thinking about the economy – the neoclassical school. That is only one school among many. In fact, in a recent book Cambridge economist Hajoon Chang identified seven schools of economic thought. So why does one of these schools have such predominance – especially after it was proven flawed so recently? Citizens should demand a diversity of economic analysis from their media and education institutions, especially public ones. No more single experts being given free reign to make objective claims about the economy as if there were no competing ideas. 3. Wealth is created by us One of the most pernicious aspects of mainstream economics discourse is the idea that wealth is privately created and publicly expropriated through government taxes. This is underpins the narrative of ‘wealth creators’ and ‘job creators’, who we must allow to accumulate more and more wealth for our society to function. This is a nonsense – and particularly important for citizen economics to dispel. If we truly believe that wealth is created solely by these people, how could we but see ourselves as insignificant in the economy? If the economy grows by providing the wealthy with bigger and bigger shares of the pie and then letting wealth ‘trickle down’ on

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