life Archives - Village Magazine

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Pervasive effects of precarious work

by Sinéad Pembroke 19 May, 2018 0 Comments

Employment in Ireland is often spoken about in terms of the economic recovery and falling unemployment rates. However, the real issue that needs to be addressed is job quality and the types of jobs that are being created. There has been increasing recognition that for many workers in Ireland and Europe employment has become insecure, with temporary and casual work increasing. The FEPS-TASC Report, ‘Living with uncertainty: the social implications of precarious work’, sets out to map precarious work in Ireland, and the impact this type of work has on precarious workers’ lives. This research involved 40 in-depth interviews with men and women living in Ireland, aged between 18 and 40, who work or had worked in temporary employment, were employed on a part-time basis with irregular hours and/or were hired on a self-employed basis. There are many definitions of precarious work, as no agreed definition exists. However, for the purpose of this report, we are focusing on employment that is contractually insecure, which includes part-time with variable numbers of highly skilled people are now being locked into insecure employment. A number of sectors of the Irish labour market have a disproportionate share of precarious work. Eight sectors scored higher than the national average. Transportation had high levels of solo self-employment, human health was characterised by a high level of part-time work, and education had a high level of temporary work. The remaining sectors (construction, wholesale and retail, accommodation and administration and support) had two or more dimensions of precarious work at relatively high levels. “Other NACE sectors”, which include occupations such as hairdressers, sports facilities workers and artists, scored high on all three dimensions. To understand the effects of precarious work, we need to look at life outside of the workplace, like the house-hold situation and access to social supports and services. We need to examine the consequences of precarious work for quality of life because, even though the basis of contractually precarious work might be similar in different countries, the experiences differ as a consequence of the availability of public services and state subsidies – for example, universal healthcare or child-care. The following are our main findings in the report. Precarious workers did not choose to be precarious First, the report found that none of our participants chose to be in temporary and “part-time with variable hour” employment. Much of solo self-employment was also not entered by choice but interviewees were forced into this arrangement as a condition for their employment. Importantly, we discovered that many people are unaware that they are working precariously; there are many workers who are working without a contract, or who assume a rolling contract to mean permanency. This finding points to the need for employers to be up-front about contractual status. Precarious workers cannot afford to be sick The report found that precarious working conditions can have a negative effect on physical and mental health. On top of that, the majority of participants cannot afford to be ill. The burden of expense is felt in two ways: through no paid sick leave, and as well as the expenses of paying to see a GP and for medication, tests and follow-up appointments. This lack of support can result in having to make hard decisions such as whether to first buy food, or pay bills or rent. Medical cards and GP cards are means-tested and most precarious workers do not fit the eligibility criteria to obtain them even though they are not able to afford primary care services. Precarious workers have difficulty finding stable housing The housing crisis in Ireland affects families and individuals with very different backgrounds. However, the difficulties that people in non-standard employment encounter are even more pronounced, as they lack economic stability. Precarious workers are not left with any other choice but to rent, or if the option was available to them, to live in the family home. With tightening mortgage regulations, (which followed the economic crash), and soaring property prices, people working in non-standard employment are unlikely to be approved by any lending bank. At the same time, renting in the private market has become prohibitively expensive in the last number of years. This has resulted in bouts of ‘hidden homelessness’ for many of our participants, situations during which they have nowhere to live and are forced to sleep on friends’ couches or stay with their parents. Precarious workers postpone having families It emerged from our interviews that having children was often challenging for precarious workers. While some decided to have children regardless, the majority of our participants continued to postpone childbearing. Postponement of childrearing amongst precarious workers is often not a choice based on individual preference. Instead, while precarious workers want to have children, their financial insecurity, directly related to their contractual insecurity, prevents them from becoming parents. For those who already had children, maternity leave and childcare are the most important issues that they face. It became clear through the interviews that maternity leave is challenging for women in precarious employment, especially for those who are on temporary contracts. First of all, the contract may be shorter than the actual leave. Likewise, for those who were on temporary contracts, maternity leave is a possible obstacle for the continuity of their employment. Formal childcare is too expensive for participants who have insecure incomes and thus alternative arrangements are often necessary. In the most extreme cases, one of the parents has no other choice but to quit their job. Such a decision is usually not based on traditional gender roles, but on employment status. Based on the interviews, precarious work does not appear conducive to having a family. Precarious work leads to insecure lives Contract insecurity and wage unpredictability lead to workplace insecurity and create insecure and unpredictable lives. The lack of independence that precarious work entails often creates a situation in which many people must live with their parents and thus are unable to develop independent lives. Public benefits and support services, such as state access to free primary care services, accommodation,

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Make sure of the facts

by Frankie Gaffney 5 April, 2018 0 Comments

There are two dominant interpretations of what’s come to be known as “call-out culture”. Many see it as an effective way of holding people, particularly public figures, to account for objectionable deeds and utterances that their status might otherwise have allowed them get away with. Social media has certainly played a massive role in an accelleration of accountability that is changing the way big organisations function. For the powers-that-be many styles of “cover-up” are simply no longer possible. One individual can go viral with their story in a matter of minutes. However, many others see call-out culture as trial by mob, a return to a medieval mentality, or puritanism in another guise – particularly when applied to individuals rather than institutions. Either way, I think – I hope – everyone can agree people shouldn’t be held to account for things they haven’t actually said or done. Yet over the past year it seems there is a disturbing new trend in the now conglomerated battlegrounds of media and social media. The values of call out culture – the idea that people should be made atone for perceived offence through group-shaming – are no longer a phenomenon of those periphery cultures largely concerned with traditional arenas of cultural theory: questions of gender, minorities, and identity. In 2017, call out culture went mainstream in a big way. I’m not referring to the Hollywood purge, which did aim to address gendered issues, and seems to have been long-overdue. The culture of the call-out – its language, style, mentality – started to intrude into new domains. The standard of offence became radically expanded, and the concept of proportionality (let the punishment fit the crime) went out the window. The most depressingly ridiculous example of this has to be the career ending decision of Barry McElduff to make a short video in a local shop, pretending not to be able to find a loaf of bread which was in fact balanced on his head. The video was posted the night before the, to be fair – fairly inauspicious – date of the 42nd anniversary of the Kingsmills massacre. Kingsmills was one of the most despicable atrocities of The Troubles. A group of workers had been travelling on a bus home from a factory when they were stopped by what was ostensibly a British Army patrol. In one of the most poignant gestures of the Troubles, when the gunmen asked the single Catholic worker to identify himself, his Protestant co-workers tried to prevent him stepping forward, as they believed it to be a loyalist gang targetting Catholics. He identified himself nonetheless, but was spared. It was the 10 Protestant workers who were machine-gunned to death. Another man survived despite having been shot 18 times. After the the video was “called-out” on Twitter, condemnation of Kingsmills seemed immediately to become coterminous with condemnation of McElduff. Defence of McElduff was taken to be defence of the massacre. This is a fixture of this style of thinking – any query as to whether or not the accusation is accurate is taken as defence of the deed that has been alleged. Those who queried the likelihood the then MLA was performing some piece of bizarre Daliesque sectarian performance art, were met with rebuttals reasserting how wicked a deed the massacre was, and that it was no laughing matter. Surely true, but irrelevant to ascertaining whether or not McElduff was actually referencing Kingsmills when he put the loaf on his head. I watched in dismay as a number figures across the political spectrum – some of whom I’ve long admired – rushed to condemn McElduff, refusing to countenance the notion that this was an unfortunate coincidence. His own then ordained leader-to-be, Mary Lou-McDonald proved of the same mind-set as she condemned McElduff’s tweet as “crass”, “stupid”, and “unforgivable”. She of course had not condemned the numerous social media posts prior to this in which McElduff had balanced other comestibles on his head, although there were many – it seems to have been a running pantomime gag for the politician. When someone points me to the sectarian atrocity he was referencing when he took a photo with a Snickers balanced on his scalp, then I’ll believe there was ill-intent. It was instead his young daughter who was left to try and defend her father against the social media onslaught, explaining the photo was taken in the shop she worked in, the family always ate Kingsmills bread, etc etc, to absolutely no avail. Fixed thinking is another aspect of this praxis – no amount of evidence will exhonerate the accused, any defence offered is taken as further evidence of their guilt. What mattered to McDonald was not the facts of the matter, or loyalty to someone who dedicated their life to a political party she joined in the late 1990s, what mattered was assuaging the mob. And this has become the prime directive for many powerful people, not only in politics, but in the media and corporate world. This is regrettable, as another recurring theme is that the outrage is often so loud it entirely obfuscates the circumstances of the original incident. In another example, John Connors drew ire after tweeting that he personally wouldn’t call the police on someone for “robbing bread”. This was then completely conflated with events later that same day, when a stolen digger was used to smash and try to steal the safe from a Lidl which had earlier been looted of food and drink. No amount of clarification could convince many of the call-out crew that Connnors was not trying to downplay or justify an event that hadn’t even happened when he originally tweeted. Thankfully Connors is comparatively invulnerable to these tactics, unlike McElduff his career is not subject to the vicissitudes of political sensitivities. Lest anyone accuse me of being partisan, here’s an example of precisely the same style put to use in the opposite direction. When former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave died, RTE presenter Sean O’Rourke retold

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Independent Living

by Sarah Lennon 30 March, 2016 0 Comments

2016 marks another anniversary, the 20th anniversary of a ‘Strategy for Equality’. This was the report of the Commission on the Status of People with Disabilities. Their task was to establish what life was like for people with disabilities in Ireland and to prepare a roadmap to equality for people with disabilities. Before deciding on the appropriateness of any celebrations, it is timely to ask a question: has Ireland become more equal for people with disabilities? The Commission took what it described at the time as “the unusual step” of consulting with people about their ‘lived’ experiences. It reported that people with disabilities experienced outdated social and economic policies and public attitudes, and pointed to “justifiable anger” felt by people with disabilities and their families. In the intervening years a multitude of laws and policies have been introduced but the question remains. Let me state it again: has Ireland become more equal for people with disabilities? A cursory look at the Strategy and subsequent developments would suggest that quite a lot has been achieved on many of its recommendations. A National Disability Authority (NDA) has been established, a Disability Act was passed into law, a National Advocacy Service was established, and a swathe of legislation was brought into force on equality, assisted decision-making and education. However, if you dig a little deeper, there is a different story to be told. Most of these measures were poorly thought out or half-implemented. The Disability Act 2005 created little by way of the rights-based legislation envisaged. Instead it provided a basic right to a person with disabilities to an assessment of need. However, no rights to services follow on from that assessment. Even this limited ‘right’ to an assessment has been only partly commenced and currently just caters for children. The Strategy envisaged an independent advocate for people with disabilities. In 2007 the Citizens Information Act was passed. This provided for “Personal Advocates” with statutory and wide-ranging powers. Four years later a limited non-statutory service called the National Advocacy Service was commenced. A total of 35 advocates operate across a country where there are an estimated 600,000 people with disabilities. The Education for People with Special Educational Needs Act 2004 has been stalled indefinitely. This means that children in mainstream schools struggle to get educational supports. Successive Governments have failed to address the issue of the cost of disability. Many of the manifestos for the recent election used the term “cost of disability” to describe plans to give people an extra ten euro on their welfare payment. This is a regrettable approach. Cost of Disability demands than an increase in welfare payments. It requires a genuine recognition that having a disability can be expensive and moving to alleviate that additional expense. The Strategy recommended that the Department of Environment develop a policy with “the right of people with disabilities to live as independently as possible” as its aim. In 2011 the ‘Congregated Settings’ report was published by the HSE, the agency responsible for care services. This was premised on moving people with disabilities back into the community. Progress on this ambition has been unacceptably poor. The Fine Gael manifesto for the recent election includes a target for 1/3 of residents to move back into the community by 2021, three years after the initial deadline for moving all residents. This is an acknowledgement that the policy has failed and that a generation of people will probably die in institutions. The Strategy stated that ful lment through relationships and sexuality is a basic right. Since 1993, the criminal law has cast a legal shadow over sex and people with disabilities, particularly those with intellectual disabilities or mental illness. The law has provided an easy excuse to opt-out of providing sex education that would strengthen their ability to protect themselves and possibly open the door to a ful-filling, intimate relationship. This is a bleak landscape, but it’s not all negative. We are beginning to win the ideological battle. Concepts of person-centredness, independent living and autonomy are creeping into the parlance of the body politic. The battle now must be to get our partially commenced legislation fully implemented. This will involve resources in many cases and a change in culture in others. Any marking of this 20th anniversary of the ‘Strategy for Equality’ must reflect that not much has changed and must pose the challenge to find the political will for equality. We have all the tools at our disposal. Sarah Lennon Sarah Lennon is Training and Development Of cer with Inclusion Ireland

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History is not Herstory

by Michael Smith 2 March, 2016 0 Comments

Less than 30% of the writers in Village are women. And only 30% of the articles submitted for publication come from women. What’s going on? Village is politically correct and right-on. Uniquely it never, to take an example, markets magazines by putting attractive women on the cover. Village takes progressive social theory seriously. It consistently takes the most ‘liberal’ stance on abortion and reproductive rights. Most of all, and this is what determines so much of its stance, Village believes in inconvenient and prickly equality of outcome, not shiny and friendly equality of opportunity. In other words not just opening up for all, but giving the worse-off an actual leg up or a quota to compensate for the iniquities of history. This applies to women as much to any group. The new Dáil will have only 35 women out of 158. This is a more-than-50% improvement since 2011 and the number of female candidates was up to 163 from 86 in 2011 when it yielded 22 women out of 166 (up from 3 in 1973 and 22 in 2002 and 2007). Nationally, the average number of first-preference votes per man was 4,205. For women, it was 3,260. Village has given a good bit of of space to women who want to change this, to move towards fty percent female representation in parliament. The Electoral Act 2012, amusingly promoted by Phil Hogan and opposed by Fianna Fáil, applied a gender-quota rule that parties had to have at least 30% candidates of each sex or they lose half of their state funding. All parties except Direct Democracy Ireland applied their quota. Village supports this. I support this. That’s politics. We should push for immediate progress, everywhere. History and culture are different. The Abbey Theatre got into trouble recently because only one of the ten authors chosen for its 1916 commemorative programme, Waking the Nation, was a women. Other theatres and film bodies have taken similar flak. A recent rather unconvincing evocation of the Rising, Rebellion, made efforts to portray the events of that era with women to the fore. I disagree with these approaches. As to the Abbey’s Programme, what if the women took bog-standard anti-feminist positions, would they still merit advancement in the programme? Is it that a third of the writers should usually write pro-feminist pieces or is it that the third should have written pro-feminist pieces in this instance? Should there also be a certain number of works produced that have been written authors from racial minorities, from the young and the old, from LGBT and straight? Should it be the same with the actors? What about the audience? The answer to much of this is No. And as regards history, you’re trying to record the way things were: history. You shouldn’t, and you don’t need for any political reason to, distort it. All you can do with history is acknowledge and let it inform, though never determine, your politics. For the same reason that you don’t make the ruling classes working classes or younger than they were in the interests of some perceived correctness, you don’t pretend that women were the protagonists in the Rising. Unfortunately they were not. I also disagree more generally with distorting the facts to suit the ideology. The idea underpinning politics is to resolve the facts objectively and then apply the ideology. Not the other way around unless you thing your ideology is so weak that it won’t fit certain facts. In which case change your ideology, it was wrong. When the facts don‘t suit your ideology it is time to find a new ideology, or stay quiet; and more precisely to realise you should have had a better ideology in the first place The debate on women’s rights has become unintellectualised, entrenched and sometimes underinformed. For example a recent only partly-corrected Una Mullally article in the Irish Times misreported that Fianna Fáil’s policy was to have “up to a third of its candidates women”. She ridiculed the policy even though the policy did not, and legally and logically could not have, said this. It would certainly have been nice for those of us who believe that the point of that party is only ever to adopt progressive agendas, at the very last minute, if Fianna Fáil had got it so skewed, but they had not. Between Una Mullally and her employer they could not bring themselves to correct the article properly. The reason for the politics of women’s equality is that it has been an unequal world. It was an unequal world when they (men) made God a Man, it was unequal in 1916 and it’s still unequal because women earn less, are politically less powerful and have less autonomy than men. Only a fool would deny it. Because of the legacy of thousands of years of suppression women have not written as good, or indeed nearly as many, plays as men. Women also write differently from men, largely for socio-cultural reasons but also sometimes for reasons based in their physiological natures. The point is to change that by counterbalancing. Women of today who want it and show talent should get more training in playwrighting paid for by the state and its institutions, than that available to similar men, particularly training that helps them break down prejudices and that facilitates overcoming sexist obstacles to success. An admirable recently announced initiative from the Irish Film Board is doing roughly this. Such initiatives tend to generate equality of outcome. Regrettably in the arts it will be some generations before the volume of brilliant works by women rivals the volume of brilliant works by men, created over the aeons, even controlling for the heightened relevance of contemporariness. It is different with politics which, unlike history, does not or should not, trade in the past. It is possible, indeed imperative, to push for progressive change. It is, because of the nature of the discipline, and the period in which it trades – the past, not possible to push for change of

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Bouquets to Boulders

by Ronnie Fay 1 March, 2016 0 Comments

It is critical that the next Government have a credible and robust National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. This will depend on political will. The last number of months have been particularly difficult for Travellers and Traveller organisations. In October 2015 we witnessed the horrific deaths of 10 Travellers in a fire at a below-standard halting site in Carrickmines. There was a general outpouring of sympathy for the bereaved Traveller families which seemed to break through the barriers of negative stereotype. Soon, however, we were forced to watch the bouquets turn back into boulders as the local authority failed to implement its plans to accommodate the bereaved families due to objections from local residents. This unleashed shocking levels of anti-Traveller hate speech on the airwaves and on social media. Meanwhile the families were left to live on a car-park while they buried their loved ones. In November 2015 Traveller ethnicity was discussed in Dáil Eireann for the first time. The Government told the Dáil that Traveller ethnicity would be dealt with in their new National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. But we had to watch the Minister for Equality, who had promised to deliver on this issue, back down. He blamed ‘focus group led’ politics. This disappointment was followed in January this year with the spectacle of riot police evicting Travellers from a Traveller halting site in Dundalk. This was apparently for their own safety. Ministers refused to get involved in local authority operations. The Government was exposed as having no plan for Travellers and Roma. The last Government told the United Nations that poor education outcomes for Traveller children and third-world living conditions for Traveller children would be dealt with in the new National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. However, It succeeded in putting Traveller issues on hold, just long enough to get to the General Election. The week before the election Travellers and Traveller organisations were involved in a round of consultations with the Department of Justice and Equality on the National Traveller and Roma Inclusion Strategy. It was ironic that outside these consultations, in the real world of General Election campaigning, Traveller issues were barely mentioned. Considerable space in print, on the broadcast media and on Social Media is readily available to decry Travellers and to blame many of the ills of society on them. However, when it comes to political discourse the space available seems to shrink. Travellers and Traveller organisations have been engaging with the State for 30 years now. In this time there have been significant milestones. The 1995-Government-appointed Task Force on Travellers was the first to provide a comprehensive agenda of policy proposals for equality for Travellers based on a recognition of the distinct culture and identity of the Traveller community. The 1998 Employment Equality Act and the 2000 Equal Status Act introduced, for the first time, a system of redress for people experiencing discrimination in employment and in the provision of goods and services, including Travellers. In 2010 the First All-Ireland Traveller Health Study was published which acknowledged the critical role that living conditions play in determining unacceptably-poor Traveller health levels. What we have failed to see in the last 30 years is the implementation of policy in accommodation, health, education and employment. Many of the recommendations of the 1995 Task Force report remain to be implemented. There has been little tangible improvement in the standard of Traveller living conditions. Travellers and Roma represent a small percentage of the total population. It is not beyond our means to ensure equality and human rights for Traveller and Roma. We need leadership that Travellers can believe in. We need Government to commit to implementing a National Traveller and Roma Strategy that: 1. Provides safe, culturally-appropriate accommodation for all Travellers and Roma. 2. Supports positive action to enable labour-market participation and employment for Travellers and Roma. 3. Reinstates and grow resources to ensure participation by and outcomes for Travellers and Roma in culturally appropriate education at all levels. 4. Implements the recommendations of the All- Ireland Traveller Health Study. 5. Recognises the distinct ethnic identity of the Traveller community and addresses the practical implications of this in policy, programmes and services. 6. Addresses deprivation among Travellers and Roma in an integrated strategy for economic equality for these communities. 7. Funds Traveller and Roma organisations to give voice to the issues faced by their communities and to participate in decision-making that affects them. 8. Promotes a campaign of public education to combat racism and to stimulate a valuing of ethnic diversity. 9. Builds capacity in the public sector to respond effectively to cultural diversity and to implement the public-sector duty to promote and implement equality and human rights. Ronnie Fay Ronnie Fay is Director of Pavee Point

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The life and Crimes of CJH

by Kevin Kiely 23 February, 2016 0 Comments

There is something quaint about Conor Lenihan assessing the life of Charlie Haughey, the man who stole money from the fund for his father’s liver transplant and then fired his father as Tánaiste and Minister for Defence. Lenihan has pieced together a mixture of his own memories of the former Taoiseach and anecdotes that his father, Brian Lenihan senior, passed on to him. Because of this, the reader inevitably looks for evidence of personal bias on the part of this author and it is certainly a particular, personal work. This is a distraction because these characteristics import a significant source of new material, and new perspectives on old material. Nevertheless the media do not seem to have embraced Lenihan’s approach and strangely this book has not been reviewed in the mainstream press. The book is easy reading if patchy. Lenihan of course has a pedigree of grandson, son, brother and niece of TDs and, as a famously boisterous quidnunc he exploits it – all. Lenihan opens by admitting, nay boasting, that it is rare that an adult life is heavily influenced by an historical figure, but that his was, by Haughey. The moral compass of the book spins unpredictably. It often lionises Haughey but also assiduously maintains another Lenihan-centred narrative which actually surfaces only sporadically and peaks in intensity with the sacking of Lenihan senior and with the loss of his bid for Áras an Uachtaráin weeks later. The most poignant page in the book is the last one, the sole appendix, which reproduces the letter from Haughey requesting the resignation of Lenihan’s father. It begins “A Thánaiste, a Aire” and proceeds to threaten that if he does not resign that Haughey will request the President to terminate the appointment. An underpinning of authorial disdain is surely being implied. Lenihan reprises a lacklustre recitation of the Small Man’s biography: son of a Free Stater, Lieutenant in the FCA, North Dublin ward boss, marriage to Lemass’s daughter, reforming minister, arbiter of taste (here Lenihan is too kind). But consistent hypocrite supporting Archbishop McQuaid’s banning of Edna O’Brien’s ‘The Country Girls’. The man from TACA, the 1960s Christian Brothers’ Boy in mohair suits doing the social rounds in The Shelbourne, The Hibernian, Jammet’s, The Russell and Groome’s. So far, so well-known. Lenihan explains the realpolitik forcing Lemass to offer Haughey the Finance Ministry and Blaney the Agriculture Ministry leaving Lynch to see off Colley (59 votes to 19) and become Taoiseach. A brisk narrative on the Arms Crisis foreshadows Haughey’s first fall. Lenihan believes Lynch “knew much earlier than he insisted that weapons were to be purchased” but “backed off and decided to blame the entire fiasco on those ministers, and Captain Kelly”. Haughey, Blaney and Gibbons were “briefed at every step of the way, if not by Captain Kelly, then by the Army’s Head of Intelligence Colonel Michael Hefferon”. Still Lenihan is perplexed as to why “Lynch opted to put those involved on trial in the courts” and adds ‘my father always said that the main person pushing for a prosecution was George Colley”. Haughey’s return is well done. He enlisted Reynolds and his country and western caucus and was back as a Minister in Lynch’s government by 1975. Haughey’s pretensions rose ever greater: “Some preferred the Mercedes but Haughey felt the Jaguar cut a greater dash, with its leather seats and inlay”. Meanwhile back in the city Haughey’s constituency machinery cranked out cheques and Christmas turkeys. In summer there was a charity gymkhana (in aid of the Central Remedial Clinic!) with marquee and CJH in riding gear with Lady Valerie Goulding, silver trays and matching teapots on the lawns of Kinsealy. By 1979 he was leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach. Lenihan notes (in a sentence that in fairness he appropriates from Haughey’s Wikipedia entry, that: “Within days of his becoming Taoiseach, Allied Irish Banks forgave Haughey £400,000 of a £1,000,000 debt. No reason was given for this. The Economist obituary on Haughey (24 June 2006) asserted that he had warned the bank ‘I can be a very troublesome adversary’”. Haughey’s 1980 Ard Fheis was “like a Baptist revival meeting rather than a political conference”. Then GUBU set in in 1982. Lenihan surely veers towards the unedifyingly bizarre as he reveals that a contact of his in the Tory party told him that Haughey was “the first person to compliment Mrs Thatcher on her legs” at the Anglo-Irish summit which spawned Lenihan senior typically ponderous invocation of “the totality of relationships”. Haughey’s interventionism over the liver transplant for Lenihan senior in the Mayo Clinic is narrated scrupulously with Haughey ordering Paul Kavanagh who fundraised €270,000, though “no more than €70,000 was spent”, to divert the balance to Haughey and his Charvet shirts (though Lenihan, being a Lenihan, is much too practical to care, or even mention, the fetish for haute couture). Lenihan recounts with palpable pleasure how Haughey survived the 1991 challenge from Reynolds (55 votes to 22). Haughey lived through his dissection by the Moriarty Tribunal and died of prostate cancer in 2006 before he could be prosecuted. Homely depictions of Lenihan’s mother and her friends debating the ethics and sexiness of early Haughey mingle with Lenihan’s recollection of how Brian Lenihan senior’s hopes that Fianna Fáil might not campaign against divorce were dashed by Haughey. Other anecdotal references sometimes, though not always, seem tailored to elevate the perspicacity of the author’s dad but also give the book a beguiling sense of Lenihanesque intimate authority – as when he reveals that he acted as an informal intermediary for Albert Reynolds in the early 1990s, though he was a working journalist. There is charming colour too as when for example he captures the private sides of De Valera and Lemass, or remembers a bottle of whiskey placed at Jack Lynch’s setting at a dinner in the late 1960s being consumed in the course of an evening. He reveals that his father and Ray Burke, of all people, agreed to fill out their ballot papers the same

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No civilisation in this jungle

by Johanna Kaprio 26 January, 2016 0 Comments

Hundreds of people line up in a queue as soon as the doors of the van open, each hoping to get a pair of warm trousers. It is a cold November day in Calais, but some of them are wearing just shorts and slippers. In the queue I recognise a Syrian man that I met in the refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos just three months ago. He is so thin that it is hard to find him a slim enough pair. But what strikes me even more is his eyes – their sadness and exhaustion – that seem to reflect the cumulation of hardships of the past months, starting in his home country, and now continuing in Europe. That moment of hope and relief, when the overcrowded flimsy rubber dinghy he was on reached the shores of Europe, has now turned into hopelessness at being stuck in one of the worst makeshift refugee camps in Europe, the Calais camp, also known as the Jungle. It’s not a jungle though: it’s more of a disaster zone. Shabby tents and improvised shelters made out of pallets reach as far as the eye can see. The site is far from ideal for camping, the less so during this chilly rain; the sandy ground has become just muddy. Some parts of the camp are exposed to a heavy wind, and people are looking for help to fix their collapsed shelters. There is no electricity. Sanitation is severely inadequate. No more than 40 toilets are currently serving over 6,000 inhabitants – one for every 150, while the UNHCR recommendation is one toilet per 20 users. With only three taps in the camp, there are not many opportunities to wash hands. Litter is everywhere, and some areas are covered with human extracts. At one of the two refuse points of the camp I meet representatives of the Médecins Sans Frontières, who have come to collect the rubbish. They remind me to be careful what I touch due to the threat of scabies and other infectious diseases. A recent investigation by the University of Birmingham, supported by the Médecins du Monde, further highlights detrimental health situations in the camp including the prevalence of ‘white asbestos’, sometimes used to weigh down tenting. As food in the camp cannot be stored safely, much of it carries infective amounts of pathogenic bacteria, causing diarrhoea and vomiting. Several water storage units exhibit levels of bacteria exceeding the EU safety standards, too. The lack of washing facilities prevents the effective treatment of scabies, lice and bedbugs. Many here are suffering from mental illnesses. The makeshift hospital in the camp has the capacity of treating only up to 90 patients a day and there is a constant shortage of medical supplies. It is especially hard to provide treatment for long-term medical conditions such as tuberculosis. Many patients also come in with serious injuries, often resulting from unsafe conditions in the camp, or failed attempts to cross the border. I meet a young boy who has a broken arm, after a failed attempt to jump an England-bound train – a typical case. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has continually expressed about the reception conditions for refugees and migrants in Calais, stressing that security measures alone are unlikely to be effective, and urging the French authorities to relocate the refugees to proper reception facilities in the Nord Pas de Calais region and further afield. Some relief is expected from the proposed EU- supported refugee centre, that is expected to be opened in Calais in 2016. It will reportedly be equipped to deal with 1,500 persons. Another alternative would be to involve experienced non-governmental aid organisations such as the Red Cross to act as auxiliaries for the public authorities in the humanitarian field. Charities and voluntary organisations offer an invaluable contribution to the current European challenge, but they cannot be expected to supersede the responsibilities of European governments. Of course, permanent aid mechanisms will be required for as long as the conflicts causing the crisis, sometimes exacerbated by Western military interventions, are allowed to continue. Naiim Sherzai is standing at the exit of the camp, watching the trucks headed for British ports. Sherzai, who comes from the Helmand province in Afghanistan, is a former translator for the British forces, and had to leave the country because of the threat of the Taliban. He now wants to seek asylum in the UK, and ultimately to bring his wife and two children there. He asks whether we could recommend him any legal ways to enter the UK. But in Calais, there are no such routes available for a refugee. Lack of alternatives drives many to desperate acts, trying to hide in the trucks headed for the ferries or the Eurotunnel, or cutting the fence to hide in the trains. At least 16 people have died this year trying to get across the Channel. Tear gas fills the camp regularly as the police tries to drive out refugees from the proximity of the trucks entering the port of Calais. Although the tightened security measures and border controls have decreased the numbers of those who try to leave, groups of refugees lunge for their freedom every night. The rest, like Sherzai, find themselves lost – the road ahead blocked, but with no turning back either. In the jungle. In limbo. Johanna Kaprio