The Top Five Places that I have Occupied this year

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

Ah, Mr Charles Dickens, the well from which has sprung many a Christmasy blog post, but no ghosts of crimbo past here, my friends, no indeed, for this last post of the year shall attempt to convey the best and worst of times that was my 2011. In keeping with the well worn tradition that at times seems to keep E4 afloat I will once again offer up my annual review in the form of a list, though given the year that is in it this year's theme will be "The Top Five Things That I Have Occupied This Year".

#5 - #OccupyUpStart

February of this year was notable for two things, it was the month when the citizenry of Ireland finally rose up and waddled to the polling booth to rid themselves of the festering boil that was the Fianna Fail/Green Government and usher in the era of happiness and prosperity that we are all enjoying today, and, more importantly, it saw a small arts collective take advantage of the relaxed littering laws enabled by the election campaign to mount a bold project that covered the lampposts of Dublin in a series of artworks and poems that brought art to the masses in a way Dublin Contemporary could only dream of. Operating on the tinniest of crowd-sourced budgets UpStart transformed the city centre into provocative gallery that caught the imagination of all who passed by, even if they had no idea what was going on.

For more than two weeks I cycled the streets of Dublin photographing all the posters I could find and posting them online, and though at the start of the project I knew no one involved by the end I had interacted with many of the writers and artists all happy to learn the location of their pieces, and my own photos and their geotags formed the basis of UpStart's official map of the project.

UpStart recently announced details of their next project for 2012, a pop-up outdoor theatre and park somewhere in the city centre, and they have secured over €10,000 in funding to do so. keep an eye on these folks, they are inspirational.

You can review my Upstart posts here and see all the photos on my Flickr set here.

#4 - #OccupyVenice

For reasons that I will elaborate on later, much of the year was a complete write-off for me health wise. In September two good friends got married in venice (good friends of mine that is, I mean they were also good friends of each other, but that's probably taken for granted with the whole marriage thing). I love Italy, I spent much of 2009 there traveling around by train at a leisurely pace, but I had never been to Venice before. I was a bit hesitant at first because, by and large, I try to avoid anything touristy like the plague, I loathe large slow moving crowds (a good reason why I wasn't chosen to narrate that penguin film) and have very little patience in such situations, but I was blown away by how easy it was to escape the herds in venice simply by stepping away from the main squares. Its almost as if the majority of vistors arrive magically in the morning, are marshaled around like cattle up a Temple-Grandin chute, and then disappear like dew in the morning sun come nightfall.

The wedding was beautiful and moving, and it was amazing to spend so much time with good friends in such a deeply personal time.

To top it all off the Art Biennale was on at the same time, and two glorious days were spent wandering around the various pavilions and exhibition spaces taking in the best and the worst that contemporary art has to offer. In retrospect I might have been less harsh in my analysis of Dublin Contemporary if I hadn't just visited the Biennale a week or two beforehand. Better luck next time lads.

Also, I love canals. I love boats on canals. In my future utopia all public transport will be boats on canals.

That is all.

You can read all my posts on Venice and the Biennale here.

#3 - #OccupyTheAirwaves

In 2011, or at least the last three months of 2011, it has been impossible to escape me. I have been everywhere, and this has been a positive thing for me (I think). Up until now I have tried to maintain a separation of my online and offline lives. Although I have be writing this blog for nearly six years now, it has always been as 'Unkie Dave', and never under my real name. This isn't because I do not stand over what I say, more because I have a deep ingrained suspicion of the internets and am a strong believer in that old-school notion of privacy. A quaint notion in these Facebook times, I know. While I stand over everything I write, I have been concerned that some of my clients or my business partners might not be too happy about being associated with the rabble rousing ramblings (and erratic spellings) of a grumpy misanthrope, and so I opted for the safe harbours of pseudonymity.

#OccupyDameStreet arrived like a tsunami against my harbour walls, for shortly after I started writing about it first Politico.ie and then TheJournal contacted me to repost some of my articles, and then did so under my real name. Oops. To be honest it was already too late by that stage, for I had given a number of interviews to various newspapers and my name and face were already plastered across the airwaves to the amusement of my friends and family.

Still, I didn't expect what was to happen next, as appearances in The Guardian and on Al Jazeera were followed by an invitation to appear on Mariane Finucane's Sunday radio panel on RTE, along with Alan Dukes (chairperson of Anglo Irish Bank), Declan Ganley (absolutely not a CIA front) and others discussing the week's events. This was followed by the Charlie Bird Show and Vincent Brown just before Christmas, and somewhere along the way I seem to have ended up in The New York Times. All of this without having to sleep with a Premiership footballer first.

Meanwhile my relationship with Politico has developed, and a good few more posts by me on topics from World Aids Day to the State of the Nation (by way of Brian Cowen's friendly thighs) have appeared, with hopefully more to come in the New Year. I am always surprised to find that anybody reads what I write, I mostly write as an extension of my thinking process, a way to tease out and clarify ideas that have been bothering me. These last few months have provided more opportunities for surprise, and the feedback both negative and positive has been altogether humbling.

Which is good, I usually could do with a good dose of humbling.

You can read my initial article on Politico here, the post on TheJournal.ie that Billy Bragg linked to and kicked off a ridiculously long and heated comments thread here, and my response to Enda Kenny's State of the Nation address (also on Politico) here.

#2 - #OccupyDameStreet

After the highs of Venice and the lows of my health, on October 8th I wandered down to the Central Bank Plaza on a sunny Saturday afternoon with my camera and a healthy dose of cynicism in tow. Expecting to see the usual crowd of placard waving lefties accompanied by a drumming circle of hippies, I thought I would do my usual thing of taking a photograph or two before retuning home to write a post about how apathetic the Irish citizenry are and castigate them for never getting up off their arses and taking a stand against the ignominies and injustices that the government, that successive governments, have heaped upon them.

Then somebody passed me a rope and said, "here, hold this", and the next three months of my life disappeared.

#OccupyDameStreet has consumed me, given me a new lease of life and motivated me to be something more than I ever thought I could. It has also broken me down and brought me perilously close to the end of my tether. Sixteen hour days have left me both energized and destroyed, and the highs of one night are laid low by the setbacks of the following day, a cycle repeated over and over on a giant roller-coaster of emotions that someone rather unsportingly seems to have broken the off-switch for, meaning there is no gentle wind down between peaks and troughs, and the only escape is a foolhardy leap as it approaches what you hope is the ground.

I love #OccupyDameStreet, and it has been a privilege to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people there.

All my posts from Occupied Dame Street can be found here, there's quite a few so be warned, and photos from the last three months can be found here.

#1 - #OccupyHospital

This is it, the biggy, what 2011 will be mainly remembered by me for. This year I have mostly been... ill. Very, very ill.

Less than a week after the election that ushered in the era of happiness and prosperity that we are all enjoying today I woke up in extreme pain, started vomiting, and then the pain got worse. This continued for a number of days before I finally had the good sense to pack myself off to hospital where I received the good news that my pancreas was broken, and no, I couldn't have a new one. Sorry.

Over the course of the year I have had seven separate stays in the hospital (two separate hospitals actually) for a total of almost fifty days in all. I've experienced eight CT scans, three ultrasounds, one endoscopy, three surgical procedures and had my gall bladder removed, pancreas carved up and attached to my stomach. I lost a quarter of my bodyweight and will never again be able to drink alcohol or caffeine, and at no stage has anyone been able to tell me why any of it happened. After all this my pancreatitis still isn't cured, nor will it ever be.

It is difficult to put into words how this has affected me this year (though that hasn't stopped me from trying). It destroyed my life for most of the year, I was in ridiculous amounts of pain for many weeks and the times in between recovering have been just as debilitating. I try to be stoical about it, saying, "It is what it is", but sometimes that isn't enough.

This is why I have thrown myself with gusto into things like #OccupyDameStreet, why I have stood for sixteen hours a day on the freezing stone of Dame Street mere weeks after getting out of hospital, to end the year with a positive memory, to be in charge of my own destiny once again and no longer to be the hostage of my own broken body.

It hasn't worked out so well these last few weeks, which is why this takes the top spot in my end of year charts, snatching victory away from ODS in the 11th hour, but all the same as I stand here on New Year's Eve 2011 I hold my head up high, look out across all that has happened these last twelve months and say proudly to my body and the world:

Fuck You All, I'm Still Alive!

Thank you all for sticking with my ramblings this year, I look forward to boring you senseless with many more come 2012. Happy New Year to you all!

#OccupyDameStreet - #OccupyOuroboros (an End of Year review)

On what has to have been the mildest Christmas Day in living memory there was just enough time between the whys and the wherefores to stop off on Dame Street for the briefest of visits to wish everyone well and make an embarrassingly paltry contribution to the planned Christmas meal later that day. While you might happily write off the residents of the Camp as a bunch of idealistic lefties and hippies, do not write them off as a bunch of idealistic leftie hippie vegetarians, for I have never met a more carnivorous group of activists in my short but frenetic time of hanging around watching other people march and shout. Many is the night when the Camp has almost come to open revolt at the thought of having to eat another bowl of "vegan mush", and so on this of all days I thought my own preferred fare of Tofurky or Quorn Roast would be as welcome at the table as Fingers Fingleton or Seanie FitzPatrick, and so I opted to bring along an altogether less gastronomically-charged pack or two of mince pies.

Which was nice, until less than two minutes after I arrived a member of the public stopped by with a rack of piping hot home-made ones that caused my own store-bought contributions to wither away in shame like a water-soaked witch in Oz (the technicolour children's wonderland, not the prison drama). If you have seen the Christmas dinner photos on Broadsheet, those are not my mince pies being enjoyed.

Oh well, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", as the man said, as true for pies as it is for revolutionary egalitarian utopian planning.

Christmas on Dame Street was nice (however brief a visit is was for me), and a chance to see some familiar faces that, like myself, hadn't been down to the Camp for a while. Illness had kept me away for the bulk of two weeks, venturing down during the eye of my pancreatic storm to staff the information stand, get harangued by Vincent Browne and facilitate a three-and-a-half hour long Active Participants Meeting (the supposedly twice-weekly planning session that figures out what the Camp is doing on a day-to-day basis) that was an exercise in Bionian group dynamics as seen through the lens of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was this experience that was foremost in my mind as I spent the bulk of the next week battling the twin evils of my pancreas and An Post's humorous approach to Christmas postal deliveries (items that I ordered from Amazon in the first week of December still haven't arrived as of this morning, leading to a mad dash around town on Christmas Eve Eve in a fevered state to find last minute replacements, a very First World problem, I know), and the enforced break presented an opportunity to sit back with a little distance from Dame Street and try and make some sense of the last two and a half months.

When we first gathered together at the gates of the Central Bank on that second Saturday in October, I don't think any of us thought that we would still be there on the following Monday morning, let alone on Christmas Day. #OccupyDameStreet has survived attempted take-overs by external groups, floods that threatened to wash away the entire Camp and sub-zero temperatures that made hypothermia a genuine fear, attacks and assaults by drunken passers-by and more coordinated exercises by trouble-makers armed with video cameras, Range Rovers and the sense of superiority and self-worth that only comes from being born into privilege. It has lived through media frenzies and journalistic blackouts, marched and sung and shared its experiences both good and bad with the nation, and witnessed both the very worst and the very best of the Irish public (happily not in equal proportions), and as of today it has outlasted almost all the other physical Camps in the US and beyond that it drew inspiration from.

#OccupyDameStreet is still here, but 83 days later is simply still being here enough?

At the Information Stand I have been asked by many, many passers-by, "What is this all about? What do you hope to accomplish?", and for 83 days I have been saying that #OcupyDameStreet is a catalyst, a starter of conversations and a symbol of people power, and while all these things are true I am left wondering if these have enough value in and of themselves or if #OccupyDameStreet needs to become something more.

To begin with let's dispense quickly with some of the things that #OccupyDameStreet cannot do. It will not overthrow capitalism, it will not lead to a single imprisonment of a corrupt banker, developer or politician, it will not remove the IMF from our national affairs nor return economic sovereignty to these shores. #OccupyDameStreet is a just group of tents at the gates of the Central Bank and the hundred or so people who have coalesced around them and while, as Margaret Mead points out, one should "never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has", the probability of a hundred people by themselves overthrowing decades of corruption and crony-capitalism in this banana republic we love to call home (until such time as we are all forced to emigrate) by standing around on a city thoroughfare making soup and handing out leaflets is unfortunately rather low.

However a question asked by passers-by almost as frequently as "what are you doing here?" is "how are you getting away with it all?". For 83 days a group of activists have built and lived in a shantytown in the centre of Dublin, existing as living proof of the viability of alternative and self-organised social, cultural, economic and political spheres. As a symbol of defiance it is a pretty remarkable one, and according to the listeners of Joe Duffy #OccupyDameStreet was the fourth most important thing that happened this year, after The Queen's visit, Dublin winning the All-Ireland and Ireland qualifying for Euro 2012, but ahead of the Arab Spring and Obama's visit. A chord does indeed seem to have been struck with the wider Irish public, while they themselves may be unwilling or unable to take to the streets it seems they are rather glad that someone else is mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore.

In fact many is the time that someone has approached me to say, “I am working all the hours that I can just to make ends meet, otherwise I would be down here standing beside you. I am so glad you are doing this when I cannot”, and I have frequently said that it is kind words like this from passers-by that have kept the Camp going, as much as their donations of food, clothing, tents and more.

Since its inception #OccupyDameStreet has always been about more than just the Camp, though that certainly has been the core around which all else rotates. From the General Assemblies that opened up decision making to the wider public to the rallies and marches that attracted up to 3,000 people one Saturday to hear Billy Bragg sing the Internationale, fist clenched defiantly in the air, from the pop-up soup kitchens outside the Dail to the Mic Checks inside the bailed-out banks, from the musical nights in Sweeney's to the musical days on the Central Bank Plaza that have seen Michael Franti, Kristin Hersh, Damian Dempsy, Christy Moore, Liam O'Maonlai, Glen Hansard and many, many others all stand in solidarity with the Movement, #OccupyDameStreet has continuously sought new and imaginative ways to engage with the wider public beyond its plywood walls and guy-ropes, and as the poll on Joe Duffy has shown the public are certainly engaged.

In fact Joe Duffy's show is but one example of the widespread and largely positive coverage the Occupation has received since its inception. TV3 broadcast live from the Camp during its first week and returned just before Christmas with Vincent Browne, who devoted twenty minutes of his show to interviews from the Camp. Charlie Bird has broadcast live from the Camp, and Occupiers have appeared on Marian Finucane’s Sunday radio panel and on television on Frontline and The Late Late Show. Newstalk radio has been a frequent visitor to the Camp and there has been a steady stream of requests for interviews throughout the Occupation from radio stations as far away as Derry, and the newspaper coverage, ranging from full page articles in the Sunday Times and Irish Daily Mail (not normally noted for their radical sympathies) through to international papers like The Guardian and The New York Times, has been both comprehensive and surprisingly positive. Al Jazeera even broadcast from the Camp on the same day that Col. Gaddafi was captured and killed, making for a very unusual news cycle indeed. Beyond the mainstream media, online coverage from TheJournal.ie, Politico.ie and Broadsheet meant that rarely has there been a day that something from Dame Street hasn't appeared somewhere in print, on the airwaves or online. Early cries from the Camp of a media blackout quickly faded and sound very hollow indeed when they resurface.

Relations with the Fourth Estate have not been the only triumph for the Movement, for its engagement with The Academy has also been a roaring success. The #OccupyUniversity program, organised by a group of academics and students, has brought the classroom onto the streets of Dublin with a series of workshops and lectures from academics, economists, writers, authors and activists all held in the open air and free for anyone to attend, participate and learn. Harry Browne, Gavin Titley, Fintan O’Toole, Michael Taft, Helena Sheehan and many, many others have all braved the elements to offer concrete examples of how another world is possible, and what form that world might take. All these talks have been recorded and will provide an online resource the like of which has never been seen before in Ireland. Dame Street has also been brought into The Academy, with participants appearing as guest speakers in a number of university classes, and at second level a host of imaginative teachers have brought their students on field trips to the Camp, to learn first hand of the joys and challenges of real participatory democracy.

The Political Establishment too has taken notice, for the Camp has seen frequent visits from TDs, Senators, MEPs, Presidential candidates and Party Leaders, all who have been asked to leave their office at the door and engage with the camp as individuals. Some have come to genuinely engage and some perhaps just looking for a bit of publicity, and while not all have been welcomed equally and not all in the Movement have wished to engage with the established order, it is a clear sign that the established order is aware of the Movement and sees it as something more than just a curiosity.

It is also important to note that since October 8th Dame Street has not stood alone, with #Occupy groups taking root in Belfast, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Letterkenny and Waterford, all separate and autonomous and all emerging to highlight a complex group of issues both local and national. Through an informal arrangement of websites and social networks the sharing of ideas, inspirations and aspirations finally brought all these groups together for two national meetings, first in Dublin in November and the second three weeks later in Cork. A third meeting is scheduled to happen in January in Belfast showing that the demand for social and economic justice is not just a Dublin issue, or a Cork issue, but an all-island issue.

Thus in 83 days the Movement has emerged from nothing to a central position in the Irish consciousness with politicians, the Media, the Academy and most importantly the citizenry themselves all engaging with the Idea of Dame Street to varying degrees (even if only to dismiss or belittle it). By any measure if the purpose of #OccupyDameStreet was to capture people's attention, then it has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. But now that it has everyone's attention, what is it going to do with it?

I have talked before about the disconnect between The Idea of Dame Street and The Reality of Dame Street. In my mind Dame Street exists somewhere between the Battle of Seattle and Paris ’68, a coming together of workers, students, the unemployed and the disenfranchised, academics and tradespeople all coalescing around the idea that another world is possible, and that they will demonstrate this by building that new world right on the gates of the old, self-organised, non-hierarchical, leaderless and egalitarian, a shining beacon in space, all alone in the night. This is The Idea of Dame Street, and it is, of course, complete nonsense.

The Reality of Dame Street is that of a group of disparate folks from varying backgrounds with widely differing motivations have ended up together, and against all the odds, are still managing to just about hold together a ramshackle collection of tents, yurts and wooden shacks in the face of extremes of weather and whose greatest threat, as with any family, is never anything external but the never-ending risk of internal conflict boiling over into catastrophic implosion.

Ironically it is perhaps this lack of external threat that paradoxically has hindered the Movement the most, for other Occupations from Wall Street, Boston and Oakland to London have all experienced their greatest moments of unity when faced with the threat or actuality of external institutional violence, bringing everyone together in an instant of shared lucidity and a clarity of purpose - to simply make it through the next few hours alive and unharmed. Without this threat of external trauma, the adrenaline-fueled and sleep-deprived world of Dame Street sets loose the specters of imagined internal conspiracies, where paranoia and suspicion are twin bedfellows that like to see more time spent on arguing over the washing up than how to realign society along the themes of social justice and equality.

That is not to suggest that The Reality of Dame Street is either all trivialities or endless talk (though it cannot be denied that there are hefty elements of both), but I cannot escape the fact that nearly three months later there still exists a gaping chasm between The Idea of Dame Street and The Reality, a chasm that erupts at your feet every time you ask someone in the Camp, “Ok, so you have everyone’s attention, now what?”, for three months later there is still no unified answer to this. The danger is that the Camp has become so fixated on its own continued existence that for many that has become the sole purpose of the #OccupyDameStreet Movement, simply to be.

In the beginning the Movement talked about the twin tracks of The Protest and The Process, that the Camp and Direct Actions were a symbol of protest and defiance and that in parallel to this would be the discussion, proposal and implementation of solutions, an ongoing process. Themed Assemblies were held to solicit ideas and alternatives from the general public, and these ran in parallel to the #OccupyUniversity program, the idea being to offer education on a particular subject then provide a platform for productive discussion leading to actionable alternatives. Somewhere along the line The Process seems to have fallen by the wayside, and though the #OccupyUniversity program continued on the Assemblies and other Camp meetings all turned inwards, focusing more on how the Camp organised itself rather than how the Movement could effect change.

An early criticism of the Movement from the media, borrowed from their counterparts across the Atlantic, was that #OccupyDameStreet had no aims and no goals, this despite the early adoption of four key demands at General Assembly (The IMF/ECB out of Irish affairs, a rejection of the transfer of private bank debt to the public purse, a return of natural resources to sovereign control, and a call for real participatory democracy on a local and national level), and when these goals were highlighted the subsequent complaint was that Dame Street offered no alternatives. My answer to this has always been that #OccupyDameStreet is about starting a conversation on theses issues, gathering ideas and then bringing back alternatives, that to offer alternatives at such an early stage in the process would be to miss the point entirely. Dame Street was a call to intellectual arms, saying to the citizenry that the language of “There is no alternative” is a lie, that the alternatives lie with the citizenry themselves and that Dame Street could be a platform to articulate those alternatives.

Three months on it is clear that that conversation has most definitely started, and that groups and individuals across the nation are offering alternatives, but I fear that at times Dame Street is no longer actively listening, so consumed is it with the challenges of day-to-day existence.

There are legitimate reasons for the current ebb it finds itself in. The composition of the group has changed significantly over the months, with only a determined handful of the original Camp residents still in situ, as are a core group of non-residents like myself who still participate as much as life, work, families and other commitments allow. But the toll it has taken on many has been great, both physically and emotionally, and I can only hope that the New Year will see many familiar faces return refreshed and rejuvenated and ready for the next stage of this amazing adventure. These absences have been balanced somewhat by an influx of new faces, all drawn to Dame Street with fresh ideas and enthusiasm, though hampered by a lack of institutional knowledge and perhaps more focused on the excitement of The Protest and uninterested in the perceived tedium of The Process. As always there are never enough people to do all the work, a challenge exacerbated by the holiday season, and quite rightly those tasks essential for the survival of the Camp are prioritised.

But for #OccupyDameStreet to remain relevant in 2012 it must do more than simply survive, its reason to be cannot simply be “to be”, a rain-soaked snake forever swallowing its own tail. It once again must be more than just a collection of shacks and tents and must become the platform that it so aspirationally proclaimed itself to be.

#OccupyDameStreet is at a crossroads. Along one path it can re-engage with The Process to drive itself closer to The Idea. To do this requires the support of a much wider group of active participants who are willing to do the less glamourous tasks necessary for The Camp to survive, and in this way free up more time for everyone, residents and non-residents alike, to refocus on the ideas that brought everyone together in the first place, and how to effect positive change. While not everyone will want to be part of The Process, its value to the Movement as the equal of The Protest needs to be recognised by all.

Along the second path lies a Movement disengaged entirely from The Process, existing purely to Protest. This too is a legitimate course of action. From its inception people have been drawn to Dame Street as an outlet for the expression of their anger and outrage. They know something is wrong and they are tired of sitting back and accepting it quietly, and for them resistance is an end in and of itself. This is a greater act of defiance than that shown by the majority of the citizenry and is to be commended, but if this is the path chosen by Dame Street then someone else needs to continue The Process, for the knowledge that has been gained and shared these last three months is too precious to be abandoned by the side of the road. While this path of Protest alone has a value both symbolic and real, it is a road I have little interest in traveling.

Something truly revolutionary could happen to Irish society in 2012, only time will tell if Dame Street is the mother of this revolution, or merely its midwife.

Links
All my posts from Occupied Dame Street can be found here, there's quite a few so be warned.
Photos from the last three months can be found here.

This is not what I asked Santa for Christmas.

Cannula-tastic! I'd almost forgotten how much I hate these things. Almost.

This week I have mostly been... in hospital.

Well, that's not technically true for on this particular occasion I was in hospital for less than twenty-four hours, just enough to get all needled up and experience my eighth CT-scan of the year.

As I believe I have mentioned I have been somewhat under the weather these last few weeks with an ongoing Mauve Revolution against the increasingly totalitarian regime of Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Pancreas taking place within my innards (what the less politically inclined might refer to as a "mild pancreatic episode"). The masses took to the streets and demanded a rerun of recent intestinal elections (Where The United Pancreas Party won under highly dubious circumstances), and this simmering dispute finally boiled over into full-on agony on Tuesday morning, with much moaning and gnashing of teeth on the part of your humble narrator. After a consultation with the independent observers of my intestines (namely my GP and surgeon), it was decided that the best course of action would be to decamp to a nearby hospital for a series of pokes, prods and scans.

And the outcome of this marvelous trip down gastric memory lane? Well, apparently I have had a mild pancreatic episode for the last five or six weeks.

*sigh*

You see that is what I love about the whole medicine/hospital thingy, they are fantastic at telling you what you already know, but are less helpful when it comes to areas that you don't already know. My chronic pancreatitis is something of a mystery, with no apparent cause and no specific course of action left beyond treating it when it bursts into revolutionary fervor. I've tried asking it for a list of coherent demands but it just shrugs and says, "hey, demands are so last century". If I'm in pain for more than two consecutive days I have to go to the hospital where, as I discovered today, apparently the course of action is to nod and say, "well sir, it appears that you have been in pain for two consecutive days", and send you on your merry way.

To be fair now the pain went away within 12 hours of getting into hospital (luckily for me, if the pain hadn't gone away the hospital visit would have been an awful lot longer and involved a good deal more morphine), but that is the way this has been going these last few weeks, two days of pain followed by a week of normality, followed by a day or two of pain again, as if I am being orbited by my very own moon of pancreatic poison. If I'm still experiencing all the same wondrous cyclic symptoms over the next ten days I'll be heading back in for something altogether more invasive with cameras and magnets and resonance (oh my).

But at least I won't be ringing in the New Year from a hospital bed.

Which is nice.

#OccupyDameStreet - 'Twas the Night Before Christmas

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through Dame Street,
Not a creature was stirring, except for Liam Ó Maonlaí, Steve Wall and Glen Hansard.

Yup, eighteen year old me would have been pretty blown away to be spending Christmas Eve with The Hothouse Flowers, The Frames and The Stunning, and thirty-eight year old me was pretty impressed too.

All that was missing was Dave Fanning's dulcet tones between each song.

The lads were down busking for an hour or two this afternoon in solidarity with #OccupyDameStreet, and raising money for The Simon Community, and all in all a good time was had by all. Damian Dempsey dropped by last night as well, adding a little more festive cheer to help drive way the winter blues.

As you tuck into your holiday turduckens tomorrow and figure out new ways to torment your relatives while waiting for Dr Who to begin, spare a thought for the fine folks camping over on Dame Street this year. Or better yet, drop by with a mince pie or a nice bit of crimbo pudding.

Sure what else is open on Christmas Day?

Steve Wall, Liam Ó Maonlaí and Glen Hansard tune up
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 24th December

Liam Ó Maonlaí in full-on Sean-nós mode
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 24th December

Liam Ó Maonlaí, Steve Wall and Glen Hansard brewing up a storm on Dame Street
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 24th December

Liam Ó Maonlaí and Glen Hansard sit back and watch some of the younger lads have a go.
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 24th December

Surprised passers-by get their Christmas Eve unexpectedly brightened up.
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 24th December

mega toughest hundred on the epic scribble fish

This year as we approach the the orgy of consumerism religious folks like to call Christmas I have done my best to make a good few of the presents I will be socially obligated to give to people myself. No coupons good for an hour of "Joey love" here, my friends, no indeed, for I have attempted to create or recycle as many gifts as humanly possible short of recreating an entire season of The Wire out of toilet-rolls and a camera-phone.

Unfortunately the corollary to this anti-capitalist approach to the celebration of these conservative and patriarchal festivities is that I have found myself with a little bit of extra change in my pockets, more so than I would normally this time of year, and after whatever suitable donations to charities and other worthy bodies as are necessary to soothe my troubled soul have been made there is still enough left for my notoriously low money-to-sense ratio to kick with a cry of obscene mirth.

Behold, my friends, the majesty that is Underworld fridge magnets.

Yup, other folks have fun rearranging Shakespeare quotes while waiting for the toast to pop, I choose to create my own remixes of dirty epic tunes of Romford, shouting, toughest hundred scribble, shouting, jumbo spoonman burnout.

Foot.

All these words and more can be yours for the princely sum of £8 from Underworld's website, where you can also pick up a new collection of tunes or two, if that's your particular cup of hot beverage.

Think of all the hilarious ransom notes I can now compose.

Only Stupid Bastards Help EMI

Just because something is talked about a lot on the Internet doesn't mean that it is actually of any great importance, in fact I am tempted to say it is often quite the opposite, the smaller the dog, the louder the bark as they say (“they” being the people on the Internet). Today I found my morning feeds and streams full of chatter about the Government's proposed new legislation to allow music publishers, film producers and others go to court to compel Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to certain websites, and for once I thought the alarms being sounded were not ringing loud enough.

In 2008, EMI Ireland - along with three other record labels - launched a series of cases against Irish ISPs, first against Eircom and subsequently against UPC. Under the terms of the settlement of its case, Eircom instituted a 'three strikes' rule, meaning that those found to be downloading copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holders, such as through peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites, would be warned and if caught three times would be banned from internet access through Eircom. In other countries with a wide range of ISPs this might not be such a big deal, but there are still parts of Ireland where Eircom is the only broadband service provider. In addition Eircom voluntarily blocked access to the Swedish P2P directory Pirate Bay for all its customers.

But this self-enforced policy was not enough for the music industry, particularly EMI, who wanted all ISPs to block access to any P2P site capable of hosting copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holders. In October of last year High Court Justice Peter Charlton ruled that this policy was unenforceable under current Irish Copyright law, and dismissed EMI's case against cable company UPC. However he did believe that EMI's rights were being infringed, and the Fianna Fail/Green government agreed to introduce a Government Order to close what Charlton perceived to be a loophole in the law.

Last month the Court of Justice of the European Union (EUCJ) ruled that web filtering by ISPs was fundamentally incompatible with human rights (Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM, November 24th, 2011), ruling that such an injunction “could potentially undermine freedom to receive information since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications”, and yet today we learn that the new Fine Gael/Labour Government intend to follow their predecessors and introduce legislation in the new year to do exactly that.

Now to be honest I couldn't care less about file-sharing or the illegal downloading of music. I have never illegally downloaded a music file nor do I have any intention of doing so. I think artists should get paid for their work, but I don't for one minute believe that EMI or any other major corporation cares about any of their artists given the meager slice of the pie that any artist actually gets, for the record labels artists are a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. My concerns are more about the precedent being set of a Government censoring the internet and blocking access to content legally available elsewhere that it disagrees with.

Back in the deep dark mists of time known as the Nineties, I had the pleasure of spending a number of days in the Supreme Court at the tail end of the infamous SPUC V Grogan case. SPUC (The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) had taken a case against the Students' Unions of a number of universities to prevent them from distributing information on pregnancy options that included abortion information. The case went back and forth between national and European courts for a number of years and after a final ruling by the EU Court of Justice it ended up in the Supreme Court during my tenure in the Students' Union in 1997 to decide on final costs. The EU Court Of Justice ruled that while abortion was a legal service in other EU member states and that one member state could not block its citizens from availing of a service legal in another member state, as the Students' Unions were not themselves providing the service nor were they acting as paid agents on behalf of the service providers, EU law (specifically Article 56 of The Treaty of Rome, on The Free Movement of Services) was not being compromised. In fact had the Students' Unions charged for pregnancy option information or had engaged in a contract with a specific UK clinic to direct people to that clinic, they would have been protected under Article 56. Capitalism trumps human rights every time, it seems.

Of course in this age of the Internet everybody has access to information on a full range of pregnancy options at the click of mouse or the touch of a screen (except users of the Siri service on iPhones) so the effect of the SPUC V. Grogan ruling has been overtaken by technology. A clinic in the UK where such services are legal can freely advertise itself online in its home country, and any other EU citizen has the right to access that information once it is provided directly by the provider of that service or an agent thereof. However today's announcement by the Government has worrying implications, particularly when the EUCJ has already ruled that web-filtering by ISPs fundamentally affects human rights because it could lead to “the blocking of lawful communications”.

Our Governments have traditionally been quite socially conservative and much of our human rights legislation has been introduced into Ireland by the EU in the face of strong opposition from successive hostile Governments. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1993, five years after Senator David Norris won his case in the EUCJ that criminalization of his sexuality was in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights, and who is to say that in the coming decade abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia, all illegal here but legal in a number of other EU member states, might similarly come to be viewed as fundamental Human Rights within the EU? Whether you agree with any or all of these, access to information on these activities is the key to education on the issues, and this is why the proposed Government legislation to compel Irish ISPs to block access to websites that offer a service deemed illegal under Irish law while legal elsewhere in the EU is a very dangerous precedent to be setting. While you may not care about the Government blocking P2P sites, what if it attempted to compel ISPs to block websites that gave detailed instructions on how same-sex couples could get married in Belgium?

Furthermore having access to a P2P site does not automatically entail that you will break the law. Many P2P sites (like Pirate Bay) also facilitate the sharing of non-copyrighted material, or material hosted under a Creative Commons license that permits non-commercial sharing. Blocking access to a site on the basis that it might facilitate an illegal action assumes a criminal intent on the part of all users of that site, effectively categorising all users as guilty until proven innocent, a troublesome development indeed. While there are signs that the controversial Blasphemy law introduced by the last Government may be repealed, since online Blasphemy is now a crime should the Government take similar proactive steps to block access to any website or online forum where a blasphemous statement could be made, say through a public forum or unmoderated user comments?

If someone breaks the law, then by all means prosecute them for doing so, but restricting access to knowledge on the basis that it could under certain circumstances be used to break the law or assuming guilt before any wrongdoing has occurred is a worrying action for any Government to take. You may be tempted to dismiss all today's online chatter about EMI and the Government as the loud barking of a small and irrelevant dog, but this would be a mistake. The Government's proposed course of action leads down a very dark and dangerous path indeed

Links
Full text of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling in the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, November 24th, 2011

Image: Only Stupid Bastards Help EMI, album cover by Conflict.

#OccupyDameStreet - Stop haranguing me, Vincent

Vincent Browne gets ready to harangue
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Wednesday 15th December

Though things may be quieter on Occupied Dame Street of late, with the normal frenzy reduced by cold and rain to a steady hum of well-insulated-shed-building (the tents that have survived thus far just won't be of any use in a prolonged sub-zero spell or snow), there was more than a flurry of activity yesterday afternoon as Vincent Browne (#VinB himself) dropped down to interview a few folks involved in the Movement.

In the end, after hearing about a number of people's backgrounds and reasons for participating, he chose to speak to four of us with a fifth person invited on to the show later that night. Somehow I found myself included in the group to be interviewed on site, but thankfully he wanted to have a Camp resident participate in the live discussion later on, so I could happily rule myself out of that little shindig.

Talking with his producers beforehand it was clear that he had wanted to come down to the Camp for a long while, but that events in Europe and the Budget had been of more immediate concern. His questions were hard and direct, and he strongly challenged my use of Michael Taft's analysis of the recent Credit Suisse Global Wealth report on income inequality in Ireland, but all-in-all I think I acquitted myself without too much dishonour. "Come home with your shield, or on it", is what my imaginary Viking mother always used to say, and I think I can stand here proudly this morning with my shield held aloft and intact (as can all those interviewed, but I know not that nature of any advice given to them by their imaginary Viking mothers, so I am unsure as to the relevance of my somewhat rambling metaphor for their specific situations).

Be your own media, #VinB!
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Wednesday 15th December

The main thrust of #VinB's questioning both onsite and for the panel later was his amazement that the Irish people are still so acquiescent after all the calamity and indignity that have been heaped upon them. Where was the outrage, where were the marches and the masses in the streets, a question that those of you familiar with this blog will know that I have been asking myself for the last three years.

Watching it all later on TV was not as traumatic as I expected. In the months before February's election I was a fanatical viewer of the show, not so much for the panel discussion or even #VinB himself, but more for the accompanying Twitter conversation that accompanied it. Tonight with Vincent Browne is not so much a news show as a spectator sport, and many is the evening that I have sat back and mused loudly on the throbbing, pulsating vein in Conor Lenihan's head or the unusual colour of puce he was turning, so I was actually more apprehensive about the reaction to the show amongst the Irish Twitterati than I was to what my imaginary Viking mother would think. Aside from a comment or two on my sartorial elegance, on the whole it wasn't too bad, and the reaction to the other interviews with my colleagues was also surprisingly positive.

To be honest though it shouldn't have been so surprising, we see the support of the wider public every day as they pass by and give us the verbal and material encouragement we need to carry on thorough the rain and sleet and gloom of night.

The whole experience almost makes me want to track down Conor Lenihan in whatever Oligarch-funded undisclosed location in Russia he is hiding in and congratulate him for going on #VinB as often as he did.

Almost.



In a perfect example of media consuming itself, the event was covered by a DCTV film crew, who stopped #VinB afterwards for quick interview on what he thought of #OccupyDameStreet (video included above), and they in turn were filmed by Donnacha Ó Briain (Director of The Revolution Will Not be Televised) who has been following protest movements in Dublin for the last few months and is an almost permanent fixture in the Camp, the unblinking eye of his omnipresent camera capturing all and sundry, pretty much part of the furniture at this stage.

Anyway, the show is now up on TV3's website (though I'm not sure if it is accessible to our international readers, sorry), so you can watch it and pass your own snide comments on my sartorial elegance below.

You know you want to.

something, something, pun involving the word "Mugshot", something

Behold, the Colonial Eggacy mug in all its resplendent majesty!

As you may remember our good friend Léan over at String Revolution broke away a number of weeks ago from her normal string-and-thread-based endevours to transform a rather marvelous/breathtakingly-terrible pun into a range of mugs and shirts via the good burghers at Zazzle, and mine arrived through the post this morning. It is actually a thing of wonder and beauty and I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of it all.

I remember a good while back an American President, probably George Dubya (given his close relationship with Meg Whitman) but it might have been Clinton, singing the praises of Ebay and declaring that this was how the hard working but low paid citizens of middle America would empower themselves, by buying and selling their unwanted tat to each other, a vicious cycle of ever-increasing circles of impoverishment through consumerism, a capitalist ouroboros where the poor sell their legacies to buy the discarded history of their neighbours, with the only true winner being the corporation in the middle taking a hefty percentage of each sale, the world's largest pawnbroker smiling all the way to the Republican National Convention.

A much more positive story of online empowerment can be told by users of Zazzle, Etsy, DaWanda and the like that provide a home for those who have created things themselves, even when those things are only ideas in search of t-shirt to carry them forth. A good few of my friends sell through Zazzle or Etsy, and I myself have been known to make more than the occasional purchase of things from complete strangers that catch my magpie-like eye.

Yes, I still have ethical issues around corporate middlemen profiting from interactions between individuals, but unlike Facebook and the like who insert themselves into conversations that could easily occur elsewhere, the service provided by an online marketplace like Etsy for makers and crafters is not one that can be easily replicated by most users of that service.

Yet.

Anyway, if the Colonial Eggacy mug takes your fancy its not too late to order one for Christmas here, though you will need to pay for express shipping rates before December 19th to sup your eggnog from one under the mistletoe on Crimbo morning.

#OccupyDameStreet - Drums and Brotherly Love

Remember folks, Pearse wrote these words almost a hundred years ago. My how things have changed...
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 10th December

The internal dispute in my body between Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Pancreas and Dmitry Anatolyevich Duodenum has entered what may be best described as a tense ceasefire, after my Duodenum denied sending a Tweet that read "It has become clear that if a pancreas writes the expression 'party of swindlers and thieves' in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting [censored] in the [censored]", alleging that its Twitter account had been hacked.

Very suspicious.

No matter, this momentary lull in their ongoing hostilities allowed me to slip away and rejoin all the excitement and action on Occupied Dame Street, taking my turn for a few hours on the information stand. This is one of my favourite jobs in the Camp providing an opportunity to engage directly with passing members of the public, answer their questions about #OccupyDameStreet, hear their grievances about life in a 21st century Feudal state and, more importantly, hear their suggestions for how to make things better. As I have mentioned before it is the constant encouragement from the wider public that makes life on Dame Street manageable

A note of Solidarity all the way from the City of Brotherly Love
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 10th December

Of particular interest today was an Irish gentleman who had been visiting Philadelphia last week, and had stopped by the #OccupyPhilly camp to see what was going on. When he said he was heading back to Dublin they wrote a short note of solidarity on the back of one of their fliers and he brought it back with him to the Camp today. I had never seen him before, he was just a passing member of the public who wanted to express his support in this most unique of ways.

Just amazing!

Although I have been feeling bad that illness has prevented me from fully pulling my weight this last week or so, this interaction cheered me right up, no end.

It was almost enough to distract me from the drumming circle.

Almost.

I turn my back for a moment and a drumming circle sneaks in. They're like that, you know, very sneaky.
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Saturday 10th December

After the pop-up soup kitchen and other protests at the Dáil over the two Budget days last week, life on Dame Street has grown a bit quieter and with the arrival of sub-zero temperatures the focus now is on simply making it through the month and into the New Year. Tents are gradually being replaced by wooden huts with much more insulation which should make things much better for the Camp Residents (and reduce the genuine risk of hypothermia). At just over two months old #OccupyDameStreet must surely now be one of the longest running #Occupy Movements unevicted and still in its original site, and it needs your support to keep on going! Information about what is going on, and what support you can give and how can be found on the website here, or just drop by the Camp during daylight hours and say hello.

You really wouldn't believe just how far a kind word goes on Dame Street!

UpStart Park is go!

In other news, UpStart have won the Better Together Giving Challenge, with a total of 1,051 unique donations.

I wrote about this project last month as UpStart were planning on creating a pop-up park and performance space in Dublin's inner city, and the participating Better Together project that received the most individual donations by November 25th would receive €10,000 towards their project. Now thanks to 1,051 of you they are €10K closer towards making this happen, on top of the value of all the individual donations.

On their blog they write: "we’re working hard on re-imagining a Dublin city centre plot as a Pop-up Park. We want to create a sustainable green space where creativity and community can thrive, where people can share inspirations, innovations, and good times. We’ve already received lots of offers of help and expertise and are delighted that so many people have been inspired to offer their advice and skills. We think there are more of you out there — in fact, we know there are — if you can help, do get in touch at hello@upstart.ie."

Congratulations to all involved, and I look forward to watching this take shape in the new year.

(A quick reminder of their first art project can be found on my Flickr set here)

Occupied Fortune

So by now you have probably all seen Shepard Fairey's Anonymous Hope #Occupy mashup that he has released as a free .pdf for all and sundry to use. Although I will admit to having an Obey piece here and there around the house I find both the Obama/Hope and the V for Vendetta mask thing a bit overexposed at the minute (I may have mentioned this once or twice recently).

While it is definitely great to see artists getting behind the global #Occupy Movement (for example both Alan Moore and David Lloyd have signed up for the Occupy Comics project, and Dublin-based street artist CANVAZ created a piece for #OccupyDameStreet) Fairey's latest just isn't to my taste.

Much more pleasing is Stanley Donwood's new work Occupied Fortune (right, click to greatly embiggen), based on the text of a placard he saw at the #OccupySheffield site. Originally released as a free .pdf, Donwood has decided to create a limited run of 99 signed and embossed prints with the proceeds from the first fifty going directly to #OccupyLSX.

While you will probably recognise Donwood's iconic work from a number of Radiohead and Thom Yorke projects, his portfolio is far more extensive and imaginative than those alone and I am a huge fan, as can be demonstrated by the fact that I am now the proud possessor of number 9/99 of this edition.

Wahoo!

You can find out more about this print on Donwood's website here, and the .pdf can be downloaded from here.

#OccupyDameStreet - Christy Moore rides on!

Christy Moore dropped by Occupied Dame Street late last night for a cup of tea and an auld sing song. Unfortunately I was otherwise engaged (having a bit of a disagreement with Mr Vladimir Vladimirovich Pancreas and his pointy-stick of tough love) so I missed it, but Dave Donnellan was on site to record part of it and kindly uploaded it on to Vimeo early this morning.

Christy Moore - what a legend!

A Chariot Worth 4.58 Million Bondmaids

'Go here, Mac Roth,' Medb said. 'Ask Dáire to lend me Donn Cuailnge for a year. At the end of the year he can have fifty yearling heifers in payment for the loan, and the Brown Bull of Cualinge back. And you can offer him this too, Mac Roth, if the people of the country think badly of losing their fine jewel, the Donn Cuailnge: if Dáire himself comes with the bull I'll give him a portion of the fine Plain of Ai equal to his own lands, and a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, and my own friendly thighs on top of that.'

- Thomas Kinsella (trans.), The Táin, Oxford University Press, 2002, p55

Just over a year ago two modern day chieftains went cap in hand to their own feudal lords in Europe and asked for a loan, not of the Brown Bull of Cualinge but of €67.5 Billion, and while then Taoiseach Brian Cowen fortunately did not make an offer of his own friendly thighs in return, what he did put forward as collateral was a chariot worth 4.58 Million bondmaids.

The Táin Bó Cuailnge is our original National Epic, the closet thing to a foundation myth we have, and while during last night's State of the Nation address current Taoiseach Enda Kenny drew inspiration from another more recent foundation myth with the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty falling squarely on tomorrow's revenue-raising Budget Day, to truly understand the state we are in the Táin is as good a place as any to begin, and specifically with the role of the bondmaid in feudal Ireland, a bondmaid being a female slave. So common were female slaves in early Ireland that, according to historian Nini Rodgers, they formed a basic unit of currency:

In the law tracts (the bulk of which were compiled c. AD 700) they are most frequently listed as units of currency. Cattle were the normal medium of exchange employed in receiving a stipend or rendering tribute, but slaves constituted a higher unit of currency. The value of land was calculated in numbers of slaves - cumal, a single Irish word requiring a double barreled term in its English translation 'female slave'.

- Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p8

The cumal, or bondmaid, did all the menial labour, they looked after livestock, milked cows and made butter, and were the primary grinders of grain, a very labour intensive and arduous activity. The economy of feudal Ireland was built on the backs of these bondmaids, and the feudal chieftains that owned them were Ireland's very first bondholders.

One month ago a group of unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders were paid over €700 Million by our government, and the toll of this on the country was immediately obvious when the following day it was announced that Social Protection would be cut by €700 million in the forthcoming Budget. In fact Michael Taft estimates that the total cost of the Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide bailouts will be €90 Billion over the next twenty years, but even the current debt figures are epic enough.

As I write this according to the National Debt Clock created by FinanceDublin.com our current National Debt is approaching €118 Billion, up from €65.278 Billion when the clock was launched on June 30th, 2009, an increase almost exactly in line with the loan taken by Messieurs Cowen and Lenihan last year. With a population of 4.58 Million, this means that the share of the National Debt is more than €25,000 for every man, woman and child in this country, a debt to be collected in taxed income and reduced services.

But the payment of this debt will not be spread evenly. Fintan O'Toole has written about the contemporary Irish aristocracy, not an aristocracy in name (for Article 40.2 of the Constitution forbids that), but an aristocracy in deed, for he defines the aristocracy as those in society who are traditionally above taxation. Once again this budget looks to leave tax bands unchanged, with a rise in VAT, a flat rate property tax and the reduction of child benefit set to hit those who can least afford it disproportionately while leaving our aristocracy relatively untouched, the rationale being that if our aristocracy is taxed they will flee the country. While the UK have retained their 50% tax rate for earnings over £150,000, our government is happy for the poor to emigrate but would miss our lords and ladies. The reality is, of course, that our Earls have already fled, yet our elected leaders still bow and tug the forelock at their long shadows cast from Bermuda and the Bahamas, or worse yet grovel at their feet when they jet in to Dublin Castle for a few hours at the Global Irish Economic Forum to dispense wisdom (we should have Paddy's Day twice a year) and largess (with an offer to sit on Government quangos for free), before racing back to the Caribbean sun before their tan fades along with their non-dom status.

With a National Debt of epic proportions arising largely as a result of the need to pay overseas bondholders and the aristocracy responsible for creating that debt held unaccountable, the citizenry of this country have been reduced to little more than currency, their present and futures and those of their children traded back and forth between the Government, the ECB and the IMF, excluded from the decisions that affect their lives with a condescending pat on the head from our modern day Queen Medb. “You are not responsible for the crisis”, said An Taoiseach last night, but you most certainly will pay for it all.

We are all bondsmaids now, the property of local chieftains themselves in thrall to feudal lords both domestic and overseas, and the state we are in is one that Cúchulainn would find not that unfamiliar at all.

Notes
The article originally appeared on Politico.ie on 7th December, 2011

A shameless bit of self-promotion

Harry Browne braves the bitter cold for #OccupyUniversity
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Wednesday 30th November

What follows is shameless bit of self-promotion by me, masked by a reference to a talk by the excellent Mr Harry Browne. You should engage your mental ad-blockers, now.

Harry Browne returned to Dame Street on Wednesday last week, to give his second talk as part of the #OccupyUniversity program (although technically a) he has visited Dame Street many times in between, he just wasn't giving a talk on those occasions and b) his first talk actually happened before there was a formalised #OccupyUniversity program, so this was actually his #OccupyUniversity debut. In many ways Harry Browne is the hipster of #OccupyUniversity, giving talks on Dame Street before it was cool). His first workshop was on the Shannon Peace Camp, but this was on the subject of CrisisJam, the online series of articles on Politico.ie and how it all came to be.

CrisisJam began as BudgetJam, a series on Politico.ie (not to be confused with the entirely unrelated Politico.com) by a group of journalists, writers, economists and academics offering alternative visions to the December Budget process in 2010 in a series of articles and a liveblog. Their intention was to challenge five main myths upheld by the political and economic establishment, 1) the country is broke, 2) we're all in this together, 3) there is no alternative, 4) we have to move on to go forward and 5) the international institutions will give us tough love, which we need. As the Budget was passed and inequality noticeably increased in Ireland (in fact those earning over €200K actually ended up paying less tax thanks to the budget) the group behind BudgetJam saw the need for an ongoing series offering radical alternatives and challenging the rhetoric and dogma of the political and economic elite, and thus CrisisJam was born.

Harry Browne summed this decision up in his workshop by explaining that "You can only start talking about solutions when you have discussed the problem".

In addition to many of the folks behind CrisisJam participating in the #OccupyUniversity program, the series has also followed the development of #OcupyDameStreet since nearly day one, with an interesting array of critical opinions being aired and a good few home truths being raised that the Movement needed to hear. Aside from the more satirical Broadsheet no other Irish media outlet has really taken the time to understand what the #Occupy Movement in Ireland is actually about. As with Broadsheet, their coverage isn't always positive, but at least they have a fair idea what they are talking about.

In the interests of full disclosure here I must admit that of course I am no longer an unbiased observer in all this, for shortly after #OccupyDameStreet began I was contacted by Politico.ie to see if they could repost a few of my articles from the first week of life on Occupied Dame Street, and since then they have gone on to publish a few more, including things that have nothing to do with Dame Street, Occupied or otherwise. This doesn't invalidate my analysis of Harry Browne as being tragically hip, nor detract from my recommendation of Politico.ie and Crisisjam as being a good place to go for an informed and alternative take on our current political and economic malaise, it is more a caveat on my use of the phrases "informed" and "fair idea what they are talking about" which obviously no more apply to my own flawed contributions than do the phrases "good grasp of English grammar and spelling" or "concise, direct and to the point".

No matter, if you want to catch up on what you have been missing of mine on Politico.ie the links to some of the more cognizant articles are below, and while most have also appeared in some form or another on the pages of this very blog, reading them on Politico.ie shows how much better everything is when recast through the skills of a very good editor.

Links
'Support the 99%!' Protesters occupy Dublin's Dame Street - 10th October 2011
#OccupyDameStreet - I am the 99% - 15th October, 2011
The #Occupy movement: Strength through disunity - 2nd November, 2011
It hasn't gone away, you know. - 1st December, 2011
A chariot worth 4.58 million bondmaids - 7th December, 2011

I'm having a whinge. A winjer today.

Be warned, epic whinge ahead.

"How are you?" is a much tricker question to answer than you might suspect.

< begin whinge >

When people ask me how I'm doing, my normal response is to say that as long as I'm not in hospital I'm basically doing fine. For the most part this is a pretty sufficient and truthy explanation, but unfortunately it is not entirely accurate. There is a line Al Gore uses in An Inconvenient Truth (and probably at the start of an awful lot of after-dinner speeches) that goes, "you win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category", and this third-category is a close enough approximation of where I've been spending my time health-wise these last few weeks.

I have Chronic Pancreatitis. I had Pancreatitis, then it got much, much worse and I graduated up to Acute Pancreatitis with a month or two in hospital along the way, followed by a fairly major operation that removed a hefty chunk of my innards, and when six weeks later it all started over again I went to the top of the class, graduating summa cum laude with Chronic Pancreatitis, "chronic" being a fancy way of saying "the type that doesn't go away".

With Pancreatitis the enzymes produced in the pancreas that normally travel into the small intestine to help digest food activate while they are still in the pancreas, and start to digest the pancreas itself, which is the opposite of nice. It is in fact incredibly painful, one of the most painful conditions you can experience according to my occasionally too-helpful surgeon. In the hospital they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, my pain dial now goes up to eleven. It normally occurs in heavy drinkers, alcohol having a very debilitating effect on the pancreas, however in about 20% of cases no cause is ever found. As I was at best an occasional drinker before all this kicked off (and a complete tee-totaller during and after), alcohol was quickly ruled out followed less quickly by gall-stones, auto-immune problems, hypertriglyceridemia and scorpion bites, leaving me happily in the middle of that magical 20% category of unknowns.

For those of you who don't know me in the Really Real World my life effectively disappeared down a dark hole the week after the February election and only just about emerged six or so months later. With no discernible cause all that could be done for me was to treat the pain, which involved being fed through a tube for a month to ease the pressure on my innards and a heavy regime of pain-killers. There were a lot more other yicky things going on but we don't need to go into those here, but I was in and out of hospital for many months, and the times in between visits were no less unpleasant. I lost a quarter of my body-weight in the space of about four months, and even now when I put on my old clothes I look like a child playing dress-up in his father's suit.

It was scary, and the whole experience still unnerves me, more so because it hasn't gone away. When I showed no signs of major improvement my surgeon suggested surgery (handy for me that he was surgeon so, and not an iron monger, for I could have ended up with a nice new set of gates instead), and while it all worked like a charm, six weeks later another part of my pancreas went kaput, and I was left with the news that a) nothing more could be done, b) I would probably suffer attacks periodically for the rest of my life and c) some would be light, some would require hospitalisation, and some could kill me.

I wasn't too pleased with that last one.

Since the cause was never discovered, I'm still in the dark as to what I can do to prevent attacks from happening again. Alcohol and caffeine (including coffee, cola, Mountain Dew etc) are completely gone as they can trigger an attack even if they weren't the original cause, and thanks to my messed-up and rearranged innards fizzy-drinks of any kind are out, as are most fatty foods (mainly because I can no longer digest fats properly), which coupled with my own preexisting vegetarianism makes me really excited about Christmas! Aside from removing all the fun from my life in this way there is nothing more that I can do about it all other than sitting back and waiting for the next attack to happen.

Which has happened about once every eight weeks since my surgery back at the end of May.

I have a deal with both my surgeon and doctor now that when an attack happens I take mild pain killers at home for two days, and if either the pain killers don't do the trick or the pain lasts more than two days, then its off to hospital for me. This is the origin of my whole "If I'm not in hospital I'm doing fine" line, but the trouble is that my pancreas went to the Vladimir Putin school of time management and has decided that "more than two days" means "more than two consecutive days", and is now playing a game of poking me with a sharp stick for two days then disappearing off and leaving the intestinal equivalent of Dmitry Medvedev to pick up the shattered remains of my digestive system before magically reappearing a few days later, stripped to the waist with a salmon firmly clenched between its magnificent white teeth and ready to take over the pokey-stick of power once again for another two days.

It is in this Chekhovian twilight that I have found myself these last two weeks, going to bed at night positive that the next day will see me in hospital, then relieved when dawn comes and the pain has passed, only to repeat the cycle of panic three or four days later with nothing to be learned from the first time around as in truth each attack could be the start of something very unpleasant indeed. And unfortunately my Doctor agrees, his only advice on what I could do differently is to take more drugs earlier and more often. Each attack weakens me, my digestion goes haywire for a few days with an underlying accompanying pain that while not as bad as the stabbing Putin-sticks of my pancreas is still rather unpleasant and something I could do without.

I'm sore, tired and worn out, and the constant spectre of another month-long visit to hospital looming over me like a ravenous ECB approaching our Budget with a magnifying glass and a scalpel is altogether quite unnerving. Luckily (but unfortunately for you, and if you've actually made it this far congratulations and I'm so very sorry) I find that writing about it makes me feel a whole lot better.

Hooray!

< /end whinge >

However all of this falls, I believe, into the category of Too Much Information which is why I reply, like most people, "Fine, just fine", when asked how I am.

Arise! Arise! Arise!

A Phoenix rises from the ashen grounds of the Central Bank
The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

A quiet weekend, in part through illness and part in giddy anticipation of An Taoiseach Enda Kenny's State of the Nation address on Sunday night (yes, Virginia, there is a Taoiseach and he'll be visiting every home in Ireland on Sunday night once all the good girls and boys are tucked up safe in bed. No Virginia, he won't be visiting all the bold boys and girls who are staying up late watching X-Factor, nothing but coal in the socks for them this year. Well, actually, its coal in the socks for everyone this year, Virginia, so feck it all, ye may as well stay up and watch X-Factor after all).

I did manage to make it out for a bit on Saturday to join hundreds of others from voluntary and community groups protesting against cutbacks in the carnival known as The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope. An amazing event more Mardi Gras than protest, with floats, stilt-walkers, costumes and musicians the parade started at City Hall and wound its way past Occupied Dame Street and down to the GPO for an airing of grievances and hopes. The day was something special, not least for the children's groups that helped create the costumes and floats and for all who came and enjoyed a magical afternoon in the December sunshine.

Not, of course, that you would have learned anything about this from our national media, for with the exception of online sites like TheJournal.ie and the ever excellent (and Ireland's answer to The Daily Show, in that for a surprising number of young folks it is their primary news source) Broadsheet the Spectacle received almost no coverage at all. In fact a bake sale to raise money for a community centre received more coverage on RTE over the weekend than hundreds of people in costume waltzing down O'Connell Street. It would all be hilarious if it weren't so tragically predictable.

As you can tell from the photographs below the theme of the Spectacle was the colour red (except for the figure of Death shrouded in black astride a horse at the head of the parade) and the images really don't do justice to just how uplifting an event the Spectacle was.

The community groups behind the Spectacle are an inspiration to us all.

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, Dublin, Saturday, 3rd December

More information on The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope can be found on their website here, and you can find a video report from the event by Paula Geraghty on Politico.ie.