Cunning Hired Knaves

The proud record of Sisters of Mercy resistance to Black and Tan oppression cited by Breda O’Brien in today’s Irish Times is a new one on me, I must admit. It would almost make you forget the fact that the Sisters of Mercy also refused to contribute to a compensation fund for the victims of the Magdalene Laundries, the slave labour institutions that were owned and run by them.

The interesting thing about the Mater Misericordiae hospital -it means Mother of Mercy- is the way the Mercy of the hospital owned by the Sisters is dispensed in exchange for cold hard cash, cf Mater Private. Perhaps readers’ own mothers drove a similar hard bargain. Maybe there are women who present their children with an itemised bill for breastfeeding services.

So there is a tension between, on the one hand, the Sisters’ commitment to ease human suffering and protect Ireland from the brutal forces of Empire, and, on the other, their commitment to the State treating hospitals as private property, the site of capitalist enterprise.

So what if the Sisters’ fight here is not really about abortion at all, but about the forces of Ccmmunism encroaching on private property rights and in particular, the right to make a tidy sum from private medicine?

Breda O’Brien is a member of the Iona Institute: isn’t one of the Iona Institute patrons a founder of the Blackrock Clinic? I wonder.

(Part I.)
(Part II.)

Perhaps the most famous remarks about utopia come from Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism. They come at the end of a passage where he says that civilisation – ‘our property system and our system of competition’- depends on slavery. Culture and contemplation, the making and beholding of beautiful things by country gentlemen, requires other men to do all the ‘ugly, horrible, uninteresting work’. Wilde says that machines should do all the dirty and degrading work, and they should be the property of all, not the select few.

He then imagines some of the practical details of such a society:

 There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.

In other words, electrification. He then asks:

Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Unlike many of his Victorian contemporaries, Wilde does not see civilisation and progress as the same thing. For him, the advance of civilisation is by no means the advance of Humanity, since civilisation depends on slavery: in contemporary terms, on capitalist exploitation. For him, envisaging utopias is a practical affair, one that is concerned with imagining how human needs might be best met. Without the initial image of the kind of society towards which we can strive, we are enshrouded in the darkness of civilisation.

These days, the work of imagining how human needs might best be met is a matter for experts, whose models of how society works and policy prescriptions are untroubled by the matter of ugly, horrible, uninteresting work.

Not because such work has disappeared, mind you. It’s just that if people are engaged in such work, it’s because they are assumed to have made the rational choice to do so. There is no need for Humanity to come into it any more, since society’s priorities are self-evident: balanced budgets, a good business climate, and an entrepreneurial culture.

In the Dáil session on the life and work of Seamus Heaney, People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett, in a thoughtful reflection on the relation between politics and poetry in Heaney’s work, claimed, in reference to From The Republic of Conscience, that Heaney was a utopian.

Whether this is true of Heaney’s poetry on the whole I wouldn’t be able to say. But it does seems true of From The Republic of Conscience, and in the terms Wilde sets out for utopian thinking. One point of contrast is that whereas Wilde is seeking to envision the future, Heaney is retrieving what is already there. There is nothing in Heaney’s poem that doesn’t already exist as part of lived human experience.

Trying to fish out deliberate allusions is something of a mug’s game. Nonetheless I think there’s an interesting comparison to be drawn between the traveller from Shelley’s Ozymandias and the travelling narrator of Heaney’s poem.

In Ozymandias,  the transience of political tyranny is glimpsed, but only at a remove of distance and time, and through the eyes of a traveller ‘from an antique land’, whose only encounter with the ruled is through the act of beholding the sculpture and interpreting the sculptor’s intent in representing the tyrant’s gaze, and whose words are then related by the narrator. In From The Republic of Conscience, however, the narrator speaks unmediated, giving an account of the living people he encountered there, who gazed into his face. If this is a utopia, it is one at which we have already arrived, and from which we can always set sail.

In response to Boyd Barrett’s reflection on Heaney’s utopianism, Ruairi Quinn interrupted, with something of a sneer:

Unlike you, comrade, he lived in the real world.

Could the poem’s line about public leaders weeping to atone for their presumption to hold office, which Ruairi Quinn had read aloud minutes previous, have weighed any lighter on his conscience? The answer is: yes, it could.

Half an hour or so later, Ruairi Quinn spoke about the fact that teachers in the ASTI union had voted No to the Haddington Road proposals. He said:

All of this represents a major impact on ASTI members relative to other teachers. The decision by ASTI to remain outside the Haddington Road agreement and to withdraw from existing commitments means that the protections and benefits of the agreement, including those in regard to security of tenure, are not available to its members. This will be a matter of concern to many teachers and underlines the strong case for reconsideration by ASTI of the situation.

The blunt message to the teachers behind the refined words of the Labour Party minister is clear enough.

It was a bad idea for you to vote No, because now you will lose your job if we see fit, so think again.

In issuing the threat, Quinn was taking advantage of the situation created by the introduction of the Financial Emergency Measures In The Public Interest Act 2013. After the introduction of this Act, unions, including teaching unions, were compelled to sign up to the government’s terms or suffer a unilateral cut to pay and conditions.

To call what happened at Haddington Road an ‘agreement’, as nearly everyone does, is an blatant instance of newspeak that masks the underlying violence. Imagine I turn up at your house and say, I will burn you out of your home unless you hand over the keys of your car. Then, when you hand over the keys, I declare -and you declare- that we have reached an agreement. This was the same dynamic operating in Haddington Road: either you sign up to this, or we impoverish you even further.

If you read the Act itself, it becomes clear that the ‘Public Interest’ cited has nothing to do with the Irish public, but with the meeting of conditions required by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sweden and the Kingdom of Denmark.

The destruction of labour rights enacted by the legislation is not a side effect of the legislation, but an intended consequence. The public ceases to exist as an autonomous body with a democratic form, and is wholly usurped by the capitalist class and its technocrat lieutentants. Education systems are conclusively subordinated to exchange value. This in keeping with the grand vision for Europe shared by people like Mario Draghi and Jean Claude Trichet. And Ruairi Quinn. This, comrade, is the real world.

In May 2010, Ruairi Quinn took to the airwaves of the public broadcaster in support of the Greek bailout. He denounced the “savage demonstrations” that were taking place in Greece in response to the plans to dismantle and sell off Greece’s public services. He told the Irish public of the “far left anarchist movement within Greece”, and lauded the “extraordinary support” that the PASOK government, headed by George Papandreou, was enjoying, with “massive support from the Greek citizens right across the political spectrum”.

The lessons for Ireland were clear, he said.

“Instead of learning to behave like Germans we continued to act like Italians, or should I say Greeks. And that discipline has to be learnt.”

Three and a half years later, the policies implemented in Greece have led to full-blown social catastrophe. PASOK as a political party is a colossal wreck, Papandreou ejected from government after humiliation by the Troika when he tried to give proceedings a democratic gloss via a referendum. Which shows you how trustworthy Ruairi Quinn’s analysis is, and how much you should trust him to take education policy decisions in the best interests of your children.

Ireland, by comparison, has fared slightly better in terms of economic indicators. But that is not saying much about a country with a political establishment committed to the logic of neoliberalism, and precious little by way of an emancipatory discourse that might act as a brake to the destruction of what is public, including the very idea of the public itself.

That emancipatory discourse will certainly not come from the Labour Party, whose JobBridge scheme has effectively abolished real jobs. Under what Quinn describes as the ‘public private partnership’ arrangement, schools are free to contract qualified teachers to teach in schools, but at dole wages. Under the new regime, teaching in a school full time as a qualified teacher is no longer a job, but merely a bridge to a job.

It’s hard to say just what the full scale effect of such an arrangement might be, on schools and the wider communities of which schools are a part, other than that it will be demoralising for teachers and destructive of the social fabric. But this is the real world, comrade, where any aggression against teachers on the part of government ministers is gladly seized on by a right wing media apparatus with a major stake in the privatisation of education and a steady supply of reactionaries to whip up resentment, as we have seen in recent days.

Seamus Heaney thought teaching was a real job. On reflection, perhaps he didn’t live in the real world after all. The real world, comrade, is the Republic of Confiscation.

OK, this is my final word on the Seanad referendum.

I think it will be better if the Seanad is abolished but it won’t make much difference either way. I have not been convinced by people who talk about power grabs and the like. There is no need for a power grab on the part of the political establishment, since it already does the bidding of elite groups quite effectively.
There has been far more commotion generated by the prospect of Seanad abolition than the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest legislation introduced back in May, even though the provisions of that legislation are far more destructive for democracy than anything the abolition of the Seanad might conceivably produce. This is precisely how real elite groups want things to work: let the little people have their occasional feeling of importance, provided they don’t interfere with the real business of running the country.

When Cornel West went to visit Hugo Chávez in Caracas, Chávez came into the room with copies of West’s book, titled ‘Democracy Matters’, seeking his signature. The book had been put on the Venezuelan school curriculum. Its subtitle is ‘Winning the fight against imperialism’. In Ireland, ‘Democracy Matters’ is the name of an astroturf civil society grouping that wants to keep the Seanad. One of its main figures is Michael McDowell, an authoritarian racist liberal who believes material inequality and loyalty to the State are necessary conditions for a properly functioning polity. Here, democracy matters only in so far as it is kept immaterial, and the majority of the political representatives and astroturf groupings on both sides of the referendum question are loyal and unquestioning servants of US and EU imperialism, and gratuitously obsequious to Ireland’s previous imperial master, Britain.

On the whole I think the referendum campaign has worked just as Fine Gael hoped it would: as a distraction from the upcoming budget and as a way of providing a sensation of mass political participation, for those who want it, without it going anywhere important. It will be treated as a reaffirmation of faith in the ballot box and in an Irish public whose main need, as the political establishment sees it, is not to take an active role in the shaping of history but to be appropriately represented, by representatives well accustomed to relying on the silence of the public to get what they want.

At times I saw a near Freemanlike faith, on the No side, in the power of the constitution to operate democratic ‘checks and balances’ (a phrase that, like Freemanism, seems to come from the US). Lots of people genuinely concerned about the concentration of power in the hands of a few unaccountable people appear unaware that the only real democratic protections come from a mobilised and vocal public.

I left this comment on today’s Irish Times article titled ‘Real reform begins with abolition of this House’ by Kevin Rafter.

I don’t know how many times I have been whacked upside the head with the phrases “reform”, “radical reform”, and even “real radical reform” during this referendum campaign, and I haven’t even been paying much attention to the news.

There is an assumption that everyone wants reform. However, rarely is there any probing of the shape that such reform ought to take. Nor does there seem to be any sense that some reforms are good and some are bad, or that there are conflicting material interests at stake when it comes to the reform of political institutions, and that these conflicting interests extend way beyond the matter of a few dozen senators picking up a tidy sum each month at the public expense.

It’s hard to imagine that the same coalition of voices in favour of doing away with the elitism of the Seanad will materialise in favour of a reform that might limit the power of financial institutions over the political process. How many of the figures from the current crop of astroturf civil society groups or Fine Gael backbenchers, would raise their voices in support of an audit of illegitimate and odious debt, for example?

One of the most outlandish claims of this campaign has been Fine Gael’s claim that it is opposed to elitism. That party is the faithful political servant of elite interests in banking and agriculture, and has been so since its formation. Moreover, is the Economic Management Council, with its coterie of handpicked special advisors unaccountable to anyone, not the epitome of an elite?

Yes, the Seanad should be abolished. But the majority of people in the political and media establishments who support its abolition on account of its elitism would sooner eat their own kidneys than challenge the real concentrations of elite power in Irish society.

(Read Part I here.)

When Ruairi Quinn read From The Republic of Conscience in the Dáil, he prefaced his reading by remarking that perhaps Seamus Heaney “had we in this place in mind” when he wrote the poem.

However, the republic of conscience in the poem is not a modern State with discernible political institutions. In Stepping Stones, Heaney says it concerns a state of mind. The poem is, among other things, an ironic reflection on how we are shaped by the State, on the gap between republican ideal and statist fact.

The institutions of the State process your identity, determine your acceptability, order your behaviour and demand your loyalty. If you don’t fit their criteria of acceptability, if you have the wrong parents, for instance, you can be arrested and deported.

In the republic of conscience, however, you are prompted with an image of where you have come from (“a photograph of my grandfather”) and it is left to you to decide how you should proceed.

Whereas a State exists upon a historic claim to a fixed territory, the res publica, the thing in the poem common to all, is conscience: shared conscience of oneself and others.

Perhaps crucially, there is no private property in the republic of conscience (“my allowance was myself”): it isn’t through concerns with property rights that we become citizens, but through mutual recognition, through the encounter of someone else gazing into your face (“The old man rose and gazed into my face / and said that was official recognition / that I was now a dual citizen”).

There are no ‘public private partnerships’.

If the lines about public leaders ‘swearing to uphold unwritten law’ and ‘weeping to atone for presuming to hold office’ are a commentary on politicians, it bears stressing that these things are incommensurable with the modern State, which hinges on the rule of law, permanence, auras of (self-)importance, vested authority and representation.

What it so bad, then, about ‘presuming to hold office’? Note that the sail on the “stylized boat” is an ear. What propels the republic of conscience, then, is the act of listening.

But political representation depends on silence. For the representative to speak, the represented have to be silent.

And ruling politicians will use silence to justify their rule. For example, there is an ongoing education strike in the Balearic Islands. Last Sunday saw the biggest public demonstration in Mallorca’s history in support of it, with tens of thousands of teachers, students, parents, and children donning green t-shirts.

Image: eldiario.es

A tenth of the population – 110,000- turned out in support of the strike. The strike, supported by 91% of teachers and now in its third week, is in response to a decree, from the president of the regional government, that students in primary and secondary schools would learn Catalan, Spanish and English in equal measure.

The president, a Spanish nationalist from the Francoist Partido Popular, had promised during his election campaign to remove immersion in Catalan from public schools, and to give parents the choice between Catalan and Spanish. The effect, he reckoned, would be to do away with the noxious immersion in Catalan.

But when parents were surveyed following his election, it turned out the vast majority of them wanted their children immersed in Catalan. Only 10% wanted immersion in Spanish. So the decree was a manoeuvre to dynamite the immersion in Catalan by other means: under cover of a modernising veneer of learning English.

Never mind that such a measure was totally impracticable anyway: the need to impose national conformity in pursuit of a right-wing economic agenda, in line with the priorities shared by the Troika, overrode any consideration of practicality, let alone democratic consultation and dialogue.

The intention of the president and his party, as El País reported, was to engineer a confrontation between parents and the teachers on strike. They failed. Parent associations across the islands organised 200 buses to bring supporters to the demonstration. There is a widespread realisation that teachers are not taking part in the strike in order to achieve individualised benefits: they are losing around €100 a day in wages foregone, and a popular fighting fund has been set up as a means of compensation.

Over the past couple of years the Spanish State, in the new social climate brought into being after the 15^th May 2011, there has been a wave of mobilisations, known as the Mareas (tides) in defence of what is public, and common to all. In Health, there a marea blanca (white tide). In education, a marea verde (green tide). An alliance has been forged between those who work in these sectors and those who depend on their services, against those -in government and business- who seek to dismantle and privatise what is common to all. Schools, hospitals, health centres: these things are seen as belonging to the people, not to ambitious government officials or private corporations to do with them as they wish.

In response, the president appealed to the authority of silence. Faced with the biggest demonstrations in the history of the islands, he refused the calls for dialogue, and denounced what he said was the “minority” that refused the legitimacy afforded to him by “the silent majority that expresses itself in the polls.”

We can’t know if Ruairi Quinn was concerned with the thorny matter of presuming to speak for others, the potential abuses of power associated with it, and the destruction of what is held in common, when he was reading From The Republic of Conscience. But it doesn’t look like it was on his mind when he spoke in the same chamber, half an hour later, about teachers in Ireland who decided to vote against Haddington Road.

Continues tomorrow.

After Seamus Heaney’s death, the Irish Times sought contributions from its online readers about what Heaney meant to them. One reader recounted meeting him at a reading at Harvard:

After the reading, I joined the throng that inched its way toward him bearing my copy of Opened Ground. When I finally reached him, to my surprise he looked me over and asked, “Ah, now. what do you do.” Flabbergasted, I told him I was a Boston Public School teacher. His response: “Ah, now, that’s a real job.” He scrawled the words, “Keep going” in my book.

Heaney himself, of course, was a teacher. He trained as a teacher at St Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast, and taught at a secondary intermediate, St Thomas’s, in Ballymurphy, West Belfast. He then trained other teachers at St Joseph’s, and when he moved south, got a job teaching trainees at Carysfort College. His wife was a teacher too, as were his sister and brother.

By becoming a teacher, Heaney was taking advantage of possibilities created by the 1947 Education Act in Northern Ireland. In his superb book of interviews, Stepping Stones, Heaney recognised that neither he nor his brothers and sisters would have gone to university were it not “thanks to the system put in place by that Labour government in Britain.”

This isn’t strictly true: the 1947 Education Act, though introduced in Northern Ireland under a Labour government in Britain, was modelled on the 1944 Education Act in England, brought in by R. A. Butler under a Conservative government. However, it’s certainly true that prospects for disadvantaged young people in Northern Ireland in the 1950s were shaped for the better by the building of the Welfare State that occurred under the Attlee government elected by landslide in 1945, so the gratitude isn’t misplaced.

Nonetheless, Stepping Stones reveals Heaney’s unease at the inequalities that the new system imposed: between those who went on to a grammar school education and those who didn’t. In recalling his time spent teaching at St Thomas’s, a school for the supposedly “non-academic”, he saw how “instead of a school where equal attention was paid to all abilities, there was this favoured upper stream and then the great non-academic flow-through. My job, for the year I was in the school, was to teach English at first-year and fourth-year levels, to two of the exam-oriented classes. And I had a PE class with a group of really low-ability first years, 1G, for God’s sake, in a ranking that began with 1A.”

He said the “school was attempting to inculcate a regime of respectability and conformity, a kind of middle-class boarding-school style, but the home culture and the street culture of working-class Belfast was very different”, and recognised “disadvantaged homes and impoverished conditions generally as a barrier to growth and self-realization”.

For all its drawbacks and inequalities, the education system in the North of Ireland for working class children, sustained by gains won by the labour movement in Britain, compared favourably to what was available south of the border.

It wasn’t until 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, that free secondary education was formally introduced in the Republic. But despite its constitutional claim to be a democratic state, the Irish State continues to fund teaching at exclusive private schools. In Enough is Enough, Fintan O’Toole highlights the fact that a fifth of all university students had paid fees at second level in 2008, and that 43% of students at UCD came from either fee-paying or grind schools. The attitude of the current government to education in line with democratic principles can be glimpsed in the fact that the 2012 Finance Bill allowed high earners to write off private school fees of up to €5,000.

In any case, ‘free education’ in the Republic of Ireland is a myth. Parents are forced to pay exorbitant amounts for textbooks. Supposedly ‘voluntary’ contributions are sought from parents to maintain basic facilities. The Department of Education sees nothing wrong with such contributions, provided it is made clear that they are not compulsory and of the parents’ “own volition”. Thus a parent can decide not to contribute to the basic upkeep of her child’s school, if she so chooses. The Minister of Education describes the relation between the State and the patron bodies of schools as a “a public private partnership arrangement”.

What all this means is that universality has no place in Ireland’s education system: the State sees to it that children whose parents lack access to economic resources, or who do not have a third level education themselves, are placed at a disadvantage, and wider society is under no particular obligation to contribute towards the education of other people’s children.

Last week in the Irish parliament, a special session – An Appreciation of the Life and Work of Seamus Heaney- was held. Sincere and mostly thoughtful statements were made by various politicians. The Minister for Education, Labour Party TD Ruairi Quinn, read Heaney’s poem From The Republic of Conscience, in full.

In the current context, in which the welfare state that characterised the post-war settlement in Europe is being dismantled and the Irish government is doing its utmost to conform to Troika demands, the sense of rich educational possibility, in which Seamus Heaney and others flourished, is under confiscation. Education budgets are being slashed and teachers’ unions made to bow to draconian legislation, for the purposes of the wealthy. These brute facts tinge the effusive tributes from Ireland’s political establishment, their acclaim for Seamus Heaney as Ireland’s national poet, with more than a hint of gall.

Continues tomorrow.

I left this comment on Des O’Malley’s article in today’s Irish Times, which is titled ‘Let’s get rid of the sideshow that is the Seanad and focus on what matters’

If Des O’Malley and other erstwhile PDs are worried about the sources of the ‘public disillusionment with the political system’, they may wish to look in the direction of the free market economic doctrine that they so enthusiastically supported, and continue to support. (But they won’t)

The effect of this doctrine has been further concentration of decisive political power in the hands of unelected bodies. It has achieved this through the denigration and dismantling of public institutions. The doctrine followed by the PDs held that health, education, housing, transport and communication should all be provided privately to the greatest degree possible. Public servants were not to be trusted.

Control over these areas has been increasingly concentrated in private hands, safely beyond the capacity of the public to ensure equitable provision. All of the main political parties now share the political and economic perspectives of the Progressive Democrats. They have no intention of using the political system to build public and universal institutions in the interests of equality. Instead they intend to stick with the doctrine.

So the public disillusionment is rather justified.

What the quadrillion or more articles calling for political reform published in the Irish Times since the onset of Ireland’s economic crisis have resolutely left out is the consideration that there are different kinds of political reform.

Political reform can be made in the interests of the working population, or it can be made in the interests of multinational corporations, financiers and so on. In the context of an economic and political crisis that is stripping away job security, welfare state provision and driving down wages and living conditions in the interests of financial capital, it ought to be obvious that any call for political reform that does not deal with the perspective and predicament of the victims of such a crisis, but rather holds forth in general terms about effectiveness, efficiency, policymaking and so on, is fundamentally fraudulent, and on the side of the people making off with the loot.