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Politics

The Jordan petition on Ireland’s referendum act.

by Village 28 January, 2015

By Anthony Coughlan. We will fix that Stalinist body”, the late Brian Lenihan TD said to me in the car-park of Athlone College of Technology following a debate on the Nice Treaty in 2001. The “Stalinist body” was the statutory Referendum Commission. The “Stalinism” seemingly consisted in the Commission being required to set out the arguments for and against in referendums The Referendum Commission was established following the 1995 McKenna Supreme Court judgment that it is unconstitutional of the Government to spend taxpayers’ money trying to obtain a particular result in a referendum. The fact that the original Referendum Commission had the job of setting out the pros and cons of constitutional change meant that the No-side arguments on the Nice Treaty had a significant weight in money behind them for the first time, through the Commission’s media advertisements. This was a major reason why voters rejected Nice in 2001. Of course the Government was anxious to reverse that result in the Nice 2 referendum. On the last day before the Oireachtas rose for the Christmas holidays in December 2001, with just one day’s notice to the Opposition, the Government put all stages of a new Referendum Bill through the Dáil and Seanad in a couple of hours with the media and public oblivious. This removed from the Referendum Commission its function of preparing and publicising a statement setting out the relevant Yes-side and No-side arguments in referendums. It left the Commission with its other original function of informing voters what the referendum was about. Fine Gael and Labour opposed this change. The democratic merit of the Referendum Commission’s original Yes/No function was that the Commission had to be satisfied that the Yes/No arguments it publicised were validly grounded in the constitutional change proposed and in legitimate hopes or fears citizen voters might have with regard to it. Obvious fallacies, irrelevancies or ad hominem arguments were not acceptable to the Commission, although these are commonplace in elections and privately funded referendum contests. Another result of the Referendum Commission losing its Yes/No function was that when private interests knew that the arguments on each side would be put fairly and honestly before the public through the Commission’s advertisements, big-league private money had little incentive to get involved. Thus when an unchanged Nice Treaty was re-run in 2002, with the Referendum Commission no longer putting the Yes/No arguments, private funders, including private companies and State firms, weighed in in a big way. In Nice 2, in contrast to Nice 1, Yes-side advertising outweighed No-side by a factor of ten to one In the eleven constitutional referendums which were held following the Supreme Court’s judgment in McKenna no Irish Government presumed to run its own ‘information campaign’ alongside the independent Referendum Commission’s statutory-based campaign to inform citizens what the subject-matter of the referendum was. This changed with the next EU referendum after Nice, that on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. On that occasion the Government decided the Referendum Commission’s campaign was not enough. It sent its own booklet to every household in the State with the tendentious title ‘EU Reform Treaty’ instead of Lisbon Treaty. The booklet carried the following slogans on its cover, which clearly amounted to implicit advocacy: “Effective democratic union”, “Progress and prosperity”, “Peace and justice in the wider world”, “A union of values”. Inside it summarised the provisions of Lisbon under such headings as “Increased democratic controls” and “Equality between Member States”. The same happened in Lisbon 2 in 2009 and in the 2012 Fiscal Treaty referendum which makes permanent balanced budgets mandatory for Eurozone States like Ireland. These one-sided Government “information campaigns” were not challenged in the courts, but engineer Mark McCrystal did make a challenge to the 2012 Children’s Rights referendum. On that occasion the Supreme Court found that the Government-issued booklet was one-sided, contained errors of fact and constituted a breach of Irish citizens’ rights to a fair and democratic referendum. In its McCrystal judgment the Supreme Court made clear that its 1995 McKenna principles accorded with best international practice in referendums. It referred to the ‘Code of Good Practice in Referendums’ which had been adopted by an advisory body of the Council of Europe, and which included the statement that “Equality of opportunity must be guaranteed for the supporters and opponents of the proposal being voted on. This entails a neutral attitude by administrative authorities, in particular with regard to public funding of a campaign and its actors”. In the Children’s Rights referendum the misleading Government ‘information campaign’ was continued to the very eve of the poll. Did it therefore pollute the Children’s Rights referendum result such as to invalidate it? This is the issue raised in the petition against that result by Joanna Jordan. A seven-judge Supreme Court heard this petition for five days in December and will give its judgment in the New Year. The Jordan petition echoes the Hanafin petition on the 1995 Divorce referendum. In 1995 the Supreme Court ruled in McKenna that the Government’s expenditure of £500,000 on Yes-side advertisements for divorce was unconstitutional. This caused the Government to pull all its adverts on the weekend before the divorce poll. Free party broadcasts on radio and TV then became crucial for the Yes-side, as all the Dáil parties favoured Yes. In the week before the poll this led RTé to give 42 minutes of free broadcasting time to the Yes-side as against 10 minutes to the Nos. Even though the present writer was not involved in the divorce campaign, he went to court when the poll was over to challenge what he regarded as the unfairness of this imbalance in free broadcasting time. In its Coughlan judgment given four years later the Supreme Court found that such imbalance was illegal under the Broadcasting Acts. These require broadcasters to be “fair, impartial and objective” on issues of public controversy and debate and ”fair to all interests concerned” at all times. Every citizen is “an interest concerned” in a referendum. The

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Economy

Magical public banking

by Village 22 January, 2015

By Emer O Siochrú Three Irish political parties support publicly-owned banks but the mainstream has yet to be convinced. Ellen Brown who spoke at Kilkenomics in October is on a mission to change that. Brown claims that a state bank can nearly double its spending power if it puts state money in its own bank as capital and deposits. I ask what she thought of Deirdre McClusky, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, describing that at Kilkenomics as “magical thinking”. She’s unfazed: “Banking is magical. It’s the source of about 95% of our money supply. Except for paper money and coins, all of our money is created by banks when they make loans. Contrary to popular belief, banks do not lend their deposits. They create deposits when they make loans”. Of course, they need their deposits to clear their cheques. But where do the deposits come from? Unlike with a revolving fund, which can only lend its money out and then wait for it to come back before lending it again, a bank can generate loans backed by its deposits while the deposits remain in the bank, available to depositors. The money is effectively double counted. If the depositor and the borrower come for their money at the same time, the bank can borrow very cheaply from other banks or the money market to cover the shortfall. And that is the magic of banking”. She is equivocal about the proposed Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland which is about to launch with €500m in credit for SMEs. “It is not actually a bank. Its money comes largely from KfW, a German publicly-quoted development bank, to help capitalise the Irish banks. The interest on that capital will go back to Germany, and the banks that will be lending the money to small and medium-size businesses are the same three big Irish banks that have not shown themselves to be good stewards in the local lending market”. In Germany, KfW provides liquidity for a network of skilled, locally responsive 200-year-old publicly-owned banks called Sparkassen. She says “they service about 70% of the domestic SME market and are largely responsible for its viability even in the face of a global credit crisis”. The Sparkassen group is quite interested in helping Ireland set up a similar network of publicly-owned banks, not because they want to expand into Ireland, which they are not allowed to do, but, according to Brown, because they want to establish the viability of the model, which is under threat in the Eurozone. They describe themselves as the last man standing, fighting for banking in the public interest. She approves. Another option she moots for Ireland is of a state-owned bank similar to the Bank of North Dakota, the only depository bank in the US that is publicly owned. North Dakota is also the only state that escaped the credit crisis, boasting a substantial surplus every year since 2008. It has the lowest unemployment rate and one of the lowest foreclosure rates in the US. All state revenues are deposited in the Bank of North Dakota by law. The bank then leverages its revenues into credit for the state. Brown believes that “One of the advantages of public bank ownership is that it can cut the cost to the public of infrastructure in half. On average, 50% of the cost of infrastructure goes to interest. It’s just like with a mortgage”. Owning the bank also allows the state to direct credit where it needs to go in the community. Publicly owned banks lend counter-cyclically, meaning that when other banks are afraid to lend, the public banks expand their lending. Public banks also have much lower costs. The Bank of North Dakota doesn’t have to advertise for customers or deposits. It has a captive depositor in the state itself, and it gets its customers by partnering with the local banks, which serve as the front office. The Bank of North Dakota then comes in and backs the loan, helping with capital and liquidity requirements and sharing in the profit. It does not pay bonuses, fees, or commissions, and it has no high-paid executives. As a result, it is highly profitable, for the state. As to the fact that Ireland already owns over 95% of AIB and 14 to 15% of the Bank of Ireland, she points out that “the public has borne the losses for those banks, but it has not reaped the profits, and until their toxic balance sheets are cleaned up, there won’t be many profits”. The government has not taken over their direction in the public interest. She considers it would be a smart move for Ireland to set up its own freshly capitalised ‘good’ public bank if only to have a ‘Plan B’ if, or some say when, the current system takes another big hit. • Emer O’Siochru is a member of the Public Banking Forum, Ireland.

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Economy

14.4% Gender pay gap issue relegated.

by Village 21 January, 2015

By Orla O’ Connor. The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) has campaigned for a gender budgeting approach to be implemented by Government. This would mean that all budgetary measures were assessed for their impact on men and women. We would have got a very different budget had this been done. A recent ESRI and Equality Authority study highlighted the greater loss of income for women in comparison to men over the years of the economic crises. It provides hard evidence that women have suffered more under austerity. Women in couples suffered a 14% loss in income levels compared to 9% for men, and this gap widened further for those on lower incomes. The tools are there for gender budgeting but Government has refused to apply them and this is the outcome. The NWCI has continually highlighted that those on the lowest incomes have shouldered greater losses and contributed a higher proportion of their income in direct and indirect taxes over the economic crisis. Rather than a squeezed middle, we have an increasingly hard-pressed majority with over 50% of all households relying on some form of social transfer to keep them way from the risk of poverty. Women and children have been hammered by these austerity measures, consistently bearing the brunt of reduced income and cuts to services. Budget 2015 provided the opportunity to begin to reverse these trends. The Government chose not to, and introduced a pre-election Budget aimed at voters on higher incomes. The cut in the top rate of tax to 40% was unnecessary, and there had been no popular demand for it. The changes introduced to income tax and the USC left workers with incomes of €33,800 to €70,000 effectively unchanged, but the greatest gain went to those with incomes of €70,000 or more. In addition any increases to incomes for the low paid in Budget 2015 are negated by the impact of increased property and water taxes, on families. Small gains were made. The five-euro increase in child benefit is a partial recognition of the cost of living increases for families. The NWCI had called for an increase in the lead up to the Budget. However, this measure, worth approximately €70 million, does not offset cuts to the payment which amount to over €400 million since 2009. Changes to social welfare in Budget 2015 will have a particular impact on women. Women are more likely to be in low-paid, precarious work, and their income is more likely to have dropped during the recession. The extension of the allowance for child dependants for the first months of employment represents a partial recognition of the poverty trap that exists in the transition between welfare and work for many women. However, it does not address the issue of those trapped in such precarious work. Incentives for employment in this Budget should have been designed to deliver quality jobs. The NWCI had called for an increase to the minimum wage. This would recognise increases in the cost of living and address low pay. It would also have a direct impact on reducing the gender pay gap that stands at approximately 14.4% (according to the CSO in 2013 – the European Commision figure is somewhat lower. See graphic opposite). A Low Pay Commission was announced in the Budget. This has the potential to deliver reform and increased living standards for those on low pay. However, it must deliver real and quick change in determining a decent standard of pay for all that is relative in some way to those on high incomes. The increase in the living-alone allowance is significant for older women. The ending of the pension levy, however, does not address the ongoing inequality in private-pension tax relief for high income earners. It merely takes us further from badly needed pension reform. In addition, changes to the contributory pension bands, which have hit women the hardest, were not reversed. The ESRI and the Equality Authority have shown that Budgets are not gender neutral. Once again we are witnessing a Budget that has given priority to higher earners and predominantly male earners. This shows how those in power have failed to learn from our past economic mistakes about the negative impact of economic and gender inequality on our society. • Orla O’Connor is Director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.

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News

In the bath with Sean Quinn, 3.2bn loser

by Village 21 January, 2015

Seán Quinn lay back in the gilt bathtub that he had got the Quinn Group to buy for him, and was hiding from Anglo, and reflected on how honest he was. I am a very honest man, he thought, decent and humble, wrecked by Anglo. I don’t use a mobile phone. I play cards in a house at night where you have to go out into the front street to go to the toilet. I’m not overly shy but I much prefer to sit back and enjoy what I’m doing with my two dogs, the Wellington boots on and dodging around the mountain. It gives my brain more time to do what it’s best at doing. Being honest and getting me billions offshore first and then away from Anglo and NAMA. I am as honest as the Cavan day is long. So honest you could play cards with me all day and all I’d do is dodge and go outside to the toilet, shyly. Never do anything dishonest. Not all day long. Never gamble away 2.8bn. Not the lad who’d cost the State 2.2bn in unpaid loans and 1bn in the insurance levy. Seán reflected on how mean he was, always had been, frugal he called it. Way too frugal to be a gambler. Warm water trickled down on him recumbent through the sterling silver taps he’d bought in Sevastopol. Sure the house was worth 10 million on its own, the size of a small hotel. Class. So I rang Petey and said, lookit Petey, whatever this agreement you and I had for the last six, 12 months. . . whatever advice you’ve been getting from Russia, if you can get that thing put together as quickly as possible it should be done. I’d love to find a handy way out of me difficulties, try to get a wee bit of pride back. He stuck a thick finger into the jar of Russian caviar, pasted it on his tongue and swooshed it against his palate. He loved it. Better than foie gras. Frugal he was. If he managed just to hold on to the Ukrainian stuff he’d still be in the top 200 richest worldwide. Not like when he was 146th in the Forbes list and number one in Ireland. But still enough to make a simple man grin, though his grin was a bit twitchy these days. Just me cards and me toilet and me wee shyness. A few shillings and a top of the mornin to ye. Anglo, them bastards in the Spotlight programme and the bloody media. Out to get him for doin’ an honest day’s work. He tried to think if he’d ever had a dishonest moment, even a wee private one, but try as he could he just couldn’t think of one. I love myself he thought and he rubbed the carbolic across his still broad and hairy shoulders. They couldn’t take those away from him. Fifty years of hard work. 8000 jobs that was what it was about. Not the 4bn he’d once had and had practically stolen from him by Anglo and NAMA and a bunch of do-good gits. I’d a great business built up over decades until I got involved with Anglo Irish Bank, which wrecked Ireland, bullied me out of office, raped me companies and made me a criminal in Irish society. Petey warned me they’d do it. I had zero interest in dealing with the State-owned Anglo after it took over the companies, he reasoned. Poor Brenda hadn’t a clue she’d owned the Slieve Russell hotel since she was three. A beautiful hotel if ever there was a beautiful fake-pillared box in a car-park with Georgian bits added on to give it style. The biggest hotel in Cavan and if I’d had me chance woulda been the biggest hotel in the world eventually. The insurance regulator bastards wouldn’t let me continue charging them special low premiums. Just cos we wouldn’t be able to pay out on claims. Me ol’ Contracts for Difference, me Nestlé shares and best of all me empire. Property empire. Property Property Property. Contracts for Difference. Bad luck and a bunch of bastards. So Aoife’s wedding was paid for by a subsidiary of the Quinn Group and we claimed the VAT back from Revenue, said that the wedding was a marketing event for the Hotel. Jayz we enjoyed the vintage wines and champagne, me in the Bentley and Aoife in the Rolls. Them’s my companies and Petey’s and wee Seánie’s. The whole war cabinet’s . Any loss to the Irish taxpayer from moving me assets beyond the reach of Anglo Irish bank is Mickey Mouse. Never a day off in me life. Never shirked a bit of hard work. Started with the quarries, a bit of the usual with the border back and forth then the glass and a bit of fiddlin with plannin objections, then plastics and soon I’d fuckin lost the run of meself. Pubs, Hotels, Currency, and then the bloody Ukraine. Not my fault though. Me beloved Japanese Yen all gone. 830m dollars pissed away on shares other than Anglo. NOT MY FAULT. Anglo made me sign stuff and sure poor Patricia wouldn’t have had a clue that stuff she was signing was loans. Signin’ is only signin’. And now youse Anglo bastards are saying MY family owes £2.3bn. BILLION. A lot of twenty-one you’d get for that. How’ll they live on just 8k a month – the lads. Sure, I signed documents in a foreign language given to me by Peter Darragh Quinn and trusted his judgment to get our stuff out of harm’s way. Sure, I’m mixed up in getting randommers on the street in Moscow to sign documents they don’t understand making them beneficial owners of Belize-based companies to which we transfer tens of millions of Russian and Ukrainian shopping centres, pubs, hotels etc to get them out of the way of

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Media

Analysing Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday guestlist.

by Village 20 January, 2015

By Rónán Lynch. BrendanOConnorGuests-1 While Village can do serious analysis of serious talk radio, we can also get down with the celebrity stuff that people crave, openly or in secret. In this issue, we turn our attention to the Irish television talk show, and Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday Night Show in particular. O’Connor occupies a unique slot in the Irish media world as a talk-show host who has developed a crackling synergy between the reality TV of the nation’s station RTÉ and the celebrity culture of the nation’s favourite newspaper, the Sunday Independent. His profile has risen on the tide of celebrity culture that has steadily filled the TV schedules. When there’s space to fill on television or in print, and there’s nothing obvious to run with, there will always be one available: the only issue is A, B or C list. RTÉ 1 is home to Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show on Friday and Brendan O’Connor’s Saturday Night Show, with O’Connor’s show lagging slightly behind in the ratings, and much else. Both shows promise national and international celebrities, music and comedy, with the Late Late offering the additional attraction of political guests. Tubridy also has his daily slot on 2FM, though he never seems quite as comfortable with celebrity culture as O’Connor, whose second job is his high-profile spot in the Sunday Independent where he edits Life Magazine. For this issue, Village looked over the 2013/2014 season of the Saturday Night Show, running from September 2013 to May 2014, drawing up a list of 128 guests who appeared on the show, but broadly excluding singers who didn’t sit to talk to the host. Predictably, the Saturday Night Show is a TV show about television. So, if you like television, or more particularly Irish television, you may like it. For more than a decade the Sunday Independent has given O’Connor free rein to troll the nation. He’s dropped some spectacular clangers over the years, including his exhortation for people to plunge into the property market in September 2007, just as prices went off the cliff, and his resolute defence of Bertie Ahern long after most had decided that the former Taoiseach was living in an alternative reality. O’Connor’s broadcasting career began with a stint on the comedy show Don’t Feed the Gondolas with Seán Montcrieff as host during the 1990s, followed by a spell as a judge on the RTÉ talent show You’re A Star, and two years as host of the TV3 show The Apprentice: You’re Fired! O’Connor’s Apprentice was a ratings success despite its low production costs. The producers could film two shows in an afternoon and still compete in the ratings with RTÉ. The synergy between O’Connor’s television career and his Sunday Independent column and editorship of the paper’s celebrity magazine Life encouraged the paper to campaign for O’Connor’s installation as a talk show in his own right. O’Connor’s move to prime time came in 2010, when Pat Kenny’s decision to vacate the Late Late Show caused a reshuffle at RTÉ, which moved Ryan Tubridy from his Saturday night Tubridy Tonight show over to the Late Late Show on Friday nights, leaving an empty slot on Saturday nights. RTE initially pitched a Brendan O’Connor-fronted show against the slicker Craig Doyle, with O’Connor’s show proving the more popular, particularly in the Sunday Independent, and he was invested as the regular host in 2011. After three seasons of interviewing celebrities with nothing to say beyond promoting their products, O’Connor decided to ramp up the seriousness quotient, as he interviewed Barry Egan, the chief celebrant of celebrity at the Sunday Independent. Egan gazed down the couch at O’Connor and asked him how it feels to interview celebrities and soap stars every week. “I love it”, said O’Connor, going on to explain that the show would try to avoid the ‘PR rollercoaster’. “Some people only want to talk about their product. It’s like if I came in and kept going on about the Saturday Night Show is coming back on Saturday night at ten to ten, don’t miss it and all that”, said O’Connor, brilliantly satirising the onanism of the celebrity editor being interviewed by his own celebrity features writer while talking about the narcissism of celebrities. Of course, being a scion of the Sindo, it’s not entirely clear if O’Connor was being tongue-in-cheek. Watching a Saturday-night talk-show, viewers aren’t expecting the parade of politicians and other worthies who populate daytime and weekend radio talk shows, and only three politicians featured during the entire season we looked at: Mary Mitchell O’Connor, who was talking about fundraising for breast cancer; the now-retired Mary O’Rourke; and Joan Burton, another surprising Sindo favourite, talking about her ambition to become leader of the Labour party. The clever strategy of avoiding the PR rollercoaster turns out to be entirely aspirational, and the workaday formula turns out a lifestyle-oriented list of TV people and celebrities, chefs, sports stars, authors, stylists and comedians, though the show does have a good share of ordinary people, who make up about 15 per cent of the guests. Unfortunately, to qualify as an ordinary person on a television talk show, you generally need to have undergone some life-changing tragedy in the form of an execrable illness or the unexpected or impending death of a close family member. That’s the trade-off: most ordinary people only share their tragedies in public once. Most celebrities share the intimate details of their private lives with the general public as often and as vacantly as possible in exchange for wealth, fame and influence in the form of a rotating presence on the small screen. The phenomenon of reality television and its attendant celebrity especially rising/falling celebrity permeates the Saturday Night Show. Little did celebrity culture realise that it spent 300 years awaiting the rise of reality TV. Not that celebrity culture is anything new. From the eighteenth century, editors and reporters looked for publicly recognisable figures whose exploits would sell papers. The travails of jockeys, boxers, actors,

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Politics

Review of ‘In the Name of Love’ by Una Mullally.

by Village 20 January, 2015

By John Gormley. A refreshing and open evocation of the evolution of the fractious civil partnership legislation When excerpts from ‘In the Name of Love’, which was written and compiled by the journalist, Una Mullally, appeared in the Irish Times recently it sparked quite a bit of debate in Green Party circles. A lot of the discussion centred on why Roderic O’Gorman was not included in the long list of interviewees. Roderic was probably the person who worked hardest to ensure the introduction of civil partnership legislation. While he does receive honourable mention, the lack of a direct interview is a serious omission in what is otherwise a comprehensive and stimulating account of an important social movement. I should declare my own interest here: I was interviewed by Una Mulally for the book and later answered a series of questions by email. I realise now that my written replies were not entirely in keeping with the spirit of the undertaking. It is, after all, an oral history, and it’s the free and sometimes discursive manner of direct speech which is the real strength of this book. The interviewees talk honestly about how the movement for marriage equality evolved, providing some fascinating insights, interesting anecdotes, and claim versus counterclaim. Refreshingly, unlike the professional historian, Mullally allows readers to draw their own conclusions. Reading the text revived memories of a fraught period in government. While we were attempting to introduce the civil partnership legislation we were also dealing with an economy in meltdown. To make matters more complicated and acrimonious, elements within the Marriage Equality movement decided to portray those who opted for an incremental approach as sellouts and traitors. I don’t have a clear recollection of the much-referenced meeting with the LGBT representatives in Government Buildings, but I do recall a lesbian couple visiting my clinic and accusing me of enshrining discrimination in legislation. And how did I react to these accusations? Well, according to Gráinne Healy of Marriage Equality there may have been a ‘touch’ of resentment on my part. Believe me, it was more than a touch. I was livid. They were so successful in discrediting the legislation that David Norris was going to vote against it. He only changed his mind when Senator Rónán Mullen tried every means possible to filibuster and block it. The book is revealing in so many ways. Dermot Ahern, the former Minister for Justice, features extensively. He rejects his categorisation as socially conservative. While his Fianna Fáil colleague and opponent of the legislation, John Hanafin, is adamant that the Bill would not have happened without a major push from the Greens in coalition. The book also shows the extent of the distrust and hostility between the fundamentalists and pragmatist in the LGBT community. Kieran Rose of GLEN concedes that Marriage Equality and Noise won the ‘communications battle’, and indeed I remember the rather muted ‘victory’ celebration in the POD nightclub. In a separate chapter, devoted to the organisation Noise, Annie Hanlon explains how it was formed by members of the Labour Party LGBT group when their private members bill was defeated. To complete the social history the book looks forward to the forthcoming referendum. Churchill once commented that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. Those with power and influence control the historic narrative, and whereas for generations the LGBT movement was marginalised and suffered real discrimination, it now enjoys overwhelming support in the newspapers and broadcast media. The tables have turned quite dramatically in a relatively short space of time: our Taoiseach makes an appearance in the Pantibar, elected representatives from the mainstream parties are coming out, and commentators who question gay marriage have become pariahs. Breda O’Brien, a sincere critic of marriage equality, felt her personal safety was at risk at the time of Pantigate. She expresses the hope that “the oppressed do not become oppressors” now that the liberal revolution is almost complete. With the winds blowing so strongly in the right direction, and with every political party supporting the proposition, it would appear that victory in the referendum for marriage equality is assured. But such an assumption would be a mistake. The electorate is in an unforgiving mood right now. If the political establishment tells them to vote a certain way, they might just take a notion to do the exact opposite. The bookies might tell you otherwise, but this pragmatist says it’s not a certainty.

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Culture

Crevices of culture.

by Village 20 January, 2015

Review of Rod Stoneman’s Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual. By Richard Callanan. There is nothing to which Rod Stoneman is not willing to turn his attention so a broad canvas had to be created to encompass his writings on everyone from Andrea Mantegna to Banksy. The hoary old statistic about our being daily exposed to three thousand images is trotted out here and might have given Stoneman reasonable cause to consider limiting the five-hundred years covered here. But even having skipped the first thirty-thousand-odd years of human graphic depiction since the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave animal drawings it remains such a broad canvas that there are occasional grounds for suspecting that Stoneman is in danger of losing himself in his own thesis: “Undermining any tendencies towards the univocal or unequivocal has led me to a degree of continuous uncertainty about the extent to which these analytical perspectives objectively correspond to external realities and the extent to which they are determined by the point and place of the subjectivity from which they are viewed”. Fifty-four short essays and another slightly longer one are bound together with two-hundred photographs in this curious, intermittently engaging publication which melds memoir with philosophical, cultural and academic exploration of the history of the image. The entire production is immaculate and a veritable visual feast as the author might have reported with his unquenchable fondness for alliteration. But ‘virulent vestiges’ and ‘crevices of culture’ hardly prepare the reader for Stoneman’s musings on 9/11 when “3,000 civilians perished, pawns in the pitiless clash”. Rod Stoneman is a political animal who has spent over thirty years operating in the middle and upper echelons of both film and television production on these islands. Yet the fleeting glimpses we get here of his first-hand experiences through these decades leave us feeling short-changed. In 1988, as deputy commissioning editor for Channel 4, Stoneman commissioned Anne Crilly and the Derry Workshop to make a documentary called ‘Mother Ireland’ which included an interview with Sinn Féin activist, Máiread Farrell. The events surrounding the subsequent killing of Farrell by the SAS in Gibraltar and the consequent decision by Michael Grade and the Channel Four board not to broadcast the programme are related with sadly little new insight from Stoneman’s unique perspective on these events. By contrast we are treated to accounts that are mostly second-hand of events extensively covered elsewhere such as those surrounding the deaths of Che Guevara and Captain – ‘I’m just going outside and may be some time’ – Oates. The investigation of an opportunity to make a documentary about Oates which initially provides the slim justification for his inclusion here soon gives way to some beyond bizarre – whoops – speculation as to whether Oates’ and Hitler’s motives for committing suicide were somehow analogous. Stoneman is immensely well read and observant and meticulous in detailing with elaborate footnotes his every cultural reference and observation, when he might instead on occasion have credited his readers with – for instance – knowing, or at least knowing how to find out, what was meant by a Google Adword. It may be a legacy of the author’s many years of public service that every base must not only be touched but numbered, catalogued and cross-referenced. So little faith has Stoneman in his readers that we cannot even be trusted to reach for ourselves the conclusion that the “moth drawn to a flame” in all likelihood “singes its wings”. The number and length of the footnotes necessitated their promotion from the foot of the page to a sidebar where too often they compete for the reader’s attention with the photograph captions. Yet when he writes of “the great castration” (his quotation marks) of 9/11 we are left completely in the dark as to the source of what is an extraordinary take on those events. Has Stoneman extrapolated this unattributed quote from the the financial industry’s own term for its biggest and brashest operators, the ‘big swinging dicks’ of Wall Street? Did the number of financial traders who died in the Twin Towers spark this notion and this phraseology which the author then could not bring himself to omit or – understandably – include as a coinage of his own. Hints of celebrity anecdote pervade the book. It was in Stoneman’s company that Gabriel Byrne went on his last piss-up. Gretta Scacchi was once a fellow tenant in a damp basement flat. Brendan O’Carroll and the then head of the Film Board didn’t see eye to eye. And so the banal litany of fleeting mentions goes on: Peter Greenaway, David Puttnam, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Michael D Higgins. Over thirty years of meeting the great and the great-and-good, is that all there is? If not, is it the author’s recollection or his discretion which leaves us so under-nourished? The individual essays are grouped under five general headings so it was with renewed enthusiasm that I turned over the page from the section on Art/Culture to that on Film/Television which opens with a treatise on the film ‘Born Free’ which came out in 1966, when the author was eleven years of age. “She (Virginia McKenna playing the part of Joy Adamson) … jodhpurs … uprightness … khaki … buttocks … clench” and so it goes on until in a post-adolescent about-face the whole thing turns into an attack on the “pink-skinned English” perpetrating some sort of African cultural colonialism into which David Attenborough is eventually drawn. And, lest any American readers get too comfortable, Stoneman hurries on to shockingly reveal that Humphrey Bogart’s ‘Casablanca’ was actually a backlot in Los Angeles where Hollywood frequently indulged its “Orientalist fantasies” – to bring us full circle, Master Stoneman. Throughout the second half of the book we are battered with constant reminders of what’s amiss with the world. We have a “financial system based on greed and folly” and we inhabit a ‘”destructive reality”. But Stoneman’s greatest scorn is reserved for one of the main sources of his own

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30 years after 1984.

by Village 15 January, 2015

By Tom Hanahoe. The social class hierarchy of Oceania, where George Orwell’s 1984 is set, has three levels – the upper-class Inner Party, the elite ruling minority, who make up 2% of the population; the middle-class Outer Party, who make up 13% of the population; and the lower-class Proles, who make up 85% of the population and represent the uneducated working class. Funny that, really: in January of this year, Oxfam showed that the wealthiest 85 people in the world – who could almost all be seated in a double-decker bus – have an aggregate wealth equivalent to the combined wealth of the poorest 50 percent of mankind i.e. 3,500,000,000 human beings. Al Gore has written that, in the United States, “the top one percent… now have more wealth than the people in the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 Americans… have more wealth as a group than the 150 million Americans in the bottom 50 percent”. A March 2013 special edition of Forbes magazine listed the richest people on our planet, comprising 1,426 billionaires with an aggregate net worth of $5.4 trillion. Placed end to end in one-dollar bills, this sum would stretch around 1,100 times from earth to the moon and back – a total distance of over 500 million miles. Under the influence of the markets, countries generally redistribute wealth upwards. In 2007, multibillionaire Warren Buffett candidly spoke of how super-rich investors, such as himself, “pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies”, thus widening the wealth chasm between rich and poor. In Ireland, native Irish businesses pay substantial taxes, while many giant multinationals have sweetheart deals with the Revenue Commissioners, conferring them with selective tax advantages. Proponents of capitalism and liberal democracy – the dominant ideologies driving the new world order – argue that the twin concepts provide the best, certainly the most ‘realistic’, ideological frames for the future, even though as Piketty showed thirty years after Orwell they inevitably lead to the hyper-concentration of wealth. More pervasive – and, arguably, more dangerous – than communism ever was, the markets have served to reconfigure the global balance of economic power, transforming mega-corporations, collectively, into one of the world’s most powerful hegemons. Globalisation – whose primary focus is the breaking down of barriers to global trade, foreign investment and finance – also played a major role in fostering corporate power. In many ways, globalisation is the international face of the markets, generating a powerful global hegemon. Naomi Klein has written of the “power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government… corporations have grown so big they have superseded government”. Minnow states, such as Ireland, must prioritise the demands of multinational corporations and venture capitalists ahead of the rights of citizens. Decent people even believe that we had no choice but to guarantee the banks! As Al Gore wrote last year, “More than half (53) of the 100 largest economies on Earth are now corporations”. The world’s top 200 corporations “control over a quarter of the world’s total assets, and their control is increasing”, noted Noam Chomsky. We live in an era of corporate gigantism and monopoly. Just five companies control some 90 per cent of global trade in grain. Such control bestows on corporate giants a near-immunity from political and popular control and influence. Democratic capitalism is dead. Together, capitalism, liberal democracy and globalisation comprise a US-sired instrumentality of US and corporate global imperialism. It is not surprising that the US ethos is hegemonical. We live in a unipolar world, with just one hyperpower. “At the dawn of the new millennium, the United States is enjoying a pre-eminence unrivalled by even the greatest empires of the past”, former US secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger wrote in 2001. It sets the global agenda.. US culture is dominant almost everywhere – its music, its films, its TV soaps, its food, even its accent. Zbigniew Brzezinski notes that when the United States and the European Union agree on policies, “together they can dictate to the entire world the rules governing global trade and finance”.. “Voter surveys in Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland and Japan show citizens who have grown to feel almost as disempowered as Americans”, concedes Robert Reich, formerly President Clinton’s Secretary of Labour. The vast majority of the most important decisions taken around the world (the signing of treaties, declarations of war, ‘free-trade’ agreements, loss of national sovereignty and independence, and much more) are taken without any public referendum or consultation, and hence without any mandate, from the people. As independence and national sovereignty are increasingly, being jettisoned by states and as political parties and politicians are ‘bought’ by the donations and lobbyings ofcorporations, political power is being privatised. Around the world, job insecurity and casual employment are increasing. Social welfare nets are being removed. Civil and human rights are being trampled on. In May of last year the spiritual head of the Catholic Church – Pope Francis – issued an extraordinarily harsh condemnation of capitalism, asserting that “human beings are now regarded as consumer goods, to be used and discarded”. Under such a model of capitalism a “new invisible and, at times, virtual tyranny is established”. He denounced “savage capitalism… with its logic of profit at any cost… of exploitation without thinking of people”. If the tyranny is clear even at the apex of such a conservative institution why aren’t the streets of the world’s cities filled with demonstrators seeking an end to the grossly inequitable new world order? The answer is simple. We live in an increasingly authoritarian world. An Orwellian world – a world of surveillance, police oppression and spin-doctored news. In Oceania people lived with an unrelenting fear that every movement they made was being observed. Giant posters warned that BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Telescreen monitors were everywhere, spying on people’s activities. Orwell’s Big Brother