Wednesday 28 March 2012

CORRUPTION, THY NAME IS BERTIE


The 19th century English religio-moralist historian, Lord Acton, wrote: 
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men (sic) are almost always bad men.

Corruption is as human as breathing. Everyone ducks and dives. But it is when human corruption is allied to power that problems really occur. 

In Ireland today, problems of power and corruption bankrupt the State, financially and morally, so that it is the least powerful and the least corrupt, the Citizen, man and woman, who suffers the most.

The corrupt activities of Bertie Ahearn, former Taoiseach and leader of the political party, Fianna Fáil, which ran the government for most of the life of the State, and various members of his Cabinets, are detailed in The Mahon Report. 

It is a case of writing up the known knowns and some of the unknown knowns of corruption in Irish political life of the past thirty years.

Such abuse of power requires collusion and evasion, both of which are founded in fear. It is not a few rotten apples. It is the national orchard and the husbandry thereof.  

With the 100th anniversary celebrations of the formation of the partitioned states in Ireland looming, the disarray in the Republic is appalling. 

Arms of the State including the police, the revenue authorities, the financial regulatory bodies, the great and the good of the Churches, the leaders of business, editors and journalists, most of academia and many others who stayed schtoom through the rapacious years are all implicated in the collusion and the evasion. In the tacit approval.

What is the impact of these formal revelations of perfidy on the part of leading Irish politicians on the believability of the Peace Process in which Bertie Ahearn was such a central figure?

Citizens do not believe the brash and bullying culture of impunity and invincibility that the corrupt powerful create about them. Citizens simply suspend their disbelief in the manner that theatre audiences do.

We see the lights, the ropes, the flats, the curtains, the gantries and the exits and entrances of the players in their costumes and make-up. We know it is a show, a charade, a pantomime. 

Most of us collude with it, suspending disbelief, at least some of the time. In fear, and in the hope of benefiting a little. Many of us switch off and don't watch the show at all. Others of us leave the theatre altogether.

While these may be necessary attitudes to strike in the theatre, they do not work in public, political life.

As citizens we are afraid of our own power, so that it is often the brash and the bullying who corral power over us, rather than with us. 

It is power itself which requires attention and de-absoluting.

It is the power of the Market, where corruption is endemic, central, right-on and valued, that most benefits from this political corruption and collusion. 

It is Democracy that is weakened. Even Lord Acton understands that.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. By liberty I mean the assurance that every man (sic) shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Against the influence of power and corruption.

The Irish Times; newspaper; Saturday March 24th 2012
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lord_Acton

Tuesday 20 March 2012

PATRICK AND THE LEAVING OF IRELAND


A parade goes by a flower shop in Tramore (52 degrees North, 7 degrees West). Patrick, a local man, dressed in the celebrated green mitred-bishop outfit, leads from the front. Behind him are loose rows of young people, marching behind banners of the associations of which they are members: scouts, girl guides, dancers, Tae Kwan do-ers, hurlers and, yet more, martial artists.

Patrick is leading them out of Tramore, one of many Hamelins all across Ireland. He is banishing not snakes, as in the Christian foundation myth, but young people. Ireland is leading its young off the island. 

Do they go or are they pushed?

They follow Patrick, embodiment of the many myths that make up Ireland today, including the current myths of Irish emigration. 

The Irish are everywhere. And always have been. They (ad)venture from their small island, from the edge of a large continent, along an extended coast, packing a capacity for escape, a history of colonialism and underdevelopment, a stifling socio-religious order in the 20th century and a native urge for romance, daring, fighting, hard-work, brio and a mighty gift of the gab. 

The native Irish are everywhere. They follow Patrick through Tramore, to the sea and emigration. 

The sun spangles on the waves across the marvellous bay between Brownstown and Metal Man heads. A woman says: There'll be no young people left.  

Her daughter is bound for Canada, with a nephew. Another niece is Australia-bound. She has a nephew in London and another niece in Qatar. The young Irish are everywhere. As always.

Patrick was kidnapped and brought to Ireland as an economic slave. He escaped and later returned as the most successful and celebrated missionary, among many, for the Holy Roman Empire brand of Christianity, raiding the green landscape of Ireland for his colour emblem.

It is the green of Islam that billows in the winds of change today.

The parade rumbles by. A line of vintage tractors and motors. There are always tractors. A parade in a small town in Ireland without tractors would not have meaning. But for how long? The drivers are vintage too.

Modern tractors are behemoths with humongous tyres, ploughing across mono-cultured farms, driven by contract boyos, wearing garish ear-defenders.

70% of emigrants say that their quality of life is better since emigrating. 56% say they are happier. Are the emigrants the lucky ones? 

International and local bankers, developers and their political cronies devastate Ireland. Young people face bleak futures. The ones who get away have options. The ones who stay have none. 

Patrick traditionally wore (or incanted) a lorica, a mystical garment, a breastplate, a prayer, that was supposed to protect the wearer from danger and illness, and guarantee entry into Heaven. 

A modified verse extract from it for today reads:

Crisis with me, Crisis before me, Crisis behind me,
 Crisis in me, Crisis beneath me, Crisis above me,
Crisis on my right, Crisis on my left,
Crisis when I lie down, Crisis when I sit down,
Crisis in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Crisis in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Crisis in the eye that sees me,
Crisis in the ear that hears me. 

Crisis when Patrick leads me. Heaven is elsewhere, not in Ireland. Heaven is an emigrant's destination.


The Irish Times; newspaper; Monday 19th March 2012
http://www.ewtn.com/Devotionals/prayers/patrick.htm




Tuesday 13 March 2012

MOTHER IRELAND. MOTHER AFGHANISTAN.

A woman steps forward, saying that if the gunmen wish to shoot her son, they must shoot her first. Is she Mother Ireland?

At a meeting on International Women's Day in Creggan, Derry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), a group of people, mainly women, reacting to the murder by Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), call a protest. RAAD uses threats, expulsions, shootings and, in recent weeks, killing, against drug dealers and users.

There is a long tradition in Ireland of the ardent, powerful, courageous and demonstrative mother, who steps to the fore in defence of her children, particularly her sons. The image of the Madonna holding her dead son, the Pieta, follows the image of the woman speaking out, standing in front of the community centre asserting 'You'll shoot me first, if you want to shoot my son.'

Will such actions force the gunmen to stand down?

Further public rallies follow, this time in the city centre. A head of steam builds up. Threats are lifted, following behind-the-scenes negotiations. 

The problems with guns and drugs continue. 

People wonder what the police are doing. The blurred, overlapping boundaries between paramilitaries, former paramilitaries, police, drug dealers and RAAD make it difficult for citizens to resolve these problems.

A US soldier murders sixteen Afghan citizens, including women and children, after suffering a nervous breakdown. Is this an echo of the My Lai (15 degrees North, 108 degrees East) atrocity by US soldiers in Viet Nam? 

Strikingly, the man who commits these murders is mentally unbalanced, while his commanders, who order wholesale killings, are in full possession of their faculties.

Allegedly. Mar dhea.

There are Afghan mothers standing forward now, in grief and defiance.

Mothers. Ireland. Afghanistan. Courage.

With all its luck and all its danger
The war is dragging on a bit
Another hundred years or longer
The common man won't benefit.

Oh, perfect loving mother
Your exiled children all
Across the sund'ring seas to you
In fond devotion call


Mother Courage and her Children; Bertolt Brecht; play; Metheun; 1983
Ireland, Mother Ireland; song; PJ O'Reilly 

Monday 5 March 2012

THE PRIEST AND UNJUST LAWS


Relationships between Church and State hit a bump on the rocky road they travel together as Father Brian Ó Fearraigh, based in Derrybeg, (55 degrees North, 8 degrees West) in the north-west of Ireland, refers to the recently introduced household charge as 'an unjust law'. The priest supports the non-payment campaign building across the country.

Politicians, including the Labour Party socialist Jimmy Harte, a senator in the Republic of Ireland's coalition government, quickly condemn the priest.

The priest is challenged in regard to what he can and cannot express an opinion upon. He is advised to confine himself to spiritual matters. In his defence, he appeals to the right of the citizen in a free country to dissent, especially when she sees that laws are unjust.

Most of the time the relationship between Church and State in Ireland is as that portrayed in Brian Friel's wondrous play Philadelphia, Here I Come; a  benign and friendly contest over a low stakes game of draughts, between the parish priest and the county councillor.

Generally, it's as Canon Mick O' Byrne, the priest in the play, says:

Black for the crows and white for the swans. 

Birds of a feather sticking together and divvying up the board and the money in a manner that does not upset the status quo, though trenchant reports into child sexual abuse scandals and a minor diplomatic stand-off with The Vatican have upped the ante in recent years.

Father Brian Ó Fearraigh's intervention invokes images and language from the New Testament, in particular the violence of Jesus in throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple and his assertions regarding what to render to God and what to render to Caesar, the imperial power. 

In the circumstances of Ireland today, it is a question of who has the moral – and the attendant political - authority; the Trinity of the Christians or the Troika of the Financiers.

As Madge, the stalwart citizen and housekeeper of the play, notes:

If it was turkeys or marble clocks they were playing for, they couldn't be more serious.

Priests and politicians, as a general rule, are on-side, colluding and conoodling. When a priest breaks ranks – exceptionally, thus affirming the general rule – the very rule itself is thrown into sharp relief.

Ironically, a core matter in Brian Friel's great play is youth emigration, in the context of a father and son relationship under stress. A core matter of the breakdown of Ireland today is the manner in which the sins of omission and commission of the elders visit the sole option of emigration on today's youth.

The priest and the politician play their parts.

Father Brian Ó Fearraigh issues an open invitation to dramatists and theatre makers:

Words must flow and the peoples' voices must be heard.

The Senator warns:

If people pick and choose what laws they want to obey, then we'll end up with anarchy.

Indeed.

Brian Friel wrote an essay in 1967/8, entitled The Theatre of Hope and Despair. He quotes Albert Camus:

'At the end of this darkness, there will be a light, which we have already conceived and for which we must fight in order to bring it into existence. In the middle of the ruins, on the other side of nihilism, we are preparing for a renaissance. But few know it.' I am convinced that the dramatists are among the few.


Is Brian Friel right? 



Philadelphia, Here I Come: play; Brian Friel; Faber and Faber; 1965/2000
Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999; book; editor - Christopher Murray; Faber and Faber; 1999