Re-imagine the Rising. Irish Independent 25/3/2016

Reimagining the 1916 Rising

"What's in the pot?" says the brother skipping in from the field with a bee in his bonnet. "Salad for the stools," says I, "and a bit of bacon and cabbage for the day that's in it."

"By Jaysus, we're gonna be in the silk," he says, rubbing his paws together like a March hare. "And how's that?" says I, cutting the heel off the loaf.

Well, declare to God, he upends the place and fires a tomato and a handful of boiled cabbage at the kitchen wall with a bang and a wallop that sends the auld dog across the lino with a yelp.

"Get me the camera from the top of the wardrobe," he roars. "Be God I will," says I, thinking to meself I'd make the call on the way and get the man seen too once and for all.

So in the hall I pick up the phone but had to put it down again on account of him roaring from the kitchen about hypocrisy, revolution and the history of auld Ireland.

"Have you lost your bearings man?" says I. There he was scratching his chin and contemplating the spattered tomato and broken cabbage dripping down the stone, as if he was looking at high art up in the big smoke. "Whisht," says he, taking the camera, "you know nothing of history! Put your paw on the wall there by the tomato for a bit of scale." Says he, "I'm going to sell this picture to the post office for a 1916 commemoration stamp." "Ah," says I to meself, "the poor craytur is gone."

"This little piece of ballistics," says he pointing the crooked finger to a vein of cabbage on the wall, "this here, me boyo, is a piece of our history that has been conveniently forgotten! Washed and hosed clean from the record like dung from the floor of the milking shed," says he.

"How do ya mean?" says I, with one eye for the telephone.

"Well," says he, "when the founding fathers of auld Ireland were hauled from the GPO, 'twas the tomatoes, the cabbages, and the consumptive spits fired at them by the good people of Dublin that encouraged the Brits to give the lead penny to each and all of them. 'Twasn't Britannia's Huns and her long-range guns that put an end to the Rising and sent the leaders to the firing squad, 'twas the tomatoes and the cabbage.

"If it wasn't for the first and more important firing squad of spits and rotten fruit, sure enough Ireland wouldn't be as free and as happy as she is today. Make no mistake, 'tis the tomato and the cabbage that are the heroes of the story.

"With all the shiny uniforms, the marches, the parades and the 1916 speeches, there should be a statue of a cabbage put outside the GPO and a stamp with a tomato on the front of it.

"That would remind us all that in Ireland a sure sign of a good idea is that the whole country will be against it from the start, and a sure sign that someone is telling the truth is the length of the queue that is lining up to give the craytur a hammering!"

Dr Marcus de Brun

Rush, Co Dublin

How the Left was Lost.

Not since the leaders of the 1916 rebellion were pelted with rotten fruit  by the good citizens of Dublin,  has there been a better indictment of the intellectual character  of the masses than the 'Right 2 Water' campaign.

This ostensibly grass roots movement, might be readily dismissed, were it not for the numbers have been taken in by what might be described as an elaborate front for Anarchy Ireland.  

This is not the type of Anarchy that Wilde might have described in his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, rather it is the type of anarchy that is defined by violence, by shouting insults at politicians, surrounding their cars at political venues, by threat and intimidation. This type of violence is for its own sake, for the sake of anger and the destruction and vandalism of private and public property.  |It is the same anger that is directed at social housing by many of the inhabitants of social housing, it is an anger at 'the other' the imagined cause of inequality and perceived inferiority. This is the face of Anarchy Ireland. Beneath its banner we find other groupings such as the Anti Austerity Alliance, People Before Profit and others who claim to be representative of the 'left' in Irish politics.

It is the presence of this angry mob, sitting alongside the political wing of the IRA and between them the political face of a corruption  and nepotism that caused our recent economic  collapse that is the current schizophrenic face of contemporary Irish politics. 

In reality when one considers individuals like Jeremey Corbin in the UK or the Gurus of contemporary European Leftist ideology such as Zizek, Chomsky, Renata Salecl and so on, one can quickly realise that there is no Left in Irish politics.  It is this absence of a left that is the cause of our current instability. That is not to say that an entirely Left politics is what is needed, the conflict between left and Right is the fundamental political discourse and it represents the entirely essential thought process that that politics must engage with in order to fairly and intelligently address social, economic, ecological and even humanitarian problems.

If we are to  achieve political stability we have no choice but to live in the old house until the new is built , until we can evolve the mature and viable left alternative that is necessitated by our present economic state and our position within the European Union.  This process may have begun with the trashing that labour has taken in the recent election and a new more left labour is indeed an inevitability.  However, in the interim a dangerous insatiability in Irish politics arises from the fact that the 'right' is not balanced by a left but rather by Anarchy Ireland, Fianna Fail and the political wing of the IRA.



Don't act. Think!

The Fall of Labour

The current lack of 'living leftist ideology' (of the Corbin type) within the Irish labour party resulted in its becoming indistinguishable from, and compliant with  its partner in Government. For this reason it has been dismissed as a Leftist alternative  to the right into which it had morphed.

There is nothing strange in this chameleon like behaviour of Labour.  The cycle of swinging from Right to Left and back again is a necessary oscillation that keeps Labour  in near perfect synchronicity with the political imperatives of the boom bust cycle of modern capitalism. When the economy is booming Labour should be more Right and when it is not booming Labour should be more Left, nothing strange in that. 
 
Unfortunately for Ireland the last election elected labour politicians who were themselves the right wing relics of the boom years, and hence their failure to deliver or champion an alternative to the same old same old. The economic collapse happened too quickly for Labour to morph into is more left wing costume.  Labour was caught with its trousers down and was wearing the wrong underpants.  It is now paying the price and will be shopping for a new costume to wear to the wake of the next government.

Presently the absence of a Left in Ireland is most evident  in our dysfunctional social systems where we encounter the bizarre marriage of extreme capitalism and extreme socialism. A recent European Commission report on the Irish health system points to the fact that second only to Denmark we have the most expensive health system in Europe and yet we are ranked third from the bottom by the OECD. With the longest A/E waiting times in the whole of Europe.

One interesting fact highlighted by the Commission is the fact that the drugs budget in Ireland represents one of our biggest expenses with 80% of our drug spend going to "one supplier". The situation in Ireland is rendered even more ridiculous when one considers that despite the fact that most of our taxes are spent on a public health system, we must pay for that system again at almost every interface. Also the fact that 40% of the population have so little faith in the dysfunctional nature of our public system that they pay for private health insurance ON TOP of their tax spend. is an ongoing indictement of the political establishment.  A major failing here is the influence of the private interests upon the public system, the power of drug companies to prevent the imposition of a state formulary rather than the present situation where 80% of medicines have a single and very politically influential supplier

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/state-criticised-over-healthcare-costs-in-eu-report-1.2560847

One might argue that in Ireland we have never really had a true left, that the state has never truly had the courage to question itself to the extent that a real and visible leftist political ideology might evolve, beyond an imitation of the British Labour movement.  Ireland has never really had a Left because Ireland has not until recently had the economic wealth that ,might allow us to afford ourselves a the  criticism of  capitalism that the left insists upon.
 The tragedy is not  that Labour has been exposed as being as right wing as that which it was supposed to be challenging, but rather in what now remains in opposition to the same old same old. This is Anarchy Ireland, the rise of the political wing of the IRA, thuggery for the sake of thuggery, and the increasingly 'fresh' view which asserts that Fianna Fail were 'not so bad' and whenever they are in power at least 'they do something for the people' like bus passes and more in the pension. 

From this perspective although Left in my own political thinking I feel entirely compelled to leave things in the hands of the Right, of established politics of the same old same old, at least until our new house has been built, or at least until the plans are drawn and we have sourced a builder.

Thus we are presented with a most unstable political system in a time of great international instability and unfolding ecological and humanitarian disasters. Despite a long proud cultural and intellectual heritage, we in Ireland can contribute nothing to the Humanitarian crisis that is sweeping across Europe, we can contribute nothing to the debate on Global ecology despite our being in ownership of almost one quarter of the European Union's oceans.  We can contribute nothing to the global debate on food production despite the fact that agriculture is one of our areas of consummate expertise. We can contribute nothing to the resolution of international wars and conflicts despite the fact that a strong central government with the support of the Irish people could easily and diplomatically  end the refuelling of American War planes in Shannon and send a clear message of peace and neutrality towards the wars and conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.  In short we can contribute nothing to the ills of humanity until we can get our own house in order. Until we can have a balanced political regime with an agreed set of national and international objectives. For this we need constitutional and political reform and for this we need leadership and direction.  Be it left or right, presently we have neither, only an insecurity and political uncertainty that is being capitalised upon by the fringe, by the dark and truly embarrassing elements of the Irish political spectrum.

The regrettable morphing of Labour into the ideology of Fianna Gael, and  the sheer lack of conflict during that coalition of supposed opposites, bears testimony to the reality that the ideological space (as opposed to the fiscal space) is the real commodity that is lacking within Irish politics.  Ultimately what is being exposed is not the lack or the compromise of Labour's left ideals but rather the absence of  intelligent and focused left ideals in the personage of labour politicians. Whilst Anarchy Ireland and Sin Fein can easily mirror back to the electorate an attractive anger and frustration with the same old same old; the formal Left, the Labour party proper has failed to harness that anger to fuel Leftist ideology because it has lost touch with that ideology, and this disjunction between the formal left and the ideology of the Left (as manifest in Europe and elsewhere) has left a vacuum that can now be filled by anger  alone.




As one of our finest and most often over looked social theorist Desmond Fennel often writes, the absentee in Irish society(and political society is no different) is thought or ideology.


In the absence of a legitimate, ideological and educated left,  we remain socially and politically paralysed. Politics must now contend with the rise of an elaborate front for Anarchy Ireland an unproductive mirror image of our own anger and frustration at our national paralysis. That which Joyce referred to as our GPI (General paralysis of the insane).


New so-called  'Lefties' with little to offer other than the time honoured mantra of the confiscation of wealth from the wealthy and its distribution to the less wealthy (an ostensibly attractive ideal stretching back to the stone age) serves now to paralyse the right, which would at least afford us the leadership needed to navigate the ecological, humanitarian and economic crises that are unfolding around us.