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Cuairt na Banríona: Éire agus Sasana

2011-05-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

Ba bheag an tsuim a léirigh muintir na hÉireann sa scéal nuair a fógraíodh go dtabharfadh Banríon Shasana cuairt ar an tír seo. Rinneadh trácht ar an chuairt i bhfad siar, bhí a fhios ag daoine go raibh sí le teacht, ach shíl formhór na ndaoine nach leanfaidís an scéal agus nach gcuirfidís iontas nó spéis ar bith sa chuairt nuair a tharlódh sé. Ach i rith na laethanta beaga roimh theacht na banríona, thosaigh na daoine ag caint. Uaireanta ní raibh i gceist ach focal grinn, ach ba léir go raibh daoine ag cur suime sa scéal i ngan fhios dóibh féin. Faoin am a leag Banríon Eilís a cos ar an fhód Fódhlach ní raibh scéal ar bith eile i mbéal na ndaoine.

Thuig an tír gur stairiúil an ócáid í. Bhí a fhios ag daoine nár thug monarc Sasanach cuairt ar Éirinn le céad bliain, agus bhí a fhios acu cén fáth: cogadh na saoirse, an cogadh eacnamaíoch, diúltú DeValera páirt a ghlacadh sa dara cogadh Domhanda (cé gur chuidigh sé leis na Sasanaigh ó thaobh na faisnéise de), agus ansin, an choimhlint fhuilteach i dTuaisceart Éireann. Is beag duine atá os cionn daichead bliain d’aois nach bhfuil íomhánna gránna ón Tuaisceart greamaithe i gcúl a intinne. Is cuimhin leis an ghlúin chéanna an chaoi ar chlis go hiomlán ar an chaidreamh idir rialtas na hÉireann agus rialtas Shasana i dtús na coimhlinte. Bhain sé tamall fada uathu teacht ar chomhthuiscint ar na cúrsaí seo.

Táimid ag leanstan próiseas na síochána le fada an lá: an Comhaontú Angla-Éireannach 1985; sos-chogadh an IRA 1994; Comhaontú Aoine an Chéasta 1998; díchoimisiúnú airm an IRA 2005, Paisley agus McGuinness mar chéad aire agus mar leas-chéad aire 2007. Mar a thug an tUachtarán, Máire Mhic Giolla Íosa, sliocht as saothar Yeats san óráid ag an chóisir in onóir na banríona “is go mall séimh a thagann an tsíocháin”.

Ba dheimhniú do mhuintir na hÉireann í cuairt na banríona go bhfuil deireadh leis an choimhlint agus an síor-achrann. Chuir an chuairt seo ina luí orainn go raibh toradh leis an obair chrua a rinne ceannairí stáit agus ceannairí pobail síos fríd bhlianta deacra na nochaidí.

Is léir, áfach, go raibh ní ba mhó na cúrsaí síochána agus polaitíochta i gceist. Tá stair fhada an dá thír fite fuaite le chéile. Le míle bliain tá daoine ag dul anonn is anall idir an dá thír, agus ag réanna áirithe bhí cuspóirí éagsúla ar intinn acu: an t-ionradh, an coilíneachas, an ghabháil, nó, nuair nach raibh an lámh láidir i gceist, an creideamh, an t-oideachas, an trádáil. Ar an drochuair ba mhinice muintir na hÉireann thíos leis na hidirghabhála seo. Suaitheadh an tír seo ó bhun go barr. D’fhulaing na dúchasaigh dí-shealbhú, dí-láithriú cultúrtha, agus i bhfad ní ba mheasa fós.

Bhí sé de mhí-ádh againn gur tháinig ann don impireacht ba mhó dá raibh ann riamh ar an oileán beag in aice linn. Agus bhain ceannairí na himpireachta sin máistreacht amach ar chuid mhór den domhain ar fad.

Ar ndóigh bhain an tír seo sochar as an impireacht fosta. Ba fríd impireacht Shasana a rinneamar ár mbealach ón mheán-aois go dtí an nua-aois. Ba dhian an turas é, ach bhí sé amhlaidh i mbeagnach gach tír ar domhain. Thug na Sasanaigh innealra an stáit nua-aoisigh dúinn; thug siad an dlí dúinn; thug siad an teicneolaíocht agus an t-eolas dúinn; thug siad córas oideachais dúinn; thug siad bonn-eagar dúinn; agus thug siad an teanga is tábhachtaí ar domhan dúinn.

Ní iontas ar bith é gur fhág an stair sin dearcadh ar leith ag muintir na hÉireann i dtaobh na Sasanach: an ghráin agus an t-éad gan amhras, ach ceann is go raibh an impireacht an-mhór agus go raibh sí fíor-chéimlathach, fágadh coimpléasc na hísleachta orainn mar phobal. Ní iontas ar bith é nach mbíodh fáilte sa tír seo roimh mhonarc Sasanach. Seo é an cúlra stairiúil ar ndóigh, agus ní féidir a rá go mothaíonn pobal na hÉireann gráin do phobal Shasana sa lá atá inniu ann, nó le fada an lá. Ach bhí iarsmaí de na sean-mhothúcháin fós ann.

Daichead bliain i ndiaidh chogadh na saoirse bhí an tír seo fós ag brath go mór ar Shasana ó thaobh cúrsaí geilleagair de. Mar thír bheag ní raibh dlúth-chaidreamh againn le haon tír mhór eile. Sin é an fáth gur chuireamar a oiread suime sa Phobal Eorpach i dtús báire. Cheapamar go gcuideodh ballraíocht sa PE linn éalú sa deireadh as bheith ag brath ar an tsean-namhad. D’éirigh thar cionn leis sin mar straitéis: ba fríd an aontas Eorpach a thángamar in aibíocht mar thír. Thosaíomar ag brath orainn féin mar phobal nua-aoiseach eile, amhail gach pobal eile ar fud na hEorpa.

Má bhí Éire ag athrú le tríocha bliain anuas – go cultúrtha agus go sóisialta go háirithe – cuireadh malairt crutha ar an Ríocht Aontaithe fosta. Tháinig deireadh le hiarsmaí na himpireachta. Chuir na pobail cheilteacha eile – in Albain agus sa Bhreatain Bheag – a gcuid féiniúlachta chun cinn. Tá ar a laghad seans ann go bhfágfadh Albain an Ríocht Aontaithe. Tá scothaicme Shasana ag teacht isteach ar an stádas nua atá ag an Ríocht Aontaithe, is ea nach bhfuil anois inti ach scoth-thír atá ag streachailt leis na hathruithe móra cumhachta atá ar bun ar fud an domhain.

Is tráthúil a tháinig an Bhanríon. D’fhág an ghéarchéim eacnamaíoch in ísle brí sinn. Tá deacrachtaí móra againn leis na tíortha móra Eorpacha. Agus arís eile tá aos óg na tíre seo ag dul thar lear ina mílte – cuid mhór acu go Sasana. Chuir cuairt na Banríona ina luí orainn gur tír neamhspleách í Éire fós, bíodh is go bhfuil dualgais ar leith uirthi. Táimid báite i bhfiacha, ach nílimid faoi chois.

Is dócha go bhfuil rian an dearcaidh a bhain leis an impireacht fós le mothú i measc scoláirí Eton nó i gcoláistí Oxford. Agus is cinnte go bhfuil corr-dhuine i Whitehall agus i Westminster a bhfuil gothaí na huaisleachta fós air. Má fuair Sasana ísliú céime le glúin anuas, tá sí fós i bhfad níos cumhachtaí na an tír seo. Ní bheidh an tír seo ar chomh-chéim le Sasana choíche agus beidh caidreamh aon-taobhach idir an dá thír.

Ach thug cuairt na banríona le fios go bhfuil meas ag an dá thír ar a chéile ag leibhéal oifigiúil. “A Uachtaráin agus a chairde” – níor labhraíodh cúig fhocal Gaeilge riamh a raibh a oiread tábhach ag baint leo. In aon abairtín amháin, d’aithin Banríon Shasana go bhfuil a mbunreacht féin agus a gcultúr féin ag muintir na hÉireann. Murar féidir cairdeas bheith ann idir dhá thír, is féidir cairdeas, nó gean éigean, bheith idir dhá phobal. Agus d’fhéadfadh sé tarlú fós go mbeadh ár sean-namhad ar an chara ba dílse againn.

Why the left hates Blair

2010-09-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

Someone in prospect magazine wonders why the left hates blair more than some of his conservative predecessors. My thoughts are roughly:

Blair’s achievements are enormous: the huge improvement in the NHS and the funding and performance of schools to name just two. His constitutional changes (though conceived before he became PM) were also very significant. So too with peace in NI.

I think the virulent opposition to Blair from the left – more instense than against conservative leaders – owes something to a sense of betrayal. From the day of his controversial court backed electoral victory, Bush was loathed on the left. For Blair to align himself so closely with Bush, after 9/11 but even before the Iraq war, was always going to alienate Blair from large sections of left opinion. Blair allowed no distance between himself and Bush, not even a shade that might have made independence of mind and policy seem credible.

On Iraq, where Blair constructed a casus belli from intelligence that was plainly insufficient, if not patently exaggerated, he was always going to destroy his image on the left. In arguments about justifying Iraq, Blair keeps on saying that after 9/11 he knew islamic fundamentalism had to be confronted, yet everyone knows now, as they did then, that Al Queda and the 9/11 bombers were not spawned in Iraq but elsewhere. So despite Blair’s insistence that Saddam’s regime posed a threat, we know that it didn’t really, not after 1991 and all the years of sanctions. Saddam was a murderous dictator, but the time to intervene to save his victims was long past (incidentally the West backed him while he was at his most brutal).

On top of Iraq, there is Blair’s rightward lurch in matters concerning law and order, and issues like Freedom of Information (which he now says makes government impossible).

Blair was an immense politician, and I believe did have a genuine progressive intent, at least in the beginning. But more clearly than any prime minister in recent times, he let power go to his head. He became a megalomaniac, even evangelical in his zeal. He seemed not to have a healthy sceptism towards power itself. The way he deployed his power, and how he altered the office of prime minister, are troubling.

For Blair there was no such thing as a cabinet. He was right and his person decision was a diktat. It is probably on balance a good thing that there was another powerful figure next door whose presence was the ultimate limit on how far Blair wanted to stretch his office.

Blair’s term exposed how little real counterweight exists in the British system for a PM with a large majority and who is in command of the senior figures in his own party. In the end, he is hated on the left as much for how he deployed power as he is for any single policy (aside from Iraq).

Subjects I hated in School (Or did I)

2010-09-03T13:44:00.000-07:00

I attended a terrible primary school : apart from the teacher in the infants’ class, the other three varied between hopelessly incompetent and simply deranged. All my teachers at primary school were middle aged women. Two of the four were so bad that they spent a good deal of their time either crying, pleading with the class, or exploding in fits of violence. It was a disaster for them and us, but that was how it was. Parents complained to the board of management – but the main voice there was the parish priest and he supported his teachers to the last. And anyway, even if he hadn’t there probably wasn’t much he could do. This was the late 70s, but even now it is almost impossible to have incompetence teachers removed. The only thing I would hope is that they are rare and that on average most children get decent, capable teachers.

It is secondary that I wanted to talk about, but primary has a huge bearing on how a child fares in secondary. Those who say primary is a crucial foundation are right. When I arrived in secondary I felt that I was far behind the other students. In everything from history, to maths, to Irish, they were years ahead of me.

At our school we did exams every Christmas and I recall that the message from my first set of exams was that I had a lot of catching up to do. Thankfully I developed an appetite for study and over the course of the junior cycle I made up the lost ground. But I was probably lucky. I could easily have become disheartened or found that I couldn’t bridge the gap, in which case I would have joined that quarter of the class or so who never returned for the senior cycle.

The truth is that I didn’t really hate any subjects, but my interest was usually a direct function of the effectiveness of the teacher. I was unlucky again in Irish, English, and French, finding myself with two of the schools weakest teachers. (I had the same one for French as English).

I dropped classical studies (my year was the first where this was offered in place of Latin) after first year, and also dropped Commerce, choosing instead to stick with woodwork and technical drawing. I excelled at all the technical subjects and in the end got very high results in subjects like drawing, maths, and the sciences. But my progress in the languages had stalled.

I had a moderate interest in Irish but the teacher hadn’t. His passion was Gaelic football and he spent large parts of the class talking to the footballers about results or forecasts (I had no interest in sport of any kind and used this time to scribble or write obscenities into the margins of my textbooks). English and French were even worse. The teacher had no command of the class – or her subject matter. I never really read any of the texts. In the end, for my intercert (now the called the junior cert) I scraped a C in English and French and a D in Irish.

I remember well the day the results came out. I walked into the principal’s office to see how it went. He was beaming. I had done very well overall. He said I had 8 honours, among them five As. I was ecstatic. I hadn’t expected to do half as well. Standing beside the principal was the Irish teacher, a dour look on his face, and as I took the slip with the results he said ungraciously, “obviously languages aren’t your strong point”.

It hit a nerve, for I can still feel the way his comment deflated my sense of joy in my achievement.

For the senior cycle I was again unfortunate with teachers. Apart from one year I had the same dreadful Irish teacher, and again the same teacher for English. Thankfully I had a much better French teacher. I made up ground in French, getting a B in the end. But I only scraped a C in English and Irish.

I know now that there was nothing at all wrong with my ability to learn languages. During my first year in college I took up evening classes in Irish. It became a passion and I read voraciously in Irish throughout college and spend several summers in the Gaeltacht. Years later I was to spend three years in France and made very good headway with the language. In English too I developed a taste for literature – and even writing.

My experience has taught me this much about education. One, the competence of the teacher is vital. A capable teacher can be inspiring and can draw students toward their subject. Two, students should never give up. Learning is indeed lifelong, and with a bit of dedication you can amaze yourself at how well you can learn even a subject you might not terribly like. Better still you might discover a way in to a subject that makes you realize you kind of like it after all. Three, never allow yourself to be categorised. I believe that the boxing of people into learner types is artificial. So and so is great at maths and so and so is great at language. True, different subjects require different skills and abilities, but after all, even at the end of the senior cycle the goal is not mastery or deep learning, but to get a very solid foundation, and that can be achieved by any student in any subject.

The Words We Use

2010-06-30T06:44:00.001-07:00

For a long time now each generation which has reached middle age has lamented the decline in intellectual ability and civility of the one coming after. Yet civilisation hasn't collapsed. In many ways it is now a better time to grow up than at any time in the past. But the changes over the last half century aren't a mere linear evolution in manners - there seems to be a substantial rupture with the past.

The way in which post-60s generations have kicked off respect for authority has in many ways been liberating. But the reaction or rejection has gone too far and has been far to unselective. This, in my opinion, is one reason why teaching in school is now a barely tolerable task. And it may also explain the explosion in petty, mindless crime. It certainly explains the evaporation of civility from most public spaces.

It seems that we have been gripped by an agressive (and agressively hedonistic) cult of the individual. All of this was underway before the late, great, acceleration of technology into the realm of the personal (where the bywords of marketeers have been 'personalisation', 'customisation', 'unique user experience' - all short hand for individualsim). The twin phenomena of rejection of authority and tradition, and the rapid rise of email, text and other casual forms of communication have cut away the formality - and the discipline - that was once associated with the written word.

Indeed, to mention just one consequence, isn't the demise of letter writing one of the more lamentable side effects of our great leap forward into the age of electronic communication. What a joy for ordinary citizens to have records from their ancestors. But more important, for posterity, what a jewel to have such things as say, the letters of Abraham Lincoln, or those of other eminent persons in the history of any nation.

I cannot claim any great knowledge of the link between proficiency with language and intellectual ability. I would hazard that informality and (what we call) debasement probably have no bearing whatever on the agility of a mind. Even the most slovenly language will be capable of conveying all that is required to run a laboratory - or a country. The great fear would be if the collapse of language were to make its way into literature. There are few greater pleasures than reading a paragraph of prose which shines in impossible beauty. When we reach a stage where literary language has been thus devalued, we should know that we have indeed reached the end of civilisation.

Watching England Lose

2010-06-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

This little post came to mind in response to a piece by Roddy Doyle in the New Yorker. Doyle wrote that he was going to bet for England but when he went to the bookies he couldn't bring himself to back the old enemy..

Doyle's remarks ring true: here in Dublin I could hear my neighbours cheer each time Germany scored. Typically punters in Irish pubs shake the rafters when someone, anyone, scores against England. These are usually the same people, like Mr. Doyle, who support English soccer clubs! Nothing illustrates our relationship with England better than the soccer paradox.

We built our argument for independence on the twin beliefs that a) we are not English, and b) they, the English, were responsible for all the wrongs of our history and our current state of misery. For this much blood was spilled (and great national myths were necessary to justify each separate horror). None of this, of course, makes us Irish unique. We made our myths, our wars, and our nation. Our trouble with the English, however, is that while we broke the political ties, we failed to break the cultural ones.

We failed to rehabilitate our national language and we remained under their cultural and (for most of the 20th century) economic shadow. Language is important. Nothing facilitates the cultural dominance of a great power over a small one more than a shared language. In terms of forging an independent culture (though I stress, not in any other way), it was to our misfortune that the power which stepped into the role of global empire after Britain was also English speaking. This cemented the position of the English language in Ireland (as elsewhere) thereby preserving a direct channel for English cultural produce into Ireland. All of this was happening at a time when communication, television, and later the internet was connecting Irish homes into the English cultural scene.

During our (ill-fated) economic boom of the 90s and naughties, Irish town and city cetres grew more and more like those in England. This is more to do with capital flow than culture, but it merely set in concrete what was happneing in parallel in cultural terms. In Ireland we consume vast quantities of British celeb culture; far from being force-fed British media, the fact is, English titles sell here because we Irish are prepared to pay to read about Victoria Beckham or Elton John.

We even follow the British Royalty, another topic which bubbles the paradox to the surface. Despite following the tribulations and foibles of prince Harry with great interest, there is something of a minor backlash on Irish airwaves at the announcement that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, is going to visit Ireland next year - the first visit by a British Monarch since Irish Independence.

In Ireland we are happy to adore and support anything English as long as it has no national symbolism attached. This is surely a sign that despite our political independence, our success at building a functioning nation, and our increasing confidence as a member of the European Union, an ache of self doubt lingers in the heart of our project to creating a unique national identity, one that need not be defined by what it is not: English.

FG wrong on Leaving Cert Irish

2010-06-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

The position of Irish in the school curriculum is central to the larger question of whether the state - and by extension this nation - ought to preserve or promote the first official tongue. The cause of the language is very dear to my own heart, and therefore I feel very strongly that this is an important issue.

Everyone knows that Irish language policy has been very flawed down the years - though some remarkable changes have taken place over the last 15 years or so. We know too that there have been chronic failures in how the language has been taught. I recall studying 16th century poetry in a class where no student had the ability to order a train ticket in Irish. Some of these failures have been corrected in part in recent years; for example, by making the curriculum more relevant and emphasizing communication over literature.

Given the known and perceived failures it is tempting to reject current policy in its entirety. This would be a mistake. If the Irish language - still declining in the Gaeltacht - has any hope of survival as a spoken tongue, it is by virtue of the latent but widespread support that it enjoys among the general population.

It is true that among those who look favourably upon the language, most never succeed in mustering the effort required to learn to speak it. The reasons for that are complex, but the fact remains that passive support among the public is a crucial buttress without which the whole edifice of recent language policy would collapse.

Compulsory Irish, I believe, has been a key factor in maintaining a thin but very widespread knowledge of the language among the general population. It makes the vast bulk of the population at least moderately familiar with the language. People may not have enjoyed their experience with Irish in the classroom (one hopes that this can be continuously improved upon for future generations), but, more often than not, they come away wishing the system had served them better and that they had learned more not less of the native tongue.

When people who struggle with the language are given the option, they will opt out, and the result will be an evaporation of the crucial familiarity with Irish. The result will be alienation from the language. It is easy to see how, over a period of time, this would lead to a drastic drop in support for government sponsored revival efforts.

That people retain a mere 'cúpla focal' after years of schooling is an indictment that the system has failed to create competent speakers. Yet dispensing with this thin base entirely would be devastating.

The Fine Gael attempt to make Irish optional is a political ploy - designed to portray a party ready to take radical steps to inject impetus into fresh policies. In reality their proposal is a populist proposal, designed to capitalise on the widespread negative view, not of the language itself, but of how it was taught in school.

I would urge those who support the goal of preserving Irish not to fall for this ploy.

It is worth noting the Welsh have increased their compulsory requirement. From the early 90s it was compulsory to study Welsh to age 14 and in 1999 that was increased to 16. Welsh preservation and even revival efforts have been seen as more successful than ours. We should certainly keep an eye on developments there, though I would accept that each situation is different.

One thing is to be welcomed. Over recent years the debate on the Irish language has been increasingly informed by expert opinion in the field of socio-linguistics. Indeed this has brought a dose of reality to the question of Irish survival prospects that was previously absent. It has also highlighted with greater accuracy than before, that the language is indeed in a very perilous position. The state of the language is now so fragile - despite popular views to the contrary - that a major step in the wrong direction could wipe it out quickly and everywhere as a community tongue.

So the status of Irish in school should not be an object of experiment or political gaming. Instead it should be seen as an essential component of a survival strategy for a language which now needs very careful nurturing if it is to survive.

Bord Gáis Taking the Piss

2010-05-26T03:33:00.001-07:00

All I needed was to have my gas metre moved by a couple of yards. There was nothing complicated - just a trench and a short pipe. So I phoned Bord Gáis. I gasped when the agent told me how much it would cost: a thousand euro!

I thought I had misheard and asked again. Yes, a thousand euro, said the agent.

I took a minute to recompose myself, took a deep breath, then, knowing I had no choice if I wanted my porch built, I begrudgingly agreed.

Ok, I asked, so will the Bord Gáis people have my gas working again when they leave? Oh no, the voice said, in a tone somewhere between surprise and contempt, you will have to call a registered gas fitter to reconnect you.

Why, that is absurd, I protested, I'm paying you, the gas company, a thousand euro, to move a box two yards, and you wont even connect me? No, that is not our responsibility.

But a thousand euro, I cried, this is obscene. Well, in any case, the voice said wryly, we need to have your gas installer certify it for safety. Wait a minute, I said angrily, are you telling me that the only major gas company in the country cannot move a pipe by two yards and verify that it's safe? That's ridiculous, I said.

My protestation was to no avail of course. This is what monopolies do: rip people off. What I had experienced was a taste of say, 1986. Back then most of the big service and utility providers were monopolies. It could take months to get a phone installed and when you did the costs of using it were astronomical. But Telecom Eireann didn't care - the last thing that mattered to them was happy customers.

So far, however, Bord Gáis has managed to maintain its monopoly over gas supply. They can defend their position under the pretense that there is competition by virtue of the fact that people can choose coal or oil. But this falls apart simply because coal and oil aren't gas. Bord Gáis and BP and Topaz and Bord na Móna now call themselves 'energy providers' as if a customer rings up an asks for three thousand kilojoules. It's absurd. For a start, coal and oil are far dirtier than gas. Plus Bord Gáis has an installed base of pipelines to houses in cities. And finally, the raw materials are priced differently. So Bord Gáis saying that users have choice is patently false. It would be like Telecom Éireann saying in 1986 that as an alternative users can choose carrier pigeons.

But anyway on the appointed morning my Bord Gáis team turned up to move the metre. (And nice chaps they were too). I asked one of them if they would be finished that day. Today, he laughed, I expect to be out of here in an hour. I have seven of these jobs to do today.

So there we are. Bord Gáis charged me a thousand euros for what it took these two men to do in an hour. Now I don't know what those men were paid, but I would presume it falls considerably short of 500 euro an hour.

To finish the job, I had to pay a gas installer a further three hundred euro to reconnect my metre to my house - along the path which Bord Gáis had just dug up.

Overall 1300 euro to move a pipe by two yards. The Celtic Tiger might be gone, but Rip Off Ireland is alive and well.

Father and Son

2010-05-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

When I was about three years old my father, directly after coming home from work or just after dinner, I'm not sure, used to sit me up on his knee and tickle my ear with his tongue. Then he would tell me a story. Sometimes this took place lying on the couch, for I remember my father tucking me in beside him. This is a recurrent and favourite memory of mine, and is both vague and brilliantly clear. I have no clear idea of exactly when my father began - or stopped - showing his affection in this way, and I cannot recall any great 'visual' detail. I don't remember any one of these occasions in particular and can only guess what my father might have been wearing, or how the room in the house was decorated. I think I know how the furniture was arranged, and I certainly remember that the couch was facing a window, in the direction of the kitchen. I always imagine my mother standing with her back to the window, as a silent observer, in silhouette. Her position there, standing watching father and son, cannot be a faithful memory. I now realise that she would have had better things to do with her time, being in charge of two boys under three and a nineteen seventies father who worked hard oursite the home, but who never interferred, we would now say helped, in domestic affairs. But the memory also has great clarity. I can hear and feel my father's tongue in my ear, and I hear his voice say hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.

This is one of serveral very clear - and very dear - memories that I have of early childhood. Another is one of me playing with my grandfather's pocket watch. He passed away in 1977, when I was four. In another memory I am riding a cart behind a donkey with my uncle, who was only 9 years my senior. This was on my grandparents' farm where the donkeys were pushed to extinction in the middle to late seventies by the arrival of a diesel tractor. (A David Brown 770 which has since mostly melted back into the earth beside the byre, also in a state of decay).

My early memories are very precious because they connect me with people, allive and deceased, who were near the centre of my life at one stage or another. Yet these memories are terribly fragile. I know that people often have false memories of childhood (Scientists of memory say that we often create these memories unconcsciously from a mix of real memories and suggestions by others. This often results in impossible memories, which are recalled episodes which could never have happened, like being present at an event which took place before you were born. This is down to a thing called source confusion where the rememberer cannot recall the source of the information. It could have been a story someone told or something they read, and in the mind it got inserted with other real memories of self).

Even if some of my early memories are false, I don't necessarily want to find out. They are like pillars that are now built into my life story, and I cannot bear to imagine them being torn away.

When my father became seriously ill lately I found myself revisiting a lot of my childhood and teenage memories that involve him. The process happened of course unconsciously and over a period of weeks. I might be waiting for a meeting to start at work when I would remember my father, wearing a yellow vest, his white shoulders exposed to the July sunshine, and hunched over a turf spade. His hair is dishevelled, but thick and ungrey. His motion is fluid and silent, though from time to time I hear the slap of peat on peat.

Or I am getting ready for bed and another memory arrives: he and I are sitting on the pier in Killybegs, hot summers day, me seven or so, and both eating ice-lollies. Mine is an orange ice thing, his a choc ice or a brunch, or one of the more adult ice creams that I couldn't manage. There is no sound but he must be telling me about the boats, the great fleet of trawlers that packed into the harbour then but which are long gone now.

Or while driving alone I suddenly recall my father perched on the tiny stage of the local pub, his paolo soprano accordion strapped on his shoulders, his eyes are fixed in the distance as he inhabits his music.

These are a few examples of the many memories which have bubbled to the surface over the past few weeks since my father suddenly became ill. Thankfully he is making a good recovery now and his prospects are reasonably good. But his close call has vivifyied him in me, and I fell I need to be near him more than before.

The inability of Irish fathers (and sons) to communicate is a well known source of anguish. My father, despite all those shared memories and experiences, remains far too much unknown to me. It hurts to admit that I still can ask, who is that gentle, patient, loving, man that tickled my ear? Or what might have been on the mind of the robust, big-hearted man throwing the sods onto the turf bank? Or where does his music take him?

It is a lonely thought that I might never really get fully inside those memories, never really acquire a fuller understanding of the figure that made them all possible. I had always thought that those memories, which are shared experiences, even if some are unreliably remembered, are a kind of collage which, when viewed from afar would form a meaningful picture that isn't visible in any single part. Yet I feel that I am standing here squinting at the grey and blurry distance.

Now more than ever I want to know my father better, to learn about his inner life and how he views his own life, and mine. But maybe I'm wrong to even try - maybe knowledge is not the currency of love. Perhaps the opposite is true. Maybe it is the mystery, and the unfathomable that sustain love.

Yet the power and immediacy of those memories create a yearning for something more. Something bigger and more complete. So I feel I will go on trying, desparately, to discover more.

Open Letter to Deirdre de Búrca

2010-02-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Deirdre, a chara,

When, or if, the Greens decide to bring down the government it will likely be as a result of an accumulation of breaches of trust. That is always how it happens. But they must carefully choose which the issue that they allow to break the camel’s back.

In your own case, whatever the merits of your argument about there being a pattern of Green submission to Fianna Fáil, you chose an issue which entirely centred upon YOU. I’m afraid it just looks so bad – for you that is.

Your timing too: the week George Lee quits. Celebrity cum superhero Lee emerges as a political idiot and sets this weeks theme music: self-obsessed clowns who cannot take the heat of political life. Then you throw out your rattler over a plum job in Brussels.

Knowing too how terrible the collateral damage your party is absorbing from being in power, and how your exit would hurt them, this is an immensely selfish act. You have hurled yourself into the political abyss, and you may well help bring your colleagues in after you. Well done!

Le dea-ghuí,
Tomaltach

Can the Left capitalise?!

2010-02-08T06:42:00.000-08:00

In a comment on a progressive blog I lamented the fact that the left seems more hung up on holding or increasing current spending levels than it is concerned about service levels and value for money. One response to my comment ran that 'yes, but few here are really more concerned about spending levels per se'.

I know that the left is not obsessed simply with spending levels : but that too often is how it seems. It appears to me that much of progressive opinion seems embattled and defensive, and in its moment of seige it is unwilling to concede anything: even the truth. The mentality is that the wagons are closely circled, and all will be defended. This must explain how the broader left can defend the scandal of social partnership.

If there has been criticism from within, it certainly has been muted. The McLoones, Beggs, and O'Conors, co-opted by the Ahern governments, and complicit to one extent or another in its disastrous economic governance, remain unscathed. Similarly no one on the left pointed to the grotesque spectacle of Higher Civil and Public Servants (among the highest paid public servants in the world in a bankrupt country) inviting those in all jobs and in none to join them in the march on PS pay. As another commenter pointed out, the same applies to calling underperforming service providers. And I am decrying the same uncritical approach to spending: the mantra is always for more spending, regardless of the evidence of chronic mispending of moneys currently allocated. The fear of course is that scrutinizing spending will lead to questions on pay, work practices and conditions.

In all of these cases the public sees a defence of the indefensible, and turns way in despair.

I don't understand why the left needs to be so defensive, especially now. True, at a time when the neoliberal dogma of the self-correcting, free market, arrogantly bruised aside skeptics with swagger and media-pumped bluster, it was understandable that the retreating left took defensive positions.

But now, with free market ideology badly shaken, it is time for progressives to go on the offensive. And in my opinon the only way to do that is to admit present and past shortcomings and to campaign with honesty and with a view to persuading the neutral ground. The time for pandering to its own constituency for the sake of survival is over. The imperative for the left to re-invent itself couldn't be more urgent because if it fails now to refresh its ideas and to bring them into force, the crisis in the current capitalist model will be an interlude not a watershed.

In Ireland the left seems to me to be represented by entrenched, self-serving, and mostly public service unions on the one hand and an opportunistic, wavering, and power hungry labour party on the other. (then there is the fringe, from Joe Higgins to SF, the People before Profit, all of whom, I hope, remain nothing more than a fringe).

We cannot be surprised that PS unions are self serving - in essence that is their purpose. Nor can we be surprised that the Labour party is power hungry - politics is about power after all. Still, I would have hoped that the Labour party could have by now worked out a viable and coherent narrative not about what kind of society it strives to achieve - we all know the mantra about fairness and equity - but how it can be brought about and in particular what kind of role the state should play in achieving social and economic objectives.

The right succeeded admirably in crafting a narrative about the virtues of the market: the market always allocates resources more efficiently, the market gives choice to the individual, the market requires but also copperfastens freedom, the market drives innovation. Why can the left not similarly frame its ideas in cogent arguments which can be made to look no less self evident?

Bás na Gaeilge

2010-02-03T00:29:00.000-08:00

Chualamar na scéalta céanna fiche uair: go bhfuil an Ghaeilge ar shéala bheith marbh sa Ghaeltacht mar theanga phobail, go bhfuil deighilt mhór idir phobal labhartha na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht agus lucht Gaeilge na gcathracha, agus gur orthu siúd, Gaeilgeoirí na mbailte, a bheidh todhchaí na Gaeilge ag brath. Bhí na barúlacha seo le cluinstin ó thús ré na hathbheochana i leith agus, má choinnigh an Ghaeilge ag meath mar theanga phobail, mhair sí i mbéal na ndaoine sa Ghaeltacht. Glactar go forleathan anois, áfach, go bhfuil stáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht ina géarchéim teanga.

Murar féidir a rá go bhfuil fíor-dhíospóireacht náisiúnta ar siúl faoi láthair faoi thodhchaí na Gaeilge agus na Gaeltachta (ní dóigh liom go mbeidh a leithéid de dhíospóireacht ann feasta), tá an réadúlacht agus an t-ionracas le sonrú anois san áit a mbíodh an siabhrán agus an séanadh. Faoi dheireadh tá daoine ar spéis leo cás na Gaeilge ag dul i ngleic leis na fíricí loma.

An rud is suntasaí faoin phlé a dhéantar ar an Ghaeilge le blianta beaga anuas ná go bhfuiltear ag cur eolas na teangeolaíochta chun tairbhe, go hairithe an méid a bhaineann le teangacha atá i mbaol, nó go fiú, an tuiscint a bhaineann le bás teangacha. Ba chúis mire é an chaoi a mbíodh daoine ag dul i muinín fhigiúirí an daonáirimh ar úsáid na Gaeilge chun cur i gcéill go raibh an teanga ag seasamh an fhóid.

Tá stáid na teanga sa Ghaeltacht geal soiléir faoi láthair. Seo an méid a bhí le rá ag an Staidéar Cuimsitheach Teangeolaíoch :

“Is é tátal lom shuirbhé na ndaoine óga nach bhfuil ach idir 15 bliana agus scór blianta fágtha mar shaolré ag an nGaeilge mar theanga theaghlaigh agus phobail sa chuid is láidre den Ghaeltacht”

B’fhíor don Dr John Walsh “géarchéim teanga” a thabhairt ar chás na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht san alt leis a foilsíodh ar beo.ie roimh an Nollaig. Agus ní iontas ar bith é gur scríobh Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhe ar an Irish Times le déanaí gurb ann do “bhliain chinniúnach na Gaeilge”.

Ón uair a thuig mé go raibh an Ghaeilge i mbaol is iomaí uair a smaoinigh mé ar an chuma a shíl mé a bheadh ar dheireadh na Gaeltachta. Ar an cheo ar fad a bhain le cás na Gaeltachta le blianta, sílim anois go n-aithním dé deireadh na Gaeilge mar theanga phobail. Don chéad uair tá an cainteoir dúchais ag sleamhnú as amharc i bpolasaí teanga an stáit. San alt céanna le Ó Gairbhe fiafraíonn sé “cad a d’imigh ar an gcainteoir dúchais, duine go mbíodh an-chaint go deo air i dtuarascálacha fadó?”. Tháinig an cheist chuige nuair a thug sé faoi deara nach bhfuil táisc ná tuairisc ar an chainteoir dúchais i nDréachtstraitéis Fiche Bliain don Ghaeilge a d’fhoilsigh an Rialtas i mí na Samhna, 2009.

Ní hionann é sin is rá ar ndóigh nach bhfuil cainteoirí dúchais fós ann. Tá gan amhras, buíochas do Dhia. Ach is cosúil anois go bhfuil tús áite caillte ag an Ghaeltacht maidir le todhchaí na teanga.

Ó thús ré na hathbheochana bhí teannas agus míthuiscint idir mhuintir na Gaeltachta agus lucht foghlamtha na teanga sa Ghalltacht. Má bhí ceannródaithe na Gaeilge sna cathracha dílis agus díograiseach, bhí siad rómánsach agus idéalaíoch freisin. Ba bheag an tuiscint a bhí acu ar an anró a bhí á fhulaingt ag lucht an tsaibhris teanga a bhí scaipthe i measc na gcnoc lom sna háiteanna is iargúlta in iarthar na tíre. Bhí bearna mór cultúrtha eatarthu freisin. Bhí an sean-traidisiúin fós beo sa Ghaeltacht fad is a bhí an nua-aoiseachas ag bualadh na gcathracha.

Bhíothas ag súil an t-am sin go ndúnfaí na bearnaí seo faoi dheireadh. D’fhéadfaí na síolta is áille agus is mó luach den traidisiúin a shábháil sa Ghaeltacht agus a chur sa Ghalltacht (smaoiním ar dhearcadh De Valera). Agus d’fhéadfaí an chuid is éifeachtaí agus is iontaí de shaol nua na mbailte a thabhairt do mhuintir na Gaeltachta (monarchana, teilifís, cumarsáid). Ní raibh a fhios áfach cén chaoi a d’imreodh na hathruithe casta sin ar a chéile ó thaobh cúrsaí teanga de. Tá tuiscint níos fear anois ann ar cheisteanna sóch-theangeolaíochta, agus tuigtear go mbíonn brú millteanach ar mhion-teanga nuair a chuirtear gréasáin nua (bóithre, fón, idirlíon) in áit na sean-ghréasáin (idir dhaoine muinteartha, inmheánach don phobal).

Is léir anois nár éirigh linn deireadh a chur le meath na Gaeltachta. Is léir freisin nár éirigh linn an deighilt idir mhuintir na Gaeltachta agus Gaeilgeoirí na gcathracha a fhuascailt. Léiríonn alt spéisiúil leis an Dr Brian Ó Broin (Irish Times 16 Eanáir) go bhfuil bearna mór teanga idir chainteoirí dúchais na Gaeltachta agus chainteoirí cumasacha na gcathracha.

De réir Uí Bhroin is gránna le cainteoirí dúchais Gaelscoilis na mbailte. Is minic a bhrúnn siad cnaipe an rialaitheora nuair a thosaíonn cainteoir a d’fhoghlaim a chuid Gaeilge ag caint ar an teilifís. Ní thaitníonn Gaeilge na Gaeltachta le go leor foghlaimeoirí ach an oiread. Dar le Ó Broin tá an chaint dhúchasach deacair dothuigthe i gcluasa an fhoghlaimeora.

Rinne Ó Broin anailís ghrinn theangeolaíoch ar shamplaí de chaint na gcathrach agus de chaint na Gaeltachta. Dar léis tá difríochta móra foghraíochta, deilbhíochta, gramadaí, agus comhréire idir an dá chineál Gaeilge. Tharla an éabhlóid seo de bharr a laghad teagmhála a dhéanann an dá phobal lena chéile agus dar le Ó Broin d’fhéadfaí ‘pidsean’ a thabhairt ar an teanga nua atá i mbéal mhuintir na cathrach. (Teanga neamhsheasmhach le gramadach shimplí agus a cruthaíodh in áit na mbonn chun cumarsáid a dhéanamh is ea pidsean).

Ba é an fhís a bhí ag lucht na Gaeilge i gcónaí ná go mbeadh an Ghaeltacht ina thobar ag foghlaimeoirí agus gur ó chaint na Gaeltachta a bhfaighidís an saibhreas agus an snas. Is léir nár tháinig an fhís sin i gcrích.

Mura féidir le foghlaimeoirí saibhreas, iomláine, agus áilleacht theanga na Gaeltachta a thabhairt leo, an fiú an Ghaeltacht a chaomhnú ar chor ar bith? Nó an é go mbeadh Gaeilge na gcathracha ní ba bhoichte fós murach an Ghaeltacht bheith ann? Nó an bhfeidhmíonn an Ghaeltacht ar leibhéal eile in intinn an fhoghlaimeora, go seasann sí mar bhun-chloch faoi choincheap éigin a bhaineann le féidearthachtaí teanga, sé sin gur mó an tábhacht a bhaineann leis an Ghaeltacht atá i samhlaíocht an fhoghlaimeora ná a bhaineann leis an fhíor-Ghaeltacht féin?

Mairfidh Gaeilge éigin ag cainteoirí aonáracha ar fud na tíre, ach is dóigh liom féin gur beag seans atá anois ann go dtiocfaidh an Ghaeilge slán mar theanga phobail. Goilleann sé go mór orm an méid sin a rá. Is iomaí uair a smaoinigh mé ar cén cineál báis a cheap mé a bheadh ag an Ghaeilge. Ag amharc ar na léarscáileanna a léiríonn na limistéir a raibh an Ghaeilge beo iontu ón naoú haois déag i leith, samhlaítear dom i gcónaí leac mhór oighir ag leá. Níl fágtha den leac anois ach giotaí beaga atá fós ag leá agus tá teas an Bhéarla, mar theanga dhomhanda, ag scalladh fúithi níos tréine na mar a bhí riamh. Is gearr nach mbeidh againn ach lochán uisce.

Falling out of Love with Politics

2010-01-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

I sat up half the night on April 9th 1992, waiting on the very tight British election to be called. It was supposed to be a narrow but comfortable win for Labour after thirteen years of Conservative rule. But in the end, it went to the wire and Labour lost.

Since then I have waited up on many an election, including the 1997 Irish election, when I think news emerged that Fine Gael's Nora Owen lost her seat. (Her constituency was one of the trial constituencies for electronic voting).

Over the years I have always tried to keep abreast of key political developments in Ireland, Britain, America, and, during and after living there, France. I was never a true political anorak, however. I always failed to muster the interest in peripheral figures or precise election tallies for example.

I became (an inactive) member of a political party, though again, I failed to be interested in the down and dirty of local political activism. I have a deep admiration for those volunteers who organise, discuss, canvass, and so on. They have amazing perseverance and unshakable resolve. They are truly remarkable, and they are the life blood of democracy. But unfortunately I found the minutiae and machinations of local political life terribly boring. Local constituency meetings often get bogged down in mind numbing procedural and organisational matters. A bewildering diversity of opinion is aired at them, and much of it is pretty bland, and a lot of it, I have to say, is downright lamentable. Some one will pipe up about economics without the faintest idea of how economics works, someone else will rage about banks, or someone will issue a general fatwa against farmers. It isn't an enlightening place to be. One interesting thing is how the multitude of voices, noise essentially, gets filtered as it passes up through the layers of an organisation, to emerge at party level at something that is coherent enough to call a policy.

Eventually I had to admit to myself that I'm not really a political animal and that my interest is more in the theory than the practice!

Nevertheless, I managed to remain very interested in the theory part! And I kept hooked in to the main national, and party, debates. But over the last 12 months I have noticed a change in myself. I am reading the political sections of the newspapers less often (I used to track them religiously), and I'm finding myself less and less in front of a political program on TV (Despite making a brief contribution myself to a recent edition of the Frontline). I think that unconsciously I have begun to tune out from politics.

I think I know why. Pure disillusionment. I have ceased to believe that any substantial change is possible no matter who you vote for. The structure and culture of say the Irish political system is set in thick granite. It cannot be shaken. A decade and a half or tribunals revealling the noxious relationship between politics and business has not lead to a new dawn. In fact, bar minor changes, the old system rolls on. And on political reform one report after another rolls out (on say Seanad reform) only to be quietly shuffled off to gather dust. And make no mistake - the proposed banking inquiry will deliver the same quantity of change: none.

Regarding the theory - I am still fascinated by the big questions. About the shape of a constitution, the structural biases of a polity, how much the state should be involved in the economy, where the line should be drawn between the rights of the individual and those of the collective, the efficacy of supranational organisations, the effect of globalisation on the state, and so on.

But on the practical side and the nitty gritty, I feel that life is far too short. It might be fun to know how a glacier shapes a valley over a million years, but few would derive much excitement from watching its progress in a day. The same is for me and political change. It just feels as though it isn't happening, so I am not going to bother watching too closely. I will continue to vote and keep an eye on developments, but my passion for politics has cooled.

In a way I feel a little liberated, though perhaps it is only a fool's paradise. I can gladly miss the six o'clock news (like I did today, home early from work and got back into a fantastic book) and I can mostly forget about the papers! A great ocean of time has opened up before me and I feel free enough now to explore it without being weighed down by the most common emotions relating to Irish politics - frustration, bewilderment, sadness, embarrassment, and often, anger. Time to forget about political life and get on with the real thing.

A Short Reflection on 2009

2010-01-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

As we start into a fresh and challenging decade I am tempted to look back at the last ten years of my life. But even a cursory glance back is enough for me to realise that a great number of chapters were added to my life over the decade – some delightful and others less so – to pore over the details here. (The truth is that right now I have neither the mental energy to relive and reflect on a full decade nor the physical time to document my meditations.) Instead, maybe I can take a peek back at 2009 just to see if it will reveals whether it was, as it sometimes feels now, a year of heavy lifting, or just another typical year in the middle of life.

On the whole 2009 was stressful. I have had to work harder, by an order of magnitude, than ever before. I now work in a small firm whose very survival depends on the next generation of its product which is a couple of years behind the ideal market window. The team is small – about ten – and we have had to work about an extra day each week for far too many months. Perhaps an extra day a week doesn't sound like much, but there was on top the incessant intensity of the work. This is not the place to go into the details of that story, but I think the burden has begun to take its toll on my mental state and even perhaps on my physical health: I have gone down with a number of severe cold/flus over the last month. This might be pure bad luck with what has been a bad winter for bugs, with swine flu and so on, but I feel that I have succumbed more readily this year than before. Just today our boss has impressed upon us the importance of, to use his words, “keeping our foot on the pedal” until the end of January. The trouble is, that was the message for November and none of us believe there is less than another two or three months of heavy hours ahead.

But the main story on the work front in 2009 was that I had some! In the autumn of the year before I was laid off and was very fortunate to start a new job in January '09. To start a new job in in 2009 and still be in it at the end was, given the wretched economic climate in Ireland, a considerable achievement.

But January of 09 brought a more sobering experience too. I visited a friend of mine, I'll call him John, who was severly ill with lung cancer. He had been ill for about a year. I hadn't seen him since about the time he was diagnosed (he was abroad for a good part of the time). His wife let me in and I passed in to the living room where John was sitting with a blanket over his knees. A warm but emaciated smile greeted me. I found it hard to conceal my shock at the feeble, emaciated figure before me. From one angle John seemed to have aged by about twenty years.

Outwardly at least he was in good spirits, and spoke as loquaciously and intelligently as ever. But I wasn't close enough to him to learn the of what must have been his inner horror. His wife showed as much a sign of the strain as he did: she seemed worn and embattled, and it was clearly a big job to manage John's illness both physically and mentally.

John's two teenage children returned for lunch from school. I didn't know them that well, but at least to my eye they hadn't yet realised how gravely ill their father was.

I thought I detected a distance in his eyes when John said that he was now beginning a six month schedule of chemotherapy, and then that “after that we'll see”. (his cancer had already spread and this was his second series of chemo).

Eventually I had to leave to catch a train and at the same time John's wife was reminding him that he was already late for a hospital appointment and that they had to leave immediately. So we left together and I walked them to their car. I said good bye as normal, but it wasn't a normal good bye. I think both of us knew. After I had walked off I turned to look back, and John was slowly bending to climb into the car. That would be the last time I would see him.

I don't know whether John's death caused my perspective on life to shift or whether it merely accelerated a change that was already under way, but over the last year I have been engaged more than ever by nagging questions concerning the direction of my life, my priorities, and what shape real tragedy takes. I have become a bit more anxious, more pressed to realise approximations of happiness, more worried about trying to weave all the ungovernable strands of a modern life into a some kind of reassuring fabric. Probably the biggest change over the last year is a realisation that old recurring dreams should be shelved in favour of more modest, but more achievable destinations. Yet when I do this exercise – banish the romantic to make way for the pragmatic – all I'm really doing is learning to grow old.

But the two greatest things in my life, bean Thomaltaigh, and my son, mac Thomaltaigh, help make growing old a pleasure in itself. They both made 2009, despite all its shadows, a very rewarding place to be alive. Bean Thomaltaigh, possessed of that silent, inner strength, that voracious instinct for life that only women have, was a support without which I could scarcely have faced 2009 let alone survived it. Bean Thomaltaigh is loved and lovable and capable of sustained generosity. And mac Thomaltaigh, now two, is at the right age to be a perfect antidote to self-doubt, age, and existential uncertainty. I see in him the mad, carefree, and relentless hunger for life that is possible only in youth. His disarming innocence, his tumbling and frolicking, all have made our living room a surer and more fun place to be.

[ There was loads more of course, and I hope to come back to this and add a little more later]

When I look at it in the round I see in 2009 a plodding, difficult year. But in the grand scheme of life, it was a year that gave as much as it took. During the year I think I've grown (as well as grown older!). In some ways it was a year I set out to survive, a holding period, a place to seek refuge in a storm, but it gave its joys as well, and even getting to its end, intact, if a little battered, gives a sense of achievement. It taught me (again and more deeply) that this is life – vagarious, relentless, rewarding, punctuated with great joys and wrenching pain, bearable, unyielding, in short, very livable.

Saoire in Éirinn

2009-08-14T03:34:00.000-07:00

An bhliain seo caite thug mé féin, Bean Thomaltaigh agus Mac Thomaltaigh, thug an triúr againn cuairt ar Iar-Thuaisceart na Fraince. Ligeamar ár scíth i mbaile beag cois farraige ar feadh coicíse. Thug mo thuismitheoirí cuairt orainn don dara seachtain - faoi mar a rinne tuismitheoirí mo mhná le linn na chéad seachtaine. Bhaineamar go léir an-sult as.

Ach i mbliana ní rachaimid thar lear. Fanfaimid ar an tseanfhód - ar feadh coicíse. Tá fúinn cuairt a thabhairt ar oirthear na Gaillimhe ar dtús (ón lá amárach). Thart fá Ghleann na Madadh a bheas muid - ceantar dúchais bhean Thomaltaigh. Áit bhreá chiúin le scíth a ligean. Iar-fheirmeoir é athair bhean Thomaltaigh agus tá eallach aige fós, cé nach bhfuil i gceist ach cupla ceann chun deis a thabhairt dó leannacht lena shean-cheird. Tá dúil mhór ag mac Thomaltaigh sna hainmhithe agus cuirfidh an chuairt seo gliondar ar a chroí (níl ag an chréatúr ach dhá bhliain d'aois).

Is deas an rud é freisin seal a chaitheamh i gcuideachta daoine a bhfuil táithí an tsaoil acu, go háirithe daoin muinteartha. Is breá an fear é athair bhean thomaltaigh agus é i mbun scéil (rugadh é sa bhliain 1933 agus ar ndóigh tá cuimhne mhaith aige ar Eirinn a d'imigh uainn ó shin). Agus tabharfaidh mathair mo mhná cúram maith dúinn fosta. Bean bhródúil bhríomhar í agus nós aici béilí breátha a réiteach.

Ina dhiaidh sin tabharfaimid cuairt ar Chathair na dTreabh, áit a mbuailfimid le sean-chairde, daoine ar chuireamar aithne orthu nuair a thugaimis 'baile' ar an chathair chéanna. Ní thugaim cuairt ar an chathair sin gan smaointiú ar na seanlaethantaí - sé sin, laethanta móra geala m'óige. Caithfimid béile i gceann de na bialanna is fearr sa chathair (más féidir) agus, le cuidiú Dé, ólfaimid pionnta nó dhó i gcuideachta Na Guí Aniar agus a bhean. Daoine a chuireann fearadh na fáilte romhainn i gcónaí.

Uaidh sin, tabharfaimid ár n-aghaigh ar Thuaisceart na Tíre. Caithfimid cupla lá i dTír Aoidh (sé sin, an 'barony of Tír Hugh' mar a thugadh na Sacsanaigh air!) i nDeisceart na Condae. Sin áit dhúchais Thomaltaigh. Táim ag súil go mór le tamall a chaitheamh i gcuideachta m'athar (fear mór a' bhocsa ceoil) agus mo mháthar, bean a bhfuil an speís aici i dtaisteal ar fud na condae! Tá sé ar intinn agam caitheamh aimsire a bhíodh ag m'athair athbhunú, sé sin an iascaireacht. Tá an t-uafás aibhneacha agus locha breatha thart fá dheisceart na condae agus ba ghnach le m'athair gabháil ag iascaireacht acu - nós a lig sé i ndearmad nuair a chuaigh sé anonn i mblianta agus go háirithe tar éis bhás uncail liom a raibh dúil aige san iascaireacht fosta.

Más féidir fosta ólfaidh mé cupla pionnta i gcuideachta m'athar - thar rud ar bith eile ba mhaith liom fáil amach, óna chroí féin, goidé mar atá sé ó scoir sé i dtús na bliana seo (tar éis dó beagnach 50 bliain a chaitheamh ag obair).

Fágfaimid Tír Aoidh inár ndiaidh agus rachaimidh níos faide ó thuaidh - caol díreach go barr tíre! Ceann Mhalainne in Inis Eoghain. Níl eolas ná aithne agam ar an taobh sin - taobh amuigh de Shamhradh a chaith mé ag obair i mBun cranacha nuair a bhí mé óg. Is ar Bhaile Lifín a thabharfaimid ár n-aghaidh. Caithimid roinnt laethanta ansin in óstán breá. Ó, mo dhearmad, tá sé ar intinn agam An Grianán Ailigh a fheiceáil ar mo bhealach ó thuaidh - sean-dún a tógadh san Iarannaois agus a deirtear atá thar barr ar fad.

Siar linn tar éis an tamaill sin in Inis Eoghain, siar frí cheartlár na condae - an bealach garbh, sléibhtiúil idir Leitir Ceannainn agus Gaoth Dóbhair. Is ó bhéal cruite do bhean chéile chara liom ó Chondae an Chláir. Cónaí orthu anois i mBAC ach caitheann siad seachtain gach samhradh i dTír Chonaill. Tabharfaimid cuairt orthusan. Súil agam go mbeidh an aimsir measartha maith nó tá an taobh sin tíre go hálainn ar fad. Tránna breatha geala tréigthe i measc na gcnoc cois farrairge.

Ar an bhealach ó dheas caithfimid oíche eile le muintir Thomaltaigh. Sin an tsaoire atá romham i mbliana.

Journalism in Irish: Waste of Time

2009-07-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

When I put the headline on this post, I thought, cheekily, that I could have gotten away with just saying Journalism in Ireland: Waste of Time. It would still be a launch pad for a viable post: over the last number of years, journalism in Ireland hasn't been a pretty place. The big broadsheets - have all had a major slimming down, with budgets cut and hundreds of journos turfed out. That was happening before the recession - it was part of the ongoing 'challenging' environment facing print media. But now with the recession it can only be accelerated. And of course it has spread to TV and Radio. Newstalk and Today FM have had layoffs and merged their news team (same owner, Denis O'Brien), and of course we all know that RTE is running a deficit of 68m and has begun a major belt tightening operation, so there aren't going to be major opportunities there for a while. Plenty of gloom there alright, but I wanted to talk about Irish language journalism.

I see that the major universities are still busy running Cúrsaí san Iriseoireacht (Irish language journalism). UCG has a couple of comms/iriseoireacht diplomas, UCD has one, DCU. There are probably more I don't know. Which makes me wonder where do all these aspiring iriseoirí think they are going to get a bit of work.

Almost all third level education is heavily funded by the tax payer, no doubt these cúrsaí are too, and perhaps they get and even higher percentage since they are ar son na cúise.

One stark figure should be enough for all those cúrsaí to simply close their doors - it is the number of full time Irish language journalists who make a living from the written word: one. Yip, just one. And that's the Irish language editor of none other than the English language paper, the Irish Times. His name is Pól Ó Muirí and he became the last surviving member of a species that is one heart beat from extinction - the full time Irish langauge journalist.

About six months ago the always-struggling daily Lá, published in Belfast, shut down. And last weekend the Irish language weekly, Foinse, running since 1996 shut down. It's advertising revenue collapsed and the grant money from Foras na Gaeilge wasn't enough to keep it alive. So plimp, it's gone.

We know that in the present climate there is no way the substantially funded Irish language project, for want of a better term, is going to get more money. But the issue is, given the level of wasteful and frankly nonesensical spending on Irish elsewhere, why funds couldn't be found to keep the weekly paper going.

Apart from the courses I mention, money is still dished out to absolutely hideously bad private operators for unused online courses and the likes.

But this exposes the insanity of the way the Irish language strategy has been piloted. All sorts of grants were available for Gaeltacht schemes - even thought about 70% of the Gaeltacht is now a fiction - and money doled out on making Irish a working Eu language. Imagine - the intricies of Eu protocols being tranlsated into Irish by Irish-trained linguists in Brussels while the last remaining Irish language news publication is allowed to die. There is no more perfect symbol for the self-defeating, wrong-headed, vested-interest driven thing that is state policy on the so called preservation of the Irish language.

There is some dignity in a genuine failure, an honest best-effort which just cannot succeed. But there is nothing noble about the shambolic, incompetent, rivalrous, clique-infested, and costly failure that is our nation's effort to preserve its still-dying native tongue.

Little Boy Time: Childhood under Attack

2009-06-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's because I'm just finishing off reading Huckleberry Finn, or maybe it's because my own son, Mac Thomaltaigh, at two, is beginning to develop his own little appetite for exploration (he seems to be particularly interested in the little area behind the wooden shed where I have put old pipes and bricks out of sight), or it could be none of these things, but I have been thinking quite a lot about childhood lately.

Maybe it's part of that nostaligia thing that I'm going through, these vivid imaginings of episodes and relationships from my childhood that I'm denying has anything to do with the concept of a mid life crisis! (In coversations with self I convince myself that my life isn't in crisis - this cannot be a crisis, for if it is then I can imagine that it will throw me into pure calamity when more nasty things happen, as they surely will. So not happy to concede on the term crisis, I tend to settle for the softer 'defining period'.)

One way or another childhood has been on my mind lately, which is probably what drew me towards Huck Finn (I had never read it). It's a beautiful and amazing work and I am enjoying its every line. But in this frame of mind a personal essay about Childhood by Michael Chabon in the NY review of books caught my attention.

In a beautiful piece Chabon talks about one essential component of childhood - the freedom to head off, through streets or woods, with others or alone, every or most days, and just conduct a little adventure. This aspect of childhood, according to Chabon, and I tend to agree, is, sadly, almost a thing of the past.

Chabon talks about his pursuits in Woodlands near his early home, and then antics round a more urban environment later on. The sense of adventure wasn't just spontaneous, but inspired by stories - from legend to history to childhood myths about other adventurers. He described this experience as being his "Wilderness of Childhood" and is now struck by the incredible degree of freedom his parents gave him to roam there. But ... "A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.".

Now it's all about control ...

Nowadays, "we schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras."

And it's all about irrational fear, especially the that seems to have taken over these days, fear of abduction...

Yet "in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was."

The freedom Chabon enjoyed was "a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible."

He then mentions taking his daughter for a trial on her new bicycle in their leafy neighbourhood on a beautiful afternoon. What stunned him most was the absence of other children. There were none in sight. The streets were empty.

It would be easy for us to lament the lack of community in the states and how different it is here. Thankfully, it is different, but the trend, in urban areas at least, is towards something approximating Chabon's descriptions of childhood taken over by adults and under continual surveillance.

Mac Thomaltaigh isn't old enough yet to be on the street, so I have no idea of the pressures involved or how real fears are of calamity or just malign influence. But from friends and neighbours who have kids I know that there seems to be a huge level of parental intrusion into 'child time'. In some cases it is security related - text me when you leave the concert, text again when you're on the bus, and I'll pick you up at the bus stop. And so on.

But some of it is pure ambition to create the best possible future for one's children. Here in South Dublin you are either careless or broke if you don't bother to send your kid to a good fee paying school. And bring them to piano lessons. And do three soccer runs a week, and two karate, or whatever. The kids must enjoy all of this. Surely there'd would be feedback from them if they didn't? And surely it would be heeded if it were given?

But in some instances I sense a parent who is living vicariously, seeing their own child as a vehicle for fulfilling the dreams they, the parent, had for themselves but which, life in all its vagaries, frustrated. A sense of pushing them - not in the direction they necessarily would like to go (as if they should have any choice!), but where oneself wanted to go once upon a time.

This is probably a real temptation - and isn't nessarily always negative. But looking at it as I just head for that territory, I feel myself wondering if childhood has been over colonised by adults. And if, by falling prey to hyped fears, and our own weaknesses for status and advancement, we aren't robbing our children of something that is precious;

Aparrently in Japanese they refer to childhood as 'little boy time' or 'little girl time'. It is precious territory and we would do well not to conquer it fully. After all, it is not 'little adult time'.

The Anglo Truck

2009-06-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

When I was a young fella we used to make little trolleys by fixing the axles and wheels of a used pram to a wooden frame that served as a chassis. We called them trucks. (In Donegal the word truck is never used in place of lorry.).

You steered the truck by pulling on twine that was attached to the left and right side of the front axle which could pivot to give direction. The truck was simple yet frighteningly effective down the steep hilly roads of South Donegal.

Our trucks had two flaws. One was born of youth's immunity to fear - they had no brakes. We probably could have fitted some kind of crude brake, say a lath that would press against the wheel, but we never did. No brakes were fitted because we never assessed the risk - and even when the risk of a potentially terrible crash was obvious (like long steep hills with a corner at the bottom, round which a car could appear at any instant) we ignored it. The bigger the hill you took on with your truck, the more daring you were, not the more insane.

The truck's second flaw was that it was hopelessly unstable: it was too narrow and, with one or more bodies sitting atop, its centre of gravity was too high. A sudden turn made a tumble certain, and many a time I took such a roll. The result was usually a lot of bruising, and often a torn jumper or trouser knee - which meant more pain later, particularly if they were new!

On a very large hill you sat at the top, peering down into the abyss. You knew your ride was going to be perilous, you nerved a bit, but your young mind was unable to muster enough fear to do the wise thing. You pulled left and right on your twine, like a pilot checking his rudder, then straightened up, lifted you legs, and away.

Even if you had launched from a particularly scary hill, there was no going back. You were rapidly picking up speed and hurtling towards some kind of disaster. You had only two choices - to bail now, which meant taking a certain amount of pain, or carry on gaining speed and losing control, and rushing headlong into an even greater horror.

An Léitheoireacht agus Imní Fáisnéise

2009-06-16T04:58:00.001-07:00

Uaireanta buaileann imní fáisnéise mé. Im' shúile, téann an domhan i méid, é ag fás agus ag borradh faoi mar a bheadh mórtas farraige ann. Agus tchím mé féin ag sleamhnú go tóin poill agus balla uisce ag briseadh orm, agus mé á bhá ag an aineolas agus ag oll-líon na gceisteanna.

Nuair a thagann an bhail sin orm is ionann mé agus duine nach bhfuil ach seal beag fágtha aige agus é faoi bhrú a oiread eolais agus is féidir a chur ar an tsaol. Brú ama atá i gceist. Sílim go gcuirtear ina luí orm na babhtaí sin go bhfuil saol an duine teorannta, go bhfuil deireadh leis, i mbeagán focal, go bhfuil an duine básmhaire.

Agus mé buailte ag an imní fáisnéise téim ar thóir an eolais mar bheadh fear mire ann. Ní féidir liom siopa nuachtáin a fhágáil gan gach nuachtán a bhfuil acu a cheannach. Braithním ar na hirisí, agus dar liom, bíonn fáisnéis agus eolas in achan cheann acu atá de dhíth orm. Ní hea go bhfuil an t-eolas seo spéisiúil - tá sé riachtanach. Gheobhainn bás gan é!

Smaointím ar fhiche réimse eolais a bhfuil spéis agam iontu nó atá tábhachtach chun mion-eolas a chur ar an tsaol - ar an chruinne, ar stair an duine, ar bhealaigh an tsaoil: an stair, an eolaíocht, an tsocheolaíocht, an pholaitíocht, an eacnamaíocht, an t-airgeadas, agus ábhair eile nach iad. Ceol, cultúr, cócaireacht. Matamaitic, tíreolas, teangacha. Agus sa deireadh caillim smacht ar m'intinn féin, bíonn an t-easnamh ar m'eolas ró-mhór, agus briseann an balla uisce orm, agus ansin, caithim seal, cúpla lá gruama, ag smaoineadh go bhfuil teipthe orm mar dhuine. Agus sa deireadh, de réir a chéile, éiríonn an ghrian, scaipeann na scamaill, agus tagann lonrú ar an tsaol arís.

Is ansin, agus loinnir ar an domhan, a thuigim nach féidir 'an t-iomlán' a thusicint. Agus níos fearr, gurb í an fhoghlaim an rud is tábhachtaí, agus ní an t-eolas féin : an turas seachas an ceann scríbe.

Caithim amach na nuachtáin (go minic, nár léigh mé), agus fágaim na leabhair fháisnéise, nó neamh-fhicsin ar leataobh. Agus déanaim an rud a mhol cara liom : "má tá tú ag iarraidh eolas a chur ar an tsaol nó ar an duine, léigh leabhar maith ficsin nó filíochta". B'fhíor dó.

Sin an rud a rinne mé cúpla mí ó shoin nuair a chuir mé an babhta d'imní fáisnéise tharam. Agus léigh mé rudaí a chuir iontas agus gliondar ar mo chroí: The Great Gatsby, Leaves of Grass, The Scarlet Letter, Stepping Stones, Out Stealing Horses, Cúirt an Mhéan Oíche, agus Huckleberry Finn.

O Heart!

2009-06-04T08:47:00.000-07:00

I'm in the office, it's 4pm, and I'm utterly exhausted. I blame that swollen, fatty, beating heart that I saw a few weeks ago when channel four screened live open heart surgery.

Some of my readers will have seen that I suddenly lost my job 9 months ago. With it went the only exercise I ever get - cycling to work. For pretty much most of my adult life I've cycled to work or college. (In fact I only learned to drive a couple of years ago when Bean Thomaltaigh announced that Mac Thomaltaigh was on the way. It was an unstoppable train that no excuse could deflect- I had to learn to drive or else. I'm not, announced Bean Thomaltaigh, in a tone that sounded final, going to drive myself to the maternity hospital. That was that).

But even after I got my license I continued to cycle to work - and continued to enjoy it. Or most days anyway. Only a few times did I let the weather or a hangover serve as an excuse. And even then I preferred to take the Luas instead of the car. (You can listen to podcasts easier on the train or walking. I find that when I'm driving anything engaging is lethal - my concentration drifts to whatever topic is at hand. I confess to shooting through an unnoticed red light once because someone said something interesting on the radio. Terrible I know, but there you are. To remove the temptation of anything engaging I now listen to the impeccably boring Mary Wilson on drive time.)

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to find a job, but at a location about 50% further from home. My previous job was, I thought, at just about the right distance for cycling to work. I could tolerate a further kilometre or so but scarcely more. So when I began at the new place the bike never really figured. I would see it in the garage, and I'd often feel a faint nostalgia for it. The crisp mornings, the extra adrenalin from getting moving in the morning, the passing of motorists stuck in traffic. Though never far behind was the wet gear, the dark, damp winter mornings, the puncture. So in the end I found it easy enough to let the bike slip back, to let my cycling days drift back in memory, to shuffle all that back from a part of me that I still possess to a chapter of my history.

Then came the swollen heart. There it was live on TV, open heart surgery. By the time I joined the spectacle, the whole chest had been cut open. There was nothing but a red-raw, rather unreal cavity which contained a rather large and shapeless pulsating muscle.

They were about to repair a valve it seems, but in order to do so they had to drain and stop, yes stop the heart. When the artificial pump had been plumbed in they sucked out the remaining blood from the chambers of the heart and then the surgeon announced, in a way that someone would normally speak of a farm animal, that he was now going to put it to sleep. They poured a large jug of ice-cold saline solution over the heart, then poured and poured again. And all the while the vigour just ebbed away from the once impressive throbbing. Slower, slower and weaker until it just lay there like a fresh steak. Then they drained off the saline solution and proceded to repair the heart. (I didn't, perhaps couldn't, watch the nitty-gritty of that part of the episode but I heard later that they restarted the heart by simply letting it warm up, but that occasionally they have to give it a squeeze or two. At its most basic the life force is as mechanical as a coiled spring).

But it was the fat around the heart that shook me. This gentleman's heart was wrapped in a swathe of fat, big soft, globular, sinister fat. And I remembered I had put on several kilograms since I had put aside my bike, so I thought of my own heart, and I imagined that it too had become choked in fat. I could see it in my chest, tired, squelching in that same horrid fat, struggling to press the next beat-full of blood around my body. There it was, my life-force, straining to keep going, but not even getting a chance. I had to do something to help it.

And that's what made me return to my bike and make that first exhausting journey today, the first I hope of many. And by this I hope to support and fortify my own beating heart, to tell it, O great indomitable life-force, be strong, keep going, beat on.

Krugman on the Great Recession

2009-05-28T01:04:00.000-07:00

"By most accounts, most projections say that the European Union is going to have a somewhat deeper recession this year than the United States. So in terms of macromanagement, they're actually doing a poor job, and there are various reasons for that: the European Central Bank is too conservative, Europeans have been too slow to do fiscal stimulus. But the human suffering is going to be much greater on this side of the Atlantic because Europeans don't lose their health care when they lose their jobs. They don't find themselves with essentially no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We have nothing underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into the abyss. That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does not happen, I want to say, in civilized countries.

And there are people who say we should not be worrying about things like universal health care in the crisis, we need to solve the crisis. But this is exactly the time when the importance of having a decent social safety net is driven home to everybody, which makes it a very good time to actually move ahead on these other things."

Paul Krugman, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics

Ireland and the Children: Slavery and Torture

2009-05-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

Systemic torture and slavery of children by religious institutions; Callous indifference and collusion by the state; and a society silent and in denial. This is the essence of the recent Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

The Irish Times editorial strikes a poignant and thoughtful tone, and if you have time to read nothing else, give it a browse.

I am brought back to the story of poor Peter Tyrell, who spent seven years in the awful hell that was Letterfrack industrial school in the 1930s. Shortly after leaving Letterfrack, Tyrrell joined the British army and fought in the second World War. He was captured, but described the German prisoner-of-war camp as a tea party compared with Letterfrack. His experience in the school caused him irreparable damage as a human being. In the 60s he tried to speak out and made several attempts to raise the issue with the authorities in Ireland. But he was stone-walled.

In 1967, with no indication that anyone had taken his accounts of brutality and rape in Letterfrack seriously, Peter Tyrell committed suicide by setting himself on fire in London's Hampstead Heath. He was so badly burned that it took London police almost a year to identify his body. They traced the unburned corner of a postcard in his pocket to his friend Dr Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, himself a noted campaigner for reform in this area. Sheehy-Skeffington was able to confirm that he had indeed sent the postcard, and that the body was that of Peter Tyrell.

When Letterfrack finally closed in 1974, the Secretary of the Department of Education sent a glowing letter of profuse thanks and praise to the Christian Brothers. The Department, he said, was deeply appreciative of the great care given by generations of Brothers to the boys at the institution.

Below is an earlier post I made in response to a piece by Mary Raftery some years ago when she began to delve into the whole child abuse scandal.

***************************************************

Mary Raftery recently likened the dreadful experience of Peter Tyrell to that of Primo Levi . After hearing extracts from Tyrell's book on the radio the other night, I was struck by the aptness of Raftery's comparison

Both men, through no fault of their own, found themselves locked in a nightmare. They suffered appalling brutality and humiliation. They were stripped of their dignity and lived in sheer terror.

The comparison doesn't end there. In both cases society closed its eyes. The extraordinary way in which a combination of hatred and cowardice gave rise to collusion in Nazi Germany is well documented. But if it is true that ordinary Germans knew well about the horrors inside Dachau, here in Ireland ordinary people knew about places like Letterfrack. Worse still, they colluded in it. A garda would assist in rounding up boys for industrial schools. A farmer would hand over escapees that he found on his land. All in full knowledge of the cruel regimes to which the boys were being returned. Politicians rounded on anyone - and they were few - who dared to speak out. The Catholic Church, cruel and tyrannical, defended its regime with ferocity.

As Peter Tyrell sobbed after his brutal drubbings, he must have wondered what kind of people lived in the little cottages all around. He must have asked himself how a Mass-going community could allow an enclave of brutality in its midst. His heart must have been continually breaking as he wondered what he had done to deserve this cruelty.

Levi suffered a similar collapse in his faith in mankind. But at least he had the satisfaction of seeing the demise of the sick regime that was responsible for his suffering. Poor Peter Tyrell had been brave enough to raise his voice against the tyranny only to be shouted down.

In his quest for justice he met a stone wall, thick and steadfast like that of a church. We are still dismantling that wall and it is essential that we try to understand how it was built.

Pondering Political Reform

2009-05-14T07:05:00.001-07:00

This is a response to a thought provoking article on political reform which appeared in the Irish Times. Dr Murphy raises a number of interesting points which have been missed by a series of previous commmentators on this subject over recent months. Notably, she brings up the subject of whether the Irish people have an appetite for serious poltical reform.

In all probability they don't. First, people have an affection for our current system, and they would be wary of proposals to push them from familiar territory. Second, while there is widespread anger at the way in which our political (and financial) leadership have contributed to our economic destruction, most of the anger is probably directed at individuals (bank execs or senior ministers) or parties (FF) or organisations (the banks, the regulator). Third, most voters have probably not given much thought to the question of how the quality of our government and leadership is a function of our political system and indeed our political culture. As Dr Murphy says in relation to some changes, such as the move from the current electoral system, even political scientists cannot agree on the likely consequences.

That the electorate does not pine for change, however, is not a reason for our political leaders to shy away from the subject. Perhaps if the subject can be opened up enough - by contributions such as that of Dr Murphy - then the debate could gather enough momentum to make its way onto what might be called the national agenda.

Dr Murphy points out that any significant change, whether it requires constitutional change or not, would have pros and cons that would have to be carefully weighed up. Yet I think it is fair to say that our political machinery has shown itself wanting for the complexities of twentieth century government. In that context I think it is time for a public debate on how the quality of our governance, the very effectiveness of our democracy, is hindered by the nature of our political system - from local to national in all its facets. In terms of effectiveness I am thinking about the quality of both executive decisions and legislation; transparency, responsiveness, and accountability; the ability to form and carry out effective long term strategies; the degree to which the system allows for sensible regional development; and so on.

I would agree with Dr Murphy that the Irish people hold dear the easy access which they have to their elected representatives (though for all its charm, I doubt if this has as much merit as we imagine). But having said that, there must be some formula for tiered government possible which can retain reasonably good access and yet allows sufficient distance for decisions that are in the national interest. And it should not be forgotten that direct access, without sufficent transparency and accountability can be more of a negative force than a positive one.

Dr Murphy's warning rings true that says certain reforms, such as a better scrutiny of legislation or improved executive accountability likely have down sides in terms of speed or simplicity. But that shouldn't daunt us. Speed isn't always of the essence, and it is hard to see how effective government in today's hideously convoluted world, would not itself be rather complex.

In short, I think the innards of our political machinery are badly worn and have evidently let us down badly. We need a refit in order to make the thing fit for purpose in the world of the twenteth century. The optimist in me believes that as a people we are ciapable of remaking our system to deliver better results. But after a moment's pause, as my thoughts drift from the mechanics and theory of change to the practical reality of political inertia, voter apathy, and party self-interest, my belief in the possibility of change dissolves.

Lee the Candidate

2009-05-12T06:52:00.001-07:00

No small amount of furore surrounded George Lee’s putting himself forward as a candidate in the forthcoming by-election. It made big news with his former employer for obvious reasons, not least that he gave them practically no notice. The story made headlines everywhere. Lee was talked about in canteens and snugs and both up and downmarket coffee shops. Sunday paper and Irish Times columnists weighed in. And of course the political blogosphere revved up with its spin on Lee’s sudden emergence.

The initial burst of excitment subsided, giving way to a more sober analysis which in turn is now giving way to less generous comment which is beginning to be laced with the Irish version of cynicism; that is to say, cynicisim with wee doses of begrudgery and ill wishes! (though I accept RTE should have a tighter rule book and Lee a better awareness of the ethical issues in the step between journalism and poltics)

When all is said and done I welcome Lee’s decision to contest a Dáil seat. The reason is simple and has nothing to do with how early Lee, with vetinary precision, diagnosed the ill health of our Celtic Tiger. Nor has it to do with his politics (After all he has joined Fine Gael!). Lee is unlikely to suggest any major change in the balance of power in Irish capitalism. He’s more likely to advocate more of the same model, just done better and with tigher ethical standards of governance.

So the reason I welcome Lee is neither politcs nor economics as such. I welcome Lee because what Irish politics desperately lacks is the ability to attract people who have seasoned experience and tested competence in diverse fields. Recall, we live in a country where, owing to parish allegiances and our peculiar political culture, people are elected for who they are, not what they know or how they are qaulified. Our ‘top three’, Cowen, Lenihan and Coughlan inherited their politcal dynasties. And in the two upcoming by-elections, one is being contested by the brother of our former Taoiseach and the other by the son of the former occupant. In other words, our political culture has a particular capacity for replicating the same genes over and over. (And I want to say, the two men involved have every right to run. And there are other candidates in the fold).

But I say Lee’s decision is positive if it can represent even a slight change in the profile of those who run for public office. Surely it would be for the better if we could see accountants, architects, business people, community activits, pyschologists, etc. etc. making their various expertise and experience available to help govern the country. Yes, we have lawyers, teachers, doctors, accountants, etc already, but the bulk of them are those who trained but came from a political background and entered politics early. I am talking about finding highly successful and talented people — from any field — and getting them to switch to take on elected office.

Back to Lee. The hype surrounding his announcement showed how truly unusual it is for a well known figure to enter the fray. And yet in terms of what he represents the whole thing was vastly overdone. Vincent Browne lamented that Lee has now tied his great talent in the chains of party dogma and his contribution to this country in consequence will be greatly diminished. What a load of rubbish!

First: Are we saying that George Lee’s early call on the Tiger tells us that he is some kind of one in a million guru whose wise, independent voice is now needed to guide us to safety? The truth is that almost everyone knew what Lee knew. And those who didn’t were willfully ignoring the reality. We had the OECD, ESRI, IMF, National Competitiveness Council and swathes of independent (?) economists studying our economy and giving us warnings and advice. (In fact, all Lee was doing was reading these reports and passing on the message - can no-one else be found to do that?).

Second, Browne implys that the best or wisest voices should be kept out of the political system (so they have no direct access to power). But locking out wisdom - as our political culture does — sits tightly among the chief causes of our political paralysis.

And that is why we need new voices, new talent, a wider net for drawing in seasoned experts from all walks of life, into the heart of our moribund political clique. but we need many more if they are to sweep into our system and blow it open.

Job Loss V

2009-05-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

Job Loss I - Shock
Job Loss II- Acceptance
Job Loss III- Reflection
Job Loss IV- Lumen

Cuckoo Call

2009-05-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

When I was about four on my granny's farm, the cuckoo called.
What is that?
A wee bird.
And where is it?
My father pointed, and from low down I thought he pointed at the sliver of moon.

Ever since when I see the sliver of moon I hear the cuckoo call.

Big Flu, Small Planet

2009-04-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

A headline in the New York times read "Contagion on a Small Planet". Obviously the writer was referring to the recent outbreak of Swine Flu that is causing concern to health authorities across the world.

Something in the headline struck a chord: the small planet. Strangely enough I have often brooded on the melancholy thought that yes, indeed, our planet is terribly small. The most recent waves of Globalisation which occurred over the last 60 years in particular have truly shrunk the world. In part this is a conceit - we in the rich countries can fly almost anywhere while those in the poorer countries struggle to feed their families. But even in developing countries the numbers travelling have been growing. And if the runways in Kathmandu and Kigali are mainly used by Western tourists, the truth is that despite the inequality this a thickening of the connection between one part of the world and another.

When you have travelled a reasonable amount you begin to feel that the world is small. I haven't clocked an amazing number of air miles but I've been several times to North America, a couple of times to Asia, round a good deal of Europe, and once to Africa. Of course one trip to Africa hardly means I know the world's second largest continent. But the point is that the path is open.

And so many paths are now open on an enormous scale. Ads by travel agents convince us that nothing stands between us and the wonders of the Pyramids of Egypt, the Amazon rain forest, or the polar Ice caps, but a phone call and credit card number.

I have always been fascinated by that page in the in-flight magazine which shows the destinations which your airline serves; and filled by a mixture of amazement and horror by the number of destinations served by big airports like Heathrow. When you're at an airport the whole world seems to be on the move. You feel - or at least I do - that the whole earth has been unsettled and everyone is going somewhere else.

It is an amazing feat of technology and a triumph of the human desire for exploration and progress that we now have a world where you can pretty much get from one point on its surface to any other within about the time the whole thing takes to rotate on its axis. Amazing and triumhant yes. But also somewhat sad. It reminds of the star trek saying that space is the final frontier.

When I imagine our former earthly frontiers, the East, the West, the Dark Continent, the American West - which have been pushed into history by our intrepid explorers, I cannot suppress a faint but deep pang of nostalgia for that older world - the one that lay utterly undiscovered.

There had to be something of a spiritual vacuum at the heart of our burning desire to discover an elsewhere. The dream that beyond the frontier lay some untarnished wonder: an exotic people, a green, empty continent, an unlimited supply of gold. And now, when I visit other once far flung parts, I wonder what did the first visitors see? What vision had they or their immediate descendants for the land they were soon to make their home, or in the case of Africa and other parts, the land they were soon to exploit within an inch of its life? But above all imagine their wonder. The excitement of first setting foot in a new world. Like all journeys the expectation and the dream were probably bigger than the reality when it came.

And so we pushed back all earthly frontiers and made rapid paths - by land, sea, and air - to all corners of our world. God gave us a large planet, and we made it small.

An Ghuí Aniar

2009-04-21T00:34:00.001-07:00

Fuair mé teachaireacht ar maidin a chuir lúcháir ar mo chroí. Teachtaireacht inár fógraíodh gur tháinig Guth Nua ar shaol na blagadóireachta. An Ghuí Aniar ainm an bhlaig úir agus tá an chéad alt scríofa go cumasach fileata. B'fhiú go mór duit, a léitheoir dhil, cuairt a thabhairt ar an Ghuí Aniar.
Táim ag súil go mór le tuilleadh ón pheann chéanna.

Political Reform - key to long term recovery

2009-04-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

It is only right that we should look for the cause of Ireland's particular economic crisis. After all, how else are we to repair the damage if we cannot identify the problem. Better still, how can we avoid a recurrence if we do not change whatever lies at the root of the breakdown.

Yet I think that most commentators, interest groups and politicians have failed to identify the crux of our problem. The unions blame big business, the government blames the world economy, the opposition blame the government, and for the most part the ordinary man in the street blames the bankers and the builders.

All of the above have indeed a part to play in how this sorry saga left us where we are. But as far as I'm concerned, the failure which lies at the very heart of our crisis is not one in regulation or integration into the world economy. Nor is it a failure to set remuneration for bankers which reflects accurately on value generated. No, the prime failure responsible for getting us where we are is a political failure.

Not in the narrow sense that the FF ministers who piloted the country during the boom bear sole responsibility. Certainly it is shocking that none of the said ministers has come close to even admitting that serious mistakes were made. To hear Mary Coughlan on morning Ireland it was as if she and her fellow ministers arrived in Leinster House only last week. I put this down to pure arrogance. It seems to me that the current cohort of FF ministers has been infected with a brazen, brass necked arrogance which makes them unable to contemplate, even for a second, that any one of them might be fallible. There isn't even a scent of humility left in their tired, brain dead beings. They have spent so long in the ministerial cars and arriving in for their executive meetings that they cannot imagine any other existence. It is hard to allow that they might have any inkling of what real life is in our crumbling economy, so removed are they from the harsh winds buffetting our lives right now.

So, much as I loathe the current crop of ministers, I think that our problem as a nation is broader still. It lies in the very nature of our political system two aspects of which are critical. One is our politicial structures which are clearly unfit for the purpose of twenty first century government. The second is our political culture.

Our moribund senate is a relic of some 1930s fantasy about diversity. Our tired and tiresome Dáil has become no more than a platform for the executive to announce its latest great plans. These houses make up our legislature but it barely deserves the name. Our executive makes the law, and makes it in the face of a legislature which is uterrly toothless to influence the main thust of what the government wants. As an executive, the government is almost completely immune from scrutiny.

True, the committee system has been a useful development over the decades. But it remains ad hoc and terribly uneven. It is a tangled web of undefined and overlapping interests. And for the most part, the general public has no purchase on it. There is without doubt a huge aspect of jobs for the boys.

On the whole then, our Parliament, the Oireachtas, needs a complete overhaul.

On a broad level, it is high time we attempted to break the connection between the parish pump and national office. The parochial nature of our political system is terribly debilitating. The constituency system needs to be re-thought. It is simply not good enough to say it served us well and therefore should be left alone. All political systems should evolve to meet the new requirements of democracy. One suggestion might be that we have a mixed system, partially list and partially local constituencies. No need to rewrite the constitution here, merely to point out that our current arrangement is deficient.

Leave it all to the 800 or so state agencies - a number which ballooned during the celtic tiger. The report by TASC a few years ago showed just how many important functions have been outsourced to powerful bodies with little or no accountability. Key positions still appointed not on merit or by an independent panel - but on the basis of being one of the old boys in the, largely, FF network. Fit for purpose indeed.

Then there is local government. Well it really is a joke isn't it. At present it doesn't really exist - we have local administrators rather than local government. Are we still so immature that local public servants cannot be trusted with our affairs?

Perhaps, and that leads on to a question that is even more important and intractable. Our political culture. At its core lies the notion that those in power should be able to do things their way and get their associates involved no matter what. It is a culture which is all about looking after those who gave the dig out. It is about nods and winks, and we hope fewer brown envelopes than before.

But its striking feature is the absence of a sense of civic duty, the modern concept of which includes transparency and accountability. The idea of accountability is almost completely absent from our political culture. As is the idea that those in high office are there, primarily, to serve the nation and the common good.

This inward, party-and-friends-first mentality is so ingrained in our political elite that it prevents them from rising to the occasion even in a crisis. Even in this hour of need, party and friends come first, not the common good. On Morning Ireland Mary Coughlan was accused of being all about the party. In defending herself, she unwittingly underlined the truth of the allegation: she listed out her priorities, which she pressed, included the nation. "First, my party and Fianna Faíl". Then " the good people of Donegal", and of course in her ministerial role, she was there to serve the nation. Basically, after Party and locals, the nation comes a poor last.

Who thinks that Brian Cowen is any different? Is he not, and probably the bulk of the shadow cabinet across from him, infected with the same virus?

With a blinkered, inward vision of politics and high office. With the absence of accountaility and integrity. With a lack of transparency and culpability, is it any wonder that the interests of those in power drifted so far from the interest of the nation at large?

This kind of paralysis breeds ineptitude by excluding merit and talent. And it leaves us bereft of the kind of leadership and ability that we so desperately need in the thick of a crisis.

The place to start reform therefore is not the banks or the finances - but the very nature of our political system.

Cowen has failed leadership test

2009-02-26T13:15:00.000-08:00

At this stage we have seen enough of Brian Cowen's handling of the current crisis to make a call on his leadership skills. Unfortunately for him, but more to the point for us, he has failed quite miserably.

Cowen got off to a wobbly start. After he became Taoiseach, he immediately faced the Lisbon vote. He took an immediate political hit when the referendum proposal failed. It could be argued that Cowen's Lisbon campaign was already badly compromised by Bertie's long good bye and endless tribunal appearances. So Cowen perhaps got the benefit of the doubt. In any case, Cowen was still walking tall after the incredibly turn around in the Fianna Fáil election campaign in 2007 which he is largely credited for. (The campaign looked like it was going to implode over anomalies in Bertie's evidence, but Cowen was senior among those who grabbed the campaign - and Bertie - by the scruff of the neck and hauled it back on track).

It is often said that Cowen's first act was to reshuffle the cabinet and that even there he lacked imagination. That is true - his choice of Tánaiste in particular was astounding and is bound to keep on hurting him. But even so, it could hardly be said that Cowen picked a few dummies for the top jobs from a sea of talent! In reality, he had slim pickings.

When the financial and economic crisis struck, however, Cowen seemed unable to get the measure of it. He seemed cast onto the angry waves and for the most part since has come across as completely adrift. As the crisis deepened, he and his government continued to underestimate the depth of Ireland's financial and economic troubles. It is true that the financial collapse was not their doing and took the international community by surprise. Lenihan, like everyone else had to engage in - and is still in the thick of - a fire fight. But the economic and fiscal crisis is different: that should have been seen earlier.

More to the point: it was seen earlier. Even in July the government saw fit to have the mini-budget. But Cowen set us on a course then which would see the same mistake repeated: doing too little too late.

It is not clear to me whether Cowen was in denial until recently about the extent of he problem in the economy or if he simply lacked the courage and nature to rise to the occasion by taking very bold steps early. In any case, nothing he has done has signalled that he is in command.

Cowen has not shown some of the essential traits of a leader who can take his people through a deep crisis. The first issue, as I mentioned, was that he didn't seem capable of quickly comprehending the nature of the crunch. Great leaders have a sixth sense, a sharp acumen that allows them to feel the nature of the crisis as or before it happens. No so for Cowen. If there was one person in Ireland who should have known that our tax base was chronically unbalanced for a property shock it should have been the man who had just spent three years in charge of finance.

Cowen also fails another test. When he finally did see the crisis for what it was, he lacked the depth to draw up a strategy. When the figures pointed Cowen towards the abyss, he shrunk. He may have felt intimidated by the sheer extent of the problem, or he may have been unable to get the measure of it. Either way, he has not given the impression he is drafting a grand strategy that, while flexible in terms of tactics because circumstances will change, charts a plausible course towards recovery.

There is probably a good reason why Cowen has not come up with such a strategy. In order to think about the kind of things that will get us through the crisis, we need to think about what kind of country we want afterward. That will require a dramatic re-alignment of Irish fiscal life, and Cowen is among those who lead us into the terrible place we are now. He was also in the cabinet which saw Charlie McCreevy devastate our tax base and prime pump the property bubble. Cowen would now need the courage to turn his back on that legacy and call a (hole digging) spade a spade.

On another crucial level Cowen has failed: communication. He simply hasn't been present. Perhaps bereft of a strategy he feels he has nothing to say directly to the people. But that is probably not the reason. He can talk with passion about pulling together and taking action, even if he lacks a plan. Yet he doesn't address the nation. When he talk at all it only happens by chance as it were - at a talk with the Dublin chamber of commerce or the like. He should take a leaf out of Roosevelt's book. Franklin D Roosevelt took over in the Great Depression. Apart from being obsessed about discovering the causes and generating a grand strategy, Roosevelt was determined to make it clear to people what was required and what he was planning to do. In his famous radio broadcasts, called "fireside chats", he spoke directly to the nation about how the process was developing. It is clear that Obama too speaks directly to his people. Cowen however, is only seen bickering in the Dáil or on the steps of some conference when he runs into the press. He needs to be out front in a crisis like this.

And finally Cowen falls on another hurdle. He doesn't display a great sense of political acumen: he completely misread the way the budget would be received, and his credibility was repeatedly damaged by a series of rollbacks such as the over 70s. On the recent levy again he failed to read the anger and failed to ensure that the cut would be equitable. He also failed to give a sense of leadership by example.

Cowen could have made great gains in terms of support if he had made some radical announcements, perhaps cutting the number of junior ministers, deeper cuts in TD and ministerial salaries, a direct promise to the people that we would pursue all wrong doing or illegal acts in the banks and build a world class culture of corporate governance (he left this to the Greens to say, why?), he could have announced in parallel with the public sector levy that, while the commission in taxation has not yet finished, the government promises to rebalance the whole tax base, and he could have said that during the celtic tiger we strayed off the path in terms of equality and fairness and that for the lower paid, any gains were ephemeral, but that now we will start afresh and create a fair society. But Cowen could never bring himself to say that.

He left those grand statements to others, such as Eamon Gilmore, who has scored exceptionally well in the latest poll while Cowen flounders. No, definitely not rising to the occasion Mr Cowen; not the leader we need now in a time of crisis.

Lenihan: Doing OK?

2009-02-13T13:35:00.000-08:00

So how is Lenihan doing? I was amused by the phrase that went round when Lenihan was first appointed to Finance by Cowen : "we is very intelligent". It made me laugh. Was he really? How do we know? And doesn't it saw something about the caliber of our senior public representatives that having a brain would make one of them stand out. Anyway, there is no way of measuring intelligence that would adequately capture the skills necessary for being a good minister - smart yes, but also courageous and possessing sound judgement and an ability to lead and, nowadays, communicate.
Here now in the middle of the storm, everyone is shouting about Lenihan's shortcomings. He didn't capitalise first off; he didn't wind up Anglo; he didn't fold the two big banks into one good big bank and dump the bad loans in a financial landfill. But actually, must of the commentary is just people letting off steam (the remainder is mainly just political game playing). People are frustrated because they still expect some kind of quick fix or rapid conclusion. The nation hasn't settled into the reality yet that the Irish economy is small raft which has just entered a long canyon with a series of rapids along its length. We don't know how long the canyon is, nor how many rapids there are, and we have no idea whether a little raft like ours can make it to the end without overturning.
In general there has been little effort to understand the situation in which Lenihan finds himself. He is not a financial expert and even if he were, it wouldn't guarantee success for we have entered completely unknown territory. Lenihan is faced with a set of circumstances which are rapidly changing and for which there is no agreed or known formula for making things better. Even the most powerful nations have been badly shaken by the global crisis and are to a large degree are making it up as we go along. How could any Irish minister expect to be any different?
True, we can disagree about specific measures : the distribution of taxes or the percentage of board members which should be replaced, but in general there is no over arching template which will lead us to safety.
We do need an opposition now - for all measures taken now need careful scrutiny. But the general public should also scrutinise the scrutiny. It is very easy for Richard Bruton for example to list off what the minister is doing wrong. "it's very simple" said Bruton "we need to set up a new bank with a clean balance sheet". But no actually it's not that simple. This route has not yet been chosen by any other country. It is by no means tried and tested. It may carry considerable risk. For example, much of the present banks function perfectly well - they have systemic knowledge of the Irish economy, they know Irish customers, they use methods which have been honed for years, they have division which functions well. It seems reasonable to me to try to resuscitate them. Yes, we need immediate changes of personnel, and medium term we need to build a brand new regulatory framework and to try to create a new banking culture. But much of this will take time and considerable thought, debate and agreement in order to make it work.
Overall, I think Lenihan has tried pretty hard and as proved agile and courageous when necessary. He also comes across as quite commanding and determined. And I would be tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. That is to say, I would see no prospect of better performance by any of his potential replacements, from within FF or without. ( By the way, this is not the same as saying I would be opposed to a change of government. I think that while Lenihan deserves a certain understanding, FF senior ranks and its power fattened, arrogant culture, is way out of touch and there needs to be a far broader rebalancing in society between the very wealthy, the merely well off, and the ordinary working people).
True, Lenihan should have read the entirety of the report that mentioned the IL&P loans. It was a mistake not to have done so. But I'm not convinced it meant that he wasn't taking the whole Anglo thing seriously nor that he wasn't dedicated to getting past that particular hurdle. But everyone makes a mistake and that one wasn't catastrophic. With our without that revelation Anglo was a basket case. But of course Lenihan cannot get away with many similar errors. He will have to be hyper diligent now.
Nevertheless, I think it is far too easy to say what Lenihan should do and what he shouldn't. For every second day he has to take (and has taken) enormous decisions which will affect this country for a long time. And there is no easy way. As economist Dan O'Brien said the other night "this is a process". And it is unprecedented and so it is like fire fighting. It's about keeping going and there are no easy answers.

It's all your Fault!

2009-01-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

There is a palpable anger in the Irish air. For many, their standard of living has already gone into decline. Some have suffered wage freezes or wage cuts. Others have been dealt the ultimate economic blow and have lost their jobs. The numbers now are quite stark - there is something like 100,000 more on the dole now than this time last year. That's a doubling of the actual figure.

Numbers for those who have suffered pay cuts or who fear their jobs will be lost soon are impossible to guess, but multiplied across the country it is easy to see why people are annoyed. Then there is the sense of impending doom - huge public sector cuts are about to be announced. And people know where this leads - for public sector workers it affects their standard of living, perhaps very sharply if you happen to be on contract and face the dole cue. The general public know it means longer queues for services and a likely decline in the quality of service when it does get delivered.

So much to be angry about. Yet who should be the object of this anger. It seems that bankers are getting a very hard time. I've heard people curse them. "They should be locked up". Others blame the government. And of course, the builders get it too.

All of these groups deserve a certain amount of opprobrium. The top bankers in particular did us no favours - though they were keen enough to do themselves plenty of favours. The government though - and this essentially means FF and the PDs - bear a far larger share of responsibility. They are ultimately the group who have wielded power. It was even they who failed to create adequate regulation for banking. And of course it was our government, under Ahern, who fueled the train wreck that was the Irish property fantasy.

But as far as I can see, very few people, however angry they are, have been willing to mention the other group who bear responsibility: the electorate. As an electorate, collectively, we chose the FF- PD arrangement. Not only did we choose it in 97 (at that stage perhaps we could be forgiven for taking a chance with a new regime) , but after 5 years we returned them, reinforcing the direction they were taking. Five years later, at a time when we all knew that our property fueled splurge was a fantasy and doomed for a sad end, what did we do? Their leader was mired in an unsavoury mess of unbelievable tales related to uncountable sums of cash. So what did we do? We returned them to power.

True, the opposition was weak. Perhaps they were even pathetic, but the fact that they too offered us the same brand of fantasy is as much a reflection of us as them. We kept buying in to the fantasy that income taxes could keep on being lowered and expenditure keep on growing, because the coffers were flush. Even Pat Rabbit of Labour felt it necessary to satiate our appetite for lower taxes by offering to cut the lower rate. The Unions -- who profress to protect public services -- bought in fully and signed up to over a decade of seemingly endless tax cuts.

So FF-PD and Labour and FG alike, each and all, failed us by not offering us the leadership and courage to tell us we were tying ourselves in to an unsustainable strategy. SO yes, our political class failed us. But they did what the political system to a certain extent guarantees - they gave us what we wanted, even if that meant setting us on a path to destruction.

But we bought it. We kept on clinging to the impossible promise of ever lower taxes and ever more public spending. We heard the phrase that we wanted the public service of Sweden with the taxes of Texas, yes we heard it, and we turned the other way. As a nation we fully bought in - literally and figuratively - to the property and low tax nightmare. It seemed so good - we couldn't make a rationally sound decision to reject it.

In the end we are all to blame. No, not equally, and our elected leaders did us a massive disservice. Bar his extraordinary commitment and achievement in Northern Ireland, Bertie Ahern's legacy has now suddenly gone from questionable to disastrous. His successor, who was at the centre of the Ahern regime, is now struggling to save his own legacy.

But we as a nation failed ourselves too. We walked ourselves into this nightmare. We were either terribly easy to fool, or, no one fooled us, and we were heedless and greedy. Neither answer is particularly glorious.

That we to some extent share the blame is one good reason why we are wrong if we indulge in a further fantasy that one small group of people - the cabinet - can take us out of this. Leaving aside their dubious talent, it is simply not possible for government of fix even most of the economic problem facing the country. It will be fixed by working its way through the system and forcing individuals to take tough decisions -- managers, business leaders, trade unionists, workers private and public. It will be a deeply unedifying way to celebrate the 90th anniversary of our first Dáil if we collapse into a mire of blame and counter blame or retreat into the fantasy that it was all the government's fault so they should fix it. Time to start shouldering a little bit of individual responsibility.

Do your duty - holiday in Ireland!

2009-01-15T12:45:00.000-08:00

Even before my good employer cast me mercilessly onto the dole cue last September, I had already decided that if God were to spare me, I would spend my summer holiday in Ireland in 2009. The reason for this was not patriotism, but economic. Bean Thomaltaigh had given up work to return to college (little did we know that I would lose my job within weeks of that). So after a nice stay in the Vendée last summer we decided that we'd spend 2009 at home.

But then today I was thinking about the number of trips abroad the Irish make and the amount they spend. In 2007 for the first time the Irish made more trips abroad than visitors came to the Emerald Isle. And the Irish spent more abroad than tourists spent here. In fact, we spent 4 billion abroad in 2007 on holiday trips (according to the CSO). This excludes business trips which was in the region of 400 million. So the Irish spent over 2% of GDP abroad that year.

Without question overall spending on holidays this year will be down dramatically. Yet a huge chunk of the population will take to the skies this year for foreign lands. Even if spending fell by 50%, it would represent well over 1% of GDP.

That would be in the region of say 2 billion euro. If Irish residents were to turn patriotic and spend this at home, it would be a huge injection into an economy where every billion counts. There will be a massive battle very soon to narrow the gap in the public finances by 2 billion this year. So an extra 1 billion in the overall economy would certainly mean a great deal.

But in the end of course this is purely a mental exercise. If people are cutting the heels of one another to get across the border to hand their taxes to he Crown, they are hardly going to forgo their tans for the sake of the greater good.

The notion I have outlined would have some practical issues, but in theory it is possible. But on reading it, you just wince at its naivety. And the reason of course is that you know that in reality people are willing to sacrifice precious little even if they knew it would make a difference to the overall state of the country. In short, people are governed by very powerful self interest, and there is no doubt we will see that in its rawest form very soon when various groups start screaming about why they are special and shouldn't have to make sacrifices for the greater good. It will be terribly interesting - though I predict unsightly - to watch how this plays out over the coming months and years and how it will reflect on what solidarity means in this country.

Job Loss, Part IV: Lumen

2008-12-22T11:21:00.000-08:00

Last week I did two second round interviews. And by Friday I had an offer. I was very very grateful to have bagged a job offer in the current horrendous job market. Most of the companies I was initially interested in put hiring freezes in place after the financial crisis broke in late September and early October.

Today the second company contacted me with an offer. I was delighted, but had already decided to accept the first offer. So I rang immediately and explained that I wouldn't be accepting offer number two. I gave the genuine reason: the commute was two long (it would probably be around an hour and a half at each end of the day while the job I accepted is less than half an hour).

In some ways both jobs are similar, though the company I will work for is much smaller (around 30 people) than the one I turned down (recently taken over by a multinational). You could say the big one might be more secure, but in the current climate, it's not even possible to be sure. Job wise the one I turned down probably had the edge, but in terms of company culture and what the job really turns out like, well, these can only be discovered after.

So today I signed the contract with my new employer and I start in the middle of January.

I consider myself very fortunate to have found a job right now. It's certainly a nice way to go in to the Christmas period.

I had prepared myself for a much longer period out of work. And I think I had got myself into a routine that was workable - basically as much activity as I could. I was enjoying the extra time and I read quite a lot and even got around to writing a few bits.

Financially our household could have stuck it out for even another year - we had found ways to narrow the gap between various outgoings and modest income: this involved adding a few odds and ends to welfare. A few bits of writing for me, and some teaching work by bean Thomaltaigh. And of course a fairly tight approach to spending. That is not to say we had cut off all little luxuries. We were prepared to use some of my redundancy money for what it was designed for: keep us alive between jobs. But the idea was to not spend it all. It is easy to imagine more rainy days in the near to medium term.

So finance wasn't the main factor that would have nagged me going into next year still unemployed. Not finance and not idleness. It was more practical. First, I felt the job market would get worse next year not better. So being unemployed in April could easily turn into being unemployed by next September - a full year. That would lead to the second problem. I feel that many employers take a dim view of long breaks in a CV. I could be wrong but that is my impression. I think this is ridiculously narrow minded, but if it's a reality it would have to be dealt with.

Therefore I felt that if by next September I was still out of work then my odds would start to decline. This is what urged me to do all I could to get back into employment now.

I hope now that it turns out fairly decent and that it lasts at least long enough so that light starts to appear at the end of the hideous economic tunnel we have entered.

Sin a bhfuil a chairde. Nollaig shona daoibh go léir agus guím gach rath oraibh sa bhliain úr.
Tomaltach.

Peig is back!

2008-12-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, that Peig: the one that a young conservative, nationalist, and Catholic state employed to revive its native tongue. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Peig's death and both the national broadcaster and some of the print media have been reappraising her significance.

For the guardians of the fledgling nation, Peig's world was not only an authentic remnant of a great, ancient and oppressed culture, it also contained the elements from which a modern, proud nation could be forged. The people of Dún Chaoin and An Blascaod showed perseverance in the face of hardship; their way of life was wholesome; their faith was unshakeable; they lived in a kind of pre-modern harmony; above all their culture was Gaelic, indigenous, and part of an historic continuity that had survived centuries of attempted annihilation.

And so it was that Peig was pressed into the service of the Free State, and later the Republic. That much is not terribly surprising. After all, the mythic belief in the power of shared ancestary and a glorious past reached its (often bloody) peak in the first half of the twentieth century. And the idea of employing the apparatus of state, especially the education system, to preach the nationalist myth was a familiar formula.

It is tempting now to ridicule the naivety of our early leaders. How could they have been so wrong? But to do so is to apply the insights of a lesson in nationalism and globalisation of which our predecessors couldn't possibly have dreamed. Yes, huge chunks of straw were gliding by in the wind, but it is far too easy for us now to quench the idealism and hope which carried our nation into being. And idealism and hope which were only slowly ground out of existence in the unforgiving mill of twentieth century history.

Yet it is at least interesting, and possibly useful, to look back at exactly how different the future turned out. In the last two decades of the century, the Catholic church went into a steep decline. The latest development in many rural parishes is that there is no longer a priest to administer the sacraments. Parish councils are being established to run the affairs of the parish and lay people are carrying out much of the ceremonial aspects of church life also. Lay people who are not studying to be priests are being ordained as deacons in order to perform functions such as baptism.

It is hardly possible for me to chart the extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the last thirty years in how we live in Ireland – and the world. Suffice to say that we have melded in rather well into a world culture whose main values are consumerism, hedonism, materialism, and self promotion. We have probably become as rich materially as we have poor spiritually.

And leave it all to the Gaelic culture. The invented variety has thrived in the form of the Gaelic games. And traditional Irish music has enjoyed an amazing revival and has infused a whole plethora of modern genres in Ireland and abroad. But the key marker of national identity – the national language – is on life support.

I am certain that many people will not agree that the Irish language is dead. Under the strictest definition – no more speakers – Irish is surely alive, and probably kicking. But numbers alone say very little about the health of a language. The language has entered a kind of linguistic purgatory. It was put there by a nation whose attitude towards it has become schizophrenic. We profess to love it, but cannot learn it. We do not want it to die, but can barely keep it alive. We have recently legislated for its wider use, but we use it less and less.

There are thousands of people the length an breadth of Ireland who have learned the language. But the levels of competence varies so widely and their opportunity to use the language is so circumscribed that any notion of a speaking public is almost ridiculous. The language continues to die in the Gaeltacht (now many primary schools within the Gaeltacht are having to offer the curriculum in English because the locals cannot cope with instruction in Irish). Enthusiasts always point to the gaelscoileanna. But there is no convincing evidence that these lead to Irish speaking families much less communities. (And as I have noted elsewhere, the demise of the Irish language section in most major book stores must surely be another indicator).

Language use – and language death – are extremely complex social phenomena, just as language itself is one of the most complex capabilities we humans possess. And in truth, how the fate of a language plays out is dependent on a bewildering interaction of uncountable parameters, which must include cultural norms, identity, status, and the most severe of all, economics. When all this mix got together, it did for Irish what it is doing to thousands of other languages, and that is, it pushed it towards extinction.

But Irish will not disappear entirely. It will simply become the preserve of the enthusiast, the hobbyist, and alas the academic. And this is what brought forth my original thought about Peig being back. I heard a debate, indeed a very interesting debate, on Radio one in which a panel of academics discussed the merits of Peig's narrative style, her place in the feminist canon, her lonely position in a world being pushed out of existence by modernity, and her awareness of a readership and what it wanted to hear. The discussion was, of course, in English. And informed and sharp though it was, there was a faint echo of elegy in the timbre of the discussion, a kind of weak signal emanating from between the words, a signal from a world that is now dead and distant.

Peig's world is distant, yet strangely recent. In rural Ireland at least, the journey from a life that was simple, almost pre-modern, intensely local, and drenched in tradition to one that is frenetic, fragmented, and post modern, was dizzyingly swift. It often happened withing a single lifetime. In a recent talk at the Abbey, Seamus Heaney explained that the immense, disorienting changes since his childhood were at least partly at the root of a trauma that found its expression through his poetry.

It's as if we have been propelled into the future without time to consume history as it happens. It's a kind of time warp, a discontinuity in time, and probably all modern societies are reeling from its effects. We simply haven't come to terms with what has been happening. Hence the anguish, and the confusion about who and where we are. And I think this goes some way to explaining our difficult relationship with the Irish language. We know it is dead, but we cannot bring ourselves to bury it. We are in effect, attending an endless wake, and no one is prepared to take the body to the cemetery. A quote from Pearse captures the kind of intensity we feel for a truth that we love but which is no longer possible: "No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true". Tá Peig marbh, ach mairfidh sí go deo.

Defending Economic Growth

2008-12-05T03:05:00.000-08:00

For John Gibbons writing in the Irish Times yesterday, economic growth is "the secular religion infecting every society on Earth via globalisation". Economists are "priests of growth", "alchemists", or "sorcerers", peddling a creed that is leading us to exhaust natural resources and wreck the planet.

I think I know what Mr Gibbons is trying to say: that our consumer society, with its insatiable appetite for resources, and its spiritual emptiness, is hideous and unsustainable. Unless we change, we will bestow a damaged and depleted planet on future generations, and they will hardly forgive us for it. If these are Mr Gibbons sentiments, then we are in agreement.

But Mr Gibbons has taken aim at the wrong target. Economic growth, per se, is not the problem. Economic growth is merely an increase in value created. Its consequences are an increase in our standard of living. From economic growth we have acquired all the great things that we could never surrender – longer healthier lives, education, leisure time, the ability to travel widely. Indeed, civilisation itself could not have come about without economic growth.

The key ingredient in economic growth is innovation -- not a hike in the level of resources used. In fact, the beauty of innovation is that it allows us to do more with less. Think of how the miles per gallon has extended for a family saloon. Given the understanding we now have of climate change, we may need to reduce this to near zero. With innovation, it is possible to imagine such an outcome. Standford economist Paul Romer, one of the profession's eminent scholars on growth, explains it using an analogy:

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.

The key, therefore, is innovation. But the direction innovation takes is usually driven by our values as reflected in consumer tastes or in government regulations. Today, with the evolution in technology, all cars in Ireland could be say, twice as efficient as those we drove in the 80s. But instead, many people have chosen to drive SUVs. The challenge then, is not to curtail growth, but to shape our values in ways that lead to a sustainable way of life.

The demonisation of economists is far too easy. The field of political economy is so huge that tarring all practitioners with the same dismal brush, is as naive as it is ungenerous. Remember, for every hack babbling on the radio about the housing market or interest rates, there are thousands thinking about how inflation affects unemployment, how firms can be efficient, or what developing countries need to break free from poverty.

Mr Gibbons accused economists of placing no value on forests. Economists have used the term 'externality' for something not directly involved in an economic decision or calculation. But this is merely the economists way of saying that this cost does not matter to us here and now. And this decision in turn is usually based on the values assigned by society at large.

Once we became conscious of pollution as a major negative result of production, we, as a society, forced it back into the equation. The results were stunning (rememer smog, CFCS, etc). While Mr Gibbons expects the economist to be our moral compass, I would say we need to look into our own hearts. If that forest has a value, let's express that as a society, through our elected representatives, through our membership of support groups, or by hugging the trees if necessary.

Sinn Féin on Lisbon - Waiting for the Revolution

2008-12-05T02:53:00.001-08:00

Sinn Féin’s stance on Lisbon shows us that they remain irredeemable purists. Despite all the evidence that governments across Europe have no stomach for re-opening the decade long reform process, Sinn Féin doggedly persist in arguing for renegotiation (Mary Lou McDonald, IT 2 Dec).

After ten years of painstaking talks, compromises, and fudges, Europe found a formula that all governments could sign. Referenda in France and the Netherlands saw it rejected, yet no essential changes could be made to a formula that is perhaps the only accord that can allow twenty seven nations to move forward. Do Sinn Féin have any grasp of the bewildering multitude of views that political leaders across Europe hold on how the Union should be reformed? The differences are so vast and varied that arriving at Lisbon at all was something of a miracle.

But no matter. Sinn Féin cannot bear surrendering their ideological purity. Not for them a pragmatic compromise. But wait a minute. Isn’t this the party that began by trying to bomb its way to a thirty two county socialist republic, and ended sharing power with Ian Paisely in a devolved UK government? An astonishing compromise by any measure.

Why now the retreat from pragmatism and reality? In the North, Sinn Féin had to painfully relearn the lesson that Collins taught us: seize the best on offer, then build on it.

Lisbon is flawed but workable. It can make Europe more fit for purpose in the twenty first century. We should seize it, and build from there. No point hanging around for a revolution that will never come.

PS: McDonald made a number of points about the workings of the Oireachtas committee which its chair, Paschal Donohoe refutes here.

The Course of Life

2008-11-27T06:16:00.000-08:00

Curriculum Vitae is Latin for 'the course of life'. Heaney with his penchant for dispensing with prepositions would call it 'life course'. The Latin seems to suggest that curriculum means a path, as in a track around a race course. Certainly, some would say a career feels like that: circular, repetitive, competitive, and intended to separate winners from losers. But not I.

These past few weeks I've had the dubious pleasure of revisiting my CV. Writing a CV has become a kind of art form. In an age that values style over substance, you really have have to shape your CV a certain way – details, summary of skills, employment, projects, and so on. The important thing is to throw in keywords. They tell me that the overworked HR mandarin no longer has time to read a CV, not to mention a cover letter. Instead, they now use key word parsers to sift through candidates to find ones with the most hits.

It seems such a shame that a whole career of training and toil could be cast into oblivion simply because HR have decided to become search engines instead of managers. (It all began when the changed from being personnel – who dealt with people, to being HR – who deal merely with resources who happen to be human. But that's another story).

So nowadays you have to write your CV with Google in mind. This seriously limits your scope for using the English language. It makes jargon mandatory. You are compelled to be customer facing, instead of just dealing with them. You have to enable things instead of just doing them. You have competence not ability. Something that can perform a task has functionality. You have to think horizontal, vertical, upskill, downturn, and then take a helicopter view. You have to commit all this verbal violence while claiming to have 'an excellent command of English'.

Given that firms lie all the time in their job ads, you have to wonder how much you can lie about on your CV. I try not to lie at all. Everything on my CV has a truth to it. If I say I have done a job in the past, it means I have gone through all phases of that job, from concept to execution. At least in my head. For me it is still perfectly true to claim you have done something, if you think you could have! There is a risk here of being accused of being Walter Mitty, but I think you can get way with it if you are at least close to the mark. For me it's a bit like saying, yes I have driven a jaguar, knowing that you have only ever driven a mini. You have told a fundamental truth: I have driven cars. Now, to claim you have flown an F15 would be stretching it. Walter Mitty would have argued that this too was fundamentally sound: I have been in charge of a fast vehicle. The trouble would come if your new employer placed you in the cockpit.

I have kept most of my old CVs going back to the days when I was at college looking for a Summer job. Those CVs glow in the innocence of youth. At college, I remember a friend of mine being stunned at seeing a certain name that he knew down as a referee. Why not? I asked. A convict? he replied in disbelief. Maybe deep down I thought my ref had paid his debt to society, but really, I just hadn't even thought of it. Nor did it ever matter.

I wonder if all CVs have a kind of life of their own? Even some of my early experience has evolved over time. The more I learned about my profession the more I massaged the content of my earlier jobs. It's a bit like going back to the same canvass and touching up the background. Again, all of this in an effort to be as truthful as possible. As if I can say, on reflection, yes, I was rather central to that project. True, at the time I was peripheral, but as my life went on I became more central to it, or it to me. Or something like that!

I cannot decide whether it is a tragedy or a blessing that writing a CV does not involve the true meaning of the term: the life course. At one level it seems sad to formally revisit, reflect on, and have to show, only one dimension of a human life. True, the prospective employer is looking for the human side too: are you good with people? do you communicate well? are you proactive? can you cope with very long hours – I mean stress?

But the employer is not really looking for humanity – just a package of so called soft skills. If real humanity were required, you could talk openly about your weaknesses. You are timid or forgetful. You don't like meetings. You fear change. You take decisions but cannot cope with detail. But alas, any admission of humanity and you are set for the dustbin. (Interviews are dramatically shortened by revealing your humanity. Once you mention any weakness, a forced and lethal smile grows on the face of the employer, and very quickly, you're on your way).

But perhaps too it is a blessing. The task of writing down your frailties would be far more daunting than compiling a list of jargon. You would have to peer into your very core – to face your inner essence, with all its lights and shadows. And over time you'd see how the joy and hurt along that race track molded your life. You'd see it all, right there before you in words: tender and quick, wounded but strong, fearful and passionate - the indomitable self.

FÁS: A sloth in Ireland's Organisational Zoo?

2008-11-25T03:58:00.000-08:00

Recent revelations of lavish spending by Rody Molloy and his team at the head of FÁS have provoked an outcry. At a time when citizens are experiencing a painful decline in their standard of living, people have learned that the state agency partly responsible for generating employment has been splashing out a shameful abundance of perks.

As far as I know Shane Ross was central to getting some of the spenging figures out there. He said today on Kenny's radio show that at first FÁS tried to fend off his requests for information under the freedom of information act. But he persisted and got his hands on the goodies.

I think there are two important elements to this which go far wider than FÁS itself. The first is the way in which huge chunks (perhaps now the bulk) of executive functions have been farmed out to agencies in the name of efficiency and under the banner of separating policy (retained by government departments) from implementation (now largely in the hands of the agencies.

There is absolutely no question that the overall structure needs to be reshaped from the roots up – in terms of co-ordinating strategy, appointments, transparency, and value for money.

The second issue that this emphasises is harder to pin dow. It is the prevalence in Ireland of wink and nod government, of patronage and close networks of old pals. And all this in a culture where the notions of civic responsibility and political integrity are almost entirely absent. (This is why Ross deserves credit – in this story his actions are remarkable if only for the fact that nearly all of our political elite know what's going on in FÁS across the myriad of state agencies, but none are willing to break the unsaid rule of letting sleeping dogs lie)

Turning back to the first issue. Our state agencies. The huge number of new agencies created under the Ahern regime is truly stunning. But that is not in itself the problem. The problem is how it was done and the way in which these agencies are themselves governed. Earlier this year the OECD examined the Irish public service and in part of that review they look at the issue of agencification. Below I have pulled out some of what they had to say.

First, the OECD give a general view that “in the absence of clear guidelines or consistent management, however, the proliferation of the agency structure in Ireland, has posed significant challenges in relation to governance, capacity and performance within agencies.”

Taking a closer look, the OECD found that “the current governance system is not transparent for the Public Service, let alone for citizens and private companies, and the management and accountability of the Public Service as a whole has become more challenging as the result of the particular path taken by agencification. This problem is compounded by the fact that, at the time they were created, little thought was given to establishing systematic arrangements for the oversight of agencies or to the idea of governance in general. As a result, the establishment of agencies in Ireland has not improved the delivery of flexible and responsive government services.”

Not only are the agencies internally difficult to penetrate, but the whole idea and concept is as vague as the kind of language used by Aherna himself. The OECD continues that “in practice there is no widely accepted idea of what is or what constitutes an agency in Ireland. This makes it very difficult to track the size of this sector or to analyse its impact. For example, no official Irish statistics are available for staff numbers in agencies in Ireland either today or 10 or 20 years ago. There are currently more than 500 non-commercial agencies in Ireland”

Furthermore, “there is no agencification plan in Ireland per se. Instead, agencies have been established on a case-by-case basis. As a result, the vision and policy goals behind agencification are unclear, and agencification seems to have responded to a multiplicity of implicit objectives – some of which are inconsistent – rather than to a strategic vision about the functioning and structure of government.”

And so we arrive in the animal garden: “this situation has led to an organisational “zoo” where citizens, private firms and government have little clarity on how the Public Service operates. The proliferation of organisational forms with different governance arrangements, the lack of logic in the control environment and the absence of investment in steering capacity have hindered line departments from developing a proper steering relationship with agencies”

A couple of years ago the think tank TASC looked into the growth of state agencies. According to their survey of the sector, the biggest problem was even getting a handle on the size of the whole mess “however, an absence of good information systems means that accurate assessment of their nature, scale and significance is difficult to establish. The fragmented manner in which they are established results in confusion, inconsistency and opacity.”

TASC were looking at it not necessarily from a point of economic efficiency but with regard to democratic accountability. What they found was a system closer to a monarchical patronage than a modern democracy. “There is something in the region of 5,000 appointments to Public Bodies at national level alone, the majority in the gift of Government. Given the number of these appointments and the importance of the function which the appointees must perform, it is a big gap in our accountability structure that Ireland has no clearly established mechanism to ensure that appointments are free from undue political or other influence or that there is an effective independent appointments system in place. As of now, ministers and senior civil servants are responsible for appointing the majority of members to Public Bodies. Moreover, the influence of the Oireachtas in the making of these public appointments is negligible.”

We'll see now in the FÁS case whether TASC's final indictment can be verified “Without clear criteria there is the danger of making appointments where the appointee has either mediocre ability or is lacking the appropriate skills and knowledge. There is a problem of lack of accountability of those appointed. The power of dismissal is, theoretically, a considerable one, but one which in practice is rarely used.”

To me the OECD writer was kind to liken the chaotic, dysfunctional, and ineffective nest of agencies to a zoo. It strikes me more like a jungle. But it is not merely the product of unclear thought and ad hoc decision making. And this is where I return to my second point, the political culture in Ireland.

If the Bertie series wasn't revealling in the narrow sense, in terms of why Bertie accepted cash or took a decision to cross Reynolds, it made up for it in another way. It showed Ahern at the centre of a culture of patronage – the proud and arrogant drumcondra Mafia, the developers who felt the had to be friends with the boss, the favours without trace. And it revealed a leader that has never and is incapable of comprehending the notion of public service and integrity in a modern democracy. Ahern tried to brush Haughey out of his past when he enterred power in 1997 and stated publicly that no officer of state should take money from anyone under any circumstances because it left the wrong impression. But he said this out of necessity, not out of conviction, and it is a message that he never again returned to.

The trouble for Ireland is that Ahern was only exceptional because he embodied the culture of nod and wink so completely, so fully. He was merely the best – or from the country's point of view – worst, of a bad lot. The FÁS shenanigans were inevitable not because Ahern had a sloppy view of public office, but because his view is deeply embedded in the DNA of our political system. Indeed, it spans far wider than that, and is likely buried somewhere deep in the national psyche.

Some improvement can be made by revising the structures that the OECD and TASC refer to. The founding fathers of the US knew that the main need for sound and robust democratic accountability is to save us from ourselves. Nothing has changed since.

But in Ireland we need to grow up as a nation. We need to admit the horrendous cost of our acceptance of political patronage and politics by envelope. We need to realise we cannot have the public services we crave, we cannot make the state (and other actors such as banks) work for us, unless we demand integrity and accountability. That is why it would be equally as valid to march on Leinster house in protest against corruption, waste, and arrogance in public office as it is to march to preserve medical cards or any other vital service. And until a rage like that builds in the public heart, we will continue to be surrounded by a tragic field of sloths and opportunists in the dreary confinement of our chaotic organisational zoo.

Job Loss, Part III

2008-11-10T04:16:00.001-08:00

Two months have now passed since my ex-boss shocked me to the roots with the unexpected announcement that I was being laid off. (See here and here) In the first few days or weeks I felt that my life had been completely blown off course. To borrow from Wilde, I felt like a ship without a rudder in a night without a star. Since then, while I have failed to find a route to a new World, I have had a rather interesting journey.

I made one very informative physical journey - to Brussels, where, over a couple of days I met a range of senior officials, MEPs, and the Irish Commissioner. For most people the notion of such a journey would draw groans of boredom, but for me, an EU anorak, it was almost fascinating. I've written a little about this particular visit elsewhere, so I'll spare the details here.

The important journey these past two months has been internal. I have used the time and space to push back the hurry of the world and try to let life happen at its own pace. Until now my professional life, and therefore my real life, has been like paddling upriver against a stubborn current. You were expected - and expected yourself - to keep pulling on the oars no matter what. It was imperative to edge upstream towards some notional destination. These past weeks, however, I've allowed myself to dissolve into the current, to meander back, drinking the wonder of life around me on the banks.

It seems strange that it was only after I became unhooked from the yoke of work that I fully realised its immense burden. Before I lost my job, I couldn't notice the solemn commuters, crammed in carriages, the tired silence in their bellies, the strained brows, the laptop bags loaded with pressure. Instead I saw copies of myself, happy in the inevitability of it all. But now I began to notice nuances that I had missed, or perhaps refused to see. I saw how a delay of single minute at a tram stop magnified the anxiety on the face of a young woman. Perhaps she had outsourced the care of her children to a creche and was running late. The precious minutes between tram and pillow were ticking away.

In town, a hurried suit, umbrella in one hand, a case in the other, darted to catch the dying flashes of a little orange man on a traffic light. A woman lugging a laptop emerged from the crowd, walking briskly, her eyes misty with distance. In an office block near Charlemont a random constellation of lights shimmered, remote signals of work that never ends. At six pm, everywhere I look, I see the penalty of work, its cruel toll etched into the very fabric of our lives.

Being out of work has turned the week upside down. Even when work was particularly interesting, I had always looked forward to the weekend. It was like coming up for air - essential and delightful. A form of temporary release. The downside was the Tyranny of weekend shopping. Sadly, the entire infrastructure of urban living is designed to just about cope with the surge of weekend demand. Now however, I can wallow in the vast spaces of mid week shopping. Streetscapes and shopping centres are open, brighter, calmer, pumped with oxygen. Shop assistants wear a smile and have a chance to provide, well, assistance. The man in the coffee shop has time to mention the weather, and I have time to learn his name is Alessandro. I imagine that as we approach Christmas the contrast between these two worlds - week and weekend - will fold into a single, frenzied madness, but it was pleasure to have enjoyed the difference for a while at least.

There have been dozens of little things that I had wanted to do but couldn't get around to. I started using my handful of books on cooking again. Basically this meant looking up and then buying ingredients. This is a break with the workaday routine of rushing to the supermarket and collecting the essentials in well worn sweep of known shelves: a pasta sauce here and packet of rice there. Instead, I now try to pick out at least one solid culinary adventure per week. And then go out in search of ingredients at a leisurely pace.

Before, dinner was simply a matter of throwing the basics into pots and willing them to be ready. At the cooker now, however, I can take my time, plan a bit, experiment, hover casually, listen to radio, sing along.

There have been other odd jobs too. A trip to the national archives here, and an afternoon of DIY there.

One superb joy of being out of work is having more time with my 15 month old son. He is still in creche much of the time, but I take him out for days at a time, and even when he's in there, I often leave him in late or take him out early. He is an addiction. He is a sponge for affection, and hoovers up kisses and mad, sustained hugs.

My time off has also allowed me to return to literature. For me this has meant leaping back into the two forms I most enjoy - the personal essay and short fiction. In short fiction I have returned to my heroes - Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov. And I have found new treasures - like the marvellous "Dog Heaven", by Stephanie Vaughan, a truly wonderful example of the short story. I found this in audio form on the New Yorker Fiction website. I have listened to it three or four times, each time discovering more nuances and connections in this complex, inventive, and delightful tale.

I came across a personal essay that struck so many inner chords that I must have chimed for several minutes. It was "For my Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business" by Seymour Krim. He says a lot about work, and even more about the notion of failure, all of which is just right for a person in my position. Krim wrote "It is still your work or role that finally gives your definition in our society, and the thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls".

Over these last few weeks, the state of my soul could hardly be described as a riot, but there certainly was some kind of ruction. For the moment, I have sought to let it rage, for no doubt I will have to call it off soon enough.

How Dash Died

2008-11-10T01:39:00.001-08:00

Wee Dash grew up just across the road from us. He was four or five years older than the rest of us, but we all played together as children.

As the eldest, Dash was always in charge. He always seemed to enjoy the mantle of leadership. And he was good at it: as six year olds he had us eating out of is hand, sometimes literally.

I remember the time he converted their little back garden into a show jumping course. He had set up a variety of obstacles to mimic what we had seen on TV. Then he timed us younger children as we trotted around hopping over the fences pretending to be Eddie Macken or Harvey Smith. Dash would provide the commentary to an imaginary crowd - " and a clear round for Paul Darragh".

Dash also organised more important expeditions - like the building of a hut in Walls's field or the raid on a silage pit to collect tyres for bonfire night. And I remember he put more thought into these things and insisted on a form of discipline, in a way that we never saw in the other older boys.

As far as I remember, around the intercert Dash dropped out of school and took odd jobs here and there before settling into a regular job as a painter. It was about this time that his talent on the football field began to show. Dash was small, and like the best small players, he had a gift for being evasive - he could switch direction in the blink of an eye. And above all, he had oodles of skill.

But as he entered his twenties Dash developed a growing dependence on alcohol. At the time stories circulated that he would show up half tanked for training. Over time it clawed him under, and prematurely ended a promising career on the field.

By the time he was thirty his addiction had consumed him almost entirely. He would drink only raw spirits. They said he'd down a half bottle, at any time of the day, then collapse into a stupor, then hours later wake and start again.

I remember meeting him ocassionally when I'd come home from Galway. He was wasting away physically, and I always thought there was a look of defeat and shame in his eyes. After a number of failed attempts during his early thirties, however, he eventually managed to cut himself free of his terrible affliction.

A couple of years ago he parked the bottle and got a steady job. Then he got a little house, of which he was fiercly proud. My mother said he kept it like a doll's house, bright, dainty, and impeccably tidy.

Dash got involved in supporting local Sinn Féin candidates. I didn't really know him in recent years, but I would say he had a traditional, nationalist outlook. Either way, he got involved and got a great kick out of election campaigns and local meetings.

Then everything - young commander, athlete, recovered alcoholic, local activist, a half a lifetime of hurt and hope - all this, ended in an instant, terrifying thwack.

Last Sunday morning, Dash and his friend were sailing along the clear, open road to Ballyshannon. Out in the distance, coursing towards them, was a young man, drunk on high speed, brimming with reckless youth, and pushing his car forward like a missile.

The speeding car went out of control and detonated into Dash's car like an angry bomb. It discharged its energy in a violent shockwave that destroyed sinew, and bone, and metal, then rippled out wider to tear mothers' hearts. The two cars exploded into one another and careened along the centre of the N15, then stopped in an ugly, mangled embrace.

A sick silence descended over the wreckage. Hot metal and warm flesh cooled together; and the smell of engine oil and dying blood oozed out into the November air.

May all three men who died in the accident rest in peace.

Maith Dom, A Theanga

2008-11-03T02:05:00.000-08:00

A theanga, atá sínte, maith dom
as thú a thréigint in uair an anáis.
Chaith mé mo chuid ama
faoi dheifir i gcroílár an anoird,
ag iarraidh an saol a chur le chéile.

lig mé an fhoghlaim le sruth,
agus lig mé an seanrún i ndearmad.

Nuair a chuala mé seanfhear ar Barrscéalta*,
arb as na Cruacha** dó,
ag déanamh spraoi,
agus ag inse scéalta agus seanchais,
a chuid focal báite sa dúchas,
a chuid siollaí ag iompar na hoidhreachta,
thit an draíocht arís orm,
an suan agus an mhuscailt araon.

Táim ar ais ag do thaobh, a theanga,
mothaigh m'anáil ar do leiceann,
Éist le mo rún i do chluais,
gach cogar a rugadh sa chroí,
á sheoladh mar ualach amach
is ag cuartú d'anam' istigh.

*Barrscéalta - Clár ar Raidió na Gaeltachta
*Na Cruacha - leagan gearr de Na Cruacha Gorma, (The Bluestacks) Sliabhraon i dTír Chonaill

Lisbon: The Brussels View

2008-10-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

I travelled to Brussels this week with a group of Irish journalists on a media trip to the EU which co-incided with the Summit. In the two days leading up to the Summit we met a number of Irish and non-Irish MEPs, several senior officials in the Commission and Parliament (including the highest ranking civil servant in the Commission, Catherine Day), (embattled?) Commissioner McCreevy, and President of the European Parliament.

That much of the subject matter centred around Lisbon (I would say two thirds) at a time when the financial system is falling apart tells us how high up the agenda Lisbon has remained - and will remain. If there was an overall message it was this: that completing the reforms set out in Lisbon is more important now than ever, that this is mostly a problem Ireland needs to resolve, and that regardless of Ireland’s ability to sign off, this reform process is going to be brought to a close.

Irish MEPs and officials frankly admitted that the No to Lisbon has made their job harder - not just in dealing with colleagues, but dealing with third parties as well. One MEP said that in dicussions with American companies thinking about investing in Ireland that the No has thrown up a cloud of confusion about whether Ireland will remain at the heart of Europe.

Some of the Irish officials were at pains to explain that the vast bulk of political measures signed off in the Union come about after compromise, trading negotiating points, and building alliances with other states. This, they now claim, has become more difficult.

But, we asked, Lisbon doesn’t bring in clear measures which would tackle the financial crisis? True, we heard, but the fact that the Union has waged a decade long internal battle to streamline its institutions and to equip itself for the twenty first century has undermined its ability to act as a unit. They also added that in the end it is getting more important, not less, to be able to reach a common position on key international issues. In that sense they stressed the difficulty the French presidency faced in getting a unified statement on issues from Russia’s invasion of Georgia to the Financial crisis. In the end the French succeeded in twisting enough arms to get a unified face, even if there were hiccups in between.

The argument went that if say Malta chaired the Union now that it is simply not credible that the EU could have brokered a fairly quick ceasefire in Georgia - even if the aftermath has been imperfect. The rotating presidency, we were told, is a very real problem. Foreign leaders need to meet a dozen different presidents in the space of a few years, all of whom are also doing their day job of running a country. Continuity is required.

It’s Ireland’s problem. Ireland, they said, signed off on this as a government and failed to deliver. True the Irish people were asked but nearly all of the EU people we spoke to lamented the Yes campaign for being incompetent and half hearted. The views ranged from disappointment that the Irish government ran such a pathetic campaign, to near contempt for the Irish government’s incompetence, to one outright claim that Brian Cowen should have resigned after failing to convince the Irish people on the deal which he was instrumental in brokering. And yes, when questioned about the French No, the speaker said Chirac should have gone too.

Overall the message was that in December Brian Cowen doesn’t just need a set of proposals and ideas - he needs a solid plan that he is ready to roll on. But what if? Well, some refused to be drawn on it, saying they trust the Irish government will speak very forthrightly to the Irish people and that in consequence of such frank outlining of Ireland’s position that the Irish people would make the right choice. But still what if? What then of Lisbon? we begged. “What then of Ireland” was the response.

It seemed pretty clear - there will be no substantial opening up of Lisbon. Though not one speaker ruled out the possibility of retaining a commissioner. But no reopening of the substantive institutional agreements. The reforms have taken too long and people are simply exhausted. It’s got to be signed off ASAP. That was the message. Europe needs this out of the way.

And the message was clear too - that if Ireland fails to come along, some formula would have to be found to let the others proceed. Personally I feel that those who say this actually want it to be true more than knowing it to be true. Because of course the risk is that if Ireland is sidelined that other states may well object. But is that where Ireland really wants to be?

Among both officials and some MEPS the idea of partial oireachtas ratification was entertained. This has been referred to here at Irish Election in a previous post. While legally possible for a partial parliamentary ratification, I find it hard to believe that the government will have the political capital in reserve to sustain the backlash. Judging by the current budgetary crisis the government may not have any political capital at all - it mightn’t even be in office!

Minister, show backbone in dealing with Banks

2008-10-03T03:51:00.001-07:00

The EU Commission has said that it will look into whether the Irish bank plan breaches competition rules and if it does, the commission will force Ireland to recoup the money from banks. This may sound like more of Brussels poking its nose into our affairs. You know what it really is: a God send for the tax payer.

While I know the government had to do something to help the banks I am inclined to believe the went too far. Why had no other governments used this approach? Why was Ireland so roundly criticised? Doesn't a blanket prop really invite moral hazard since there isn't even a fear of failing now. At least on a case by case basis bank execs would wonder if they were going to get the help the need.

But I don't know. Perhaps as more facts emerge we will be provided with justification for the nuclear option. Fair enough. But one thing really worries me. It is that the government will not be robust enough with the banks in the even of their drawing down tax money. In our little clientelist, boys network elite, can we have confidence that the government will go in hard and rough if they have to bail out a bank?

In France, before Dexia was bailed out the government set strict conditions. They insisted not only that the CEO would go, but he would go without his golden parachute. Can you imagine that happening here? I can't.

The minister has talked about possibly taking equity and maybe putting members on the board or management team in the event of a major bailout. I haven't heard what is provided for in the legislation but I gather it is up to the minister in each case. Will he make use of the full rigour of these provisions or will he pussy foot and give funding with no guarantee other than the financial regulator will monitor the bank's activity.

Well you know what. The Financial Regulator is worse than useless. Yes, worse. If there were no regulator at least there would be no pretence of oversight. But the current regulator has been gutless, even reckless, in his dereliction of duty.

On prime time, CEO of the Regulator, a very uninspiring John Neary, insisted that the only problem in the Irish banks was the international credit freeze. He denied they had lent recklessly or taken too much risk with a construction bubble. You know what John - you are either stupid or lying. Perhaps a bit of both. And it is shocking John if the likes of you are left guarding 400 billion of tax payers money. What kind of crony are you? Where did you crawl from you spineless, disgraceful twit?

So please please, Mr Lenihan, I hope you show that under your sweaty shirt there is that which our regulator so singularly lacks: a backbone. Please, it's our money, so you have our full permission to be tough with the banks. Use it.

Financial and Economic Crisis will hurt the Greens

2008-09-30T02:54:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times talking on KRCW's To the Point. Friedman has been arguing for years that the US needs to drastically cut its dependence on oil and to transition to more sustainable technologies and behaviours. "The problem for the US economy" he said "is that it has become a giant money laundering system. We borrow money from the Chinese and give it to Saudi Arabia after running it through our gas tanks".

Friedman sees a world balanced at a delicate juncture. A new and radically different world lies before us. The future must be green. There are, says Friedman, huge opportunities now to spot the potential of new green sustainable technologies. And the US, he thinks, could be and should be leading the way.

Friedman argues that the world will take a new direction economically, like a mini revolution, and the Us needs to be at the front of the pack not lagging behind. If the US doesn't innovate and alter its course, others will. Japan, Europe, and even China, will quickly respond to price signals about energy and will drive hard from new technology. Already, the US is behind. Friedman finds it insane that one of the contenders for the White house holds to the mantra "Drill Baby Drill". He sees this as analogous to advocating more investment in type writing and carbon paper at the point when the PC was just being born.

But Friedman must be right when he remarks that the current financial and economic crisis is now going to kill off, for the time being, a transition to more sustainable technology. Any movement in a new direction will require innovation funded by generous amounts of venture capital and by heavy political sponsorship to alter taxes or set carbon limits so that signals are sent to the market to move to new technologies. In the current climate this kind of manoeuvring is unthinkable. Leaders will be forced to be parsimonious with spending. They will retrench and hold the line out of fear.

Surely when the tax payer is being asked for at least $700bn, it is impossible to start playing with taxes to give incentives to invest in green energy.

And so I thought of our own Green Party who entered government saying they were not a PD style watch dog, they were not powerful enough to dictate major policy, but that they would above all else, focus on moving Ireland on to a more sustainable path in terms of energy use and carbon footprint.

With the economy falling apart however, and public finances in deep trouble, there is now almost no scope for bold initiatives that might encourage investment in green technology. No capacity to reduce tax say on items that are environmentally friendly. No scope to pour funding into exciting new ventures for conservation or energy production. Instead, all we hear is that Ireland's carbon output has been grossly underestimated. Overall then, the Greens are facing a fairly sparse time in terms of what they can hope to achieve.

Some commentators have mooted that there may be bold new carbon plans or insulation incentives in the budget. I honestly doubt if there will be anything of the magnitude required to make a difference. Given the depth of the current economic crisis, it seemly highly likely to drag on for several years. This means that the latitude for generous green projects is reduced to almost Nil. And I feel the Greens will finish their first term in government will precious little to show.

Lisbon and the Irrational Voter

2008-09-25T04:45:00.000-07:00

Voters are not ignorant, according to Bryan Caplan, they are irrational. Caplan is the author of the provocative “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, a book in which he lays a large part of the blame for poor political outcomes on the shoulders of voters. The voter messes things up because he or she makes choices about issues which they do not understand and about which they hold inbuilt biased opinions. Given the huge amount of discussion about how well or badly voters were informed on the issue, I immediately thought of Lisbon.

If the only problem were that voters are ignorant the so called Miracle of Aggregation would still hold. Suppose 90% of voters knew nothing about the EU or about the Lisbon treaty and the remaining 10% understood the EU institutions, how they work, and the exact nature of the proposed changes. Well, the 90% of voters just don’t know, so some are swayed to vote Yes, some to vote No. Overall they statistically cancel each other out. The remaining 10% of ‘informed’ voters effectively make the choice, and that choice, since these voters understand the policy implications, is the right one. (whether that is yes or No can be debated elsewhere!).

But Caplan calls on an impressive swathe of empirical evidence to show that voters aren’t simply ignorant, they are, he argues, irrational. They have inbuilt biases which predispose them to prefer policies which are anti-foreign, or pro-national, or to policies which are against the free market (Could this be why voters latched on to many of the very right, very left or socialist campaigners during Lisbon?) By bias here he means that they prefer certain policy choices that go against the accepted wisdom in the relevant field of expertise. He focusess on economics, but argues the same applies to other fields too. He cites a number of voter biases in economic and foreign policy and argues that it there are likely other biases, which haven’t yet been tested, which mean that the voters make the wrong choices.

Are the experts right? Well Caplan argues that most lay people on the whole accept the opinions of doctors in medical matters, physicists in nuclear energy, traffic planners, legal advisors and so on. Why then would they not accept the analysis of economists and foreign policy experts?

Caplan would not be surprised by the evidence that voters didn’t understand Lisbon - there is good evidence for this from polls after and since the vote. But he would go further. He would argue that voters are pre-disposed to prefer inward looking, anti-foreign choices.

Not only that, he argues that emprical evidence show that voters take an overly pessimistic view of policy proposals in general. He showed that voters had thought the outcome of previous choices at the time would be worse than they turned out. During Lisbon there was much of the hype about conscription and doomed farming communities. Caplan may have a point.

Some commentators pointed to the large Yes vote for Lisbon among middle class males a sign that this cohort favoured the treaty because they thought it would benefit them. Caplan would take a different view. First, Caplan says his findings show that voters are far less selfish than we might expect. In general they are more in favour of improving the general social welfare than merely their own welfare. (Caplan spends a lot of time demolishing the traditional public choice hypothesis of the Self Interested Voter). The problem is they don’t know which policies are best to bring it about. Second, Caplan would say that his studies show that as a persons level of education increases their views converge with those of the experts. So if middle class males happened to be (statistically speaking) better educated, they would be more likely to agree with the experts. Since most experts were for Lisbon, this is likely why middle class males voted Yes, not because they thought Lisbon would favour them as a cohort.

One of the most controversial aspects of Caplan’s work is the exceptionally dim view he takes of what he calls the median voter. Basically, he says most voters don’t know about issues terribly well and are biased against optimum policies. Therefore it would be WORSE not better if more voters come to the polls. This is because those who currently don’t vote are generally the least educated and knowledgeable about politics. If they voted they would bring down the average choice.

Caplan goes further. Because educated voters make ‘better’ decisions, it would be better if their vote had extra weighting. The result, he argues, would be better for everyone. (Caplan doesn’t go into the ethical or practical difficulties with this approach or the dangers of ending up aiming for philosopher kings and getting dictators). Perhaps next time Lisbon comes round the government will only give the vote to PhDs in European Politics.

Getting a Start in Life

2008-09-23T02:41:00.000-07:00

Twelve year old Rebecca has a hole in her heart. It is a congenital defect and it may cause her problems in the future. But it is not by a long way her biggest challenge in life. Rebecca's parents are both heroine addicts and they have abandoned her to her granny who is now in her eighties.

Granny does her best for Rebecca but raising a child at that age is an enormous challenge. And recently Granny and Rebecca got some terrible news: Granny has cancer. It is not yet known how badly or how quickly it will affect her health, but even the knowledge of having it is weighing heavily on her ability to cope.

Rebecca attends a school near where she lives in Dublin's south inner city. The school is designated as a disadvantaged school, a term which fails to convey the immense difficulties faced by both its pupils and teachers alike. Many students have acute learning problems. Some, like Rebecca, have attention deficit sydrome. Many more are hyperactive or have low self esteem. Some can barely read or write. And still more have behavioural issues which flow directly from family environments which are chronically dysfunctional. Then there are those who barely attend. One of Rebecca's friends, Natasha, attended for only one month over both terms last year.

Her teachers say Rebecca tries as hard as she can despite her ADS. But often she retreats from learning and finds it impossible to stay focussed. Even if Rebecca had one to one tuition, one teacher said, it would be a huge challenge to keep her from leaving school and to get her to Junior Cert level. As it is, with twenty others in the class, there is little hope that Rebecca will obtain a successful Junior cert.

Teachers in most shools are charged with the task of covering the maths or geography curriculum and getting their pupils to obtain reasonable grades in Junior cert. But in Rebecca's school the mission is of a wholly different order. The school's role is more social than educational. One major aim is simply to keep the children in school for another few years, so that they aren't on the street all day, every day. Another aim is to provide basic literacy and numeracy skills which are normally associated with the early phase of primary school.

It is tempting to think that the state ignores the plight of schools such as Rebecca's. In fact, the state has made enormous efforts in recent years to help children in disadvantaged schools. Through the DEIS (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) programme, disadvantaged schools have been identified and targeted for extra resources.

Rebecca's school has a much lower pupil teacher ratio than the average; there are extra resource teachers and special needs teachers; the school gets much higher capitaion grants and has state of the art facilities in terms of teaching equipment and classroom kit; and the pupils, many of whom would otherwise be malnourished, are provided with a lunchtime meal.

Yet the teachers in Rebecca's school face almost insurmountable challenges. Some of their pupils will drop out, get addicted to drugs, or fall pregnant. Parental support is often absent. A neutral parent is considered a bonus - a small number of parents have threatened teachers physically for reprimanding their often difficult children.

Some pupils who stay in school will be seen to make little progress. One teacher felt disheartened and said she sometimes wondered if all the effort and resources weren't a waste of time. But of course, we know we have to try. If society can be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, then it will fail miserably if it doesn't attempt to help these poor souls who are given such a terrible start in life.

The trouble is that the school is being expected to do far more than it can ever hope to achieve. The problem is not educational, but a breakdown in how society has provided for its citizens over the long term. Teachers in Rebecca's school deserve admiration and respect for facing up to a problem that wider society and its political masters have created. The lesson must be, try hard to help Rebecca make a better life for herself, whatever the odds, but try far far harder to build a more inclusive society where there are fewer and fewer twelve year olds in Rebecca's predicament.

Job Loss: Part II

2008-09-09T05:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to the welfare office. There remains a tinge of stigma on anything to do with welfare. I will admit that I'm not immune from it. As I made my way to the 'dole' office, something gnawed at my pride. Of course, this effect is shaped entirely by the orthodoxy that insists we must be working all the time.

We are not invited to look at it rationally, which would give a picture something like this: we work most of the time and pay in to a system that is intended to provide a safety net. More important, globalisation as made many jobs very volatile and Ireland has bought in particularly heavily to this model, therefore it is right that the state should provide adequate bridges to help people make their way between islands of work.

I was pleasantly surprised by my first visit. I had this image of nasty staff harassing applicants in a deliberate effort to discourage people from making further claims. In fact, the lady who dealt with me was courteous and helpful. And the process seamed relatively smooth to begin with. This all made it much easier. I need to go back in a few days with more documents, then I hope the payments will start. I view it as a refund of my own money!

Over the last few days I've had time to reflect on what has happened. Strangely enough, the downturn in Ireland is not the reason the company had layoffs. It is more to do with the fact that the firm never fully recovered from the dot com bust. It has been struggling ever since. Certainly, the bust in 2001 accelerated the phenomenon of offshoring which was already underway. This meant that while the market for our services (IT development) recovered, the downward pressure remained on costs and we kept on struggling to win projects. The company has an office in Eastern Europe and over the last few years that office grew while the Irish office shrank. It seemed like a deliberate ploy to keep costs lower. But even that wasn't enough.

The senior management too have been less than inspiring. They have been with the company almost since the start and are all engineers bar one, who is an accountant. I'm sure they read management blurb and are influenced by the latest trends. But they show a poor understanding of some elements of business. A poor quarter and they abandon their latest and greatest strategy for a new one. They cannot surrender pet projects – a few of which have been embarrassingly costly and were obvious dead ends. They seem to forget a very important fact: a service company relies on people! The latter failing has been catastrophic. While management grew more and more obsessed about building stories for the market and the press, they simply let the whole notion of a career in the company die a slow painful death. Morale ebbed away to reach biblical proportions. Cynicism spread through the workforce like a silent plague. A company that once gave people careers now gives jobs – mostly bad ones, and obviously not very secure ones either.

So while the layoffs were a bolt from the blue, with hindsight a few fragments of straw had been swirling by in the breeze. The company was doing badly and had been struggling for years. Over the last year our new owners, (we were taken over a few years ago), had become increasingly irritated by the performance of the company. They were stepping up the pressure on management to stop making losses, whatever it might take. And certainly a number of our business lines have been, to say the least, unimpressive. There had already been some mild restructuring – a department head removed here, a research project canned there, and so on.

But there you are. It's academic for me now and one merciful aspect of my recent experience is that I'm now liberated from an environment that had become infected with gloom.

Finally, just to say that, in a social setting, I have already met many of my ex-colleagues who survived the cull and their response was overwhelmingly, almost embarrassingly, sympathetic. I have felt a very genuine sense that they felt sorry or my situation. True, they now face going back in to a workplace where morale is even lower than is possible to measure, but still, I believe the good wishes were heart felt. That kind of reassurance is very welcome at a time like this. Not only were they re-assuring but helpful as well, in some cases providing me with a list of contacts they knew that might give me leads in a search for a new job.

And of course, there have been some very kind remarks here online as well. So there is such a thing as humanity after all! Alright, let's leave it at that. Time to move on and figure out what's next.

Job Loss: Part I

2008-09-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

A senior manager called by my desk last Wednesday and asked if he could have a word. There was nothing unusual in that. He had occasionally asked me to his office to discuss a project or a customer. And anyway, my immediate boss was on holiday and we had just put in a bid for a new project with a US customer, so he was going to ask about that, I thought.

But something in his tone of voice struck me as unusual, some timbre that was heavy with portent. And he turned more swiftly than usual to head back to his office. He had more or less avoided eye contact as he asked me to his office.

As I followed him down the corridor a brief thought shot across my mind that this could be serious. Some nerve quivered but rationality took over and insisted that I had just read the signals badly: no, this would be the usual stuff.

When I turned into the office I saw the head of HR was already there. Then I knew it was grave, but before I had time to weigh it up, I think before the boss had even taken his seat, the bomb had exploded. He was sorry to say that I was being made redundant.

Boom : shock and awe. There was no warning, nor no warning signs. I was in utter shock. Sound became muffled and a mild form of tunnel vision narrowed my view. Only words followed: amalgamating departments, board decision, Q4, profits, support staff.

The HR manager, who managed to convey a sense of genuine empathy, was now going through the figures. A package was mentioned and statutory and tax. That's when I stopped him. I'm sorry, I said, can we talk about the details later? At this point, I'm not taking much in. Ok, he said, we could talk later. But my PC had been disabled he said and it was probably better if I could just leave the building now.

I made my way to my desk, picked up my bag and headed for the door. Then I stopped. I had to say goodbye to a few colleagues. After all, I'd known some of them 8 years. I told them I was gone. There was a round of layoffs. They were stunned, but those who survived said later that I looked like I'd seen a ghost. I went to the lobby phoned by wife, who was calmer than I thought, and then I left for home

Palin - not all plain sailin

2008-09-02T05:24:00.000-07:00

McCain's choice of running mate is not as inspiring as it looked at first. Tomaltach's first reaction was very close to that of his old friend, An Spailpín, who gives a glowing assessment of McCain's choice. True, on the face of it, Palin's selection is a stroke of genius, a relatively young woman with considerable political experience, and who is sufficiently conservative minded to pull in republican voters that were put off by McCain not being too centrist.

One thing which I had assumed was that the candidate had been rigorously vetted. This would have implied that many senior hacks in the GOP would have known in advance and would have given their approval. An Spailpín too assumed that the Republican camp were thinking advance and pulled this stroke of genius. But that seems not to be the case.

According to the NYtimes the appointment of Palin was a belated and hasty response to rejection of McCain's originally preferred candidate, Joe Lieberman, by the conservative wing of the party. The whole thing was rushed. Basically the feelers for how Lieberman would go down in the convervative wing went out too late, and when the cold air came blowing back, a touch of panic set in. A name was needed - for the convention at the latest, but preferrably in order to make the news the minute Obama closed his acceptance speech in Denver. A fresh news cycle would obliterate Obama's glow and the stage would be set for McCain's nomination.

But events dear boy, events. The hurricane shattered the notion of a smooth transition into the Republican convention. But the real trouble is starting to flow from the Palin nomination.

Now that we've had time to digest the McCain's surprise, however, calmer assessments can take place. Moreover, a few things are coming out now which may undermine McCain's bid from a number of directions.

First, Palin's credentials among the chirstian, conservative wing of her party . One of their cardinal values is the importance of the family. How important can your family be, however, if you have a down syndrome child and a pregnant teenage daughter and you choose to be second in command of the most powerful nation in the world? Family may be important to Palin, but not as important as power. Simple as that. The same applies to men. Famliy could hardly have been that important to Tony Blair when he sat out an extra term despite having a young family. That was his choice, and his family I'm sure were well looked after. But no-one can argue they were more imporant to him than remaining in power. The same thinking can be applied to Palin. Family, yes, but power first.

Second. Again the breaking story now of the rushed decision on Palin exposes another flaw: judgement. Is McCain the determined but clear sighted maverick, or is he simply erratic. The latter certainly seems plausable. Certainly there is no ground for the notion that he and his camp burned the oil in the small hours over recent months building a solid strategy for running mate. Instead it was poor planning, and in the end and improvised effort tinged in all likelihood with no small amount of panic.

The third problem, achlowledged by shocked insiders in the republican campaign, is that there is now no plausable way to launch attacks on Obama's experience. Democrats could defend this, but it was a weakness in terms of Obama's youth and his lack of executive power. But I disagree with my friend an Spailpín here, when he says "While Senator Obama has done nothing, Ms Palin has governed Alaska. For a little less than two years, granted, but she has had hands-on gubernatorial experience.". This would sound reasonable if the word Alaska were replaced with say, California, or Florida, or, well almost any other state. Alaska is the ultimate nowhere in American politics. Geographically, demographically (Dublin has a far bigger population than the entire state), and of course, politically.

I'm sure there will be passionate exchanges between fanatics in either camp extolling the great experience of Obama on the one hand and the great leadership of Palin on the other. But without getting into the gritty, I would say Obama through his hard won nomination race, and his term in the Senate, is far better prepared on issues such as Foreign Policy, Security, and National politics. But either way, Palin's nomination now gifts the democrats with a defence on the experience argument, which was seen as a significant Achille's heel for Obama.

Finally, it will not help in reaching out the ever present and important patriotic element (another angle of attack against Obama) that Palin was a member of the Alaskan Independence party for a couple of years. She is now campaigning to lead the union she sought to cede from.

While seeming an inspiring choice at first glance, Palin promises more than anything to complicate things for McCain.

Village Dies

2008-08-29T04:08:00.001-07:00

Who can be surprised by the announcement - reported in today’s Irish times - that Village Magazine is to cease publication?

Village went intro terminal decline pretty quickly. From the start the mag made losses that were as impressive as its copy was unimpressive. True there were a handful of strong journos at times - Justine McCarthy and Browne himself (though personally I find much of his output in recent years has been tedious, incoherent, lightweight given his stature, and often irritating).

Early last year when McCarthy’s exit was announced and when the magazine switched from weekly to monthly, it became only a matter of time, and I personally marvelled that Browne had continued to publish it. Incidentally McCarthy moved to the Tribune where, she was “offered a real journalists Salary as well as regular working hours”, jibbed Phoenix.

Even after becoming monthly, the mag struggled to fill pages, and it was always padded out with inane items like the boring two page ’state of the world’ map that became a regular filler. Then it added items on science and nature (this was Ireland’s political monthly remember).

Occasionally there was a reasonable splash on the government and the coverage of Bertie’s finances was thorough and convincing. But overall the Village remained little more than a vehicle for Browne to vent his own spleen against his usual bugbears - the last puff of which was his rant on Lisbon.

I stopped buying buying Village quite a while back. It just became so empty ( it should be added that it’s product values weren’t exactly a pull either, with chunky graphics, a very early 90s feel to layout, and bewildering mixes of colour ) If there is anything to lament about the death of Village it is that Ireland seems incapable of sustaining anything like a real political magazine that can retain talented journalists, conduct in depth investigations of political life, and present us with more penetrating analysis than can be provided by the Newspaper.

The Free Fees Fantasy

2008-08-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

Here we go again with another round of debate on third level fees. And again we all climb back into our ideological boxes. Free fees are fair because education should be free to all, scream the egalitarian idealists, or at least those who made a politicial stroke out of free fees. Too right, scream the rich and upper middle class, who happen to benefit most from the largesse. We already pay our taxes, they continue, and higher taxes than the poor. No, cry those for whom individual responsibility is the supreme virtue, we should all have to pay, if we pay the price, we know the value. In the end, the politicians look at the voting numbers and decide to leave it all as it is.

And so we are for the forseeable future stuck with the absurdity of free fees. It is absurd because we live in a time when all kinds of forces have made it extremely difficult for governments to argue the case for higher spending - even if they wanted to! We lived through an unprecidented boom in Ireland, and coming from a low base we saw absolute spending figures grow rapidly on education, health, and other services, such as transport. yet we remain at or below, mostly below, OECD averages in all of these areas. And let's face it, in reality, the boom is over, and even if we return to sustainable growth, our per capita spend on education and health is not going to rise rapidly any time soon. That leaves us with the reality that our current per capita education spend is going to stay where it is. Given the shortage of government cash then, it is utterly absurd for the state to pay for expensive higher education for children of the rich ( for whom our country is configured to favour in so many other ways already ). We simply cannot afford it.

Meanwhile reality gnaws at us from another direciton. It is this: our universities are relatively low in international rankings and that position is likely to decline. If indeed we are serious about hooking in to a global knowledge economy, and frankly, for a small open economy, there is little option, we need to push our universities up the rankings. This does not mean that we are going to compete with Oxford or Harvard. The elite universities are a class apart and we don't have to worry about them. What we need to do is to be as good as the plain ordinary universities in Europe or the US. I'm thinking of say matching the University of Helsinki, or Oslo, or some of the mid ranking State universities in the US. (The only Irish University which features in these lists is Trinity, which does pretty well on the THES listing at about 53, and on the Shanghai Listing at between 200-300) This cannot be done without vastly greater funding to build up world class facilities, to attract top academics, and to fund pioneering research programs.

How do we get that vastly increased funding? First, by abandoning our entrenched positions and examing the reality of Irish third and fourth level education and asking where we need to go. For funding we need to think of flexible and innovative ways of raising money. We need to pull industry into the sector far tighter. Industry in Ireland, including the multinationals, simply point the finger at government. "We don't have enough high quality graduates". "People are deserting science". If so, industry too needs to get stuck in. They need to work with government - not in a token way, but in long term partnerships, to turn things around.

But there are other options. Fees cannot be ruled out (Actually I believe that the abolition of fees was a terribly regressive move, though I acknowledge that the old means tested system was chronically abused and deeply unfair to PAYE workers) We need to come up with a fair and sensible way of promoting university attendance among lower earning families. But grants, graduate taxes, scholarships, and student loans are all options. Perhaps we also need to foster a culture of philanthropy and of the university as a place which launches a person on their path to prosperity. In this way, alumni might be persuaded to pay something back afterwards. The universities too need more autonomy - to raise funds themselves like businesses.

Some fear the introduction of business practices in University. But there is nothing to fear if the sector, government, and business make clear goals and objectives together and come up with solutions which match our economic and yes, social goals. This means that history and Irish language don't need to disappear. The American university system is a complex mix of public, private and with a fair dose of market forces. It is not ideal and is elitist and too expensive for many students. But it demonstrates that its mix doesn't mean the death of humanities or the end of studies which don't feed directly to the economy. American universities are pioneers in anthropology, geology, literature. There is nothing to fear by borrowing some of the things they have done to become world class.

Our university sector has been transformed over the last 15 years. When I began in UCG (NUIG) in 1991 I arrived at a campus that was chronically underfunded. Buildings were overcrowded and decrepit. Class sizes in some cases were horrendous - students crammed into the isles in theatres. Facilities were from the 70s - our engineering facility had clapped out mainframes, a handful of groaning PCs, and old poorly equiped labs. There were many prefabs. The library was pathetic. Since then whole new buildings have sprung up - a new IT wing (god bless them), a brand new Irish language centre, a new engineering building, a new millenium arts wing, a brand new sports centre, etc.

All of this was necessary and is welcome, but it brought NUIG from the 70s to the 90s. But that push in our sector stagnated around 2003/2004 and funding was again cut. Since then there has been a constant battle by university heads to re-ignite the funding debate, but each time we get drawn in to the fees quagmire and ferociously entrenched positions. Sadly we will squander the great progress made unless we open up our minds again and accept that we live in a time when complex and innovate solutions are required. We also need to realise that we cannot continue to live in the fantasy where we crave a top class university sector but refuse to pay for it. We seem to want first rate eductation, but no one wants to pay - not students, not the tax payer, not business. The first challenge is to shatter this fantasy and to face reality.

Tomaltach ar Saoire: Tomaltach takes a break

2008-07-31T06:41:00.000-07:00

Well, Tomaltach is set to head off on holiers with Bean Thomaltaigh agus Mac Thomaltaigh tomorrow!

It feels likes an age since I've had a real holiday, but it's only been two years. Last holiday was a lovely trip around Andalucia in 2006. Last year my annual leave was used for a very different purpose - to take time off for the birth of our son, Mac Thomaltaigh. That was a wonderful experience, but doesn't count as a holiday I'm afraid. I've had a couple of trips abroad since - but they were with work and again, not exactly a holiday.

So I'm really looking forward to our little trip dans la Vendée. I find the sense of excitement and expectation of heading on holiday is a huge part of its value! I'm genuinely excited about setting off tomorrow - though in funny way, since I don't particularly enjoy air travel (who does these days). But still the sense of voyage - even if this one is modest in scope - is always a bit of a thrill. In some ways I hope I don't get more of an adventure than I'd like - this of course is our first time travelling with Mac Thomaltaigh.

And so this week was our first time to pack for going away with a young child. Oh how life has changed. First, no more last minute packing. Worse, no more 'carrying light'. No matter how you compress it, you need bottles and a few toys and lots of clothes and a million bits and pieces. Then there's the push chair. I reckon it at least doubles the load - and almost the cost! But such are the joys!

So while on previous holidays we always liked to travel around, explore and area, do some trekking, check out some monuments, explore the nooks and off-beaten tracks of cities, this time it'll be a more settled affair. A rened house and stay put - perhaps we'll take a couple of 1/2 day trips to look around.

Ok, a change, but I'm kind of looking forward to it. I've packed a couple of books and might buy a few french books while there. And there should be ample time to sit back and read at our leisure. If the weather is bad (and the Vendée is changeable enough) - the book can be washed down with a beer, or if its hot, a nice rosé. And hopefully we'll manage to dine out a few times.

Here's the master plan: for the first week we will be accompanied by my wife's brother and law, his wife, and their one year old. For the second week, my parents arrive. The extra hands should give everyone a chance to break away a bit and do what they like, and I hope that includes a couple of fine meals and a bottle or two of the good stuff.

Cheap mé ar dtús go dtiocfadh liom mo chuid francaise a chleachtadh, ach sílim go mbeidh cuid mhaith béarlóirí thart faoin trá agus faoin tsráidbhaile. Mar sin féin, is cinnte go mbeidh orainn roinnt mhaith rudaí a shocrú agus mar sin de. Is breá liomsa an teanga sin a labhairt mar bhí sí ar bharr mo theanga agam nuair a bhí cónaí orm sa Fhrainc. Tagann meirg ar do chumas labhartha i dteanga nach labhrann tú go minic. Is annamh a fhaighim seans é sin a dhéanamh ar na laetha seo.

An rud is tábhachtaí ar saoire - dó scíth a ligint. Le go nglanfaidh tú imní an tsaoil amach as d'intinn ar fad. Bíonn deis agat macnamh a dhéanamh ar do shaol féin agus breathnú ar an chaoi a bhfuil cúrsaí ag titim amach. Tá súil as Dia agam go n-éireoidh liom na rudaí fíorthábhachtacha seo a dhéanamh.

Rud eile - is deas an rud é roinnt mhaith ama a chaitheamh i gcuideachta do chlainne agus do mhuintire gan aon bhrú ama a bheith ort nó brú intinne. Is iontach an chaoi a gcuireann an obair isteach ar shaol an duine. Cuireann an obair sriain ar do shaol ar fad, agus cuireann sin isteach ort ar an iliomad bealaí. Is deas agus is pleisiúrtha briseadh ón tsriain sin anois agus arís.

Sin a bhfuil, beidh mé ar ais is dócha faoi cheann coicíse nó mar sin.

The Right to Whip and be Whipped

2008-07-25T02:42:00.000-07:00

I was delighted that Formula One boss, Max Mosley, won his case against the News of the World who paid one of his prostitutes to secretly film one of their orgies. The paper ran the headline "F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers". Mosley sued the paper for invasion of privacy. The paper argued the exposé was in the public interest.

Mosley had hired 5 prostitutes for a sadomasochistic orgy. But the court found there was no evidence for the allegation of Nazi undertones. More importantly it ruled that the public interest was not served by this severe invasion of the man's private life.

The reason I'm delighted is that this is a slap in the face to the cheap, sordid, kiss and tell sleaze that has become the stock in trade of British tabloids.

I watched John Snow interview a legal guy from the News of the World. The guy from the paper was seething at this judgement. It was just so beautitful and satisfying to see him frothing at the mouth. He kept on repeating that the public ought to know about Mosley's "Dark Secret Vice". Really? Snow asked that, since the court found that there were no Nazi overtones, why should the public know about this mans sex life? Again, the answer was, when it comes to the "rich, the influential, or the powerful" we ought to know if they have a "Dark Secret Vice". Well, snow asked, if we ought to know about the sex life of the rich and influential, should we know what the editor of the News of the World gets up to? Pause. Or it's senior legals? Pause, and then "the editor perhaps, but not me" (Ooops, I hope that hooker last night wasn't filming). You could hear the scratches from the bottom of the barrel.

The News of the World guy went on then to complain about the curtailment of freedom of speech creeping into Britain from Strasbourg. He was referring to the protection of privacy which is enshrined in the European convention on Human rights, which Britain signed in 1998. The convention doesn't provide an absolute right to privacy, but, basically, specifies that privacy should be protected unless there are genuine public interest concerns.

Let's be clear: freedom of speech is vital, and the function of the press in investigating matters of public interest is essential to democracy. But the interesting thing here is that the British court looked at the various provisions, took into account the European convention and made a judgement that is both fair and sensible. And the court explicitly stated that it believes its ruling will not curb the power of the press to conduct its work in matters of genuine public interest.

All said, a sound ruling. And just so great to see the vile, despicable, and debased rubbish that is the British tabloid, getting what it deserves: a whipping.

No to Lisbon .. or something

2008-07-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

I just took a brief look at the eurobarometer surveys taken after the referenda on the constitutional Treaty in France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Spain. The first thing I noticed was the difference between their reasons for voting No and the reasons Ireland voted down Lisbon. The top reasons in the Irish case, according to the eurobarometer, were:

Ireland ( No 54 % / Yes 46%)
1. Not enough info
2. Protect Irish Identity
3. Protect Neutrality
4. Do not trust our politicians
5. Retain commissioner
6. Protect our low tax

For France (No 54% / Yes 46% )
1.Economic situation in France / Jobs / Relocation
2.High unemployment in France
3.Economically, the text is too liberal
4.Opposes the President and Parliament of France
5.Not social enough

For Luxembourg (Yes 56.5% / No 43.5%)
1.Employment / Relocation
2.Economic situation in Luxembourg
3.Not social enough
4.Goes too far too quickly
5.I oppose Turkish entry
6.Too complex
7.lack of info

I added 5 and 6 here because the percentages of respondants who mentioned these remained high, at 17% for both.

Netherlands ( No 61.6% / Yes 38.4% )
1.Lack of information
2.Loss of sovereignty
3.Opposes national government and parties
4.EU too expensive
5.I am against integration

Spain ( Yes 77% / No 23% )
Unfortunately the eurobarometer on Spain didn't give the reasons for voting No.

One thing that stands out is the predominance of economic issues in the French and Luxembourg results. Obviously the backdrop there was critical. The social / liberal issue came up in both of these countries as well. The social option wasn't presented to Irish voters, though there was an 'other' option and it was hit in 14% of all No responses. However, it is to be presumed that the drafters of the poll listed the 15 or so issues that were to the fore in the campaign. The Irish results stands out too for the importance of the lack of information. These polls are only a snapshot and of course other surveys with different methodology produce a different take. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that economic issues were highly important in France and the Luxembourg while they weren't in Ireland. The Commissioner issue became big in our campaign and it gets a mention - though both this and the tax were each only mentioned in 6% of responses. Commissioner aside, institutional issues don't feature that much anywhere.

You can go through as many permutations as you like, but the main reason I checked was to see if there was any commonality between the Irish No and the others. More specifically, I wondered if the other No voters were raising similar concerns to the Irish voters. And basically, the answer is no. The only real commonality I see is between the Irish and the Dutch case - where the top reason was lack of information. This was also significant in the spanish campaign in the sense that the low turnout (42%) was mainly due to lack of information.

The fact that economics was behind the French and Luxembourg votes too was interesting. Certainly in the French case their economic malaise was very hard to pin on the EU. Much of their problems are home grown.

Clearly there is a huge communication gap. The workings of the EU and its contribution to the plus and minus side in each country are poorly communicated and as a consequence poorly understood. True, bridging this gap won't be easy, but the issue needs to be addressed.

Incidentally the eurobarometer survey summary after Nice I had this to say about knowledge of the EU amoung Irish people :

"an index of knowledge of the European Union and its institutions shows a rather sorry
picture - 63 per cent score zero, 25 per cent score 1, 10 per cent score 2 and a mere 2
per cent score 3"

I wonder how much that is change!

Certainly, it is very hard to have a debate about changes to EU institutions and policies if you don't know much about them to begin with.

Aid in Africa

2008-07-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Myres has written another article which has caused a bit of stir. This time on Africa. Myres laments that aid to Africa has only allowed its population of miserables to multiply and propped up several vile regimes in the process. The Indo letters page was bombarded. Then in today’s Irish Times Bryan Mukandi from Zimbabwe expresses his shock and horror at what Myers had written.

The reaction on the Indo letters page to Myres’ piece tells us two things. First, people still care about Africa. And second, many share Mr. Myres frustration and despair.

Given the overall record in Sub-saharan Africa since the withdrawal of the colonial powers between the 50s and the 80s, it is understandable that many people have given up hope. People in rich countries can feel betrayed too, when a country they have supported and was making progress is suddenly swept back to square one by another coup d’état. Sometimes it all seems so futile.

Yet I find it disheartening that the debate on Africa has taken on a kind of fatalism. Ah, sure it’s the Dark Continent, a basket case. This attitude misses the fact that Africa is huge and varied and that some parts are making progress while others are not. Last month, for example, a World Bank report found than democracy in Botswana continues to mature and that its political leaders have led it from being one of the poorest in Africa at independence to being at the top end of middle income countries now. Botswana proves that Africa is not condemned to deplorable governance and endless misery.

We often hear about African countries closing ranks. Sadly that is often the case. But nuances are emerging. For example, Kenya’s prime minister Raila Odinga recently spoke out against Mugabe, but there too internal political games might well be at play. The reality behind this is complex. The African experience of Western colonialism – which was so recent and brutal – has shaped a particular world view. Whether we like it or not, the world looks very different to African leaders. There is a fundamental ideological spit which prevents any real dialogue from taking place. Having said that, it seems undeniable that a gradual willingness on the part of moderate African leaders to crticise brutal regimes would be a vital step forward for the continent.

Aid too is a complex issue and it appears that many economists doubt its long term value in terms of development. That said, in a situation of crisis, such as war, famine or epidemc, aid is nothing less than essential and those who would deny it for some ideological position do not possess a human heart. The other point about aid is that nowadays no-one is under the illusion that aid alone can bring Africa’s worst performers, or nations elsewhere for that matter, to where they need to be. In tandem with aid other measures are required – a consistent and agenda free diplomatic approach, strict management and oversight of aid programs, close co-operation with local initiatives on the ground, fairer international trade regimes, and perhaps, in worst case scenarios military intervention. Unfortunately these latter components are often missing or applied for the wrong reasons in the wrong way.

Before we explode in anger at Myers’ uncompromising and seemingly heartless words, we need to appreciate that his piece comes from the pen of seasoned polemicist. He has honed his arsenal – and when he fires the results can be devastating. But his job is not to educate or enlighten – merely to provoke. In that he succeeds brilliantly. I welcome his opening of the debate on Africa, though it’s unfortunate that Irish media remain silent on Africa until a controversial shot is fired. It would be a regrettable side effect of Myer’s piece if some readers swallowed his arguments to re-inforce their own prejudices. But that is the price of freedom of expression. In any case, this is an eddy of a breath of a puff, and doubtless the Irish media will let the subject of Afica drop as suddenly as it picked it up.

I digress, and I’d like to return to a few points in the article. Mr. Myres inadvertantly raises a crucial point. He pointed out that Japan, China, Poland, Germany, and others suffered horrendous catastophes, yet they found their way back to the path towards progress and prosperity. True, but here is the nub: these countries have a history and culture which is better adjusted to the requirements of a functioning, central government geared for progress. No system is a guarantee against calamity, but the absence of certain values and norms invite leaders to view the apparatus of state as a set of tools for personal advancement. This is a controversial view – and I would emphasise that my point about Africa having an unfortunate starting point is historico-cultural not racial. That should not need to be said, but unfortunately it does. Africa’s horrific experience of colonialism and its own cultural baggage left it poorly equiped to deal with the nightmare of the modernity it faced. Not only that, but it wasn’t even left alone to sort things out – the Cold war first, and a form of neo-colonial meddling now is anything but helpful. Darfur is one case, so too are the seeds of the ugly and shameful genocide in Rwanda. At home in the west so to speak, we are obsessed about the harsh effects of globalisation – farmers marching about WTO deals, credit crunch flowing across the face of the financial world like dominoes, outsourcing, offshoring and so on. Globalisation is harsh and volatile even for rich, robust democracies. Imagine how it is effecting the weakest players who are so poorly equiped to deal with it and who have little power in the global institutions to make any difference and where their interests are often bulldozen by those of the West.

Again to Myers’ comparison. China’s presence on the list signals that even where progress and prosperity are possible, democracy doesn’t necessarily follow. Africa teaches a similar lesson as the ongoing adventure in Iraq: nation building and democracy are not some kind of default settings that kick in when all else is cleared away. Like vulnerable seeds in the perpetually volatile soil of human nature, they require patience and constant care. When they wither, the only response is to replant, and replant again if necessary. And democracy is that peculiarly delicate plant that can only be grown and not transplanted.

If we work with Africans to help them build functioning societies and if we fail, they cannot walk away, and neither should we. We just replant, and try harder next time.

We keep our Commissioner and Revote

2008-07-15T05:45:00.000-07:00

The following is my translation of an article in today's Le Monde about proposals to get another Irish referendum. It is quite interesting in the kind of manoevering it reveals and also there is an interesting little comment at the end about the way the commission is evolving into something less than desireable. The article was written by Arnaud Leparmentier

The reform of the European Commission is to be sacrificed on the altar of the Irish No to the Lisbon Treaty. It’s the likely direction for Europe, as Nicolas Sarkozy, incumbent president of the EU, meets the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen in Dublin on Monday the 21^st July.

For some weeks now, the experts have been seeking an avenue to secure and Irish revote after the No on the 12^th June. The aim is to modify the text, without legal implications, to assure the Irish that their vote has been taken into account: it is out of the question to start the negotiations on a new treaty from scratch and to restart the ratification process in 27 other (sic) countries.

By careful rereading the legal experts have found a single avenue: the commission, even if it wasn’t central to the referendum campaign. As the No camp pointed out, the Irish will lose, like everyone else, their automatic right to appoint a commissioner in Brussels. The Nice Treaty, currently in effect, provides for a reduction of the number of commissioners once the total number reaches 27. That applies from 2009.

The Lisbon Treaty, however, offers an escape route: the reduction is postponed until 2014. Moreover, the treaty provides that the commission be composed of a number equal to two thirds the number of member states in the EU “unless the European Council unanimously agrees to modify this number”

The latter provides the margin for manoevre: the 27 can decide that the Commission will continue to be composed of one commissioner per country. The Irish will have the choice to make: it’s Lisbon and keep the Commissioner, or Nice will apply.

The Commission is Overcrowded

The No camp have always indicated they would oppose this kind of concession. To make the package more attractive, it is envisaged to issue a new declaration of the European Council which will restate the guarantees already given to Ireland in the entirety of the treaties: assurance that the EU will not be inolved in abortion, given in Maastricht in 1991; a guarantee of Irish neutrality, re-iterated as it happens after the first Irish No in 2001 to the treaty of Nice; a guarantee that fiscal matters will remain under unanimity.

These proposals could be debated at the Council in October and adopted in December. The Irish could therefore run another referendum, on the same day as the European elections in 2009 at the latest.

The Commission would be weakened by this compromise. It has now become overcrowded, especially since the commission president, José Manuel Barroso, has made “legislate less”* his motto. The commissioners have reduced responsibility, sometimes of a derisory nature, and less than those of the directors general over whom they have authority.

These measures, combined with the centralised management of Mr. Barroso, have eroded the special nature of the commission: the collegial character of its decisions. Gradually the commission is becoming a secretariat of the European Council of ministers, beset by haggling among nations instead of seeking a European optimum.

* Barroso adopted the theme "Légiférer moins pour légiférer mieux (Legislate less to legislate better)"

Emergency Care in Ireland - a Sham and a Disgrace

2008-07-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

Last night I had the misfortune of having to go to an A&E room in a Dublin children's hospital. Happily my 10 month old wasn't terribly ill - but an out-of-hours GP had recommended that he be seen by a pediatrician. "Go to Tallaght" the GP advised "you should be seen fairly quickly. Crumlin is straight from Dante's inferno, and entering Temple street is like arriving on the Western Front". Ok, we thought, let's give Tallaght a try. We agreed in the car on the way over that we would sign in, take our chances and if the queue seemed impossibly long, we'd simply leave, keep and eye on the young fella and reassess in the morning (thankfully in our case that was an option).

So we arrive at Tallaght Hospital and head to the adult A&E, which is the starting point for finding the Children's A&E nearby. In we go and ask directions."You need the children's A&E?" a security guard asked helpfully "just follow the steps on the floor". And sure enough there were little red (unhappy choice of colour in an A&E?) paw marks on the floor that led to the children's A&E.

We followed the red paws down a series of corridors through the adult section. That trip alone was enough to tell you all you need to know about the state of Irish emergency care. The entire network of corridors was lined with adult patients on trollys. Some of these patients were visibly distressed. You could tell that apart from privacy and facilities, these people were not getting what any sick patient requires: rest.

One man sat on his trolly looking into the distance. He had obviously gone on the emotional odyssey that a visit to an Irish A&E typically entails: you arrive in expectation which the atmosphere alone, together with he obvious chaos, grinds down to mere hope. Then you enter a chasm of uncertainy. The passage of time and the feeling of invisibility begin to lead to doubt. A few false dawns, sometimes in the form of pure lies, give despair. Another few non-productive interactions mixed with a sense of being ignored sends you in the direction of anger. The sheer absence of the notions of care and dignity compounds the anger. But a realisation that the staff are overburdened and working in a vast chaotic morass, soon defeats even anger. Resignation is next. That is where the man on the trolly was. He'd been through the cycle - we were just beginning.

So we sign in and wait for triage. A very pleasant but hurried nurse took basic readings and information. Then we joined the real queue. We were still in the hope stage. The queue didn't seem that long - perhaps a dozen patients. But when three quarters of an hour elapsed without a single patient being called, hope began to evaporate. We were asked for a urine sample from the wee man. (Not easy from a 10 month old - the timing always seems wrong!) Eventually he obliged!

Half hour later we were asked for a second sample. They needed two. Great. This time it was harder. But finally, we get a good cupful! Maith an gasúr!

By this stage the young man is not only unwell, but very very tired, and also overexcited by the other children and the general husstle busstle. Frustration is setting in all round. But here is the key. I asked if there was a list or if the staff could tell me if the young man was anywhere near being seen. Good news. Only two patients before him.

Sadly another long cranky hour passed before two more patients were seen. But at last our chance was imminent. Then hang on! Another patient is called, then another. Oh no. Here we go. I approached and asked again about our status. I was assured we were next. But then another patient and another are seen. Anger is setting in. Not anger that we are not being prioritised: anger that we are being fucked around.

Why is there not a modicum of concern for distressed patients? Not a shred of honesty? Not even a hint of treating people professionally and with dignity? Why no automatic communication? Where have all these basics gone among the hideous, mess that is A&E here? These questions well up in anger time and again as you get fobbed off and lied to or just ignored.

I make a final attempt - citing politely how our curious progress on this list is hard to understand. But if there was an explanation, none was given. Just an interuption "Child's name". I answer. Ok, his chart "seems to" have been taken by a doctor. You'll be called soon. We wait again. Nothing happens. More patients called. I wonder if the chart exists. Another paitent is called. We grab our coats and head off: resignation.

But my heart went out to those who could not leave, yet had to suffer in this shameful, appalling, and chillingly inhumane system. It's a sham and a disgrace. And this is what's on offer after a decade and a half of abundance. It seems this is as good as it gets. We're heading into to cuts now. Sad. Terribly sad.

What will McKenna say about Polish No?

2008-07-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

If Ireland took the most democratic route to ratification, arguably Poland did the opposite. The parliament elected by the people voted to ratify the Lisbon Treaty. But ratification could not procede because a single person was against it - their President. The President says he won't sign because the Irish voted No. That cannot be true - there is nothing in Lisbon which says that the ratification process should stop if a single voice says No. Instead the text simply says that if after a certain period of time only four fifths of the states have ratified then there is a Council meeting to discuss etc. True, ratification cannot be completed without assent form all. But that is not the same as saying ratification should stop. And the precedent is that if the thing has enough momentum ratification should continue (Maastricht, Nice) after rejection and then discuss how to procede in a way acceptable to all.

So Patricia McKenna bemoaned that we were the only people asked to voice directly. A broad based demoractic mandate was required for the Treaty. So she must be horrified that a single person in Poland can decide. I'm sure she will say as much and say that the Polish outcome should be ignored because of the thinness of the democratic mandate.

Worse still, unlike the Irish broad based rejection for a variety of reasons, it is clear that President Kaczynski is playing politics with the future of the Union. His party has been suffering and his twin lost power in Parliament. He is now playing to the eurosceptic gallery of his conservative party. This kind of opportunism is a huge reason in favour of abolishing the notion of veto at the heart of the Union. There are genuine reasons why unanity should be preserved - but the Polish antics are a strong reason against. The Irish No is legimate at least. (Despite the issues with campaigns being influenced by misleading information or being skewed by money - these are factors in any democracy and of course we should strive to eliminate them).

I am looking forward to hearing the main voices in the No camp on this issue.

I'm pro-Europe, but...

2008-06-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

For reasons that I'm still trying to understand, but which are real and cannot be written off, there has been a significant growth in eurosceptic sentiment in Ireland. But wait, I don't mean that euroscepticism is suddenly widespread and deep. Nor that it was the key factor in the recent outcome. No, but it has expanded significantly.

The bulk of the country is still pretty much in favour of the European Union (minus Lisbon of course!). A eurobarometer survey in January showed that 87% of people thought Ireland had benefitted for EU membership. Pretty high. Yet underneath, and beside all this, is a growing constituency of doubt. At least doubt about the future of Europe.

That such overwhelming numbers are still positively disposed to the EU explains why the small but growing group of eurosceptics still couch their attitudes in pro-European tones. "I'm pro-Europe, but". It would still be counter productive, they calculate, to be an all out sceptic. But sceptics they are.

I have heard No campaigners question how much Ireland benefitted from membership. A kind of 'what about the fish' argument. Or 'what about the water charges'. Or, even more obviously eurosceptic, 'we can do most of these things better ourselves'.

But this kind of disguised euroscepticism is best embodied by the man of the hour, Declan Ganley. Ganley tells us he is not against Europe and not even against European integration. It's just that he wants a more democratic Union. But then according to today's Irish Times, Ganley wrote in an article for a US think tank a few years ago in which he "argued against the development of the European Union "in contradistinction" to the US.

(Funny too that the man whose platform was making the Union more transparent has refused to tell us where the money came from that funded his extravagant campaign. Oh yes, he'll comply with the law, which is so weak that it means this - we shall never know)

But look. Ganley's attacks on Lisbon though often made calmly contained a latent hostility that showed where the heart was when the tongue said "I'm pro-Europe but". Perhaps the victory of the No side gave Ganley the boost he needed to throw off his mask, I don't know. But his rush to join a group of virulent eurosceptics at Westminster in a mutual wankfest just after the vote makes it clear enough.

How Europe Lost the People

2008-06-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

So the Irish people have said a resounding No to Lisbon. Already the reasons, and some of the consequences, are being debated. I have already seen lists appearing on web sites. They hit many valid points : effective No campaign, inept Yes campaign, fears of militarisation, loss of commissioner, bullying tactics from the Euroelite, lack of information, and so on.

I believe there is a wider issue which fed into this campaign in a more significant way than during the Nice debates. It is this: along the way the European project has lost the people. That is not to say it has been a negative force on the quality of life or freedom. I was a passionate supported of the Yes camp. Europe has been and still is a force for the good. But that is not enough to take people along.

The French and Dutch rejections were massive shocks to the European system. The reasons for No in both cases were varied and sometimes contraditory. People were concerned about immigration, about jobs, about competition, about social protection, about liberalisation.

Clearly then, the Irish are not the first to pull the stop cord. After France and Holland the Union stummbled on. The approach was to add a dollop of sugar and force the matter through without asking again. But the fundamental issue was not addressed: why did the Union loss the confidence of the people and how can it be regained?

I argue that it lost the confidence of the people because it moved too quickly. Enlargement and integration, both distinct issues, happened in parallel and very rapidly over the last 15 years. The trigger for this was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Arguably the Union had to move quickly while before the Eastern countries drifted into another alliance . In any case, the move was swift and within exactly 15 years the Union had gobbled up most of Eastern Europe.

Integration was happening in parallel: the Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, and then Nice all tied the Union closer politically. Monetary Union was introduced, a raft of new areas were added to Union competence. In short, the entire shape of Europe has been utterly transformed since 1989.

The changes are so profound that they have to be lived to be believed. Whether right or wrong in terms of long term strategy, this kind of rapid change is disconcerting for citizens. And arguably Ireland is the country which transformed most during this period. It is true we had our economic boom which European membership in no small part helped to create. The same for dramatic social change in Ireland. Then came monetary Union. And then came very large scale immigration. The consequences of having old certainties swept away so utterly was extremely disorienting. Arising from this is a desire for a return to some sort of stability. In that sense the No to Lisbon is an attempt to stop the train until people figure out where it's going.

Another factor here is the dramatic changes that have taken place globally, again a convenient date is 1989. Since then a number of currents have emerged:

- world power has been radically redistributed. America is the sole, but relatively speaking, declining superpower. Asia has risen at lightening speed.
- globalisation in the sense of movement of information, capital, and goods has become dizzyingly rapid
- after the fall of communism in Russia, capitalism was triumphant and a harsh, arrogant liberal orthodoxy took hold

These global forces are now impacting people's lives in a big way. Companies move to lower cost locations, often outside Europe. Immigration is seen as a cultural and economic threat. Organised and international crime has grown consistently. Huge international businesses have homogenized the high street. Some hoped the European Union would be a buffer against these forces. I would argue that in many ways it has, but the Union and the governments of member states have failed to explain how the European Union addresses these problems.

Another critical issue lies behind the failure to build a bridge between the Union and the citizens of member states. Europe is not a unitary state with the allegiance of a unitary nation. Instead it is a voluntary Union of nations states. In the end, there may be a limit to how much power the people of nation states, each with its deep sense of nationality and particular pysche, are willing to cede to a great, overarching government.

In summary, we have reached a stage where a large amount of power has been given by the nations to a centralised Union. If the Union has genuinely employed that power in promoting the welfare of European citizens, it has failed to show them how it has done so. Where citizens gave their power, their loyalty didn't follow, and without that loyalty the Union suffers not just a deficit of democracy but a deficit of trust and confidence. These crucial ingrediants are essential to confer the legitimacy which the Union requires for further integration.

More Contraditions from No Camp

2008-05-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

On Prime Time last night Declan Ganley of Libertas and Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin made interesting points against the Lisbon Treaty, but they were full of contradictions.

Declan Ganley decried the loss of Ireland's veto in a number of new areas. Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan retorted that the vast bulk of EU measures are in Ireland's interest and therefore it is better they get passed. Mr Ganley replied that yes, but two big powers plus two smaller ones can block such a measures.This is blatantly contradictory. How can one argue in favour of a veto for single countries but lament the fact that now four countries can block a measure? (Incidentally the blocking threshold was increased from 3 to 4 in the negotiations to stop the three biggest states from blocking measures agreed by the smaller states)

The other interesting point was made by Mary Lou McDonald. She reluctantly admitted that Ireland's veto on taxation is safe in Lisbon but that our corporate tax might be undermined by back-door measures. This is extraordinary stuff from a party whose policy on taxation until recently advocated that corporate tax should be hiked up to 40% for some sectors, which would make it the highest in Europe. Sinn Féin's dpolicy documents until recent years deplored the lower tax regime in Ireland, in particular the lower capital gains and corporate taxes. Are these lower taxes now sacerd all of a sudden or is Sinn Féin setting aside its core principles for the sake of expediency in campaigning against a Europe that it so much loathes?

New War Poetry

2008-05-20T08:16:00.001-07:00

When I think of War poets I think of Siegfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen, or closer to home Francis Ledwidge, Thomas McDonagh and Pádraic Pearse. Notably these men all fought at the beginning of the 20th century.

Sadly, one hundred years later War certainly hasn't gone away, yet we hear little about War Poetry.

Perhaps it is the fact that poetry itself has become an even more marginalised artform in the age of instantaneous messaging and downloadable videos. Who knows? In any case, I was certainly very pleased to discover that War Poetry is alive an well in the 21st century. I tune in regularly via iPod to American radio stations (oh Janus faced technology, you destroy the old yet insist on keeping it alive). One favourite is the magnificent public radio station KCRW, based in Santa Monica, Southern California, and which specialises in new music and the arts. It was on "Bookworm", presented by the excellent and inimitable Michael Silverblatt, that I came across Brian Turner. (incidentally the show seems to give decent coverage to Irish Writers - Colm Toibín and Anne Enright were recently given a full length show each).

Turner was part of the 10th Mountain Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999 and 2000. Later, in 2004 he was a team leader in the first Stryker brigade to be sent into the combat zone in Iraq, and was stationed for much of 2004 near Mosul. He had already aquired a Masters degree in writing and had written a substantial amount of material during his experiences in the Balkans. But it was his time in Iraq which really unleashed his talent. He wrote in secret, not wanting to tell his comrades in arms, because he said "it’s hard to be hard-nosed if you’re writing poetry" The quote from New Yorker 2005, the year when Turners "Here, Bullet" collection won the Beatrice Hawley Award.

Here are three poems from Here Bullet, the last being the title poem of the Collection.

AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)

Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulence, with anesthetics
dripping from an IV into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesn’t hear, except perhaps as music—
that faraway music of people’s voices
when they speak gently and with care,
a comfort to her on a stretcher
in a flying hospital en route to Landstuhl,
just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia
drifts in and out of consciousness
as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,
her palm on Thalia’s forehead, her vitals
slipping some, as burned flesh gives way
to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within
opening to fill her, just enough blood
to cough up and drown in; Thalia
sees the shadows of people working
to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,
cannot hear them any longer,
and when she closes her eyes
the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,
tangerine washing into Russian blue,
with the droning engine humming on
in a dragonfly’s wings, island palms
painting the sky an impossible hue
with their thick brushes dripping green…
a way of dealing with the fact
that Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,
his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard
where pilots fly in blackout, the plane
like a shadow guiding the rain, here
in the droning engines of midnight.

The Baghdad Zoo

Is the world safer? No. It’s not safer in Iraq - Hans Blix

An Iraqi northern brown bear mauled a man
on a street corner, dragging him down an alley
as shocked onlookers shouted and threw stones.

Tanks rolled their heavy tracks
past the museum and up to the Ministry of Oil.
One gunner watched a lion chase down a horse.

Eaten down to their skeletons, the giraffes
looked prehistoric, unreal, their necks
too fragile, too graceful for the 21st Century.

Dalmatian pelicans and marbled teals
flew over, frightened by the rotorwash
of Blackhawk helicopters touching down.

One baboon escaped the city limits.
It was found wandering in the desert, confused
by the wind, the blowing sand of the barchan dunes.

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Arguments of Lisbon No Camp built on Sand

2008-05-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

There have been some very impressive and eye catching claims made by the various factions within the No Camp. In some cases their argurments are made very professionally, are bolstered by quotes from the Treaty and often look entirely plausible. I have found, however, that in all cases that I’ve seen so far, when you dig a little deeper, you find that these impressive edifices are build on foundations of sand. The technique is usually to misrepresent the content the Treaty or to use sleight of hand to shock the reader into thinking that behind the Treaty there is a vast and hidden agenda in which both the Yes camp and the referendum commission are complicit. Another tactic is to imploy the notions of sovereignty and nationhood in an evocative way that obscures any reasoned argument about the value of our place in the Union and about the need for deep and substantial international cooperation in a world dominated by big players. In turn I will now examine some of these claims.

Corporate Tax

Let’s start with taxation. It’s widely cited by the No camp that Lisbon will lead to tax harmonisation which we all know would be detrimental to the Irish economy. For example, the Libertas campaign has the following Slogan on its buses “don’t let Brussels set our taxes!”.

First, there is no provision in the Lisbon treaty to allow the Union to alter corporate taxes without unanimity. The EU already has competence in the area of taxation, but it will remain under the unanimity rule. In the consolidated Treaties (as they’d appear after Lisbon) there is specific competence given in the area of indirect taxation, but even here, unanimity is preserved:

The Council shall, acting unanimously in accordance with a special legislative procedure and after consulting the European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee, adopt provisions for the harmonisation of legislation concerning turnover taxes, excise duties and other forms of indirect taxation to the extent that such harmonisation is necessary to ensure the establishment and the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition. [ Consolidated TEU, Art. 113]

Where ‘turnover tax’ essentially means VAT. Note that this provision is specifically dealing with indirect taxation. Corporate tax is a direct form of taxation so there is no question of it being imposed without getting further consent from the member states. In fact, so sensitive is the area of taxes that even the area of Energy, which was introduced in Lisbon and is normally decided by QMV, any possible fiscal implications were specifically ruled out without getting the consent of all nation states:

The Council, acting in accordance with a special legislative procedure, shall unanimously and after consulting the European Parliament, establish the measures referred to therein when they are primarily of a fiscal nature.[ Consolidated TEU, Art. 194]

This approach applies throughout the treaties. Again, for example, in the area of environment, matters relating to taxation are to be decided using unanimity. In short, Lisbon does nothing to damage our low corporation tax rates.

Proposing Commissioners

Another area which has been highlighted by the No camp (particularly by Anthony Coughlan) is that the treaty changes the way nation states select a commissioner. First, the phraseology always used is “Ireland will loose the right to a commissioner”. In fact, the treaty states that although only 2/3 of states will appoint a commissioner for any one term, this operates on a strictly equal basis and in a manner which seeks to ensure a demographic and geographic spread. Furthermore, a commissioner is an officer whose remit is to promote the interests of the Union, not of member states:

The members of the Commission shall neither seek nor take instructions from any Government or other institution, body, office or entity [Consolidated TEU Art 17.5].

Any Commissioner which violates this can be forced to resign by the President of the Commission. Furthermore the commission as a body is responsible to the democratically elected European Parliament.

Mr. Coughlan makes much of the change in wording from using the verb “propose” to the form “suggestion” in relation to how commissioners are appointed. His implication is that that Council and Parliament can ignore our suggestion and then select whoever they want. But the text is clearer than that. They shall be selected…on the basis of the suggestions made by Member States [Consolidated TEU 17.7]. There is no escaping the suggestions by the member state. Clearly, as has happened before in the case of Italian commissioner designate Buttiglione, the member state may suggest an entirely unsuitable candidate whose tract record is incompatible with promoting the interests of the Union. In the Italian case, the MEPs threatened to veto the appointment and the designation had to be withdrawn. The process was fully democratic.

Workers’ Rights

The Socialist Party of Joe Higgins are voting No because they claim Lisbon will be bad for workers’ rights. This, the argument runs, would be par for the course because the EU has done little for workers anyway. Instead, as their web page points out, the socialists argue for “a democratic, socialist Europe of workers” to replace “the capitalist club that the EU is.” Leave aside the ideological debate here. Let’s look at the history of workers rights in Ireland since our membership of the so-called capitalist club. Where the title of the Act doesn’t make its provisions broadly obvious, I have added some explanatory text and in each case I have noted if the Irish law was the implementation of a Union directive.

Ireland Joins EEC 1 Jan 1973

The Holidays (Employees) Act 1973 - increased annual leave from 2 to 3 weeks

The Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act 1973 – right to a minimum period of notice before dismissal

Anti-Discrimination (Pay) Act 1974.

Employment Equality Act 1977 implemented the 1975 Equal Pay and the 1976 Equal Treatment Directives

Unfair Dismissals Act 1977

Protection of Employment Act , as amended in 1996 and 2000, implementing Council Directive 75/129/EEC which puts an onus on employers to enter consultation with employees representatives in the case of collective redundancy and to notify the relevant authorities.

Terms of Employment Act 1994 – Directive 91/533/EEC which puts an onus on employers to make conditions of employment clear and specific

Maternity Protection Act 1994 92/85/EEC

Adoptive Leave Act 1995

Protection of Young Persons (Employment) Act 1996 94/33/EC

Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, 93/104/EC – clarifies conditions on working time, minimum rest period, maximum shifts

Parental Leave Act 1998 – 96/34/EC

Employment Equality Act 1998 - the purpose of which was to outlaw

discrimination in employment on nine separate grounds (gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race and membership of the Traveller Community) thus further implementing Directives 75/117/EEC and 76/207/EEC and anticipating Directives 2000/43/EC and 2000/78/EC

National Minimum Wage Act 2000

Carer’s Leave Act 2001

Protection of Employees (Part-Time Work) Act 2001, the purpose of which was to transpose Directive 98/81/EC and Directive 96/71/EC. – on working in hazardous environments, and entitlements of workers posted to Ireland from other member state

Protection of Employees (Fixed- Term Work) Act 2003, the purpose of which was to transpose Directive 99/70/EC. – equal treatment of fixed term contractors

European Communities (Protection of Employees on Transfer of Undertakings) Regulations 2003, the purpose of which was the transposition of the mandatory requirements of Directive 2001/23/EC – protection of employees in mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies

In short, after Ireland’s accession to the Union enactment of workers’ rights legislation in this country accelerated. Many of those protects were directly as a result of EU measures. Even recently many of our protections for workers, especially part-time or fixed-term workers have been driven by EU measures. The picture is clear – the EU has been an overwhelming sponsor of workers rights.

It is true that the EU has attempted to promote competition in the services area by making it easier for workers to cross borders, notably via the famous services directive of 2001 which aimed to allow companies to maintain workers in another country for a temporary period on conditions of the country of origin. It should be understood that services remains an area that is stubbornly closed to competition and which as a result is highly uncompetitive internationally and is, quite simply, ripping off the local consumer. But even here, the EU measures were both limited and controversial and in the end the final measures were so watered down that they remain completely insignificant. Overall, nothing promoted from the angle of competition has undone the huge body of workers’ rights that the Union has promoted and accumulated over the years.

Health Strategy

Many No campaigners argue (the socialists, and members of the Peace and neutrality alliance) that the Lisbon’s provisions on competition will break open our health services to the private sector and make health care a product not a public service. (Let’s ignore the fact that the elected representatives in many countries with public services to put ours to shame, have negotiated, agreed, and ratified the treaty)

The crux of the argument here is competition. First, the provisions for competition and its central place in EU economic thought is already there. Lisbon does not create it, nor significantly enhance it. It is already explicit. Voting No to Lisbon will not undo it.

Second, our health services, again without and before Lisbon, have already been opened up to the private sector. This was not the fruit of some EU capitalist club, but the direct result of the ideology of the Irish government, particularly that of the PDs.

Third, the treaties include specific provisions on health. Many of them are related to disease control measures or promoting public health. But the Treaties single out health as a sensitive area where the Member state should have prime place and freedom to act:

Union action shall respect the responsibilities of the Member States for the definition of their health policy and for the organisation and delivery of health services and medical care. The responsibilities of the Member States shall include the management of health services and medical care and the allocation of the resources assigned to them [ Consolidated TFEU 168.7]

In short, Lisbon does not alter the fact that our shabby two-tier health service is entirely of our own making and fixing it will remain a job for the Irish nation, its representatives, and the employees in the service.

Constitutionality, Independence and the Superstate

There are two issues here. First, the allegation by the No camp of sleight of hand employed when talking about the change to the constitution and second, the issue of whether the EU is a state and Lisbon a constitution.

Anthony Coughlan has argued that the referendum commission is failing in its duty to inform us about Lisbon because it has not told the Irish people that we will have a new subarticle 11 in article 29.4 which states that :

No provision of this [Irish] Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State that are necessitated by membership of the European Union referred to in subsection 10° of this section, or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the said European Union or by institutions thereof, or by bodies competent under the treaties referred to in this section, from having the force of law in the State

True, that will be the text of the new subarticle 11 if Lisbon is passed. What Mr. Coughlan fails to say is that this is already in our constitution as article 29.4.10 and is only being moved down to article 11 to make way for the clause on the ratification of Lisbon which logically would go into article 10, just after the other clauses on the earlier treaties. So the general clause, as quoted here, simply moves to the end of the list in this subsection. Once again, voting No to Lisbon makes no material change here. We retain the above clause to prevent constitutional challenges to each piece of EU legislation which comes along under areas of competence which we have already agreed to give to the EU.

The next issues is that the No camp argues about whether Lisbon is a constitutional treaty and if the EU is a superstate. Again PANA and Coughlan are to the fore in these arguments.

A constitution is a set of rules for a system of governance. When we joined the Union we agreed that some functions of government (government being the authority to make laws and administer them) would be taken by the Union on our behalf. We entered this system eyes open and our experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive. By definition the entire list of Treaties signed so far comprise a constitutional framework for the Union. They are its rules, they set out how it works. No more, no less.

Certain factions of the No camp attach an almost mythic meaning to the notion of the nation and of the state. I think you see where I’m going here. For them the nation and the state are sacred concepts. If you’ve followed the piece this far there is no need to remind you where this kind of ideological dogma has led in the past. If you can remain a little pragmatic and level headed about it, I would propose that a state is a political association with sovereignty over a defined area. Under that definition, yes, the EU is a state. But let’s add the qualifiers we know belong here. It is a voluntary political association with limited sovereignty given to it by its members to promote their interests as a collective.

Moving on to independence – another sacred cow for the No camp. First, this is not 1916. We live in the 21^st century where the world is tightly interconnected and interdependent as never before. A multipolar world is emerging where the major issues, such as global trade and climate change, are decided by a small number of big players. Though new in depth and extent, the picture of dominant players controlling the international scene is not as new as we think. The modern world was ever thus. Alliances and clashes of the Great Powers characterised the development of the modern world from the Teaty of Westphalia of 1648. But key here is the acknowledgement that, with one twentieth of one percent of the world’s population, a minuscule nation such as ours needs to be part of something bigger. We are one of the most globalised nations on the planet, which for the most part has been to our great advantage. Independence today, therefore, is a chimera. In theory we could attempt to go it alone, and push our bow straight into the great waves of globalisation. Or we can travel in convoy with the European Union, where we have good reason to hope that, certainly not all, but most of our key interests will be protected in a Union where human rights and civil liberties are probably better protected than anywhere else on the planet.

Only Radio could have done justice to Ó Faoláin Interview

2008-05-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Only radio could have conveyed the power and beauty of Marian Finucane’s interview with Ó Faoláin. The ubiquitous image based media would have destroyed its poignancy and its intimacy.

Radio is special. In a world where the image is king, the loveliness and serenity of radio is a kind of escape. Today we are not just hooked on images of course, but on moving images. This usually means TV, which has become increasingly characterised by frenetic, almost chaotic, fast paced, images. Typical now are rapid montages with knife edge editing, dizzyingly moving camera angles, and graphics splashing and clashing and rolling incessantly. Music, quiz shows, and advertising are of course the worst offenders, taking the concept of movement and graphic to delirious levels. But more sober programs and broadcasters have been infected by the same virus.

Radio for the most part is immune to this pathology. It is a medium where you are still treated with dignity. You are a listener, not a mere consumer. And free from images the spoken word is particularly powerful on radio. There is an intimacy with radio that is utterly impossible on television because the paraphernalia of television doesn’t allow it. The visual staging, lighting, and makeup on television set up an artificial environment. And the camera creates a battle between the eye and the ear which obscures the delicate meaning carried by voice alone.

The listener to radio creates their own mental image of the speaker, matching the tone and texture of a voice to a face that is either remembered or imagined. Radio unlocks the power of words, which are the true channel to the human heart. The human facility of speech is unique and magical. It is an essence of humanity, and radio renders it faithfully. Television destroys it.

That is why radio was perfect for the interview of Nuala Ó Faoláin by her friend Marian Finucane. Words are the stock and trade of Finucane, just like they were, in a different way, for Ó Faoláin. The interview was utterly captivating.

I tuned in by chance at the beginning, without knowing in advance what the program was about. Finucane was speaking and when the other voice answered I recognised Ó Faoláin.

After a few words from Ó Faoláin, and before I’d heard enough to know her situation, something grabbed me. I turned around to the radio an turned it up. The timbre of her voice was quivering with the purest sadness I have ever heard, and it was clear that it was coming straight from a heart that had just been irreparably shattered. I stood motionless listening, absorbing the raw emotions wavering out from the wireless.

At various points in the interview Ó Faoláin would slide into her horrendous abyss, her voice channeling nothing but an overwhelming, insurmountable despair. This happened for example, when she mentioned a cancer hospital in New York and then thought of her beautiful room, a pad on which she had recently rebuilt a renewed life in New York, but which she now said, breaking down, she would never see again.

The interview, I learned just after it had finished, had been recorded. It’s not easy to know what amount of editing took place, though it felt as if very little. In any case Finucane was excellent and, given that she was interviewing her friend in those circumstances, admirably strong and clear headed. She nudged the interview forward with a light touch, inviting her guest and friend to do the talking and to open up. Which is precisely what Ó Faoláin did.

In the course of the interview she delved way down into her dying self and bravely wrenched out chunks that mattered or that once mattered. It was clear too, and desperately sad, that she felt the whole thing, the accumulation of pain and the bank of joys and the factory of creativity that was her life, the whole thing, seemed pointless and in the end had no meaning or no redemptive power. It was as if she had endured the odyssey of life and reached the destination to find there was nothing there. Her trembling hopeless voice carried all the horror of seeing the richness and tumult of an entire existence reduced to a singular and infinite nothingness.

And yet despite her hopelessness, and a feeling she called her ‘sourness’ with life, which came across like a mixture of anger and despair, there remained a humanity. She had lost her love of reading, and the power of music had faded from the heights of redemption and joy to something no better than palliative. Food was still enjoyable, sometimes. Her friends and family were never far away. Her concern about putting them out if she went on one final valedictory holiday was particularly touching.

She cried when she thought of the Irish song Tráthnóna Beag Aréir. It brims with nostalgia: a Rí na glóire gile, tabhair ar ais an oíche aréir - O King of shining glory, Bring me back last night. Ó Faoláin said she didn’t believe in an afterlife, but confessed somewhat reluctantly, that the question of whether there was a God was different. Perhaps there was a pinhole in the black despairing sky, a tiny gap that refused to close. I was left wondering if hope refused to die.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam dílis.

Touching the Void

2008-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

This is one of those days when I want to write something on the blog but nothing is taking shape in my mind. It is a very odd and hugely frustrating sensation to feel that you want to say or write something but you dont' know what. It seems like a contradiction in terms - if you have nothing to say, why have you an urge to say something?

I wonder if other people sometimes experience the same?

When it hits me I often open my blog and say, ok, I'm going to write something. I feel the need to get something out, to lift some kind of weight. And I open up, and go to new post: click. And there it is before me, the entry box lying open, a white, empty, void. And nothing comes. It's like lifting a full jug or water, placing over your glass, and then you pour and there's nothing. And you feel that the void on the page is telling you that your mind is also a void.

For an instant you try to find the issue that's making you want to write. What is it? You pause and think, and let your thoughts run, but they race, and skip. Is it personal? Or is it one of my pet topics? Is it something new or something in the news today, some hook in the subconscience from today's paper or yesterday's news? You feel your mind panicking. Trying to search for something deeply important to it, and beginning to realise it's not there. Where is it? I feel the niggle?

Then it kind of finds something, snippets, and semi-thoughts buzz past in a frenzy, too quick to snatch from of the neurons: cowen-lawn-burma-bank-mother-baby-bill-holidaybooking- bookreview-hillarobama-ofaolain-brown-cycloneburma-
homewifebaby-past-childhood-learn-cabinet-work
-lisbon-politics-radiogreens. STOP.

And you have a long series of those little shocks you get when you think you've lost your keys, thousands of those instances, maybe millions all racing and packed into a single second of life. For a moment it feels like a short circuit? Can brains reset? And when they reboot is everything still there?

But all this happens so fast. And then there's a calm. Wait a minute! I don't have to write a blog. It doesn't matter. Even if I wrote something brilliant or devastating or beautiful, it wouldn't matter. Because it's only my blog. It's irrelavent to my life. This is the mobile phone syndrome where people feel they have to answer it, or feel empty and lost if they leave the house without it. Is it a technology thing?

But you calm down. Stand back. It's only the blog! And this is a beautful summers day: lawnhomewifebaby.

Mary Coughlan as Minister for Employment

2008-05-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

As a native of Donegal I would like to congratulate Mary Coughlan in her appointment as Tánaiste. I would also hope that she succeeds better in her role as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment than she has at creating employment in her own constituency. She and her colleague, Pat the Cope Gallagher have been in power for much of the Celtic Tiger period, yet unemployment in Donegal remains well above the national average. In fact, the 2006 census records unemployment in Donegal as over 4 points higher than the average for the state. On closer inspection more worrying trends emerge. In Donegal between 1996 and 2006 employment in manufacturing fell from 6 points above the national average, at 22%, to about 2 points below the reduced national average of 13%. Another cause for concern is that employment in construction in Donegal, at 15% of the workforce, is significantly higher than the national average. It is well known now that the construction sector is shrinking rapidly. The consequences will be grave for a county with an already high unemployment rate. Minister Coughlan is not, of course, minister for South West Donegal, her role is national. But it would do no harm if she could dedicate some of her time to closing the gap between her home constituency and the rest of the country.

The Strange Case

2008-05-01T06:37:00.001-07:00

By day he was a respected member of his community; by night a monster. In a cabin at the rear of his home lay a world of horror, a place of implacable darkness that gave him cover for his obnoxious parallel life.

When he entered his secret quarters through a reinforced door, his nature would change utterly. The shackles of decency would snap, and fall away from his feet. The dreary norms and suffocating restraints of society would give, and the pose of conscience would dissolve. The layers of civilisation were pared away, exposing a raw, distorted core. Here, in his secret chamber, he became a ghastly beast with an insatiable thirst for cruelty.

In his altered state, he would now perpetrate acts of savage barbarity. Yet after each horrific episode he would emerge from the darkness unchanged. He would step back into the ordinary, humdrum, world as if nothing had happened. Some circuit in his bizarre, dual mind would trip, and connect him back to humanity.

When a horrified friend learned of his friend's monstrous double world he said:

"My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror."

The friend is Dr. Lanyon and is speaking of his friend and colleague Dr. Jekyll who found he could transform himself into the deformed and hideous monstrosity that was Mr. Hyde. Dr Jekyll used to become Hyde in order to indulge his darkest impulses, and to do so separate from his good persona.

Dr. Jekyll revealled in a note found after his death :

"I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde"

He explained the conflict between Good and Evil that his dual states embodied :

"I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was, of course, a work of fiction, penned by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886. But alas the truth is often stranger still, and far more ghastly. This week we learned how Josef Fritzl, a construction engineer from Amstettten, Austria, began raping his daughter while she was in her teens. When she reached 18 he imprisoned her in a reinforced cellar at his home, where he continued to rape her for 24 years. During this time she gave birth to seven of his children, 6 of whom survived. Three remained locked in the cellar and had never seen the light of day. One had died at birth and Fritzl had incinerated it in a furnace. And the remaining three had been taken above ground and raised by Fritzl and his wife as their own. His wife was led to believe the daughter had ran away and that the three young children which Josef had brought into their home down the years had been abandoned on their doorstep by the daughter.

It is tempting to think that Fritzl's depravity excludes him from the family of humankind. But the reason people the world over are so horrified by his case is precisely because of our common humanity. We are struck in disbelief that this, this monster, is one of us.

Fritzl tells us nothing new. History is replete with illustrations of the grisly and unbounded horror that can be wrought by the distorted nihilistic core of humanity. In fact, one way of looking at the history of civilisation is to view our progress as the fruit of a constant struggle, not with chance or with the elements, but with our heart of darkness. Indeed, a struggle of this kind is central to many of the world's religions: the opposing forces of all things symbolized by yin and yan, Seth and Osiris in ancient Egyptian religion, the opposition of divine and mortal forces in Greek mythology, and of course the struggle between Good and Evil in the Christian bible where the combat against Original Sin lasts for the entire duration of humanity.

When evil breaks through the imperfect cloak of civilisation, there are always victims. In Fritzl's case, seven of them were children. We cannot help imagining what they suffered, especially those poor creatures locked in the darkess. Their mother tried to make their lives livable, she tried to simulate normality. She told them fairytales and entertained them with elaborations of what they had watched on TV. She must have had to convince them that their frequent visitor was a benefactor, that he loved them, that he protected them.

Incredibly, while in their company he wasn't always Mr Hyde. He could revert to Dr Jekyll. He would play with the children and discuss their welfare with their mother - whom he never ceased to beat and rape. It is impossible to imagine how she summoned the power to bear the violence and depravity for over 20 years, long after hope of escape had receded. Her mental torture must have been worse than that of the kids. She knew another world, a world of spring air and winter snow, of mad autumn colours, of birds and birdsong, of rolling clouds and warm sunshine. A world of space and movement, and freedom. A place filled with people, real people, who were decent and kind and loving and dignified.

We cannot resist wondering how Elizabeth and her children will ever manage to build up anything like a life after such sustained and horrific damage. Can their minds be repaired, at least in part? Can they regain an appetite for real life? How will they cast away their mistrust of people? Will they adjust to streetscapes or parks or any open space? Do the children know or can they ever learn the language of love? Will they ever cope with the constant motion of their new world? What is the shape of their hearts after years of torture and depravity? Can they be healed? We pray that they can.

And as for Fritzl himself, it is hard not to be sucked in by his monstrousity. We are compelled to marvel at, and be shocked by, the revelation that this absurdity, this wretched, cruel beast, this is you and I.

The Strange Case of Josef Fritzl draws our attention because he appeared so ordinary, his victims were so helpless, and his depravity so hideous. But above all we are tormented by thoughts of what it was like to be Fritzl, or far far worse, one of his victims.

The Health Nightmare

2008-04-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

Every time you turn on the TV or open a paper you are greeted with another HSE Nightmare: cancer misdiagnosis, wrong kidney transplanted, needless deaths from stroke, died on waiting list. It's no surprise then that when you look into the HSE archives, that too is like getting trapped in some sort of horrible recurring nightmare. Take the issue of waiting lists from 1998 onwards, through the period when first Cowen, then Martin, then Harney, held the top job in Health. It is like a broken record of broken promises. "Cowen promises more funding for waiting list initiative"(1999) "Minister [Martin] launches new strategy to tackle waiting lists"(2000) "Minister [Martin] announces further £8.9 million allocation of 2001 Waiting List Initiative"(2000)

In fact, Minister Martin promised to end the problem for once and for all. In Feb 2000 he said of waiting lists: "there is no reason to accept them as inevitable. In the current economic climate it is simply not tolerable to people that they should settle for a reduced quality of life as a result of problems of accessibility to fundamental public services".

In the government Health Strategy 2001, signed by both Bertie Ahern and Michael Martin, there is a specific promise on waiting lists. They promise to end the repeating nightmare : "specific targets are set so that, by the end of 2004, no public patient will have to wait for more than three months to commence treatment, following referral from an out-patient department". Wow. We were to wake up from the horrible, sick dreamscape by 2004. Aaaah. But when it came, 2004, Mary Harney was still grappling with waiting lists. In November of that year she was promising more money for the National Treatment Purchase fund in order to tackle waiting lists.

Four years later, in 2008, there were still waiting lists. Harney did make some progress. She said on 5 Feb of this year that "waiting times had come down from years to months". But how many months? The target of three months promised in 2001? Mmmmm. No.

So now, in 2008, 11 years after the first government with Cowen-Harney-Ahern-Martin took office, a stunning 58% of Children and 57% percent of Adults are waiting more than 6 months. That's right, about two thirds of all patients are still waiting for a period twice as long as the target promised seven years ago.

So a despairing population remain locked in the Health Nightmare with no escape. Some people wonder if it's just that the Health Service is chaotic, and suffers from chronic mismanagement? Others wonder if we simply aren't spending enough?

Well the sad news is that it's both of these. The Irish health budget has tripled from 1996 but since it started from a shockingly low base and because the population expanded as well, our per capita investment is still below the Eu average. Clearly in order to make up for decades of underinvestment we needed to overshoot the EU average for a significant and sustained period in order to rebuild the service. That hasn't happened. The recent OECD report tells us that well are still lacking acute beds (by about half) compared to other EU nations.

What about the management and the allocation of resources within the service. Let's begin with the Secretary of the Dept of Health, Michael Scanlon. He recently said about the Irish Health Service that "it is a nightmare trying to find your way through our health system, even when you know your way around it". That's interesting. How about another source : when the commission on public pay tried to assess if the pay scales in HSE management were adequate they were confounded by the impossibility of determining what exactly some of the jobs were supposed to be about. It was unclear what people should be doing or where the chain of accountability lay. No shock there. This shows that nothing has changed since the Brennan Report on the Health Service in 2003 found that:

Management and control of services and resources is too fragmented; there is no one person or agency with managerial accountability for how the overall system performs on a day-to-day basis.
Those who make decisions (mainly Consultants and other medical practitioners) which commit resources are not accountable for that expenditure and the outputs to be delivered.
Systems of governance, financial control, risk management and performance management need to be developed further.
The capacity of existing systems to provide relevant, timely and reliable information for linking resources to outputs/outcomes is severely limited.

In short then, we don't invest enough in our health system. Oh, and anyway, the system is hideously inefficient and badly run.

Sadly, nothing will change under Brian Cowen. Any Taoiseach who was serious about the Health crisis would get more involved and would declare it a specific ambition to fix the system. He would team up with the Minister for Health and have regular meetings to help keep the issue at the top of the agenda. But the man who called the Health service Angola will want no hand, act or part in the nightmare. If he changes Harney at all and there is now almost universal appetite for her exit, he will likely plug in another horrified (and probably incompetent) minister who will want to return from Angola ASAP. Back to musical chairs. And regarding investment, well, the man renowned for his caution is hardly going to allow the purse strings to open further on Health. The nightmare goes on..........

Lisbon and Tax

2008-04-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

[update: while the main post was about tax harmonisation, the comments section has developed into a discussion on the Lisbon Treaty]

What does the Lisbon Treaty say about tax harmonisation? The answer of course is - Nothing. Lisbon will not mean tax harmonisation. (But that won't stop the Euroskeptics from shamefully telling us the lie that Lisbon will mean instant tax levelling and disaster for the Irish economy).

Nevertheless, the issue of tax harmonisation is here to stay. It is here to stay because the huge variation corporate tax rates across the EU is resulting in a massive disparity in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

According to the OECD the cumulative FDI Inflows into Europe for the period 1994-2004 look like this:

UK $534m
Germany $375m
France $356m
Spain $184m
Ireland $139m
Italy $100m
Denmark $71m

Ireland getting more than Italy in absolute terms! Unreal. On a per capita level Ireland is getting 5,8 times more FDI than France, 7.5 times more than Germany, and 20 times more than Italy.

A further start figure: according the to US department of State the total US capital stock in Ireland as of 2006 stood at $84billion which is more than double the US investment in India and China put together ($31 Billion).

These stark figures explain a large part of the Celtic Tiger. But they also expose its vulnerability. It is no secret that more and more capital is being diverted to Asia or countries in Eastern Europe such as Estonia which imposes a zero rate of corporate tax on some categories of company.

The figures also explain why some of the bigger European countries are crying foul. The European project was supposed to entail levelling the economic playing field by ironing out distortions in the market across countries. The single market, remember? But Ireland is not the only country seen as an offender. In 2006 Germany accused Austria of fiscal dumping in order to poach companies from Germany. Austria responded that they had to reduce their rates to cope with competition from their neighbours on their Eastern borders.

And so, Germany put the tax debate back on the table.

There is no doubt that it's going to stay on the agenda - although the Germans and French leaders may remain fairly mute about it until after the Irish referendum.

In any case, the referendum will make no difference - Europe, and therefore Ireland, is going to have to face this issue sooner or later. It is true that even under Lisbon each member will retain a veto over taxation, but in practice when the big EU powers apply pressure something has to give. It is unlikely that tax rates will be harmonised, but the way in which tax amounts are calculated could be harmonised to take into account the size of the local market for each firm, or the size of the workforce. This could mean an end to the famous transfer pricing, whereby companies located in a low tax country such as Ireland, simply push their funds around internally to be taxed in the low tax location and not their high tax location. In effect, it would be the same thing - Ireland's tax haven status would disappear.

There are two things to note about this. First, the argument made by the big continental powers is probably right: in terms of how tax is calculated it is ridiculous to pay most of your Eu tax in Ireland simply because you employ 200 people in Sandyford. (Ridiculous if you're German, not if you're one of the employees in Sandyford!)

Second, if the UK backs us we have a fair chance of postponing the inevitable. In the end, the UK will be powerful enough to protect her interests by only agreeing to watered down proposals which will probably be phased in over a long period. It just might be enough to give us enough breathing space to do what we need to do anyway: start unloading some of those eggs into another basket.

Missing You

2008-04-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

She would spend most of the day alone, sitting in the kitchen-living room of her council-built rural cottage. She sat to the right of the fire, facing the window that looked out on the hill where gorse and rush had long conquered the meadow in front of Toland's old house which had melted away among a handful of firs. She would regrip the rosary beads when her mind returned to prayer after wandering among clippings of happy memories and fragments of dreams. And, prayer regained, the focus of her gaze would pan down on the empty chair at the other side of the fire.

The figure who was not in the chair was her husband, who was now almost 7 years dead. They were forced to marry - there was no other choice in 1940s Ireland if the unthinkable happened. Society had reserved a special taboo for their case - they were first cousins. In a tiny, close-knit community, a violation of mores such as theirs couldn't be concealed, it had to be endured. Worse followed. He fell ill and was unable to work their small, subsistence farm. The incessant toil in the fields and on the bogs was now added to her burden of carrying, giving birth to, and rearing a family of 10. One of the ten was to die of TB when he was only 6 months.

These days she would think often about the figure not in the chair. He was timid and physically frail. But he was gentle and compassionate. His slight, bony frame moved slowly in the world. He preferred the imagined life to the real, which he kept at a slight distance. His weapon of survival was his humour - a quirky, almost childish humour. All throughout his married life his humour was his shield against her caustic tongue. She could never let a word of his pass without cutting it down. Even in front of visitors he was always humiliated. He was a silly old. Where did he think he was? He was a waste of oil! She had blamed the ghost in the chair for the life of struggle that was etched in her face.

But again today, she reminded herself that her life was not all misery. She loved their children, even if they didn't visit very often now as adults. She remembered the banter and craic of the meitheal after gathering the harvest. The generosity of neighbours. Births and Weddings. The raucous disorder of children playing on the street. She recalled the earthy smell of livestock and their wordless dignity. The hope of progress after a good year. Ramblers singing and how music suspended the drudgery.

Her whole life, everything in it and that flowed from it, all of it was nested in and around this house. And he, the absence from the chair, had always been there, a quiet, tenacious anchor. She looked again at the chair and took a slow, deep breath.

Caricature Undrawn: China and the West

2008-04-15T07:24:00.001-07:00

I cannot draw cartoons. But if I could here is what I'd draw:

A cartoon version of the Chinese Premier, Hu Jintao is in the centre, wearing a mischievous smile, his roguish eye looks out from the page, his face is turned to the right, fixed on a gigantic carrot that dangles before him. In small letters written on the carrot are : WTO Membership, Olympic Games, Respectability. On the left of the page, and behind Hu Jintaos back is a smug, wily diminutive figure who carries in one hand a rod from which the giant carrot dangles, and his other hand he is bringing down a feather on Hu Jintao's back. The creepy sly figure on the left has The West marked in large letters on the front of his t-shirt, and a tiny upside-down logo on the collar runs "Made in China".

Memories of Ice

2008-04-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

At the tea station today my colleagues and I were chatting about the cold snap and how the winters seem to have changed since we were young.

Some of the coldest winters I remember occurred when I was about 9 or 10. It was the early 80s. One of those winters, I think 1982, was particularly cold. I thought I could check the integrity of my memory by looking up the Met Eireann site, but it seems they haven't got around to putting their historical data on line. First I thought, that's a shame, it would be a fantastic service.

On reflection, that might be wrong. Maybe we lose something in the conversion of a memory, which is rich, and blurred, and pliable, into a mere fact. (One of my pet subjects at the moment is memory and subjectivity of historical experience, personal and non-personal, and I've my eye on a couple of books, but alas, the unread section of my library is getting too big to bear another parcel from Amazon).

I think there is something wonderful about the unreliability of memories. I find a particular magic in revisiting the ice days of 1982. But maybe it wasn't 1982, it could have been 81, or 83, I'd say 84 at the latest. Maybe there wasn't much ice: that might be what the facts say. Perhaps a few days of -2. But in the deep caverns of experience that I have retained from childhood, I have a record of weeks and weeks of unbroken and severe frost. The landscape of those memories contains very little snow, though everything seemed white. The bitter weather had sucked away the colour, leaving everything in shades of gray. But it was as if in doing so, the contrast was hightened - everything became crisp and sharply focused.

I used to spend a lot of time at my Granny's farm as a boy - holidays and weekends - and I recall being there during the Big Freeze. The Cattle were short of water, in winter they depended on a fairly rudimentary suppy that consisted of a few pipes leading from a spring well on the hill, all lay over ground. They were, of course, frozen solid. So uncle Gabriel and I set off to the lake to fetch a few barrels of water. When we reached the lake, the wide, circular surface was a pure white, motionless disk. Even on a calm day the surface would ripple and dance a little, just to let us know that time was passing. Now it was still, like a stopped clock. The shallows and the deeper centre, reflecting and refracting the sky in different ways, had always looked different. Now the entire covering was uniform. The fir trees on the far side of the lake were a frozen white, and the rolling hills around were shades of gray and white. We had just landed in a lunar crater - in a tractor! The lake appeared to be asleep, and its shoreline was part of its serene dreamscape. Nothing moved. No sound. Until we arrived in the David Brown, disturbing the Sea of Tranquility.

Gabriel had taken a pick axe to smash the ice. His first swing barely scratched the surface. He was as impressed as I was, and so he decided to test his threory that the ice was strong enough to support the tractor. He backed the two large wheels out onto the ice. (he wasn't insane, just young, he was still a teenager) The ice held. Luckily the frosty surface provided enough grip to allow the tractor to pull forward again off the ice. A few hard smashes of the thinner end of the axe eventually smashed the ice. I was kind of surprised, and even disappointed to see the water bobbing under the two or three big chunks of ice that had shattered off. Water underneath after all, not a new era of solid lakes and visible breath. We filled the barrels, icy bucket after icy bucket, then headed for home.
My memory of the frozen lake is stored near dreams that were filed as memories. They must be dreams : one of them has uncle Liam, Gabriel's brother, and who had a reputation for being a pioneer (or just heedless), standing on the ice near the shore. In the background his Ford Capri is parked towards the centre of the lake. There is no motion -- it's, I suppose literally, a freeze frame. And there's a sense of foreboding, the whites aren't white enough, and there is a grave expression on Liam's face, as if whatever was going to happen had already happened.

I hope those memories, or inventions, or dreams, never thaw for they are marvellous and beautiful in all their childish, icy madness.

Ahern's Legacy as Taoiseach

2008-04-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

I have never been a fan of Bertie Ahern as Taoiseach, but I became, rather reluctantly, a great admirer his political skills. I don't believe he was corrupt in the rotten sense, but he failed to acknowledge the damage that political shananagans have wrought on Ireland and their inherent danger to democracy. He never grasped fully the arrival of the internet age of informed citizen-voters who expect from office holders the oxygen that democracy needs - transparency. And as such, Ahern had at times no little contempt for the machinery of democracy itself, such as the oireachtas, procedure and accountability, and dare I say it, the media.

He was the perfect man for the North. He carries no ideological baggage, even though he comes from a light green republican background, or not so light if you recall that his father fought in the War of Independence and was a supporter of the Old IRA who fought to bring down the Treaty. Bertie is shrewd and pragmatic. He has an acute political instinct. He was able to read the north and tread lightly on its delicate egg shells. He approached it with a genuine desire to achieve peace, not some pre-imagined political outcome that would please the greener wing of Fianna Fáil. And he didn't prejudge the other political actors, British, Unionist or Republican. He treated every man or woman as an equal. And he had honed his deal making skills in partnership talks. On top of all, he was a decent, likeable man. The result was stunning and the photo of his handshake with Ian Paisely is one of the most memorable images of any Irish Taoiseach. For all of this alone, Ahern's legacy is safe.

Ahern had extraordinary success in building a solid, modern political party from the ruin of two decades of infighting. The party had lost its way, and he put them back on track. The same ability to coax a consenus was magnificent there too. He united a fragmented party, and his personal, ordinary manish appeal made him popular with the nation at large. He drank pints, not Chateau Margaux; he was a lover of Man U, not a conaisseur of Rembrant; he lived in a semi-D, not a manor house.

That his parliamentary party are showing signs of fatique, and even arrogance is a symptom of success. Ahern's achievements for his party, which include 3 election wins in a row, are all the more astonishing for having happened in an era of fragmented interests, and competing loyalities. He leaves behind by far the best organised, most efficiently run, and most successfully modenised political apparatus in Ireland. Fianna Fáil scientifically burrowed into the unconquered corners of PR with STV. They became experts in vote management. They became media savvy, tuning in to the new obsession with, and necessity for, slick PR. Message, grooming, make-up.

Ironically those instincts which seal his place in history made him a poor leader in other ways. Ahern never seemed to take decisions. He would either wait until the decision was affectively taken already, or no decision at all would be taken. He never articulated any vision for Ireland in time to come, never outlined in detail what he wanted for his country in any sphere. There were slogans, peace and prosperity, more to do, but that's as far as it went. Even after 11 years with unprecedented financial resources at his disposal, no significant project is marked with Ahern's fingerprint: not in Health, not in education, not in transport. Ahern simply doesn't do vision. And in his wake our key public services lie creaking under the strain of antiquity, begging for reform.

In his cabinet too, his instinct was to offend as few as he could. Reshuffles had no meaning. This put a huge question over whether he rewarded talent or just kept people happy. As his grip on power weakened, and after a terrible, though ultimately successful, third campaign for government, Ahern resorted to doling out jobs for all and sundry. He expanded the number of junior ministries and multiplied the chairs and vice chairs of committees. Everyone he'd hoped, would be happy.

Ahern's term in office coincided with an extraordinary recovery in the Irish economy. Not much of this can be attributed to Ahern: the economy had already been set on a path to recovery, the Us and Britain were experiencing unprecedented booms, interest rates were low and energy was cheap. Moreover, much of the low tax strategy can be attributed to the PDs, and certainly not Ahern. The causes of the Celtic Tiger will be debated endlessly, but no matter. In the end, Ahern ultimately presided over a government that got the cardinal point right in matters economic: do no harm. And on top of that, his team done a lot of things right. Some people talk of the Clinton Boom in the Us. Bertie Ahern has at least as good a claim on the boom during his tenure as President Clinton has on the American surge in the 90s.

But Ahern missed or wilfully ignored other changes that were happening in modern democracies. People are no longer happy to hear pronouncements from Ministers or recieve curt replies from government agencies. Citizens are now informed and demanding. They know how things work and they want decisions explained and reasons given. Many government agencies have moved in this direction, in the inevitable tide of modernisation that has washed over democracies in the internet age. But Ahern himself always treated transparency with no little contempt -- his government gutted the Freedom of Information Act. What are all these explanations about, why should he have to answer to the media? He justed wanted to get on with the job, after his own manner. Conventions, such as the manner in which the Dáil is dissolved or new positions announced, were set aside willy nilly. In other words, Bertie governed with his own system, not the one that previous generations have honed. Like many leaders who are given a long run at the helm, Bertie began to treat the whole apparatus of government like his own little fiefdom: to hell with tradition, he would do as he pleases, and it was nobody's business to ask questions.

It is always wrong for senior office holders to take large donations. It is wrong now, it was wrong in the 90s. That everyone was at it, and that it was the culture of the time is a defence, but a weak one. The inherent risk of bribery and the obvious damage which can ensue for democracy has always been known. The McCracken Tribunal didn't invent Ethics. But even if it was acceptable then for a finance minister to receive enormous donations, it is not acceptable now. Ahern straddled two eras - the pre and post Haughey, and in the end those worlds collided. He stated after McCracken and the Haughey affair that office holders should not compromise themselves by taking money. He had done just that and was snared by Mahon. His response was a web of obfuscations and inventions that brought both hilarity and insult to the Irish people. Each new revelation wore another layer off his famous Teflon until eventually his denials looked naked.

In the end he, and undoubtedly his senior colleagues, realised the wisest course was to pass on the baton. And his exit is far more graceful than an ugly, prolonged defiance after the tipping point had been reached.

Oidhreacht Bhertie: Freagra don Spailpín

2008-04-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Seo freagra beag gearr ar an alt seo a scríobh an Spailpín Fánach ar imeacht Bhertie.

Aontaíom le cuid mhór a scríobhann an Spailpín: nach duine olc é Bertie; gur imir an freasúra calaois nuair a cháin siad é tar éis an toghcháin in áit é a dhéanamh i rith an fheachtais féin; gur iontach é an t-éacht a rinne sé i gcur chun cinn na síochána sa Tuaisceart.

Ach scríobh peann uasal an Spailpín é seo freisin: [nuair a bhí Bertie] ina Thaoiseach bhí an tír níos saibhre ná mar a bhí riamh.

Tá an ráisteas sin fíor, gach aon fhocal de. Go deimhin, bhí Éire ní ba shaibhre nuair a bhí Ahern ina Thaoiseach. Ach ní hionann é sin is a rá gur Ahern féin nó aon rud a rinne sé a ba chúis leis an rath seo. Mar a tharlaíonn sé, is dóigh liom go bhfuil sé deacair lorg Ahern a fheiceáil ar eacnamaíocht na tíre seo ar chorr ar bith.

Islíodh rátaí cánach go mór. Bhí seo ar siúl sula dtáinig Bertie i gcumhact agus ba iad na PDs is mó a raibh sé mar fhealsúnacht acu dearg-ísliú a dhéanamh ar an cháin.

Tá roinnt rudaí seachtranacha freisin a raibh baint acu leis an tíogar: rátaí isle úis san Eoraip, ola ar phraghas íseal, agus borradh mór millteach in eacnamaíocht Mheircéa.

Anuas air sin tá cúiseanna eile taobh thiar den tíogar: an déimeagrafaic a bhí ag baint le hÉirinn sna nóchaidí - go leor den daonra óg, go leor ban nach raibh ag obair ach sásta dul amach ag obair de réir a chéile. Bhíomar ag baint tairbhe as an leathnú mór sa chóras oideachais - borradh ar an líon daoine a chríochnaigh dara léibhéal sna seachtóidí is sa líon daoine a chríochnaigh triú léibhéal sna hochtóidí.

Anois, tá go leor leor rudaí taobh thiar den tíogar, agus tá an lucht eacnamaíochta ag troid faoi go fóíll. Sea, is cinnte go bhfuil an t-uafás cúiseanna taobh thiar de. Fiú amháin an dóigh ar éirigh leis an IDA agus Entreprise Ireland a gceird a fhoghlaim go bhféadfáidís comhlachtaí móra meiriceánacha a mhealladh.

Rud amháin a raibh Ahern páirteach ann: an chomhphairtíocht shóisialta. Arís tá an gaol idir Ahern agus rath na tíre de bharr na comhphairtíochta iontach doiléir. Murach é, an dteipfeadh ar an phróiséas go hiomlán? An féidir bheith cinnte nach mbeadh aontú éigin i gceist? Agus anseo arís tá ceist mhór faoin mhaith a rinne an chomhpháirtíocht de réir mar d'imigh an aimsir. Agus ní bhíonn i gceist ach cuid bheag de cheadatán den GDP gur féidir a rá gur de bharr an phróiséis atá sé.

I dtaca le comhpháirtíocht is cóir a rá freisin go raibh próiséas eile ann, mar atá An Tagarmharcáil (Benchmarking). Is cinnte go neachaigh an próiséas seo thar fóir agus gur chuir sé go mór is go scannalach le costaisí na séirbhíse poiblí. Ní raibh aon chinnteacht ann, nó aon choinníoll go mbeadh na hardaithe móra ag brath go dlúth ar Athleasaithe a bhí (agus atá) ag teastáil go géar. Sa deireadh thiar thall ní dheacaigh an Tagarmharcáil chun leas na tíre.

Mar sin, ní fhéadfainn aontú le mo chara, An Spailpín Fánach, gur cuid d'oidhreacht Bhertie é an tíogar ceilteach. Cosúil le Clinton, agus b'fhéidir Blair, bhí Ahern san áit cheart ag an am cheart ó taobh cúrsaí eacnamaíocht de. Déanfear trácht go deo sna leabhair staire ar an Clinton boom, agus iontu freisin tá seans maith go luífidh Ahern agus an Tíogar Ceilteach san aon abairt amháin. Ach titeann an dearcadh seo ó chéile nuair a amharctar ar na firící le súil ghéar.

Remembering Meena

2008-04-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy I used to stay over at my Granny's small farm every summer. One summer when I was there I paid a visit to my aunty Philomena -- we called her Meena -- who lived nearby with her husband, John. I think it was 1980, making me 7 at the time. It was a glorious day so Meena took me for a walk to Peter's Lough, which was just over the hill. The walk to the lake was delightful - it took us along a quiet back road, where the only stir was the busy hummmmm of the bees, hovering impatiently over the wild flowers in hedgegrows, or the ocassional chirp overhead. The air was sweet with the scent of summer, and as we went, I plucked at the long grasses that hung out into the road to greet us.

As we turned in towards the lake I noticed a huge rock in the middle of a small round field. There were no other rocks around it, just one giant, rounded boulder dominating the little field. "Where did that stone come from?" I wondered. "Fionn McCool threw it from the top of Breesy mountain, and it landed there" Meena explained. I looked towards Breesey and then at the stone. To dispel my doubts she continued "You see that big hole in the side of it - that's the track of his thumb". I was convinved.

Meena lay down by the lake to soak up some rays, while I waded into the shallows. The shore of the lake was sandy like the beach at Murvagh, and lovely and soft on the feet. I remember looking down at the sunlight playing on the water, and feeling the sand swirling over my feet. "Don't go out too far" Meena warned "there's leeches where it gets deep".

"Leeches?" I wondered.

"They're wee boys like worms and they'd go up into your foot".

"And then what?".

"They go up your leg".

"Jesus" I said, stepping back to safety.

Meena loved the sun, she knew it made her look prettier, and she would grow an inch when someone complemented her tan. She was in her late twenties at the time and a consumate socialite. People loved her company and she had an enormous, admiring circle of friends. She was good crack. She was dependable. She was always very kind to her parents and years later, when her own kids came along, she was a devoted mother.

So everyone was shocked when, still only 38, she was taken ill. I recall that my mother said it was the big C. Meena underwent treatment. I remember her visiting us after her mastectomy. My mother hoped that "with God's help that'll be the end of it". But Meena had her doubts "Now Mag, knowing my luck it'll come back". As a teen, I still couldn't grasp the enormity of her ordeal, but even then, I knew it was something terrible. Her phrase was heavy with dread and it burrowed deep into my young mind.

Within a year of her diagnosis Meena lay terminally ill in Sligo General Hospital. The cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and finally to her lungs. She bravely underwent repeated chemo, despite the terrible stress. And she endured great pain while the doctors used giant needles to remove fluid from her lungs. My parents remarked on how she courageously bore her fate, and always kept asking to see her little three year old daughter.

One evening, after the doctors had ruled out any hope, my parents were visiting her. She was in a bad way. While my parents were there the medical staff administered another injection - chemo I think. Her husband John, who had kept a constant vigil by her bedside, had nipped out for a cup of tea. Shortly after the injection, Meena raised her head and asked my father "give me a kiss". My father leant in, and kissed her on the cheek. Then she raised her arm and made a little feeble wave, and said faintly, "Bye bye now". Her head fell back on the pillow and her life drained away. It was as if the angel of death had tapped her on the shoulder and allowed her a few seconds to say goodbye.

Even now, the mystery of how she knew that death was upon her gnaws at the very root of my conception of the world. Seventeen years later, I still feel the intensity of my family's grief. How one day, when I met uncle Pat crying, I knew. And for days, words went out of use.

When I think of Meena I always remember the trip to the lake, and I recall the face of the big stone, and something makes me want to go back, to climb in over the hedge, to kneel at the stone and feel the imprint of Fionn McCool's thumb.