Culture

By Kieran Fagan. The recent pardon for Harry Gleeson, hanged in 1941 for a murder he did not commit, brings into focus the early career of Seán MacBride. MacBride, then barely four years after relinquishing the role of chief of staff of the IRA, was a controversial choice as Gleeson’s junior counsel, working with James Nolan-Whelan who was a more experienced senior. Gleeson managed his elderly uncle John Caesar’s farm at New Inn, County Tipperary and, as his uncle was childless, expected to inherit it. One morning in November 1941, he was out in the fields looking for wandering sheep when he discovered the body of Mary McCarthy lying in the corner of a field. On finding the body, Harry Gleeson ran back to the farmhouse to talk to Bridget Caesar, his uncle’s wife, to know what he should do. She told him to go over to the Garda station at New Inn and report his find, but not to “let on” that he knew who the woman was. Moll was a scandalous woman, and it was better to have no knowledge of her. Moll Carthy, as she was known locally, was approaching 40 years of age, and she lived with her brood of six children in a cottage adjoining Caesar farm. Moll was a bit of a problem for New Inn, having had different fathers for each of her six children, and local efforts to get her to move on or have the children taken into care had failed. A murder investigation began, and fairly soon the finger of suspicion pointed at Gleeson. He had been carrying on with Moll, it was said, and she was blackmailing him, threatening to tell John Caesar who would disinherit his nephew, and Harry was charged with murder. This was the case that Gleeson’s solicitor brought to MacBride, whose legal brilliance had become the envy of other more established practitioners at the Irish Bar. The question which my book asks of Seán MacBride is: why, if he was so talented, did his client hang? The difficulty which many writing about MacBride quickly encounter is which of MacBride’s many personae is in the frame? Is it the gilded youth of the Irish independence struggle, scion of Major John and Maud Gonne MacBride? Is it the hardened gunman of the 1920s and 1930s? Or the gifted lawyer who would earn international acclaim? Ahead of him lay initial domestic political success, founding Clann na Poblachta in 1946, entering government in 1948, and later winning Nobel and Lenin peace prizes, and being the grand old man of liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere. For Gleeson’s solicitor John Timoney, MacBride’s reputation as a brilliant and disruptive lawyer was enough. The two lawyers, united by their belief in Gleeson’s innocence, soon became friends and Timoney won a Dáil seat for Clann na Poblachta in 1948. MacBride’s file on the Harry Gleeson trial still exists and it bears witness to his meticulous preparation, and much burning of midnight oil in the weeks before, during and after the trial leading up to the hanging. His approach to finding discrepancies in witness statements is instructive: he drew a big timeline on which witnesses’ whereabouts were plotted. His old nemesis de Valera would have approved of the scientific approach. After conviction it shows MacBride tirelessly working his contacts, political and legal, to try to get his client pardoned. But the file also contains material relevant to another facet of MacBride’s complexity – efforts to mediate between de Valera and the IRA, then under severe pressure because of the failed English bombing campaign of 1939. It also makes reference to the IRA kidnapping of Michael Devereux, one of its own members, who was suspected of informing to police. The hue and cry to find Devereux – he was dead at this stage and MacBride would have known that – was putting pressure on IRA sympathisers in south Tipperary in late 1940 when Moll McCarthy was murdered. But the question remains. Why did MacBride not challenge his former IRA comrade Thomas Hennessy when Hennessy gave evidence of hearing shots which the prosecution said were those with which Gleeson murdered Moll McCarthy? Why did MacBride ignore the existence of a group of former IRA activists in New Inn, people who had an interest in silencing Moll McCarthy because they believed she had become intimate with Garda sergeant Anthony Delaney, and was committing that most Irish of reserved sins, informing on them to the police? To MacBride’s credit, he did not let the case rest. Throughout his long life he continued to insist that Gleeson should not have been hanged. Harry Gleeson liked him, and MacBride dealt gently with the extended Gleeson family and friends, and with other victims of miscarriages of justice who approached him. But on the occasion of Harry Gleeson’s trial it is fair to conclude that it was not the defendant’s past which caught up with him, but that of his defence  counsel. •

By Frank Armstrong and Michael Smith. The Charlie Hebdo attacks by individuals purporting to represent Islam once again linked that religion to violent behaviour anathema to Western, liberal values. From stoning of adulterers to beheadings and burnings alive of infidels, flogging bloggers and even female genital mutilation, a picture registers of a religion stubbornly rooted in a barbaric past, even if those practices have little or no real justification in Islam, and are abhorrent to most Muslims. What we generalise as ‘Islam’ is a constantly evolving and diverse set of beliefs influenced by the varying settings of its over one billion global adherents. A range of interpretations of Islam can be found, many of course self-consciously malign. Nevertheless most Muslims in the West find little difficulty reconciling their lifestyles with the norms of their societies, albeit they may be highly critical of the foreign and domestic policies of their governments. Muslims may embrace the uniquely dangerous doctrine of Jihad the place of which in Islam is mysterious to heathens. Care is needed as the term Jihad for some refers to spiritual as well as military conflict and where military it implies defence not attack. Nevertheless again, some of those hostile to Islamists have cynically used the term to their advantage. There are also various views as to whether Sunnis and Shias differ on the concept. In Shia Islam, Jihad is one of the ten Practices of the Religion, (though not one of the Angel-Gabriel-revealed mandatory Five Pillars). With the Islamic revival in the eighteenth century a fundamentalist movement preaching Jihad was perpetrated by the Wahhabi movement which spread across the Arabian peninsula starting in the 18th century, emphasising Jihad as armed struggle. Wars against Western colonial forces were often declared Jihad. For example the Mahdi in the Sudan declared Jihad against the British and the Egyptians in 1881. In the twentieth century, one of the first Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, emphasised physical struggle and martyrdom in its credo: “God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; struggle (Jihad) is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations”. The group called for Jihad against the new Jewish state of Israel in the 1940s, and its Palestinian branch, Hamas, called for Jihad against Israel when the First Intifada started in 1987. In the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood cleric Abdullah Azzam, sometimes called ‘the father of the modern global Jihad’, opened the possibility of immediate Jihad against unbelievers. Azzam issued a fatwa calling for Jihad against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. In 1996, al-Qaeda announced its Jihad to expel foreign troops and interests from what they considered Islamic lands. Osama Bin Laden issued a Fatwa (compulsory religious edict), calling for war against the US and its allies. Before rising to indignation about this it is instructive to recall Christianity’s history of justifying the Crusades, the Inquisition and oppression of minorities. The Bible was even used to justify slavery before the American Civil War. The corpora of works that constitute both Christianity and Islam contain a wide range of possible interpretations, though the era and ethos of crusading are now remote. So what at a minimum does religion mean for violence? Sociologist Emile Durkheim claimed that religions are: “a system of ideas with which the individual represent to themselves the society of which they are members”. This follows Aristotle’s dictum that: “men create the gods after their own image”. A contrasting view, articulated by another sociologist, Max Weber, is that religions of themselves generate socio-economic conditions: most famously he argued that the Protestant work ethic led to modern capitalism. This brings us to the important question of whether religious violence is a product of the religion itself or emanates from the wider society. The Christian Philosophical Anthropologist, René Girard, identified a universal tendency towards what he termed “acquisitive mimesis”. By this he meant that humans copy each other’s consumption (a version of monkey see, monkey do) which naturally leads to rivalry over scarce resources. Unlike other animals, from quite early in our evolution we developed a capacity to employ weapons, beginning with stone projectiles. With this capacity for wreaking destruction early humans found it necessary to resolve potentially fatal conflicts brought about by competition for resources. Girard identified the mechanism of the scapegoat across a whole range of cultural contexts.  It serves to pacify the violent tendencies that bedevil human societies. Jesus Christ’s crucifixion is an obvious example, but he found this to be a near-universal feature of tribal societies. Religions play a prominent role in scapegoating. According to Girard: “The sacred is violence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of violence is supposed to bring peace; religion is entirely concerned with peace, but the means it has of bringing it about are never free of sacrificial violence”. With this apparent paradox in mind we may explore the origins of violence in Islam in its socio-cultural context. The harsh desert environment of post-nomadic Saudi Arabia where literacy was rare and violence endemic preserved religious practices that we in the West consider barbarous. The discovery of enormous oil reserves after World War I thrust unimaginable wealth into the hands of the new state, and the fundamentalist Wahhabi form of Islam has been used by the ruling Al-Saud family to legitimise its rule. Weber’s view of religion resonates here. The often intolerant Wahhabi teachings emanating from Saudi Arabia over the last decades have had a strong and worrying influence on many of the global Islamic community and on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The values of a violent, desert society remain influential. Reflecting on the nature of, and differences between, global religions is instructive. One distinguishing feature of the monotheistic faiths of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is they firmly place man at the centre of the universe with dominion over all life. This anthropocentrisim drives how they consume food – a fundamental part of their relationship

By Frank Armstrong In her recent Michael Littleton lecture for RTé, ‘Has Poetry a Future?’, Eavan Boland identified the “vertical” audience poetry has enjoyed throughout history. Many hallowed poets, such as Keats, did not find a public in their own time but their words may echo down the ages unlike other forms of culture which may have a short-lived or “horizontal” appeal. She argued that those who assert poetry’s present irrelevance are hopelessly myopic. In a recent book of prose essays, ‘Say But The Word: Poetry as Vision and Voice’, leading Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail also explores the point of poetry. He writes: “The role of poetry is often seen as that of guardian of a language. However, I would like to extend this somewhat to include the more dynamic concept of an ecology, which stresses both a mutual responsibility and a continuing process of renewal”. Poets assert authenticity in the languages of the dynamic societies they inhabit. O’Siadhail identifies a confluence of the language of heart and mind in poetry that serves as a refuge from daily corruptions where: “our core words – ‘motherhood’, for example – are daily exploited and polluted to tempt us to consume”. Even if poetry is not overtly political it may still perform a vital role in creating a dissonance that subtly subverts power structures. O’Siadhail approvingly quotes Vaclav Havel from ‘An Anatomy of Reticence’: “even a word is capable of a certain radiation, of leaving a mark on the ‘hidden consciousness’ of a community …. it is vital that we remind ourselves that whether there is a visible political content or not is irrelevant. At a much more fundamental level, any poet who unswervingly pursues an artistic truth, is potentially political”. Under Communism in Czechoslovakia poets like Havel resisted the totalitarian regime by bending the language of authority. O’Siadhail wonders “whether Osip Mandelstam did know what he was talking about when he said that he measured a civilization by the number of its poetry readers”. But O’Siadhail identifies a danger that Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot have developed a self-absorbed and potentially redundant poetry. He explains: “The clear danger of this interiority is an opting out of society and a refusal to take any responsibility for shaping a wider meaning. Apart from the risk of solipsism and plain self-indulgence, there is the risk of turning poetry into a kind of private piety, which ends up marginalising poetry, or branding it as some kind of academic pursuit not appropriate to the ordinary reader of books”. A further question to ponder is whether contemporary poetry should be embraced at the expense of the old: most obviously in the secondary-school syllabus. Should teenagers be asked to engage with and perhaps recite older poems if the subject matter seems remote to their experiences, and even if the views of a poet would seem outmoded in the science classroom next door? Seen through the lens of its ‘vertical’ influence, educators should be hesitant to alter the canon in the interest of inclusiveness, or of according a rapid recognition to poets who have attained popularity in their lifetimes. Tussling with old masters might give students a better sense of the contingency of established ideas. Unfortunately this gives rise to gender imbalance, but there is little point in including unremarkable poetry for the sake of political correctness. Moreover a more nuanced view of gender might allow us to identify a feminine voice in any verse notwithstanding its author. Poetry is more than a personal undertaking but a common inheritance of a language. O’Siadhail quotes Edward Sapir who wrote in 1921: “Every language is itself a collective art of expression … An artist utilises the native aesthetic resources of his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of colours is rich, if the springboard is light. But he deserves no special credit for felicities that are the language’s own”. Boland’s distinction between the vertical and horizontal might also apply over the course of an individual’s lifetime: when he first encounters a poem a student may find little beyond conjunctions of words with a musical ring to them but over the course of a lifetime may begin to inhabit the ideas expressed. In that sense the old method of teaching poetry orally, where lines are learnt by heart to be called on in future, seems worthwhile. Reflection on the work, a child’s search for meaning, might then be conducted in a more personalised, instinctual, rather than as a crash-course in understanding for the sake of an examination demanding the often cynical obligation to deconstruct. In this collection that spans many years of reflection O’Siadhail addresses the tension between form and content, laying bare his artistic process with great clarity. He examines the workings and appeal of the sonnet, the haiku, of Dante’s terza rima and of the free form of the Black Mountain Poets and Beats. Ultimately O’Siadhail does not assert the superiority of any one among them, stating: “My own feeling is that both the howls of the Beats and the ‘open field’ of the Black Mountain Poets may have done us all a great service on both sides of the Atlantic. It may have been necessary for a while to move away from the perceived stuffiness of formality, to leave the stanza behind and to give free rein to a line based more on breath and utterance”. He concludes that: “the use of form is now a matter of choice … It is like a move from an arranged marriage to a life of voluntary commitment”. As a poet trained in linguistics he adumbrates rare insights into the archaeology of languages and the challenge of translation. He quotes Dante who declared that “nothing harmonised by a musical bond can be transmuted from its own speech without losing all its sweetness and harmony”; although adding that: “For all the well-known dictums about the failure of all translations, from time to time the magic happens

Capitalism and history are bad for Irish health

Enjoyable agitprop with no sledgehammers. Review

We should marshal Ireland’s musical genius for political not economic ends

By Frank Armstrong. “In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly” – Seán ó Faoláin     Donal Dineen recently described this as a “golden age” in Irish music. We might take heart when a DJ of his calibre with knowledge crossing genres and continents makes such a pronouncement. His sets and peripatetic shows reveal a remarkable and unyielding musical engagement; his vocal input merges clarity, wit and pathos even if at times he does wander. Of course it will be for posterity to judge whether such a description is warranted, or whether Dineen ‘has gone off on one’. What is this this creative outpouring in our midst?. No golden age in music can be divorced from its socio-economic and cultural context. Musicians do not float free, insulated from broader currents. We may expect the golden age to have a silver lining. On many levels we’ve ‘never had it so good’ in spite of the Celtic Tiger failing a dope test: the country has survived unbroken unlike after other historical crises, albeit with a diminished standard of living and increased emigration. But the brain drain is not all in one direction. Immigrants from all over the world continue to arrive in Ireland. In terms of music, there is sufficient wealth for patronage of concerts to continue and a comparatively generous social welfare system (for all except the under 25s) forces few musicians into serious poverty. Of course there is serious inequality, a public-health time bomb, far too great a concentration of economic activity in Dublin and an often atrocious attitude to the environment. And yet there is a spirit in Ireland that visitors and even residents remark upon. Strangers actually talk to one another. Distasteful efforts to brand and commodify the Irish welcome cannot mask genuine warmth. Importantly those who have arrived are keen to integrate and a garrulous culture is happy to accommodate outsiders. Ireland doesn’t have the exclusionary colonial baggage of some of its neighbours and there is little obvious racism. Surveying the wider culture we have long been a country on the geographic edge, but also on edge creatively. Musically, many New Irish are asserting individual creativity and drawing on international influences shaped by appreciative Irish audiences. In jazz and world music, the Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, the Italian pianist Francesco Turrissi and half-Sierra-Leonean-half-Irish singer Loah deserve a global audience. Meanwhile traditional forms have been nourished by interactions with foreign styles. The ‘session’ which blurs the boundary between audience and performer thrives, particularly outside Dublin. Exploring the context of the Irish cultural revival that began at the end of the nineteenth century, the literary historian Joe Cleary identified “conjunctures” or intersections of socio-political and economic forces that generated impressive artistic achievements. Rather like the profusion of nature at the fault line of two clashing tectonic plates, the first, blood-curdling, adventure of the British empire, had enmeshed a peasant society with an advancing industrial society generating an embarrassment of cultural riches. The Irish had acquired the language of the coloniser but some chose to distort it and question the prevailing optimism of the epoch. In ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ the English language was subjected to an almost mocking treatment by James Joyce, and WB Yeats was inspired by peasant lore to a mysticism central to his oeuvre. Both Joyce and Yeats were also profoundly musical. Yeats in particular developed a remarkable sonorous quality to his verse, quite at odds with the Modernist rejection of form that has transformed much contemporary poetry into a largely academic pre-occupation. This loss of a wider relevance for poetry could have dangerous, dislocating consequences. In ‘Songlines’ the travel writer Bruce Chatwin recalls how the aboriginal population of Australia believe their ancestors sang their land into existence. He writes: “In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land; since if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die”. He concludes that ‘the Songlines were not necessarily an Australian phenomenon, but universal: that they were the means by which man marked out his territory, and so organized his social life”. Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: Gesang ist Dasein meaning “song is existence”. Songs are of course both music and words, but their inspiration comes from different parts of the brain. Fascinatingly, some stroke victims who lose the use of their brain’s left hemisphere can no longer speak, but retain a capacity to sing. The right hemisphere is associated with nuance and metaphor which are the life-blood of poetry. But when a musician plays her instrument she is largely working from the left hemisphere. This is not surprising considering the mathematical basis of chord progressions and rhythm. To some extent the playing of an instrument is the operation of a noise-making machine which is the responsibility of the practical, left hemisphere. But when composing the musician enters the domain of the right, as symbolic meaning interacts with the relative order of a musical key. A sensitive instrumentalist can also recognise the sentiments expressed in lyrics, indeed echo and embellish them. This co-ordination of hemispheres helps explain the power of music, especially that of song raised on instruments, to lift us out of our seats. The psychiatrist and literary scholar Iain MacGilchrist explains that: “both hemispheres are importantly involved. Creativity depends on the union of things that that are also maintained separately”. Religions have long understood the power of songs. Hymns have always occupied an important place in Catholicism and Martin Luther said: “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world”. John Lennon’s claim in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus was not as naïve as it may seem. Their success arrived at a time when organised religions were in decline and the enduring connection between spiritual devotion and song music gave Beatlemania characteristics of a religious revival, although any movement was forestalled by the egos in the band. Religious songs take a meditative