Night on earth

Spent the day yesterday at the Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. Each year it gets bigger and better, and this year the sheer number of musicians and activities scattered throughout the town was staggering, and best of all it was almost all entirely free.

Actually, the best bit wasn't the music, or the shows or celebration of dynamic multiculturalism (all of which were certainly great). Nope, the best bit for me was the simple ability to wander around in short sleeves at 9pm at night through the streets and harbours of Dun Laoghaire with thousands of other folk out having a good time with none of the usual Dublin hassles. No traffic, no fighting, no public latrination, no aggressive guards, just families, couples and groups of friends out enjoying the evening. Not even Sinead O'Connor's warbling could upset the mood*

If only every weekend could be as pleasant.

* actually, she was really quite good, spontaneously appearing on stage late in the evening outside the Kingston Hotel.

Links
Night photos

Morning Glory

If you look at only one blog this morning (highly unlikely I'm sure) it should be thestory.ie.

Mark Coughlan and Gavin Sheridan through extensive FOI requests have put together a Google Docs spreadsheet containing all declared political donations to TDs since 1997. Its ridiculous that in this day and age this isn't instantly available on an Oireachtas website, but then again try to find even a simple online record of how often an individual TD has even bothered to turn up and vote on bills during their time in office and you'll see how little information is made available and easily accessible to the public.

Mark and Gavin say the site will expand with more FOI-garnered information, and have put out a general call for assistance with tracking down who is behind some of the obscured donations.

Looking through the list at the Green parliamentary party you see that over the last ten years Ciaran Cuffe received at total of €3,500 from two individual donors, Eamon Ryan received €5,000 from four individual donors, Paul Gogharty a single donation of €1,500, Trevor Sargent two individual donations of €1,200 each and John Gormley received three individual donations of €1,000. In addition both John Gormley and Dan Boyle received donations from party constituency groups, presumably via organised fundraisers, of €4,250 and €1,500 respectively. There is currently no information for Mary White, which means either that she has yet to file information or, more likely, that she has received no donation above the minimum necessary to declare.

Many of the individual donations to Green TDs appear to have come from family members, and the Greens have a very strict policy of not accepting and corporate donations to either the party or individual candidates, the only one of the major parties to do so. This really is one area that the Greens should shine in, and it always amazes me that the party doesn't do more to highlight this policy as a way of distinguishing itself from the rest of the political landscape.

Both Mark and Gavin deserve major kudos for this work, it is journalism at its best.

Die Macher, Grün edition

Went in to Sub City on Friday to buy a birthday present for a friend, and while there came across possibly the geekiest* board game in the history of the known universe, 'Die Macher', a game of German regional elections. From wikipedia:

"The game is based on the German electoral system and each player takes the role of one of five political parties (in the 2006 edition, the CDU/CSU, FDP, SPD, Greens, and Die Linke). Parties score points based on seats won in seven state (Land) elections, the size of their national party base, the amount to which they control the national media, and how well their party platform aligns with national opinion.

Each state election is a "mini game" on its own. Each state has its own interests (such as "do we support higher taxes, or not?"), and a party will do better if its platform aligns with the local concerns. Players can deploy a limited number of "party meetings" (groups of grassroots activists) to a state; the more they have there, the more votes they will generate when the election is resolved. "Shadow Cabinet" cards, representing influential party officials, can be used to perform some special actions, and each party tracks its "trend" (favorability rating) in the state using a sliding scale. When the election is held, each party scores votes based on the formula (trend + interest alignment)* (number of meetings). A maximum score is 50, and parliamentary seats (victory points) are awarded based on this score and the state's actual number of seats in parliament. The seven states are chosen at random from the sixteen Länder of Germany, so some elections will be more influential than others. Players can modify their party’s' platform and by controlling the local media can also affect what the state is concerned about.

Winning the local election allows the party to advance their media control to the national level and to help outline the national issues list. Players see the elections developing in advance and can apply their resources to the current election or upcoming ones, adding to the difficult decision making. During each state election, parties can agree to, or be forced into, coalitions, and share in any victory. Parties must also decide whether or not they will accept contributions from special interests with the possibility of alienating their grassroots donor base."

I am already hard at work on the Irish edition, where all the pieces are kept in a brown paper bag, players have the option of passing their seats on to their children, and going into coalition with Fianna Fail results in the removal from the game of your party at the next election.

Until that's done you can bide your time with this NAMA Downfall video, originally brought to my attention by, surprisingly, the Green Party Press Office on Twitter , showing the party still has a sense of humour. While it raised the heckles of a few who accused the party of mocking the electorate, it brought a smile to my face and a welcome reminder that if we can't stand back and laugh at ourselves what's the point of anything really.



* and by 'geekiest' I mean 'something that I must possess instantly'

Ted Kennedy and a wall of memories

I went out to Howth yesterday to spend some time with my grandparents. Since my grandfather came out of hospital in June it is like he has a new lease on life. After extensive tests they discovered that he was anemic, and probably had been for many years, but a simple course of iron tablets has sorted it out completely. He literally seems ten years younger.

Over a cup of tea we sat and watched the removal of Ted Kennedy from his house in Hyannis Port, and my grandfather started to reminisce about meeting him in the mid-eighties. On a wall in the house amongst a lifetime of memories is a picture of the two of them standing on the steps of the Capitol Building, when my grandfather brought a Defence Forces' Gaelic Football team on a goodwill tour of the US. What I didn't know before last night was how that meeting was never actually supposed to happen.

Although they were staying in DC the Senator's schedule was too tight to meet the team, despite the best efforts of the Embassy. On their second morning there my grandfather was walking through his hotel lobby and a man came up to talk to him, noticing the Irish Defence Force's logo on the tour blazer he was wearing (although he was a serving general at the time, while in the US they all wore civilian clothes), and invited my grandfather to join him and his wife for breakfast. The man was George McGovern.

Over breakfast McGovern asked if my grandfather and the team had met Ted Kennedy yet, to which he replied no, that the Senator's schedule hadn't allowed it, and the talk then turned to other things. My grandfather said that McGovern was one of the nicest, genuine and most impressive politicians he met on the whole trip. That one chance meeting led to another, for at 9pm that night back in his hotel room my grandfather got a call from Kennedy's office asking if the team would be able to meet the Senator the next morning. Unprompted, McGovern had arranged everything.

The next morning they met at the Senator's office and talked for some time about Ireland and family, and Kennedy posed with the team on the steps of Congress for the photo that would look down on me throughout my teenage years. Like Bertie, my grandfather was impressed with the wall-to-wall photos and Kennedy clan memorabilia in Ted's office, and upon his return to Dublin his own life-wall started to take shape, with family photos gradually overtaking presentations and commemorative plaques as the years went by. He described Kennedy as larger-than-life in all ways. While he would have been too Republican (in the Irish sense of the word) for my grandfather's liking, as he talked to me last night there was a clear sense of the towering figure that Kennedy was for my grandfather's generation (despite being almost ten years Kennedy's senior).

My own image of Kennedy is of the liberal parliamentarian, the progressive elder statesman reminding the rest of the Democratic party of their obligations to the most vulnerable in society. He had his darker and weaker side, much of which was public but no doubt more of which will come to light over the coming weeks, and was a lionising figure for both right and left in America. Perhaps never fully out of the mythologising shadow of his siblings, his legacy as a Senator is nonetheless stronger than any he might have left had he been President.

It is rare that my grandfather and I see eye to eye on politics, beyond our "anybody but Fianna Fail' attitude, but we could both agree on one thing last night, with Kennedy's passing an era in America has come to a close. For the US this is perhaps the true end of the 20th Century.

A Social Contract for a Second Republic

A few days ago I sat down to put some thoughts on paper on the subject of a Second Irish Republic, and what form this would take. There have been some interesting comments on this subject recently both in the mainstream press, and in threads on both Gavin's Blog and irishelection. Most of the thoughts seem to be on Oireachtas reform along the lines of a move towards a unicameral legislature with a reduction in the proportion of representation, the a replacement of PR-STV with a list system, or enshrining tax levels within the Constitution along the lines of the Swiss model. All of these fail to tackle what I see to be the main flaw at the heart of the 1937 Constitution, and in an attempt to solidify my own thoughts on the matter I decided to write an op-ed piece, rather than a typical blog post.

A Social Contract for a Second Republic

As we approach both the 100th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic of Ireland, and the 75th anniversary of the the 1937 Constitution, the country is in the deepest economic, political and moral crises of living memory, caused in no small part by a failure in the system of the State itself. Successive generations of Irish women and men have taken the model of democracy and government as handed to them by their forebears as custodians and guardians, passing it down without significant alteration to subsequent generations. What changes have been made to our national civic model have been clumsy additions bolted on and jury-rigged to provide a measure of temporary relief, but the fundamental flaws at the heart of the system itself remain. With each successive iteration of office holders these flaws are replicated, more errors enter the genetic code of our political, economic and civil society, and our Constitution and Republic are no longer fit for purpose as a contract of mutual cooperation and governance between the citizens themselves.

The State was born and baptised in blood and sacrifice, but it has been held captive to the memory of that sacrifice for too many generations. The State was forged by Great Men and Women, who have become giants that tower over the nation they created, whose very shadows themselves have become sacrosanct. The State was an infant whose Citizenry needed guidance through the uncertainty of independence and the chaos of Civil War, but the youth who approach the ballot box today for the first time are four generations removed from that infant State. The era of the Great Men and Women is passed, we are children no more and need no paternalistic guidance. The system created by their long shadows is creaking under the strain of modernity, weighed down by decades of corruption enacted in their name.

The time now is not for reform. Reform suggests that the base system is inherently solid and with revision and upgrade can once again be fit for purpose. This is not the case with our State. The flaws are too great, the gap between the Citizenry and the political and economic elite too vast, the inequalities too endemic. The time now is not for reform, the time now is for Rebirth. The time now is for a Second Irish Republic.

Ireland is a small nation, with a current population of just over four million, less than many cities around the world. Yet the level of real participatory democracy and civil control residing in the hands of the Citizenry is less than in many of these cities, let alone in comparable nations. A Second Irish Republic must begin with the drafting of a new Constitution, one which would enshrine the theories of Social Justice through true participatory Democracy as the soul of the new State.

A Constitution is a contract between the Citizenry of a State on how they want to live with each other. It should not be something imposed upon them, rather it should be something that they themselves have a hand in drafting, framing and amending. Under the 1937 Constitution, amendments to the Constitution can only be proposed by the Oireachtas and submitted to the Citizenry for approval (Article 46.2 states: “Every proposal for an amendment of this Constitution shall be initiated in Dail Eireann as a Bill, and shall upon having been passed or deemed to have been passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas, be submitted by Referendum to the decision of the people in accordance with the law for the time being in force relating to Referendum”).

There is no current mechanism for the Citizenry themselves to propose alterations to the Constitution, a contract that ultimately governs almost all aspects of their interactions with each other. In this way the Citizenry themselves have been alienated from each other as an essential tool of dialogue, if not the core tool of dialogue between them on a national level, has been removed from their control. Any new Constitution must have provision for amendments to be initiated by the Citizenry outside the control and approval of the Oireachtas.

Under the 1937 Constitution, nomination of a candidate for the Presidency can be made by either twenty sitting members of the Oireachtas or by four or more local authorities. This provision could be extended to proposed amendments to the Constitution, with an amendment needing to be passed by the Oireachtas in the current manner, or be proposed by 2/3 of the local authorities. A method by which the Citizenry themselves could introduce a proposed amendment could be based around the California model that requires the signatures of 8% of the valid poll in the most recent gubernatorial election. When proposing amendments to a national, rather than a regional Constitution, perhaps a figure of 10% of the valid poll of the most recent national election would be more appropriate. On the basis of the total valid poll of 2,085,245 in the 2007 general election, a proposed Constitutional amendment submitted by the Citizenry in this manner would require 208,525 signatures, or roughly 5% of the current population of the State. Amending the Constitution should not be taken lightly, it should not be easy to do, but it should still be within the grasp of the Citizenry.

Before any Oireachtas reform can be attempted, before the 'special place of women' in the home can be erased from history, and before all references to national authority being derived from God can be removed to herald a true separation of Church and State, the Constitution of the nation must truly be of the people, by the people and for the people. Only when the ability of the Citizenry themselves to create, amend, approve and reject and in all aspects have complete ownership of their own social contract will the foundations of the State be strong enough for a nation based on social justice to be built.

as a part of the human species

I awoke this morning to find a "you bought this, you might like this" email from Amazon in my inbox, announcing the publication next week of the fourth of the Penguin Great Ideas series. This is good news.

Each of the series follows a similar format, 20 paperbacks, smaller in size than normal, each reprinting a tract or piece of a tract from an influential thinker of the last two or so millennium, with Plato, Confucius and Plutarch standing shoulder to shoulder with Marx, Orwell and Camus. The series are all colour-coded, with spines and cover designs all in the same hue, red for series one, blue for two, green for three and now purple for series four, and to be honest many of the books are worth buying for the cover design alone. Each individual book is priced at £4.99, which mysteriously ends up being between €6.50 and €6.99 when it hits Irish bookshops, another classic example of the paddy tax.

However when I took a look online at the full series, I was somewhat dismayed to see that Penguin have made the exact same 'mistake' that they did in the previous three series, they somehow have forgotten to include any great ideas from women. Series one contained twenty books, only two of which ('A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf, and 'A Vindication of the Rights of Women') were by a female author. Series two also had two out of twenty ('The City of Ladies' by the medieval writer Christine de Pizan and 'Eichmann and the Holocaust' by Hannah Arendt), and series three unbelievably had none. Series four only manages a single work, 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid' by Virginia Woolf.

I'm sure if challenged Penguin would explain that the Great Ideas Series is composed solely of works that are either long out of copyright or that they own the copyright of, that their early catalog does not contain many female writers and until the modern era female writers simply were not as widely published as male. However given that they include works from the thirties and forties it shouldn't really have been that difficult to include more, perhaps Emma Goldman to balance the Marx and Tolstoy, Mary Prince to balance the W.E.B. Du Bois, or Simone de Beauvoir to balance out Foucault. I really think that with a bit more effort they could have produced a slightly more balanced list.

A House famously recorded their song "Endless Art", in which the names of great artists are recited with their dates of birth and death, without including a single woman. They had to go and release a follow up single, 'More Endless Art', just listing female artists. The Irish collaborative novel 'Finbar's Hotel' featured chapters submitted by a who's who of contemporary Irish authors of the day, none of whom were women. A subsequent collection, 'Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel' was released featuring an all-female ensemble of authors.

'Endless Art' was released in 1992, 'Finbar's Hotel' in 1999. You'd think that in ten years we would have moved on enough and learned from our mistakes to not publish a series entitled 'Great Ideas' with only 5% of the contributions from women. This sort of carelessness is just not good enough, Penguin really should be able to do better.

I danced for the scribes and the Pharisees

During a lull in the Ukulele Hooley yesterday, Tadhg and I had a brief conversation on the relative merits of interpretive dance. We both have friends who are dancers and he had recently been to a group performance and was amazed by how good some of the individual pieces were. I on the other hand, have been to far too many pieces, and not once have I been amazed or surprised by how bad it all has been. It's just not an artform that I can seem to appreciate on any level beyond sadly acknowledging just how fitter than I am, or will ever be, the dancers are. I just don't see the point of it all.

The talk then turned to other performances I have no time for (it was a reasonably long lull), and I found myself (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) dismissing theatre almost in its entirety. The reason for this is two fold. To begin with I know quite a few stage actors, and almost all of them are tragically and stereotypically narcissistic and self-obsessed; while watching them or their colleagues on stage I find it impossible to separate the actor from the role, and thus I sit uncomfortably in my seat for the duration of the play thinking about how it has been ruined by the actors, who are all arrogant sods.

Which brings us to my second criticism, that beyond the relative strength or skills of any given actor, the medium itself is unfortunately dependent upon on the presence of actors. For me they are a barrier between the writer and myself, preventing the accurate transmission of the playwright's intent by imposing their own interpretations upon it. They are middlemen who pollute a meme with their presence, attempting to shift focus away from the writer and their ideas, and on to themselves.

As you can see I am a bundle of laughs to see a play with.

When I read, or view a sculpture or painting, go to a concert or listen to a CD, or even, lord forbid, endure contemporary or interpretative dance, I feel as if there is a sense of communication between the artist and me. By it's nature it is a one-way process, but the interpretation of the artist's intent lies entirely with me, whether I grasp their intent or instead am inspired to create a meaning purely for myself, at least the communication between us has been pure. However introducing a middleman into the equation corrupts this communication, as the actor's own interpretations distort and distract the message transmission.

Of course the counter to this is that the medium itself allows for this distortion, that the playwright creates their work on the assumption that it will be performed, and that the very nature of performance will transform their work into something other than what they intended.

While rationally I am aware of this, I can't seem to accept it enough to suspend my sense of disbelief. I just cannot see the wood, for the trees are all annoying me too much.

Of course the written word itself is not always the purest form of communication, particularity when the writing is obtuse. I am currently working my way through a the works of a number of French Situationalists, post-modernists and other ne'er do-wells infused with the spirit of '68, and it is pretty tough going at times. To begin with I am working with translations, so already an element of distortion creeps in, but then to compound it all the original writing was often never intended to be accessible. The ego of the author has wrapped the ideas in so many verbal bows and ribbons in an attempt to display just how clever they are, that getting through to the message inside is so frustrating that like a child at Christmas I'm often tempted to give up and play with the shiny paper and string instead. Much more interesting.

While reading a few criticisms of Debord and the Situationist International I came across this amazing pot-calling-the-kettle-black quote from Chomsky:

"Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed. Perhaps the explanation lies in some personal inadequacy, like tone-deafness. Or there may be other reasons. The question is not strictly relevant here, and I won't pursue it."

So if even the words themselves of an author can corrupt and pollute their message, if language itself is a barrier to true understanding, what then is the only true form of communication?

The answer, it would seem, is dance.

poo.

Anyway, the festival was great, highlight of the day was Gus and Fin with a stomping version of Rawhide. You can get a taste of it here in a much more subdued version. Congrats to all involved, what a great day!

Ukulelehoo

Tomorrow will see me spend most of the day at the inaugural Ukulele Hooley, the first ever Irish International Ukulele Festival, in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar. Doors open at 2:30 and things don't wrap up until late in the evening, with workshops and performances galore. Tickets are a reasonable €15 for eight different artists and groups including Ukulelezaza, The Uke Box, Peter Delaney, Gus & Fin, Winin Boys, Vertigo Smyth, Steven Sproat, Andrew Robinson and The Ukuhoolies.

It is important to point out that I am not a ukulele player, nor do I have a particular love of the instrument, but many of my friends have a strange affinity for it, and if the weather holds it promises to be a fun day out.

Greens and NAMA

Over on IrishElection Mark Coughlan has an interesting post on the current proposals to hold a Green Special Conference on NAMA, doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how any vote would go if a convention was held:

"Approximately 400 members voted at the recent Green special convention on Lisbon II. Of that number 170 (220 minus 35%), under my dodgey calculations, would have been from one of the six overtly NAMA-sceptic branches...

...So that leaves 230 members from other non-NAMA-sceptic or covertly, thus far, NAMA-scepetic branches who are active voters. Considering that these members are part of a generally non-NAMA-sceptic group and that the majority of remaining Greens have followed the leadership’s line since entering Government, I’m going to take 20% of these as potential anti-NAMA voters. That’s 44 votes.

So, 44 plus 86 gives a total of 130 anti NAMA-support votes from a figure of 400. That verges on the 1/3 needed to defeat the 2/3rd majority required for an internal Green vote to pass."

A couple of thoughts:

1) Learning from last month's Special Convention on Lisbon II, I would imagine that if a special convention on NAMA is held, the smart money would be on the leadership angling for a motion to be phrased in such a way as to require a 2/3 majority vote in order to mandate the TDs to reject NAMA, rather than requiring a 2/3 majority in order to mandate support for it, assuming the leadership don't want to use this as their get-out-of-jail-free card (god knows they've turned down enough opportunities to use one thus far). It all depends on who gets their motions in first and how they are phrased, but the leadership are unlikely to want to have as close a vote as the Lisbon II one, which passed by exactly a 2/3 majority, a single vote could have seen it defeated.

2) This all assumes that a special meeting is actually held, for already in Dublin South Central there is a move afoot by some members to hold a new vote on withdrawing the consistency group's support for the motion to hold a special NAMA meeting that the branch itself instigated. I doubt this second vote will be successful, if it even procedurally is allowed, but it goes to show that just because a constituency group proposes something it doesn't hold that the all their members, even a majority of their members, will support that motion at a national convention, just that a majority of the members that voted on the day supported the motion.

History is written by those who show up, something especially true at Green meetings.

My 2-bits - gazing through my crystal ball I foresee a special convention happening, nothing very exciting coming out of it, and it all being a bit moot thanks to the Supreme Court.

However this grassroots movement does show that despite their defeat in the recent Special Convention there still remains a vocal minority that opposes the continuing participation of the Greens in government, and this group will continue to take action to have its voice heard.

Links
Background to Mark's post

The Pelican Brief

I'm a bit of a sucker for good design, in fact in many aspects of my life style and design have a tendency to win out over substance, as evidenced by a shockingly large assortment of Apple products, Nokia phones, and happy plastic noisemakers from Korg sitting forlorn and unloved on my shelves. However when it comes to books I thankfully don't have to choose between style and substance, at least when it comes to the clean crisp lines of a classic Penguin or Pelican.

I'm a huge fan of the Penguin Great Ideas series, and will admit to buying the new Penguin editions of 1984 and Animal Farm purely for the Shepard Fairey covers; The new white-spined editions of the Penguin Modern Classics line are great, but nothing really comes close to the original editions from the 40's to the 70's. The evolution of the Penguin style over the last 70 years can be seen quite strikingly at The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, a fan site from someone who appreciates great book design as much as I do, but possibly has a little bit too much time on their hands.

I'm obviously not alone in this appreciation, as fans have done mock-ups in the Penguin/Pelican style of everything from Harry Potter books to video games, and the style continues to be an inspiration for generation after generation of graphic designers.

While walking past Whelan's recently I noticed that the current range of posters for Foggy Notions gigs have also taken this classic style as their inspiration. Quite different to most of the other posters on display, eye-catching when presented in a series, and yet strangely anonymous in that they suggest nothing about the bands themselves.

They did make me stop and pay attention to them though, and that, I suppose, is the ultimate object of any poster, and a sign of good design that does its job well.

Update: Stupid feckin' BoingBoing, yet again copying my idea for a post. I'm getting tired of these 'coincidences'... Nice link to The Pelican Project though, which traces the evolution of the Pelican cover over 50 years.

Update 2: While rereading 'Penguin By Design', I came across the design for the cover of a 1967 edition of poetry by Heine, by Henning Boehlke, which turns out to have been used above in the poster for Dirty Projectors. Looks like the Foggy Notions' designers were more than just 'influenced' by classic Penguin design...

Sunday comes and sunday goes

With the government in danger of collapse, Biffo's leadership in question, and the prospect of a November election very much on the cards, the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I decided to take yesterday off, it being a religiously mandated day of rest, albeit mandated by religions neither of us subscribe to, and spent most of the afternoon in the Botanic Gardens.

I hadn't been there in a while, and TVUG had never been, so it was a great experience for both of us, though we couldn't quite escape the feeling that we were living the life of a pair of sixty year-olds. To combat this we walked back into town from Glasnevin (trying doing that on a zimmerframe!) and dropped into Seomra Spraoi, Dublin's very own autonomous social centre off Mountjoy Square. We hung around for a bite to eat, a cup of tea and a showing of "Coconut Revolution", a short film about the revolutionary and ecological uprising on the Pacific island of Bougainville in the nineties, and all in all a good time was had by all.

The photos in the composite pictures above were taken on my iPhone, and stitched together on the phone itself with a nice little App called Autostitch, available on the App Store for the princely sum of €1.59. Its a fun program that brightens up the otherwise appallingly feature-poor camera on the 1st gen iPhone.

Links
National Botanic Gardens
Seomra Spraoi
Coconut Revolution on Google Video
Autostitch

Undermining the individual in Irish politics

On Wednesday of last week the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland issued new guidelines in advance of the Lisbon II Referendum on how the media have to cover the campaign. In stark contrast to Lisbon I, the BCI have decided that broadcasters do not need to give equal airtime to both sides of the campaign, only to those political parties involved in the campaign, stating that:

"Firstly, the guidelines clarify that there is no requirement to allocate an absolute equality of airtime to opposing sides of the Referendum debate during editorial coverage. The guidelines require broadcasters to ensure that the proportion of airtime allocated to opposing sides must be fair to all interests and undertaken in a transparent manner. Secondly, the guidelines clarify the requirement to ensure that the total time allocated to political party broadcasts will result in equal airtime being afforded to parties that support the Referendum proposals and those that oppose them. While broadcasters are under no obligation to carry political party broadcasts, those that do must comply with the guidelines."

Since the Green Party Special Convention last month, only four recognized political parties, Sinn Fein, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party/People Before Profit Alliance and what's left of the Workers Party have announced they are to oppose the Treaty, none of whom save Sinn Fein have the resources to effectively produce compelling Party Political Broadcasts.

In the 2007 General Election Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, the PDs and the Greens received between them 86.4% of the 1st preference votes, and in the June 2009 Local elections they (less the PDs) received 75% of the 1st% preference vote. Yet between those two votes in the Lisbon I Referendum 53.4% of the electorate voted against the Reform Treaty, showing a substantial difference between people's support for the major parties, and their levels of agreement with the stated positions of those parties on a specific issue.

However despite 53.4% of the citizenry opposing the Lisbon Reform Treaty, in the wake of this week's BCI decision it is highly unlikely that 53.4% of the airtime will be given to the No campaign, as editorial coverage will be skewered in favour of the major political parties, and political broadcasts will only be produced by those parties with the resources to do so, all of whom save Sinn Fein support the Treaty. Furthermore although Sinn Fein are the only party likely to receive airtime on the No side, as they represent only 7.4% of the national vote they cannot be said to speak for the 53.4% of the electorate who voted No to Lisbon I, and thus they will most likely do more harm than good to the No campaign this time round, alienating moderate voters who would not want their No vote to be seen as a pro-Sinn Fein vote.

Two issues concern me here, the first is that in a representative democracy our elected officials should seek to represent the wishes of their constituents. They are not there to tell the citizenry what to do, they are elected to represent the wishes and concerns of the citizenry when decisions are being made on our behalf. The fact that there is such a disparity between the wishes of the people and the recent actions of those elected to represent them should be setting off alarm bells in the minds of every voter, regardless of their own position on the Lisbon II Treaty.

The second issue is on the BCI decision when seen as part of a move by the State to counter the rise of the individual in Irish politics. In the June 2009 Local Elections 18% of the total first preference vote was for independent candidates, or for those from statistically insignificant parties, resulting in 15% of the elected councilors nationwide now being from outside of mainstream party politics. This was a considerable increase over the 6.6% share of the first preference vote in the 2007 general election, and over the 13.4% of 1st preference votes in the 2004 local elections. While the success of non-party candidates can be attributed largely to the voter backlash against unpopular government actions, the size of this success could never have occurred were it not for our PR electoral system.

The use of the Proportional Representation, Single Transferable Vote system (PR-STV) in Ireland is almost unique, with only Malta and (with modifications) Australia using it to any degree. With it comes a strong focus on the merits of the individual being elected rather than the policies of the party they belong to, which is why voters are often offered a free choice of multiple candidates by the same political party, and why these candidates are often defeated by someone unaffiliated with any party. According to Richard Sinnott in 'Politics in the Republic of Ireland':

"The primary focus of PR-STV is on the choice of individual representatives. Indeed, the originators of PR-STV in Britain were highly critical of political parties and of the role they played... Reservations about the role of parties were also quite widespread in Ireland when PR-STV was adopted, and the party affiliation of candidates was not listed on ballot papers until 1965." p.106

While in many areas familial ties have dominated local politics and allowed the dynastic selection of candidates, in general the PR-STV system has still allowed ample opportunity for individuals outside the Party system, with little or no financial backing, to be elected either at a local, national or even European level and represent their constituents on issues normally outside the scope of the national political system.

Although he later tried to abolish PR-STV, its originator De Valera enshrined the rights of the individual to have their voice heard both through the PR-STV system and through the use of Referenda in the 1937 Constitution. As Bill Kissane outlines in 'Explaining Irish Democracy':

"Indeed De Valera, 'the maker of the modern Irish polity in its mature form', left behind him a constitution that has proven remarkably adept at protecting the public from the despotism of elected majorities, Firstly, De Valera argued that fundamental rights could not 'be changed by the Dail except by a specified majority or approval by the people by way of referendum' and ensured that the constitution could no longer be amended by ordinary statute law. Secondly the 1937 constitution prescribed not just the principles of PR but the STV system. When asked why the clause did not allow for a more flexible choice, De Valera replied that electoral arrangements were too fundamental to be left to the mercies of party politics" p.215

PR-STV does not serve the will of the political parties though, and twice Fianna Fail have attempted to abolish it by Referendum, once in 1959 as De Valera prepared to retire, (rejected 3rd Amendment on Article 16, To replace proportional representation by plurality system, defeated by 51.8% to 48.2% with a 58.4% turnout), and again more resoundingly nine years later in 1968 (rejected 4th Amendment on Article 16, To replace proportional representation by plurality system, defeated by 60.8% to 39.2% with a 65.8% turnout). While Fianna Fail's motivation was to establish a 'first past the post system' and ensure a future of majority governments for them, the defeat of this move also preserved the ability of the individual to participate at all levels of politics in Ireland outside the party political system.

At the recent Green Special Conference both Minister John Gormley and Senator Dan Boyle expressed interest in examining a move away from PR-STV and towards a list system. In his role as Minister for Local Government, Gormley wants to end the overlap of local representation between TDs and local councilors, believing that too much of a TD's time is spent involving themselves in purely local issues that by rights should fall under the brief of a local councilor. His move towards a directly elected mayor for Dublin and a strengthened city council is part of this program, another would be on the national side with a move away from directly elected TDs and towards a German style list system. In Gormley's proposal Ireland would be considered a single consistency and people would vote for their desired party in national elections, with TDs being allocated to parties on the basis of the total national % of votes for that party. Under a list system the ability of an individual to be elected outside the party system is almost non-existent, and popular parties could ensure that their own leadership continues to stay in power without any checks or oversight of those individual politicians by the citizenry.

If an election were held today the Greens would fail to have any TDs returned under PR-STV, whereas with 2.3% of the vote (their share of the national vote in June's local elections) under a list system they would be allocated 4 TDs under the current Dail numbers of 166 TDs, or 3 under their proposed reduction of Dail deputies to 130. While Fianna Fail wanted to abolish PR-STV to guarantee their continued dominance, it seems the Greens want to do it just to stay alive. At this stage it is just a discussion point, no formal legislation is in the works, and while I agree with the need to increase local democracy I do not agree with using it as a justification to remove PR-STV.

In 1959 Fianna Fail masked their motivations behind the doublespeak argument that PR-STV was undemocratic, robbing the electorate of a clear choice between two competing ideas for government, and leaving the formation of government as a form of haggling and bargaining between too many competing parties and not in the hands of the electorate. It would appear that fifty years later the Greens would adopt a similar approach arguing that to make democracy work at a local level we must remove the local from the national, and leave national government in the hands of the parties unburdened by a reliance on the wishes of individual constituents.

Signs of Government support for a move to a List System on the heels of the BCI decision to enable the exclusion of individuals from outside the political party system from national debates, is a worrying and undemocratic trend. While I myself am currently a member of a political party this is a personal decision, and one shouldn't be forced into the narrow straight-jacket of party membership to participate in national or local politics. We are a small nation, and as such the opportunities for real and meaningful participatory democracy are so much greater than are currently being realised.

One can only hope that in light of the events of the past eighteen months, when the actions of the Government have been so contrary to the expressed will of the people, that the general and widespread realistion will occur that true power should remain directly in the hands of the people, and that the people themselves will passionately resist any action taken to remove it.

Links
Explaining Irish Democracy - Bill Kissane
Politics in the Republic of Ireland - J. Coakley, M. Galagher eds.

Should I stay or should I go?

Earlier this year a former colleague got in touch to have a chat about their current job. They were unhappy with the direction it was going, and had been sounding out friends and family about whether they should leave and look for something else. I threw in my own 2 cents in an email, and to be honest forgot about it until this afternoon when they got back in touch with an update. I seriously doubt that my advice made any difference to their decision but, reading back over it, it still makes sense to me so I thought I would post it here and share it with everyone...

Should I Leave My Job?

If there is one thing that I have taken from my own experiences over the last few years, and that of many close friends, it is that in the long run being unhappy in your job far outweighs any material benefits that the job may provide. Your health and happiness should always be your number one concern. Knowing when to leave a role is never clear cut though, as most day-to-day work involves a ongoing trade-off between the stresses and other negative aspects of the role and the material benefits that put food on your table and a roof over your head, and our instinct is always to put up with a bad situation out of fear of the unknown.

My own experience makes me think that its like the whole "one pint too many" thing, more often than not you don't realize that you've had enough, you only know when you've had too much. It is very difficult to walk away from a job at the right time, you normally only do it when you are burnt out and will need time to recover. However while you often don't recognise that its time to go, those closest around you often do, so if folks have noticed a change in you, its worth listening to them. The caveat with this is that we rarely tell our friends the good stuff that happens in work, we only talk to them about the bad stuff, and so they tend to get a distorted picture.

A couple of things to think about, or at least a couple of things that I thought about when making my own decisions:

1) How is your current job making your life better?

a) Money - this is the main reason everyone works. Your rent is paid, there is food on your table and you are able to save a bit.

b) Professional growth - are you learning new things by being in this job? If you stay another twelve months, will you have a better insight into your role and industry and approach things in a better way than you do today? Even if the answer to this is yes, the follow on question is how much does that knowledge matter to you, ie, do you see your next role or even the one after that as being a continuation of this one - will the knowledge you gain in six months be of benefit to you in five years time, or will it only benefit you in seven months time?

c) Personal growth - very nebulous, but are you learning things about yourself in this role? Does it teach you things about yourself that you can use outside of a work context?

d) Is it challenging, and do you actually need to be challenged? A lot of folks talk about the need to be constantly "challenged" in a role, but this is more often than not just something that is said in interviews because it sounds good. I always think that somebody who needs to be challenged all the time actually has a short attention span, bores easily and has a short term view - not a great combination, and there is something to be said for hitting and maintaining a level of competence and expertise in a role. However really being bored in a role can make you dead inside. There is a balance to be struck between trying not to be too bored in a role, and constantly being under pressure.

e) Also to consider are other intangibles like networking and relationship building, even if the job itself isn't great, does it give you the opportunity to build up a strong network of industry contacts that you can use/call on in later life? Again - this is only relevant if you plan to stay in the industry over the long term.

f) Friends - we usually make friends in work. You spend 40+ hours a week with your colleagues, and sometimes they can make a positive difference in ones life. This can often be a factor for field workers (sales folks etc), who genuinely experience loneliness in a role because they do not have regular positive human contact, the same goes for folks who work from home. The reverse of this is when you have too strong a bond with colleagues, and that prevents you from seeing the negatives in your role, ie you end up staying longer than you should because while the job is dreadful the friendships make the pain better.

2) How is it making your life worse?

a) Stress - we are often told that stress is a good thing, I have my doubts. Constant stress leads to all sorts of mental and physical problems, and while everybody's job produces some sort of stress, its very difficult to see how much is too much until its too late.

b) Self-worth - are you still the person you want to be? Some roles can make you a better person, happier with yourself and proud of your accomplishments. Others can erode your sense of self-worth through the actions of others around you (bosses, co-workers etc) or through the nature of your own work. If you aren't getting either the development, challenge or recognition from the work you are doing it becomes very easy to start to blame yourself for the situation.

c) Toxic environment - American business culture will tell you that your destiny is in your own hands, and that if things in work are bad its your own fault for not making them better - this culture is designed to remove collective responsibility and absolve leadership from any responsibility for their employees. However many environments are rotten from the leadership down, and no matter how strong you are in your own role this will not compensate for the environment you are in and the benefits you gain from your own personal achievements will be outweighed by the cultural negativity of that environment.

d) Compensation - not as important in many cases as the other factors, but are you genuinely being paid enough for the work you are doing? Nobody thinks they are being paid enough, its a fact of human life, but it is worth examining this in a bit of detail. On paper your salary might look good when benchmarked against a notional 40 hour week, but if you end up doing 60 hour weeks, or working weekends regularly, then if you look at it on a per/hour basis it starts to look considerably weaker.

e) False expectations - Sometimes, more rarely, a person may genuinely not be a good fit for the role they are in. This is difficult to see particularly if they like the idea of that role, and normally a person will attribute all their problems to the above external factors long before coming to terms with the fact that the problem actually lies with them.

3) Is the alternative better?

a) What will you do - Do you have something else lined up? Have you explored this role in detail - will it actually be a different environment than the one you are leaving, or will it generate similar problems?

b) Timing - Are you able to move right into the new situation, or will there be a transition time? Do you need to take time between the roles to recover from the effects of the previous role? If so can you afford to take the time off financially, or what is the cost to your health and well being of not taking time off? Are you going to need any preparation or upskilling to move into your new role?

The Bottom Line

Your happiness should be your number one priority. If you are unhappy in your role and there is no prospect of it improving in a way that matches your personal goals, you should leave, and it is just a matter of devising a proper exit strategy. In fact I think that once you start to think of leaving, your decision is already made, you are leaving, and its just a matter of timing.

Romanes eunt domus

Picked up Jonathan Hickman's latest collection, 'Pax Romana', today. If you aren't interested in comics, this would not be the one to change your mind, so probably best just to ignore this post and skip ahead to the next one filled with wrath, anger and politicized ire; knowing me there's bound to be one like that along any minute now.

Go on, off you go.

'Pax' is illustrated in the same slick uber-design conscious style as 'Nightly News', and its choice of subject matter (time-traveling mercenaries in the employ of the Vatican out to reshape history for the betterment of all mankind by creating an eternal Roman Empire) will not appeal to as wide an audience as 'Nightly News', but is nonetheless engaging and worth a read, and for me a stronger work than his other recent collection 'Transhuman'.

While he is often compared to Warren Ellis in terms of combining multiple ideas based on current cutting edge and/or fringe social and scientific theories with a retro twist, Hickman's work can at times appear to be a triumph of style over substance. And yet perhaps because it seems to be directed at that rather niche market of forth-estate loathing sci-fi-loving theologians with a penchant for neo-liberal conspiracy theories and an inherent suspicion of proselytizing organized religions and politicians of all creeds, I find it appealing in spite of this flaw. It is not often that one sees a portrayal of the council of Nicea debating the specifics of the Arian heresy in the style of an iPod ad, let alone one with gun-wielding time-traveling Swiss Guards in the background.

Huzzah!

It's not available through Amazon yet, so if you don't have a local comic shop nearby you can check out a preview here.

Books v. Superman

When I left work just over fifteen months ago I had carefully drawn up a budget to get me through eighteen months without having to think about finding a new source of income. This monthly budget included such trivialities as the mortgage, electricity, cable and food (not necessarily in that order), and essentials such as books. Thanks to the global recession my mortgage has actually dropped substantially over the last few months allowing me to spend a few weeks on the road without having to choose upon my return between eating in the dark or listening to the sound of my empty belly while reading at night. The option to cut back on my monthly book allowance never even enters the picture.

However as October approaches, the symbolic end of what I will come to call my "sitting on my backside" period, and I begin slowly to add up the total costs of my proposed new revenue generating venture (which, for the time being, we will simply call "Project Behemoth"), I have started to consider ways in which I could stretch my book budget to either a) encompass more books for the same price, or, and I know this will sound a bit radical, b) spend less on the same amount of books. Again, you will note the complete lack of an option c) buy less books, that's just crazy talk.*

With option b) firmly in mind I spent a bit of time this morning figuring out how to stretch my budget a bit further. I normally buy books in one of two places, on Amazon or in Hodges Figgis, the main bookseller in Dublin. I of course also frequent Books Upstairs, the Winding Stair, Cultivate in Temple Bar and the large second hand section of Chapters, but Hodges Figgis is my primary shop for mass market and recent publications, namely because of its loyalty card scheme that gives you €10 off for every €80 sent. Nowhere in Ireland seems to stock the majority of the specialized political, left-wing economic and ecological books that have been my mainstay recently, and thus I end up turning to Amazon with some frequency not to buy from them directly, rather to buy from resellers operating through Amazon's marketplace program.

This morning I took some time to look at the real cost of shopping through Amazon, and found out a few interesting things. I wanted to buy 'A Thousand Plateaus' by Guattari and Deleuze, not currently available in any Dublin bookshop. Amazon sell it directly for £14.24 + shipping, and it was also available new through the marketplace program from prices ranging from £10.81 through to £32.61, all for the same edition, from nineteen individual resellers. The Book Depository, a UK online bookshop, had the lowest price listed, £10.81 excluding shipping, and also sold it directly on their own website, outside of the Amazon marketplace program, where (detecting an Irish IP adress) it displayed a price in euro for me of €16.03. However The Book Depository offer free worldwide shipping through their own site and this is where the real cost of online purchasing becomes evident:

Amazon.co.uk: £14.24 + £4.98 delivery to Ireland (total €23.47)
Book Depository on Amazon: £10.81 + £3.94 delivery (total €18.01)
bookdepository.co.uk: €16.03 + free delivery to Ireland (total €16.03)

So interestingly while the same book appears cheaper to buy from The Book Depository via Amazon, its only when you are about to complete your order in the checkout and the shipping to Ireland is actually shown that you realise what a difference the free shipping from The Book Depository's own site makes.

To list products on Amazon retailers have to pay a monthly subscription, plus a commission per sale to Amazon, which for books works out at 15% ex vat of the sale price and £0.54 for shipping to Ireland. Thus on the £10.81 Amazon listed price The Book Depository pays Amazon £1.62, and £.54 of the £3.94 shipping also goes back to Amazon. So if they still manage to make a profit on a price of £9.16 on a sale through Amazon, it is interesting to speculate on the margins of the £13.57 direct purchase, even when the cost to them of absorbing the shipping cost is factored in.

In this light Amazon's own shipping cost of £4.98 to Ireland, on top of their full £14.24 price for the book, really starts to look outrageous. Ebay sellers have known for years to inflate the listed cost of shipping to increase their profit margin, although they might only make a few cents per purchase this way, the Superman III salami slicing effect starts to add up after a while. It looks like Jeff Bezos is also a big fan of Superman.

So the lesson for today is never judge a book by its cover price, or if you are a bookseller, perhaps 'A rising shipping lifts all titles'.

ahem.

And before anyone suggests that even €16.03 is too high a price to pay for a book, in 1946 George Orwell wrote a short essay on the true cost of book buying, working out mathematically that while he did spend a lot on books, he spent less per year than the average man did on cigarettes. He finishes 'Books v. cigarettes' by lamenting the small amount of money the average person spends on reading:

"...it is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive"

* To confuse things somewhat further, Project Behemoth will, if successful, actually introduce an option d) into the mix. And that's all I have to say about that for a while.

Don't just book it

As we sat around last night in the warm and fuzzy afterglow of our sojourn abroad I turned on the Six-One news on RTE to catch up on events of the last few days. The only item that really caught my attention was the report of the sit-in protest by a group of sacked workers in Thomas Cook, the UK travel agents, in two of its Dublin branches.

On Friday morning a manager from the UK had flown to Dublin, met with the workers and informed them all that the shops were closing immediately. Although the workers had been informed in June that the shops faced closure, they had been led to believe that they would still be employed until the end of August, and negotiations were still ongoing over the terms of their redundancy packages. On Friday they were told to vacate the premises at the end of the day, and offered a bare-bones package of two weeks redundancy money regardless of length of employment. Thomas Cook have been in Ireland for 125 years, and some of its current employees have been with the firm for almost twenty years. The company itself remains profitable and its CEO received a total compensation package of £10 Million last year. Faced with these moves forty workers took the brave decision to take a stand, and began a lock-in protest in an effort to bring the company back to the negotiating table.

On Saturday Thomas Cook went to the High Court to seek an injunction against their employees, ordering them to vacate the building. This was ignored and the numbers supporting the workers were bolstered initially just by family and friends, and then by a group of unions (the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association) and smaller political groups, most notably Sinn Fein and the Socialist Workers Party (both officially and in their 'People Before Profit Alliance' guise), and a rally outside the Grafton Street branch was organised for yesterday morning after the workers had been occupying the building for almost three days. Late yesterday afternoon the High Court granted Thomas Cook a further injunction against the workers, ordering them to vacate the building by 7pm or face arrest and detention.

This was about where our warm and fuzzy afterglow started to fade, and our feelings of anger and outrage started to rise, so the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I put on our raincoats and went off into the evening's drizzle to stand outside the shop and show our solidarity with the workers inside.

We arrived at about 6:45, fifteen minutes before the deadline for the workers to leave, and there was a sizeable crowd outside, maybe 50 or so people, many of whom had been there in the rain since the mornings rally. Sinn Fein banners were still in evidence tied to the railings of Trinity College, but only the SWP folks seemed to be still around, with Cllr Richard Boyd Barret inside with the workers. The media were out in force as well, locked inside with the workers in anticipation of the imminent confrontation with the gardai. We stood around chatting with a few other who, like us, were unconnected to either the workers or the parties, but felt a sense of solidarity and were motivated to come down and take a stand against big business. We talked with one woman in her sixties who had been a Thomas Cook customer for twenty years, had never been to a protest in her life, but could see the injustice of the company's actions and felt compelled to act.

Seven o'clock came and went with no sign of any garda action, and by 8pm one of the workers came out to have a chat with the supporters saying that as far as she knew there would be no action until 11am the next morning. She invited some supporters in to the shop who wanted to stay longer, and asked everyone else to come back the next morning before the final deadline of 11am. We wandered off in the rain as the crowd quickly dissipated.

At 5am this morning the gardai broke down the glass door of the shop, refused to produce the written court order authorising their actions, and arrested thirty employees and supporters, including Cllr Boyd Barret. A worker who was eight and half months pregnant went into labour shortly after her arrest, and now she and her partner, who was also arrested, are under garda supervision at a hospital. Her colleagues will appear before a judge later this afternoon and face immediate detention in Mount Joy prison for taking a stand against the unjust actions of a multinational company.

All the workers wanted was a fair and equitable redundancy package from a profitable company whose CEO personally made £10 Million last year. Now they all face incarceration at the hand of a State that increasingly uses its powers only to protect the interests of the international corporations and the richest 1% of its citizens.

If any good is to come from this appalling situation it will be the solidarity shown to the workers from workers in other companies (workers from Dunnes, Supervalue, McDonalds, Spar, Vodafone, Leo Burdocks, Superquinn and even the Dublin City Council all came down and donated food and drink, money and general support to the those in the lock-in) the unions, fringe political groups and most importantly the general populace.

In Milan last week we visited a Centro Sociale run by a group of friendly communists. It was late at night and I was very hesitant to drop in announced to an unfamiliar group, especially given my propensity for being mistaken for an undercover policeman, but The Very Understanding Girlfriend was more enthusiastic having experienced Social Centers in Rome a few years ago. As we peered through the graffiti-covered windows we were enthusiastically greeted by a couple who were walking past, and invited in to the deserted building to have a look around. The Center was closing for a summer break, August being the time when almost all of Italy shuts up shop and goes on vacation. They offered us a drink, gave us a guided tour and between their halting English, our non-existent Italian and feeble French we got a good impression of the work the center does with migrants, the poor, the unemployed and homeless, women's groups and others marginalsied by Italian society.

As I talked with our hosts about the struggle for workers' rights in Ireland in the face of the Celtic Tiger, I realised that the greatest hurdle to any movement was the almost complete lack of a sense of solidarity in the Irish psyche. Except in those few, rare occasions of international sporting victory the average Irish person feels almost no sense of kinship with their fellow citizens, or if they do they manage to mask all trace of it to such an extent as to render it completely invisible. We look out only for ourselves, expect everyone else to as well, and hold a grudging respect for the audacious liars and cheats in our country, even when it is we ourselves who haven been lied to and cheated.

But the events of recent months, as the nation as a whole began to realise just how great have been the lies and cheating, have stirred a sense of national outrage that little by little seems to be overcoming our inherent self-centred apathy and the realisation that we are all in this together is starting to dawn in the minds of the people of Ireland.

The other lesson to be learned from this event is one for the apparatchiks in the Green Party. I hold no truck with the specific politics of the Socialist Workers Party, nor their People Before Profit front, nor the Communist group in Milan, and especially not with Sinn Fein, but all of these groups have one thing in common, a strong focus on local activism. You can be guaranteed that at any rally or protest on even vaguely left-wing issues, the SWP and the Shinners will be out in force with their banners and placards. the SWP in particular is the ultimate rent-a-crowd, punching above their weight in any protest by providing a seemingly unlimited number of placards to unaffiliated marchers who feel banner-envy after arriving empty-handed to a protest. But their members, like Boyd Barret, are willing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with others, and pay the price for it. And these actions are remembered by the local communities come election time.

All politics is local, the SWP and Sinn Fein know this, and the Greens have forgotten this, and that is why People Before Profit emerged from the recent local election with double the number of elected councilors than the Greens. While the Thomas Cook lock-in would not be a typical event for the Greens to support, the equivalent campaigns such as 'Shell to Sea', the Tara bypass and the use of Shannon for US rendition and troop flights were all abandoned by the Greens upon entering government, an act that was punished greatly by the local electorate in June. The only salvation for the Greens as a national party is to reengage with local community initiatives and rebuild the trust and support of the general electorate at a local level.

Boyd Barret and his SWP colleagues understood this, and they were rewarded greatly for it in June, but it is not just the hollow opportunism I would have accused them of before this morning. Boyd Barret faces jail time today for supporting the Thomas Cook workers, are there any current Green politicians who would do the same for the Rossport 5, or the Tara supporters, the organisers of the Shannon Vigils?

And as for the Thomas Cook workers, they will know their fate at 2pm today. Whatever the outcome, they are deserving of our respect, support and admiration, and I can only hope that their actions since Friday are the shape of things to come.

Links
Photos from the lock-in
CSA Vittoria, an amazing Centro Sociale in Milan
Photos from CSA Vittoria

Nous sommes ici

With all the excitement over the An Bord Snip Nua report, the Green Special Convention, the Blasphemy and Criminal Justice Bills, and the imminent release of the NAMA terms of reference all coupled with the rather appalling weather that we had been having, I decided to do what any sensible person does when faced with an overwhelming depressing environment and little sight of any light at the end of the tunnel, namely to change trains and start going in the opposite direction. Given that the Very Understanding Girlfriend and I had only just returned to Dublin from Italy, the obvious course of action therefore was to retrace our steps almost exactly and return to Italy.

Yup, we fled the country and went back to Italy for a few days via Nice and Monaco, and returned late last night via Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein, Germany and England, mostly by train. On the way we encountered good friends from the Have', stayed in a medieval fortified Italian town now converted into an Eco-village, viewed the Last Supper, attended a production of Aida that literally rose up from the waters of Lake Constance and saw Zeppelins flying over the roof-tops of Friedrichshafen. We ate in possibly the best vegetarian restaurant I have ever been in and later traveled for three hours just to have a pint in Lichtenstein. We stayed with friends and family in London, in a bio-hotel in Milan, youth hostel in Austria and the hotel in Nice where Chekhov wrote "Three Sisters". We wandered the halls of the Steve Zissou-esque Oceanographic Museum in Monaco and dropped in unannounced on a wonderfully receptive Communist Social Center in Milan. We rode cable-cars and ferries, trains and trams and subways galore. And the best part of all this was simply traveling together for two weeks with no plan, no timetable, no end goal. Just the two of us, our bags and a star to guide us*.

Simply amazing!

I'll no doubt post a bit more on the trip in the coming days, but for now I'm just enjoying being home, relaxed and recharged and ready for what comes next.

* and by star I mean a Samsung NC10 netbook and a 3 usb modem that coincidentally worked in almost all the countries along our route.