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.

Questions & Answers: The End

I have, like many others, been educated and informed by Questions & Answers over many years but all that was almost set to nought by the unfortunate appearance of Brian Cowen on the final programme last night. John Bowman did not need it and I’m not sure whose idea it was. It was self-congratulatory and cheap. Even Bowman did not seem particularly enamoured of the unfortunate set piece designed to honour Bowman but which ended up giving a free plug to the nation by one of the three people responsible for the depth of our current financial woes. The other two being Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy. If no one is interested in inviting Cowen on air it’s because no one wants to listen to his childish denials of responsibility.

The Secret History of the World

This book by Jonathan Black has left me wondering and I’m not sure what I’m wondering about really. I read it quite quickly which is a fair indication that I enjoyed the reading itself and also that it presented no particular difficulties. That it was accessible as it were but yet I am wondering. Coming towards the end of the book I marked a series of paragraphs that I hope will illustrate my point.

Madame Blavatsky wrote that among the Carbonari – the revolutionary precursors and pioneers of Garibaldi – there was more than one Freemason deeply versed in occult science and Rosicrucianism. Garibaldi himself was a 33rd degree Freemason and Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry.

In Hungary Louis Kossuth, and in South America Simoll Bolivar, Francisco de Miranda, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juarez and Fidel Castro, all fought for freedom.

Today in the USA there are some 13,000 lodges, and in 2001 it was estimated that there were some seven million Freemason worldwide.

What has the fact that Bolivar and Castro fought for freedom got to do with the Freemasons? Yet by sandwiching this between a reference made by Blavatsky in the late 1800’s and a statistic about the number of lodges in 2001 Black is implying something that he provides no evidence for. And this problem runs throughout the book. Implications made without any supporting evidence at all. Not even any footnotes, just again the implication that the extensive list of “key sources” will provide all the supporting evidence we might require. Black knows well that none of his readers will trawl through his list and I expect he is banking on that.

I must declare an interest. I am a student of the Arcane School whose courses are based on the books of Alice Bailey. Alice Bailey’s books are channelled from The Tibetan and because of this are specifically excluded from consideration by Black in his book. That’s fine and indeed reasonable to a degree but doesn’t seem to prevent Black claiming certain historic individuals were reincarnations of various masters.

On page 515 he sticks in a reference to Lorna Byrne, which I found on Lorna’s website and which led me to The Secret History. Here again we have an idea being presented, something else is just dumped in and then something else is connected to it by implication.

Rilke is using heightened, poetic language, but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.

IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book, I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book,… …… Hers is an alternative method of perception, a way of apprehending the parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place. Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness­eaters were on the move again.

So Rilke, Lorna Byrne and the first War in Heaven are all linked together in some way which the author considers not to require explanation. I’m really not sure what is going on in this book. It is sloppy and may be an edited version of a much larger body of work which has been attacked by an editor who did not have Blacks level of knowledge. Black says that “THIS BOOK HAS ACCUMULATED EVIDENCE to show that through­out history highly intelligent people have immersed themselves in esoteric philosophy.” I’m not convinced. I will accept that these people have had access to inspiration derived from higher planes of experience but to imply that secret societies were passing on techniques from which such inspiration was derived is pushing it.

A far simplier explanation is that bright, intelligent people sought out other bright intelligent people with whom they could have interesting conversations over coffee, over dinner or over a bottle of wine. What we would today call hot-housing. The conclusions they reached may well have being inspired but in order to make use of inspiration you need to have created a fertile ground within which the seeds can grow. Given the nature of the societies within which they lived and the protectionist nature of the church authorities secrecy may well have made sense. Look what happened to Galileo.

Leaving all that aside and making good use of a highlighter there are some useful ideas contained in this book. The central one for me is that we cannot make the assumption that previous generations perceived the reality as we do. I would apply this idea to the recent past. As we pour boiling oil on those whose behaviour is laid bare by the Ryan Report we need to balance our anger with an understanding of the value system that existed in Ireland at the time. The 20th century saw the extermination of 6 million Jews. It saw the massacre at Nanking. It saw the more recent atrocities of the Yugoslav war and the killing fields of Cambodia. To the people who carried out this actions it somehow made sense. We assume individuals are evil at our peril and enable ourselves to ignore the conditions from which such behaviour arises. Behavioural Psychology has much to offer by way of explanation.

Black offers the following:

How to recognize Satan? Or any false prophet? Or any false, pur­portedly spiritual teaching? False teaching usually has little or no moral dimension, the benefits of reawakening the chakras, for example, being recommended merely in terms of selfish ‘personal growth’. True spiritual teaching puts love of others and love of humanity at its heart – intelligent love, freely given.
Beware, too, of teaching that doesn’t invite questioning, or tolerate ‘ mockery. It is telling you, in effect, that God wants you to be stupid.

Here is a very important message to readers of this book. Here is much food for thought. If your education system does not promote questioning of those in authority, watch out. If your media is getting dumber and dumber, watch out. If everything is based on feeling comfortable and not upsetting people, watch out. If your beliefs cannot support others disbelief, watch out. THERE’S EVIL ABOUT.

Special Occasion Speeches – Project 4

Presenting An Award

This project has a time of three to four minutes and this final version came in at 3min 55sec but that was only after pretty severe last minute cutting. As I practiced it and got the the pace and pausing right I kept going over time. Hence the cutting.

The evaluator raised a number of issues:

• Failure to liaise properly with the Toastmaster on the night. This arose because my follow-on speaker was doing project 5 and accepting the award. We hadn’t organised how we intended to handle that with the Toastmaster: where people would stand and so on.
• The two speeches were not properly adapted, one to the other. This was due to emails going astray more then anything else but I should really have made sure my opposite number had my speech well in advance.
• Signs of nervousness that may be due to lack of confidence which I should address. Not sure what I could do about this.
• Take more control of the room. Again I’ll have to speak to my evaluator to see what exactly he means.
• He also raised one other useful point about the difference between writing for speaking and writing for reading. He considered many of my sentences to be too long and complicated making them difficult to recall when speaking. This results in over use of notes. This is very good advice. I love language and especially well constructed phrasing but that does make remembering the exact phrasing hard and that causes me to panic a little. So this is one I’ll be taking to heart for my next speech.

While these may seem rather petty/severe by normal meeting standards, the speech was delivered at a club formed specially for speakers doing advanced manuals and wishing to progress to a high standard. The assumption is that we know the basics and want to address the small things. So if we can’t handle the heat, we need to vacate the kitchen.

—————————————-The Speech————————-

When people retire from community work wonderful things are often said about them which they wish they had heard before they had retired and which would have being of massive encouragement when things got that little bit tough.

So each year we recognise the contribution made to community over an extended period of years by a single individual who is still active in their community by presenting a lifetimes contribution award in order to recognise the excellent work they do.

This man’s involvement with the GAA started as it does for most people, as a participant.He himself was at the receiving end of a previous generations contribution to their communities. As a football player he won both Club and Junior titles.

While we were chatting earlier he told me he played both full back and centre back but while his playing position may have been defensive, his subsequent career and contribution to the GAA in West Cork has been to lead from the front.

I’d say he’s held every administrative position his club had to offer, Secretary, Treasurer, PRO and now Chairperson.

He has even found time to be a selector for teams from under 10’s all the way up to Senior club level.

As always with people who give so much of their time and who put so much effort into what they do, they end up being asked to shoulder additional responsibility on a broader stage.

Tonight’s recipient has served on the County Board, chaired the Beara Division Committee and has been on the General Purposes Committee without which, as many of you will know, the games would not take place.

Now Beara has some of the mildest weather this country has to offer, but you just can’t do GAA without getting very familiar with mud, and wind and rain.

You also need to like driving along some very poor country roads, eating sandwiches of various degrees of quality, endless cups of tea.

Here we have the quintessential community volunteer without whom community cannot and could not exist.

Volunteers like tonight’s recipient give not because of any high ideals or lofty convictions but because it comes natural to them. They enjoy what they do.

They might not admit it to your face but for me this level of commitment, this level of selfless giving can only be maintained if you really enjoy it.

In recognition of the many dark winter nights he has spent in the mud, the wind and the rain.

In recognition of the endless meetings he has attended and which make the GAA the wonderful organisation it is.

In recognition of the millions of miles he’s driven often, I’m sure, into the early hours of the morning.

But most importantly in recognition of a lifetimes contribution to the people of both his own community, to the wider community at large and in particular to the youth members of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

It is my great pleasure to present this award to Mr ???????.

The Return of the Economic Naturalist

Robert H Frank is a journalist and academic who writes a regular column for The New York Times. This book is up to the minute having been published in 2009 and including some of his articles up to November 2008. It is very accessible stuff and even includes alternative explanations of American terms for the Anglophile reader. The material is all the more interesting because it deals with much of the Bush years from an economic perspective and which we can now view with the benefit of hindsight and in the midst of the results of Bush type free-market neo-liberal thinking.

The basic premise behind much of his thinking is that a consequence of trickle down economics is the debt incurred by middle income earners as they aspire to match the consumption of their higher earning neighbours. Frank sets the context with his own experience.

As a young man, I served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. The one room house I lived in had no plumbing or electricity, and its thatched roof leaked during heavy rains. At no time, however, did I feel it was unsatisfactory in any way. Yet I could not live in that same house in the United States, even in the poorest neighbourhood, without experiencing a profound sense of humiliation. If I had to go into debt to escape that experience, I certainly would.

And I understand what he means. Today, once again my car has had to be towed to the garage and it had to be towed home last Friday evening. If I could get it fixed I would but it has an electrical fault that no one can find never mind fix. Every so often the on-board computer looses the key security code and just stops the engine. Is it a source of humiliation for me? Yes, it is. No matter how much I tell myself that this is not my fault I feel a sense of inadequacy at my inability to resolve the situation and that inability is paraded publically each time the car has to be towed.

The problem is that having taken out a five year loan on the car I am in a negative equity situation as it is not saleable in its present state. Mind you it’s scary how many people have no problem foisting the car on some poor sucker willing to buy it, faults and all. But am I willing to take on additional debt, scrap the car and get a different one? Going into further debt to offset the sense of public humiliation would work but would result in a profound sense of failure internally. Maybe I could live with the less public version. In any case I need to do the sums and compare the ongoing maintenance costs with the cost of the additional debt (assuming I can secure additional finance). Mind you the question may become academic as my NCT is due in August.

Another theme threaded through this book is the attention we need to pay to behavioural economics in the future. Frank suggests that

[Republican Senator] Gramm and Greenspan were like many other traditional economists in their uncritical enthusiasm for Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand – the idea that unfettered market forces will guide self-interested individuals to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Had they taken an active interest in the behavioural economics revolution, a lot of misery could have been averted.

Basically, behavioural economics tells us that people respond to the context of their financial lives emotionally and very often irrationally. What our mammies and daddies, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours think of us plays a much larger part in our financial decisions then any cost-benefit analysis we might attempt to do. Our perceived status within our social group weighs heavily on us. As Frank says

The problem is that many people have difficulty weighing the trade-off between immediate benefits and future costs. when confronted with easy credit access, some inevitably borrow more than they can reasonably expect to repay. Once they get in over their heads, they borrow more, if the law permits. It was thus all but certain that million’s of society’s most economically vulnerable members would borrow them selves into bankruptcy if confronted with easy credit access. If we are unhappy about that, our only recourse is to change the rules.

The reality is that those who voted FF in the last general election were perfectly happy with the rules as they were. One hundred percent mortgages and deposits borrowed from other lenders. Sowing and reaping come to mind.

Frank does make many interesting suggestions regarding taxation in this book so there are ideas as to how best to balance the burden/services books. He describes the Americans as being tax adverse which I think could also be applied to the Irish. We have not quite got the connection between the quality of services and infrastructure available to a people and the amount of taxes they pay. That connection was lost way back in the seventies when local rates were abolished in pursuit of one party government. Yes, another FF idea. History may well show that the advent of the PD’s did even greater damage then would have been done had FF being able to keep this more extreme economic element within its ranks. We support extremism of any sort at our peril.

In any event The Return of the Economic Naturalist is a good and informative read. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of this authors thinking in the future.

Ok, Phase One Complete

OK, well done everybody. Phase one is now complete.

We have reduced Fianna Fail to second place. We have exposed them as a rural, backward looking party. We have shown them to be in complete denial as to the part they played in the current economic meltdown. The voters now accept that the Celtic Tiger years were by and large a wasted opportunity. An opportunity wasted by Fianna Fail. We have reduced their capacity to pull strokes and do favours which was their modus operandi and as such their only way of gaining popular support. They are not much use for anything now as they have no capacity to think creatively.

They will now implode (I hope) due to the loyalty to leader thinking. Most of the top dogs were complicit in the Wasted Years so there are few, if any, Soldiers of Destiny to replace Cowen with. The idea of finding a new Duce would cause such internecine warfare as to make the description of “political party” redundant. They will become known as the Cumman Wars. Maybe Michael Martin as he got sidelined rather early.

The next step is to force a general election and consolidate the gains. In addition we need to get the various extreme elements on the left and right to bugger off and not be so stupid as to believe that there is any fundamental change in the slightly left of centre position of the Irish people. The votes for socialists are just our way of saying “I’m serious. I’ll really vote against you” but don’t represent any real ideological position. As many FF commentators have said the real challenge will arise when the budgets on councils have to be agreed. But I think Council Managers have the final say anyway so steady as she goes.

Phase two involves using the years of experience gained negotiating deals in national agreements and in the North to strike a balance between spending cuts and spending supports that will help people through this crisis without placing a burden on future generations through excessive borrowing. At its core it needs to ensure that people proposing spending in any area are made responsible for the outcomes. Extreme Socialists rarely have to take responsibility for their ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ ideas. Everybody having enough to get by is not a long term option. They really do need to get real, study some behavioural economics, cost their proposals and while still holding to their long term goals, seek to bring people along with them rather than adopt ‘holier than thou’ attitudes. You will be dumped next time round unless you can get people on board.

The negotiating must continue after the general election with a view to getting that balance right between FG and Labour. That combination did the job cleaning up the FF mess before and should work better given the stronger support for Labour. I think Enda Kenny might have the management ability to do the business but FG need to get the message out that charisma is OK up to a point but the leadership style in cabinet is what counts. Right now we need people with organising ability. We need people to tell the truth.

You can’t run an economy like Big Brother or Britains Got Talent. People have to be allowed to express doubts about policy and it has to be OK for them to give something support in the short to medium term. Dump the PR people. We know spin when we see it. Communicate, explain, persuade but don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes. Tell us that your doing a deal and what your trading. We can take it. Explain that if people what more of your policies then they have to vote for you but twenty per cent of the vote gets you twenty percent of the policies. But above all expose the vested interests were you find them. Even your own.

If the weekends results mean real change then the people of this country have to take responsibility for the governments they elect. If they choose to vote on the basis of policies that are too good to be true then they will suffer long term. As a nation we now have to pay for the bouncy castles and the garden decks, the SUV’s and plasma screen TVs. The bill is now due and we must pay with effort, be it physical or intellectual. We must not only earn our keep but pay the ferryman too. He brought us here because we told him to. And Chris De Burg did warn us.

Preventing The Future – Tom Garvin

This was the last of my Christmas books and boy did it inform my mind regarding the recent Ryan Report. If you want to gain some insights into the why and how of what happened, read this book. Plenty of little yellow page markers and passages underlined in my copy. There is an excellent introduction which outlines the basis for Garvins’ book. His “starting point” is the work of Mancur Olsen as Garvin attempts to answer the question which is the object of this book: why was Ireland so poor for so long? This introduction is of itself sufficient reason to read this book. It explains the principle tool used by the vested interests within the Irish state to ensure those interests were protected.

to pursue one’s own material interest while disregarding an alleged collective, communal or general national interest can be declared by the culture to be immoral, anti-national, a betrayal of one’s comrades, political ‘idiocy’ in the classical Greek sense, evidence of a gross lack of ’spirituality’, selfishness or thievishness. Such idealogical declarations and finger-pointings can suit the private interests as well as the public purposes of elites striving to keep their followers in line.

I have observed and been subject to such tactics in many and probably in all groupings and not just politics. Although one must remember Gerry Collins’ in 1991: “Don’t burst the party!” with tears in his eyes designed to induce the maximum of guilt. I have heard the same type of rhetoric used in Scouting and Guiding (”Think about the young people!”) as someone sought to defend the status quo and ensure that nobody in authority gets upset.

But let me return to my yellow page markers. For starters:

The Fianna Fail government was tired in 1947, and the harsh winter of that year did not help. The same men who had stormed into office as Young Turks in 1932 held office and, in the eyes of many people, had become increasingly complacent in office. During the war years, it seemed that many ministers were immune from the privations which other people had to endure.

Does that sound familiar or what? In addition Garvin asserts that in 1948

the Fianna Fail monopoly of power was over. In sixteen years, the party had woven a web of connections, influence, multiple monopolies and bureaucratic and ecclesiastical alliances that amounted to a kind of large mutual benefit society for powerful institutions and individuals.

So why are we surprised that some sixty years later we find ourselves in exactly the same position. But then it is probably understandable when one accepts the place the belief in loyalty to the leader plays within Fianna Fail. Dev was the leader and it seems that a façade of allegiance to his, what I assume were honestly held, beliefs was in place and we get an insight into that belief form an interview he gave to the Manchester Guardian in 1927.

The journalist queried, ‘ … suppose your expert advisers tell you that by insisting on the use of our own resources you can indeed support a larger population, but only at a lower standard of living, would you [as prime minister] face that?’ De Valera had replied:
You say ‘lower’ when you ought to say a less costly standard of living. I think it quite possible that a less costly standard of living is desirable, and that it would prove, in fact, to be a higher standard of living. I am not satisfied that the standard of living and the mode of living in Western Europe is a right or proper one …

So here we have an insight into Dev’s thinking that we would all be better off with less. While I would be the first to agree with him, I’d prefer to use persuasion so that people might exercise enlightened choice rather than relying on deliberate neglect as a means achieving my aims. But it appears that within government it was the practice to say one thing and do quite another. As in cherish the children and at the same time subject them to systematic abuse.

But for another dose of deja vue Garvin tells us

… it does seem that it takes a sometimes scary economic downturn to force economically rational decisions injurious to the interests of political elites through the Irish governmental decision-making system. Such a pattern of decision-making was certainly evident in the late 1950’s and again in the late 1980s; veto groups were forced to remove their vetoes when it was put to them that a general collapse of some sort might occur.

Garvin’s analysis leads him to consider that

faith in the modern world seems to be liable to be poisoned by an overly intimate relationship between Church and state and, more generally, by an intimate relationship between ecclesiastical organisations and political power.

An analysis I would have to agree with and which seems to have been recently evidenced by former Taoiseach Ahern’s opinion that those seeking a larger financial atonement was required from the Irish congregations responsible for the abuse outlined in the Ryan Report as “anti-clerical”. It is also to be noted that the same Mr Ahern was once an employee of the individual negotiating with Dr Woods TD on the sweet deal they subsequently achieved. A “web of connections” indeed. [I've stopped using the term 'Bertie' which suggests that this man was some kind of benign cuddly figure in Irish life.] But thankfully the web is under some strain, at least in relation to the Roman Catholic Church and Garvin comments.

Ireland is becoming declericalised; the laws and rules of behaviour laid down by priests for laypeople to conform to came to be defied and afterwards simply increasingly ignored, which, from the Church’s point of view, was worse.

Garvin offers some hope by saying that “A focus on ideas suggests, rather, the possibility that human agency can defy the constraints of political and social structures and create new political possibilities.” It’s just that it seems to take so damm long. Mind you when you have deliberately set out to prevent any ideas other than approved ones seeing the light of day through censorship and the threat of being socially ostracised, it is not surprising that it takes so long. We need only look to the former USSR and to China.

Institutional abuse

The congregations are involved in a certain degree of double speak. The reality is that they are currently involved in cleaning up their own mess and I’m not sure they are best qualified to do that. It’s the same type of double think that the government is subjecting us to. Fianna Fail created the Irish version of economic crisis and try to tell us that they are best qualified to fix it. The Catholic Church created the society that led to many of the social ills we are now faced with. We are a people who suppress their real emotions and overlay them with a facade of being great craic. We put on the face of friendship while we shaft you for every penny you’ve got. We are by and large a dishonest people.

This is a unique moment in Irish history that future generations of historians and social scientists will discuss in academic institutions as case history. We are being asked to make a collective decision to change the way we view the world. We are being asked to take individual responsibility for the society in which we live. We are being asked to acknowledge that in the past we have abdicated responsibility for the way we lived our lives in return for social acceptability. We are being asked to accept that we paid a high price for our collective absence of conscience.

The pursuit of the quiet life is fraught with danger. It leads to frustration as we internalise our rage at injustice, at unfairness and at abuse of power and privilege. Maybe it was the survival technique of a conquered people! Maybe. But having won our independence as a nation we have yet to assert that independence as individuals. Only when we have done that and risked the conflict over ideas and beliefs that must follow will be be truly free to place that independence at the service of society itself.

The churches and the political parties know well that if we were to think for ourselves we would soon realise that we have no need of church or party. It is in their own best interest to embed a sense of belonging as something we need to have to be happy. The last thing they want us to realise is that we can survive as individuals, that we can choose the degree to which we cooperate with others in the common interest and that there is a big difference between management and control. Complex societies need to be managed but they don’t need to be controlled. In reality complex societies are to a large extent self organising and have been since man first walked the earth.

I’m not speaking here of any ‘ism’ or any collective homogeneous belief system. I’m speaking of honestly held ideas that are defended and fought for in the clear expectation that we may be proved wrong. This is not consensus but a willingness to compromise in the common interest. A common interest that changes with the seasons, with the years and with the evolving nature of human existence. Central to this is a willingness to change. We need to foster a willingness to embrace change among our people.

To do this we need to challenge vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We need to educate our children towards change, towards innovation and learn how to manage transition so that it is not a threat but a challenge and a socially enjoyable thing to be involved in. To be stuck in the past needs to become a source of embarrassment. To be called a traditionalist needs to become an insult. To refuse to grow needs to be seen for what it is: a characteristic deserving of our pity.

Angels in my Hair by Lorna Byrne

A surprisingly enjoyable book.  Certainly thought provoking. Never mind the angels but the description of the life the author lived. Very tough, very tough indeed. The innocence and simplicity of the writing while endearing I found a little annoying but certainly written from the heart. Do I believe that she can see and communicate with angels? Certainly. No reason not to. In my own spiritual practice they are referred to as Deva spirits. If you have a belief in any existence beyond the human existence then there must be crossover points or individuals whose gift or cross it is to live life on the edge of both. The mind will interpret the experiences of such a state of being according to its cultural context. In this case: Catholic Ireland. Read between the lines and you will be rewarded by very profound insights into the nature of existance and of good and evil.

Lorna Byrne has an excellent website and obviously has some very good people assisting her. So certainly a force for good and I hope life is easier for her these days. I thank her for the love and solace she has brought and continues to bring to so many people.

A hint to the editors if this book goes to another edition: there is a repeated paragraph in the acknowledgements.

Consider yourself warned

Noel Whelan (whom I consider to be an apologist for Fianna Fail) wrote the following in today’s IT in relation to the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse:

I wonder what our generation’s response will be in 40 or 50 years’ time when our children turn to us and ask: “Where were you in the 1980’s or 1990’s or the early 21st century when these horrible things were going on?”

I will be able to say proudly that ever since I was able to vote I was voting against Fianna Fail. I do not belong, nor have I ever belonged to any political party or grouping, but I have always had an intuitive understanding that Fianna Fail was a dangerous and corrosive influence on Irish Society.

That intuitive understanding may have it’s roots in my fathers unquestioning support for the party, for I always questioned everything and was deeply suspicious and continue to be deeply suspicious of people who don’t ask questions. Even he stopped voting for them a few years before he died. For me it is the purpose of youth to question their parents and while my questions were often ignored, it is a source of great pride to me that I have raised my children to always question, everyone and everything. Such a policy is not without cost. My adultees have constantly questioned my actions, my behaviour, my ideas and continue to do so. It has been the greatest gift I could imagine for it has forced me to modify and change my ideas as the years went by.

Coincidentally, over the last few weeks I have been reading Tom Garvin’s excellent book Preventing The Future and in it you will find adequate explanation of why the abuse was endemic and accepted within Irish society. For example;

Jeremiah Newman, a well-known priest who was later to be bishop of Limerick, was at that time an influential academic sociologist who was close to government. As late as 1962, Newman let the ideological cat out of the bag, writing eloquently in favour of the middle-sized farm family, on the interesting and profoundly non-economic grounds that it produced young men who aspired to be priests. Newman pointed out that the ratio of population to priests had gone from 1,376 to one in 1871 to 558 to one in 1961; the Catholic population of Ireland had declined in that near-century by 23 per cent, but, mirabile dictu, the number of priests had increased by 87 per cent. The beginning of the Second World War had triggered a further extraordinary jump in this ratio.

Sadly, I suspect, and the report into child abuse appears to bear this out, that many were press-ganged into religious life at 13 or 14 years of age. Official government opposition to industrial development created the environment in which people with no religious vocation where left with no option to but to join the orders or take the boat. The clever ones took the boat. It is clear from Garvin’s book that the Catholic Church opposed education beyond the most basic of levels required to produce the required crop of priests, brothers and nuns. Once within the seminary system, the real education could start. Education in obedience to rightful authority (see Spiral Dynamics – Blue).

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prison Experiment fame) tells us what can happen and why it can happen. In his book he deals with “the power of situational forces over individual behaviour”. He examines “research on conformity, obedience, deindividuation, dehumanization, moral disengagement, and the evil of inaction.” As Breda O’Brien notes (also today’s IT) “Brothers, priests and nuns were our siblings, uncles, aunts”.

Unfortunately the system thus created a population resistant to change.

However, back in 1962, the Irish priest was confronted by his real constituency of support, the Plain People of Ireland, and by the ’suspicious gaze’ of the many ’simple people … who were hostile to change of any kind. This situation was to change, but opinion change was to occur at a glacial pace.

These people who were resistant to change were, I believe, largely Fianna Fail voters and continue to be. Fianna Fail voters abhor change. They have benefited from a system of parish pump politics. A system of cronyism and pandering to vested interests that has existed since the foundation of the party. This is a party which was founded from the remnants of those who took up arms against the democratically expressed wishes of the Irish people. Then as now their primary allegiance is to themselves, to their group and to the benefits that arise from gang membership. And that is dangerous for any society.

Thankfully they are a dying breed. Anyone who tells you they have always voted FF and doesn’t think they should be changing now is too stupid to be allowed to vote but that’s in the nature of democracy. Anyone who considers allegiance to the party leader or indeed the party to be sacrosanct is too dangerous to be allowed play with sharpe instruments. Anybody who believes that power for its own sake is the primary objective will be blinded by that power. For FFers winning a seat is on the same level as winning an All Ireland final except that one is real life and the other is a game.

Back in the 80’s when nurses were being laid off left, right and center, an uncle of mine (FF of course) offered to get my wife a job in a Limerick hospital. We refused the offer. Recently a friend of mine (not a FFer) suggested I have a word with Simon Coveney about getting myself a job. I was shocked that such an attitude still existed anywhere else other than FF where at least I expected it and I told him so. I have the faint hope that Simon would have laughed in my face at the suggestion. Such is the slow, glacial, pace of change in Irish Society.

Eamon Gilmore made an interesting comment at a union conference the other day when being pressed about entry into possible coalition with FF. He asked the assembled audience how many ways they wanted FF back in power. And that is the pervasive nature of the beast. The Irish people seem largely incapable of imagining a post Fianna Fail Ireland. Such has been the propaganda machine foisted on the Irish people for almost a century that we have come to believe that feudal concepts of power for its own sake, allegiance to leaders and family dynasties are in our own best interests. Thankfully, as the FF support base erodes, the party is becoming more incestuous as the same families are having to provide more and more of the candidates as seats are handed over to sons and daughters, brothers and sisters in an ever smaller circle of thinking and ideas.

Such is the paucity of ideas that the Fianna Fail mantra that the property boom was not the result of government policy is being repeated over and over again long after everyone has stopped listening. At the last election I tried to discuss the behaviour of Haughey and Lawlor with Michael Martin when HE came to MY door. He just turned and walked away. Deny, deny, deny. The soldiers of destiny can do no wrong in their own minds and that makes them dangerous.

Michael Woods did a deal because the party was scared shitless that the Catholic Church would pull the plug on all the schools and hospitals that successive governments (of all shades) have failed to nationalise and bring under state ownership. In addition the Fianna Fail belief in power and authority forces it to back down in the face of power and authority. They willingly accept in others what they accept in themselves. To challenge traditional authority institutions would create a precedent for others to challenge the very basis of their own existence: to have and hold power.

So what will a post Fianna Fail Ireland look like? Well, I suspect it will follow the model of the more advanced societies. People will take responsibility for their own problems. If something needs to be done, they will form a group to do it. They will seek funding from whatever source it is available by going directly to the administrators of those funds with little or no recourse to politicians. They will no longer go cap in hand to politicians for that which is theirs by right. They will learn how the system works and operate accordingly. Where they believe that systems need change they will lobby to have that change but clear in the knowledge that the politician is simple the means by which the end is achieved. It’s their job and when they do that job well (according to whatever criteria or value system) then they will retain the support of the voters. It’s called a representative democracy. The politicians represents the people who vote for them, not the party to which they belong. We see such a model in Europe where MEP’s form groups based on common goals and negotiated objectives. It’s not rocket science.

We will, in effect grow up and take responsibility for our own lives. The institutions are finally falling one by one. The Catholic Church, the Garda, the Lawyers, the Doctors, the Bankers, the Unions, the Teachers, the Builders have all been exposed as fundamentally human and flawed at that. They got away with stuff because they banded together in order to intimidate opposition and protect their own selfish interests. We now know what happens when we hand over responsibility for our lives to other people. Consider yourself warned!