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Garda investigation of Leo Varadkar
Garda investigation of Leo Varadkar
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Rory O’Sullivan watched Bridgerton Season 2 yet wonders why anyone would bother. A period-piece represents the past and by representing dominates it. In general, the past survives only mythologically, as a collection of loose figures and attitudes in the present. In a period-piece, the prevailing attitude imbues these figures with itself and alters the past in its image. Strictly speaking this is inevitable, which is to say that there is nothing wrong with it. But as a result the hardest, most important task for a period-piece is to avoid smugness and try to be a little searching about its own time, the time representing rather than represented, which Bridgeton does not do, ever. Season Two, Episode One: Kate and Edwina walk procession-style into what seems a purpose-built ballroom on the edge of a manicured think-of-Versailles Garden (the building looks weirdly like the White House), where two anonymous servants grandly open its doors to the dollying camera: inside there are innumerable pairs of perfectly in-sync dancers sashaying between neoclassical columns garlanded with floral wreaths. The music is a strings-version of ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna. Turning to Edwina, Kate says: “Remember to breathe”. Eighteenth Century, Actors of Colour, Madonna, Ballroom: Wow!Bridgerton is smug. At the heart of it is not so much a sense of fun as of giddy triumph. Some of this comes from the feeling all Netflix shows have that there is a joke everyone but the viewers is in on, but mostly it comes from this period-piece demeanour for which the normal and completely wrong word is irreverence. Irreverence is what you do in front of something sacred, powerful, a defiant sort of thing that leaves others staring at you in shock and awkwardness. On the other hand, for what Bridgerton does the word is domination. This show fills the eighteenth century with United States Democratic party donors: racists and sexists alike lose the day, every day, but no one says the obvious things about the British Empire; the country’s sarcastic but soft-hearted ruler and attendant are the queer-coded Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury, the heads of the two main families are men in name but in fact women, and all the fun is had by the people who are either young or in charge; and the sex scenes, disappointingly fewer and less varied than advertised it must be said. But if Bridgerton is about renewing our culture’s relationship with the mythology of the past, then the real lesson here is how much, in dominating these figures, in turn the show is dominated by them. Painfully so: ballroom-dancing, marriage plots, an absurd formal manner of speech that leaves you wondering why this show, so feminist-seeming, makes everyone say so often the words “My Lord”, and of course that soulless and destructive thing people mislabel ‘wit’. In Bridgerton’s plot there is nothing to spoil because in each storyline everything is so familiar and laid bare from the beginning, besides which, from the start to the end the characters do nothing except identify themselves on the moving escalator of these implicit figures. This makes the dialogue so awful that sometimes the show sounds like a bunch of spliced-together video game cutscenes. For example: Kate is in love with Lord Anthony Bridgerton, a fact to which she constantly alerts us by too much protesting – her every word is to do either with him or else how she loves her sister, who (from the beginning it is made obvious) is the romance plot’s blocking figure, and becomes engaged to Anthony until the viewer has waited long enough when she steps aside with the most figurative drama, but least actual fuss possible. One confusing thing about the show is the exalted place it affords writing. The pamphlets of ‘Lady Whistledown’ give both a plot device and the voice of the show’s narrator, but also some strange lines of dialogue here and there such as “It is rather clever the way she uses plant puns to belittle”. They make an identification of good writing with cleverness, about which there is nothing automatic in a series that no one would ever turn to for a good line. Indeed in general a healthy question to ask is why anyone would bother in this short life to turn to Bridgerton at all. Perhaps they wrongly think the colourful costumes and sets compensate for the bad writing, and those accents. Personally all I can think of is that if they were to opt to ignore it they would miss the last shot in the fifth episode of the first season, the greatest moment in the entire series – even if accidental, short – because for once almost it tells the truth. In the first season Daphne, who is innocence pictured, meets and eventually marries the worldly Simon, and just before this moment, just married and with Bridgerton’s usual strings in the background playing Strange by Celeste, they have had sex for the first time in a scene which impressively skirts the line with porn. It is interesting how that sex scene’s intensity comes from when Daphne tells Simon that she masturbates to him – meaning that they both have sex with, or in or else under, the idea of her masturbating just as much with each other – which nicely proves Lacan’s point that at the heart of sex is the imagination and there is barely anything carnal about it whatsoever. But when they are done in bed Simon turns and asks, “How do you feel?” and lying there she says, out of breath, not very convincingly, “I feel…I feel wonderful”. There are at most three seconds before the cut to credits during which we see nothing except her face. What is her expression? Forcing a smile – but for some reason the barest emptiness. Yasujiro Ozu would have kept the camera there for twenty seconds. Bridgerton is available to view on Netflix but may be streamed illegally without much difficulty.
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In Spring, when I was born, Ireland was full of daffodils: in the city in window-boxes and the front-gardens of houses, apartment-buildings, and on the stony small ridges beside footpaths as well as here and there in forests and uncultivated fields. I have always identified strongly with the daffodil. I have never said so openly before to a single person – nor, to be honest, have I remembered it much myself; and yet every Spring, like when an old friend’s favourite piece of music comes on in the car, suddenly, entirely they fill my thoughts at the centre. I am convinced that the part of everyone’s life we call ‘inner’ is like this: what Baudelaire described as “forests of symbols/who watch us with familiar looks”. Our deepest selves are less a stream of ideas than a criss-crossing lattice of relations, memories, habits, and desires all around particular things. For everyone who exists there is a kind of secret symbolism, a non-verbal language, revealed to them and them only: it is their passport through life. A novel tries either to elaborate one new such symbolism in its writing; or else to depict in some way the conditions in which it forms, to discover or at least raise the possibility of an Ur-language, a theory of universal totemism; or else simply to scold and terrify people, or make them laugh. ‘Seven Steeples’, the latest novel by Sara Baume, is of the second kind. It is much less a story than a list of the objects and creatures encountered by Bell, Sigh, and their two dogs, who have left Dublin to seek out a way of life in the South-West far away from everybody. Insects, nettles, the washing machine – each other – the book is really about its paragraphs, like musical phrases, each describing an encounter with something, new or old, and its conversion into a symbol. Insects, nettles, the washing machine – each other – the book is really about its paragraphs, like musical phrases, each describing an encounter with something, new or old, and its conversion into a symbol. Baume’s sentences rhapsodically repeat words and make liberal use of the ‘Tab’ and ‘Enter’ buttons on the keyboard; sometimes the paragraphs feel like they were written by Alice Oswald. But if in Oswald’s poetry, which is after all made of verses, the point is to approximate by turns the gushes and drips of water, in Baume’s paragraphs it is to approximate the wind. As symbols, both water and wind are varieties of nothingness, which is to say that these stylistic approaches are both about accommodating non-being in speech. But if water is a refracting spread that pulls reality apart, then wind is a blustering movement that sweeps it all together. The embedded theme of Seven Steeples is oneness: symbiotic oneness, how things live by encounters with each other; erotic oneness, the drive towards the whole which is the greatest significance of love; and beneath these, symbolic oneness, the idea that in truth everything is one. The embedded theme of Seven Steeples is oneness: symbiotic oneness, how things live by encounters with each other; erotic oneness, the drive towards the whole which is the greatest significance of love; and beneath these, symbolic oneness, the idea that in truth everything is one. In a way this idea is very old – at least as old as the Greek philosopher Empedocles – the tone, shape, and themes of this book recall the Ancient Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe. What is new is how this deathly wind, this oneness gusting everything into symbols, is so strongly aligned in the book with interiority and the rejection of other people. As a result what we are given here is essentially a beautiful but false and virtual reality. People often say that virtual reality is something in the future – the day we can put on glasses and see the Spotify menu in front of us – but at least in sound rather (and more importantly) than sight, it is already here. Everywhere now public spaces achieve a kind of altered reality through music. For anyone who uses headphones this virtualisation of experience is even more profound, more personal, more constant, and in the end more solipsistic – think of the stereotype of the teenager with headphones tuning out the world. In ‘Seven Steeples’ headphones come up a surprising amount, even if near the end they are replaced: “In November the song of the house was a gurgling in the throat of the bathroom tap, a crackling emitted by the tangled TV cables. The boiler growled. The fridge purred”. Whereas in the past a ‘song’ was conceived as a public performance, something you went and looked at, someone talking to you, here it is imagined as something lived and moved around in: this kind of ‘song’ has not been widely available for more than a few decades. It is a great metaphor – two hundred years ago would someone have come up with it? I am not sure. None of Bell and Sigh’s friends of family (who do not appear in the book) understand what they are trying to do, which is to transport themselves into a reality as solipsistic and virtual – as musical – as can be. None of Bell and Sigh’s friends of family (who do not appear in the book) understand what they are trying to do, which is to transport themselves into a reality as solipsistic and virtual – as musical – as can be. This is not to say that the alternatives to which the book refers (emails and The Nine O’Clock News) are any less virtual; but Seven Steeples is about Bell and Sigh swapping one dream for another, somebody else’s for their own. The two dreams have the same basic origin. In A Line Made By Walking, also by Sara Baume, the main character takes photos of every dead animal they find. It is typical of her characters
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By David Burke. This article was first published on 2 July 2021. It is republished to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lord Widgery’s infamous report which defamed the victims of Bloody Sunday and exculpated those who murdered them. 1. Brigadier Frank Kitson subverts the law. Brigadier Frank Kitson of the British Army was a so-called counterinsurgency guru. He was sent to Northern Ireland in 1970 to tackle the IRA. The following year his astonishingly indiscreet book, ‘Low Intensity Operations’ was published. In it he explained that there were two ways of administering the law during a counterinsurgency, the first one being that: the law should be used as just another weapon in the government’s arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible … The other alternative is that the law should remain impartial and administer the laws of the country without any direction from the government. [Kitson (1971), p. 69.] The first tribunal investigating the events of Bloody Sunday – Widgery – is a good example of how the law was used as “just another weapon in the government’s arsenal”. On Monday 31 January 1972, Tory Home Secretary Reginald Maudling announced in the House of Commons that there would be a judicial inquiry into the Derry massacre. That evening British Prime Minister Ted Heath and Hailsham, his Lord Chancellor, asked Lord Chief Justice Widgery to chair it. Widgery had been a surprise appointment as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales by the Tories the previous year. He was not viewed as a jurist of the first rank by his peers. His career was one which would ultimately descend into bedlam. Private Eye magazine would report that “he sits hunched and scowling, squinting into his books from a range of three inches, his wig awry. He keeps up a muttered commentary of bad-tempered and irrelevant questions – ‘What d’you say?’, ‘Speak up’, ‘Don’t shout’, ‘Whipper-snapper’, etc”. [Private Eye Issue 436, 1 September 1978.] These comments were published two years before he stepped down from the bench. The view expressed by the Eye is reflective of Widgery’s reputation for having been ‘difficult’ by members of the Bar in Britain. ‘Difficult’ in this context is a polite euphemism. Widgery was despised by the legal profession which viewed him as a second rate political appointee who strove to conceal his shortcomings in the traditional manner of the lower tier judge: by hectoring, pelting and bullying. 2. Judicial compromise The night before Heath asked Widgery to conduct an inquiry, he had expressed his belief to Taoiseach Jack Lynch that Kitson’s paratroopers had behaved properly in Derry. If Heath truly believed what he had said to Lynch, he had an unusual way of showing it. He chose Widgery – a safe pair of hands – and left him in no doubt that he was to pervert the course of justice. At the meeting on 31 January Heath told Widgery that it “had to be remembered that we were in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war”. It is hard to conceive of a more compromising comment made by a British prime minister to a senior member of the judiciary, let alone the man at its pinnacle. No matter what way one looks at it, the comment demonstrates a breath-taking lack of esteem on the part of Heath for the independence of the judiciary. Yet Widgery did not rise to his feet and leave the room in protest. Instead, he did what his master bid him to do. 3. An Allegedly Independent Judge pre-judges the Murder Victims by Attending a Meeting at which they were referred to as ‘the other side’ At the same meeting at which Heath had given Widgery his riding orders, the parties to the discussion had also referred to the victims as the ‘other side’. [Para (viii) of minute of meeting of 31 January 1972.] Moreover, according to confidential notes by a Widgery associate, the “LCJ” [Lord Chief Justice] could be counted on to “pile up the case against the deceased” even though the evidence provided “a large benefit of the doubt to the deceased.” [‘Hidden Truths’ (1998), p. 95. 4. Threats to Muzzle the Ever Compliant British Media In the days after the massacre, the journalist Murray Sayle and his colleagues completed a report which was submitted to the Sunday Times. There was internal opposition to its conclusion, namely that Colonel Derek Wilford, who had led 1 Para in Derry on Bloody Sunday, had set out to provoke the IRA into coming out into the open so his troops could wipe them out. Harold Evans, the editor of the paper, decided to ring Widgery. “I said we had done a great deal of interviewing and proposed to publish this Sunday. We also had compelling photographs. I told him I presumed contempt would not apply since nobody had yet been accused. It would be an exaggeration to say he was aghast, but he made it very clear it would be ‘unhelpful’ to publish anything and yes, he would apply the rules of contempt. .. I withheld the article, but that week I took the chance of publishing the shocking photographs by Gilles Peress of unarmed men being shot”. [Harold Evans, ‘My Paper Chase, True Stories of Vanished Times’ (Little, Brown and Co, New York, 2009), p 474.] On Sunday 6 February, the paper reported that, “The law is that until the Lord Chief Justice completes his enquiry nobody may offer to the British public any consecutive account of the events in Derry last weekend”. [Sunday Times 6 February 1972.] Heath’s press office rowed in declaring that anything which anticipated the Tribunal’s findings would amount to contempt. This was a highly contentious assertion without
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Sinn Féin is democrically cenrlised
FF was controlled by developers and FG tends to the will of property-owners but SF’s backroom regime is even more powerful than those in other big parties
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Fissiparous DUP may give it a run for its money in May election
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Reazoning For Mammon
March/April 2022 19 scheme is purely for rental and does not meet the need for local residents and their community for housing which is integrated and provides for people of mixed incomes as well as appropriate social housing. The scheme includes provision for the required 10 per cent social and 10 per cent aordable housing. Rory Hearne of Maynooth University said the “mega build-to-rent scheme would essentially be a private enclave set apart from the local area, owned by overseas institutional investors”. “This is a reversion of 100 years in the social progress of land ownership and is part of a race to the bottom in the Irish housing system”. It also appears to conflict with an assurance by former Archbishop Diarmuid Martin in advance of the, Vatican-approved, Clonlie sale that the priority for the diocese was “to ensure the buildings and lands would be used for the benefit of the local community and a legacy for the city of Dublin”. The land deal certainly benefited the Church and the GAA which hailed it as the best in its history and “the key achievement for the year, if not the decade” in 2019. “The Archbishop was very anxious that he would sell to the GAA and he really wanted to deliver a social and aordable housing complement to that part of the city,” explained GAA stadium and commercial director, Peter McKenna. a hotel, two new pitches, a clubhouse and oce facilities on the 11 acres it has retained from the land deals. Instead of helping to resolve the housing crisis, as the church says it wants to do, many of the 120 parties who objected to the Hines application have argued that it will exacerbate the emergency. The €610 million Hines plan proposes 12 apartment blocks ranging from two storeys to 18 storeys in height on the former site of the former Holy Cross seminary and college. Among those with reservations was Dublin City Council which said that it was disappointed with “the disappointingly high quantum of single aspect and studio and one-bed units” which, it argued, “is not considered appropriate to the area and could constitute an unbalanced form of development”. DCC said the proposed 71 per cent of studio and one-bed units within the scheme “is alarming” adding that “it is considered unlikely the development will provide an attractive mixed-use sustainable neighbourhood….in compliance with the Dublin City Development Plan 2016-2022”. The local authority did not, however, recommend against the planning application. What must also concern the Catholic Archdiocese is the criticism of the Clonlie and Croke Park Residents Association that the T he move by the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin to alter the zoning of lands where 33 churches are located across the city has once again raised the question of its potential role in the provision of aordable and social homes in the midst of a deep housing crisis. In mid-February, it lodged a 130-page submission in response to the Dublin City Council development plan opposing zoning rules which preclude housing or office developments in all but “highly exceptional” circumstances on such lands. In the document, solicitors Mason Hayes and Curran claimed that “the proposed changes are unlawful insofar as they affect religious institutions such as our client”. Some of the churches “are located in disadvantaged areas where the delivery of housing is taking priority over additional institutional land uses”, according to the planning consultants Brock McClure, which contributed to the church submission. The development comes after a request last year by housing minister, Darragh O’Brien, to the Catholic archbishop, Eamon Martin, to identify vacant buildings or lands which are owned by the Church and could be used to alleviate the housing crisis. In response, the retired bishop of Killaloe, Willie Walsh, agreed in August 2021 that the church should be doing everything it could to help address the housing crisis. “I would have always had the attitude that church land is not private property. church land is land belonging to the people. The people involved in the church. It is not belonging to the bishop or parish priests or that sort of thing. It is the people’s land and I think that anything the church can do to help the housing situation I think it should be there and trying to do it”, Walsh said. All well and good. Since then, however, the Dublin Archdiocese has come under intense criticism over the circumstances surrounding its sale, in 2019, of a 31.8-acre site at Clonlie Road to the GAA from which it netted a reported €95 million. According to its financial report for 2020, the Catholic Archdiocese received a further sum of almost €3 million due to a to a clause in its contract with the GAA that it would receive “a share in the profits made by the GAA if they sold on any of the lands or buildings to a third party”. The allocation followed the sale of 19 acres of the lands by the GAA to US investment fund Hines which has been granted planning permission by An Bord Pleanála to build almost 1600 ‘build to rent’ apartments on the site. It is understood that the GAA received €105 million for the lands it sold to Hines and plans to provide NEWS Rezoning for Mammon The Catholic Church had high ideals in getting its land rezoned but there is little sense its Clonliffe lands will be used for the common good By Frank Connolly
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RISING Tensions
March/April 2022 17 around Moore Street was not reflected in the final recommendation. Claims that the compensation offer was conditional on accepting the Hammerson proposals have been rejected by ocials of the Council and the Department of Heritage with knowledge of the negotiations. Butcher, Stephen Troy, has claimed his business on Moore St will be severely disrupted during construction and received no oer of compensation from the developer. The representatives of the traders did not participate in the vote taken by the Advisory Group in relation to the Hammerson proposals before it published its recommendations in May 2021. The Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, has also been dragged into the controversy after he publicly endorsed the Hammerson project as the planning application was submitted to DCC. He confirmed that he attended a private meeting with Hammerson executives in April last year after which he provided a statement to the company for a press release it issued some weeks later. The Taoiseach was accompanied by the P lans to redevelop the north city centre from the GPO in O’Connell Street to Parnell Street and including the Moore Street fish and vegetable market have led to a fresh outbreak of hostilities on the historic site linked to the 1916 Rising. The lands, known as the Carlton site, have been the subject of prolonged planning controversy going back to the late 1990s when architect Paul Clinton, and a number of property owners on Upper O’Connell Street, sought to develop a retail scheme and conference centre. For almost three decades, the site has remained derelict and a monument to the neglect, by several governments and Dublin City Council (DCC), of the main street of the capital city. A row has recently erupted over a proposal to compensate 17 street traders, who hold licences issued by DCC, for any disruption to their business caused by UK developers Hammerson, which has been granted partial planning permission to build a large shopping, residential and oce complex on the largely disused landbank. Details of a scheme to give €1.5 million to the traders in compensation while construction work is underway were confirmed at a meeting of the Council in early February by DCC chief executive, Owen Keegan. Village has learned that this oer was raised to €1.7 million in early May 2021 following discussions between the Council and the traders and that an offer of further negotiations was made on Sunday, 20 February. However, tensions over the compensation issue were dramatically raised when it emerged that a planning consultant acting for the traders said that they wanted €34 to €40 million, or more than €2 million each, to move their stalls during the construction of the Hammerson scheme. A subsidiary of Hammerson, Dublin Central GP, had agreed to pay €1 million towards the compensation package, with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and DCC contributing £300,000 and €200,000, respectively, to the overall €1.5 million oer. In a statement in reply to a question by SF €34 to €40 million, or more than €2 million each, to move their stalls during the construction of the Hammerson scheme NEWS Hmmerson scheme, viewed from O’Connell Street Debate as to whether 30-year-derelict Carlton site should be developed though scheme demolishes much of the Moore St battle site By Frank Connolly RISING TENSIONS Councillor Micheál MacDonncha, Keegan said: “In the spring of 2021, prior to a planning application….Dublin City Council’s Housing & Community Services Department, Casual Trading Section began to engage in a commercially sensitive process to try and put a framework in place to compensate traders in the event of development. This was a tripartite framework with DCC, Department of Housing, Local Government & Heritage and Dublin Central GP Ltd. (Hammerson) partaking to compensate traders as all three…. brought forward proposals that may have an impact on traders over the coming years: DCC on the upgrading of Moore Street, the Dept. on the restoration of the National Monument as a commemorative centre and DCGP on the delivery of the Dublin Central site and Enabling Works for Metrolink”. The Council chief executive insisted that the process was “entirely separate from that of the Planning Authority and that the Planning Authority has no role in matters of compensation”. Two out of three planning applications relating to the Hammerson project were granted in late 2021 after an Advisory Group set up by the Government and including politicians, street traders and relatives of those who fought in the Rising recommended support for the commercial development. Some of those who participated in the advisory group have claimed that their opposition to the development which, they argue, will destroy much of the historic battlefield site Butcher, Stephen Troy speking t recent ‘Sve Moore Street’ protest 18 March/April 2022 secretary general of his department, Martin Fraser, at the meeting on 19 April, 2021 with Connor Owens, Ireland Director of Hammerson, its development manager Ed Dobbs and architect Friedrich Ludewig. At the meeting, Owens set out the company’s vision of the scheme including the restoration of Upper O’Connell Street, pedestrian entrances to Moore Street through a new public square and its provision of works for a Metrolink station. He said that Hammerson would retain all pre-1916 buildings on Moore Street and construct a new archway to commemorate the Easter Rising. The development includes the construction of 94 new homes, 210 hotel rooms, retail outlets, restaurants, oces and shops. In a press release by Hammerson in early June announcing its decision to lodge the planning application, Micheál Martin was quoted as welcoming the rejuvenation plans, which, he said, “will enhance the status of O’Connell Street by developing new transport links and delivering new homes, retail facilities and oces which will boost employment in the area. The locations around Moore St and the GPO will see an increasing number of visitors who will be drawn into the seminal role it played in our history”. He added that “it is important to continue to liaise with the street traders and those
