I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Louis MacNeice

Dublin’s Medieval Core

Peter Sirr writes: Sir John Perrott decides to make a circuit of the walls of the city. It is 1585, he is the lord deputy of Ireland and thought to be a son of Henry VIII. In seven years’ time he will die in the Tower of London, convicted of treason. Fifteen years earlier he had come to Ireland as lord president of Munster, landing at Waterford and conducting a ruthless campaign against the Geraldines, the heads of fifty of whom he fixed to the market cross in Kilmallock, pour encourager les autres. He hanged another eight hundred before he returned to England in 1573.

He took up the lord deputyship in 1584, and here he is now patrolling the walls with military thoroughness, working his way round clockwise via Pole Gate, Geneville’s Tower, Nicholas Gate, New Gate, Gormond’s Gate, Bridge Gate and Prickett’s Tower on the river side and up towards Isolde’s Tower and Dame’s Gate. You could rebuild the walls pretty efficiently from Perrott’s circuit. He gives us the exact distance between each gate and describes the shape and conditions of the towers, the ramparts and the ditches outside the walls, and where the towers are not in the ownership of the city he tells us who they belong to; so we learn of Mr Christopher Sedgrave’s tower, Sir Patrick Sarsfield’s tower, and ‘the tower in Mr Richard Fagan’s possession’. Some towers are both round and square, like Stanihurst’s, ‘round without the tower and square within’. He is thinking of the defensive capacity of the walls, so he gives us the thickness of walls and towers and gate-houses. He notes the ordnance available to the city, inspects the portcullis over New Gate, laments the absence of a portcullis and ‘murdering hole’ over the castle gate. You can see a visual representation of this walled Dublin in a wonderfully detailed drawing made by the architect and writer Leonard Strangway in 1904, the city running from the castle to Usher’s Island and from Patrick Street to the river, the castle a walled and gated citadel within the city, and watching over it. You can identify the streets and imagine their inhabitants and their traffic. You can see where the butchers operated from, where the fishmongers had their stalls, where the taverns were clustered and where food was offered for sale. You can see and comprehend an entire encapsulated urban island.

Perrott is a soldier looking to the defences of a garrison town, a town which mostly dislikes him, as it happens. He pokes around and notes down his details. Maybe action was taken, maybe tradesmen were summoned to insert a proper murdering hole above the castle gate. A woodcut from John Derrick’s View of Irelande, published in London four years earlier, shows Perrott’s predecessor, Sir Henry Sidney, father of the poet, riding out of the castle gate across the bridge over the Poddle which served as the castle’s moat, his army crowding Castle Street, on his way to impose as much as he can of the queen’s will on the Irish. Just behind him, impaled on spikes above the portcullis, are the heads of three rebels whose fate is commemorated by the following admonitory lines:

Their truncles heddes do playnly showe, eache rebeles fatall end,
And what a haynous crime it is, the Queene for to offend.

In the little museum under City Hall they have made a model of this scene, adding the homely touch of a couple of citizens going about their business outside in Castle Street, paying no attention to the clatter of soldiery beside them.

I go to see a stretch of the old wall. There isn’t much left of it but what there is is impressive enough, a stretch of thick grey stone wall with buttresses and battlements, running down Cook Street at the back of St Audoen’s Church, protecting the city from, among other things, the ovens of this street of food shops and bakers. Once the Liffey came as far as here, and everything below this line is built on reclaimed land. The wall is now the boundary of St Audoen’s Park, entered here in Cook Street through the last remaining city gate set in its impressive gate tower. You can see the steps into St Audoen’s behind, but the gate itself is bleakly padlocked. I think back to John Speed’s 1610 map; the tiny city on its hill enclosed by walls and entered by gates. Walled cities exercise a strong pull on the imagination. Antiquity is part of the lure; a wall is an image of the unreachable past, it implies glamour and danger. The walls of Jericho, Uruk, York, Avila, Babylon.

There is the absolute definition of what is within, the pure zone snug behind the walls that can’t be adulterated by sprawl. There’s no need to ask where the city is, or the centre: it is unarguably here. No buses trundling from the suburbs with the mysterious, mythical destination An Lár blazoned on the front. And then there is the theatre of exit and entrance, the restrictions and tolls, the gates and gate-towers. A walled and many-gated city is a serious place, a place of prestige and danger. The walls of Dublin protected the inhabitants from the ravages of the Irish who occasionally descended from the mountains to exact their own bloody toll. Later, they become a statement of civic power and achievement: the city is that which is enclosed. It has its own charter, its own laws, its own exclusive systems and work practices, its rigid social demarcations, its closed-shop guilds and privileged merchants, its underclass of the unenfranchised and despised. There is within and there is without. The first suburbs are much more than suburbs, they are an alternative urban jurisdiction, the liberties, liberated from the writ of the city: anti-cities, in fact.

Back inside the walls the laws multiply, thought up by the municipality or shipped in from England in cargoes of parchment, written in Latin, French or English. Don’t put your dung outside the door. Cattle shall not be eviscerated beside the river. Hides not to be salted in the city. A miller who steals fourpence worth of corn shall be hanged from the beam of his own mill. Pigs are forbidden within the city walls. Even so, they continue to rampage through the archives until the end of the eighteenth century, destroying gardens, fouling streets, even, in 1601, devouring an infant. (Ian Cantwell, ‘Anthropozoological Relationships in Late Medieval Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol 13, No 3/4, [1953], pp 79-93)

The pig-warden, whose job it is to round up illegal pigs, is also responsible for clearing beggars from the city. In 1579 this is Barnaby Rathe, bellman, master and beadle of the beggars. His main problem is less the pigs and beggars than the slippery citizens who are supposed to be paying him fourpence per house per year for his labours. After a couple of years, he asks to be relieved of the job, claiming that he can’t collect his stipend. He asks instead for a room in St John’s, the poorhouse, but the aldermen are too canny for that. He’s either very good at his job or beadles and pig-killers are hard to come by. They come back with a counter-offer: you can have the room but you have to keep the job. But it’s no use, and even the constables assigned from the various wards to help him in the execution of his duty can’t extract the necessary funds, and he eventually secures his retirement. (See TK Moylan, ‘Vagabonds and sturdy beggars: poverty, pigs and pestilence in Medieval Dublin” in Howard Clarke, ed, Medieval Dublin: The Living City, Irish Academic Press, 1990. Also, John T Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, Dublin, 1907, Vol 2 pp 127, 142, 154/155). Unringed pigs snort in the records for centuries after.

You realise what a tiny place is enclosed by these walls. Many of the citizens are known by their first names: William the Clerk, Robert the Moneychanger, or by the place they originally came from: John of Notyngham, Wulfran of Bristol. Even the city charters are small, not the vast scrolls unrolled ceremoniously by heralds that you might imagine, but tiny micro-documents you could slip into a jacket pocket. Dublin’s earliest charter, issued by Henry II in 1172, was a mere 6½ inches long by 4¾ inches broad. Tiny, self-contained, rigidly hierarchical – a typical medieval town.

Apart from the cathedral, a length of wall off High Street, and the longer section behind St Audoen’s, and of course St Audoen’s itself, and the older parts of the castle and its walls, there’s not a shred of any of this left. The roads and the names, but the epicentre of the medieval city is the yellow box junction between the top of Patrick Street and Christchurch, with its constant north and southbound traffic. It’s something of a leap to banish the frenetic rush of cars and step back into the different din of the earlier city, picking your way down High Street through the mess and rubbish and the marauding pigs.

Where would someone, descended from the distant future to make a survey of Dublin’s boundaries today, begin and end? The walled city is beautifully simple; the city and its liberties and the northern stretches across the river are easily comprehensible. The later city, with its centre shifted eastward, and its broad streets and squares, is still a compact place. As is the city of Joyce. Suburbs have grown up in the nineteenth century but these themselves are distinct, satellite townships connected to but separate from the core city. But as time goes on and the car becomes the dominant form of transport and the dominant feature in the minds of planners, the core is increasingly dug out and its inhabitants deposited in newly created functional suburbs. Today, the greater city area stretches north into Meath and Kildare and south as far as Wexford in an expansion driven by developers and property values that forced people ever farther from the old boundaries. These are cyclical events, money pushing and pulling the boundaries, dispersing and collecting populations.

Yet in some respects people’s experience of the urban centre isn’t that far removed from the medieval city. They journey to the core for work or for shopping. The latter tends to be confined to Grafton Street, Henry Street and their surrounding areas, a tiny geographical area whose boundaries don’t really shift much. It’s a peculiar feature of Dublin life that no matter how much the greater urban area sprawls across the map, the area properly recognised as the city or ‘town’ stubbornly refuses to expand. There’s a kind of mental or psychic wall running from Stephen’s Green north to Parnell Street, bounded to the west by George’s Street and Capel Street and to the east by O’Connell St.

This is the area into which visitors, shoppers, suburban Dubliners pour in great numbers every day, giving it the flavour of an intense, carnival village. This is where the shops, cinemas, coffee bars, pubs and big department stores are. This is the area illuminated by lights at Christmas. This is the mysterious and semi-mystical An Lár, at which all incoming transport aims, and an area that can only effectively be traversed by foot. The limits of this city are also the limits of the pedestrian impulse. I remember how much of a challenge it was, when I worked in a cultural institution in Parnell Square, to lure people that far north for an event, yet Parnell Square lies at the top of the city’s largest thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. It was as if the Gate Theatre, on Cavendish Row, represented the limits of the tolerable city after seven o’clock and a portcullis snapped shut outside the Rotunda, prohibiting any further northward progress. There was a certain amount of class prejudice embedded in that, but it’s hard to imagine the equivalent distances in any other city generating the same unease.

People who live in big cities think nothing of traversing them constantly for work or play, but they have the subway, the Métro, the underground, the subte, to do it with. But Dublin is still a medieval town at heart, it doesn’t really matter how big it gets, how far it sprawls, it still vests its sense of itself in the same historic core, the locus of its informal as well as its ceremonial life, the stage on which it acts out the drama of itself. Those whose families were exiled from the centre during the slum clearances of the last century still retain strong ties with the city areas their families moved from. The centre, and the districts to the east and west of it, are now full of new apartment buildings, and new generations of city dwellers will develop a strong relationship with the area between the canals. The suburbs are awash with shopping centres, coffee shops, restaurants, offering increasing competition to the centre, but they can never be really self-contained. The core of a lot of newer suburbs is a shopping mall, safe, secure, soulless. Nothing that we have built in a century has managed to house the urban soul, which is why we hunger for the centre, why we take the bus into town, looking for the point at which the buildings and the accelerated life of the streets tell us we have arrived.

Perrott is busy making himself enemies. A man of violent temper, enmity comes easily to him, and he has a habit of attacking his associates. He decides that he wants to get his hands on the funds of St Patrick’s Cathedral to endow a couple of colleges, earning the undying hostility of the archbishop, Adam Loftus. Drink didn’t help. On one occasion, in the council chamber, he struck Sir Nicholas Bagenal, the elderly knight marshal. Eventually he is replaced, and when he gets back to England his many enemies there are waiting to plot against him and ensure his ruin. The account of the circuit of the walls seems too calm, too disinterested a work to come from the hand of this rash and impulsive man. How likely is it that he did it? He would certainly have conceived and ordered it, but maybe it was some minion who actually walked around and took down the details.

From Cook Street the walls would have continued through what are now the bunkers of Dublin City Council on Wood Quay. The wall was in fact discovered during excavations when the offices were being built, after widespread protests against the destruction of an important Viking site. The original plan was to demolish the wall and store it somewhere else but in the end it was left on the site. The wall is now part of the new Wood Quay Venue but I discover when I go to see it that it has been incorporated into a private space for hire. There is a viewing platform on the upper level, part of a multimedia exhibition on the city, but when I go to that the blinds have been drawn as a meeting is in progress in the room with the wall. It is only available to view when there are no meetings and the security guards are unable to tell me when that is likely to be. The only way to get a close view of the wall with its stones numbered in preparation for the cancelled demolition, is to hire the room. Unless you have a purpose and a Powerpoint presentation, the wall is off limits. The guardians of the city, having built the wall to repel intruders and then smothered this part of it with its colossal bunkers, now exacts a toll from any of its citizens who want to examine it. I shake my head at the polite Eastern European guards, leave the museum, and continue on my circuit of the mostly vanished walls.

When I lived in the area I always felt a psychic connection with its past; I was excited by the sense of the multiple layers of the streets, and by the various excavations that were being conducted at the time. The simple physical experience of walking through these streets was a link with everyone else who had walked them down the centuries. I felt somehow brushed by that past, implicated in it. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but it seems to me that this constant murmuring from the past is one of the gifts of old cities. Dublin’s past is, like that of many cities, complicated and cantankerous; many cities are embedded in it, many prejudices and factions, many exclusions. Perrott’s circuit of the walls, whether personal or virtual, is a small reminder that for centuries it was a bastion of colonial privilege, designed to keep the natives out. Another city has long since arrived at the gates of the old and completely submerged it. Yet all the stages of the city require our attention. Living in a city is a relationship with what’s not there as well as what is, with the demolished and buried as well as the brightly flourishing.

Now and again, the citizens come out to assert their rights to their past. One of the most spectacular examples was the struggle over Wood Quay, which brought more than twenty thousand to the streets. It might seem astonishing, given the level of the protests, that the Corporation nonetheless went ahead and built the Civic Offices on the prime site of Viking Dublin, but the civic bureaucracy moved, like all bureaucracies, with unstoppable force, impervious to argument. The historical geographer Anngret Simms remembers giving guided tours of Wood Quay during the summer of 1977, ‘when thousands of people walked on the medieval stone wall and glimpsed for the first time the physical origins of their city. . . as a settlement along the waterfront’. Her worst memory of the site was October 1980, when she walked with some students up Fishamble Street and found that ‘the medieval stone wall was being dismantled by a group of building workers, and bulldozers were moving on ground that, a short time before, had held the fabric of the first streets and houses of Dublin. The anger of the students was intense, probably because they instinctively realised that in a democratic society the preservation or neglect of historical monuments reflects fairly closely the cultural consciousness of that society.’

Thousands of people had come, unexpectedly, to find out about the origins of their city. No one had anticipated the level of public interest in the archaeology of Wood Quay, or the strength of the opposition to the city’s intent to build its tower blocks on the site. Anngret Simms felt strongly that ‘the national monument in the core of medieval Dublin should have been preserved as a symbol of the continuity of human purpose in the city’. That seems to me to be the key, the human continuity of the city. In all sorts of surprising ways, people discover that the past, even, or especially, the remote past, is important to them.

This is the case even, or especially, when the past seems to have vanished. I was standing outside the apartment building in Christchurch Place recently, about to visit friends, when a tourist asked me the way to ‘the Viking Quarter’. The visitor, to whom the past is most energetically marketed, expects it to be visible. The Vikings and their quarter have long vanished beneath the city and all I can do is make a sweeping gesture with my hands to indicate the geographical area where the disappeared past took place, and, of course, direct the tourist to where it is recreated as a consumer ‘experience’, to the Civic Museum or ‘Dublinia’ with its ghoulish exhibits and kitsch concoctions. In a city which has outlived its past and carelessly swept it aside, the past has to be kitsch, has to be a virtual product peddled for small change. For the citizens, though, the past is internalised, it lies quiescent somewhere in the back of the brain like a hidden map or an unused language until it’s pulled to the front by an unexpected event or a threat of extinction; we know, and are, maybe, vaguely comforted by the fact that there’s more beneath our feet than the pavement of the present.

5/02/2023

This blog was first published in October 2019. Peter Sirr’s stimulating reflections on Dublin’s history was published as a book, Intimate City (Gallery), in 2021.

 

The Trials of the Red Prince

The presidential, and subsequent legislative, elections in France earlier this year told us a number of things about the changing nature of the nation’s politics. First, that the main contest is now, and has been since 2017, not that between left and right but that between centre and far right. Second, that the stumble in the 2017 presidential election which saw the traditional big beasts of the Parti socialiste and Les Républicains eclipsed by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement nationale and Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! was not just a temporary aberration in the configuration of national politics. Third, that Marine Le Pen’s firm grip on the sizeable far-right electorate, strongly challenged for a time by an exotic figure even further to the right than her, Eric Zemmour, has been confirmed. Fourth, that the radical left, represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (“Rebel France”) (LFI) movement, is now by far the most important socialist force in the country, having swept aside its rivals in the last few weeks of the presidential campaign before further consolidating its dominance by forging, and leading, a new left-wing alliance, which performed impressively in June’s legislative elections.

There could be no ignoring the Parti socialiste’s spectacular failure in the presidential election (its candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, polled 1.7%, the worst score in the party’s history). But, as is sometimes the case in human affairs, the hurt occasioned by one’s own failure can be significantly magnified by the success of others. LFI had run a brilliant campaign, which came to a head just when it counted, in the final fortnight of the contest. Playing on the relative weakness of the other left-wing candidates, it called on the electorate to cast a vote utile (a tactical vote) in Mélenchon’s favour which might see him surging through to the second-round run-off against either Macron (he would almost certainly have lost) or Le Pen (he would probably have won). In the event, Mélenchon came in just a little more than a point behind Le Pen and a few more behind Macron and thus failed to make the second round, but he, and his movement, had nevertheless clearly notched up a political triumph.

The Parti socialiste found itself in the brief pause between the second round of the presidential elections (April 24th) and the first round of the legislatives (June 12th) under immense pressure from LFI to form a broad alliance to maximise left-wing representation in parliament, deprive Emmanuel Macron of a parliamentary majority and force on him a cohabitation with a left-wing prime minister – who would be none other than Jean-Luc Mélenchon. (Macron, one suspects, would rather have cut off his leg rather than enter into such a prospectively stormy liaison.) LFI, strengthened by its election success, certainly had the upper hand in the necessarily brief discussions over the terms of the deal with its political allies. What was agreed was that only one left-wing candidate would contest each constituency ‑ and that the majority of these would be nominated by LFI. One can see some justification for this: Mélenchon had, after all, won more than twice as many votes as all the other left-wing presidential candidates put together. On the other hand, many socialists did not feel that it was fair on them to be limited by the “snapshot” of public opinion that was the vote of April 10th. The party retained, in spite of Hidalgo’s derisory vote, considerable strengths in provincial towns and in the regions, where LFI was still a much more minor presence. (Eight of the ten most populous cities in France are currently run by the centre left ‑ five by the socialists, three by the Greens.) LFI’s advantage meant that some candidates were parachuted in to constituencies with which they had previously had little connection. It should be said that this didn’t stop the left-wing electorate voting for them. In the end, in spite of some grassroots revolts the PS’s leadership and its negotiators did not feel they had much choice; it was, they felt, at this particular juncture a case of coalesce or die. The broad front group which emerged from the talks (which assumed the name Nouvelle union populaire, écologique et sociale, or NUPES), was indeed dominated by LFI and in the legislative elections (in June) it performed impressively, helping – in unwilling tandem with the far-right Rassemblement nationale, which also did well – to deprive Emmanuel Macron of an overall majority and becoming the largest opposition bloc in parliament.

The exhilaration that accompanied this victory for “unity on the left” was not to remain unalloyed for too long. It quickly became clear that no one apart from LFI wanted NUPES to evolve into a single left-wing political party: though there would be co-operation in parliament, socialists, communists and Greens all wanted to maintain their own political identities, and perhaps also to keep their future options open. This was not merely a case of party egoism: both the socialists and the Greens have serious difficulties with what they see as LFI’s cavalier, or populist, attitude toward the European Union (their desire to pick and choose which commonly agreed European policies they will subscribe to and which not, and also to take a “national route” when it is their view that this suits France). Probably all the other left parties have problems with LFI’s perceived softness on the essential French republican principle of laïcité (secularism, very roughly), which they suspect the insoumis have been prepared to drop or tactically soft-pedal when seeking electoral support from Muslim communities.

La France Insoumise sees itself as a movement rather than a political party. And like many another “movement” before it (gathered around a charismatic leader) it is not hugely bothered about internal democracy. One of its leading intellectual figures, Charlotte Girard, left the party as long ago as 2019 after failing in her efforts to have structures accepted which would give a voice to the membership and allow it to bring forward policy motions for consideration further up the line. After the installation last week – without an election – of a new leadership group around Manuel Bompard, the most loyal of Mélenchon loyalists, internal discontent is growing. At a time when some of the other component parts of NUPES are involved in organising congresses, which will vote on policies and leadership, Bompard says that LFI prefers “consensus – in order to avoid a clash between a majority and minorities”. Many of the membership and the newly elected deputies, as well as figures who were previously part of the leadership circle but have now been dropped, are far from persuaded. Many parliamentary deputies indeed were not even informed of the meeting which announced the leadership changes and did not know where it was being held. Of the new structures, the leader of the LFI group in the European Parliament, Leila Chaibi, commented: “One has the impression that in respect of some people criteria were concocted that were designed to exclude them; and in the case of others, posts were conjured up for them.”

On top of this disquiet over the lack of democratic structures in the movement, there has been the particularly embarrassing case of the figure previously considered LFI’s number two. Adrien Quattenens is a gifted orator close to Mélenchon and often spoken of as his dauphin (anointed successor: the dauphin is normally the king’s eldest son). The royal reference is perhaps not inappropriate: Louis XIV is famously said to have announced “L’état, c’est moi (The state, that’s me)”. Mélenchon is thought to have pretty much the same idea about the political movement he created.

In September, the satirical journal Le Canard enchaïné revealed that Adrien Quattenens’s wife was bringing an action against him for conjugal violence. The couple had separated and divorce proceedings were in motion. In a statement made through Twitter, Quattenens admitted having slapped his wife during an incident in 2021 in which, he said, there was “extreme tension and mutual hostility”. In November, Céline Quattenens spoke of a history of moral and physical violence extending over several years. Adrien Quattenens, speaking through his lawyer, has strongly denied this.

The initial reactions of some of Quattenens’s party colleagues were perhaps less than one might expect from a party that prides itself on taking women’s rights very seriously – or indeed even one which has access to professional media advice on damage limitation. True, one deputy commented, Quattenens might have to spend a little time in the wilderness, as had notable figures before him, like Christ, or General de Gaulle, but after that surely everything would be all right again. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a Twitter message on September 18th, thought it better to point the finger elsewhere: “The ill-will of the police, the voyeurism of the media, social media, all have been invited into the conflictual divorce of Adrien and Céline Quattenens. Adrien has decided to take everything on himself. I salute his dignity and courage. I convey to him my confidence in him and my affection.”

On December 13th, Quattenens was fined €2,000 for his violence against his wife and given a four-month suspended jail sentence. He had previously stood down from his party functions with LFI but it seems he has no intention of staying away from parliament, even temporarily. Indeed he is determined to be there when the chamber reopens in January, though for the moment he will not be sitting on the LFI benches. On the day after his judicial condemnation he gave a long interview to BFM-TV. This time his colleagues were not quite so supportive. The prominent deputy François Ruffin (just recently removed from the party leadership and who had previously publicly backed Quattenens) said that his colleague’s hasty recourse to the media bespoke at the very least a culpable absence of restraint. “Not in my name, not in my name,” tweeted the Paris deputy Sarah Legrain, while Danielle Simonnet wished to make it clear that Quattenens, in his interview, was speaking on his own behalf and not on that of the parliamentary group, adding: “Sometimes you just have to know when to shut up.” The strongest statement came from the LFI deputy Marianne Maximi, who said that “revealing the past, the childhood, the intimate life of the victim” (a reference to comments made by Quattenens in the television interview) in the interest of “minimising and relativising his own violence” was “a strategy commonly employed by the authors of conjugal violence”.

Referring to both the internal struggles over the absence of democracy in LFI and Mélenchon’s indulgent handling of the Quattenens case, Le Monde (a firmly left-wing newspaper), thundered in an editorial:

[The whole affair] would put one more in mind of the antics of a Trotskyist groupuscule than of the behaviour one might expect from a party fully integrated into parliamentary life and aspiring to take power by democratic means. The episode confirms at the same time Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s arm’s-length relation to democracy and the fragility of what he has sought to build.

It is perhaps as well for LFI that there is no significant electoral test coming up in the near future. Perhaps, if it is prepared to learn some lessons, it will bounce back. But it is unlikely to recover whatever trust or good will it might once have enjoyed among its socialist, Green or communist allies. There is a possibility that Emmanuel Macron, deprived of an overall majority in the assembly, might at a time of his choosing be tempted to call early legislative elections. Otherwise, there will be a long wait until the next presidential contest in 2027. There is little we can say at the moment with any certainty about that. Macron cannot run again. Will his centrist formation survive his departure intact or will its component parts reassert their individual political characters through separate presidential campaigns for Édouard Philippe (on the right of the centre) or Olivier Véran or Clément Beaune (on the left)? Will the centre-right (Les Républicains) at last find an electorate after a number of failed attempts by mimicking the positions of the far right as it seems determined to do under its new leader, Eric Ciotti? Or is it doomed to continue to decline or lose significant figures defecting to the centre? Can the socialists, who occupied the French presidency for nineteen of the last forty-one years, ever recover their strength? (The answer to this one is that – at the moment – the party having comprehensively lost almost all of its working class support and its links with trade unionism, it is really hard to see how.) Can LFI maintain its radical élan without Mélenchon – no longer a parliamentary deputy – as figurehead (he is now seventy-one)? Perhaps it can.

Looking around the political landscape, it is somewhat depressing to note that the greatest pole of stability and evident staying power seems to come in the form of Marine Le Pen, whose support has been slowly increasing in successive presidential elections and who has recently seen off a quite determined assault on her position from a well-organised rival on the far right. Le Pen is still well short of what is required to win the presidency, but her apparent four-point advantage over Macron (according to Ifop polling) in the 25-34 age group in the run-off of this year’s election might give us grounds for worry. One hopes that, whatever their differences and rivalries, all of the forces of republican France will give the highest priority to making sure that the Rassemblement nationale – which distinguished itself again this week by congratulating the white members of the national football team ‑ never wins the presidency.

15/12/2022

 

The Dunmanway Killings

Brian M Walker writes: The recent TG4 documentary Marú in Iarthar Chorcaí (shown on December 7th) looked at the killings of thirteen civilians which occurred in West Cork in April 1922. The fact that all the victims were Protestant has drawn special attention to these events. The programme highlighted the controversy over the deaths. We heard various explanations for what happened. But other accounts, especially those expressed at the time, are also worth exploring.

Part of this controversy relates to the late Canadian historian Peter Hart, who wrote about not just these particular killings but also the whole revolutionary period. He was the author of a number of important articles and books on the IRA, especially in Cork. He also looked at the experiences of Southern Protestants at the time, the first historian to do so in a significant way.

In his work, Hart dared to write that not all members of the IRA were pure good-hearted heroes and also that Protestants suffered at the hands of republicans, especially after the treaty and during the civil war. These views aroused heated criticism, against not just his work but him personally.

Hart’s views have often been exaggerated and selectively quoted. It has been claimed that he wrote of widespread ethnic cleansing and that the IRA were a sectarian force. In 2003, however, in The I.R.A. at war 1916-23, he rejected the idea that there was “full-scale ethnic cleansing” of Protestants and acknowledged that the IRA was “formally non-sectarian in membership and constitution”. But he argued there were instances of “what might be called ethnic cleansing”. He also stated that while the IRA organisation was non-sectarian there were republicans who acted in a sectarian manner. This was certainly the case in West Cork in April 1922.

The basic facts are these. Early in the morning of April 26th a group of anti-treaty IRA volunteers arrived “on special duty” (unspecified) at the Protestant Hornibrook family home at Ballygroman House, Ovens. When refused entry, their commandant, Michael O’Neill, tried to break into the house but was shot dead by one of the inhabitants. Later that morning a larger IRA party returned, seized and then killed the two Hornibrooks and another family member, Captain Herbert Woods. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves which remain undiscovered to this day. In the following two days and nights republicans carried out a series of attacks on members of the Protestant community in Dunmanway and surrounding areas. Ten were shot dead, their ages ranging from sixteen to eighty-two. Another twenty, eighteen of them Protestant, were targeted but escaped with their lives.

How do we explain these killings and attacks? Clearly the death of O’Neill acted as a sort of spark. But most are reluctant to see it as the main cause, because his death had already been avenged by the killing of the Hornibrooks and Woods.

In the recent television documentary there was little or no attempt to name the killers. Why? Instead, efforts were made to explain the deaths of victims as a result of their alleged former involvement as informers, connections to the British army or membership of some anti-Sinn Féin society.

No doubt there were informers in the area but no firm evidence emerged to label these victims as such. It is doubtful that an anti-Sinn Féin society existed in1922. Mention on an IRA list of “suspects”, which included dozens, was hardly damning proof. Allegations made were often tenuous or not meaningful. Even if such claims are valid how can they explain these killings? The War of Independence had been over for nine months. This was April 1922, not July 1921.

The principal argument, however, against believing that these people were killed for such reasons is that at the time not a single person said this. No comments or speeches about these events, as recorded in the press, make these allegations. For some, claims of this kind would have explained, or even excused, the murders. But they were not made. Indeed, others spoke up to the contrary. At a meeting of Bandon District Council, chairman Sean Ó Buachalla stated that he could personally bear testimony that many, “most wanted by the enemy”, were sheltered by their Protestant neighbours. This claim was later backed up by another councillor, Timothy Murphy, who said that some of the victims had “sheltered our brave men”.

To understand these killings we must see them in their contemporary context. The early 1922 months were a lawless period, with the winddown of the RIC and withdrawal of the British army. Efforts were under way to create a new police force but An Garda Síochána was not yet formed. Divisions over the treaty led to different factions seeking control over particular areas, affecting discipline and good order.

Events in the North impacted on the south. The press carried many reports of Northern violence, especially attacks on Catholics in Belfast. On March 22nd, the Cork Examiner talked of “the wild orgy of murder that is disgracing the name of Belfast”. An Irish Independent article on April 26th was headed “Sad plight of Belfast Catholics”. Sectarian attacks in the North would lead to sectarian reprisals in West Cork. Reprisals were a very nasty feature of the revolutionary period. Innocent members of a community were targeted because of the actions of perceived other members of their community.

In Belfast six members of the Catholic McMahon family were murdered in March in reprisal for the death of two Ulster Special Constabulary members. At Altnaveigh near Newry, seven Presbyterians were murdered in June in reprisal for the death of two IRA members. In 1920 Cork city was burnt by British auxiliaries in reprisal for IRA actions. In his book Guerrilla Days in Ireland, West Cork IRA leader Tom Barry recorded targeting homes of loyalists in reprisal for British army actions. He wrote: “Our only fear was that, as time went on, there would be no more loyalist homes to destroy.”

This background helps to explain the murders. At the time they were widely condemned and viewed as sectarian and reprisals for murders in the North. Erskine Childers, in the May 1922 anti-treaty propaganda sheet Poblacht na hÉireann, wrote: ‘We do not forget the provocation, the daily slaughter of Catholics in Belfast such as that of the McMahon family…. But nothing… can justify this  horrible episode.” Unhesitatingly, Childers declared: “Sectarian crime is the foulest crime, and is regarded as such in the tradition of our people, for it violates not only every Christian principle but the very basis of nationality as well.”

Similar statements were made by many others. On Sunday April 30th, a local priest, Canon Hayes, stated: “If a mad Orangeman murdered a Catholic in Belfast, he saw no reason why an innocent Protestant should be shot in the South as a reprisal.” The Catholic bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, asked: “Where would they find themselves if in the North Protestants continued murdering members of the Catholic community and in the South Catholics took reprisals on the Protestant community.”

On May 12th, Michael Collins, a West Cork TD, met a Church of Ireland deputation in Dublin and sought to give reassurance about this event and other incidents targeting the Protestant community. Collins referred to the “brutal murder of Protestants in County Cork”. He declared that “it was obvious that the revolting murders in Belfast had an effect on the current situation: but the Belfast massacres could not be considered any justification for the outrages to which the deputation had alluded”. He stated that “the government would ensure civil and religious freedom in Ireland”.

Given the strength and range of these views, it is reasonable to argue that the attacks in Dunmanway and district were sectarian reprisals by elements of the IRA for sectarian attacks in the North, and were probably sparked off by the shooting of O’Neill. Through no fault of their own, Dunmanway Protestants were targeted because of their perceived links as Protestants with Northern Protestants and events in Northern Ireland.

These murders had immediate consequences in West Cork, with reports of large numbers of Protestants fleeing the area. They also raised concerns in the broader Southern Protestant community. Before long, of course, the whole country was consumed in the violence of the civil war. Most Protestants were not directly involved in this conflict but many in different parts of the country were affected by violence for political, economic or sectarian/religious reasons, described by Hart, which caused considerable numbers to leave.

Comments by Bishop Cohalan in February 1923, confirm the harsh treatment of Protestants at this time as well as showing his strong condemnation of these events. He described how “Protestants have suffered severely during the period of the civil war in the South” and urged that “charity knows no exclusion of creed”. Speaking at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin on May 15th, on the eve of the meeting of the general synod of the Church of Ireland, Bishop JL Peacocke spoke of the recent experiences of church members: “Very many of them, who would have been good and loyal subjects of the Free State, and who only asked to live quietly in their homes, had been driven from home and everything, out of the country.”

These killings in April 1922 (not April 1921) were completely unjustified sectarian murders and should be seen as such. All the victims were Protestant. All were civilians. Their murders were carried out by members of the IRA. The actions were widely condemned at the time.

On July 3rd this year former Fianna Fáil senator and TD Martin Mansergh had a letter published in the Sunday Independent about another sectarian incident during these months. This involved the burning by anti-treaty forces of the Ballyconry Protestant orphanage at Clifden, Co Galway at the very beginning of the civil war. He dismissed allegations which have surfaced recently trying to give some legitimacy to this action, as have allegations concerning Dunmanway. He wrote: “One hundred years on, many attitudes have evolved and we do not have to defend everything in the past, from whatever side, in the national cause.” This approach should be taken to the Dunmanway murders. They should be accepted for what they were ‑ sectarian murders. We owe this to the victims of one hundred years ago. We also owe it to their descendants today, who have had to endure crass allegations and insinuations about their ancestors. Hopefully, as we come to the end of the decade of centenaries we will have learned to take a more truthful, a more repentant and a more compassionate approach to our past. This is important as we move to the future.

15/12/2022

Brian M Walker, Professor Emeritus of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, is author of Irish history matters: politics, identities and commemoration (2019).

 

The Killer and his Little Friend

A decade ago, Zakhar Prilepin was a Russian extremist, and the political party he belonged to was banned. These days he is the mainstream. Prilepin has not changed. Vladimir Putin has.

When Putin’s pet project, the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, was bombed and partially destroyed in October, the Russian political hardliner and Ukraine war veteran Prilepin said: “This gives us a chance. Mobilisation in all spheres should finally begin. In all spheres, and I am not only talking about soldiers going to the front.” Eleven days later, Putin announced martial law in the occupied territories of Ukraine and in those Russian areas bordering them.

I met Zakhar Prilepin about thirteen years ago, at a literary event in Bucharest, with his Russian publisher. He had written a prizewinning novel and a book of stories based on his service in Chechnya with OMON, the interior ministry special forces, in 1996 and 1999. A big shaven-haired man in his mid-thirties, somewhat gruff in manner, he had fond memories of the military; his comrades were the finest men he had ever known. He was billed as an anti-Putin activist, though the name of his party set no bells ringing with me at the time. Asked, during a question-and-answer session, about the ever-tightening censorship of Putin’s Russia, Prilepin replied that literature was still uncensored because its power to influence public opinion was negligible; and anyway, Putin didn’t read. That drew a laugh from the audience.

Presented with a writer who was “Anti-Putin activist”, I blandly assumed that Prilepin’s activism was based on the general liberal principles that people who attend literary events tend to share. As though history were not full of writers who were also extremists.

“Let’s go drink,” he announced at one point, losing interest in the panel discussion. His translator did not translate this exclamation.

I liked one of Prilepin’s stories about the war in Chechnya and he agreed to let me use it in an anthology I was putting together at the time for the Stinging Fly Press. The story was called “The Killer and his Little Friend”. I translated it myself; it was published. In the years since, several of Prilepin’s novels were translated into English, but I never had contact with him again.

And then, more recently, his name started popping up in news reports, usually described as a “hardliner”, and a quick search on the web revealed an interesting story.

Putin, as it turns out, had not been hard-core enough for Prilepin a decade ago. Back then, Prilepin was a member of the banned National Bolshevik Party, founded in the early nineties by, among others, Aleksandr Dugin, one of the most radical voices recently calling for the total destruction of the Ukrainian state. The “Nazbols”, as their pageantry suggested (black and red, hammer and sickle combined with a Third-Reich-style double-headed eagle), believed there was nothing wrong with communism a bit of fascism couldn’t put right. Banned by the courts, they were never permitted to compete electorally.

Dugin left the National Bolsheviks in the late nineties, believing it was too Bolshevik, not enough nationalist. Another founder, Eduard Limonov, was imprisoned from 2001 to 2003 for purchasing weapons and plotting to overthrow the state. Branches were established in Ukraine and the Baltic states among ethnic Russians. The Nazbols in eastern Ukraine formed militias in 2014 as part of the pro-Russian insurgency. In 2017, Prilepin served in one such battalion; he boasted of his sub-unit’s success in killing Ukrainians. He is wanted in Ukraine on terrorism charges.

By 2018, following the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas, Prilepin decided Putin had come around to his way of thinking; he joined the All-Russia People’s Front, a political grouping founded by Putin that serves as a tolerated semi-opposition to his ruling United Russia Party. He was elected to the Duma. His party affiliations have evolved since then, and he has founded his own faction, “For Truth”, within the fold of the pro-Kremlin “opposition”. With Russia’s liberal opposition assassinated, imprisoned and forced into exile, Putin has gradually co-opted the neo-Nazis who once wanted armed insurrection against him. Dugin has for some years been cited as Putin’s ideologue. And Prilepin, now a party leader, no longer leads battalions in Ukraine; he is more important influencing political opinion at home and calling for Russia’s transformation into a machine for fighting a never-ending war. His fate is now tied to Putin’s.

Putin has declared his intention to de-Nazify Ukraine, and in this has the full support of the neo-Nazis who once wanted to overthrow him.

I still think Zakhar Prilepin is a good writer and do not regret translating that terse, violent story, “The Killer and his Little Friend”, in which the narrator, a member of a special forces brigade in the Chechen War, admires a comrade for his capacity to be cheerful and courageous – “the only thing about men I find appealing”. This comrade, “the Killer” in the story, is not satisfied with combat. Central to the story is an episode where he shoots a prisoner he claims has tried to escape.

And I think about the title, “The Killer and his Little Friend”, how it could refer to the relationship today between Prilepin and Putin. Though I am not sure who is the killer and who the little friend.

16/11/2022

Philip Ó Ceallaigh has published over fifty short stories; his most recent collection is Trouble, from the Stinging Fly Press. He lives in Bucharest.

Brian O’Doherty: 1928-2022

They are described by their shadows.
Brian O’Doherty on Edward Hopper

With the death in New York of the Irish-American artist, writer and critic Brian O’Doherty, on November 7th, it can be said of the Irish literary landscape that another oak has fallen. This was the description of the passing of Seamus Heaney in 2013, and Seamus Deane in 2021, the image being particularly appropriate since Doire, the name of both writers’ native county, means an oak grove. The association of trees with knowledge goes back to the Ogham alphabet associated with the Druids in ancient times, and no contemporary artist did more to rekindle interest in this abstract system of lettering in contemporary art than Brian O’Doherty, most famously in his Mondrian-like Ogham on Broadway (2003), now hanging the National Gallery of Ireland.

As the crossovers between words and images in the arboreal (or ecological) language of Ogham suggests, O’Doherty was not only one of the leading Irish artists of the last half-century but also a novelist who established an international reputation. His first work of fiction, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992), was succeeded by his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), and in 2014 by his panoramic historical novel The Crossdresser’s Secret.

Born in Ballaghaderreen in 1928, Brian O’Doherty qualified as a medical doctor in UCD in 1952 before emigrating to America in 1957 to embark on a distinguished career as an artist, writer, art critic, arts administrator, curator, university professor, television director and presenter. As a visual artist, he was a leading figure in Conceptual and Installation art, installing three-dimensional rope drawings in dialogue with strikingly coloured abstract configurations on walls and, drawing on his Irish background as noted above, intricate patterns based on the ancient linear Ogham alphabet. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York; Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; National Museum of American Art, Washington DC.and elsewhere. He worked as art critic for The New York Times in the 1960s and editor-in-chief of Art in America in the early 1970s and his influential critical works include American Masters: The Voice and the Myth (1974); his creative/critical project, Aspen 5+6, in Colorado (1967), with contributions by Marcel Duchamp, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag among others; and his landmark book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space (1976, 1999), which changed irrevocably the relations between the art-work, gallery and wider cultural fields. His Collected Essays, including discussions of major figures such as Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, and fellow Irish artists Nigel Rolfe and James Coleman (also from Ballaghadereen), included a follow-up to Inside the White Cube, and was published in 2018.

The argument of Inside the White Cube was that the reverential awe of gallery space could no longer seal the aesthetic purity of art off from the rough ground of the world outside – or inside, as floor space became a site for installations, performance, and even walk-on parts by gallery personnel. In the hushed atmosphere of Vermeers and Fragonards on a visit to the Frick in New York in 1956, O’Doherty could not resist an everyday aside: “To be an Irishman visiting the Frick is to become important – or most of the attendants are Irish, with names like Boland, Walshe, Lee, McDonald, McQuaid. Courteous, full of information about the pictures, friendly and eager for news of Ireland, they gathered at the doorway as I went away.”

O’Doherty’s first novel, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P., is located in late eighteenth century Vienna, and can be seen (though this is not necessarily what the author had in mind) as a parable on the trope of the blind bard, such as the Irish harper O’Carolan (1670-1738), in which loss of sight is compensated for by the gift of music. This interplay across modes of perception was already signalled in O’Doherty’s early ink-on-paper drawing The Five Senses of the Bishop of Cloyne (1967-68) and takes on an evocative and even tragic expression in his novel. The story weaves a compelling fictional account of the complexity of real-life events surrounding the alleged restoration of sight to the accomplished musician Marie Thérèse Paradies, by Dr Franz Mesmer, the founder of modern hypnosis. The real-life Marie Thérèse’s talent was such that Mesmer’s friend Mozart wrote a concerto for her, but for Mesmer, “the darkness … was in her mind and not her eyes”. His theories of animal magnetism and universal fluids regulating behaviour obscured his real discovery for subsequent psychology – that of unconscious forces shaping the self, and the mind’s exertions on the senses. On leaving Mesmer’s care, “Mademoiselle P” reverted to blindness but regained her musical prowess: the ultimate casualty, in a world where powers of suggestion rule, is truth – “How does the truth survive at all?”

The action in O’Doherty’s second Booker-nominated novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), is set during “the Emergency” of World War II in a remote mountain village in Co Kerry, cut off from the nearest town by two severe snow-bound winters. In the near starvation of the first winter, the women in the village (bar the priest’s housekeeper) die from an unknown illness, and though the local curate, Father McGreevy, prays that tragedy will not strike again the following winter, a series of events brings destruction to the entire community. The fate of such outlying settlements is compared in the novel to the inhabitants of the Blasket Islands whose removal to the “mainland” was considered inevitable in the same period, but it is the manner in which the mountainside village falls from grace that is unforeseen. As if in a parody of Flann O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth, drained of humour but maintaining its blackness, a brain-damaged young man’s “unnatural practices” (as the legal terminology went) with animals is projected onto the whole community by small town gossip, emanating from a disgruntled source with a score to settle: “They’re all tarred with the same brush now, innocent though they may be.” As the respectable townspeople trade on their prejudices, the death of the deranged young man leaves his father, Muiris, as the scapegoat, leading to his imprisonment and eventual transfer to a mental home: “Why on earth you would charge Muiris I don’t know … It’s a sad day when anyone would believe them. He was the only one left and they had to charge someone I suppose.” The historical backdrop of other deserted villages and the guilt-ridden memory of the Great Famine, not to mention other valleys of squinting windows in Ireland, is given a twist through the linking of Fr McGreevy’s faith in God’s providence, the belief that good may come out of harm, with the aisling genre of eighteenth century Gaelic poetry: in a dream of Muiris’s, however, the deliverance figure of the aisling is not a “sky-woman” but a sacrificial lamb “who wanted to free her and her kind from the calumny of those who saw her and her flock as degraded creatures”.

That truth is the first casualty not only of war but of forces within one’s own camp is the subject of O’Doherty’s third and most ambitious novel, The Crossdresser’s Secret (2014), charting the extraordinary life of the famous eighteenth century diplomat, spy, swordsman, author and crossdresser, Charles de Beaumont, later the Chevalier d’Éon (1728-1810): “In all this excitement, Truth, as in an allegory, wandered without a home.” The real-life d’Éon came to prominence as a diplomat in St Petersburg, securing a valuable alliance between France and Russia after the Treaties of Versailles in 1756/1758. His achievement was partly due to his successful passing as a woman to gain admittance to Empress Elizabeth’s inner female circle, following this a year later by reintroducing himself as her brother, in his role as secretary of the embassy and persuading the empress to dismiss her anti-French foreign secretary.

But he was not just a diplomat: he was also a spy, operating in a shadow intelligence unit of the French foreign service known as “The Secret”, known only to the king and handful of others (hence the double coding of the title in O’Doherty’s novel). In recognition of his skills, Louis XV made de Beaumont captain of the dragoons and during the Seven Years War his bravery and military prowess, and negotiating skills at the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, earned him the Legion of St Louis and the title, Chevalier d’Éon. That he was an outstanding swordsman, becoming one of the master fencers of the age, added to his fame but also to his notoriety, for he performed in female garb: as late as 1794, he fenced dressed as a woman on the Cork stage.

The Crossdresser’s Secret explores in fascinating detail how d’Éon’s impersonation of a woman was not a matter of posing but extended to his personal identity, making his sexual indeterminacy one of the great causes of scandal and gossip in the late eighteenth century: “I had practiced the art of concealment all my life – as diplomat and spy. Now I had to conceal my nature even from myself. And what is that nature? Not who I am but what I am.” Based as a spy in London, his possession of state secrets prejudicial to the king placed him in a dangerous position when the existence of “The Secret” became known to Madame de Pompadour, but his private life also was in jeopardy, Louis XV forbidding him re-entry to France unless he declared himself unambiguously a woman – ‘La Chevalière d’Éon’. Such was the confusion over his fluid identity that it became subject to enormous bets, leading to a number of cases in the English courts that turned on the right to privacy against voyeuristic and salacious gossip. Part III of The Crossdresser’s Secret ends with a summary of Lord Mansfield’s landmark ruling: “What is at issue is the violation of an innocent third party’s right to privacy … The peace of mind, reputation, and honor of the third party is profoundly compromised.”

O’Doherty’s multiple personas, operating under different names as artist, critic, and novelist, leave little doubt that he is no stranger to enigmas of identity: “I wish I could preserve a steady state of mind, but there were so many different selves within me that one overlaid the other the next minute.” The narrator of The Deposition of Father McGreevy, the London-based William Maginn, is based on the real-life Cork exile in London, William Maginn (1794-1842), who wrote under the pen-name “O’Dogherty”. Though set in the eighteenth-century, The Crossdresser’s Secret could be an allegory of contemporary debates about sexual identities, exploring the pathos of uncertainty that surrounds the deepest negotiations of the self: “When I write about women’s virtues do I have a woman’s feelings? And what are woman’s feelings? When I wear dresses, what are my feelings? No matter how long I wear a dress, I possess the certificate of my manhood.”

D’Éon’s narrative voice strikes a chord not only with European but Irish readers: in one scene in White’s famous coffee house in London, “an ugly, bald young man with an accent not unlike my brother-in laws” listening to a “corpulent fellow … pontificating with his little group” can only allude to Oliver Goldsmith, trying to get a word in edgeways with Dr Johnson. D’Éon’s “brother-in-law” refers to another ebullient character in the novel, the Clare-born Chevalier Thomas O’Gorman (1732-1809), who in real life eloped with, and married, d’Éon’s sister Marguerite, but who returned to run the family’s wine business in France. O’Gorman entered the Irish Brigade in France and, like his brother-in-law the Chevalier, later volunteered for service as an officer in the French army in support of the American War of Independence.

A native Gaelic speaker, O’Gorman used his proficiency in Irish, and his wealth, to become one of the outstanding antiquarians of Gaelic culture, establishing a close scholarly friendship with Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, Co Roscommon, and amassing a valuable collection of manuscripts on the continent, including The Book of Ballymote, which he donated as a founding text to the Royal Irish Academy. This establishes another connection with Brian O’Doherty’s work outside the novel: O’Gorman (with his namesake, the poet and scribe Muiris O’Gorman) was the first to translate the Ogham sections in The Book of Ballymote, and this book provided one of the key sources for O’Doherty’s modern artistic engagements with the Ogham alphabet, as in his wall series, ONE HERE NOW [1986], installed at the Sirius Art Centre, Cobh, Co Cork, in 1995, and reopened to the public in April 2018, and Ogham on Broadway in the National Gallery.

In 1972, as a response to Bloody Sunday in Derry, O’Doherty changed his artist’s name to “Patrick Ireland” and did not relinquish the pseudonym until the consolidation of the peace process in 2008, interring his persona in a mock-funeral in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Despite his long, immensely productive life, questions relating to last days and late style were there from the outset. He and his wife, the eminent art-historian Barbara Novak, were among the small group of only six people who attended Edward Hopper’s funeral in 1967. He was the last to draw a portrait of Jack B Yeats, visiting the painter shortly before his death in 1957, and instead of painting a portrait of Marcel Duchamp, O’Doherty (drawing on his medical training) took an ECG of his heart, signing it as if by a technician: Doctor B. O’Doherty.

Living in an apartment in a building on West 67th shared with Elizabeth Hardwick and her estranged husband Robert Lowell, O’Doherty was among those who helped the poet as he stumbled out of a taxi to die in front of the building in August 1977, seeking to return to his wife. On a visit to New York with my partner, Dolores, last September, Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novak kindly invited us to call at their apartment. Though illness had taken its toll, his mind went back to his recent visits to Ireland and the unexpected pleasure at being awarded the Freedom of Roscommon by Roscommon County Council at a ceremony at IMMA in 2018. In a poem, “The Golden Age”, published in a recent anthology of Roscommon poetry and dedicated to Barbara Novak, O’Doherty recalls how voices from the past haunt even walks through Central Park:

     The world is born anew, the Golden Age returns just
Inside the Park at Sixty-Seventh Street
West. We reach out, touch – the slight depression of flesh ignites
The rush of liquid gold from head to toe –
Light dazzles – we disappear – the sun has made us blind …

Who is singing? Are we singing? No, not us.
Are you there? You are always there.
The singing is sweet and far away
like the voices of grandparents …
It was as if Broadway had indeed brought it all back home.

16/11/2022

Luke Gibbons’s review of Brian O’Doherty, Collected Essays, ‘Once Upon a Space’, appeared in the Dublin Review of Books in December 2018.

A Winter of Czech Discontent

To understand the seriousness of the recent anti-government protests in Prague, one needs to rewind a bit. It’s been nearly a year since the billionaire Andrej Babiš and his party, the Dissatisfied Citizens’ Action (ANO), lost the Czech parliamentary elections. Together with his coalition partner, the Social Democrats (ČSSD), Babiš was defeated (just barely) by a disparate bloc of five parties, ranging from the liberal centre-left Czech Pirate Party to the conservative centre-right Christian Democrats. Headed by the centre-right Civic Democrats (ODS), this shaky five-party coalition ran and won on an explicitly anti-corruption, anti-Babiš ticket.

The lion’s share of the work necessary to mobilise voters against Babiš was carried out by the Million Moments for Democracy movement led by a young, inspiring student called Mikuláš Minář. All the arduous work of enlightening voters on Babiš’s secret interests and machinations, ensuring sufficient voter turnout and forging an unlikely coalition just to remove Babiš from power bore fruit in the end. The ex-PM has recently gone on trial in an EU subsidy fraud case at the Municipal Court in Prague, even though he himself insists the trial is no more than a political witch hunt aimed at preventing him from running for Czech president in the upcoming January 2023 election.

The October 2021 elections brought in other significant changes: for the first time since 1989, the Communist Party fell short of the 5% threshold required to take seats in parliament. Other populist, nationalist movements such as Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), the Czech equivalent of the German AfD, also came out of the elections notably diminished. Less than a year ago it therefore seemed the balance of forces in Czechia had tilted, significantly if not overwhelmingly, away from unscrupulous, corporatist populism and an anti-immigrant, anti-EU nationalist agenda to a more principled, less corrupt and safely pro-EU democratic politics.

Yet even this cautiously hopeful take on where Czechs may be headed after ten years of Babišism looks too optimistic now. On September 3rd, seventy thousand (if not more) gathered at Wenceslas Square in Prague to demand “Czechs First”. So it seems the anti-EU populists, nationalists and pro-Russian agitators are back in force, even if only in the streets and not in the parliament (yet). How did that happen?

The organisers of the protest are well-known figures associated either directly with the parliamentary nationalists (the SPD) or with similar, smaller groupings on the political fringe. Quite a few of them first acquired a wider following during the Covid-19 pandemic, typically as anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and peddlers of pseudo-science. They have now re-directed their pandemic-honed skills toward the current cost of living crisis, playing on people’s understandable fears for the coming winter. Not only was the Czech core inflation rate running at nearly 15% in August but Czech winters tend to be longer and quite a bit harsher than winters in Ireland: an extra sweater is not going to cut it in temperatures of ten or even twenty below zero.

While inflating fears about the rising price of fuel, the organisers of the protest have also deliberately started stoking anti-immigrant sentiment against Ukrainian refugees, of which there are officially over four hundred thousand in the Czech Republic. Outright lies and rumours are spread on social media about BMW-driving Ukrainian men, flashing their latest iPhones, turning up just to collect the over-generous social welfare – even though most of the refugees are women with children. Social media also abound with rumours of Ukrainian president Zelenskiy renting out his Italian villa to Russians etc.

Importantly, all this resentment is re-cast in slogans that chime with Russian state propaganda. It is no accident that among the people associated with the protests one finds a Czech contributor to the Russian Army TV channel Zvezda and the TV Rossiya state broadcaster. “We are against price rises and against the war” runs one such SPD slogan. Consequently, rising gas, electricity and food prices are used not just to blame the EU for the inflation but to “unmask” key EU policies, such as the Green Deal and the European Energy Exchange, as strategies to ensure German supremacy in Europe. (The demand for national sovereignty, at least when it comes to electricity, sounds superficially plausible because, unlike Ireland, the Czech Republic can export a surplus.) The Czech government is then denounced as a mere vassal to Berlin and Brussels and exhorted to put the Czechs first by declaring military neutrality; by striking a bilateral agreement on gas supplies with Putin; and by demanding that Germany pay further reparations for its Second World War occupation.

Some of the propaganda is beyond ridiculous, as when protesters demand that all Ukrainian refugees be returned to Ukraine so as not to “dilute the nation”. Mostly, however, the protest organisers are cleverly blurring the lines between plausible concern and devious misinformation. Unfortunately, the Czech government has so far proven incapable of communicating and implementing its plans for the winter in such a way as to assuage the real, legitimate fears of the genuinely vulnerable, estimated to represent a huge part (20-35%) of the Czech population. Even worse, the Czech PM initially chose to dismiss the protesters en masse, lambasting them as no more than Putin’s stooges. The real worry is, as Mikulář Minář, the ex-leader of the Million Moments for Democracy movement has put it, that this demonstration was just the tip of the iceberg: that for every protester standing in Wenceslaus Square on September 3rd, there were about seven sitting at home, watching the protest on TV and silently agreeing that “Czechs [should come] first” no matter what. If Babiš were to promise just that, might he make a comeback yet as the new Czech president?

1/10/2022

The Big Boo

In his memoir My Mother-City the poet Gerald Dawe writes of mid-twentieth century Belfast’s pervasive Calvinist atmosphere, which lasted well into the 1960s. It’s a portrayal of pre-Troubles Belfast which has become familiar, a place Caroline Blackwood depicted as smothering its inhabitants with “the gloom of her industrialised provinciality, by her backwaterishness, her bigotry and her tedium”. And yet, by the mid-1960s, Dawe identifies something else going on here too, a slight cultural thawing evidenced before the storms, a barely glimpsed, progressive alternative:

I can remember one key factor, which emerged during the late 60s, just before the curtain fell. It was the fleeting growth of a renovated, energetic, non-sectarian generation which was moving into place, at ease with nationality (indeed promiscuously post-modern in that regard, well before ‘hybridity’ became fashionable), critically engaged by literature, politics and world events and motivated by a sense of civil society, defiantly rejecting tribal allegiance as backward looking.

This alternative never quite came into being. The progressive, cultural energy was, Dawe writes, “critically invisible and remains a phantom”.

Fleeting and ephemeral, soon to be shattered under the convulsions that overtook the city in the next years, the emergent promise of an energetic, progressive culture hardly got off the ground; now, with the notable exception of Dawe’s writings, it barely ghosts the footnotes of the pre-Troubles era. Among those gathered for Bob Dylan’s concert in Belfast’s ABC Cinema, on the evening of Friday, May 6th, 1966, many would have been alert to the notion of such cultural potential; some of their lives would have embodied this critically engaged, progressive spirit (though they would hardly have framed it in these terms) and the future that evening in Belfast, for those in that venue, must have felt wide-open.

The ABC Cinema had been named The Ritz when it opened on November 9th, 1936, with Gracie Fields launching her film The Queen of Hearts. One story had it that the site had earlier been occupied by a fairground. This, and The Queen of Hearts, might put us in mind of carnivals and troubadours on the edge of town, revues of rolling thunder. More prosaically, following the demolition of a row of terraces, the ground lay undeveloped for several years and “Barry’s Amusements” took up a temporary residence there, while waiting on the cinema’s construction. “Ireland’s Wonder Cinema”, as it was nicknamed, was still the Ritz when the Beatles played there in November 1963, just a few years before Dylan’s concert.

There are a few photos online of Bob Dylan earlier in the day on May 6th, travelling on the Enterprise train from Dublin to Belfast for Friday night’s concert. One photo shows him on the train as it passes Balbriggan. In the next he is passing Hilden, near Lisburn, where something seems to have caught his attention. He is pictured, one finger pressed against the windowpane, staring out at the nondescript walls of Hilden station. Dylan in the years 1965 – 1966 was endlessly visible, like a celebrity of our own image-saturated era, but for us looking now at these mid-sixties photos, it is the image of him – as he was then – that forms the context. Dylan had just played the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin the evening before – the first show of his tour in Ireland and Britain. His next concert in the Republic would be at Slane Castle, some eighteen years later.

After his infamous appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965 – when he plugged in his electric guitar and sparked off a barrage of heckles and controversy –Dylan spent the remainder of the year touring North America, then Australia, followed by Scandinavia in the spring of 1966. The shows followed a consistent format, relentlessly consistent, with the set list varying only slightly night to night. Dylan would play the first half accompanied only by his acoustic guitar and harmonica, before being joined by the relatively unknown Hawks for the amplified second half. As a review of the Montreal concert in February 1966 by Zelda Heller puts it: “He performed [during the first half] in a wailing voice, gentle introspective verse of remarkable literary quality, set to a few hypnotically repetitive sung phrases and an even more monotonous and equally hypnotic accompaniment.” But all that was before the intermission:

Then came the second half. In it he took his burgeoning talent and ground it under his stamping heel … At first it seemed that the amplifiers on the accompanying instruments had been turned up too loud. For it was impossible to hear anything he sang, or rather shouted … But it seems that he had carefully prepared the balance and the volume at rehearsals during the afternoon.

The shock waves of Newport fizzled and sparked around every concert Dylan played throughout those months. By the time he toured England that May there was a nightly deluge of heckles and jeers. Dylan, by this stage, had released two albums incorporating bands and electric instruments; his tour the previous winter and throughout the spring included an amplified second half. Concert attendees knew, presumably, what to expect. On the part of the purists then there was a sense of wanting to be outraged. The ex-fans weren’t going to miss their chance to walk out. The ex-fans weren’t going to miss Dylan.

Most of the audience at the Adelphi in Dublin on  May 5th seemed to have enjoyed the show. Yet you wouldn’t have known this from the reviews. The Evening Herald labelled it “The Night of the Great Let-Down”. “They booed …” it announced, “they jeered.” The reportage was picked up by the Melody Maker in England, which stated that the second half of the Dublin show “produced instant reaction” with shouts of “traitor”, slow-handclapping, and catcalls. The media were overstating the case, if we are to go by the letters to the newspapers which arrived in response to their reports. John Bauldie, in The Ghost of Electricity, cites one “Disgusted”, of Foxrock, who found the Herald’s report somewhat wide of the mark:

Admittedly there was some booing and even jeering, but Mr JK [the Herald’s reporter] would lead us to believe that practically the whole audience was participating in this, whereas I doubt if there were forty people responsible … he omitted to mention the enthusiastic applause at the end of each number …

Now that we can hear recordings of the full show (following the 2016 release of The 1966 Live Recordings), it is hard to disagree with Clinton Heylin’s balanced take (in his book Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall) when he states that the second half of the concert was met with “stony silence from some, vocal vituperation by others and audible acclaim from the majority at the Adelphi.”

The pockets of negative reaction at the Adelphi concert were a precursor to the infamous reception that Dylan’s set was to receive later that month at concerts in England and Scotland. Even the cries of “traitor” at the Dublin gig anticipated the “Judas” heckle in the Manchester Free Trade Hall a few weeks later. Heylin writes that the relatively minor dissent voiced in Dublin was still a surprise to Dylan. The hecklers were a minority, “but they were awfully persistent”. Just before his Belfast show the next night, Dylan complained to a reporter of “the lousy reception he’d been given in Dublin”. He kept close track of his write-ups and had already read the reviews which had appeared that day in the Dublin press.

If the Adelphi concert prefigured the war of attrition that was to take place between Dylan and a large portion of his audience in Britain, his Belfast appearance seems unique for the lack of audience hostility. The concert in the ABC cinema wasn’t reviewed locally at the time, nor was it picked up by any of the English papers. The only extant write-up, by Jim Mulligan, is posted online on the Expecting Rain website. Mulligan reminds us that the “haunted and haunting voice”, so familiar to us now from the album Blonde on Blonde, was an unprecedented change of Dylan’s vocal style for the audience, with the LP’s release still some weeks away. Back then, Mulligan reports, “none of us had heard this Dylan”. He recounts that the Belfast audience were on side – spellbound – from the start. Further, and quite uniquely among the audiences for this tour, they loved the amplified second half:

The applause was rapturous at the end. He stood alone on the stage after The Hawks had left and acknowledged the cheers with a slight bow and a bemused expression. This must have been one of the very few places on the 1966 tour where Dylan and the Hawks were not booed. [They had been booed loud and long in Dublin the previous night.] I feel so lucky to have witnessed a moment out of time.

Apart from this piece, the Belfast concert barely exists in the cultural record. There are plenty of advance notices and advertisements, often appendaged to write-ups of the Adelphi gig, and the Belfast Telegraph, four decades later, tracked down attendees who had given brief comments outside the theatre. But there are no contemporaneous reviews: Jim Mulligan’s brief and perceptive memoir may be the only written record of the night. We’re left with the image of Dylan bowing awkwardly from the stage of the cinema, or this report of him taking his leave of an UlsterWeek journalist immediately before the show: “Bob Dylan’s hand was very limp as we shook goodbye. His eyes were looking at the blank wall. ‘Yeah!’ he mumbled. ‘Belfast!’”

Until relatively recently, Dylan’s Belfast concert seemed to have left as little trace on vinyl as it did on print. If anything, the lack of recordings was more surprising than the dearth of reviews: illicit recordings from Dylan’s 1966 tour have exchanged hands ever since the Dylan bootleg The Great White Wonder kickstarted the entire bootleg industry in 1969. Black market releases from the 1966 tour seemed inexhaustible, appearing regularly throughout the following decades. Soundboard recordings had been made nightly during the tour, with Dylan and his entourage playing back the tapes for themselves and the assorted late-night hotel cast of friends, road crew and hangers-on. This in-house material inevitably found its way to the streets. The first half of the Adelphi concert featured on a 1970 double LP bootleg Looking Back, which paired four of the acoustic tracks from the Dublin concert with the electric set from the Royal Albert Hall. A CD, While the Establishment Burns, was “released” in 2000. This comprised tracks from the acoustic set of the Adelphi but the electric set came from the Copenhagen and Edinburgh shows. If half of the Adelphi set was lost, the Belfast concert, seemingly, had no afterlife. For all the multitudes of tapes of this tour, no rustle of the Belfast concert reached the surface. Richard Alderson – the sound engineer who’d maintained this nightly archive against all sorts of odds – had, it appeared, let Belfast slip by. It took the release of the Biograph retrospective in 1985 to finally unearth a blistering version of “I Don’t Believe You” from the Belfast concert. Clinton Heylin, over thirty years later, noted the archival gap. He stated that the Belfast concert went unreported as “No reviewer bothered to file a contemporary account of any Ulster showdown” and he observed: “Even the splenetic ‘I Don’t Believe You’ released on Biograph in 1985, attributed to Belfast, came from a mislabelled Columbia reel of ‘the night of the big let-down’ [the Adelphi concert].” So, we didn’t, it seemed, even have this fragment. As it stood, Dylan’s concert at the ABC, which took place during his most creatively luminous period, in a place about to tip into societal and political turmoil, had left no trace in sound or print.

It was almost half a century after the concert before this situation changed with the release of The Live 1966 Recordings from Sony. Undoubtedly, this 36-CD box set of all the extant recordings from the tour is one for the completists. Included among them are the complete Dublin and Belfast shows. It even restored the wonder of Biograph’s “I Don’t Believe You”: Heylin, for once, had been wrong on a Dylan-related fact. The Biograph track came from the Belfast concert after all. Its tattered aura was restored and now, some fifty years on, it could be listened to in context.

Heylin reports that directly after the concert on that May evening in 1966, Dylan was joined by Roger Daltry of The Who, “fresh from a nearby gig”. As unlikely as it seems now, The Who were playing in neighbouring Lisburn on the same night as Dylan played Belfast. The coincidence of this alerts us that Belfast, in the years directly before the Troubles, was an integral part of the touring circuit for live music. Just a few weeks after Dylan’s gig, Johnny Cash appeared at the ABC in Belfast (on May 20th), also having just played the Adelphi (on May 17th). Just a decade or two later, the idea of Dylan and Cash performing in central Belfast within the same month would seem hardly credible. In the North, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, trying to grasp the cutting edge of popular music meant, for many of us, a fear of missing whatever slivers of the independent or hardcore scene made it across the Irish sea. It strikes me now though, just how much the punk and indie bands owed (knowingly and unknowingly) to a version of the mid-sixties Dylan. And this before Cate Blanchett captured both him and (by extension), them, in her own rendering of Dylan in the film I’m Not There.

By this stage of course, Dylan himself was a frequent visitor to Ireland. He’d first returned in 1984, to Slane in Co Meath, with riots sizzling through the village on the weekend of his concert. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his “Never-Ending Tour” followed its own waywardly insistent routes across times zones and brought him back, every few years, to some unlikely places. The Dundonald Ice-Bowl was one of the more incongruous venues he played at that time. In those days, my interest had moved from Dylan records to catching bands like Sonic Youth or Dinsoaur Jnr at the Art College in Belfast, oblivious then to just how much the atmosphere of these gigs would have paled in comparison to the borderline anarchy on display at Dylan’s earlier concerts. But I like to think that listening to Dylan early lay at the back of many a punk or indie ethos: that the “thin, wild mercury sound” Dylan spoke of, as partial description of the sound he attained on Blonde on Blonde, and as partial aspiration, was still the gold – somewhat mercurial – standard being sought when a new My Bloody Valentine LP was released or when the House of Love’s guitars shimmered on for days after their gig at Queen’s University’s Mandela Hall in 1989. Now, I go looking for Sonic Youth’s cover version of Dylan’s (perhaps greatest) unreleased song, on a CD I used to have. It sums much of this up, but, inevitably, it’s not there.

Decades later, during the pandemic, Dylan both appeared and didn’t appear. A music-streaming platform appeared to promise a live performance. Or was it a “live broadcast event”? We paid anyway and watched Dylan – there and not there – performing in a fictional bar, a speakeasy made over in textures of David Lynch, for a pre-recorded sequence of “The early songs of Bob Dylan”. (The definition of an “early song” was stretched as pliably as a syllable at the end of a Dylan line: among the songs represented was “What was it you wanted?”, a track from 1989, which, by a certain logic could by now be classed an “early song”.) But “early” and “late” become somewhat interchangeable anyway. When we had watched Dylan play in Galway’s Pearse Stadium in 2004 all the fun was in how the phrasing was strung along in wholly new directions, how lines of “early songs” would be altered, apparently on the spot (I’ve never, since, been able to listen to “If you see her say hello” without the line from that night –  “her eyes were blue and her hair was too” – superimposing itself over the recorded version.) As we watched him streamed to our sitting rooms, all these years later, it seems that Dylan is always partially “not there” as the biopic film has it, even when he is. The “broadcast event” seemed to display yet again the rule-of-thumb that whenever Dylan appears to give ostensibly less, in the end it turns out to be qualitatively more than we had any reason to expect.

The day following Dylan’s concert at the ABC in 1966, if money talked, in the Republic at least, it probably swore. On May 7th striking bank employees closed clearing banks in an industrial action which lasted into July. The economy survived on an informal trust system, using cheques that couldn’t be cashed and which were, essentially, IOUs. Commentators have since expressed surprise at how well the economy managed to function throughout this. Of the twenty-two thousand spectators in Belfast on the evening of May 7th watching the Northern Irish football team being defeated 2:1 by West Germany in a friendly at the local Windsor Park stadium, it’s likely that only a few might have had the Dylan concert from the night before ringing in their ears.

But despite all the cultural, sporting, and labour activity, and the progressive spirit that Dawe identified in Belfast at this time, already there were deadly manifestations of sectarianism. Only hours after Dylan flew out of Belfast that Saturday, a recently formed paramilitary grouping, the Ulster Volunteer Force, in their attempt to burn out a Catholic-owned pub in the loyalist Shankill district, instead set fire to the home of a 70-year-old pensioner who lived next door. Matilda Gould was critically injured in the flames which spread to her home and died from her injuries seven weeks later. By this time, two Catholic men, John Scullion and Peter Ward, had been shot dead by the same group. Street disorder, with Ian Paisley at its centre, was to follow throughout the summer of 1966. While the conflict would not fully erupt until later in the decade, Belfast, midway through 1966, was violent and fraught. A case could perhaps be made for May 1966, rather than October 1969, denoting the start of the Northern conflict.

Dylan faced into turmoil when he left Belfast that May. The remainder of the month passed in a ritualised, nightly maelstrom. First up was the Colston Hall in Bristol, three nights after the concert at the ABC, with Peter Gibbs for the Western Daily Press labelling it a “noisy, blaring, ear-splitting disaster”. At Birmingham’s Odeon, the war of attrition between Dylan and his audience was picking up. Dylan, tiring of the sporadic heckling, introduces a song in a drugged, slow, drawl, mocking the disaffected folkies: “Now I’ll sing you a folk-song, that ma granddaddy sang to ma mother when she was a little girl” – Dylan is increasingly contemptuous of these crowds, and of their idea of the music he should be playing – before launching into a blistering rendition of “One Too Many Mornings” (or the “crowning atrocity”, as a reporter for the Birmingham student paper Redbrick described it.) By the time he played the Gaumont in Sheffield, there were bomb scares. On the foot of a telephoned bomb warning the fire brigade searched under the stage while Dylan played above them to a crowd of two thousand. Dylan, the band, and the audience were all oblivious to the danger.

As the tour continued and more reviews poured out, the nightly commotion grew. Dylan delivered introspective, associative, Rimbaldian, verse with mind-boggling accuracy, while still finding space to rejuvenate the phrasing, night after night in the first half of his show. Paradoxically, even though this could not have departed further from the social protest songs that the folk contingent putatively expected, the crowds were resoundingly happy with these acoustic halves of the concert. It seems it took the symbols – the guitars and drums and amplifiers – rather than the content, to turn up the heat. The second half opened to a Dylan armed with an electric guitar and flanked by The Hawks: for some of the audience this was their cue for catcalls and the dead thud of slow handclaps; in some venues this evolved into a jeering battle between Dylan and the paying audience.

May 17th saw Dylan play the Manchester Free Trade Hall – where the shout of “Judas” has since become the most infamous heckle in popular culture. After storming out of the theatre, the heckler paused to tell the press: “He’s a traitor. He wants shooting.” Following more concerts in Britain, and a detour to Paris involving a tetchy performance by a clearly rankled Dylan, he played the Royal Albert Hall in London on May 26th and 27th. The stage seemed set for a showdown. While the mislabelled Manchester Free Trade Hall bootleg masqueraded in its place for many years, the actual Royal Albert Hall concerts make riveting listening. So well-rehearsed is the dissent, its procedures almost habitual, that you can imagine the audience as one cohesive group, the same people who, night after night, cheer and heckle and walk out only to reconvene at the next venue and begin all over again the next night, ad infinitum, a formation marching en masse from gig to gig, pitchforks and flaming torches lighting the skies.

On his final night in England, with a large segment of the audience primed for opposition, Dylan announces: “This is my last visit here.” He is exhausted, the band is exhausted, nerves are frayed. Listening to the concert now, it is Dylan who frequently takes the offensive, delivering barbed monologues at the audience, pre-empting the hollering. At other times he attempts to cajole the dissenters, or he gives up on this and instead sends them up, venomously. Reviews play up the slow-handclaps and walk-outs but even the most disparaging of these can still note the “ferocious appeal” of the music. Even here, at breaking point, the roars of support predominate at the end of each song, before giving way to a wave of heckling. If anything, conflict seems more likely to erupt among the different factions of the audience than between Dylan and the purists.

Dylan left England shortly after these concerts and soon after was involved in a motorcycle crash on the winding roads of Woodstock. This transpired to be an ultimately recuperative accident. Only Dylan could have an ambiguous motorbike crash, but it did provide an exit route from the increasingly tumultuous atmosphere of his recent tours.

A few years after Dylan’s Belfast concert, towards the end of the 1960s, the flooding which had been an intermittent occurrence at the intersection of Belfast’s Great Victoria Street and Grosvenor Road, became a deluge and water seeped into the ABC cinema, destroying its prized Compton organ. While the cinema survived the flood, it was gutted by IRA incendiary bombs less than a decade later. On the same night, in September 1977, the Curzon and New Vic cinemas were also damaged in fire-bomb attacks. The ABC lay vacant for a few years until it was rebuilt and reopened as a four-screen cinema. By 1994 it was closed definitively, replaced with a Jury’s Hotel.

The above piece draws heavily on the following, which are essential reading (and listening) for anyone interested in Dylan’s 1966 tour:
The Ghost of Electricity: Bob Dylan’s 1966 World Tour, by John Bauldie, (1988).
Judas! From Forest Hills To The Free Trade Hall: A Historical View Of The Big Boo, by Clinton Heylin, (Route, 2016).
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s basement tapes, by Greil Marcus, (Picador, 1997).
Bob Dylan: The 1966 Live Recordings (Sony Music Entertainment, 2016) – with accompanying liner notes by Clinton Heylin.
Bob Dylan ABC Cinema Belfast 6th May 1966, by Jim Mulligan https://www.expectingrain.com/dok/div/belfast66.html
See also: My Mother-City. by Gerald Dawe, (Lagan Press, 2007).

1/10/2022

Ross Moore lives in Belfast, where he works as a librarian.

Javier Marías 1951-2022

 

Javier Marías, who died on Sunday in Madrid from pneumonia, contracted after a bout of Covid, was probably the Spanish writer best-known outside his native country. His work ‑ sixteen novels as well as many volumes of short stories and essays – was translated into more than forty languages. In English translation he may be best known for A Heart So White, which won the Dublin International Literary Prize in 1997, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and the trilogy Your Face Tomorrow.

Marias’s mother, Dolores Franco, was a professor of literature, and his father, Julián Marías, a philosopher, a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset. “I was a privileged child,” Marías told the newspaper ABC in 2013, in so far as he had parents who were “cultured” and “fundamentally honest”, “with what one calls principles, which today can sound a little old-fashioned, but shouldn’t.” His horizons were also broadened by his childhood stays in the United States, where his father, barred from teaching in Spanish universities because of his republican past until 1964, worked as a guest lecturer.

The young Javier became fluent in English and in the years before his breakthrough as a successful novelist worked as a translator – of, among others, Sterne, Hardy, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner and Updike. He also taught in the early 1980s at Oxford (one of the cities in the world in which the least work is done, he said). Out of this experience came the 1986 campus novel Todos los Almas (translated as All Souls). As an avid reader as a young man of English-language literature he developed a particular affection for novels published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, which he says he handled “with awe and reverence”. In 2012 his own novels were republished in that list, a rare distinction for a living writer. He commented: “I must assume … that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s. But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud.”

Marías was sometimes criticised for not being a more political novelist. But he seems to have preferred to keep comment on politics – and on football: he was a fan of Real Madrid ‑ for his considerable body of journalist work, much of it in the leftish newspaper El País. He was not slow to criticise the conservative Rajoy government of the early 2010s for its privatisations, labour “reform” and cuts in education and cultural spending:

As a columnist I write as citizen, and maybe have too many opinions, but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad?

In his own work, Marías recognised “certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself …” “There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before.”

12/9/2022

Sources: Le Monde, The Guardian, El País. Photograph: The Irish Times

Sabina Right or Wrong?

Maurice Earls writes: Following the Treaty of Limerick, Ireland’s capacity to put an army on the field capable of defeating the English ended. For some time, there was hope that Catholic Europe would provide such an army. That turned out to be a vain hope.

Irish political culture has been shaped ever since by this reality. We are the great negotiators. We are the great users of whatever political instruments are available to exploit. Our method is patience. We proceed in increments toward our goals. We make strategic concessions and blow hard about our peaceful nature, while all the time inching forward. Eventually, with the aid of carefully modulated violence, the autonomy project crossed the line in 1922. The strategy worked even if, in retrospect, the method offers something less than full emotional satisfaction.

For some, moral satisfaction has been achieved by elevating our military caution into an almost mystical love of peace. But we are not actually especially non-violent. Like many small nations we simply learned the everyday utility of pragmatism the hard way.

The value of pragmatism persisted after independence. De Valera assured the British in 1937 that the state would never be used as a base to attack Britain. The treaty ports were handed over and, as a result, the economically and demographically fragile state managed to stay out of a war which could have led to its collapse.

Pragmatism of its nature, however, is not always emotionally or morally satisfying. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Ireland there was a widely expressed moral revulsion at exercises in imperial aggression around the world and support for those who took on aggressors militarily. In the nineteenth century, for example, the Irish public were very familiar with and very supportive of Poland’s struggles against its imperial enemies, including Russia. There is probably an element of emotional displacement in enthusiastic Irish support for anti-imperialist struggles abroad. Today, the widespread feeling of moral revulsion at Russia’s imperial aggression in Ukraine draws on that tradition, a tradition that is much stronger than that of military neutrality.

Yet on the face of it, the situation in Ukraine is one which fits the Irish historical experience and is suggestive of a “pragmatic” settlement. A big country with massive resources is pushing into a smaller, weaker country. The answer suggested by the Irish playbook is crystal clear: negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, because, well, you’re not going to beat them, are you?

Preference for negotiated settlement is reflected in our constitution. Article 29(2) affirms “adherence to the principle of the pacific settlement of international disputes by international arbitration or judicial determination”.

Sabina Coyne Higgins recommended the traditional Irish pragmatism and commented:

I cannot be but dismayed that people would find anything unacceptable in a plea for peace and negotiations …

But this time it is different. A military power greater than that of Russia has come to Ukraine’s assistance. It could well be that things will not go as hoped for by the aggressors.

What would the response have been, if say in 1914, to pick just one possible date, a friendly superpower had said to the Irish:

We have vastly superior weapons than the British. We don’t want to go to war with them ourselves, but we will give you weapons, as many as you need. We will also coordinate a worldwide ant-British campaign and train your soldiers to the highest military standards.

The answer would surely have been in the affirmative.

It turns out that Ukraine’s friends in Europe, at mounting expense, and also the US, in the form of military training, equipment and funding, have offered just such help. For the Ukrainians, this support changes everything and postpones the requirement for peace negotiations.

12/9/2022

The Low Pay Trap

Marie Sherlock writes: Looking from the outside in, Ireland is a paradox of plenty. Despite the havoc wreaked by the pandemic, our economy expanded last year by almost 13.5%. Our national income grew just below that figure, and that was still a huge rise of €32.8 bn in just twelve months. Despite the enormous and entirely justified cost of having to subsidise workers and workplaces, the state’s borrowing agency, the NTMA, forecast that they will need to borrow less over the 2021-2025 period than over the previous 2017-2020 period. These are years that include some of the fastest growth in the history of the state. During the same period, the total volume of household savings grew substantially, with the value of deposits in Irish banks rising by €30 bn in the twelve months to February 2022.

Despite all of this, there is poverty in this country ‑ a growing poverty induced by the enormous cost of housing, in which low-income workers will be permanently reliant on the private rental market, a hardship caused by the lack of affordable childcare, which is causing some families to reduce their hours or leave employment. There are recent forecasts by the ESRI that see fuel poverty rising to over 903,000 or 43 per cent of all households if fuel costs rises by a further 25 per cent (Barrett, Farrell and Roantree (2022), Energy poverty and Deprivation in Ireland, ESRI, Dublin. While many see the problems of this country relating, in the main, to the high cost of living, what is all too often overlooked is that Ireland has an exceptionally high number of people working in low-paid employment.

The latest available data from the CSO’s 2019 Survey of Income and Living Conditions tells us that 22 per cent of all workers in this country can be classified as low-paid. One in five of all men are low-paid but what is more shocking is that almost a quarter of all women workers are in low pay. Some 24 per cent of women earn less than two-thirds of median earnings per hour. Furthermore, we know that 32 per cent of lone parents are in low-paid employment compared to just 16 per cent of two-parent households.

The obvious question is why are the rates so high among women and lone parents? There is a significant link between part-time work and low pay. Women are almost three times more likely to be in part-time employment in this country than men and we have to look to the very high cost of childcare combined with the patchy availability of flexible working conditions across sectors to explain why so many women are in part-time work.

Given what we know from the economic research about the low-paid traps that so many of these workers find themselves in and the so called “stickiness” of low wages, there is an enormous challenge in trying to overcome low pay in this country.

As the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission succinctly put it, “work is core to people’s livelihood, their identity and their well-being. (McGinnity, Russell, Privalko and Enright (2021), Monitoring Decent work in Ireland, IHREC, Dublin). Secure, decent employment has a fundamental role in providing dignity and autonomy to people’s lives in enabling them to provide for themselves and their families.

In recent years, attention has rightly been given to the rise of precarious work, the use of if and when contracts and zero hour contracts and the appalling insecurity associated with those conditions. But it would be a mistake to believe that low pay and in work poverty are confined to those workers. The CSO’s labour force survey data from 2019 tells us that 65.2% of all national minimum wage employees are in permanent employment. Furthermore, we know from that same survey data that 22 per cent  of minimum wage workers are on that rate for four or more years. This puts paid to any notion of the minimum wage as a labour market entry wage or stepping stone to better wages.

I recently stood with a group of workers on a picket line on their first day of strike. Many described the frustration of having received no pay increase in fourteen years and how no one is willing to take responsibility for their pay (the government insist it’s the responsibility of the organisation which employs these workers, but the organisation itself is funded by the government to provide disability services). One worker took me aside. She wanted to confide that she had spotted two of her colleagues with their kids one evening outside the GPO. They were queuing for food and their mortification upon being spotted was horrendous. These were two workers on full-time hours, in secure employment and with significant years of service for a state-funded organisation.

With employment at all-time high and with apparently severe labour shortages in hospitality and in construction, there is a simplistic notion that it is a worker’s market and that workers can command their rates of pay. That mistakenly assumes that workers have high levels of inter-sector mobility. The evidence suggests otherwise. For those working in the care sector, the workers referred to above and others remain in their jobs because they hugely value the work they are doing in caring for the most vulnerable, even when the state and society does not.

It is also important to highlight that the key difference between the low-paid workers cited above and the majority of low-wage workers is that at least the careworkers were in a trade union and could take a stand and in time hopefully collectively bargain for better terms and conditions. Low-paid work is heavily concentrated in the retail, hospitality, care and leisure sectors, where for the most part, union density is extremely low and not helped by the absence in this country of a right to be recognised for collective bargaining purposes. This goes to the heart of why we have such high levels of low pay in Ireland. There is a fundamental imbalance of power between workers and employers.

The EU’s Directive on Adequate Minimum wages is hoping to change that and if enacted in the full spirit and intent which EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has set out, it could be a game-changer for low-wage workers in Ireland. It will force countries like Ireland to put in place a framework to ensure collective bargaining of wages within sectors. Unfortunately sectors like hospitality and retail have bitterly resisted any attempt to come to the table in recent years to form what are called joint labour committees. These were originally established in the 1940s to agree wages and conditions between employers and unions. If low-paid workers are to have any hope of dignity and decent working conditions, enabling them to bargain for their wages will be the single most important measure.

1/7/2022

Marie Sherlock is the Labour Party’s spokesperson on employment affairs.

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