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UNambitious
Ireland will again exercise its place on the Security Council to promote consensus rather than vision and values
Opinion
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As Covid takes everything from the Young, Society and the Media single them out for even rare breaches of the rules
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Focus on the 12.8%
We need to refocus on those who could actually die from Covid – and de-focus on the rest
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by Michael Smith It’s 2020. We’re transitioning to a civilisation with a wiser sensibility. We’re defenestrating monuments that subvert our values. What’s the first erection we should remove? On its twentieth anniversary, it’s Dublin’s spike, the ‘Spire of Dublin’, a tiger in metal. Dublin lost the run of itself in a boom that started in the mid-1990s and found its monument in a lump of pointed pointless metal on its main street erected in 2003 after a battle, to celebrate the millennium. It was non-functional, non-contextual and sterile, a searing icon of the times. It replaced Nelson’s Column, the tallest Doric column in Europe which afforded full public access, and complemented the classical architecture of the street perfectly. Nelson could have been pulverised and replaced by James Joyce, Ulick O’Connor, Mannix Flynn, Maeve Binchy or Maureen Potter atop the statuesque and visitor-friendly pillar. No. In 1966 the whole column went up! The spire of Dublin was selected by Dublin City Council in March 1999 by 34 votes to 14. It was designed by the London-based firm Ian Ritchie Architects. It is a 120m high cone that is three metres wide at the base and tapers to 150mm at the top. At the time, I wrote a submission, on behalf of An Taisce, decrying the proposal. I conspired with Mícheál O Nualláin, a wry artist and ex-school-inspector, to challenge the scheme for want of an Environmental Impact Statement. He was the perfect person to do this as he was Flann O’Brien’s sibling, figuring in the great surrealist writer’s works as “the brother”. Na Gopaleen had an acute sense of Dublin and would have murdered this ridiculous self-conscious symbol. “The vainglorious spire of Dublin has had its day and should be chain-sawed“ The brother’s own design, one of the original 205 competition entries, had been rejected. As reported by Frank McDonald in the Irish Times, Ó Nuallain had proposed a ‘skypod’ mounted on a huge hexagonal column rising from a three-storey glazed box at street level, a ‘sculpted flying saucer’. Ó Nualláin’s scheme was awful but he was justifiably miffed when the winner proposed something much bigger and aesthetically outside the bounds of what was envisaged in the architectural competition they had both entered – which had required that the monument relate to the scale of the buildings on O’Connell St. If “relate” was to mean anything by reference to the quantitative phenomenon of height it must have meant “be similar to”. At 120m it clearly was dissimilar to the heights of all other buildings on the street and thus did not relate to their scale – though as regards the qualitative criterion of materials – “quality” it may indeed have “related”, though perhaps primarily through contrast! Ó’Nualláin found a good vehicle for his case in the EIS Directive and a forceful advocate for it in the well-named Colm MacEochaidh, a young barrister and a friend of mine. The case was never really treated seriously. Joan O’Connor, President of the Architects’ Institute, who thought the spire would be best “infinitely” high, claimed that the spire was the first time an EIS has been required for anything as “ephemeral as a slim and beautiful object”. As Chairwoman of the architectural-competition panel for the spike she might usefully have been aware that the last thing beauty (which aspires to transcendence) aims at is ephemerality (which means transience). In the Irish Times, Frank McDonald focused more on Ó’ Nualláin’s own entry than the breach of the competition’s rules or the need for an impact study. McDonald was a worshipper at the altar of the phosphorescent architecture of the Celtic Tiger and here championed its icon. In July 1999, Judge TC Smyth ruled that an EIS had indeed been required before the spire could be built. Commentators then and now don’t realise that any urban development that “is likely to have a significant effect on the environment by virtue inter alia of its nature, size or location”, requires an EIS. The nature, size and location of the spire could not have been more important, even if it was ephemeral, beautiful and slim. Subsequently, a detailed EIS was compiled and submitted in June 2000 to the Minister for the Environment rather than to the City Council itself as would have been the case if the EIS had not been requisite. Of the 121 submissions received on it, three-quarters were against the project. Nevertheless it was approved. Progressives are looking for monuments to topple. The spire symbolises how a country lost the run of itself, sterilised its national genius, lost its sense of irony and came to respect quantity over quality, and money over values. At the time I noted that the scheme was “reversible and could be erected somewhere else if its siting jars with a future generation”. It should be chain-sawed at its base and removed, on the shoulders of the citizenry, to the Croppies’ Acre park where it can be interred next to its sister in folly, the floozie in the jacuzzi. And then we can have a debate about what aspirations we want to see enshrined in a magnificent and democratic replacement.
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Coronavirus shows that our self-destructive civilisation is fragile. But the earth may be on our side. by Michael Smith. This article argues that self-destructiveness including neo-liberalism facilitates twin scourges: plagues and environmental catastrophe (“ecocide”). In reacting, as you would expect, against ecocide Gaia, the force that regulates the earth’s environment, also attacks plagues and those that cause or facilitate them. I’m going to take you on a journey through plagues; humans’ self-destructiveness; neoliberalism as a manifestation of that self-destructiveness; how countries have performed on both Coronavirus and ecocide in ways that reflect their self-destructiveness; and how ultimately Gaia is responsible for the Coronavirus and is a warning to us to take better care of our exhausted earth. Plagues Coronavirus and plagues Coronavirus is not the first plague to bring civilisation to a standstill. But looked at from the perspective of the planet forcing a standstill is a cry for help that, rather than bringing down our civilisation, affords us the chance to reflect on our selfdestructiveness and maybe save it. Particular human civilisations – as opposed to humanity itself – assailed by plagues have not always had that chance. Historical Plagues In 430 BC during the Peloponnesian War typhoid crossed the Athenian walls as the frugal Spartans laid siege, killing two-thirds of the population of the cradle of democracy. The first appearance of the bubonic plague in 541 AD stopped the Emperor Justinian from saving the Western Roman Empire and expedited the ascent of Goths and Vandals and the so-called ‘dark ages’. In the fourteen century bubonic plague put an end to England’s feudal system with its moribund social rigidity. In 1520 the death-worshipping Aztec empire was destroyed by colonists’ smallpox. So…plagues are dangerous to the very survival of particular civilisations. Human Ecocide Human driving of species loss and climate change is self-destructive. In the last fifty years humans have damaged the earth so much that most life forms are under existential threat. Humans have wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles and threatened a million species with extinction to the point where we are facing the sixth Great Extinction. Since 1906, the global average temperature has increased by more than 1.1 degrees. A further .4 of a degree rise may put 20-30% of species at risk of extinction. Climate change generates rising seas, hurricanes, floods, droughts and desertification. Self-evidently it is self-destructive to have manufactured a future of this. It is, then, extraordinary that we are currently accelerating towards probably 3 to 4 degrees and perhaps, in places, 10 degrees centigrade of warming by the end of the century. A quarter of a billion years ago, a rich and wonderful world was annihilated in the end-Permian extinction when the world warmed the same amount, 10 degrees. It is a simple truth that most humans have not synthesised that this bears on our civilisation. We’ve known about climate change since the 1860s. We’ve really known about it since around 1988. Yet since then global emissions have risen by 50% and continue to rise, causing and threatening all this, to the point that over the last dozen years it has become a clear and overarching existential threat. Society has failed to recognise, still less control, this momentous threat. Some countries are worse than others in their approach to climate change. So…ecocide is dangerous to the very survival of the whole of human civilisation. We have discussed the dangers of plague and ecocide. But human self-destructiveness compounds the dangers of both plague and ecocide. Self-destructiveness Self-destructive societies are open to plague and ecocide Societies that are self-destructive tend to make mistakes. They open themselves to predation, to attack – to plague, to ecocide. Already-self-destructive societies are more likely to generate plague and ecocide. Societies that are underprepared, licentious, self-absorbed, intolerant, arrogant, profligate, reckless, short-termist, greedy, laissez-faire, uneducated, anti-scientific or ignorant. That, in Freudian psychoanalyticalterms, have clinched Thanatos – the death wish. Self-destructiveness. Humankind has always had a destructive side but it really lost its existential caution, and became self-destructive from, at the latest, the beginning of the twentieth century after which it fought two ‘world wars’ and entered an epoch of nuclear and now environmental threat to the continuation of the human species. But some societies and some people within those societies are particular vectors of self-destructiveness – and of plagues and ecocide. Neo-liberal self-destructiveness: Britain, the US, Brazil The most self-destructive, though of course certainly not the most evil, ethos to have arisen in the history of humanity is globalised capitalism, market-deferential laissez-faire that I shall call, denigratingly, neo-liberalism. It originated in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s USA forty years ago. It promoted capital over humans. It stopped those countries investing in their populations, including in their education. It promoted irresponsible laissez-faire. It celebrated inequality. It was a form of death worship. Aftera while society and many citizens became self-destructive. After a generation of social, environmental and cultural decay countries that had been beacons for much of the twentieth century turned to populist authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism and narcissistic leadership: the UK elected hedonistic Brexit Boris; and the USA racist, sexist Trump. A similar but accelerated process threw up proto-fascist Bolsonaro in Brazil. Self-destructive leaders and Coronavirus Boris Johnson is so self-destructive he did not even protect himself or, apparently, his heavily pregnant partner, against Coronavirus. He nearly died. His chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, who advised a lax approach to the disease, then discovered he had it and travelled and picknicked half way across England risking multiple infections in search of law-breakingisolation. Trump’s deathly instincts have helped make the US the worst mortality victim of Coronavirus. They spawned his initial denial of the disease – a “Democratic hoax” and his subsequent obsession with prematurely reopening his country. He believes Coronavirus can be cured by applying light and injecting disinfectant. On a personal level he continues to shake hands, does little to social distance, ingests insidious malaria drugs, and refuses to wear a mask. Reflecting this puerile vanity, Vice-President Pence
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Government projections on how long a lockdown will last hijacked by pessimism not evidence, though readers will make their own minds up as to whether Ireland’s trajectory is more like those of China, Singapore or South Korea than those of Italy and Spain. By Michael Smith. It is obligatory to preface articles about Covid-19 with a disclaimer that the author is not an epidemiologist or virologist but this article is about the derivative complex issue of how long the current pandemic may last. In any event virology and epidemiology may not be the professional disciplines best equipped to dictate the appropriate political reactions to the findings of the science of Covid-19. Those reactions should ultimately comprise a balance of the science with an assessment of the social, economic, environmental, cultural and even (because measures should aim to avoid a backlash) political consequences of any decisions. Nobody is expert in all of these and the role in democracies is assigned to politicians in whom there is not generally much popular confidence. Flowing from this, the role of criticising their reactions will inevitably on occasion be filled by journalists not experts. In Ireland politicians seem to be taking decisions that properly balance all the factors. We have, after all, become a sensible, cautious (who remembers all that change-imperative stuff from February?) body politic where even a discarded Taoiseach pretentiously deploying Churchill can sound reasonable to the point of international encomium. In the UK and the US on the other hand there is a sense that Science is not properly valued, and that the egos of their heads of government who tend to want flash solutions and downplay justifiable pessimism are interposing on the public interest. So far the high ground here has been appropriated by those who claim we have not acted fast enough. But that is easy to say and most of what the doomers, animated formerly by China and now by horrors in Italy and Spain, recommended has been applied just a few days after they wanted it. Towards the end of whatever period of restrictions we face it is likely that discipline will break down as some people consider the social, economic, environmental and cultural consequences have been disproportionate. Delaying the imposition of draconian measures may have the effect of reducing that breakdown later on and better equipping us to pre-empt a possible second wave. It is of course a balance. For this reason there has not until now necessarily been a moral deficit for those cautioning against closing society down as fast and as conclusively as possible in the interests of disease prevention. Of course there is a moral deficit for those who flout Science, which is to say those who offer ungrounded opinions on matters they do not understand. Or who understand, and party anyway. Normally rules would not necessarily import moral imperative but dealing with Covid-19 requires social solidarity and, at least where the advice in favour of rules seems driven by a plausible perception of the common good, it would be a breach of the fragile social contract to flout it. An ancillary challenge is to decipher the advice, and being patient with opaqueness at the edges, as with advice on pubs (until recently), restaurants, public transport, car-sharing, discreet physically-distanced socialising and much more. For those who believe that society evokes obligations it is difficult to argue against following Irish government advice. On the other hand actually going beyond that advice, which purports to be comprehensive, seems unnecessary and – where it threatens proportionality – inadvisable. So I would not advocate ignoring government advice. Of course nobody should exaggerate the facts and prognostications. It is unhelpful for example that during the week the Guardian negligently reported “a generation has died” in Bergamo near Milan when in fact 1959 people out of the area’s 1.2m population had died. On 15 March the front-page headline in Ireland’s Business Post was ‘Irish health authorities predict 1.9m will fall ill with coronavirus [sic: in fact the disease is Covid-19]’. Official spokespeople agreed this was accurate. In fact it is not. It is a do-nothing prediction. The word should have been “may” not “will”. Where I demur is on the crucial area of the nexus of case-projections and how long quasi-lockdowns will probably last. It seems to me that – on this and this alone – policy-makers in Ireland have been hijacked by pessimism not data. It is not that they are not aware of the data and the international research it is that they are deploying it on the basis of worst-case outcomes. Such caution is desirable insofar as it is dictating life-saving policies, but it may lead to inaccurate projections of the medium-term future. As a result they are not duly recognising two things: The consequences of the stringent measures we have now put in place and committed to putting in place soon The lessons of the epidemiological pattern in China. The constantly and consistently iterated headline figure of 15,000 projected cases at the end of the month, representing roughly one-third increases daily, which has been more or less registering as predicted since 16 March (though substantially less for the last three days; 906 cases, 4 deaths as of 22 March), turns out to be in the absence of the remedial measures – distancing, closures, that we have actually taken. A similar study by Imperial College London on the UK projected half a million deaths in Britain. The Imperial model’s clear message, though, was not this possible conflagration: it was how small the effects are of half-hearted strategies. Remedial measures, it accepted, would reduce the height of the epidemic’s peak by two-thirds and pushed it from May to June. China took remedial measures. So what happened there to the ongoing one-third increases? Just a few weeks after introduction of draconian measures cases dropped. The first case of Covid-19 was detected on 17 November in Wuhan city; the first death was on 9 January; quarantine was imposed in Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei region on 23 January. Figures leapt from around 800 then to 80,000 in mid
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Ireland’s largest party of the left may soon have us at last, whether we like them or not By Rory O’Sullivan Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Féin from 1983 to 2018, published five Audacity of Hope-style books – part-autobiography, part-political manifesto – during the most intense phase of the peace process in Northern Ireland. The last one, which came out in 2003, was entitled Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland. “Hope and history” is from those lines of Séamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy which are quoted constantly: “Once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme”. The Cure at Troy, first staged in 1990, is a version of the play Philoctetes by Sophocles, in which the Greek heroes Odysseus and Neoptolemus try to convince the wounded archer Philoctetes to return with them to Troy. A prophecy states that the Greeks will need Philoctetes’ bow of Heracles to help win the Trojan war, but at its beginning Odysseus had marooned Philoctetes on Lemnos; he had been bitten by a snake and his screams were distressing the crew. Heaney’s play is clearly about Northern Ireland, with the characters’ eventual conciliation a kind of symbol, and a roadmap. The Cure at Troy is really a play about getting over the wrong someone has done to you in order to share a future with them. But this is not quite what the Philoctetes is about, since in the end what Philoctetes agrees is to go back and fight a war which will end in destruction and massacre at Troy. During the sack of the city, all three men will commit sacrilegious acts, things which today we would call war crimes. They will in turn be punished by the Gods for them, and all of this is foreshadowed at the moment of conciliation with which the play ends. Philoctetes is not simply a guide to achieving peace or justice; it asks what justice can really mean in a world of endless conflict and guilt. And it is out of these two sides of the mouth that Gerry Adams speaks in the title of his book: “Hope and History”, the man who put down the armalite to fight with the ballot box instead; “Making Peace in Ireland,” the man who did it, not to reconcile with Unionists, but to defeat them. Even in 2003, it would never be ‘Northern Ireland’. Adams, now retired, has a blog called Léargas where he posts from time to time; he posted an entry last Friday, 24/1/20, entitled “Keep your eye on the prize”. He offers a Sinn Féin-centred view of the peace process, saying of the Good Friday Agreement that “we had in fact established an alternative – a peaceful way to win freedom for the first time in our history”. He closes by saying, “Unity is no longer an aspiration – it is achievable. It is a doable project. It is the prize. There for everyone on this island. All of this is part of the continuum of struggle”. Peace, or Irish unity: which is the prize? It depends who you ask; and if you ask Sinn Féin, it depends who’s asking. In the book, Hope and History, Gerry Adams describes the Sinn Féin tactic of “love-bombing”, which unnerved and bewildered Unionists during the peace process. When Adams and the UUP’s Ken Maginnis appeared together on America’s Larry King Show after the Ceasefire in 1994, Adams repeatedly tried to shake his counterpart’s hand and pat him on the shoulder. Maginnis stiffened up and didn’t know what to do. He looked out of date. The standard Unionist charge against Sinn Féin is that they committed to ‘Northern Ireland’ in the Good Friday Agreement only in order to destroy it, and have spent their time in Stormont using power-sharing against itself. Of course, this is a regressive point on Unionists’ part since it amounts to a demand that, as a precondition of peace and power-sharing, Republicans profess loyalty to the Union. But it is also true that Adams and McGuinness had long-believed that the Republican movement needed to be mainstream to win, and that this meant putting the political above the military as a matter of strategy. In his book, ‘Blanketmen’, the hunger-striker Richard O’Rawe claims that Adams ordered strikers to die so as to increase support for Sinn Féin and open the political theatre of the struggle. O’Rawe’s claim is disputed, but it is clear that by 1986 Sinn Féin’s leaders were carefully laying out the path that the Republican movement would follow through the 1990s and 2000s. In that year’s Ard-Fheis the party ended its policy of abstentionism in Leinster House. It was over precisely this question that Provisional Sinn Féin had split from the party in 1970; and the 1986 decision caused another split, with Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and the party’s Southern old guard breaking away and forming Republican Sinn Féin, whose military wing is the Continuity IRA. Ó Brádaigh gave a fiery speech at the 1986 Ard Fheis, excoriating Adams and McGuinness for betraying the core values of Republicanism. He said that ending abstentionism meant recognising the ‘Free-State’ as the government of Ireland, and therefore its army as the Irish army. In other words, and in contrast to Unionists like Maginnis, he argued that Sinn Féin were repudiating the principles behind the armed struggle. He ended the speech by saying: “In God’s name, don’t let it come about…that Haughey, Fitzgerald, Spring and those in London and Belfast who oppose us so much can come out and say “Ah, it took sixty-five years, but we have them at last”. Neither Ó Brádaigh nor the Unionists were wrong, exactly, in their criticisms of Adams and McGuinness, but neither had managed to see the pair from both sides. What drove Sinn Féin through the peace process and into Stormont was a pair of contradictory principles, each espoused in turn to different listeners. The only concession Sinn Féin made in principle
