As I write, it remains to be seen whether Ireland will actually pay off the outrageous (banking) debt that has been settled upon us, courtesy of our inept, lame-duck government (itself the product of a rotten political system).

My main point in the discussion–besides pointing out that we are being penalized unfairly–was that civic reform is vital. The public space in Ireland is currently agog with initiatives, most at an early stage of gestation, testifying that a historical opportunity is upon us.

If we leave our public life unmended, darker forces, in my view, will seize the initiative. Besides emigration, political violence is another Irish “solution” to Irish problems.

You can download/listen to the radio show here:

KNPR Radio Discussion

Stay tuned for details of a new online initiative being cooked up by myself and some friends here in Westport. Flickr image by karen horton

Good News from Another Universe

Not exactly high-fidelity since I forgot to take the recorder out of my pocket–but I hope you like it.

Thanks to Dermot and Steve for a great night of music, fun, and smart people. The next event is being held on Saturday, November 20th. See their Facebook page for details.

The Brown Envelope

This story came second in the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Contest. I hope you like it.

flickr image by Conor Pendergrast

This dates from just over half a century ago and the time to consider the poem’s meaning has surely come.

Happily our generation comes out of this interrogation rather well, as the English language, whatever the platform, is livelier and more playful than ever. But I leave it to you to decide–after all, the piece is addressed…

        To Posterity

        When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
        And reading and even speaking have been replaced
        By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
        Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
        They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
        And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
        Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

        -Louis MacNeice (1957)

From Selected Poems

Flickr Image by ‘Quick, like a mule’ (CC Licensed)

I am writing to you to express my deep concern as an Irish citizen about the establishment of NAMA and, in particular, the unorthodox methods being used to establish the value of properties concerned.

Perhaps all concerned are acting in good faith–but there is a great danger that the present and future treasure of our country, of our children and our grandchildren, will be squandered: all in a vain attempt to mitigate the losses of a reckless element.

The thinking of course is that those losses, when realized, represent a systemic risk. That may be so. But the creation of NAMA, like so many responses in this crisis, is ill-conceived and burdensome.

• For one thing, why are stakeholders in our banks not absorbing the losses first?
• For another, why are values being determined as though they will not fall further?
• And, to stop only at three points where a dozen could be made: how immune is NAMA to the “stroke-pulling” that seems endemic to our public life?

I would appreciate you redoubling your efforts to stop NAMA; if you are in support of it, I beg you to reconsider.

Definitions

• Ireland: a functional society trapped in a dysfunctional state
• Globalization: Angelus bell rings in distance while WNYC News plays in kitchen and messages from Iran stack up in office.
• Happiness: kids in bed and cricket on television. (sentimental alternate: playing cricket with kids)

Ireland

• Violent pogroms against Romanian Immigrants in Belfast are linked to Sectarianism: in a divided society, where children are educated apart and never encounter people of other creeds and ways of life, any ‘other’ can seem a threat.
• New pipeline in Mayo may be good or bad–but Shell’s record in Nigeria shows that we need to be sceptical of their intentions
• Could Archbishop Martin of Dublin be the Gorbachev of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland?

A Nicer Film Title

• Fort Apache The Hamptons

A Pop Song Anti-Climax

• Dust Around the Clock (We’re going to dust, dust, dust…)

Outputs

• Redrafting a play on the Dylan Principle: “You do what you must do and you do it well”

Inputs

• Hope Humph would be pleased: I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue is back on BBC Radio 4 with guest chairs, starting with Stephen “No Better Man” Fry.
• Watching “Dancing Skeletons” (Disney, 1934) with the kids. Walt does German Expressionism: David Lynch couldn’t top it.
• Watching “Star War IV” (Lucas, 1977) with the kids. The film now seems a product of post-postwar angst. Consider the central conflict of a death-giving and bureaucratic Military-Industrial Empire versus the ragtag band of a Blonde Superman-child. In the end “Pop USA” wins the day.
• Watching Vincent Browne’s political talk show on TV3 is like watching the party scene in “The Plough and the Stars” (and, as it happens, the country is in a state of chassis).
• Chatshows on RTE since Gay Byrne retired often fail because they are “genre-driven”. The opening segments of, say, The Late Late Show or Saturday Night with Miriam will be ‘light’ come what may–while later segments will be ‘heavy’, again come what may: there is no room for spontaneous evolution of a discusion e.g a political commentator may be determined to be flippant or a pop singer may turn out to be unexpectedly articulate: good hosts adapt and let the conversation grow accordingly, but RTE’s current crop seem unable to ‘trust to the moment’.

Decline of Western Civilization, Ch. CXLVII

• At the bookshop. Assistant: “How do you spell Proust?”
• Probably the rot set in when fishmongers started calling themselves “seafood delicatessens”

At the Dinnertable

• Missus and I agreed over dinner that Herb Caen would have loved Twitter.

Proofs

• A parrot wrangler in Vegas once assured me crows were by far the smartest birds. Here is the proof.

Irish blogger Damien Mulley has helpfully pulled some of the evidence produced by victims into a slideshow: this, mind you, is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Catholic Church in Ireland

View more OpenOffice presentations from damienmulley.

Yes, things are dark here in Ireland, in keeping with our customary winter lightlessness.

Looking back on the Celtic Tiger (which, living in the US for 14 years, I entirely missed) one can see 2 phases in the boom: the first, from 1994 to 2001, was founded on an explosion of potential, a ‘legitimate’ boom if you like; the second, ‘bubble’ phase ran from 2001 to 2007 and was largely built on government-enabled profiteering in construction and related industries. Many Irish banks over-leveraged themselves during this decade and are in big trouble right now: but for government intervention a number of them might have gone under. Consolidation is certainly in the offing.

The fear, as recently expressed in the New Statesman and the New York Times is that the Irish have squandered the gains of the boom years.

The net reality is that quality of life for many people here has improved dramatically, expectations have soared, and the unskilled are being left behind either way.

What to do?

As in the US and UK, don’t rely on multi-nationals or governments. Look again to developing your own potential and the potential of the people around you. That is what fuels sustainable growth: let’s not forget that.

Flickr Image by MissNatalie

Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.

Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.

It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).

On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.

Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.

So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton

The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

In Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues, painter Oskar Kokoschka talks about this curious German word, defined by him as the “panic that breaks out before the closing of a door”

Given its usefully precise meaning, the word has been used in English on occasion: the OED records the following instances:

1963 P. Bracken I Hate to Housekeep Bk. ix. 92: The random housewife is often prone to Torschlusspanik, or fear of being locked in the park at night, after the gates are closed.

1977 Time 8 Aug. 21/3: She was haunted by Torschluss-panik (mid-life crisis).

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Mar. 287/2: Mme de Staël is perhaps history’s most outstanding case of Torschlusspanik: the panic at the shutting of the door.

and our lexicographer ventures beyond the painter to offer a more metaphorical definition:

Torschlusspanik [Ger., lit. ‘shut door (or gate) panic’] A sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the suspicion that life’s opportunities are passing (or have passed) one by; spec. that manifested in an ageing woman who longs to (re)discover the (sexual) excitement of youth, and who fears being left ‘on the shelf’.

Either way, the door closes in two weeks…

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

Image: 10, originally uploaded to Flickr by bartmaguire.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, where the Provisionals came from and where they ended up. A de facto mandate was seized by them when Civil Rights were denied to Catholics in the late 1960s. But they bungled it: rather than defend their people, they succumbed to a harebrained ideological dream, which quickly devolved into death-worship and, more recently, a brutal criminality. The courage of the McCartney sisters reasserted the voice of a decent society too long silenced by shame, fear, and grief. The IRA’s decision may mean, at last, an end to the nightmare.

Link: IRA Statement

Posted: July 29th, 2005