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!