Politics

Ireland quietly subscribes to voguish Thatcherite programmes to get people back to work

Assets that are social not just financial Ireland’s housing crisis and swirling property prices threaten precious and irreplaceable green spaces in our cities and suburbs with housing developments. House prices have risen more in the first six months of this year than the entire twelve months of 2016. Recognising the opportunity for maximum prices to take care of an aged clerical population and reparation commitments for historical abuse, religious orders are selling off their most valuable assets (after their faith) – their land. Unfortunately these sites are not vacant lands. Agonisingly they are where the children go at breaks and lunch-time, they are the schools’ resort for children’s sports and funding fairs and often community resources for dog-walking and exercise and simple relief from the traffic and commotion. Dublin has the highest land valuations and so has seen the biggest rise in the sale of school land in recent years. Infamous examples include Oatlands in Mount Merrion, St Paul’s in Raheny, and Notre Dame in Churchtown, carried through despite a shortage of schools in these areas. Holy Faith Convent in Killester, adjoining the school of the same name, is currently for sale. The brochure from WK Nowlan Real Estate Advisors suggests the zoning allows 70 apartments on the attractive one-hectare site which also contains a large former convent building. The same agent will sell the former St Teresa’s school in Blackrock, which closed in 1988, by auction on 21 July. It describes it as an “Exceptional Development Opportunity and period residence on approximately 3.92 hectares (9.7 acres). Large Residence, Gate lodge and former school buildings on mature landscaped grounds”. Of course in sales of mature institutional lands from Kilcoole to All Hallows WK Nowlan, the reverends’ favourite, publishes expensive marketing materials that suggest that the opportunities to cover these attractive lands in second rate housing is an occasion for public celebration. There has never been a greater market for education in this country. The population of the country continues to grow and projections for new schools continue to grow. Doctors complain that our children are not exercising enough. Institutional lands cannot be replaced once built on. A future generation, richer and more civilised than ours, will certainly curse us for the betrayal of our legacy of fine institutions on elegant grounds. So whose interest is being served by their ubiquitous sales over the last generation and in its desperation to deal with a severe housing crisis are the government and local authorities sleepwalking us into an educational crisis in Dublin?     God’s Land The Catholic Church owns €3.743bn of land and property in the State. It owns or occupies more than 10,700 properties across the country and controlled nearly 6,700 religious and educational sites. The assets owned by the State’s 26 dioceses and 160-plus congregations and other district Catholic organisations have been accumulated over more than two centuries of providing religious, educational, health and other services to a once comprehensively devout populace. In the case of many orders the congregations transferred the running of institutions to separate bodies which are invariably charities, for example the Edmund Rice Schools Trust (ERST) which was set up in 2008 with responsibility for 95 former Christian Brother schools and 37,000 pupils. Its objective (as stated on its website) is “to foster the advancement of education”. Interestingly, and showing that Richard Bruton’s proposal to preclude Catholic schools from discriminating against those who have not been baptised in the Church is, at least in the case of the Christian Brothers, pushing an open door, its schools “promote equality of access and participation – in other words, children of any faith, or none, at every level of ability, of any nationality or ethnic grouping are all welcome in our schools”.     Addressing the Redress Scheme Apart from peak land price, the tiptoe to the auctioneers is driven by clerical abuse and its financial legacy. The Catholic Church has surrendered ownership of 44 properties worth €42m to the State as part of the 2002 Residential Institutions Redress Act. In the wake of the 2009 Ryan report, the Government wanted the religious orders to pay half of the total bill of €1.4bn due for redress payments and legal costs. But the religious orders still have a long way to go to reach the €700m the State in the end demanded. Minister for Education Richard Bruton spoke out in March of this year, following the publication of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) which showed that in total €209m has been received by the Irish Government from religious groups to address historical child abuse. Bruton condemned religious organisations for failing to help meet the costs of residential institutional child abuse. It might be argued that the Church should have met sanctions at the upper end of the financial scale and as a result transferred not just ownership, but control, of the institutions over which it is widely accepted it exercised control well out of proportion to its mandate in today’s society. Many of the schools, hospitals and clerical-training colleges could have been transferred to the Republic, with little unfairness since much of the money subscribed in the first place was for progressive-secular, as well as religious, purposes. In addition the funds raised from these sales are to meet the challenges arising from declining and ageing congregations of nuns, brothers and priests. The average age of the Christian Brothers is 79 and of the Sisters of Mercy 74 with over three-quarters of the nuns aged over 65. Part of the cost of maintaining retired members and the staffing of their care homes will be taken from the final price fetched for the school land sales.     Celestial Figures The sale of these lands is not only taking away green spaces from the schools but it also ignores the need for new and expanding schools in light of anticipated population growth in these areas. There are currently 345,550 secondary-school pupils in the Republic (excluding PLC

Several years ago I lectured in a management school in England. One of the classes I gave was on food marketing. I began the class by playing a clip from the then famous documentary, ‘Super Size Me’, where the protagonist Morgan Spurlock undertakes an extreme diet of McDonald’s-only food for a month to chart the consequences on his body and mental health. The clip I chose is near the beginning of the documentary – where two American teenagers are about to sue McDonald’s for their obesity. I freeze-framed the image of the two teenagers, and turned to the class. “Where”, I wanted to know, “does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?”. As you can imagine, the entire class fell silent. Then one student pointed to the screen, and said, “Do you see those two girls? They deserve to die”. My shock only lasted a moment before the other students chimed in with qualifications to the student’s statement – no, not really that they deserved to die, but that they were the ones that were ultimately responsible for their own health! – everyone knows that McDonald’s is unhealthy food and should be eaten in moderation! – no one is forcing them to eat junk food! – and so on. I asked them whether they would react differently had I presented them with a documentary on the beauty industry and freeze-framed two anorexic girls who were suing L’Oréal for their unrepresentative portrayals of extremely thin women. “No!” was the incredulous reaction. In such a scenario, there would be more justification for blaming beauty brands, as they stimulate a mental vulnerability in all women, with some falling victim at a more extreme level. The classroom is a microcosm of society – albeit a pretty rarefied one. These students, I concluded, were not some extremist bunch whose mental processes were close to psychotic. In fact, you could probably argue, their reactions were a base point for most people’s; they just happened to be unguarded in their response. I suspect in fact most people feel this way. We feel that we should be able to ingest what we want, as long as it’s legal, and that the market doesn’t force us to do anything – certainly not to consume to excess. These two obese girls are what we would call ‘bad consumers’ – they haven’t learned the rules of the market properly. Perhaps they lack information (they don’t know that it’s healthy to eat at least five pieces of fruit or vegetables a day, for example). Or perhaps they lack restraint, whether moral or physiological (as in, their hypothalamus, the part of the brain that supposedly regulates appetite, isn’t functioning properly). And yet, is this the whole picture? The longer I teach marketing, the more uneasy I am about where this locus of control lies. We have never been so health-conscious and at the same time so fat. These two trends, rather than being opposites, go hand-in-hand. How come? The first reason I believe lies in what I call the perversity of marketplace knowledge. Marketplace knowledge refers to all the information we have about the market – how much a pint of milk costs, where to buy a lawnmower, how many calories are in a can of Diet Coke, that washing machines live longer with Calgon. That is a huge trove of information that we learn over the years and carry around in our heads! Thus, it is much better to think of consumers as learners and marketing as their teacher. Within this model, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the more information you had the better decisions you’d be able to make. However, recent research would suggest that this is not the case. In fact, the more involved we are in our market-place decisions, the more ‘brand literate’ we are, the more we fall victim to what are known as halo effects. The consumer researcher Pierre Chandon has shown that when one aspect of a food is portrayed as healthy, consumers will tend to mentally categorise the entire food as healthy, leading them to underestimate its calorie content, and to overconsume it. This phenomenon is known as the health halo, and it is not ‘marketing illiterate’ consumers who fall victim to it, but precisely those of us who know a little about nutrition, are health conscious, and can understand how branding works. When the so-called health benefits of a food are foregrounded on packaging and advertising (organic, gluten-free, high in natural fibre, sugar-free, low-fat, packed with fruit, etc.), consumers typically miscalculate the product’s calorific content: gluten-free bread or organic ice-cream is somehow healthier for us. This is not a conscious mechanism; in fact, when people are made aware of it, they tend to regulate their behaviour. The problem is of course that the environment we live in is obesogenic – we are surrounded by messages that encourage eating, and counter-messages are virtually non-existent. Chandon’s research also revealed that when consumers believe they are eating healthily they will unconsciously reward themselves – those who opted for Subway (positioned as a healthy fast food) over McDonald’s in one particular instance tended to add a side and a dessert to their order. In another experiment, by Chandon’s colleague Alexander Chernev, overweight participants when presented with ‘light’ M&Ms increased their consumption by 47%, whereas normal-weight participants only increased their consumption by 16%. In this ‘negative calorie illusion’, people who are more attuned to features of food and drink that supposedly promote health are likely to consume more. You can be weight-conscious and opt for diet versions of foods, but you are more likely to underestimate the calories, consume more and ultimately become heavier. These mechanisms are typical of the psychological vulnerabilities that the food marketing system is expert in. Our weaknesses stem in part from how we think of food in the first place. Ask anyone to give a definition of ‘food’, and their answer will likely be something like ‘a source of fuel or energy

I don’t like ‘-isms’,” War of Independence veteran George Gilmore once said to me.  “Heaven save me from the Marxists!”, an exasperated Karl Marx is reputed to have exclaimed. “All the ‘-isms’ are ‘-wasms’ ”, was a witticism following the collapse of East European communism in 1991. Nonetheless ‘-isms’, ideologies of one kind or another, show no sign of vanishing.  We all subscribe to some ideology or other once we have developed political views and think or say that our Government or the powers-that-be ought to do this or that, even if we do not know it or fail to give it a name. They are slippery things, “-isms”, shifting in meaning from place to place and accreting different connotations over time. One person’s praiseworthy “-ism” is likely to be regarded as reactionary by at least some others, depending on their politics. That is why sensible people who engage in political or polemical debate and want to avoid fruitless argument will seek first to define their ideological terms if they use them. “Populism” is a new “-ism” that has come into fashion only this past year.  It refers to electoral or referendum outcomes that the elite who control mainstream public narratives do not approve of – e.g. Brexit, Donald Trump’s election or the growth of EU-critical movements like UKIP, Marine Le Pen’s National Front and the Alternative for Germany party. ‘Nationalism’ is one of the oldest ideologies, from Latin ‘natus’, referring to where people were born.  In Ireland the word has traditionally had positive connotations as referring to the aspiration or movement for an independent State, which most Irish supported. Thus Pearse and Connolly were nationalists, as were De Valera, Collins, Cosgrave, Lemass etc. In modern Germany by contrast ‘nationalism’ is seen as a bad thing. ‘Nationalist’ is a term of abuse. The Nazis were nationalists. Hitler’s nationalism brought a catastrophe on Germany, as Mussolini’s did on Italy. The words are redolent of reactionary and anti-human doings. Clearly the same word, ‘nationalism’, can refer to quite different, even diametrically opposite, things in different contexts – to movements for national self-determination and independence on the one hand, with connotations of patriotism and love of country, and to imperialism on the other, the aspiration to conquer or dominate others, and associated chauvinism, racism and xenophobia. It is interesting how negative associations have come to attach to the words ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ in Irish public discourse since 1970.  The decades since have spawned a whole school of ‘anti-national’ revisionist history-writing which tended to disparage past movements for Irish independence. The IRA’s campaign of violence from 1970 to 1994 was one reason for this. The commitment of the Republic’s Great and Good to European economic integration since we joined the EEC in 1973 was another.  After all if one thinks that history is moving towards a supranational United States of Europe, talk of national independence for individual States is out-of-date and Europe’s national histories need to be drastically revised. ‘Internationalism’ is probably the most helpful ‘-ism’ to fall back on when one is dealing with national questions. Internationalists desire the emancipation of mankind. The human race is divided into nations. Therefore internationalism stands for the right to self-determination of nations. That was first advanced as one of the Rights of Man in the French Revolution. It is now a basic principle of international law, enshrined in the UN Charter, and is a fundamental of modern democracy. Internationalism does not mean that one is called on to urge every national community to seek a State of its own. Some nationalities are quite happy within multinational States as long as their rights as a minority are respected.   But if enough ‘nationals’ want to have a State of their own, that is their right, and internationalism calls for democrats everywhere to show solidarity with them if they seek it. In France’s recent presidential election the basic conflict, we were told, was between ‘globalisers’ and nationalists.  Nearly half the voters in the first round of the French election backed candidates who were critical of either the EU or the EU-currency. They were anti-globalisation.  By contrast, the victory of Emmanuel Macron, the most europhile of the candidates, was seen as a win for globalisation’s supporters.  Macron’s walk to the podium for his victory speech was to the tune of the EU anthem, not the French one. He plans to save the euro-currency by pushing for more integration in the Eurozone. The carrot he is likely to hold out to a reluctant Germany is the prospect of France’s nuclear weapon being ‘Europeanised’. That way Germany will get its finger on a collective nuclear trigger. The Deutschemark for the Euro-bomb, monetary union for political union, has been an objective of the Franco-German duo since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. ‘Globalisation’ is at once a description of fact and an ideology, a mixture of ‘is’ and ‘ought’. It refers to important trends in the contemporary world: ease of travel, free trade, free movement of capital, the internet. The effect of these on the sovereignty of States is often exaggerated. States have always been interdependent to some extent. There was relatively more globalisation, in the sense of freer movement of labour, capital and trade, in the late 19th century than today, although the volumes involved were much smaller. At that time too most States were on the gold standard, a form of international money. In contrast to the 19th century modern States do more for their citizens, are expected by them to do more, and impinge more intimately on people’s lives than at any time in history, most obviously in providing public services and redistributing national incomes.  Globalisation imposes new constraints on States, but constraints there always have been. Nation States adapt to such changes, but they do not cause States to disappear or become less important. Globalisation as another newly fashionable ideology refers to the interests of transnational Big Business and High Finance that seek to roam the world looking for profitable