Crapitalism at The Irish College of General Practice

Its actually a word crapitalism. Def:

"Use of political favor, force, or position to benefit a for-profit business, but calling it "free-market". Similar to "mercantilism"

This morning I had an email from the ICGP informing that there is a significant delay in processing the MICGP-AR applications due to the apparently unexpected large volume of applications.

For those who don't know Minister Reilly is busy working on the finishing touches to "Free" GP Care for everyone in the Audience. Effectively turning all patients into medical card patients.

Only those on the Specialist Register can see medical card patients, therefore the pressure is now on all GP's on the General Register to transfer to the oxymoronic Specialist Register for Generalist Practice.

The Medical Council refer all such applications to the ICGP and Membership of the ICGP is the gateway to the Specialist Register.

So the ICGP have come up with the MICGP-AR (Alternative Route)which would be more appropriately called the MICGP-PR. This is the back-door to College Membership for mugs like myself and a thousand others who trained abroad. The Fee for the MICGP-PR (MCQ and viva) is €7000.00 Euro, and guess what... The college is overwhelmed with applications.

Hurry Hurry. Bigger than Harvey Normans Sale!

GMS contracts €7000.00 For a limited time only. If you dont buy one .. You may be out of a job real soon!

What a great little country!

The Green Disease

If one was to assert in words or rhyme
that the greens are the cause of ecology's decline
The birds and the bees, the leaves on the trees
would undoubtedly declare one to be out of ones mind

Some months ago when I was a member of the Green party, I recall a meeting (one of many) with Trevor, a man whom I admire more than I dislike. Although he is not the leader of the Green Party, Trevor is undoubtedly the crown-less regent of the Irish Greens. He maintains a hold over the minds and the hearts of most green party members. Most within the Environmentally conscious community can readily recall how he quixotically resigned his ministerial post in the last government following allegations that he had interfered with due process. It emerged (or was leaked to the paparazzi)  that in his capacity as a Minister he had written to the Gardai in support of one of his constituents who was involved in a criminal matter.

Sargent is undoubtedly a man of high moral character, chances are it was the media who were interfering in a good process, and that the then Minister's motives were morally sound, if not politically misguided.  One cannot help but have an admiration for someone who might act with their conscience rather than the usual squint being focused on a political career.  A cynic might declare however that Sargent is more intelligent than he is moral, and that he was simply waiting for the first opportunity to end his own involvement in the illicit affair with the political prostitute that was once Fianna Fail.  That he wisely wished to get his trousers on and flee the crime scene before the inevitable pounding of an angry reality upon the bedroom doors of Lenister House.

A voting public might also recall how Trevor resigned the leadership of the party when the Greens went into government with Fianna Fail; keeping his word that he would 'never lead the Party into Government with Fianna Fail.  Sargent is either of impeccable moral character, or he is a shrewd and clever politician, who is not only capable of smelling rats, but of being the first to join them in jumping ship when the sea water starts to rush in.  Forever the optimist, I am inclined towards the former conclusion but am ever wary of the latter.

These days Trevor is noticeably absent from the top table at most Green gatherings. Although unwilling to lead the Greens into government with Fianna Fail, he has apparently chosen to join most of his former Ministerial cohort and quietly live out their lump sums in political obscurity. Unlike the bevy of bankers and Fianna Fail ministers who have chosen to float from stormy Irish political waters into the calmer climes of a Mediterranean yacht or villa, Sargent has taken the good counsel of Voltaire and has chosen to 'tend his garden'. To focus on his horticultural skills, gardening-publications, and the good work that flows from the National Ecology Centre at Sonnairte.

If there is any suspicion to be levelled at Sargent it arises from the fact that he has chosen to take a back seat and to watch as his party and the Green movement in Ireland slowly disintegrate and disappear from the political landscape.  His gardening and scribbling, calls to mind that familiar phrase of Moore, about the triumph of evil when good men choose to do nothing.  When the Party is in dire need of leadership that has some moral and ethical foundation, Trevor is pruning apple trees.

If  there is a lack of support for Sargent or the Greens in general, it is because the same political failures sit at top table and continue to preside over; the ongoing destruction of  Irish ecology and our worsening global ecological crisis. Seeking votes for the Greens with the same personalities at the helm, is akin to asking people to deposit their savings in Anglo with Seany Fitz as the CEO.  The Green Party's response to these unfolding tragedy's is not with contrition or introspection, neither do they give voice to the anger and despair felt by most of the ecologically aware members of Irish society; but rather with a closing of ranks and the same failed leadership at the helm of a rapidly sinking ship.

The on going consequence of this closing of ranks, this protection of the old school and old guard, of pensioned ministers and former MEP's; is the loss of many members of real calibre, and a million potential voters, who are not blind to the lack of accountability.  Sadly we witness the impotent fracturing of the Green voice into small ineffectual environmental factions. These small voiceless groups are scattered about the country, left to fight; Governments, Multinational Corporations, and vested interests, in doomed contests to; save our bogs, protect our beleaguered ecology from the horrors of fraking, of small and large scale pollution and the destruction of habitat, heritage and species.  In the midst of our recession, with the ongoing hunger for 'jobs at any price', the environment is now easy prey, it has no chaperon, no voice and little if any hope.

In conversation at this particular meeting, in recognition of the loss of many party members Trevor stated  that:  "the Green Party is bigger than individual personalities", and I persisted in my membership of the party because I believed him.

I am however, a realist and a pragmatist, I have always believed that the way forward is principally composed of the shortest distance between two points. If  I am guilty of romance it is in the love I have for great men and women who have passed, who have never known me, but have left an indelible mark upon the landscape of western culture, upon the landscape of science and literature, and upon the landscape of my own immortal soul, (what ever that is when its at home).

I have a romantic love for my heroes, for; Joyce, Beckett, Freud, Marks, Tolstoy Dostoevsky, Nietzsche Kafka and others, and despite Nietzsche's understandable scorn for nationalism, I have a love for my country, and hence for Padraig Pearse whom I believe to have been a Christian, an Uberman, a saviour of the scant physical and cultural remnants of our Gaelic, Celtic, and pre-Christian philosophical heritage.

In a practical sense I believe that these things are important, they are important because humanity has lost its way.  Humanity has set itself upon a consumptive and materialist path that leads towards catastrophe and mass extinctions. A path that has the horrific side effect of rendering us more and more stupid as we proceed further down its yellow bricked paving.  In a practical sense whatever one thinks of  Pearse, of the rebellion of 1916, or of nationalism in general; the ideals that Pearse put to the fore of his particular struggle, were and remain the antithesis of capitalism and materialism.  They are the antithesis of what Ireland has made of her independence.

In essence my romance, my love for intelligent men and women, my love for Ireland, is contained within the rather pragmatic belief that within these things, within Joyce's Ulysses, within the environmental and cultural ideals that spurned Pearse to his execution; within the alternate world of of the Irish language, within the good counsel of Emerson and Thoreau, and buried within the archaeology of what separates pre-Christian philosophy from the capitalism of modern Catholicism; there can be found the seeds of hope, the seeds of a salvation not just Ireland, but for the human race in its entirety. 

What stands in the way, what bars us from seeing here, is ignorance and small mindedness, the intellectual contraction that accompanies globalisation. The stupefaction of the masses (Yes Lord Sugar!) and the increased materialism that accompanies this contraction in our intelligence.  That is not to say that the more materialistic one is the more stupid one is (although the point might be argued) from my own perspective I am of the conviction that the more materialistic one is in ones thinking, the less intelligent one is, the less philosophical one is, and as such the more stupid one is in ones behaviours.

We behave stupidly when we are ignorant of an alternative.  We must be kept in ignorance if we are to continue to be good consumers (that is the job of RTE) and consumption is at the heart of environmental destruction.  This ignorance of the alternatives that lie buried within our rich environmental, cultural and intellectual heritage, is the same entity that Joyce referred to as 'GPI' (General Paralysis of the Insane). Ironically, this ignorance is not blissful, but is instead the cardinal ingredient to unhappiness meaningless and superfluous consumption.

When the Greens were in government, the present party leader was the then Minister for Energy.  At a Green convention in Wexford this year, the director of the documentary Pipe Down, which follows the Shell to Sea campaign, the sale of our Natural Gas reserves to Shell, and the struggle of locals against the miles of pipeline that are to traverse their lands.  Rather than help arriving from the Green Party, it was the then Minister for Energy and present party leader who signed the eviction orders, turned the blind eye and did the bidding of Fianna Fail.

I am afraid that I have come to differ with Tervor's analysis, and must conclude that the Green Party is no bigger than a few personalities.  That the party is presently dominated by an old guard of  familiar faces who have moulded it into their own corporation, an entity that is primarily concerned about their careers, their pensions and continued aspirations for a political future.

And yet in terms of ethical policy and environmental ideals, the Green Party is perhaps the closest to the hearts and minds of a majority of decent Irish people.  There is (I believe), an ideological continuity  that joins a pre-Christian and Celtic respect for nature, with the ideals of  Pearse, and the core ideals of green politics.  The question the Green party must ask itself is, not how to get new members, but rather, how it has effectively alienated so many? That the 'Emerald Isle' should not be Green in politics is a rich and telling irony.

It is a tragedy that at a time when the environment appears to be haemorrhaging like never before, when the abuses perpetrated upon the Irish and the global ecological landscape are approaching the level of genocide, that this should be the time when the Green party should be upon the brink of extinction?  At the Party's Ard Fheis in Galway recently it was reported that the party may soon have to surrender its head office on Suffolk street.

There are many who might feel that this tragedy is simply 'bad luck' or 'bad planning'. I on the other hand believe that it is a collapse that is condoned by party leadership, by their lacking the honesty to declare that mistakes were made and by exercising some of the same accountability that the Greens have always pleaded for when on the opposition benches.

I suspect this type of accountability  will not be forthcoming, and that the Captains have decided that the ship must go down with both passengers and crew.

In it's present form, were the green party to be operating in the opposite direction, were its ideals and mandate to be the 'destruction of Ireland's ecology' rather than its preservation, it could only be accused of doing a fine job.  At present it's, absence from the political arena, its impotence and the loss of any cohesive environmental movement, translate into two equally unsavoury possibilities. Either the party exists only to serve the personal interests of those at the helm, or it exists to facilitate the ongoing and destruction of environment and the very ideals upon which both it and  the state were founded.

The Divine Afflatus

There is perhaps no better way of describing our modern era other than the manner in which it was described to me by my former professor of anatomy in the elevator at the RCSI in Dublin. 'We are living', the portly, jocular and yet somewhat stern countenance of Professor Monkhouse declared, 'in an intellectual dark age'.   It is a phrase I am constantly reminded of as the evidence for this astute observation becomes more poignant with each passing year.

Nietzsche called for thinkers who might see beyond the horizon of 'good and evil' for 'philosophers of the future'.   The American philosopher Emerson called for a 'poet of the future'. That future brought Emerson, Hemingway, further afield it gifted the Europeans with; Joyce, Beckett, Thomas Mann, the French existentialists and so on.  That same future answered Nietzsche's prayers with Freud.  It is doubtless that Emerson would have immersed himself within Joyce's love of the moment.  His minute and precise dissection of, a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, and his rendering of the apparently banal into the truly sublime, is a clear answer to Emerson's call for us to transcend the myopia of convention and marvel at the infinity that we are a part of.

In Ellmann's definitive biography of Joyce he describes a scene where Joyce and his brother were on a platform at a train station. The pair observe in a passing moment, a woman hurriedly crossing the tracks. Joyce remarks at how that occurrence would take on an entirely different significance, if the woman had been unfortunate enough to have been struck by an approaching train. Each second; before during and immediately after the incident would become invested with a detail that is generally forgotten as soon as it is perceived because that moment lacks a significance for us.

It has taken me more than a single day to read Ulysses and each time I approach the novel I discover more and more; ever new veins of intellectual treasure within it's single day. Doubtless this will be my experience each time I return to the text for as long as I live. Indeed if Emerson's Christian sentiments were to survive Bloom' masturbating in the park and defecating with relish and consummate pleasure, I am sure he would have greatly appreciated Joyce's controlled explosion of a moment into it's constituent infinities. Within this magnificent rendering of the common place, of the pedestrian perambulations of one 'El Bloomo', we encounter the clarion call of the Transcendentalist (whoever he is when he's at home).  We hear the words of Thoreau and the grave admonishments of centuries of Greek philosophy.  For an Irishman to 'know thyself', one could just as easily begin by looking in the cracked looking glass of our humble servant Joyce.

There is of course, for both Thoreau and Emerson, little difference between the lump of compressed carbon one wears upon ones finger and the equally beautiful if not more useful lump that one tosses upon the fire. Joyce was assuredly a capitalist, he enjoyed money and was always short of it, yet neither his wealth nor his legacy were of the material, rather they are of that same substance that Emerson often refers to as 'Soul'.

The world, unfortunately is not ready for Emerson, for Thoreau for Nietzsche. It was not then, it is not now, and one wonders if it ever will be? This is perhaps why philosophy must appeal to the future, for an audience, for delegates and devotees, for the revolutions that might evolve our civilisation towards the practical application of intelligence.

However, where is this future that is so welded to our receding horizons?  This veritable Eldorado, where each age of thinking men and women do send their prayers? As far as I am concerned this appeal to the future is entirely misdirected.  For sure the future will undoubtedly iterate and reiterate the ideals of a Nietzsche and an Emerson.  This stream of consciousness will inevitably find it's Zeitgeist, it's voice as the vision of an era is reborn in it's new skin. This  inexhaustible seam of precious metal will be dragged to the surface in new and more sophisticated vessels. The old truths,of the old masters will say the same things, but in a language and attire that are more familiar to its age. Where once there was God, the philosopher of the future will substitute Infinity.  Where once there was 'soul' the scientist will substitute life.  In place of the mysteries of the universe we shall diet on quantum mechanics, astrophysics, ultimately the same points the same philosophies are being iterated and reiterated over and over again.

The philosopher of today must always look to the future because today he has been the first to climb over that old fence, to escape that old mire. Because he does so alone, because he is, he was, and he must be the iconoclast, the father of revolution he goes to that place alone, and there he must anticipate he future.  The purity of the metal he has brought up from the mine-shaft is inversely proportional to his following.  He can only look to the future for its refinement, for its iteration it's capital investment into an ephemeral truth. How far a nation is from an evolution of its intellect is reflected in the reverence it affords to the philosopher and the poet.

And yet what is brutally distinct this time round, what is entirely different for today's philosophers and poets of the future, is this: 

That they cannot luxuriate in these notions of a future, of a 'next generation' to ignite that torch and carry on this crusade.

Ecology population growth, and the expansion of the human herd, bring a new imperative and altered form to this 'future', one that the past did not and could not have imagined.   Humanity may well be compelled to listen to the voice of catastrophe.  The same catastrophes we meticulously construct, our monuments and temples to the 'old ways'; all may well be lain to waste by the approaching storm.

Should there be a recovery from the disasters we are building, and doubtless there will be in some form. That same future will laugh loudly at our ignorance and our 'old ways' just as we deride the ignorance of the past. Today we have our Pharaohs and our crusades, today we put our fellows into ovens and gas chambers, today we remain as faithful to the ideals of the past, we are ignorant of the deluge approaches from the future.

Where to begin with the idiocies and ignorance's that simultaneously blind and define our age? With medicine perhaps? This enormous farce that we perpetrate upon ourselves. Indeed, the only thing that modern medicine preserves is the ignorance necessary to keep itself alive.

Consider this: which would you rather, illness and happiness, or health and unhappiness? Most of the sensibly sentient would undoubtedly choose the former. Yet what are we saying here other than iterating the reality that illness is entirely mitigated, cured and dispelled by happiness.

How can one label another as relatively sick or unwell if indeed he is happier than ourselves? We are led to believe that healthy people are happy, or at least that they have good reason to be;  yet it is the inverse that is entirely and unequivocally true, that happy people are healthy.

Indeed there is little point to being healthy if one is unhappy.  Many many billions of dollars are wasted upon the ridiculous attempt of trying to make unhappy people healthy, whilst leaving them chained to the same conditions that causes them to be miserable.  Suicide, self destruction quick or slow, this is the primary pathology of our age. Unhappy people invariably engage themselves in the process of 'health-destruction' and all medicine is purely palliative.

It  remains a poignant testimony to both the intellectual paralysis of our age, and the abject failure of modern medicine, that unhappiness (in the western world) is the leading cause of premature death.  Of course it is not recognised as 'unhappiness' but is referred to by the euphemism of 'life-style'

When are we going to get it into out thick heads that people damage their health because they dislike themselves, and they dislike themselves because they are anxious and unhappy. Whether by design or accident medicine has not taken ownership of the concept of happiness.  This ideal once belonged to religion and its forfeit was a consequence of not adhering to this or that particular dogma. Without legal ownership of the ideal of happiness human medicine is simply veterinary. Cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, obesity, all are manifest forms of abuse perpetrated by the self  upon the self as a consequence of unhappiness.

Happy people are happy enough that they do not need drugs to make them happy. One of the crucial ingredients to happiness is freedom. However with freedom comes the implicit obligation to apply that freedom towards happiness. America loves it's freedom, and yet it does not know what to do with that freedom, it has yet to evolve this capacity and remains shackled to 'ownership' and the material.  In the land of the free, the free enslave themselves to a greater degree than anywhere else on earth. They enslave themselves to food, to drugs to the herd, to idiotic notions of success in the eyes of others.

Freedom is wasted to the degree that the world would be a better place if America were instead a nation of slaves, united in labour towards some common purpose, some husbandry of the land or industry. And yet, enslaved as they are Americans unlike the Europeans and the Asians, possess the freedom to think independently.  This remains a crucial distinction.  Even in the fading twilight of American industry, they will undoubtedly be the first to imagine a freedom beyond those liberties they have enslaved themselves to.  Given enough time, enough rainforest, enough oxygen, America might yet evolve a 'new cowboy', a new hero, and a new crusade; one that leads towards a freedom that is free of the old 'freedoms'.

Freedom from dependence, freedom from addiction and most importantly freed from ignorance. Socrates was perhaps the first old fool to remind us that the wisest man is the man who can recognise his own foolishness. Intelligent people are happy, they are as happy as the fool who is ignorant of his ignorance, yet the happiness of the intellectual is relatively free of disease, is relatively immune to dependence.  The intelligent man is identified by his capacity to honestly recognise and remediate his ignorance, and by the capacity for independent thought. To think independently one must be free.

The moment one becomes capable of thinking independently is the moment one obtains the potential for happiness. Independent thinkers make no aesthetic and ultimately no material distinction between gold and brass, the one is hard the other soft; both are equally brilliant when polished and viewed in the light. Those who can think independently garner as much pleasure (if not more) from the blackbird as from an evening at the opera. Those who can think independently will walk with Bloom rest with Thoreau, shout with Neitzsche and iterate in word and deed, the wise counsel of Emerson and the rest.

The Last Days of Finn Mac Cumhal (Chapter 2)

THIS NOVEL HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS OWN BLOG: http://www.dyingireland.blogspot.com