ICTU says “Get up, stand up”.

Today I received some paper for recycling in the post. It has gone the way of all political advertising that I receive. I  took it upon myself to let him know my response by contacting him through his website unionconnect.ie.

Mr Begg, You saw fit to send me a letter and some stickers in the post. I, therefore assume the right of reply. During the 19 years I spent at work I was a union member and spent a period as a shop steward. My father was secretary of his union and advocated membership all his life. That tradition, that assumption that unions have a role to play that is always honest is trashed by years of compliance with IBEC and FF. You must bare your responsibility for the current crisis. You were perfectly happy to see builders at work, competitiveness eroded. For ICTU saw only the short-term gain and the money in members pockets. A curse on all your houses for you have failed us all. I can [not] believe you as I can [not] believe IBEC or politicians. You too have become a “vested interest group” and as such must be treated with suspicion. You failed to get up or stand up for future generations. You were short-sighted and you represent short-sighted people. And yet you, like your fellow travellers, seem incapable of acknowledging your part and as a result are doomed to repeat the mistakes. Your’s

This nonsense from Mr. Begg is symptomatic of the problems we face as a nation. It is further typified by the behaviour of management in CIE with regard to the fraud and theft that they are now attempting to cover up. These all belong to the same class of people who do not seem to realise that the game is up. We know what you have been up too. We know that Ireland has been governed and managed at all levels of society by individuals who represented vested interests and even as they fool themselves into believing that they are legitimate interests, the failure to recognise the interconnectedness of the society as a whole should be a source of shame to them all.

The reality is that if you gain someone somewhere else is loosing. Whether its a cleaner from Latvia or a farmer in Uganda or a factory worker in China, all services must be paid for by someone somewhere. We make a choice. ICTU oversees incompetent teachers at all levels in the system refusing to set any kind of standards. Surely it is not reasonable to give the same levels of protection to the incompetent and the lazy as to the honest and willing. The INO protects restricted practices that increase the workload of those fellow union members trying to make a broken system work. Unions protect the abusers of the workplace. We all know that civil servants treat sick days as annual leave days. It has always been thus and unions have not only sanctioned that but supported that.

Mr. Begg you have lost your way because in your heart you know you have become part of the problem. I had hoped that you were returning to your roots by fighting for the rights of migrant workers abused by Irish employers but now I wonder. Now you are back with your mates, shouting and screaming stupid slogans: “What do we want? blah, blah”. I remember it well. Student marches back in the 70’s. But I was young and innocent. I did not realise that our nation, our people do not see themselves as one nation, one people. They see only narrow sectional interest.

I’ll “get up, stand up” when you cease to protect and expel members from your unions that abuse the common good. I’ll support a political party when it acts in the interest of the common good and not for political advantage. Another generation is lost as we struggle to come of age, to mature sufficiently to recognise that what we do unto others we do unto ourselves. For we are a community, interconnected in ways we have yet to accept but which are easily understood. Will you watch as the planet burns? Still waving your banners in pursuit of the farthings and the hapennies. I suspect you will for in order to keep your job and maintain your position you too, like Ahern and Cowan and the bankers and the employers, you too must hear no evil, see no evil and thereby pretend you are not the devils sidekick.

Technical Briefing – Project 1

The speech involved a powerpoint presentation. The text below is the notes from the ppt but I didn’t use them after the first slide. Ran a bit over time at 11min+ but given the amount of information I was trying to cover I’m not surprised. Just need to be tighter on the extras. Pleased overall. Evaluation was good.

__________________________________

Slide 1

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and welcome guests.

More and more information is becoming available online about the history of our people and our communities. Accessing it is easy and following the footprints left by previous generations can be both interesting and enjoyable. Tonight, I want to show you just one source of online information: the National Archives of Ireland website. This website has made available, as recently as last August, census records from 1911.

Slide 2

Here is the welcome page from the online archive. As you can see there is a whole load of links here that you can brows at your leisure. What we are interested in tonight are two links: 1.The SEARCH CENSUS link , The BROWSE CENSUS link

Household Occupants

Slide 3

Which ever way you go you will end up on a page like this. This page is for an individual household on the night of the census. It shows the SURNAME, the FORENAME or Christian name, the AGE and the SEX of the individual. The National Archives have promised that this page will include the rest of the information entered on the form before the end of the year. But in the mean time we need to look at the image of the actual form itself if we want to know more.

This is the record of a single household

Slide 4

This is the most important form, FORM A.

CHRISTIAN NAME

SURNAME

RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD

RELIGION

AGE

This is interesting for what else it can tell us. We can get the year of birth. If the person was born after 1864 then the registry office will have a birth certificate. That birth certificate can give you the mother’s maiden name and where she was living at the time of marriage. It also gives the fathers name and occupation and where they were living.

OCCUPATION

Here we have Vintner and that’s a big clue as to which famous Carrigaline Pub we are talking about. We see William was a Carpenter, Denis the son, an Assurance agent and Edward was a clerk.

MARRIED/SINGLE

YEARS MARRIED

This column again helps us find a new direction for our search. Margaret and Denis were 30 years married in 1911 making their year of marriage 1881. Again its after 1864 so there is a marriage cert for them. This will also given the women’s maiden name. It also has both father’s names and occupations.

CHILDREN BORN

This column gives the number of children born but also how many were still alive. It was quite common for families to loose several children at a young age.

CHILDREN SURVIVING

WHERE BORN

Another source of surprise can be this next column which tells were the individual was born. The parents may have been more in another county or have moved at some stage with different children born in different places. This can be very important information when searching for births certs.

SIGITURE

One other interesting item is the signature. Whereas the enumerator may well have filled out the form, here you will often have the actual signature of your ancestor. Sometime when they couldn’t write the name is written by the enumerator and an X is added with the comment “his mark”.

Slide 5

This is Form B1. This tells us about the families neighbors and who they were but it can also tell us about what the buildings around them were used for. Here we see Household 11 is a Public House. This matches nicely with the description of Denis Cogan as Vintner and lets us know the family were living in the pub. These columns tell us about the size and quality of the building, whether it was thatched and how many windows it had in front. All this gives an indication of how well off they were. Look at household number 8. It has 6 rooms and 5  windows in front. But there are also 14 out houses. This dwelling was occupied by the Cantellions. This last column tells us they owned the house because if they didn’t this column would tell us who the leased it from.

Form B2

Slide 6

This is Form B2. This can be a very interesting form because of what it tells us about the other buildings used by the family. The Cantellions had 3 stables, 2 coach house, 2 harness rooms, a cow house, a piggery, a boiling house, 2 sheds and 2 stores. I’m assuming this was Beaver Lodge which once stood over here behind the hotel.

Form N

Slide 7

This final Form is Form N. The form doesn’t add much information on the individual housholds because it only lists religious affiliation. But it’s the stuff up the top that can be useful in your research. We have the County as Cork East Riding. The Parliamentary Division as Cork South East. The District Electoral Division is Carrigaline. We can also see the official name of the town land or street, the barony and the Civil Parish. Note that the Civil Parish, the Roman Catholic Parish and the Church of Ireland Parish can be 3 very different things. All this information is very useful if your extend your search further to local maps and maybe even to the Griffiths Valuations maps of some 60 years earlier. But that will have to wait for another occasion.

Madam Toastmaster

An attempt to help myself

Sometime last friday morning a friend of mine took his own life. For whatever reason this man whom I have known for almost thirty years choose a path that leaves untold sorrow and pain in its wake. In recent years we were not as close as we once were. Our families were at different stages: mine growing into adulthood, his still children and teenagers.

I suspect that the relationship was also in some way a victim of the Celtic Tiger. I ignored the boom for the most part, seeking spiritual growth and enlightenment at a time when he was deeply embedded in the construction bubble that eventually burst. So the two families drifted apart except for birthdays and special occasions. My wife and I being Godparents to one of his children. My daughter babysitting once in a while and maybe taking on the role of a big sister on Bebo and by text.

I am left to wonder if had I paid a little more attention to the world beyond my mind would I have been able to say or do something that might have made a difference. You see no matter how many times you read about how it is not our fault, when it smacks you in the face you react just like everyone else. You ask the same questions of yourself, you feel the same sense of disbelief and delude yourself into thinking that you have the power to save someone, if only in hindsight.

The only way I could have helped is to have known. And I didn’t. I didn’t know the recent history of this man’s life. The ads are running on TV telling us to talk to someone. They are directed at teenagers and show the anguish of friends at their own inability to help someone who simply won’t talk about the problems they face. I know I was available. I know I would have listened with love and understanding. I know I would have helped… had I known. But I didn’t.

That I didn’t is down to the awesome responsibility of freewill. Freewill is an oft misunderstood gift from God. A God whose creation flows in a particular direction and with which flow we are invited to get in touch. Invited, not forced because it simply doesn’t work that way.

My current understanding of life tells me that death is not something we should be afraid of but neither is it something we should bring upon ourselves. The span of our lives is determined by our souls purpose and it is therefore for our soul to determine when that purpose is served or to decide that that purpose is no longer achievable in this lifetime. Given how unaware the majority of human beings are, it is probably wiser to leave the span of our lives to the circumstances of our lives.

My friend is no more. Yet all relationships continue at the level of the soul so in that sense there is no time and place, only experience. We will share time and space again even if we don’t recognise each other and in that I find comfort. But in the meantime there is the week ahead. There is the emotion of loss, of anger, of deeply felt pain. For those closer to him then I was, those whose daily lives have a terrible hole in them, the weeks will be months and the months will be years. My fervent hope is that they will not suffer in silence or go softly into the night but that they will scream their pain loudly so that we all can hear, and listen, and never have to say “if only I had known, maybe I could have helped”.

Special Occassion Speeches – Project 5

This project is about accepting an award and doing it in a time of 5 to 7 minutes. I am learning that there is a real need to manage your speaking environment (for want of a better phrase). By this I mean briefing the Toastmaster in detail as to what way you want things to work. In this case there was a need to set the scene,  to do an actual award and to provide a physical token of the award.

I didn’t give my Toastmaster enough of a briefing in hindsight. I didn’t say where I wanted him to stand, tell him where I wanted to sit and so on. The result was a bit too toastmaterish when in actual fact an element of role playing was required. So my advice would be to clearly separate the Toastmasters introduction from the role play of the award. Another thing to watch is time. My time was 7 min 24 sec (I recorded the speech with a dictaphone) but the Timekeeper started when the role play started resulting in a time of 8 mins 40 secs. So clarify that the time is to start at your first words of the actual speech.

WARNING! This is a made up speech made on some of my own personal history but with elements tweaked to suit my own purpose in the project.

Introduction by Toastmaster:

Acting the role of the Chief Scout, I will be presenting an award to Shay for which he will make an acceptance speech. He has asked me to point out that while such an award does exist in scouting it would never be accepted with a speech in this way. Each February 22^nd is celebrated as Founders Day and a list of those receiving awards for their contribution to Scouting is published.

Intro by Chief Scout

For various reasons this is the first opportunity I’ve had to present a Silver Elk to someone who has had a long career in Scouting starting with 1st Dublin, then with 12^th Cork and now with 1^st Cork. Unknown to many people he has also had a long association with The Irish Girl Guides but I’ll leave him tell that story himself. So, for services to Scouting over many years, I would now like to present this Silver Elk award to Group Leader Shay McInerney.

Acceptance speech

My thanks to the Chief Scout for the very special effort that I know he has made to be here tonight. I know how busy he is these days. When I saw the list of names on the awards list last February I was suitably impressed. Many of them were people I’d known for many years.These were all people I knew deserved to be recognised for their contribution.I was surprised to find my name on the list.Over the years I had come to associate the awards list with a certain generation within Scouting.A generation before mine.It was a bit of a shock to find myself to be part of that older generation.

There are more than 28 million Scouts, youth and adults, boys and girls, in 160 countries.Add to that another million Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in 145 countries. So you have what can only be described as a global movement. Baden-Powell never set out to form a world wide movement.I never set out to receive an award. I joined because it seemed a good idea at the time. In fact I joined twice.

My first time was at about seven when I joined my local Unit in Finglas. Back in the 60’s I was given a booklet of prayers and told to learn them off. I lasted three weeks.

My second attempt was ten years later. A friend of mine persuaded me to join 1^st Dublin Venture Scout Unit. That was 1977 and thanks mainly to people like John Fox and Paddy Halton, 1^st Dublin was the place to be. It was a time of great change and 1^st Dublin was in the centre of that change.

They had one of the first Beaver Units in the country. They ran the first, then experimental, mixed Scout Troop in the country. The Venture Unit had its own minibus. They were a specialist caving group and part of the Irish Cave Rescue Organisation.

Lads in their late teens on the north side of Dublin city were more likely to have a trade then be going to college. I was able to work with electricians like Dick Wilson, the unit leader. Plumbers like his brother Willie and carpenters like Sean Lyons. Helping these guys was useful and what you did counted. When I joined they were central to the preparations for the SAI 70^th anniversary camp taking place the following year. Almost every weekend we headed for Inistioge to work on preparations for that camp.

The experience of being on staff on an international camp is the ultimate in Scouting for me. It ticks all the boxes in terms of contribution and fellowship. It can make a lasting difference in a young adults life. It certainly did to mine. I staffed the Electronics base and as a result made it my career. I met my wife on that camp. That brought me to Cork and to 12^th Cork Sea Scouts. I could not have done Sea Scouts without the support of people like Tom McMullan, Dinny Mulcahy, Jerry Aherne and Mick Murtagh.

Several of these Scouters were involved with the Fire Service. Meetings were often held in the Fire Station in Anglesey Street. Many of these meetings ended suddenly. The Call bell sounded and half the meeting left to answer a fire call. “Be prepared” was at a new level.

Being married to an Irish Girl Guide leader also worked very well for me. We shared activities, camps, transport and equipment. We had a calendar on the wall in the kitchen with an A4 page per month. The rule was that who ever booked the slot first, the other one had to find the baby sitter. It encouraged forward planning, let me tell you.

Sometimes things happen that are not planned. Like when my family moved to France in 1989. We used to take our kids to the only local fast food outlet on a Saturday. We noted scouts going into a building across the street. After a few weeks we decided to say hello. Within a month I was their Scouter. No police vetting in those days. They had no leader for scouts and my being there kept that troop open until they found a leader. They spoke little English and I spoke little French. But it worked none the less.

And the work goes on. Now I find myself as an elder lemon and Group Leader. We have new age ranges, a new programme and the challenge of integrating two different traditions. We have one hundred years of Scouting behind us. We face into some hard economic times. Scouting is about using your initiative and making whatever you have work. I am confident we will succeed. Thank you, fellow Scouters.

Where do I go from here…

Note the change in subject. Thus is less a “we” and more an “I” blog because I am from today and for the second time in my life an honest to God, real life, full time, third level student. Yes, today I embark on a four year Hons Deg in Software and Computer Networks. The course while having a fancy and long title is known by insiders as DNet. You could say this with a suitable Cork accent and the result would be “De Net, Boy”. I’m sorry but that just cracks me up.

It is the weirdest of experiences to be a Mature Student in a campus full of 18 to 24 year olds. By mature I and everyone else means OLD and by God you feel it. I know I’ll get used to it in time but the lecturer spends a lot of time looking towards the mature student simply because it seems to be the only source of reaction in the room. I’m sure a class full of 1st years is a tough audience for any one. But there has been an early success as I am using one of the “machines” (apparently that’s the insider term used in De Net Boy). the significance lies in having successfully logged on to a “machine” without having to pay a visit to the password gatekeepers. So go me.

The biggest surprise so far has been the pep talk from the Course Year Co-ordinator which was excellent but which left me a bit shocked at how almost apologetic he was for suggesting that students should actually attend classes. The 31 hours of programmed classes was considered “a lot”. Back in ‘79-’82 in Kevin Street we had nine until five, five days a week for three years. All study was outside those hours. Even with thirty one hours per week and the month of January off, the suggestion was that making 80% of classes would be a good idea. Clearly there is no expectation of anyone attending all classes and an expectation of attending much less than that. We’ll see. Maybe I’m in way over my head here and things are going to be so tough that I’ll need all those spare hours and the Learning Support Centre just to keep up.

Anyway looking forward to my first labs this afternoon. Getting up at 06.30 is a killer, as is the hanging around but needs do as needs must. This is a four year project to re-insert myself into the world of peoples after a seven year absence. So here goes.

Visioning the future

Former President Mary Robinson made a speech over the weekend that led to the Irish Times front page article ” ‘Absence of vision’ at heart of problems, says Robinson”. Extracts from her speech are included along with various pieces by Patsy McGarry from the Humbert Summer School under Home News. I have long held the view that it is exactly this absence of a vision for our country’s future that is at the heart of the failure of the Irish political class to deliver on any form of social or economic plan. If one’s horizon does not extend beyond the next election one is necessarily limited in terms of what one can see.

Robinson, speaking about vision, says she feels “the lack of one is at the heart of the crisis we face”. I agree but I do not agree that we as a people lack a vision of the future or indeed a vision of how things could be. The current discussion on NAMA has produced countless ideas and discussions. The various summer schools such as the Humbert and Merriman summer schools, have produced very interesting ideas and viewpoints on a wide range of subjects. So we are not and I believe never have been, short on ideas as a people. That is why so many of our people have been so successful abroad.

So the problem must lie elsewhere and it seems to me that where we fall short is in implementation. And the question needs to be asked as to why. Why is it that a people with a worldwide reputation for talking to anyone that is willing or even unwilling to listen, seems to be completely incapable of implementing any of its ideas? Mary Robinson devotes part of her speech to what she sees as the achievement of “something in recent years which many thought unattainable: peace on our island.” I have begun to wonder whether the failure to properly complete the independence project has hung like a millstone around our collective necks since 1922.

In 1922 a small minority of the people of this country choose to force, by violence means, their view upon the majority under Eamonn DeVelera. It resulted in a Civil War which, as Mary Robinson says, left “a legacy of bitterness that lasted for generations”. The continuing presence of the IRA after the creation of the Fianna Fail party may have contributed to a suspicion that unless we are very careful it could all kick off again. Talk, talk being recognised as much better than war, war. In 1969 it did kick off in the North and the sense of anxiety was further reinforced by riots and bombs in Dublin in the 70’s and 80’s. I am left wondering if psychologically we did not respond by circling the wagons around our various vested self interest groups as a way of ensuring that no national movement ever became big enough to provoke a national response.

It is almost inevitable that major change involves the destruction of entrenched positions. The old ways must loose out and those who profit either economically or by way of status must also loose their sources of income and status. Almost always they must be forced to relinquish the power their hold. The tendency in Ireland has been to let age do the needful and death wrest the reins of power from the gnarled hands of the elites. We all quietly stepped away from the Catholic Church as so many are now doing from Fianna Fail. Hundreds of thousands stepped quietly on board ships and planes rather than force the changes they believed were necessary. In recent years rather than demand changes in the accountability of public servants like teachers, doctors and civil servants, we turned to fee paying schools and private hospitals. We created the PD’s as the delivery boy and idealogical talking shop for the more extreme elements but walked away from them too once we realised how extreme they really were. The social partnership model that was created in the 80’s reinforced the idea that we can make omelettes without breaking eggs.

I am learning loads from my eldest son who has spent large portions of his unemployed summer watching Fora.Tv. One of his most recent pointers has been to watch an interview with the person responsible for education in Washington DC. It is certainly scary stuff but also somewhat inspirational. One important point made by Ms Rhee is that poor performance in education has nothing to do with poverty or disadvantage per sea and everything to do with the quality of the adults in the education system in which they found themselves. In one case she paid a public employee to stay at home because, unable to fire her, it was cheaper than the consequences of her incompetence.

I have come to realise that my misguided support for ‘reasonable change’ is based on my own lack of self-confidence after almost eight years of not working outside the home. I have become afraid that the very changes I believe Irish society needs to make would have no place for useless people like me. I have come to accept that the system can only be changed from the inside and that being outside the system I am powerless. I am powerless but not because I lack ability but because the political class which includes IBEC, ICTU and all the rest, make sure I stay outside the system. Being a member of ICTU or IBEC or the IFA or the Catholic Church means you must be one of their type of people. You must think what they think, behave the way they behave and accept the status quo inherent in the leaderships of these groups. You cannot become a shop steward unless you do ICTU training. You cannot become a senior member of IBEC without the right contacts and influence. These organisations are self perpetuating. Change comes slowly and is dependent on ageing for new ideas to become the norm. That process is too slow in the context of a modern, connected society.

Increasingly the individuals in our society will find that there is no place for them at the table. The powers that be will become increasingly out of touch with the people they preport to represent. A black economy of ideas will arise with eventual consequences in terms of the very trouble we are seeking to avoid. There is a lesson from history in this. One of the factors that made the Irish War of Independence so successful and relatively bloodless was the creation of a parallel system of government which was used by the people (albeit with a degree of duress) and which made governance by the British impossible without the use of overwhelming force.

Eventually we will learn to get by without the elites. We will learn to solve our own problems in our own ways because it will make sense to do so. We will ignore those laws which we don’t consider relevant to us personally. Just look at the behaviour of bankers, our road users and those who systematically pollute our environment. The property boom was facilitated by a belief that property development was not really subject to planning because the state would never be able to deliver the schools, transport networks or amenities required. Nor would it ever be of a mind to enforce the laws.

This time things are different. Since the foundation of the state the young people with the potential and inclination towards revolutionary change were able to leave rather than come into conflict with their parents, their uncles and their aunts. During the Celtic Tiger they had the money to either move out or avoid the conflict that living in close contact with those with whom you disagree brings about by buying experience elsewhere. The young are now being forced to stay at home. They are being forced to live in community. Both they and their parents lack the skills needed to negotiate their way through life. Unless we are very careful there will be blood on the streets of our towns and cities. I kid you not.

To nama or not to nama

We all have mammies and daddies and uncles and aunts but not all of us have ones that were in a position to set aside large portions of their incomes in pension funds or to buy shares in banks or large businesses. Mine certainly didn’t. I remember being called back to my company HQ in Bandon during the late nineties to hear a talk about how we could all buy Additional Pension Contributions. My colleagues and I listened as the MD and HR Manager spoke enthusiastically about how tax efficient it would be. Then one of my colleagues spoke. He told us how he was being paid so little by this same company that he qualified for Family Income Supplement and he asked how he could ever be able to afford APCs. In fact he was loosing money by simply listening to this presentation as in being called back to his base he had lost a days on-site allowance and would still have to pay for B&B and his meals.

I have been reading and listening to whatever has come my way regarding the question of whether NAMA as proposed by the government is a good idea. I find myself beginning to draw some conclusions at last. Central to my thinking on this issue is the motivation of Fianna Fail and the senior civil servants involved. Why would they be doing what they are doing? I do not believe for one moment that this government gives a toss about the general population as such. They base their thinking on the consequences for the people they know, the people that make up their immediate circles, the people they consider to be their type of people.

That group is a very limited group of people indeed. Brian Cowen is not an ordinary man in the street no matter what the propaganda would have us believe. You simply don’t become Taoiseach unless you have spent a lifetime associating with the people who decide who becomes Taoiseach. He may well honestly believe otherwise but his thinking has been formed by people within Fianna Fail. So it will make no sense to him to do anything that does harm to his people. And his people include the top civil servants within each of the government departments. The Department of Finance oversaw the debacle of the last five years. The Secretary of that department must shoulder his share (and I assume it’s a man) of the blame for the failure to plan and/or regulate the Irish Economy over the last ten years.

Just listen to the representatives of ISME or IBEC or ICTU and it will soon become apparent that all these speakers represent vested interests. They speak from a particular and limited perspective. If they didn’t, they would not be allowed to represent their constituency. It is no different for any of the political parties. They represent the types of people who vote for them, who support them, who want them to see things from a particular perspective. Each in their own way represents sectoral interests within the Irish population. Ideally this would result in some degree of compromise. Some degree of common interest. But not in Ireland. And the reason is that over the years of the Celtic Tiger and under Bertie Aherne all the sectoral interests were bought off with borrowed money. Money that it was assumed would be earned in future years and on which tax would be paid.

Therein lies the problem. The assumption of future earnings was a false one. Or at least the assumption that it would be earned within a relatively short period of time was a false one. Basically lots of people bought goods and services today with the expectation that they could pay for them tomorrow. Now they can’t. The people from whom they bought the goods and services also bought goods and services from suppliers on the assumption that they would be paid for them. They used money provided by the financial markets. The financial markets got their money from people who assumed that all these people would be able to earn enough to repay their loans with interest. These people were the same people who bought the APCs and thought they could retire at 55 into the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed and that that lifestyle would be paid for by a never ending supply of double income families.

I have come to the conclusion that the same people who wanted me to buy APCs that I couldn’t afford in the 1990s are the people who have supported FF for the last 15 years, are the people who populate FF and the banks and the upper echelons of the civil service. They are the people who will do everything they can to protect their pensions, their investments, their money. They will never accept that they have made investments which have not returned a profit and that they must take the loss. They do not accept that they had an individual responsibility to ensure that those who managed their investments did so wisely. They wanted profits and their greed blinded them to the risks involved. They did not ask the question they should have asked. These are not doddery auld ones. They made their money in business, in their careers. They had a responsibility to police their own investments.  Yet they did not. All they saw was the dividend popping through the letterbox.

These same people will ensure that the rest of the Irish people pay them what they believe to be their due. These are the same generation of people with the off-shore bank accounts. These are the Pee Flynns, Liam Lawlors and Charlie Haugheys of this world. And they are the people whose friends, sons and daughters, and in many cases ex-colleagues, are making the decisions. I have come to the conclusion that Nama is designed to protect the assets of this class of people. The rest is propaganda. The scary thing is that I’m not sure there is anything the rest of us can do about it.

Polygamy

I watched a few minutes of a TV programme last night. The piece I saw was a series of interviews with Muslims who were in favour of polygamy. So I got to thinking about it and subsequently decided I didn’t have a problem with it. During one of the interviews a polygamist, a man, referred to men who engage in extra marital affairs and who father children. He suggested that it would be better if there was a legal basis to these relationships the man would have a responsibility to the women and kids involved. So I got to thinking some more about it and decided he was talking sense.

The problem is that the whole discussion of polygamy in general takes place against the background of an assumption that marriage is a sacred union. The assumption that marriage is in some way sacred is itself based on the assumption that God or some divine entity has an opinion on it one way or the other. This I am not so sure about. In the Christian tradition it stems from the reference in the bible that says “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19.6). This too is used where it is based on the assumption that God has in fact joined together all the relationships that man says he has. That assumption is manifestly wrong and there is no basis for it at all. There are a whole bunch of marriages that no God in his right mind would ever give the OK to. The arrogance of religion is that just because the religion deems something to be sacred that it implicitly receives the support of the particular God in question.

Marriage is an arrangement. It has always been so. For many people it is a commitment made in public and with due ceremony (and expense) so as to signify its importance for those concerned. We make a big deal of those occasions which we consider to be a big deal for us. Because of this whole sacredness thing in a pluralist society it has become increasingly necessary to separate the legal relationship, the contract between two individuals which one hopes is freely entered into, from the emotional relationships. So it seems reasonable to me that if individuals want to enter into legal contracts they should be free to do so with all the consequences and responsibilities that flow from that. It is quite another thing for any children that result from such relationships as they have  not exercised any choice. We don’t choose our parents.

Of course there are implications in considering “marriage” in its religious connotations as being distinct from civil contracts. Once you do that it follows that any consenting adults must be free to enter into such civil contracts. Therefore same sex civil partnerships would be perfectly reasonable. I can conceive of civil contracts being enacted between people on the basis of a genuine lifelong friendship. It seems to me that once one lets go of the religious legacy the question becomes one of what the state is willing to support through its taxation and social welfare policies.

So much of what we call “normal” is a result of solutions found for problems that existed due to life conditions that no longer exist. Much of the work previously carried on by union activists is now the responsibility of government agencies and that, I believe, is how it should be. The state declares the standard that is to be adhered to based on the wishes of the population (allowing for ignorance and stupidity of course) just as FF did for the last number of years. People wanted light touch regulation and they got it. Given the technologies available to us and the level of sophistication of our legal system it is reasonable to suppose that we can determine questions of hereditary and ownership which marriage proposed to solve. We can resist the temptation to covet our neighbours land or goods without resorting to marrying his sister or fathering a child with his cousin. Richard the Lionheart offered his sister to Saladin during the Crusades. Such is the basis of the dowry which was once part and parcel of every culture and remains so in some.

Ultimately society will have to recognise the individual has having inalienable rights as a result of their existence and not as a result of their hereditary, their relationships or their position within society. This is not a position likely to gain the support of those seeking to maintain their power and status within society. Yet it would recognise that other declaration of the Catholic God that all men are created equal as far as he is concerned. Therefore children would have rights. This position is one being resisted by both church and state here in Ireland for to give the individual rights is to place a responsibility on those exercising power to treat all equally under law. The state does not want this because it involves taking from the rich and powerful in order to level the playing field of social history and of genetics. It becomes a massive insurance scheme against the vicissitudes of life. A spreading of the risks imposed by evolution as natural selection winds down from the human perspective. It is not supported by the religions because it removes the possibility of being one of the select group of those who have a special relationship with the divine. The special relationship so dismissed by A Course in Miracles is the basis of dogma. It removes the need for conscience in that one can simply refer to ones interpretation of the rules and lash all round you.

So all relationships, legally enacted or implied, become the subject of judicial process. That judicial process can be a mediation one or subject to judgement. We are all then free to add whatever layers of meaning or significance we choose to that relationship but rest assured we will be held accountable for it. That sense of accountability would be an advance on the current situation where relationships are entered into frivolously and with scant consideration of the longer term implications.

The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain DeBotton is an absolute joy to read. I love language and this is language at its best. The imagery is powerful and evocative. The photographs are really wonderful. And behind it all are stories of real peoples lives. People who live quiet ordinary but necessary lives upon which we all depend in one way or another. We live in a society that suggests that live must be in some way special and that each of us should be hankering after being the best that we can be. The reality is that this planet is populated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, day in and day out. And that is the way it is and that is OK. That we have been fooled into believing it should be otherwise is due to manipulation by those vested interests who seek to take advantage by creating dissatisfaction. They manipulate the genuine desire to improve the circumstances of our lives in order that such desires are distorted into their quest for wealth, status and power.

There is a balance to be struck and this book examines where that balance might be. For example:

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations, save for having the opportunity to spend a day away from his office. Of the two thousand business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinised fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a ‘graveyard cycle’ of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.

Then again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs’ activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unreemarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

Don’t you just love it? The current financial crisis epitomises this idea so completely when today we hear talk of reducing the minimum wage. What is not spoken of is the reality that many of the jobs created during the Celtic Tiger were unsustainable even when they were created. They were subsidised by borrowed money which will ultimately be repaid by the state. They were job schemes designed to shorten dole queues rather than invest in education. What price the €2.95 latte now when you ad in the interest we will have to repay over the next ten or twenty years? Tens of thousands left school with probably a Junior Cert and many without basic literary and numeracy skills because FF could not see the big picture. And now they want us to look to them to provide the SMART economy. Stupid people cannot deliver SMART.

Another wonderfully expressed image from DeBotton during a visit to a firm of accountants:

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver statue in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other  people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing 0r melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.

This image is particularly apt to me as I face into returning to full time education after some thirty years and to what could be loosely termed a “job” with it’s nine to five routine. I admit I did feel a sense of relief when I received the CAO offer a few weeks back. At least now I had a label. I was more then “a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe”. I could now nestle secure in  “the assumptions of colleagues”. I could now answer that “What do you do” question with “I am a student”. Safe from the barely suppressed moral outrage of the working classes for a few years at least. Except for the fact that one should really only study at night while holding down a day job. Otherwise you’re just lazy.

And the ultimate question:

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has’ the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o’clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.’

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningfull, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like ‘Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits’ and that whatever the logic and perspicacity of Vilfredo Pareto’s arguments, another principle to which no one has yet given a convincing name has here been ignored and subtler human laws violated.

Tell it like it is. Oh and by the way “perspicacity” means Acuteness of perception, discernment, or understanding. I looked it up. Don’t you just love it?

Truely inspirational stuff

Do yourself a favour and watch these two lectures on http://fora.tv/

The first talk is given by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson and he is certainly one of the most inspirational speakers I have heard in a long time. His talk is entitled  Cities and Time and focuses on the issue of sustainability in urban environments. If you had any doubt about what is possible in terms of dealing with the major issues facing countries like Ireland listen to this man talk about what his city IS doing and HAS already done. Try not to be depressed by any comparisons with our own government or that we probably get the politicians we deserve but try and accept that if we change our thinking, our expectations as individuals, things can and will change. Really uplifting stuff.

Toastmasters should just marvel at the delivery.

Unfortunately, as the poster of a goat on the back of my kitchen door says we are so far behind we think we’re in front. This is what being in front looks like on sustainability, on energy conservation, on green tech, on transport, on housing, almost everything.

The second is a lecture titled A Theory of History with an Application and is given by economist Paul Romer. These are the issues we need to be thinking about as we face into another Lisbon referendum.

Anyway do something with your mind that stretches it a bit and watch these lecture. Then move on to the rest of the stuff that Fora.tv has to offer.