The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Unprecedented? August 19, 2016

The news this evening that:

A number of leading Northern Ireland politicians, including three party leaders, have commenced a legal challenge against the UK’s plans to leave the EU.

Papers were lodged in Belfast’s High Court today on behalf of the leader of the SDLP, Colum Eastwood, the Alliance Party leader, David Ford, the Green Party’s Northern Ireland leader, Stephen Agnew, Sinn Féin Assembly member, John O’Dowd, and representatives of the community and voluntary sector.

NAMA NI names… August 19, 2016

Intriguing what’s going on in the North in relation to NAMA, isn’t it? SF is having a spot of local difficulty. There’s talk about ‘conspiracies’ and the DUP wants investigations. Anyone have a handle on it?

Road, Rail and Rebellion August 19, 2016

For Heritage Week 2016, TII is organising a series of events nationally. At its Dublin seminar Road, Rail and Rebellion, attendees will hear papers on a turbulent period in Irish history, from the streets of Dublin during the 1830’s cholera epidemic to the hills of Cork during the War of Independence.

This seminar is taking place on Thursday 25th August in the City Wall Space, Wood Quay Venue, in the Dublin Civic Offices.

‘Bring out your Dead’: The Dublin Cholera Hospital and the Midland Great Western Railway’
Emer Dennehy

Victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832 received treatment in the ‘Dublin Cholera Hospital’, otherwise known as the Richmond Penitentiary, from April to December of that year. The deceased were buried within the grounds of the penitentiary and remained undisturbed until the 1870’s when the site was sold to the Midland Great Western Railway (MGWR) to facilitate expansion of their railway line. During their redevelopment of the site the MGWR exposed the remains of over 1,700 individuals, which they reinterred beneath a narrow laneway used at the time to provide access from Grangegorman Lower to the MGWR facility. The redevelopment of the laneway during Luas Cross City works led to the excavation of the disarticulated remains of these individuals.

This paper will discuss the background to the Cholera epidemic, and will provide an insight into the city’s institutional response, with over 11,000 infected and more than 6,000 deaths in Dublin alone. It will discuss the results of the archaeological excavation of the cholera cemetery and our proposals for future analysis.

Emer Dennehy is an experienced excavation director and has worked as an Archaeologist with TII (formerly RPA) since 2008. Emer is the Project Archaeologist for Luas Cross City and is responsible for overseeing the comprehensive programme of archaeological mitigation, including the current phase of archaeological monitoring that is being carried out by Rubicon Heritage on behalf of SSJV.

From Blessings to aftermath – The role of the Dublin tram system in 1916
Padraig Clancy

Dublin of 1916 had an extensive tram system which traversed the city centre. The network served to link the main train stations and suburbs with the business and administrative centres of city. As such the trams were one of the key modes of transport for the Dublin population. This presentation will explore the accounts of those active in the events of 1916 and their usage of the tram network as a means of transportation and distribution during the Rising.

Bio
Padraig Clancy was curatorial assistant with the National Musuem of Ireland’s Proclaiming a Republic curatorial team in the Military History and Decorative Arts Division. He is a freelance interpretive planner and collects care specialist. Padraig was previously an Assistant Keeper with the Irish Antiquities Division of the National Musuem of Ireland.

Monumental Change
Donncha Ó Dúlaing

In 1916 between St. Stephen’s Green and the top of Sackville Street (O’Connell Street) alone there were up to eight monuments celebrating and commemorating the great deeds of Kings, Queens and soldiers of the Empire. Fighting for position amongst these great and powerful figures of the establishment along the main thoroughfares of the city were fine monuments and statues to Irish patriots, visionaries and political titans. Quietly holding their ground were other statues and monuments highlighting the great achievements of our poets, writers and social crusaders.

This busy and competitive streetscape was to utterly change following the seismic events of 1916 and all that followed. Over the following 50 years all (with one or two exception) of the Kings, Queens and soldiers of the Empire had either been removed or destroyed. In their place the new fledgling Republic installed a whole range of new symbols to celebrate the new states vision of political and cultural independence. The presentation will explore the destruction of King George II and King William III, the removal of Queen Victoria and King George I, as well as the most infamous of all the destruction of Nelson’s Pillar.

Donncha Ó Dúlaing is Contracts Manager on the Luas Cross City Scheme whose role includes managing the protection, removal and reinstatement of heritage items impacted by the works in the city centre. A number of statues and sculptures have been carefully removed to storage, where conservation and repair works are currently being completed. These heritage items will be reinstated over the coming year as works for the new Luas near completion. Prior to working on Luas Cross City Donncha was Dublin City Heritage Officer where he managed and implemented a range of projects from works in the Medieval City to historic buildings, churches, statues etc. Donncha also established the GAA Museum in Croke Park and worked on a range of projects with OPW including the construction of the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre at Newgrange.

 
The Coolnacaheragh ambush
Faith Bailey

During the early 1920s, the stunning landscape of rural West Cork was alive with bitter unrest and flash points of armed conflict, fuelled by military occupation and intense counter resistance. Rarely glimpsed by today’s tourists that pass through the gorse-covered rocky outcrops, traversed by winding roads, the memory of the conflict lives deep within the bones of the landscape and within the memories of local people. Set against a backdrop of two roads—one old, one new— Faith Bailey’s talk at Road, Rail and Rebellion will focus on the War of Independence ambush site at Coolnacaheragh, approximately 4 km south-east of the village of Baile Bhuirne. Recent TII-funded research, undertaken in advance of the proposed new N22 Baile Bhuirne–Macroom road scheme, focused on the analysis of various historical records and witness accounts in an attempt to map how the ambush unfolded during what was, in the ‘fog of war’, a desperate human struggle of life and death on the bend of an old country road.

Faith is a Senior Archaeologist and Cultural Heritage Consultant with Irish Archaeological Consultancy Ltd. She holds an MA in Cultural Landscape Management and a BA in single honours archaeology from the University of Wales, Lampeter. She is a licence eligible archaeologist, a member of the Chartered Institute of Field Archaeologists and has over 14 years’ experience working in commercial archaeology in Ireland. Faith worked on the archaeological and cultural heritage assessment for the new N22 Baile Bhuirne–Macroom road scheme for five years and carried out extensive research on the landscape of West Cork during this time, including the Coolnacaheragh Ambush site.

British and Irish Diaspora’s… August 19, 2016

Thought this was fascinating, the way in which the respective diaspora’s are treated on wiki. For Britain it is contemporary British citizens living abroad. In the case of Ireland it is populations of Irish heritage. Both raise interesting facts. For example the sheer number of those of Irish heritage in Argentina is astounding – a good million. Even the number of those in the US, 33 million who can claim Irish heritage is a massive number. And proportionately it is about the same in the UK, 10% or so (or 14 million in the latter case). Which makes it a bit frustrating given that the comparison on the British diaspora page is with current residents here – just shy of 300,000 in the RoI.

Spain, it has to be noted, is enormously popular with the British. Three quarters of a million live there, more than the US, and a bit over half of the number in Australia. Indeed I was a bit surprised that Canada and the US have similar numbers of British citizens in them. I love it when we get to the 100s. There’s a small crew in Albania and for some reason this also surprised me, Cuba.

And what of the places with next to no British. Benin. Burkina Faso. Chad. Or closer to home Belarus or Armenia.

Granted these are official or semi-official estimates.

Depressing simplistic ideas… August 19, 2016

This excerpt in Slate from a while back from Helaine Olen’s Pound Foolish neatly skewers some of the lines that argue that:

the wealthy are the wealthy because, unlike you or me, they don’t waste their money on frivolities.

This is a trope that has been extant during the crisis and after. It is, needless to say, incorrect.

As Olen notes, there are much more obvious reasons for overspending in recessions…

The advice in his and other books spreading this idea was often cloaked in the guise of your friendly next-door neighbor offering tips that were good for you. Take Jean Chatzky, a perky adviser with a frequent, somewhat nervous smile who came by way of working on the Forbes 400 list and, like Bach, Oprah’s couch and morning television. Her response to the Great Recession? Penning a book that contained money advice for the poor from the wealthy, with such words of wisdom as “Overspending is the key reason that people slip from a position of financial security into a paycheck-to-paycheck existence” (italics in original). Of course she failed to acknowledge that it’s easy to overspend one’s unemployment check that, at the time of publication, averaged $293 weekly.

And Olen notes, and this is as true here as in the US, that:

Warren and Tyagi demonstrated that buying common luxury items wasn’t the issue for most Americans. The problem was the fixed costs, the things that are difficult to cut back on. Housing, health care, and education cost the average family 75 percent of their discretionary income in the 2000s. The comparable figure in 1973: 50 percent. Indeed, studies demonstrate that the quickest way to land in bankruptcy court was not by buying the latest Apple computer but through medical expenses, job loss, foreclosure, and divorce.
Giving up a latte or another such small extravagance in this environment wasn’t going to be enough. Yet the personal finance shills continued to tell people their problems were mostly of their own making.

Someone is well satisfied by the 1916 Commemorations… August 19, 2016

And that someone would be Stephen Collins. And he’s entirely open about why… I missed this at the weekend but… worth looking at.

Fears expressed by some, including this column, that the inevitable glorification of violence 100 years ago could have damaging implications for today’s politics do not appear to have been justified, although it is probably too early to come to a definitive conclusion on that.

Though perhaps that fear was more about certain groups building support in the context of the commemorations.

He has a nice anecdote about reconciliation – I won’t spoil it by quoting it. You can read it in the text. And so it’s all about reconciliation. And the right to have different views. And “open minds”. And “encouraging pride in national independence and an open discussion about the Rising”.

And then there’s this:

One of the paradoxes about the commemoration of the Rising is that alongside the obvious national pride it generated there comes a refrain from a range of commentators, politicians and activists of various kinds asserting that the ideals of the 1916 leaders were betrayed by those who came after them.
This jaundiced view of the leaders of independent Ireland chimes with the current denigration of politicians and political parties which pervades so much of the commentary on public affairs.

Well now.

And he goes further:

One of the highlights of the Parnell Summer School was a paper by Trinity College Dublin historian Anne Dolan who suggested that in tandem with the way “we have danced, sung and seminared” every twist and turn of the Rising, there had been “a rather eager trumpeting of all that we have failed to do, of just how much we have disgraced, reneged on, degraded and betrayed the ideals of the men of 1916”.
President Michael D Higgins is just the most prominent of those who have found the leaders of independent Ireland wanting on so many levels, but like other critics he has not given any credit to the politicians who came before him for the very real achievement of building an independent, democratic Irish State.

But how can one top the following:

Of course, the politicians of independent Ireland have had their faults, but there is no guarantee that if the 1916 leaders had survived things would have been any better. In fact, going by events in other European countries at the time, there are grounds for believing that things might have been far worse if the dreamers, poets and radical revolutionaries had emerged victorious from the Rising to impose their vision on an unprepared nation.

Feel the reconciliation.

Still performing… August 18, 2016

I’ve said it before. Is the Trump campaign one of the most high profile examples of trolling we’ve ever seen. Or if not quite trolling, something utterly performative. Which is saying something given the nature of US national politics. But this list on Slate.com of how at various points Trump has been regarded as ‘pivoting’ towards becoming or attempting to present himself as a mainstream candidate is telling. There’s been so many of them, all followed by his trademark propensity to shoot his mouth off in ways that rather than building support see him lose it, piece by piece.

Indeed, even the most cursory examination of the manner in which the campaign has been fought by him suggests that any claims to managerial skills, expertise, ability, innovation, whatever, are wide of the mark. Very very wide of the mark.

If the following is correct – a quote from Politico in the Slate piece – is even half true then what sort of election is it going to be?

Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.

And this raises other questions. What of the credibility of the Republican party? That it could come to this surely raises questions over its approach, structure and so on. Of course there’s a broader dysfunction but how does this play in terms of it as a political vehicle. Granted it’s a lot more nebulous an entity than parties we are familiar with. But surely this must see serious damage inflicted or is 2016 going to be done and dusted in four years times. After all, one S. Palin didn’t entirely upset that apple cart.

Public ownership and nationalisation in the EU August 18, 2016

Here’s two contrasting views of what is or is not possible in regard to public ownership and nationalisation in the European Union. Here’s the case suggesting there is no space for same, and here’s another which suggests that while there are some limitations they are of a lesser order than is generally understood.

There is a broader point which is that that which has been introduced can be removed and therefore the limitations are far from set in stone if there’s a political will to engage with them. Further more there’s a fundamental reality. This state, the ROI, is hugely unlikely to follow the UK out of the European Union. It would be good to think that all the forms of public ownership already available even as matters stand are pursued – whether municipal, etc, etc. But that requires political representatives elected to make that case.

Interview with Danny Healy-Rae August 18, 2016

The latest issue of Hot Press brings us an interview with Danny Healy-Rae, conducted by Jason O’Toole. Now some of it is predictable. He doubles down on his climate change views.

You must have felt hard done by, the amount of abuse and criticism you got over what you said about God being in charge of the weather…
No. I’m not bothered at all. Everyone is entitled to their view. I’m basing my views on facts. The facts are there and history proves it. We had the Ice Age. We had Noah’s Ark. We had all those stories. We’ve proof of the Famine in 1740, which was caused by two years of incessant rain. We lost almost a third of our people because they couldn’t feed the cattle
and the cattle starved, and they couldn’t save turf to keep themselves warm. Those are facts. There were some centuries when the country was very hot and warm and then there were different centuries with so much rain and cold. So, those are facts.

Which evinces this response:

You mentioned Noah’s Ark there. That’s not a proven fact – or do you believe everything that’s in the Bible?

The first thing I have to say to you, I never read all the Bible. But I found the Bible to be correct in many instances. I do believe that there is a God there and I believe that there is some place after. I was brought up that way, Jason.

But he’s a raft of views – though, perhaps tellingly – he strikes something of an uncertain note on many of them. Not abortion. He’s no fan of repealing the 8th. And he’s still not convinced by same sex marriage (‘what I thought was wrong with that was the little baby had no choice.’). At one point there’s this exchange:

I’m just trying to make it clear for readers. I hope you understand that.
I do. You’re doing your job, but I have to kind of mind my corner too.

He’s no time for Trump, nope, he’s supporting Clinton. But what of a vision? The closest it comes to one is this:

All we want is to create the infrastructure so that we could attract investment – like the Macroom bypass, like broadband. I feel the country will tip into the Irish Sea because all the weight of the people going into the eastern side of the country at the present time to the detriment of Kerry and the west of Ireland.

It may seem like thin stuff and some will mock but as O’Toole notes he is one of the first pair of brothers ever elected in the same constituency at the same election. Somehow, on some level, the message is resonating with a significant tranche of voters in Kerry. Worth asking how and why. An interesting interview which perhaps points to the answers to those questions. Another worth reading.