#OccupyDameStreet - What is it going to take?

Taking a break during the Carnival of Resistance
Former Anglo Irish Bank offices, Stephen's Green, Dublin, Monday 23rd January

RTE Six-One News, Wednesday 25th January. €1.25 Billion had just been paid to holders of unsecured Anglo Irish Bank Bonds, €1.25 Billion that would literally just disappear with the click of mouse, the equivalent of all the cuts announced in last year's austerity budget to Health, Social Protection, Education and Overseas Aid vanishing into the ether, never to be seen again. In between the twin smokescreens of a partial return to the bond markets and the arrest of a bilocating phone-loving Senator, RTE illustrated public outrage against the bond-payment with footage of two dancing pigs on Merrion Street.

Two dancing pigs.

Less than one hundred meters away around the corner forty people had chained themselves to the entrances of the Department of Finance since six am that morning. The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, TV3, 4FM and many others had all run with the #OccupyDameStreet protest as one of their main stories during the day. RTE showed two men dressed as pigs, dancing all alone on the street.

On the other side of the Dáil, on Kildare Street, four hundred farmers protested over septic charges. This RTE Six-One dutifully reported. Four hundred people outraged that the government would dare to ask them to ensure that they are not polluting the land with their own human waste. Four hundred people, ten times the number of those protesting the theft of €1.25 Billion a hundred meters away, angrily proclaiming that a €50 charge would destroy their way of life.

On Tuesday night at the first public meeting of the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' coalition, I sat in front of a journalist from the Financial Times. He wanted to know why the Irish people weren't protesting. He talked to two women in their late fifties, who then left the meeting during the coffee break, muttering that it was "just another talking shop". The first half of the meeting saw Tom McDonnell explain the history of the Anglo bailout and the apocalyptic effects that ongoing payments of the promissory notes will have on the country, the second half was a call to arms asking the audience themselves to identify ways to resist the payments. The two women who left seemed unwilling to make their own contributions, they wouldn't even give the journalist their first names. They wanted something to be done, they wanted action to be taken, but they wanted someone else to do it for them.

For three days a Carnival of Resistance was held outside the former Anglo offices on Stephen's Green. The Anglo name may be long gone and its business transferred to Burlington Road, but the shadows of the Anglo sign can still be seen on the ESB International building and for many it remains a potent symbol of all that went wrong with our country. From early Monday morning and continuing on until nearly 10pm on the night of the bond-payment itself, bands played and speakers rallied on the pavement, children danced and drew pictures with chalk on the ground, passers-by stopped, listened and engaged with writers and academics from the #OccupyUniversity program, artists, musicians and, most importantly of all, each other. Outrage was expressed but the message was one of positivity.

As I stood on the street uploading pictures from the Carnival from my phone, I saw a series of comments from a member of Dublin's underground Street Art community decrying that it all looked "a bit amateur", that the public would never respond to a bunch of guitar players and home-made signs, that no movement could succeed without a strong and visible leader. He believes in action, but not in protests, "Protest in Ireland was kidnapped years ago, rendered harmless and pointless. It's all a token" he said.

#OccupyDameStreet activists locked-in to cement filled barrels
Department of Finance, Merrion Row, Dublin, Wednesday 25th January

For seventy-two hours I resisted the Anglo bailout. I stood on Stephen's Green through sunshine, rain and dark of night and bent the ear of any passer-by who stopped to listen, and when the speakers and musicians had packed up for the night I swept the pavement clear. I educated myself and attempted to educate others, I attended meetings and publicized them to all and sundry, live-blogging from within for those who could not be there in person. For the day of the bailout itself I stood outside the Department of Finance with forty Dame Street activists who had chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels and watched Alan Dukes walk by, eyes firmly fixed ahead to avoid any contact with the cold harsh reality of the situation.

I have done everything in my power to resist what I believe to be an act of heinous injustice, and the feeling I am left with today is what was the bloody point?

Dancing pigs on RTE. Self-interest more likely to bring people onto the streets than public calamity. A wider population eager to highlight the problems but unwilling to get up off their own backsides and do something about it themselves. The radical underground telling me we need hierarchies and leaders.

I don't mean to criticize the two costumed performers, they are to be wholeheartedly commended for the effort they went to. Similarly the septic tank charge is a serious issue, yet another stealth tax like the Household and Water Charges that will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, imposed by a Government bent on taxing the marginalized to bail out the wealthiest in our deeply unequal society, and while some sectors of the street art community may not believe in the effectiveness of current protests, others actively engage in their own protest as shown by CANVAZ on the city's walls at the start of the week.

What depresses me though is that there were only two pig performers, not thousands. That RTE treat the bailout like the "and finally" story of a water-skiing squirrel at the end of the news. That the people only take to the streets when they can feel their own money being taken directly from their wallet. That it is fifty quid they shout about, not €1.25 billion. That it is one wall, on one street saying "Not Our Debt", and not every wall, on every street, in every town and village in the country.

Where are the people? Where is the anger? Where is the action?

What is everyone waiting for?

"We do not have the resources to mount a national campaign" said 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' on Tuesday night, "but we will give you all the information you need to mount your own". The information is out there for people to educate themselves, why must they wait to be told what to do? For nearly a year the villagers of Ballyhea have been staging their own weekly protests, come rain or shine, they didn't wait for an external group to organize something, they didn't wait to be given permission, they just did it, and they haven't stopped. For three weeks a small group of activists planned to blockade the Department of Finance on the day of the bond-payment, none of whom had ever done anything like this before. They reached out to others with more experience and learned how to make lock-on barrels and passive-resistance techniques (not that they were needed in the end). They had an idea, commitment and educated themselves, then they took action.

Just before Christmas Vincent Browne visited the #OccupyDameStreet camp and for twenty minutes he asked the Occupiers, "Why aren't the Irish people protesting?". On Tuesday night the Financial Times asked me the same question, "Why aren't the Irish people protesting?". I had no answer then, and I have no answer now.

All I know is how sad it all makes me feel. What is the bloody point?

Four months ago I was a passive observer. On October 8th everything changed. I stood on Dame Street, skulking in the background, snapping pictures and trying not to be noticed, then someone handed me a guy rope and said, "here, hold this", and suddenly I was protesting.

When will the rest of the country have their own Dame Street Moment?

What is it going to take?

Give a man a loan...

Dublin-based street artist CANVAZ was out and about last night adding his latest stencil-work to the city's Outernet.

Appearing this morning on the corner of Abbey Street and Capel Street, the piece reads "Give a man an education and he will build a new world but give a man a loan and you can own that man forever", and signs off with "Not Our Debt", a reference to the €1.25 Billion payment to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders scheduled to be made by the Government on Wednesday, part of over €9 Billion that will be paid on behalf of Anglo from the public purse this year alone, in addition to the countless billions that will be paid directly to the ECB and IMF for gambling debts that the citizenry had nothing to do with.

CANVAZ was also responsible for the "Occupy All Streets" piece last year, and the response to our current economic, political and cultural crisis from artists has been an amazing thing to follow. You can see more of CANVAZ on his Facebook page and on lusciousblopster's Flickr set.

Surface Tension at The Science Gallery

Somehow I seem to have developed a nasty habit of only making it down to The Science Gallery on the last day or so of their current exhibition. This is a difficult thing to do for I am actually in the Science Gallery quite a lot, both to attend lectures and for meetings (The cafe is a great place to meet clients when its not too busy), but somehow lately I never seem to find the time to actually walk through whatever exhibit is currently being staged until the volunteers are starting to take it all down around me. This means that taking the time to write about their current exhibition is almost a waste in bits and bites, for you can do nothing with this information beyond saying to yourself, "well that looked great. Pity you didn't say anything about it at any stage in the last three months when I could have actually gone to it".

No matter, I took some time on Wednesday afforded to me by a surprisingly light calendar and a strong case of the AhFeckIts to head on down and make up for lost time.

The current Exhibition, entitled Surface Tension took 'Water' as its central theme, and had a wide range of pieces ranging from an exploration of Dublin's water table and the various ways of producing potable water (even from Dublin's canals) through to prototypes for cleaning up oil-spills. As I wandered through I was, as usual, intrigued by many of the pieces while wishing some had something more tangible, and at times found it hard to distinguish between the Art and Science, which I suppose is the whole point of The Science Gallery.

Take The Sea Chair Project for example, illustrated with a rather nice series of plastic models (above). The ocean contains an awful lot of plastic. Every day tons and tons of plastic gets washed into the sea, or lost overbaord from shipping containers. It gradually breaks down into tiny 2mm plastic pellets called nurdles and these are everywhere, approximately 13,000 nurdles float in every square mile of the ocean according to the UN. These get into the aquatic food chain and as they are indigestible cause untold problems for marine life. The Sea Chair Project envisions a trawler being repurposed for harvesting these nurdles from the ocean, then using the plastic to manufacture chairs, boosting decimated fishing communities across the South-West coast of the UK. "Brilliant" I said, but as with many works exhibited at the Science Gallery I couldn't tell if this was an actually work-in-progress, a workable concept, or just a science-fiction artwork designed to provoke thought.

Even if only a concept, it is still pretty cool though, giving rise to notions of giant oil-rigs being repurposed to decontaminate the sea while feeding our insatiable thirst for plastic.


One piece that definitely wasn't science fiction, and my favourite of the exhibition, was David Bowen's Tele-Present Water. Using data relayed from an ocean buoy, a lattice suspended on moveable wires recreated in real time the movement of waves. The model was built to a scale of 1:12, meaning that for every inch of movement by the model, the corresponding wave was moving by a foot. During my visit the peaks and troughs were separated by at least a foot, meaning that wherever the bouy was it was experiencing waves of at least 12 feet high. I say "wherever" because its exact location isn't actually known, for although it was originally moored 205 miles South-West of Honolulu, it broke free of its moorings in April of last year and has been wandering the oceans ever since. The volunteer that I spoke to reckoned it was currently near Alaska based on a correlation between the size of the waves a few days ago and a massive storm that hit the Alaskan coast at the same time. Like Silent Barrage in last year's Visceral exhibit, there is something about telepresence that really captures my imagination.

While sadly now closed you can find out more about the exhibition here, and find some photos that I took here.

Overall I have to say that it did indeed look great. Pity I didn't say anything about it at any stage in the last three months when you could have actually gone to it.

Anglo: Not Our Debt

The launch of the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' campaign
Central Hotel, Dublin, Wednesday 18th January

I have written more than once on the subject of Anglo Irish Bank and the ongoing repayments to holders of Anglo bonds, both secured and unsecured, and of the crippling situation we find ourselves in because of these private debts that have been socialized onto the public purse. It should come as no surprise to you therefore that I found myself yesterday morning in the audience at a press conference announcing the launch of a new coalition-based campaign calling for the Government to cease paying these bondholders and the associated Anglo promissory notes immediately.

Organised under the banner of the Debt Justice Action coalition, the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' campaign (or #NotOurDebt with the obligatory hashtag) brings together academic, political, economic, development and religious groups from across civil society all calling on the Government to suspend Anglo-related payments immediately, beginning with the €1.25 Billion payment to unsecured Anglo bondholders on January 25th (less than a week away). This payment, which we are under no legal obligation to make, is almost exactly equal to the cuts of €475m to Social Protection, €543m in Health and €52.9m in Overseas Aid, and "savings" of €132.3m in Education announced by the Government over the course of two budget days back in December. #NotOurDebt is not calling for the Government to default, rather they are calling for a suspension of payments to bring the ECB back to the negotiating table with a view to adjusting the principle of the debt, and the repayment schedule.

The #NotOurDebt campaign argues that a) the Anglo payments, and in particular the nearly €50 Billion in Promissory notes, are not part of the EU/IMF memorandum, so non-payment will not affect our wider bailout or relationship with the Troika, b) Anglo is not a pillar bank, and it is highly unlikely that suspension of payments would lead the ECB to retaliate by punishing our pillar banks as this would lead to the same sort of contagion they have been fighting to prevent since this crisis began, and c) with our Government bonds already rated as 'junk', it is hard to see how the markets could have any less confidence in us than they do already, suspension of payments realistically could not make the environment any worse for external investment than it already is.

There were a good few familiar faces there, with John Bisset from the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope speaking at the launch, and both UNITE's Michael Taft and TASC's Tom McDonnell doing a lot of the number crunching for the campaign. Mrs Browne's Boys (Harry and Vincent, sadly no relation to each other but its still worth trying to coin a phrase) were also there in the audience, and #VinB had both John and Michael on his show last night to discuss the Anglo fiasco.

There will be a public meeting of the #NotOurDebt campaign next Tuesday 24th in the Teachers' Club, Parnell Square in Dublin, at 7pm, the night before the next Anglo payout. This falls nicely in the middle of three days of planned defiance around the bond payment, which sees a broad alliance of groups come together for joint actions, as well as autonomously-planned events.

The country sat by last November and quietly watched the government hand over €720 million to holders of five-year Anglo Irish Bank bonds. Next week's payment will be almost double that. We cannot afford another week of silence.

You can find out more about the #NotOurDebt campaign here, read their full statement from the launch here, and watch #VinB's show from last night here.

Tell me now, how do I feel - Redux

New piece by Solus
Corner of Drury Street and Fade Street, Dublin, Wednesday 18th January

And we're back. Bet you didn't even notice our SOPA inspired absence, did you?

*sigh*

Well here at Boomingback we took advantage of an enforced day of rest from the internets to get out into the Really Real World (you remember, that place that is permanently AFK) and do the things that ordinary folks do, ordinary folks without anything else more pressing to do. The day started off with a press conference (more about that later), followed by a brief sojourn on Occupied Dame Street and a more lengthy visit to the second last day of the Surface Tension exhibit in The Science Gallery, all wrapped up in an impromptu walking tour of Dublin Street Art.

At the start of the week I wrote about a new piece by Dublin Street Artist Maser commissioned by the First Fortnight program in aid of Mental Health awareness, but Maser was not the only artist to contribute new work to the festival. ADW (right), CANVAZ, Aidan Kelly and Solus (above) all picked up their spray cans and stencils and set to work in Temple Bar and Drury Street.

Street Art is definitely more The Very Understanding Girlfriend's cup of tea than mine, but through her I have come to have a healthy appreciation for the work of a good few Dublin-based artists, and seeing their work around the city has a tangibly softening effect on my often antagonistic relationship with Dublin (I can no longer call it a love/hate relationship since I find there is so little to love, it's more like a "can't-afford-to-ever-move-away-thanks-to-the-property-crash-so-I-might-as-well-grin-and-bear-it/hate" thing).

The irony/synchronicity of being cheered up by Street Art commissioned by a Mental Health campaign is not lost on me.

You can find a map of the pieces here, First Fortnight's Street Art blog here, and my own photos of the pieces here.

Books I should have read last year

Something odd happened last year. Well, actually, many odd things happened last year, but the thing of oddness that I am specifically referring to here is the fact that I lost the ability to read books. Now I don't mean that I suddenly went blind or developed dyslexia, rather as a consequence of pain and medication I lost the ability to concentrate long enough to finish anything longer than a few pages at a time.

I am a voracious reader, my not-so-secret vice is book buying, real dead-tree books, and a typical month sees the purchase of far more books than I could possibly read in the same period even if I treated reading as a full-time job (which at times I have). In Nassem Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan he recounts an anecdote of a vistor to Umberto Eco's house remarking on how big a library Eco had, asking him how many of the books had he actually read, to which Eco replied that the real question was how many of them he had not read. That is the way I treat my library, all the books on my shelves that I have not read serve as a constant reminder of how much there is that I do not know, how small and insignificant my understanding of the world around me really is and this helps keep my easily inflated sense of self-worth in check.

However last year was particularly poor for pushing the read-to-unread ratio on my shelves in a favourable direction, as I lost the ability to concentrate and absorb anything of weight for most of the year, and it is hard to convey just how great a loss this was. Slowly my powers of concentration have come back to me, and my mission this year is to catch up on a good deal of what I failed to read last year, and in the interest of having something to write about I thought I might share some of these lost books with you all in the first of an erratic series of posts entitled, "Books I should have read last year", and as a special bonus we'll start this series off with not one, but two, Books I Should Have Read Last Year.

Sins of The Father - Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, Conor McCabe

I have had a chance to meet Conor a few times on Dame Street, even chatting with him on one particular day before he went down to the launch of this very book, and I really wish that I had been more familiar with it before talking with him, because then I possibly would have upped my conversational game beyond the "uuuurgh, Capitalism Bad" level. Many of the recent explorations of our current economic woes have focused solely on the Celtic Tiger years, on the property boom, light-touch regulation and crony-capitalism of the last two Fianna Fail administrations. While McCabe explores these themes as well, it is in the context of a broader examination of Irish history from the foundation of the State, and an analysis of the near-universal myopia that affected successive Irish governments.

Beginning with the rule of the Cattle Barons, who saw Ireland's role both pre-and-post Independence as predominantly to supply England with beef, continuing on with the abandonment of any serious attempt to form a large scale native-owned industrial sector in favour of the courtship of foreign Multinational Corporations (MNCs) who would treat Ireland primarily as a tax haven, through to the creation of an actual tax haven in the form of the IFSC and the subsequent property boom fueled by tax-avoidance legislation such as Section 31 Relief, McCabe shows how the one constant in Ireland since Independence has been governance by a hereditary minority in the interests of the wealthiest citizens. The political and economic inequality of the Celtic Tiger years was nothing new for Ireland, just merely is most extreme manifestation.

A very accessible book, it deserves a place on your shelf beside Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools, and Shane Ross' The Bankers as an examination of how we arrived in our current dystopic fantasyland, providing a much broader context than either and complimenting their more in-depth analysis of recent events.

You can read more by McCabe at Dublin Opinion here, and Sins of the Father is available at Amazon here.

Vultures' Picnic - In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores, Greg Palast

Journalism-noir from everybody's favourite misanthrope. Its been five years since Palast's last book, Armed Madhouse, the examination of voter-caging and other political skuldugery that led one student brandishing it at a meeting with John Kerry to be forceably subdued by security, uttering the now immortal line, "Don't tase me, bro". While the Bush era may long be gone, Palast has not been resting in the subsequent years, but perhaps paralleling the Occupy Movement's focus on our economic rather than political masters, Palast has turned his raincoat and hat away from election fraud and towards the much murkier world of Big Oil, Big Nuke and the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs.

Travelling from Alaska to Azerbaijan by way of New Orleans and Ecuador, Palast explores the dominance of BP in global affairs (ironically linked via our own Peter Sutherland to Goldman Sachs) and the countless lives destroyed by their ultra-capitalism. It is also, somewhat surprisingly, a love story, but any good noir tale needs a mysterious love interest.

I love Palast's writing style, unapologetically polemical with a healthy swathe of grumpy, a man critically aware of his own failings but somehow reveling in them all the same. Highly informative, wrath-inducing and exceedingly entertaining at the same time and while perhaps not as focused, a worthy companion nonetheless to Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

You can find out more about Palast, watch his video reports for the BBC and others, and read more of his investigations on his website here, and Vultures' Picnic is available at Amazon here.

Tell me now, how do I feel?

Good news everyone - the most depressing day of the year has arrived!

Blue Monday is here, scientifically proven by a guy who works in a building to be the saddest day of 2012 (once December 21st and/or 22nd are excluded, depending on how many credit card bills you are planning on not paying this year).

What everybody needs of a morning like this is nice cheery positive aphorism, which for those of you in the Camden Street area has been supplied courtesy of street artist Maser (he who loves you). As part of the First Fortnight program that ran for the first two weeks of the month, "seeking to challenge mental health prejudice through creative arts", Maser was invited to contribute a piece and the Simon Community donated their wall for the project. The piece went up on Wednesday of last week, and while the First Fortnight program is now over for another year, hopefully Maser's words will be brightening up many a Blue Monday for weeks to come (and blue Tuesdays, and Blue Wednesdays etc, etc).

What pleases me most about today is that while January 16th is traditionally the most depressing day of the year for me, today everyone gets to share in the misery. And if misery loves company, today I am a Mormon fundamentalist.

Speaking of which, it occurred to me that since in America corporations have the same constitutional rights as people and are treated as citizens under the eyes of the law, Mitt Romeny's aggressive acquisition of companies and their subsequent gutting is a) staying true to his ancestral Mormon practices of polygamy and b) possible spousal abuse. But I digress...

On this, the most depressing day of the year, spare a thought for those of us who have just entered the twilight of their thirties. Winter is coming, my friends, our youth is disappearing over the horizon on a galloping steed, its place by my side being taken by a pale horseman with a fondness for garden implements and size -1 dresses. While there is still far more ahead of me than behind, I fear that much of it will involve incontinence, jazz and Inspector Morse, and the survivors, as they say, will envy the dead.

Happy Blue Monday to me,
Happy Blue Monday to me,
Happy Blue Monday Unkie Da-aaaave!
Happy Blue Monday to me.

#OccupyDameStreet - The First 100 Days

And we don't look a day over 39
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Sunday 15th January

I've been very under the weather these last few days, hence the tumbleweeds blowing through the pages of this blog, however I did make it down to Dame Street this evening for an hour or two to share in the celebrations of this, the 100th day of the #Occupation!

I wrote my own summary of the year to date back in December, but for an alternative perspective I recommend you take a look at lusciousblopster's post over on No Fixed Abode, or take a look through her extensive Flickr album chronicling life on Dame Street since day one, way back on October 8th.

I don't think any of us would have thought that we would have lasted even ten days, let alone make it to 100. I wonder if the President will send us card?