Culture

On 8 February 2017 the inaugural meeting of SPAB Ireland (The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in Ireland) took place. In the audience were the bulwarks of Irish architectural heritage; the Irish Georgian Society, the Irish Landmark Trust, An Taisce, the Dublin Civic Trust. But the demographic for SPAB were better than for any of these organisations. The first meeting in Trinity was overflowing. Its convenors are graduates who have recently completed SPAB Scholarships in the UK, with the aim of extending SPAB to Ireland. The first meeting in Trinity was overflowing. SPAB is a charity founded in 1877 by William Morris. Though best known in his lifetime as a poet and social campaigner, he posthumously became better known for his designs, particularly of textiles. It was founded in response to the highly destructive, if well-intentioned, ‘restoration’ of medieval buildings popular with many Victorian architects, exemplified in Ireland by the overdone Dublin Cathedrals. Today SPAB claims to be the largest, oldest and most technically expert national pressure group fighting to save old buildings from decay, demolition and damage. To this day the 1877 manifesto remains the basis for the Society’s work. Village spoke to Rachel Morley, Tríona Byrne and Oliver Wilson, SPAB convenors, about the future of SPAB Ireland. According to Morley, SPAB has a statutory role as adviser to local planning authorities in Britain. “We must be notified of listed building applications that involve total or partial demolition. We are also informed by those religious bodies that have an exemption from the secular system, of certain types of proposal for listed places of worship. In addition, our casework includes campaigning to protect historic buildings at risk”. That sounds like a lot of the work carried out in Ireland by An Taisce though of course An Taisce’s remit is environmental and planning-focused too, and by the Heritage Council on a narrower and professional basis. Morley says that “Ultimately, SPAB Ireland would like to become formal consultees for applications to demolish or partially demolish listed buildings and applications for any works to, say, pre 1720 buildings”. Morley claims to be a bit of an oddball. While studying Process and Chemical Engineering at UCC, “I fell in love with old buildings – the architecture, the history, the materials, the decay mechanisms and conservation and people’s relationships with old buildings. I went on to study Applied Building Conservation and Repair at TCD. As this course wound up, I desperately wanted to learn more about plaster conservation – learn practical skills. I moved to England and spent twelve months funded by the Heritage Lottery undertaking a training internship in architectural stone and plaster conservation with the Institute of Conservation. I spent several glorious years travelling across England and Europe repairing plasterwork of all periods. I am currently work with the Churches Conservation Trust and am responsible for the repair of 129 redundant Anglican churches across the southeast of England. I am endlessly fascinated and inspired by churches”. Morley got involved in SPAB in her early twenties while living on the Welsh borders. “It was beautiful, but I was lonely. I wanted to meet like-minded people and I wanted to explore the buildings that surrounded me. SPAB has several regional groups – groups of members who arrange local events, lectures and tours to ensure members throughout the country are engaged with the Society. I joined the local committee and for two years arranged these events. In 2014 I was lucky enough to be elected to the Guardians’ Committee which is responsible for upholding the ethos and traditions of the Society and plays a leading role in the Society’s listed building casework and in historic buildings policy discussions”. Wilson is an architect, originally from Donegal: “I got the conservation bug quite early, in my late teens I got involved with The Journeymen, a group of craftspeople (led by Séan Brogan) who did craft demonstrations around Donegal, Sligo and Leitrim. I did my ‘part 2’ thesis on Ramelton and after that I worked with Dedalus Architecture (Duncan McLaren), a small but principled conservation practice in Donegal. While there I got a place on the SPAB scholarship in 2015 and since that I’ve been working with Andrew Townsend Architects”. He’s passionate about conservation and outlines SPAB’s philosophy: “The idea is that a building should be allowed to age gracefully, we love when an old building looks old and see the patina of age as something which should always be retained. Take for instance an old wall that has gone bulged and wobbly and is perhaps on the brink of collapse: rather than take it down and rebuild in the new, the stonework could be stitched together and repaired it in situ, stabilising the wall whilst retaining its wobbliness and telltales of its age”. Byrne is a structural engineer working in conservation in Dublin. “In 2016, I completed the SPAB scholarship programme, which involved travelling all over the UK for nine months visiting hundreds of building conservation projects and meeting the people involved – craftspeople, contractors, professionals and anyone involved in the project in any way”. Byrne says that during her scholarship, I kept thinking about how great it would be to have something like the SPAB in Ireland. Whenever I met the other Irish SPAB members, we always spoke about it. I knew I wanted to return to Ireland after my scholarship (as long as I could find a job!), and with Eoin based in Ireland too, we decided it was a good time to try and establish SPAB in Ireland. Byrne too favours minimal intervention as a philosophy: “SPAB favours a conservationist approach – if there is nothing wrong with a building, why do anything? Often, restoration replaces the history and character of a building, as well as patina of age, with an essentially new building, ‘sanitising’ the old building in the process of restoration”. As to the future of SPAB and its relations with other worthy bodies, Morley says: “There are many great organisations

Pankaj Mishra inhabits a perplexing position in Indian and international letters. One of India’s most exhilaratingly provocative voices, his blistering op-eds and essays in Asian journals and such “intellectual outposts of Anglo-America” as the New York Times, Time, the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books (NYRoB), frequently involve lacerating moral critiques of both Indian and triumphalist Western ideologies. He has drawn an impressive array of naysayers down the years: from neo-con military historians such as Max Boot, to “neoliberal” bigwig, Jagdish Bhagwati, a WTO colleague of Peter Sutherland’s who, in a 2010 speech to the Indian Parliament, denounced Mishra’s criticisms of India’s economic liberalisation as “fiction masquerading as nonfiction”. Meanwhile, life rarely delivers such pleasure as Mishra’s demolition, over a long and remorseless 2011 essay in the London Review of Books (LRoB), of the preposterously right-wing Scottish TV historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, whose enthusiastic apologia for Western imperialism, for Mishra, amounts to “moral and intellectual onanism”. Gentle in person, Mishra is a compact, boyish-looking man with a piercing gaze: his faultless courtesy framing a voice of quiet gravitas from which undulate impeccably elocuted, oft-ornate and resonant sentences. Much of this flows from the exactitude and force of his writing; his vivid, pyrotechnical style embroidering telling quotations from world writers and philosophers into propulsive passages which often ignite in the mind. Mishra diagnoses our era of resurgent bellicose nationalism as a recurrent symptom of capitalism’s dysfunction: as opportunist demagogues deflect mass disaffection onto minorities (or “Islam”); and make grand promises of “development” whilst facilitating crony capitalism. They typically present themselves as social revolutionaries promising to uproot entrenched “cosmopolitan elites” and political “insiders” who are seen, correctly, as callously unresponsive to the sufferings of their peoples. Mishra’s latest book, ‘Age of Anger’ interrogates the contradictions inherent within western liberal democracy: forged in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as a secular, materialist, universalist civilisation based on rational self-interest, equality, ‘liberty’, and laissez-faire free market capitalism. “Even equality is a deeply problematic concept. It has its origins in Christianity, where it is conceived as equality before God. When you transfer that into a competitive commercial society, it becomes elusive, even deceptive. Really, the drama of the modern world is the collision between the promise of equality and the fact of structural inequality. This is where neoliberalism’s promise of meritocracy is an illusion. It has created a subjectivity where equality is seen as achievable, not through state intervention or socialism, but through the pursuit of prosperity. Except that prosperity creates and requires new hierarchies… “So it becomes a completely futile pursuit, accumulating all kinds of political pathologies in its wake. This is not the left view: I think the left is committed to the idea of equality through redistribution. But here we reckon without specialisation, industrialisation, all these complex processes of gradation and heirarchy which make the project of equality all the more difficult. Even in socialist states, you had massive inequality; say in Yugoslavia, what was called the ‘New Class’ ….” Meanwhile, fuelling the engines of history, Mishra identifies Nietzschean ressentiment: a corrosive, rancorous mix of powerlessness, subjugation, humiliation and hatred which can boil over into revolution or terrorism; and from Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (which sold out on Amazon after Trump’s election), a “new terrifying negative solidarity”- a “structureless mass of furious individuals” and superfluous people, united only in loathing of the status quo. Arendt was writing about post-WWI Europe, where class collapse and economic calamity created an atomised people without social identity or emotional moorings. Now, declares Mishra, it is happening again, not just at the global margins, but “in the heartland of modernity. So you get this political insurgency, a nihilistic impulse to punish the elites, to blow up the system; and retreat into fantasies of authenticity, some imagined national community”. For Mishra, “the history of modernisation is largely one of carnage and bedlam”; of uprootedness, dislocation and alienation, as economically backward countries often take cruelly coerced shortcuts to aggressive urbanisation. “Socialist states in general have been everywhere committed to this particular vision of modernisation – whether in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union or in Asia or in Africa – which more and more complicates the project of equality”. He reminds Westerners of our own often wartorn historical transition to modernity; mirroring the turmoil and extremism often witnessed in the developing world, especially after 1945, when emergent nations shook off colonial shackles across Asia and Africa. Thus huge recent advances in India and China are the most radical since Bismarck’s Germany: shoring up catastrophic environmental and social disruption, where just as in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe and the US, many millions are being left behind. Across Asia, he says, this threatens to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage among hundreds of millions of have-nots. Born in 1969 in Uttar Pradesh, Mishra grew up near the north-central Indian city of Jhansi, the son of a railway worker whose high-caste Brahmin family had been impoverished by post-independence land reform. With parents “decisively shaped” by “a pre-modern world of myth, religion and custom”, he can attest to “the ruptures in lived experience and historical continuity, the emotional and psychological disorientations… that have made the passage to modernity so arduous for most people”. Although born a Hindu, “Hindusim is not really a religion, it’s a way of life: there was no obligation to go to temple or engage in rituals, it was very agnostic, very relaxed”. They lived “a semi-rural life on the margins of small towns, amidst a mixed local population. I grew up assuming human diversity to be the norm. That’s why I find any suggestion that we should have a homogenous society deeply repulsive. For me, humanity is diverse”. “I grew up in an India where the collective project was important, where the phrase ‘the common good’ still had some meaning. We didn’t think of ourselves as individuals competing with each other in the marketplace. There was a particular

During 2015 in Ireland there were 49,689 applications to the family law courts in the context of relationship breakdowns. This indicates a high level of contentious separations and divorces exposing children to ongoing conflict between their parents. Definition One emerging phenomenon currently facing social, legal and mental health practitioners is that of a child or children strongly aligning themselves with one parent while rejecting the relationship with the other despite having had a previous loving relationship with that parent, either mother or father. The primary behavioural symptom is the child’s refusal to have contact with the alienated parent. The behaviour of the child includes a persistent campaign of denigration against the alienated parent and weak, frivolous and absurd rationalisations for the child’s criticism of the alienated parent. This phenomenon is referred to as parental alienation. Is it recognised? A frequent critique put forward is that the dynamics of parental alienation are not recognised. But it is important to note that in fact these dynamics have been independently noted and documented in the empirical psychiatric and psychological literature since the early 1950s. More recently, the current edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual 5 (DSM) has included a number of terms that contain the spirit of parental alienation such as “child affected by parental relationship distress”, “parent-child relational problem”, and “disruption of family by separation or divorce”. Rates of Alienation Studies have concluded that there were elements of false or negative ideas about the other parent in eighty percent of the 700 divorces studied5. Further studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of parents were considered at a minimum, to be naive alienators while at the other end of the spectrum there were obsessed and active alienating behaviours in an effort to damage and terminate the child’s relationship with the targeted parent. Key Features of Parental Alienation Practitioners are increasingly being faced with angry and distressed children who strongly insist that they do not want any contact with a previously loved parent in the context of a high conflict separation or divorce. The child may react aggressively toward the targeted parent by kicking, punching or spitting at him or her. The names of Mum or Dad are replaced with him, her or it. They may destroy property belonging to the targeted parent. They may suddenly and completely shun the targeted parent and his or her extended family including grandparents, uncles and aunts in public. The child may offer scripted responses using adult language to justify their rejection of the targeted parent and make allegations of neglect and abuse. They deny previous positive experiences with the targeted parent, say that they do not remember them or that they were just pretending to be happy at those times. Some examples of the reasons for parental alienation offered by children include “she treats me like a slave” (10-year-old female) when explored further, she went on to say, “She makes me empty the dishwasher” and “she makes me tidy my room and put my clothes into the wash basket”. It is striking that these seemingly ordinary reasons are used to warrant such an extreme response from the child, however, in high-conflict divorces events can take on alarming new meanings. In another case a 9-year-old boy presented with fourteen written pages of reasons as to why he hated his father and did not want to see him again, while another 11-year-old female stated: “Under Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child I do not have to see my mother if I do not want to”. Some children present with more serious concerns about themselves and their safety such as “I am in fear of my life”, “I fear for my safety”. Thus, the clinician may find themselves obliged to report and/or investigate such allegations. It is important to acknowledge that some children do indeed reject a parent for what can be considered normative reasons such as abusive or neglectful parenting. This is considered realistic estrangement and is not to be considered alienation whereas, an alienated child is described as expressing freely and persistently unreasonable negative beliefs that are disproportionate to the child’s actual experience with that parent. It is crucial to be able to differentiate true estrangement from parental alienation. Therefore, unless there is compelling evidence to investigate or there has been proven sexual, physical or emotional abuse children should be strongly encouraged to have contact with the other parent in order to preserve the relationship into the future when the child may be feeling less angry and upset. When it comes to decisions regarding custody and access it is important to recognise that joint custody is usually in the child’s best interest when both parents are fit to parent. Therefore, it is crucial to look behind the statements of a child who seeks no contact with a previously loved parent rather than simply accept a child’s strident rejection at face value as somehow being a negative reflection on a parent’s parenting capacity or competency. A close evaluation of the parent/child relationship before the relationship breakdown is important; otherwise practitioners may assume that the current parent/child relationship is a reflection of the true parent/child relationship resulting in professionals recommending reduced contact time between the targeted parent and child. This may lead to perpetuating the alienation process by practitioners, albeit unwittingly. The aligned or alienating parent may present as disempowered regarding contact with the non-resident parent stating, “what can I do if my child does not want to see him/her”? Paradoxically, this same parent will present as very much empowered in all other aspects of the child’s life. False allegations of abuse and neglect in contact disputes The contemporary literature provides us with numerous examples regarding the prevalence of false allegations of abuse and neglect in this context. These studies demonstrate 70 per cent of cases where false allegations of neglect and abuse have been identified. Other researchers found that both mothers and fathers are equally likely to make unfounded allegations.

“Don’t Hug Your Mother”. This is the order our father gave to my brother JP and me as we were on our way to visit our mother. It was just over a year after our parents had separated. We were ten and twelve years of age. My father’s demands were the beginning of a process whereby he systematically forced my brothers and me to be hostile to our mother. It soon escalated to the point where we were being banned from seeing her and shortly after that we were banned from even speaking to our mother on the phone or even referring to her as our mother. Failure to comply with our father’s demands resulted in punishments, both physical and psychological. The result: we did not have any contact with our mother for eighteen years. When we looked back on our childhood as adults, we thought that what had happened to our family was rare and we held this belief until quite recently. We were midway through writing a memoir about the experience when, curious to find out if there were any other books similar to ours, we searched a few terms in Google and made a discovery. To our amazement, we discovered that our plight was not an exceptional case at all; rather it was happening regularly in Ireland and worldwide. The name of this epidemic is ‘Parental Alienation’. A prominent American clinical and research psychologist and author, Dr Richard Warshak, defines it as “the process, and the result, of the psychological manipulation of a child into showing unwarranted fear, disrespect or hostility towards a parent and/or other family members”. It is not defined as a condition by, for example, the World Health Organisation. We continued to research and we found websites, forums and Facebook groups for Parental Alienation with many thousands of members. The majority of the members are parents who assert that they have been alienated from their children whom they love and long to see. We knew that our mother felt this pain for eighteen years so we could sympathise with these people. Once we became aware that Parental Alienation was continuing to damage children’s lives today, we became determined do something. We wanted to finish our book and get it in the public eye to show the detrimental effects of Parental Alienation, especially given the scant coverage the problem received in Ireland. The court services tell us that out of the 5,700 custody and access applications made in 2014, a total of 2,016 applications were rejected. It concerns me that some of these applications were likely to be made by parents of children who were being manipulated and brainwashed like myself and JP had been. We were coached by our father to tell a solicitor, judge or psychologist that we didn’t want to see our mother. There has been recent legislation in light of the Children’s Referendum (in 2012) which alludes to Parental Alienation. The Children & Family Relationships Act was enacted in January 2016. It improves upon the old legislation in that it states that the Court shall facilitate that the views of a child are not borne out of undue influence of a parent. The Law Society submitted recommendations in anticipation of the bill, referring directly to ‘Parental Alienation’, stating that, “the Court may find it very difficult if as a result the child is refusing all contact and seems convinced that the other parent poses a danger”. I commend the Law Society for this but I believe the legislation alone doesn’t tackle the problem adequately. In my opinion, proper training is required for solicitors, judges and child psychologists to understand and identify Parental Alienation. The Irish Parental Alienation Awareness Association has dramatically called for alienation to be made an indictable offence. Andries van Tonder, its secretary, says that in Mexico, the parent encouraging alienation can be imprisoned for 15 years. “It is a serious form of child abuse to turn a child against a parent”, he maintains. In April 1993, when my brother JP was asked by our father’s solicitor how seeing our mother would affect him, he listed off our father’s words, even copying the numeric sequence our father had applied: points one, two and three. JP spoke like an adult, yet he had just turned fourteen. Speaking the words of the alienator parent is a characteristic of Parental Alienation that was identified in the early 1980s. It appears this solicitor didn’t identify that in 1993. Without proper training regarding Parental Alienation, I am not convinced that a solicitor would identify it in 2016.   ‘Don’t Hug Your Mother: A Memoir’ by JP and Brendan Byrne can be purchased here on Amazon.   https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Hug-Your-Mother-compelling-ebook/dp/B01LX2QC52

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