Has anyone accepted responsibility?

Has anyone in this country actually accepted responsibility for their part in the calamity that was the property bubble? It seems that all those who signed the various wage agreements hold everyone else responsible for their consequences. So let me be the first: in so far as I voted for all agreements up to August 2001 I accept my complicity in the creation of the bubble that burst upon us all. For me it was not so much the wage increases as the other elements of the agreements that won my vote. In those days I could not see far enough ahead to know what was to happen but I had been through one bubble already, the dot com bubble and soon recognised the signs.

I lost my job (somewhat willingly I might add) to the dot.com crash and many others did too. One of the consequences I found out recently was a drop in class size in the CIT Software Degree from 120 down to its current 1st year intake of 20 or so. At the graduation day last week there were 220 business graduates. I’d imagine that the intake for business courses this year is just as high. The absence of planning is obvious. But such is the nature of the system within which we live.

One of the functions I assign to government is planning for the future of the country. They have the resources for that type of thing. The CSO have the data and it should be possible for them to extrapolate some distance into the future and plan accordingly. So it seems strange that the courses offering the types of skills the economy supposedly needs are running down in numbers while those creating increasing numbers of managers are being expanded. Strangely the system is still producing candidates for the very jobs that we need to eliminate from the employment environment: those of administrators.

The problem is that 3rd level institutions are paid on the basis of the numbers of students they have enrolled. So the plan is to get ‘em in the doors, put them through the mill and spew them out the other side whether they have any function within the economy or not. Surely it would be better to incentivize the sector to produce graduates that are aligned with those industries been fostered and supported by the government. This requires a plan with a horizon of at least four years.

Coincidently my eldest son is currently doing his masters in eBusiness in UCC. This masters is funded by the EU because in their wisdom they have decided that the EU will need business leaders with skills in programming, databases, and networks i.e. smart economy workers. So the EU saw the need even if the Irish government did not and they were willing to put their money where their mouths are.

Having read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman I too am willing to put Irish taxpayers money where my mouth is and am doing a degree in software and computer networks in CIT. All going well I will qualify in 2013 just in time to play my part in a smart economy on the rise but only if the planning starts now. This government do not have the capacity to plan for that day.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

An Invitation to Coffee

Gossip doesn’t interest me.

Yet I do like talking to people. Not necessarily with people who think the way I do but with people who think about the things I think about. I am often accused of “thinking too much”.

I like to think about what I consider to be the big questions: politics, spirituality, economics, history, science, that kind of stuff. And I like to talk to people about how these things affect individuals, groups and nations.

Jamboree 2008… and now the spin

Just received this email from the camp chief. Not just me might I add and I suspect it’s a general email but the language of spin is evident. The wagons are circling I think. Ironically it was sent straight to my spam folder by Firefox. The weather was neither unprecedented nor unexpected. I was at both Woodstock in ‘78 and Portumna in ‘85, both of which were washouts but neither of which saddened me to the extent that this camp did. This spin doctor email is more evidence, if any were needed, that image has become paramount in Irish Scouting.

Scouting – Celtic Tiger Style

I awoke bright and early at half past eight yesterday morning (Friday) in my little two man tent and decided I was going home. I’d had enough. It was Air Day, the fifth day of activities at Scouting Ireland’s one hundredth anniversary camp, Jamboree 2008. A few weeks ago I answered the call and after a ten year absence from Scouting decided to rejoin, go on staff for Jamboree 2008 and remain on serving scouting in some capacity into the future. Never make such decisions in haste for you will live to regret them, as I now do.

Recession Perspective

One of the objectives of modern marketing is to bastardise the spiritual concept of living in the NOW into a way of living where what you have just bought is forgotten and where waiting until tomorrow until you buy something is anathema. The objective is to sell stuff all the time, in all markets and to erase any memory of the natural cycles which occur within life.

Coffeehouse Conversations

While reading Respect by Richard Sennett I read the following which I think is a great idea and would love if some Coffee shop would try it out for an evening. Any takers?

“In the cafes and coffeehouses of eighteenth century Paris and London, for instance, strangers felt free to speak face to face.