For the first time in nearly thirty years, I found myself yesterday in the wheel-house of a fishing boat, at the controls while we hauled some 6 miles of tangle nets. The circumstances were such that it was the only way those nets were going to be hauled, due to the absence of sufficient crew on the 'Tricky Business', a catamaran that one of our sons is skippering.
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| Tricky Business alongside at Carrigaholt. |
James had started fishing the nets some fifty miles off the south coast, but even there his meagre catch had been destroyed by seals, so having decided he woul be better off at home here on the west coast grounds where I used to make a living, he steamed up to Cappa pier at Kilrush, which was more convenient for his crew and for supplies, and also not a bit congested with small boats like Carrigaholt. A problem |
| seal damage |
with Cappa is that the Shannon pilots have it practically to themselves these days, and they do not like sharing it with fishermen. The last time that they had to do so was back in the 1980s. A flotilla of boats around 56 feet long had landed down from Donegal to partake in the spur-dog fishing bonanza, when Finbar Murphy and the West Clare Development Coop had established a lucrative market for them. The pilots got their answer to their complaints when some half score of the Rosses boats tied up outside their cutter!
Anyway our James got a fine welcome home after flopping down to snooze after tying up at Cappa,- Guards jumped into the boat, hand-cuffed him and, leaving the boat's engine running, dragged him off to Ennis for questioning, after someone had reported the boat for suspicious activity. Needless to say, the Guard's search of the boat for drugs, and indeed their subsequent search of our property here in Rahona, yielded no results. Three weeks later, James is still waiting for his mobile phone to be returned.
In the 1980s when we had a community guard here, with whom I had a good relationship and incidently to whom I reported a suspicious sailing boat that was arrested off Loop Head loaded with drugs, this would not have happened. In those days of course fishermen had more respect for the difficult work that they did, bringing much needed income into remote communities of the West. Nowadays it seems to be mainly those with a nice reliable government income of some kind who have cudos. Meanwhile, the governments of this world have been getting away with running up massive debts with impunity.
Fishermen are now a demoralised remnant on the whole, their industry regarded as a dodgy hang-over from a past age, like, say, cutting turf (in the way of being banned, though this is still a vital part of the economy of some country households), unless perhaps the fishermen get on the bandwagon of the few millionaires, whose ships may cost some €15,000,000. This situation has been a long time in the making. I remember Sean Keaney up in Teelin saying "It will have to get a lot worse before it gets better", back around 1980. Well, now it can hardly get any worse.
The boat James is fishing represents the culmination of a spectacular process of technical innovation in the line of fishing gear, especially in electronics and hydraulics for hauling and handling nets. The problem is that it's nearly impossible to catch enough fish to make it pay in that way, or to find crewmen to do so. This is not just a consequence of the shortage of fish. Blindly following in the wake of technology, the men have on the whole lost something even more important.
The smoking, drinking, cursing fisherman has always been around. Fishing has always been difficult and dangerous, and I do not wish to overly romanticise the Donegal fishermen with whom I kind of fell in love in the 1970s, but the fact is that they inhabited a culture that was profoundly spiritual and Christian, even if it was something of a remnant even then. They had a routine in Killybegs of only fishing four days a week, of attending to their boats and gear on Fridays, to their home and family on Saturdays, going to Mass on Sunday morning and a football game in the afternoon, before heading to sea with a Sign of the Cross on Monday morning.
The likes of John Maguire in Glencolmcille, who taught me more about fishing than anyone else, always made that Sign of the Cross before shooting a net, and indeed the Port men consciously did it on the water with their boat, making a sun(clock)wise turn to seaward, having launched stern first. It is extraordinary how such little acts condition what follows!
When I gave up fishing for a living, after 26 years at it, and as long ago as that today, I made two main efforts to address such problems. One was political,- I stood as a Christian Solidarity Party parliamentary candidate here in County Clare. I was never going to be elected, but hoped that I was paving the way for something. That Something may possibly be arriving shortly, if those who currently tend to be dismissed as 'the far right' can get finally get their act together.
What put the cabosh on my little effort, more than anything else, was the split between those, like myself, who believed in the European Community while believing its direction as the European Union was dangerous, and those who considered it as damaged liberal goods past redemption. I note that Victor Orban of Hungary seems to have hit a good note with regard to this problem, with his line that the Brussels Blob has 'stolen our dream' of a community of European nations living in peaceful and prosperous harmony, with subsidiarity and mutual respect, not to mention the Christian heritage upon which European civilisation was founded.
I was addressing more than the problems of politicians, needless to say. My other effort was to write a novel, Wavedancing, a story that would lay out the narrative of our situation as I saw it. We have been living through a time of crisis in all of our lives, not least in the life of my beloved Catholic Church. Hoping that my notions may have lately acquired new relevence, I am bringing out an audio version, and while I am at it, doing some re-writing, Here is an extract, mainly about an idea that perhaps we might take a look at the form in which we make the Sign of the Cross. Here is the new and expanded version of Father John's conversation with Liz in Book I, Chapter 5, -
“Not bad,” said Father John, “that's the form of the Sign of the Cross that the early Pulawayans adopted; they realised that to achieve wholeness, we must relate to God with both our heads and our hearts; they revelled in the idea that our natures do indeed reflect God's, for we are made in His image. In a way it's absurd to apply the concepts of sex to God, since He is all in all and transcends all polarities; but that's not to say that the whole business of gender does not derive from His nature. What's more, how we imagine God and attempt to relate to Him is fundamental! It seems to us Pulawayans that there has been a widespread suppression of the feminine principle out in the wide world, sadly reinforced by certain concepts of God which have done a great deal of damage, making a bunch of unnecessary obstacles to His grace.
"Do you agree that it is not unreasonable to associate Nature, and our own emotions, with the Eternal Feminine? And to associate our minds with the masculine side of our natures? As humankind emerged from Nature and a purely instinctual way of going on, we had a struggle on our hands! We found that we had minds, with terrible choices and responsibilities. God wanted us to be free creatures, so He had to let us make the mistake of imagining that we could ‘go it alone’, as had the Eternal Temptor before us, and for this we had to elevate Proud Intellect and suppress the Feminine side of our nature, which was always calling us back to our feelings, to solidarity with our fellows and to enmeshment in Nature.”
“For all that, I notice that you do not have women priests. How come?” asked Liz.
“Maybe we might say it’s simply a matter of the right old way to dance the Great Dance! Now at last we do indeed have to face the fact that our proud intellect is doomed to failure and absurdity unless we find our way to harmony with Nature, and to do so we need to recognise that God is immanent as well as transcendent, hence the magnificent revelation of his three-in-one nature. We need to recognise the Holy Spirit as God the Mother, inspiring and, as it were, haunting Nature, engaged in passionate love with the Father, without whose knowledge not one sparrow falls to the ground according to Jesus in the Gospel of St Matthew,- the two of them constantly bringing forth Jesus, the Son, the Word, Consciousness.
“So we start from a profound respect for gender, and the sexed manner in which we humans relate to each other, to Nature and to God. We need to 'plug in' to His power the right way round; to realise that though He speaks to us through matter, He transcends us and comes to us from without; in the first instance, His Word, as a male seed, is inserted from the great Beyond into our human condition. We do not carry the seed of Life within ourselves, and we must be fed constantly from without; we may not like to accept these facts, but unless we align our minds with that of the transcendent Father (for which, their nature being one and the same, we must equally love and respect the Mother), we will find no peace.
“She speaks to us primarily through our feelings and through Nature as well as through our minds and our conscience; but even so, the first and last word, the primacy, has to remain with the Father, and in our personal lives, with our own minds! Yes, sometimes in our fallen state, our feelings and our minds conflict. Our feelings must be attended to, but our mind and conscience has to have the last word.”
“Humm”, said Liz, “This is a big mouthful! I wonder how Our Lady fits in?”
“She is the pattern and exemplar of the response we all need to make, and our first help in making it! It may sound complicated, but it’s really very simple, and is not so very difficult, if only we are able, following Mary’s example, to get off the high horse of our illusory self-sufficiency as human beings. By the way, if you are worried about messing with hallowed tradition, it’s worth recalling that the Orthodox tradition of touching forehead, chest and shoulders with three fingers held together fits well with our Pulawayan tradition. Jesus is our strength,- the manifestation and the action of God's grace, but the Three are indivisible!
“Even in humdrum ways, we may see the basic pattern replicated everywhere, down to electrical machines and even those famous internal combustion engines; as if they were of any use without power or fuel! You have a machine - a Concept, you bring Energy and you get Action. Note that we do not worship Nature, nor identify it as the Mother herself, who dwells with the Father in transcendent bliss which is unapproachable for us here on Earth, except through the Son. But through Him and His church, we may get to perceive the Father and receive the Holy Spirit!'
* * * * *
I find that the people with a 'scientistic', materialist world-view, who think technology can solve our problems, quite apart from the generalised crisis with our whole culture that is vividly illustrated in the fishing industry, are the ones who especially want to forget Covid19 and move on. Well they may, ignoring the fact that the results of the response are very much still with us, with many people suffering from them, and huge lessons needing urgently to be learned, before the next such crisis is upon us. I recently made the following submission to the public evaluation of the Covid19 response;-
'Personally I only suffered a mild dose of covid, having caught it from a double-vaccinated son. He did not want to be vaccinated, but said he had to be on account of his job. He has a young family and a big mortgage. My wife and I only suffered from mild social ostracism on account of being unvaccinated, however the experience gave us a glimpse of the very nasty possibilities. The logic of some fully vaccinated folk asking us to stay away from them on this account continues to elude me.
We were very fortunate as fairly self-sufficient retirees living in the country, and moreover being sufficiently informed to stay away from the ‘vaccines’; however, I was deeply scandalised by the closing of churches, the isolation of very sick and infirm people, the inability to bury the dead with dignity, the ruination of small businesses, the explosion of public debt and many other results of the lock-down. In fact I completely disapproved of the entire handling of the pandemic, though this remains an uncomfortable place to be. For a start the deliberate spreading of fear was apparent, which is no basis for sound action.
It soon became further apparent that this was part of a coordinated global effort, which swept aside all national or local responsibility or room for disagreement, as well as the Nuremberg Code. I completely disapproved of the entire handling of the pandemic, let alone the mandatory vaccination touted by, among others, the President of the European Commission, and which was inflicted on many citizens of countries that we thought of as free democracies. This opened a seriously scary prospect to the likes of me, with the prospect of civil disobedience perhaps becoming necessary to stand up to intolerable totalitarianism, in an atmosphere reminiscent of communism and nazism.
There was no public debate between experts, perhaps because the only people who seemed credible were on ‘the wrong side’, and they were demonised. I have my doubts as to how seriously your consultation will consider their evidence, even now! The mainstream media meekly abandoned their duty to investigate and criticise the authorities.
The origin of the disease was claimed to be natural, until it became more and more obviously the product of deliberate research. The vaccines were touted everywhere as ‘safe and effective’, and even promised to be so by the President of the USA, even when the little evidence available at the time was to the contrary. Effective early treatment was actively discouraged, with successful physicians being fired. The lockdown was against established advice and practice, and hugely destructive in very many ways. If there may have been some justification of it for a couple of weeks, there was none for two years.
The legacy is a mind-blowing collapse in trust of governments, democracy, media, medicine, science, every kind of authority. We can only begin to remedy all this with far more accountability and recognition of what went wrong. The signs are, however, that the powers that be are only doubling down, with such tools as the WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty. Whatever hopes may be derived from political developments in the USA are of a somewhat ambivalent nature. While most people in Ireland seem to want to forget the whole business, this is the very time when the truth needs to be recognised and asserted!'
* * * * *
In the spirit of William Blake's minute particulars however, I continue to dream of a fishing boat that uses sails, for charging batteries for general use, as well as for an electric motor to get around with, fishing mainly with lines and hooks. Anna M is by no means forgotten, but I have had to scale back the time frame again, and am now looking to make a big effort in August and September to get her back in the water and down to the Algarve for the winter. This Shannon Estuary is a beautiful place, but it's no fun beating down it against the prevailing west or south-west wind, neither in a sailing nor a fishing boat!
'The High Rocky Banks on the West Coast of Clare'.
