Cunning Hired Knaves

I left this comment on the article by Roy Foster in today’s Irish Times, which is titled State visit seals the end of an era for Ireland, in which the historian discerns that the ‘two countries finally see each other as indeed separate but equal, in a mutually fulfilling relationship. Nearly as good as sex.’

There is a kind of neat echo, in the Professor’s climactic ejaculation here that the relations between Britain and Ireland are now ‘nearly as good as sex’, of Michael O’Leary’s crude joke last week in front of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, about having sex with the Queen, which provoked revulsion among those assembled.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

-George Orwell, Animal Farm

I think that’s enough for today. I have just turned off the Liveline programme on RTÉ Radio. Callers were discussing the suit worn by Michael D. Higgins on the State visit to the UK. Earlier, on the Sean O’Rourke programme, guests were discussing the outfits worn by Sabina Higgins and the Queen of All That Is. Apparently if it is a windy day, Sabina Higgins may have to wear some pins in order to keep her hat on. Everything was weighed up in terms of its significance: the music, the military displays, the horses, the hats. Indeed, I doubt I’ve ever heard the word “significant” used so often in such a short space of time as I did on the Sean O’Rourke programme this morning. Eminent historian Roy Foster, called upon to put everything into perspective, was asked how significant the State visit was. He was asked if it was significant that the first State visit came from Britain, and not the other way round. Yes, said Roy, this was immensely significant.

You know something is significant when they get Roy Foster on to signify how significant it is by saying “it’s significant”. But that it is significant is far more significant than whatever it is that the signifier signifies. Got it? No?

OK. What is the significance of all this significance? Or to put it another way, what sort of system of signs are we being confronted with here?

Let’s start with a few basics. Michael D. Higgins is the President of Ireland. He is on a State visit to the United Kingdom. That means, in constitutional terms, that Michael D. Higgins is representing the people of Ireland in an official encounter with the…well, the Queen. The people of Ireland, so it goes, have sent Michael D. Higgins to represent them, and the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales have sent the Queen to…wait a minute, I don’t think that’s written down anywhere. The Queen is not doing anything on behalf of her subjects; rather, she is doing it because she is the Queen. It’s a pity Lord St. John of Fawsley isn’t still around to resolve these thorny questions.

Anyway, as The Guardian in the UK notes today, Michael D. Higgins is officially the head of democratic and republican Ireland. That means, for those who take these things seriously, that when he visits UK on a State visit, and he stays at Windsor Palace, he is doing so on behalf of each and every citizen of Ireland. If you are a citizen of Ireland, this means that it is as good as you yourself sleeping in the Queen’s bed, and drinking her brandy. The significance of this, to the people of Ireland is: if you’re ever in the vicinity and the Queen is in town, she’ll put you up for a mighty night’s craic. If you are ever evicted in London, I encourage you to try this some time, to check out how much the signified corresponds to reality.

Absent from all this talk of significance, apart from the most superficial of references, was the question of the intended target of this significance. To whom were these things supposed to signify stuff? A generous interpretation would be that mystical imaginary body commonly known as “the Irish people”, who, it turns out, are pretty much the same “people” that existed back in the day of Queen Victoria, when, according to Roy Foster, it was only “extremist nationalists” (his words), such as Maud Gonne, who objected to the relation of a subject people to its monarch.

Various Irish people had their views sought by RTÉ on the significance of Michael D. Higgins’s visit. Many others had their views represented by RTÉ broadcasters. As they put it, it must have been very significant for them to see their Head of State come to Britain. But wait. Most Irish people in Britain didn’t vote for Michael D. Higgins as ‘their’ Head of State. If you emigrate from Ireland, you lose the right to vote in the country’s elections. It has been a feature of Irish ‘democracy’ that the material deprivation that drives emigration goes hand in hand with basic political disenfranchisement.

A TV documentary is running on RTÉ at the minute titled ‘A Sovereign People’. Last week, a judge was talking about the 1916 Proclamation. He pointed out, quite rightly, that the language of the document, with its emphasis on the citizen, stood opposed to the political discourse of the subject that had hitherto prevailed under the colonial power. Whereas the subject, the royal or imperial subject, in these terms, was passive and obedient, the active citizen was the central figure of popular sovereignty. This kind of citizenship necessarily entails dispute, argument, conflict: qualities utterly absent from RTÉ coverage of the State visit, and from its political coverage more broadly. Instead, the RTÉ listener could hear Olivia O’Leary effuse about how “we” had given the Queen a great welcome to Dublin. Which is why An Garda Síochána put Dublin on lockdown for the duration of her visit.

These days, the significance of citizen poses problems for the declaration of equal rights enshrined in the 1916 proclamation. What now comes to the fore, in these post-sovereign days, is merely the question of who is a citizen and who is not, or more broadly, who is Irish and who is not, and how that distinction can best be drawn.

Who should be first in line to have their entitlement to health and welfare withdrawn? Who is useful to economic growth, and who is not? Who should be locked up and deported, and who should be allowed to move freely? These are the real shared concerns of the Irish and British ruling classes. What is rendered absent, from the generally sympathetic representation of Irish people who were once the object of suspicion, exclusion and surveillance in Britain, is the fact that this apparatus is now trained on other sectors of British society, particularly British Muslims, and Muslims more generally, but also migrants from places such as Romania and Bulgaria.

In this scenario, it comes naturally to Ireland’s media establishment to identify the Irish in Britain as their own, as part of the ‘diaspora’, and to go as far as identify the achievements of these people as the achievements of Ireland, whilst turning a blind eye to the processes that landed them in Britain in the first place, and to the fact that these people have been altogether excluded from Irish political life. Michael D. Higgins will be paying a visit to Irish people whose labour helped build the National Health Service; the bitter irony is that Ireland has never had one, and the British establishment represented by the Queen is dismantling it anyway.

Instead of these live political concerns, we have the image, conjured up by people like Roy Foster, of two peoples being “separate, but equal”, at the very same time that popular sovereignty in both islands is little more than a sick joke, with financial and economic elites destroying the public institutions and services and social protections that were built by generations of British and Irish people. And beneath all this, it as if there is a secret celebration underway that the Irish, or at least, the Irish people who matter, have now become fully white in the eyes of their former masters.

The deal struck by the GAA with Sky Sports is causing a lot of consternation, and receiving a lot of media attention. I am not the biggest GAA fan in the parish by any stretch of the imagination. The last time I was at a match was maybe nine or ten years ago. I only went to Armagh matches when they were good. I watch the championship sporadically and have no idea what happens in the national league from year to year. I played football and hurling at school and was very mediocre, lacking variously the drive, the physical prowess or the desire to beat people up that might make a fine player. Normally I don’t say anything about GAA matters because there are millions of people far better informed about them than me, and I would only make an arse of myself if I started discussing team selections and such. Personally, the fact they start showing GAA matches exclusively on Sky Sports would do very little damage to my enjoyment of Sundays.

In this particular case, though, I think it is worth making a comment. I’m not going to get into jumpers-for-goalposts recollections about things related to the GAA, though I have my fair share. I have heard quite a few people on the radio and television talking about the ethos of the GAA, and how this move goes against this ethos.

I am always suspicious about the word ‘ethos’ when I come across it in Irish public discourse. Normally it refers to the Catholic Church, and elements of the Catholic Church marking out their territory on the terrain of education and health care. This ‘Catholic ethos’ has more to do with the defence of privilege – the right of social elites to exclusive schools funded by the State in preservation of the ‘ethos’, or to hospitals that exclude people on the basis that they haven’t enough money. This ‘ethos’ is, at root, about cold hard cash, property, speculation.

What about this GAA ethos then? Given that bishops used to throw in the ball at the start of big matches, and given that the GAA is another institutional mainstay of Irish society, is the GAA ethos similar to that of the Catholic Church? Perhaps, but only superficially. This ethos is said to entail things called ‘volunteerism’ and ‘amateurism’. ‘Volunteerism’, in this context, means giving of your time freely, as opposed to getting paid for it. ‘Amateurism’, in this context, stands in opposition to ‘professionalism’, that is, those who play the sport do it for the love of the game, not because they aspire to hold any particular status or make lots of money.

However, I do not think either of these words in accurately characterise the ethos of the GAA. I think the ‘volunteerist’ and ‘amateur’ labels are actually cover for something a lot more profound.

Let me explain. Contrary to how it gets represented, the GAA isn’t a monolith. It has contradictions and competing tendencies. There are people involved in it who are motivated by power and status and ego and icy cold calculation in the service of market forces. Then you have others who participate in the life of a club or school team or whatever, and give of their time freely because it is part of the essential fabric of broader community life. The former group capitalises on the work of the latter. It is no coincidence that many high-ranking members of the political establishment, including the current Taoiseach, have sought popular legitimacy for their right-wing policies on the basis of their links to the GAA. When bishops used to throw in the ball at GAA matches, it wasn’t just because the Catholic Church was a dominant force in Irish society; it was also because the bishops needed the popular classes to get the impression that they were on their side.

In Irish, the name for the GAA is Cumann Lúthchleas Gael. The first word – Cumann – has the same etymology as ‘common’, ‘community’ – and communism. The Irish for communism is Cumannachas. Now you would need to be away in the head to imagine that the GAA is, on the whole, a communist organisation. I have heard some people describe it as a mass organisation and even a socialist organisation, but never a communist one. However, there is something about the activities that take place on under the aegis of the GAA that is, in fact, communist.

The moral logic of a great deal of its activities is not the moral logic of money, but is rather informed by a sense of basic equality. GAA clubs and matches and training sessions are also focal points that allow communities to exist, and people to interact with each other, with some degree of decency and equality and sense of belonging and maintenance of a social bond. That is not to say that the whole of the GAA operates on this basis. On the contrary: the GAA of the corporate suites at Croke Park and sale of exclusive television rights to Sky is the GAA of the gombeen bourgeoisie, what some people often refer to as the ‘Grab All Association’.

So, there is a dimension to the GAA that operates outside the logic of money, and then there is the other dimension, overseen by a different social constituency, that wishes to subordinate the GAA to the logic of money altogether. It is this latter constituency that is happy to laud the GAA’s ‘volunteer’ status, its ‘amateurism’, because it sees what the GAA does in terms of something that can be commodified and eyes it up as something it can get its hands on, practically for free. As GPA spokesman put it, “people were saying, ‘Ah, if you could only bottle it, if you could only expose it to the outside world.’” This is precisely what the Sky deal is intended to achieve.

But the ‘volunteer’ and ‘amateur’ status of the GAA is also celebrated in wider Irish society, particularly by Irish elites, because it corresponds to a vision of the world where money rules, everything gets privatised, and the fallout is dealt with by what the Tories in Britain described as the ‘Big Society’: the elimination of social rights and their replacement with charity and work for free.

This same social constituency loves the GAA’s volunteer and amateur status because the spirit of co-operation and equality and solidarity and enjoyment that it calls to mind among a great many people serves as an alibi for robbery. Let’s not mince our words here: it is robbery. Though there is an excellent argument for player compensation, the simple fact is that none of these players who will now play exclusively on Sky TV screens would have got anywhere had it not been for the fact that hundreds of thousands of people dedicated vast amounts of time, freely given, to the building of a culture and a community and a way of life, on the understanding that anyone could take part and feel part of it.

Many of these people might want to go to see their county play at Croke Park or whatever, but simply can’t afford it. And now the GAA hierarchy decides that not only will these people be unable to afford going to the match, they’ll have to pony up if they want to see it on TV too. That, sadly, is the ethos of money, the ethos of Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. It seems to me pretty obvious, then, that anyone who is part of the GAA because for them it means things like friendship and solidarity and community should push back against this attempted enclosure.

‘Horizon’ – El Roto

I left this comment on the article by Michael D. Higgins in today’s Irish Times, which is titled ‘Time for citizens to forge a better future for our country‘.

Who is this ‘we’ Michael D. Higgins is talking about?

He speaks of the disempowerment of ‘our citizens’, and extends an invitation to ‘all of the citizens of Ireland’ to reimagine Ireland. As he is writing as the Head of State, there is no room for ambiguity when it comes to the matter of who comes under this category of citizen. He is extending the invitation to people who hold the status of citizen as conferred by the Irish State. He is not extending the invitation to people in Ireland who fall outside that category.

This means that the more inclusive discourse he seeks to launch has an exclusive dimension in its foundation. It means that many people who live in Ireland and who are subjected to the State’s mechanisms of racial discrimination and violence are not called upon to take part; they are left out. The starting point of this discourse, then, guarantees their status as unpeople and the normalised violation of their human dignity.

Michael D. Higgins says ‘friendship, care, trust, justice and equality’ are moral-ethical principles that matter greatly to the people he is addressing. If they are, then that is a good thing, without doubt. But if that is what really matters to them, perhaps they ought to be thinking about what it means to be part of a political community and a State that systematically discriminates and excludes on the basis of racial-biological criteria.

Is the official category of ‘citizen’, as deployed by the Irish State, really the basis for friendship, care, trust, justice and equality? Perhaps the best person to answer this question would be someone living under Direct Provision, or in fear of deportation.

There is nothing wrong with reimagining Ireland. But first of all, perhaps we should account for how Ireland and its ‘citizens’ are already being reimagined, through events such as the Citizenship Referendum of 2004, or the fashioning of a ‘diaspora’, along racist and exclusionary contours that form a bulwark against the moral-ethical principles Michael D. Higgins enumerates here.

Illustration by ec

I left this comment on Fintan O’Toole’s article in today’s Irish Times, which is titled Three sorrowful mysteries of the Garda taping saga and deals with the unreliable official account of events in relation to Garda taping of phone calls.

Is there not a fourth sorrowful mystery underpinning the other three here? I am referring here to the mystery that binds us to believe that ‘the Cabinet, the Dáil, the Civil Service, the courts and the Garda’ are all components of a supreme entity that Fintan O’Toole names as ‘our democracy’.

It would appear, by Fintan O’Toole’s lights, that for ‘our democracy’ to exist, these components need only tell the truth.

But it looks to me as if all these things, since their inception, have operated primarily on behalf of the moneyed class in Irish society, whilst claiming to operate on behalf of society as a whole. And so: economic policy decisions are concentrated in the hands of a few men, the Dáil offers up a grotesque spectacle of parliamentary back-and-forth whilst never endangering the absolute primacy of individual property rights, the Civil Service does sterling work in making sure private interests hold sway over health, education, finance and natural resources, and the courts and the Garda give the disciplinary backbone to the whole operation.

The mystery, to my eyes at least, is why Fintan O’Toole refers to this thing as ‘our democracy’ when, in the cold light of day, it looks rather more like ‘their capitalism’. Hence I am wondering what kind of truth he expects from these august bodies.

I left this comment on the article by Una Mulally in today’s Irish Times.

This is a dog’s dinner. The author laments the lack of social and political change in Ireland, without telling us what kind of change she is talking about. She talks about a ‘period of flux’, but doesn’t say what things were in flux. She says ‘we’ shirk opportunities for change, but doesn’t say who this ‘we’ encompasses, or who it leaves out.

To add to the confusion, the author says the 2011 election was ‘the greatest opportunity for change since the foundation of the State’, but doesn’t explain how. True enough, the change of government after the election was ‘lipstick on a pig’ – but that was always the intention. Both Fine Gael and Labour committed to the full implementation of the Troika programme well in advance of the election campaign.

The author says the 2011 election was ‘the potential to reimagine’: but who was doing the re-imagining? She doesn’t have anything to say about the political limits imposed by a bailout intended to save the financial sector, nor about what this means for the democratic order that she believes to exist in Ireland. In fact, the political establishment has been committed to the interests of finance capital above the interests of the population, and has no interest in democracy.

The items she finds in the constitutional convention are mere crumbs of comfort. There is nothing in them that will alter the political landscape in any way that might endanger the drive for speculation and accumulation. Nothing to put a brake on the social and political changes that flow as a consequence of privileging the interests of capital.

You can’t have a meaningful discussion about the lack of political change in Ireland without looking at how the needs of the majority clash with the needs of the capitalist class, and hence the political consequences of this situation. But this fundamental fact -class conflict- is hidden from view, so that it appears as if the needs of Dermot Desmond and the needs of the long-term unemployed are identical. This appearance is maintained by Ireland’s ruling political parties, by its media establishment, but also by the vague cultural bric-a-brac of this article.

‘The Hole’- El Roto

If you click on the link to this Irish Examiner report and scroll down, you can see a picture of a middle-aged man standing in a pothole, wearing only underpants and wellies. I’m not reproducing the image here because I would prefer to give people thumbnails that made them want to read my posts, not scare them off.

According to the accompanying report, the man in question, who lives in Cavan, has been made enter a bond to keep the peace, meaning he must refrain from his habitual activity of painting the roads in areas where there are potholes.

The politician who fixes the road, and the citizen who votes for him, are figures of mirth for elite opinion in Ireland. They are eternal symbols of parish pump politics; a political system in which immediate local concerns inevitably take precedence over the wider, grander visions for society that could otherwise take shape, if it wasn’t for these gombeen politicians and their culchie acolytes.

Where this politics is going, we don’t need roads. The cost of repairs to cars and agricultural vehicles isn’t that important. Sure they’re only boggers, anyhow. This view is particularly popular among low-and-even-numbered Dublin suburbs with relatively decent public amenities and transport links.

I am not saying anyone who gets passionate about the problem of potholes to the point of stripping off to their underpants in public is heading in the right direction, politically speaking. Stripping down to your underpants in public is an effective way of getting a message across. But the content of that message is rarely anything other than: look, a man standing in his underpants. I think only a small segment of public opinion is likely to get behind such a man’s campaign.

Actually, I think the absurdity of a man standing in underpants and wellies serves to hide the fact there is something absurd about a man getting hit with charges for criminal damage for painting public roads whose condition poses a danger to vehicles and their occupants.

Apparently the road belongs to Cavan County Council, not the public. Would the man have taken up painting around potholes if the local council had been able to keep its roads in decent condition? Maybe he would. Maybe painting the roads and posing for photos in his underpants is the fullest expression of his civil passion, and potholes are simply the present object of that passion. On the other hand, he may have a shrewd understanding of what makes people in Cavan tick. I can’t say for sure.

Fixing in the roads is one of those issues, however, that is unlikely to divide public opinion. There is no vocal constituency in favour of letting the roads turn to shite. Capital investment by the State in transport infrastructure is an important matter for both IBEC and socialists. It just so happens that the former group thinks it should be paid for by cutting things like social welfare payments and school maintenance budgets, and that it should target those areas that maximise the profitability of dominant business interests.

The other day I had to contact a local election candidate to see what he would do about fixing the road. It was something that came up at a parent association meeting. The council had been unresponsive in fixing the road, and it poses a constant danger to children going to and from school. The council budget doesn’t stretch to fixing dangerous roads in good time. So in order to put pressure on the council, people felt it would be a good idea to get the local election candidates to demonstrate how good they were at getting the roads fixed: Pothole Idol.

That is how local politics works in Ireland, mostly. They have an inbuilt depoliticising dynamic. There are urgent practical issues to be addressed. You get the best tool available to fix it, and not, for example, the person best able to diagnose the suffocation of public finances under neoliberalism and the systematically engineered absence of local democracy.

I’m sure people would be quite interested in the broader social and economic context for why the road is full of holes, if they had the time and opportunity to discuss it. But the inevitable problem of getting the person best equipped –with the hands closest to the levers of power, and often with influence or strong links to local business groups- to fix local issues guarantees low participation in local politics, and zero discussion of conflicts of interest.

This reliance on the man with the ear of those in the council buildings militates against building local alliances to democratise local government. It’s difficult to see, in such a situation, how the local population might exercise greater control over local economic resources in order to improve the quality of life for the whole community.

It is too easily forgotten, if it was ever known in the first place, that local services and facilities and planning functions are part of the social wage, or, if you like, indirect wages.

What this situation favours, then, is not an ever-deepening mobilisation of local communities against forces of privatisation and primitive accumulation, in the interests of decent local services and facilities for a decent community life. Rather, it favours the spectacle of lone men standing in potholes in their underpants.