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Paean to culturally rich, politically limited patriots

by John Gormley 2 April, 2016 0 Comments

The paperback version of ‘Handbook of the Irish Revival’ was recently launched at Notre Dame’s O’Connell House, to coincide with their St Patrick’s day festivities and, of course, the commemoration of the 1916 Rising. The volume, an anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891-1922, is beautifully produced by Abbey Theatre Press with the look and feel of a hardback though it is very reasonably priced at just €15. As the Abbey director-turned publisher, Fiach Mac Conghail, reveals in his introduction, the book arose from the ‘Theatre of Memory’ Symposium in 2014. During the concluding session Declan Kiberd lamented the fact that so few of the original writings of the Irish Revival were readily accessible. It’s to Mac Conghail’s enduring credit that he rose to the challenge by facilitating Kiberd and his co-editor PJ Mathews. Kiberd, though not a professional historian, has emerged as one of the most authoritative voices on the 1916 Rising, providing us with the clearest insights into the complex and sometimes confused intellectual world of the revolutionaries. He has always contended that for Romantics like Pearse and MacDonagh, both keenly interested in English literature, the Rising was a piece of theatre that could only end in their own deaths. Pearse who was described by one of his admirers as a “bit of a pose” may have been comfortable with the bizarre pageantry of the GPO, but he lacked the skills of a military commander. A prolific writer in both English and Irish, he features regularly in the anthology. It’s a digest of essays and articles, pamphlets, songs and poetry – most of them no more than two pages long – from the great names such as Yeats, Synge, Joyce and some of the lesser known but also influential. Each of the chapters is accompanied by an introduction in much larger font. Indeed, the overall design of the book makes it very appealing. No sooner have you read one chapter than you immediately want more. It’s a book for the serious academic or the ordinary punter who wishes to dip into writings of the period to get a avour of the zeitgeist. As you read it you get the sense, as the introduction states, that these were men and women who “lived intensely in the present moment; took ideas more seriously than their own careers; and contributed brilliantly to debate”. That selflessness, brilliance and intensity is perhaps best reflected in the writings of Connolly, whose prose can hardly contain his obvious passion. Take for an example this sentence from his 1897 essay ‘Erin’s Hope’: “Recognise the right of all to an equal opportunity to develop to their fullest capacity all the powers and capabilities inherent in them by guaranteeing to all our countrymen and women, the weak as well as the strong, the simple as well as the cunning, the honest equally with the unscrupulous, the fullest, and most abundant human life intelligently-organised society can confer upon any of its members”. What it lacks in Orwellian precision it makes up for it in its obvious fervour. This passage is taken from the chapter entitled ‘Militarism and Modernism’ whose introduction identifies the reason for the cultural and political malaise that would soon envelop the new state. “Militarism began to trump modernism”, the authors observe- the men of the the Rising, war of independence and the civil war were better suited to military affairs then forging a modern democratic state: “Mass suffrage came to many areas but soon declined into mere electoralism, as political leaders whose consciousness had been formed more through soldiering than through cultural action, offered ever more dogmatic, ever less thoughtful analyses”. It is easy to ‘idealise the idealists’ at this remove, but it would be foolish to forget that our new State was governed for its first fifty years by the men – the women were written out – of 1916. Socially and economically our new state was illiberal and stagnant, a failed state dominated by the Catholic church. So while this book shows that those who inspired the Rising may have been enlightened, it could also be argued that they were in many ways obstructions to progress. The new State was patriarchal, consigning women to the home and discriminating against them in the workplace. It must have been a disappointment to the women who had campaigned for universal suffrage such as Eva Gore Booth. In her poem ‘Women’s Rights’ from 1906 she portrays male dominance as contravening the natural order: Men have got their towers and walls, We have cliffs and waterfalls. Oh, whatever men may do, Ours is the gold air and the blue. Men have got their pomp and pride – All the green world is on our side’. The new State’s attitude to the Rising has been at times ambivalent. We have moved swiftly from commemoration to revisionism back to celebration. We have also moved from isolated nationalism to become the most globalised country in the world, without pausing for breath or even adequate reflection. The transformation has been staggering. Ireland, the country that its citizens wanted to leave, and whose citizens emigrated in droves, is now a favoured destination for migrants. From the end of the Second World War up the start of the 1960s we were the only state in Europe that experienced population decline. Now one in eight people is a non-national in a population that has grown steadily. This new Ireland is closer to Boston than Berlin and has, as perhaps might be expected, even turned its back on some British virtues. The British tried with some success to introduce a system of planning for urban and rural areas. One only has to contrast the British countryside with its beautifully planned towns and villages with the free-for-all in Ireland, to know that independence embraces the freedom to make a mess of things. And though there are many who wouldn’t change a thing, this strain of individualism is unhealthy in a State that is not just unplanned but saw t to

Party climate poopers

by John Gibbons 2 March, 2016 0 Comments

To say that environmental issues didn’t have much of an impact on Election 2016 would be a bit like observing that feminism hasn’t exactly been the defining feature of Donald Trump’s exciting US presidential run. The topic was completely ignored in the botched opening Leaders’ Debate on TV3, and again, on RTÉ’s seven-way debate the following week. The Green Party had fallen foul of an internal RTÉ decision to exclude it from a slot among the extended parties. This telling ruling was upheld in the High Court, and sure enough, RTÉ’s Claire Byrne steered the seven leaders through two long hours of questions and answers without a mention of anything remotely environmental. Ironically, the same journalist had dramatically dashed in an Air Corps helicopter only a few weeks earlier to interview some of the latest victims of this winter’s extreme flooding event. This dramatic fare, with long shots of ruined farms and submerged houses, interspersed with heart-rending stories of loss and struggle, is understandably grist for RTÉ’s current affairs mill. It is standard training in journalism to ask the five Ws – who, what, where, when – and why. We are getting lots of who, what, where and when from our media on flooding disasters and other climate- fuelled events, but precious little time is being devoted to that all important final W: why. And the ‘why’ is of course climate change. This vast topic made it into the last few min-includes lots of easy utes of the nal leaders’ debate, where just the savings, by 2020 four main parties were involved. Presenter Miriam O’Callaghan admitted in her introduction to it that it hadn’t featured at all in the campaign up to that point – the media weren’t asking and the politicians sure as hell weren’t going to bring it up spontaneously. O’Callaghan lobbed the climate grenade into the reluctant lap of outgoing Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, who – shocked that there might be an Idea in play – took fright and ubbed his lines. First off, he announced that the EU’s 2020 targets (20% emissions reduction versus 2005) “are targets we cannot reach”. Fair enough. And why, prime minister, would that be? “We have a chance with the abolition of milk quotas to expand greatly the capacity of our national herd…to increase our dairy herd by 50%”. Having fessed up to the fact that Ireland has chosen not to meet its 2020 targets, Kenny then went on to make the following quite extraordinary statement: “The targets that are set for 2030 are dif cult targets, but we will meet them”. The targets he is referring to are for a massive 40% cut in emissions. Given our inability to hit 20%, which includes lots of easy savings, the idea that we can escalate to an infinitely tougher 40% target in just one more decade suggests, to the cynical, that Kenny knows for certain that he will be long gone before the fantasy 40% emissions cuts by 2030 are exposed as a sham. So, the world’s greatest existential threat, according to Mr Kenny, is a distant second to pushing the agri- industrial expansionist agenda on behalf of the IFA and the food PLCs it so often appears to speak on behalf of. These same transnational organisations offshore their tax affairs to ensure the Irish Exchequer gets as little as possible. Glanbia, for example, routed its €40 million profits in 2014 via brass-plate companies with no employees in Luxembourg in order to cut its Irish tax bill to a paltry €200,000, or an effective tax rate of 0.5%. These patriotic enterprises represent, in the view of our Taoiseach, so vital a national interest as to set aside all other considerations to ensure their burger and baby milk powder export operations are in no way impacted by binding international emissions targets. To be fair to Mr Kenny, when asked to choose between agricultural expansion and climate chaos, the three other major party leaders also waffled and equivocated in equal measure, all fearful of riling up the assorted special interest groups that maintain such an effective lock on Irish environmental policy. Both Micheál Martin and Joan Burton did try to point out that the transport sector is on an equally ruinous trajectory, but the clear instruction that O’Callaghan pursued single-mindedly was to pitch climate policy in Ireland as either pro- or anti-farmer. This obsessive focus on agriculture seems to be a rut that RTÉ’s PrimeTime has dug for itself, as reflected in its paltry two efforts at covering climate change since 2009, which have lurched from cack-handed to catastrophic. Having attracted a slew of written complaints, the BAI will rule in the coming weeks on whether PrimeTime’s most recent ‘climate debate’, in early December, was in breach of broadcasting regulations. While climate and environmental issues were squeezed to the periphery of both the media and political framing of Election 2016, there was sufficient to be gleaned from the assorted party manifestos to suggest that whatever coalition is eventually assembled to lead the 32nd Dáil might represent a step forward on the hugely underachieving FG/Labour coalition, and the woeful Alan Kelly in particular. While Labour’s stewardship of the Environment ministry was a huge failure, the loss of outgoing Energy Minister, Alex White is a genuine setback, as he is regarded as one of the few politicians with the brains to truly understand climate change, and the guts to speak publicly on it. Not that it in any way helped his own political cause. The obliteration of Renua signals that the Irish public is in no mood to return to the simple-minded moral certainties of the 1980s. For the Green Party, turning a 2.8% national share of vote into two seats was an impressive achievement; whether such slender representation can really add a green hue to the new Dáil remains to be seen. While both Labour and the Green Party have plenty of useful things to say about addressing climate change and moving Ireland towards decarbonisation, given that the two

Election 2016

by Village 23 February, 2016 0 Comments

In 2011 we wrote in this space, “You would think from our recent history of some of the most notoriously bad governance on the planet, that we would have learnt that our political classes need to be replaced. In fact, this election time we see no new ideas”. Sadly democracy in Ireland needs an overhaul every bit as much now as it did in 2011. Village is disappointed at the quality of politics, across the range. It’s easily diagnosed: Fine Gael is open to regressive policies and cronyism. However, at least on its own terms it deserves credit because it has consistently stuck to its agenda of (unimaginative) economic orthodoxy and because Enda Kenny has proved relatively competent, in the face of scepticism, including from this magazine. In 2011, we stated, “ Perhaps it is a unique merit of Fine Gael that if it is elected with a mandate, this time it may actually govern as it has campaigned. The electorate will be able to assess whether what it voted for was what it wanted”. This edition of Village explores at length the extent to which the coalition government delivered on its Programme for Government. It’s a fair test and it shows that, beyond promoting economic stability, the Government has been a disappointment. Labour certainly does not have the Fine Gael appeal of consistency. It never does what its manifestos promise. Worse, a number of its senior TDs have allowed themselves to appear smug and ideologically jaded or even, in Alan Kelly’s case, dangerous. Because of the elasticity of its conscience Labour has long attracted the wrong type of representatives. Fianna Fáil is tainted by its reckless past and the incoherence of its platform. It believes serving the people, parish and business in equal measure is viable. It has learnt little beyond the need to regulate the banks. Sinn Féin’s commitment to a Left agenda is unclear bearing in mind its defining preference for irredentist nationalism over ideology, its centrist pragmatism in the North and its willingness to coalesce with Fianna Fáil. Its performance at local-authority level is not impressive or particularly leftist. It is cultist, and ambivalent about democracy and transparency, and its leaders lie casually about its, and particularly its leader Gerry Adams’, past. Renua seems like a somehow unendearing chip off Fine Gael’s Christian Democratic block, with a penchant for propriety. The Independent Alliance (dubbed Shane Féin) is utterly incoherent of policy and membership. If ex-stockbroker Mr Ross and turfcutter Michael Fitzmaurice ever breathed an atom of the same political air, Village cannot imagine where it was. Village has a weakness for the Social Democrats, whose mild platform is essentially the same as Labour’s, though strangely more pro-business, but whose small membership is more prepossessing. Its antipathy to water taxes is expedient but regrettable. The radical Left offers the huge appeal of integrity and seriousness but its opposition to property taxes is inexcusable, and its focus on opposition to the loathed water taxes rather than a broader anti-inequality platform, including opposition to the iniquities of Nama, corruption and the resurrection of the developer classes has diverted its revolutionary ideology. The Green Party’s policies are often radical, and its agenda mature, but it is not hard-minded and it achieved so little in the last government that it is difficult to be enthusiastic. To the extent that we have not afforded space in this edition of Village to the policies and protagonists of most of these parties, it is because they simply don’t offer enough to justify it. Village believes equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability are the most important policies; and it is difficult to be optimistic about their immediate Irish prospects. Laboured machinations over the fiscal space are ephemeral, though most of the other media address little else. Reflecting the need for a vision of society as well as economy this edition focuses on the coalition’s delivery across a number of departments that promote equality, sustainability and accountability, though we do have articles by Constantin Gurdgiev, Michelle Murphy and Sinead Pentony on the iniquitous handling of the fragile economy. We consider Education, Health, Social Welfare, Environment including climate change, Small Firms policy, and Accountability. These departments make life worth living. We systematically assess whether they achieved the goals set by the Government for each of them when it took office. In the end the conclusion is that they have underperformed. And so therefore has the unimaginative, regressive and stolid Government behind them. Against this backdrop, we would again not presume to advise readers where to direct their votes. However, we can say the non-ideological, non-visionary parties of the pragmatic centre hold little appeal, even when mitigated by somewhat more thoughtful ones. A coalition of the parties of the Left, radical Left and the Greens would, as always, best promote Village’s agenda, if no doubt imperfectly.