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    Villager (June 2011)

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    Canapés and gobbleydegook for pampered ex-pats The Government is to host a second global Irish economic forum at Dublin Castle in October, Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has said. “The forum will provide an opportunity for the Government to meet directly with many of the most influential members of our diaspora and discuss our priorities for economic renewal, job creation and the restoration of Ireland’s reputation abroad,” he told the Dáil. More than the previous forum in 2009 held at Farmleigh, he said, “will be less on what we should be doing and more about action”. The first forum remember was billed as an “Irish Davos” think-in of our business élite and cost €300,000. David McWilliams promised five business plans out of the beano; and Dermot Desmond outlined a brilliant and original plan for a university of the arts. Eighteen months on, Where is the brilliant and original plan for a  government-backed “recovery” bond that would be marketed to the 60-70 million Irish diaspora? Or for the  “super”-website, “selling the country and linking with, say, the top 1,000 Irish movers and shakers abroad”? Or the plan for nationalising Eircom advanced by Denis O’Brien (may the Gods bless him and make fecund his tribe)? According to Gilmore, Farmleigh “led to the implementation of a series of significant initiatives across a range of areas, including business network development, innovation, tourism, the promotion of Irish culture and diaspora engagement”. “Diaspora-engagement”, Eamon? Ubiquitous waving Villager doesn’t like queens. They expect to be called Your Majesty, to be fawned over and not to be elected. In the particular case of Her whom we still anomalously know as “the” queen she notably never says or does anything progressive either. Still she did a good job here and seemed to enjoy her outing, at least more than such chores as royal weddings and variety performances, if the unusually radiant smile was any indicator. The folk in the Village office couldn’t look out of the window for a week without yer wan’s white glove oscillating up at them. She leaves a strange legacy of luminescent yellow spanner outlines over every drain and man-hole-cover in Dublin city centre. 21st-Century Security. Where are you, youth? Internet activists Art Uncut say they will be holding up a large, illuminated “Bono Pay Up” sign during the band’s set at Glastonbury and will also float an oversized bundle of fake cash across the crowd; from an Irish Tricolour on one side to a Dutch flag on the other – all, of course rehearsing the self-righteous but capitalistic band’s controversial 2006 decision to move part of their business to the Netherlands to lessen their tax burden following the Government’s decision to put a cap on the amount of tax-free earnings available to artists here. Very solicitous of them but why do the British do youthful political activism so much better than here. The last stunt in – politically-disploded – Ireland came courtesy of … Mick Wallace! Denis, Gavin, Brian and Dermot; and Michael Denis O’Brien, Independent News and Media’s largest shareholder, said Gavin O’Reilly and Brian Hillery (soon to be INM ex-chairman as well as ex-chairman of Unicredit in Ireland and general all-purpose FF ex-Senator) were “delusional in their total denial of the extremely chronic financial situation” at the group. Denis O’Brien, remember, is the non-delusional paragon who said, “I never made any payment to Michael Lowry”. Interesting to see his arriviste Esat mucker Dermot Desmond, now the proud owner of 2% of INM, backing him up here. Desmond made over €120 million out of Esat , benefiting from whatever largesse Lowry cast Esat’s way as a result of the goodies paid to him by O’Brien – allegedly. Chief Justice John Murray is retiring as Chief Justice. Apart from a limited number of jurisprudential gems he is most notable for being from Limerick, serving as president of the Union of Students in Ireland in 1966/7, marrying former Supreme Court judge Brian Walsh’s daughter Gabrielle, being twice Attorney General under Charlie Haughey and working as a Judge in the European Court of Justice. Funny with all that he never really caught on as a force for anything much. Anyway the push is on to succeed him. Fine Gael lost out on the Attorney Generalship, with Frank Callanan in particular, historian of Parnell, scourge of Bertie and a staunch Endaite the most disappointed. The Labour/Fine Gael dynamic will determine the next Chief Justiceship which is said to be a call between Susan Denham, elegant and progressive daughter of former Irish Times editor, Douglas – with Labour leanings; Niall Fennelly, ex-Clongownian former European Court of Justice Advocate General – with Fine Gael leanings. Two Fine Gael-leaning High Court judges are also in the mix: Frank Clarke of the High Court, one of the sharpest judges on the bench and Mary Finlay Geoghegan who began her career as a solicitor. Adrian Hardiman, the photographic-memoried Jeremy Clarkson of the bench brings PDish views that are too strong for the squeamish and the soft-minded and has little chance. John Rogers, who served as Attorney General under Dick Spring and engineered the recent ascent of the formidable Máire R Whelan to the attorney generalship in teeth of derision from Michael McDowell and his mouthpiece, Sam Smyth, is a possible last-ditch parachuter in (now the endless hearing at An Bord Pleanála over the Slane Bypass to which he is passionately opposed, has come to an end). Deputy Chief Justice While he’s at the bar, Villager salutes Declan Costello, another one-time Attorney General who died at the beginning of June. He was a disciple of Thomistic philosopher, Maritain. As a politician he was progressive architect of Fine Gael’s influential Just Society document. Later as a High Court Judge he was too inclined to believe that the State represented that Just Society and should not be judicially reprimanded. This led to some hard decisions like his – overturned – 1992 judgment in the X case injuncting the 14-year old rape-victim from leaving the country for an abortion

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    Government popularity will survive until budget when populist Sinn Féin will surge (June 2011)

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    By John Gormley It has been a good few weeks for the new government. The visits of the Queen and Barack Obama exceeded all expectations and that air of excitement and optimism still lingers. Even the charges of plagiarism against Enda Kenny could not dampen the euphoria. The new government has managed to convey a feeling of renewal and revitalisation. Their spin-machine is well oiled and operating at maximum efficiency. So much so that many believe the state visits were entirely the initiative of the new government. When you get credit for things you’re not fully responsible for you know you’re on a roll. If an opinion poll was held now – and there must be one due – both Fine Gael and Labour would be the beneficiaries of the feel-good factor. Fianna Fáil, on the other hand, may not have yet reached rock bottom and the dreaded decline could continue for a time. This won’t worry Micheál Martin unduly. He is a skilled and experienced operator who knows only too well that the government honeymoon will continue until the budget. Thereafter, it’s reality time for Fine Gael and Labour and the electorate who placed so much hope in this new administration. They did so on the basis that the incoming government would give the people a better and fairer deal, that they would stimulate employment, that they would burn or at least scorch or singe the bondholders. It is not about to happen. Sure, eventually we will get a lower interest rate but in the context of ten billion a year repayments it won’t make a huge difference. And no amount of spin can hide the fact that growth rates are flat-lining and that the government’s deflationary measures serve only to exacerbate the problem. Éamon Gilmore’s “Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way” has proven to be not just a diplomatic faux pas but also a major hostage to fortune. Despite this, the government spin machine has ensured that all ministers stick to the script. You’ll notice a number of lines being repeated. The first of these is that this is a ‘national government’. It is not. Fine Gael and Labour rejected the concept of national government whilst in opposition, knowing full well the prize of government would fall into their laps if they could force an election. Both parties now have an overwhelming – and perhaps unwieldy – majority. They are faced with a shrunken , diverse, even disparate opposition, which they can dismiss as inconsequential if they succeed in branding themselves as a national government.  The second line trotted out by government ministers and spokespersons is that two-thirds of the adjustment has already been made. True, perhaps. But it wasn’t this government that made that adjustment, a fact that won’t be lost on Micheál Martin as he looks ruefully at his depleted and demoralised ranks. Nor will it be lost on government backbenchers. And here’s one from the blindingly obvious department: taking money out of people’s pockets makes you unpopular. This will concentrate the minds of those backbenchers who got the second party seat in a constituency and those backbenchers who did not get ministerial preferment. There are quite a few who see themselves in that latter category. The third line of spin – and this is the mainstay of government communication – is that fourteen years of Fianna Fáil mismanagement have brought us to this sorry pass, necessitating further austerity measures. It is the line that works best because it has a strong foundation of truth. Nonetheless, as the new Icelandic government knows, it is not a line you can hide behind forever. Come the budget there will be no more benefit of the doubt. The cosy fireside chats, which pass for radio interviews, will be replaced by more rigorous interrogation. And, yes, the poll ratings of this new government will inevitably disimprove. And who will benefit? The answer is clear – Sinn Féin. They have a crop of new articulate deputies who will target Labour ruthlessly. Like Labour, they are extremely pragmatic and will pursue a strictly populist line that could yield significant electoral success in the coming years. Can the Labour party withstand that sort of sustained pressure on their left flank? Probably yes, but it won’t be easy. Already, there are indications of some unease on the Labour bankbenches relating to the Richard Bruton proposals for Sunday payments to low-paid workers. Likewise, there were some on the Fine Gael backbenches who were less than happy with the taxes on pensions. Most significantly, the unequivocal statement by Enda Kenny rejecting any sort of debt restructuring was in direct contradiction of an earlier statement by Pat Rabbitte. Perhaps all of this is simply the creative tension of coalition government, but one thing is certain: the budget will change the dynamic of this government and soundbites and spin doctors will be unable to disguise that.

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    The Irish Times, champion of bourgeois privileges (June 2011)

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    By Harry Browne As much by luck as by design, I have found myself in recent months spending some days in two of the world’s great conurbations, Chicago, Illinois, and Naples, Italy. It occurred to me that the cities had something in common other than my visits, and even beyond the great food and largely, astonishingly, good-natured citizenry. The poor and working-class people of both Chicago and Naples can see every day the expressions of their culture, mostly but not exclusively musical, celebrated and valorised by élites at local, national and international level, even while they themselves are crushed by poverty, discrimination, oppression and crime. Chicago blues and canzone napoletana remain not only globally popular but integral to the self-image of the cities — even while jazz and opera are far more highly subsidised — and in both places an aura of dangerous authenticity hangs around “the baddest part of town”, where homeboys and scugnizzi are not only picturesque, but probably up to no good. The people of both cities have, over the centuries, exercised some of the most memorably robust resistance to the plans of their rulers, and have been on the receiving end of some of the most savage repression. The rulers themselves have of course been notable both for the ambition that helped to make the cities among the most beautiful in the world, and the corruption that helped to block any equitable or democratic sharing of that beauty. In Chicago, at any rate, a pair of reactionary local newspapers have been, despite a spirited journalistic tradition at newsroom level, bastions of the power structure. Naples and Chicago are, in these and other respects, not unique cities — otherwise it would be pretty pointless writing about them here — but rather archetypal ones. It’s not difficult to project some similar characteristics on to, say, Dublin, with its “Rale Dubs”, captured memorably by writers from Seán O’Casey to Roddy Doyle, those Dubs with their problematic historical relationship to both colonial and national élites. Dublin of course has the added spice of being the capital of a state that has not generally been run by Dubliners, which may be part of the reason that the city’s middle class finds it so easy to express the most vicious snobbery about the inner-city poor, a contempt that was especially evident in the coverage of, and social-media discussion about, the small protests that accompanied the British queen’s visit. Poor Chicagoans and Neapolitans are of course despised too, but I think not quite so openly by local élites. In Dublin the local élites are also national élites. And their “local” newspaper, the Irish Times, is able to think of itself as a national institution despite its readership being overwhelmingly based among the capital’s middle and upper classes. The newspaper’s senior ranks are more geographically diverse, though you’ll rarely hear a working-class Dublin accent among them. The nearest thing to an exception is Fintan O’Toole, in many respects the outstanding, albeit often overstretched, Irish journalist of his generation. O’Toole’s misfortune, if he can be said to have one, is to have attached himself to the Irish Times just as it emerged as the definitive journalistic expression of the needs and priorities of the national bourgeoisie (much of which had previously regarded it as suspiciously Protestant). This meant that O’Toole, with his strong personal and political connection to the historic radicalism of working-class Dublin, could never be editor. To my mind it may also help explain why O’Toole can be seen to flit from a devastating left critique of Ireland’s predicament to a piecemeal reformist strategy in partnership with irredeemably bourgeois figures such as McWilliams and Ross. Our market is too small to afford several upmarket newspapers distributed along a left-right spectrum, in the British manner. The Irish Times must be the Telegraph, Times, Independent and Guardian folded into one. For a while that wasn’t really a problem, as Ireland’s social-liberalising, anti-clerical mission of the late 20th century enjoyed broad cross-class support, especially in Dublin, so the likes of O’Toole were welcome to join the crusade, as formulated in the Irish Times. During the boom years the sideshow of cultural and identity politics could proceed unhindered, with the Irish Times a broad church that could, for example, welcome immigrants just as much as both ICTU and IBEC did. But today the mission of that newspaper, like that of the class it embodies, is much simpler. Its needs and priorities come down to this: to preserve the status and privileges of bourgeois Ireland through this crisis, even if it means the devastation of ordinary workers and the poor. Indeed, if it can use the crisis to advance long-term ambitions, especially to reduce the role of the public service and the power of unions, it is happy to do so. It’s not Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times. Instead, the newspaper’s economics editor Dan O’Brien, adept at concealing the iron fist of neo-liberal retrenchment inside the velvet glove of reasonableness and “regrettable necessities”, is the living embodiment of the ideological “commonsense” that serves to protect and project these class interests. In the context of the argument over the “bailout”, O’Brien and the Irish Times also reflect the natural habit of that class to kowtow to international corporate and financial institutions. This habit is not merely some cultural cringe but a fundamental consequence of the nature of Irish capital over the last half-century, essentially providing land and services to international companies, thus giving rise to financial and property speculation as the important sort-of-indigenous sectors. Recently I saw historian and blogger Conor McCabe give a terrific talk that previewed his new book, Sins of the Father. McCabe persuasively and humorously argued that Irish capital could not be personified as some Michael Corleone figure, clear-eyed and coolly cruel, but as something much more like Michael’s brother Fredo, making sure every important visitor at the casino had plenty of drinks and “girls”, and in the end, perhaps, too caught up in the

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    Eurostrich (June 2011)

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    ‘See nothing’ or ‘do nothing’ about structural problems: the EU wrongly sees only “liquidity” problems in “peripheral” states. By Constantin Gurdgiev Perhaps nothing defines the detachment from reality of European (and Irish) élites than their own statements. Like proverbial ostriches with their heads in the sand, the official responses to the current crisis have been oscillating between two extremes. On the one side, there is the extreme of ‘do nothing’ about the structural causes of the unfolding financial catastrophe – the ‘kicking-the-can-down-the-road’ policies of the ECB, Ecofin and the member states. On the opposite side, there is the extreme of denying the catastrophe itself – ‘ see nothing’ – that is evident in the policy pronouncements from Brussels and, most recently, in the debate here. The ‘do nothing’ response by Brussels and the member states, like Ireland, is embodied in the policy platforms adopted over the last three years. It is further reinforced by the soaring choir of ‘Hope will set us free from the crisis’ analysts who push forward an argument that, with just a little tweaking here and there, the Titanic of the debt-financed Euro zone will be able to sail on. The core policy documents published since 2008 by the EU Commission have virtually nothing to do with the crisis Europe is facing. The flagship EU programme unveiled during the crisis is an aspirational tome called Europe 2020. This envisions not a path to resolving the problem of debt overhang in the ‘peripheral’ countries but a grandiose scheme to jump-start the EU’s knowledge, green, and social economy. That Europe 2020 is an idea that is neither new, nor workable is highlighted by the fact that most of the platform proposals date back to the failed and abandoned Lisbon Strategy (2000-2010), Social Economy Europe (a zombie policy lumbering on since 2000) and a long line of knowledge-economy strategies aggressively promoted by the EU over the last decade. Even over the boom years of 2003-2007, these delivered virtually nothing. ‘See nothing’ is predicated on the political timetables of local and national elections in Germany, France and elsewhere across the EU. As a result, political rhetoric is being used to combat economic reality. The economically artificial deadline of 2013, the much-hyped hope of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (‘the PIIGS’) returning to the bond markets and imposing burden-sharing on the banks lenders (in the case of Ireland) and sovereign bondholders (in the case of Portugal and Greece) serves as both the goalpost to be reached and the deadline for the end of the can-kicking. The circularity of this 2013-or-bust argument is compounded by its surrealism. By 2013, the entire debt burden of the PIIGS will be carried solely by their central banks, the ECB and the Governments. Put simply, if debt default comes after 2013, it will be default of the worst imaginable variety –sovereign default. In the mean-time, as the debt crisis ravages the Eurozone, Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris continue to deny the true extent of the problems we face, though Angela Merkel has at least recognised recently that the problem is a “debt crisis”. Hence, instead of finding the means permanently to reduce debt burdens accumulated across a number of EU economies, the Union pushes forward a solution of writing even more debt against already over-indebted countries. Behold EFSF/EFSM (don’t ask) and their ‘permanent’ off-spring ESM (European Stability) which will come into existence… yes, you’ve guessed it right… in 2013. The most amusing vehicle for this denial is the EU’s terminology. As you’ve heard, the Euro area is experiencing ‘liquidity problems’ in its ‘peripheral member states’. Never mind, the terminology seems to imply, that the liquidity problems – the phrase evokes some sort of temporary hiccup – are a full-blown debt crisis with a number of countries effectively frozen out of the bond markets and large swaths of the Euro-area-wide banking sector left unable to function as banks. In 1991, Euro area members’ gross government debt to GDP ratio was just under 54.1%. By 2007 it had risen to 66.2% of GDP. That was pre-crisis. At the end of 2010 the same ratio reached 85.04% and it is now projected by the IMF to peak at 88.4% in 2013. Since 1991, levels of real indebtedness across the Euro zone have grown annually by 2.26% in excess of economic growth. The chart above, based on IMF data and forecasts, illustrates this. Next, take a look at the ‘periphery’ label attached to Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. In 2010, its ‘periphery’ accounted for 35% of Euro-area GDP, 40.5% of its population and 40% of the total gross government debt. I doubt any US administration would ever be arrogant enough to call, say, the States west of the Rockies the ‘periphery’. The crisis, faced by the EU is a structural one, which means it is long-term in nature and not resolvable by simply sitting and waiting for growth to come. And it is not being helped by those who deny it – be it Brussels politicians or Irish economists and ‘green jersey’-sporting commentators. Let’s face the facts, while using our own situation as an example of what is going on across a number of other European economies. Having digested the fact boxes, you must either assume that all these losses, if they materialise, will be covered by a fairy, in which case no contingency provisions should be made ahead of them crystallising. Alternatively they will be covered by the Irish taxpayer, in which case some forward thinking is required. Whether by our own design or by the interaction of complex forces of politics and economics (and I prefer the latter explanation) we are now caught in an EU-wide crisis of unprecedented proportions. Instead of praying for a magic solution and sitting out this crisis, we need a credible plan. That plan must start with analysis of the problems we face – problems of debt overhang, not liquidity shortages; and of lack of real-growth drivers, not lack of

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    Spot the slimy creatures – Healey Rae and the Kerry slug

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    This week Kerry County Council blamed the Kerry slug from holding up the Macroom By Pass through a Judicial Review. But in fact the Judicial Review is being taken many miles from the home of the slug to protect a national monument. The traffic hell that the residents of Macroom are enduring is being blamed on the wrong slimy creatures.

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    Chance for truth about Omagh (Archive, June 2011)

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    Belfast High Court says security forces may have had foreknowledge of the Omagh bombing. By Anton McCabe In February 2011, Omagh bomb victim, Laurence Rush, won an important legal victory in February, which attracted little notice. The North’s High Court allowed Rush to proceed with legal action against the North’s Chief Constable and Secretary of State. He is claiming their neglect of duty allowed the 1998 bombing to happen, and that they subsequently failed properly to investigate. Rush’s wife, Libby, was one of the 29 people killed. Last year the High Court struck Rush’s case out, ruling it had little chance of success. The headline on the Belfast Telegraph report “Blame RIRA for your wife’s death” was typical of coverage. All reports quoted the end of the judgment: “Those who committed the civil wrong against Mr Rush, as a result of which he tragically lost his wife, were the members of the Real IRA who organised and carried out the Omagh bombing”. Mr Justice Gillen, in the Belfast High Court, has now upheld Rush’s appeal. In his ruling, he wrote: “I have come to the conclusion that it is neither plain nor obvious that the cause of action in this matter has no chance of success. In short I do not consider that on the pleadings the case made by the plaintiff (Rush) is unarguable”. Regarding evidence produced by Rush’s legal team suggesting the security forces had foreknowledge of the bombing, he wrote: “I have concluded there may well be substance in this argument”. Some relatives of victims are calling for a public inquiry. However, after the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, British Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament: “let me reassure the House that there will be no more open-ended and costly inquiries into the past”. Thus, the hearing of Rush’s case is the only chance for the circumstances of Omagh to be examined in public. Rush has always said that he sees the Real IRA as primarily responsible. In his Statement of Claim, he says: “The bomb which killed Elizabeth Imelda Rush was planted by the so-called Real IRA, a criminal terrorist conspiracy and a proscribed organisation.” However, he claims the state failed to properly investigate. Rush is being represented by British human rights barrister Michael Mansfield, instructed by solicitor Des Doherty. At the inquest into the Omagh deaths, their questioning established there were only four police in duty in Omagh at the time of the bombing on 15 August 1998. They also established that ten were being sent to Kilkeel to police a contentious parade. This police unit normally patrolled the Omagh area in civilian-type cars. Rush is also relying on information that emerged subsequently. A long-term security force agent, Peter Keeley (who uses the name Kevin Fulton), has produced evidence that he informed a police handler the Real IRA was preparing a bomb for an attack somewhere in the North on the weekend of Omagh. These allegations led the Police Ombudsman to begin an inquiry. Her inquiry raised serious doubts about the effectiveness of the police investigation; among other matters. She established that police had received a call on 4 August 1998 warning of an attack in Omagh on 15 August, the date of the bomb, but this information was withheld from investigating officers. The Panorama programme on BBC1 later established that the UK’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ was monitoring mobile phone communications between the bombers; but did not pass the information on to investigating police. Rush’s legal action is separate from the Omagh Victims’ Legal Action, which two years ago obtained a judgment for £1.6million against four men associated with the Real IRA. Rush was originally a part of this, but withdrew. He was the most outspoken of a several relatives, Protestant and Catholic, unhappy with the Action’s strategy. In her book Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families Pursuit of Justice’, conservative writer and academic Ruth Dudley Edwards has claimed to have been one of the main strategists behind this action. She wrote of some relatives: “There were bereaved and injured and suffering republicans whose instinct would always be to blame the police for failing to prevent a tragedy rather than terrorists who made it happen”. Rush believed there was no point in taking legal action against individuals with no resources. He was unhappy with the decision to employ London lawyers H20 as legal representatives. There have been subsequent complaints about the fees charged by H20. Rush further felt there was an agenda of pinning all the blame on the Real IRA, and presenting the security forces as without fault: “The RUC were still the heroes”. In her book, Dudley Edwards admits she did not wish to query the role of the security forces. In December 2001, the Police Ombudsman produced her report. Dudley Edwards writes:  “In London, lawyers and supporters alike were fearful that the fundraising effort would be damaged as the focus moved from the bombers on to the police, and Henry (Robinson) and I were sent to Omagh to talk to Michael (Gallagher – chair of the only victims’ group) about steadying the ship. … Henry and I sent messages to (RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie) Flanagan urging that he reassure the families urgently, but he was pre-empted by (Police Ombudsman) Mrs O’Loan, who spent four hours in Omagh presenting her report to victims immediately before making it public”. Dudley Edwards’ book does not give any of the details of the findings of the Ombudsman’s report. However, she devotes two pages to rebuttals by police and their supporters. Rush was further concerned at the involvement of former security force agent Sean O’Callaghan in the Action. O’Callaghan was in charge of its media side. Rush said O’Callaghan was presented as “someone with an understanding of Irish terrorism”. Rush subsequently established that O’Callaghan had two convictions for murders committed in the 1970s; and claimed to have murdered a low-level informer within the IRA in 1985 while he (O’Callaghan) was a high-level informant. O’Callaghan told

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    Hogan blows it in Brussels

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    Our new Minister for the Environment blew it in Brussels when it transpired that his claim that Ireland was protecting its raised bogs was exposed as dramatically false by an NGO Report with more than 700 photos of savage destruction covered in the current Village magazine. In trying to undo the damage, he and his climate sceptic sidekick Conor Sheehan encouraged unrealistic ‘compromises’ to benefit the turf cutters that they know Europe will not allow. Tony Lowes’ blog asks why.

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    Poetry made prose at Drumcliff.

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    By Michael Smith. Sligo County Council and the National Roads Authority have ruined Yeats’ grave. Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! The most famous epitaph for a great literary Irishman is the last lines of Under Ben Bulben, for William Butler Yeats. In that poem, Yeats advocates “whatever is well made”, and disdains “the sort now growing up/All out of shape from toe to top”, while he imagines a future passer by, sometime in eternity, casting “a cold eye/On life, on death” near the poet’s imagined tomb in Drumcliff Cemetery. The poetry is tumultuously poignant; the importance of the place in time afforded Drumcliff momentous. It lends to Drumcliff churchyard universal and all-time significance. So we can assume the Cemetery and the grave have been treated with reverence, not to say imagination? The cemetery in 2010 is the child of Sligo County Council and the NRA. The half acre nearest the great man’s grave is now a tarmac car-park. It ends within a metre of the grave itself. You could put your foot on the grave and leave the other one rooted in the car-park. A hundred metres away, the new Sligo-Bundoran road channels the juggernauts of the North West on their noisy way. A constant drone of disharmony. The plaque commemorating Yeats at the entrance to the graveyard is sponsored by the National Roads Authority. Even the limestone is cut somewhat crassly and the capitalisation of “Life, Death and Eye just wrong. If ever a man is spinning in his grave (pern in gyre) it is the beloved bard Yeats, reinterred in 1948 nine years after burial in the far more favoured hilltop Roquebrune church yard in France where he died; now circumvolving within spitting distance of the tour buses and not a horseman in sight. Yeats Country beaten down. Inside the still-pleasant church beside the graveyard is a visitors’ book for comments on the Drumcliff experience. The gushing almost drowns out the traffic: “a peaceful place”, “an oasis in a world gone mad”, “I could feel the presence of the great poet” and so on. It is not, it is not and you cannot. Ne’er a fool like a pre-disposed tourist. I attended one of the, admittedly charming, Leonard Cohen weekend concerts In Lissadell over the summer. Cohen is allegedly a poet, the lyrics to his gravel-plated songs demanding, according to the comfortable demi-intellectuals who comprise his Irish audiences, reflection. I found his performances a little stage-urbane. Twice during his set that Saturday he introduced his band, stopping to praise each member in turn but somewhat disappointingly using precisely the same adjective for each member on both occasions. The “inspirational Bob Metzger”. The “irrepressible” Neil Larsen. Or whatever. The attractive, backing Webb Sisters he described as “sublime”. Twice. During his concert Cohen made clear his veneration of Yeats and quoted from his work. According to the Irish Times, “earlier on Saturday he had visited Drumcliff churchyard and paid his respects at the grave of Yeats, a poet whose work he had first read, as Cohen told his audience, ‘at home in Montreal, about 50 years ago’. He smiled his wry, rueful smile. In the visitors’ book at Drumcliff church he wrote ‘Leonard Cohen, Montreal’, and next to it a simple comment. “Sublime”. How unpoetic. 2010 (photo: James Eccles, courtesy Benedict Schlepper-Connolly)

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