Culture

By Lorraine Courtney Political art is often charged with achieving the impossible: producing real, tangible change. Artists don’t pass laws or have a finger on the button, so what can they possibly do to influence governments or dislodge the structures of power? Will they ever save the world through ideas, objects and images alone? ‘Counter Culture’ is a play trying to do this. The play was first launched by the Fishamble Show-in-a-Bag scheme for the Dublin Fringe in 2013, and has toured widely in Ireland ever since. It’s a hilarious yet hard-hitting social realist fairytale, that’s set in the fictional Macken’s Department Store in Dublin on the busiest day of the year: a snowy 8th December. It’s also the day management decide to introduce zero hours contracts for their workers. The murky world of life on zero-hours contracts hit the headlines here with the recent strike in Dunnes Stores and we learned what it is like not to know how big next week’s pay cheque is going to be – or if they will receive one at all. Katie O’Kelly was inspired by an old photograph though. “I came across a picture. It was of my Granny, on strike, holding a placard outside Clery’s in Dublin in 1983. She worked there for over 30 years. She was campaigning for better pay and conditions for workers, and the right to form their own union. It was a side of my granny I had never known about, and it all seemed so different to the world of retail that I knew, where employees were treated almost like replaceable commodities”. And so O’Kelly flings her audience into the world of fashion retail, a web of hangers, sales targets and bunions, where the workers realise they as disposable as the fashion they sell. O’Kelly begins and ends her multi-character journey as a personified snowflake who flutters about and alights in the palm of the outstretched hand of Jim Larkin’s statue. This is the story of four employees (and a few other transitory characters) on a normal working day. It’s skillfully if a touch schematically done, and energetically performed by O’Kelly, who manages effortless transitions between the protagonists. We meet Gemma, a heavily pregnant young woman who is not allowed to sit down during her long shift in the bedding section, and her frail grandmother, Bridie, who has never missed a day’s work at Macken’s since she started out working there at just eighteen. “Amidst all the chaos of contracts and consumerism, at the core of ‘Counter Culture’ is the personal story of a granny and granddaughter, and their journey together through the day in Macken’s when zero-hours contracts are brought in. I think it’s important that the central two characters are female, as the majority of retail workers affected by zero and low-hour contracts are women, and their story should be told”. Through this kaleidoscopic story of inequity in the modern workplace, nostalgia, bribery, struggle, and half hope, told with the utmost industriousness by the pitch-perfect O’Kelly, the plot brims to the point of overflow for such a short play. The storytelling is not always successful. The characters (and this production) seem trapped on a roundelay, turning in ever decreasing circles. It is indulgent in its way – it could run at less than the apportioned time without losing anything. Yet O’Kelly’s baggy, blackly hilarious script is marked by a great joy in writing and a love of her characters. She imbues it with a beautifully watchable rhythm that only flags a little. Still Donal O’Kelly’s direction is taut and there are beautiful scenes like the brilliantly imaginative use of an empty metal clothes-rack. O’Kelly believes ‘Counter Culture’ can make a real impact this year in Edinburgh – the biggest international theatre window in the world, and focus attention on the issue of decent working conditions. It could. This enjoyable piece of agitprop makes no apologies for doing so. You see the truly political artist can insinuate and subtly subvert opinion without sledgehammer sermons, engaging the public consciousness on a deeper level and infiltrating the lifeblood of culture. Politics in art is still possible; in this age of apathy is vital. •

By Frank Armstrong. You know you are in trouble when the Minister for Health boasts about taking out health insurance although the Programme for Government stipulates a “universal, single-tiered health service, which guarantees access based on need, not income”. In his cheery way Leo Varadakar was effectively admitting that the provision of public health care will remain unfit for purpose and that the poor are not enjoying the same level of treatment as the rich. If his British counterpart were to make the same declaration there would be an outcry over the denigration of a national institution, the (national) health service. No-one seems to care that those who cannot afford medical insurance (otherwise known as the poor), are going to be subjected to inferior treatment in two tier Ireland. But Ireland’s Left is bedevilled by petty squabbles and attachment to nationalist aggrandisement. Moreover, the media are uninterested (the principal shareholder of Independent News and Media recently acquired a private hospital). The commodification of healthcare may also have sinister consequences even for those who can afford it. Put simply: if a private client doesn’t get sick then the medical professional doesn’t earn a living. Treatment of disease becomes the raison d’etre of the system. What motivation is there for the doctor to prevent disease by advocating the kind of lifestyle changes that promote health before they encounter a medical professional? And Big Pharma just wants to sell medicines. That is not to impugn the reputations of individual doctors, nor to question the validity of evidence-based medicine, although the work of Ben Goldacre has shown just how corrupt the system can be. Of course it goes beyond Big Pharma and their sinister machinations. It extends to Big Food and all its wretched emanations. We know that large companies actually work to engender compulsive eating. Quite how our laws permit this is staggering. Big Tobacco is getting its comeuppance but we have a long way to go before Big Food executives are hauled before the courts. In Ireland the Big Food lobby has been highly successful in telling people that without consuming meat and dairy we’ll collapse with anaemia and osteoporosis. This is achieved through extensive lobbying, skilled manipulation of media, and the funding of studies and conferences where evidence-based methods are manipulated to draw favourable conclusions. Most startling has been the success of the dairy industry in promoting baby cow food as necessary for preventing osteoporosis. This ignores that humanity domesticated cattle less than ten thousand years ago. Clearly we have not evolved a dependence in such a short time, and in any case most of humanity is still lactose intolerant: the independent Harvard School of Public Health argue that there are better sources of calcium especially green leafy vegetables. Also occluded from most of the Irish population is the firm evidence from most long-term epidemiological studies (from Okinawa to China and on to the Mediterranean) which show that predominantly plant-based diets rich in wholegrains and vegetables promote longevity and reduce disease risk. Sadly the medical community in Ireland which should be making nutritional arguments are structurally deterred from doing so. Often it’s easily ridiculed practitioners of complementary medicine that are putting these points across. And so the health of the Irish population deteriorates and we may be reaching a point where, despite advances in vaccinations and life-saving antibiotics (notwithstanding their overuse) today’s parents will enjoy greater life expectancies than their children. This, at least, was the finding of one recent US study and Ireland seems to be converging with US norms. At least many educated people are finding out about the beneficial effects of dietary change for themselves, but those without the educational capability (another sector underpinned by inequality) many are unable to untangle the cacophony of nutritional advice. Obesity is now, paradoxically, linked to food poverty. Across the water some months ago a Tory peer by the delicious name of Gayle Hunnicutt got into a spot of bother when she suggested that those availing of food banks simply had poor cookery skills. “We have lost a lot of our cookery skills. Poor people do not know how to cook” Hunnicutt said. “I had a large bowl of porridge today, which cost 4p. A large bowl of sugary cereals will cost you 25p”. Predictably a wave of revulsion greeted the dame’s remarks, especially drawing attention to how cookery facilities are often lacking in impoverished circumstances. But she does have a point. Poor immigrants arriving in Ireland from countries whose food cultures amount to more than meat and two veg display far greater dietary range and acquaint their children with different flavours at an early stage in their development. Ireland seems to have an even more dysfunctional relationship with food than its nearest neighbour and one UN agency recently predicted that Ireland will soon have the highest rate of obesity in Europe. Of course the origins of obesity are multi-factorial and include: the stress of living in a competitive capitalist society; urban environments unfavourable to walking, cycling and public transport; and the over-use of antibiotics. Nonetheless the absence of a resilient food culture drawing significantly on native crops rather than foodstuffs skillfully marketed by a capitalist system at a relatively advanced post-industrial stage is apparent. The convergence of Irish diets with those of the wider then United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century has had a lasting effect. Improvements in diet through the development of alternative agriculture, especially fruit and vegetable cultivation, could help confront the obesity pandemic through the appeal of increased variety, freshness and a reduction in cost. Imbalances in the present system are revealed in the 2011 healthy-eating guidelines of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), which found that foods high in fat and sugar were generally a far cheaper source of calories and that fruits and vegetables were in the most expensive category. Damningly, the report noted that “healthy eating was less affordable for families dependent on social welfare”. The authors identified a need

By Domhnall Casey. Most people now see homosexuality as ‘normal’, a big improvement on the recent past when to be gay was a criminal offence. The Government’s proposal to hold a Constitutional referendum aimed at changing the law on equal marriage for the homosexual community has, apparently, been greeted so far with almost universal approval. This has been a long struggle. More than one hundred years ago, in his book ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, Freud wrote: “Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal restrictions of their sexual activity are fond of representing themselves through theoretical spokesmen as evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate stage of sex or as a ‘third sex’. As much as one would wish to subscribe to [the demands of homosexuals to be considered as representing a third sexuality] out of humane [sic] considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychogenesis of homosexuality. Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the memory picture of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother he conserves the same in his unconscious and henceforth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to become disloyal to his mother”. According to classical theory, the human infant is polymorphously perverse, which means that any conceivable object can serve sexual gratification. “Normal” sexuality which grows out of the same tree as perversions and other sexual choices is really the end point of a long, often disrupted pilgrimage and is a goal that many never reach. It is a conceit of heterosexuals that their lived sexual orientation alone is enough to classify them as “normal”. In fact the mature sexual drive is an achievement seldom attained, according to Freud. Sexuality begins at the earliest time in the life of a human being. A more or less hypothetical form of energy called the libido by Freud, which occupies, one by one, the erotogenic zones of the body beginning with the mouth area (the oral phase), progressing to the anal and genital  phases and indeed the musculature and the whole body is the precursor of later mature expression of sexuality. The earliest of these phases are subject to infant amnesia. It may well be that ‘sexuality’ in the sense of gender identification, begins long before the birth of individual human beings and is in fact phylo-genetic in origin. Phylogeny refers to the development of the race and ontogeny to the development of the individual. These terms belong more correctly to biology but Freud borrowed the idea for his foray into anthropology in ‘Totem and Taboo’. Freud was a Lamarckian (whose theory was that characteristics acquired by an individual can be inherited by his descendants) even though this theory does not fit with the Darwinian view of evolution. If there is a phylogenetic component to sexual orientation this might help explain why many homosexuals have “always known” their sexual preference and why most heterosexuals move apparently seamlessly into the ‘straight’ world without a second thought. Sexual orientation is seen as innate, genetic and not a choice and only sometimes caused by external events. So, genetic determinism and the domination of nature over nurture, unacceptable in most other spheres, is more and more popularly accepted in the area of sexual orientation. But this may not always be the case. Indeed if it is the case it is not helpful to gays since there is growing evidence that hormonal influences from the mother have a profound effect on the genetic system of the foetus, thus affecting which genetic traits will be expressed in the child’s lifetime. The stem-cell biologist and pioneering epigeneticist Bruce Lipton claims: “Parents can …act as genetic engineers for their children” and Norman Doidge, in his book ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’ writes that “thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behaviour…..”. Nevertheless, it seems churlish and even dangerous to go against the flow of popular opinion that homosexuality is anything other than one of the variants of ‘normal’ sexuality – especially given that the concept of “normality” is a cultural fantasy – and to inquire into the nature of homosexuality and indeed of sexuality in general. The weight of opinion seems to be overwhelmingly that there is no question legitimately to be asked and that we have gone beyond the necessity for such considerations. However, I believe that Freud and his later interpreters provide a commentary that remains of interest. Sigmund Freud’s view of homosexuality was open and liberal, as would be expected – though it is important to note it is not seen as the mainstream view now. He pointed out that in the male homosexual there was an intensive erotic attachment to a “feminine person” (mother) which was “later entirely forgotten” by the individual……Too much love from the mother produced or favoured this attachment” and this state of affairs was “furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period”. He went on: “Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose mechanisms we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother…..merges into repression. The boy represses the love for the mother by putting himself in her place, by identifying himself with her and by taking his own person as a model through the similarity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual; as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitutive persons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We

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Mother’s resilience is unpredictable, fragile and liable to flip