'Dunkirk Without Ships'.

Denis O’Brien, ‘the leading Irish businessman’, described Brexit at Davos as ‘Dunkirk without the ships’. What truth is there in this arresting observation? Brexiteers themselves, particularly in the wake of the movie, are wont to invoke the ‘Dunkirk spirit’, as if it were the retreat from Europe in itself that ‘saved the Nation’s bacon’. They seem to have missed the fact that it was a disaster that only by good luck avoided being a catastrophe, and it was extremely fortunate that the British army was able to return four years later to participate in the real triumph.

What's more there is a clear continuity between that considerable section of the British establishment that had evinced sympathy for fascism in the 1930’s and the Brexiteers. Certain tabloids that supported both come to  mind. Some more pertinent facts are that Hitler established his authority by means of referenda and of exploiting popular fears and resentments of ‘others’, resentments that went with a sense of national humiliation*, and of establishing full employment on the back of borrowed if not merely stolen or printed money.

So yes, Brexit promises a massive and potentially catastrophic withdrawal from British involvement on the Continent that may be compared with Dunkirk, and what’s even worse, a degree of collusion with ‘the Enemy’ and an abrogation of responsibility; for we may compare the existential challenge to civilisation of the last century, as represented by totalitarianism, to that posed by the three-headed hydra of environmental disaster, chronic wealth disparity and warfare these days. This century again, those existential challenges clearly call for efforts in response that transcend merely national ones. Politically speaking, such response for us in Europe is invested primarily in the EU.

As for the ‘without ships’ bit, well the Duckie promises an American navy coming to the rescue, and that’s the man who far from combating the existential threats we face this time around, does his best to embody them.

Surely we are at last at a critical juncture where we have to get serious about our response. The science, the warnings, the evidence of galloping threats are all out there. But how can one in practice live with them and respond to them?   It is extremely tempting to fall back on saying that it won’t be too bad yet awhile, that we’ll manage something when we really have to, and meanwhile ‘sufficient to the day are the evils thereof’? From time immemorial, we may say, people have been subject to catastrophic threats, some real, some imaginary. We are all going to die anyway, and really fear of catastrophe is an inescapable part of the human condition.

It is clear that Christ did not mean us to merely take what was coming. While there is an unprecedented global totality about the threats that are now looming, there are also clear indications of how to combat them. I actually do hope for the best. For a start, with regard to Brexit, I have not given up hope of the whole sorry saga resulting in a much deeper and more authentic European Union, but if we have to get there by way of some kind of Dunkirk, where might we hope to see some ships showing up to take us off the beach?
 

Possibly this is to over-dramatise what is merely a good old English mess, but disaster is already a day to day reality for very many people, and apart from the imperative to help one another, I think it wise to construct our lives on the assumption that the world will become increasingly unstable and dangerous for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, if we face the threats rather than try to ignore them, we may even find that they have a positive side and that facing up to them generates well-being even right now. For example, if we think that the present industrial structure of food production and distribution will probably come to a bad end, then surely we should start now finding ways of producing organic food for ourselves. We just might find out that it’s also fun to produce and good to eat.

With young people locked into stressful city life and careers that involve moving here and there, while family and country life decays, we might try to recover the Irish tradition of keeping up with the family ‘back home’ in the country, Mum and the children spending the summer there, and so on. The trouble is, there is nowadays rarely a family farm back in the country, and if there is, the work is mechanised. It has been said that the human race’s worst enemy is boredom. Besides having nothing to do, it involves a sense of radical powerlessness, of inability to engage with life. Anxiety and fear have to be up there with it, and wealth may hide them but does not assuage them. How may we get from  the dull misery of awaiting doom to some place where we may respond effectively, engage, celebrate and enjoy life?

Fiona and I aspire to make our home here on Sherkin Island a place such as this; one of beauty, order and security, where memories and traditions are cherished, flowers and vegetables grown, and the simple old survival skills passed on. Such are the boats that might ‘take us off the beach’ these days! Damn it, if I can get the ‘Anna M’ going again, we might do so literally!  But time is running out for the Fundit scheme, do please take a look at the link** and see if you can find more people to participate!

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/26/dunkirk-brexit-retreat-europe-britain-eec

** https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1

Sherkin Island

Coming In To Land.

A snug stove-warmed corner with a comfortable seat and a good book, and with a big strong window between oneself and the weather, whereby one can glimpse angry breakers through the vicious horizontal hail showers, all make for a particularly Irish species of bliss. Yes, in its way, I love it!

I was enjoying such delights  lately at the house of our John, in Co Clare, also known as 'The Loop Head Smart Engagement Centre'. Having trained in civil engineering and hydrology at Galway and London, he has travelled much before coming home to roost where he grew up, with his Romanian lady and their baby. Along the way, especially in Romania, he picked up serious skills in managing the relationship between development projects of one kind and another, and their host communities. Wherever and whatever the project, from mines to motorways, he found very similar problems, and he developed a methodology for addressing them.*

Our John.

Currently high on his agenda is the establishment of wind farms, in such a way that they constitute welcome assets rather than resented intrusions for the adjacent communities, integrated by agreement with leisure facilities such as woodland trails. I suppose most people agree that it is a great thing to harness all that wind energy, but when it comes to erecting wind turbines of course there are problems; it must be done sensitively and with respect for local residents. There will be plenty of Don Quijotes tilting at them, and by no means all for daft reasons!

I recall with pride the campaign that I was involved in myself, against a Loran C mast about 1000ft high being erected on Loop Head. It would have seriously impacted that wild and open landscape, which has only come to be much appreciated in the years since, mainly through the efforts of an active local committee. But what really got me going against The Mast were the downright deceptions practised by a patronising representative of Irish Lights, at a p.r. meeting they called.

He tried to ‘sell’ it as necessary for the safety of fishermen and other seafarers. Too bad that some of us were up to speed with the much superior GPS system that was coming out, and anyway we had been using Decca receivers with a lat/long readout for some years. It turned out that the people really behind Loran C were the French Government, who did not like to have to depend on the Americans to guide their nuclear submarines and force de frappe. The local community rallied, and we won!

However there is a class of people whose favourite sport is ‘tilting at windmills’, and it has to be said this can be very tiresome. The fact is we must have electricity, and those wind turbines are a huge improvement on big chimneys spewing pollution. But no matter how good any particular idea may be, there will be those who see in it nothing but a scam; they construct a whole identity out of being smart enough to do so. Then indeed there will be those who do in fact manage to make a scam out of anything, and the better that thing is, the more successful scamming it may be. The welfare state, the EU, the organic movement, even the Church all come to mind.

It is extraordinary, if you take the EU for instance, that over half the voters of Great Britain appear to see in it nothing but a dark and sinister plot to deprive them of their liberty. I was there lately myself. I find a tense and apprehensive atmosphere about it, rather like that in a plane trying to land in thick fog on a dark and stormy night.  Brexit took off bravely enough, but now it’s time to land; the plane is juddering and creaking, and they cannot see where they are going.

We must consider whether we can help them to get safely down to earth, for it will be a disaster for all of us if they crash. We must understand that an unacceptable gulf had indeed opened up between the elite who ‘get’ Europe and in fact make it, and those who, experiencing a radical disconnect between it and any version of politics which they may just about relate to, concluded that it is another scam.

It seemed to me at the time that the European elite were getting ahead of themselves when they changed the name European Community to European Union. The latter is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, while the term Community is much less threatening. Few people want a European superstate anyway. Merely changing the name back to Community would send a signal that might well help that wayward ‘plane to land safely! But perhaps we could have a Union within the Community, like a couple of Russian dolls, if some are determined to press on to a United States of Europe.

Europe as a whole in fact needs to sort out its ‘operating system’. Unfortunately, this raises spiritual and religious problems that our contemporary culture is very poorly equipped to deal with, and we would prefer not to have to do so. We must go very deep to get to grips with them. ‘If a man wishes to know the deepest ocean of divine understanding, let him first if he is able scan the visible sea’, said our Irish Saint Columbanus more than fourteen hundred years ago. He was described by Pope Benedict XVI as ‘one of the Fathers of Europe’.

The Gannets’ Way is all for that approach. However, unable to keep the sea all the time, we turn to those lands closest to it, Ireland and Portugal. They have a lot in common besides being on the western seaboard of Europe. Of course there is their size, and also being both republics of catholic culture that have quite recently ‘escaped’ into the delights of affluence and secularism, and are experiencing these days a resultant spiritual void. In asserting their independence, they both had to struggle with more powerful neighbours, and are relatively free of the temptation to throw their own weight around. It may be said that Portugal did have an empire, but it is notable that if so, it was mainly a trading one, more interested in establishing posts for that purpose than in colonialism.

The catholic bit is important in this context because it implies seeking one’s salvation by finding one’s place within a universal totality, albeit it a strange one, fully present in each particular manifestation; the Whole that catholics believe in is nothing less than the Body of Christ, with the strange property that it can be present in a piece of bread. For protestants this is all too much, something of a scam in fact which is presumably what they are protesting, for which I cannot blame them, but it does have the result that they tend to envisage salvation on a more individual or national basis.

So I hope for some useful synergy in the contribution of Ireland and Portugal to the urgent task of developing a rebooted ‘operating system’, so badly needed by not just ourselves and Britain and Europe, but for the whole world. I'm all for recognising that we are facing existential challenges, but let's remember that there’s a lot more to life than merely lurching from one crisis to the next, and these crises may be better appreciated as divine nudges, in the direction of our great but so dimly perceivable ultimate consummation. Which is all very well, and indeed on the way ‘saving the planet’ is very necessary and good, but let it be fun too! Actually it's a lot more likely to get done if only we can find out how to enjoy it.

So much for the ruminations of an old man, on a winter’s night in Ireland while the wind whistles in the chimney! Meanwhile, I must try to get back on that sea, on the Gannetsway. Soon it will be time to head for Portugal again. The Fundit scheme only has three weeks left to fly and will struggle to land! Beyond trying to fix the ‘Anna M’, this is an opportunity to involve more people actively in one little attempt to develop a beautiful and sustainable way of life. Please take a look at:

 https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1

Clare Coast.

*astoneco.com

Getting Those Fisheries Back.

The cry ‘We’re going to get our fisheries back!’ is one of the jewels in the crown of the Brexiteers. In this blog, I want to lay out the reasons why I do not quite buy it.

Cleaning nets in Nazare.

For a start, let me say that the principal foes of the fish stocks, and therefore of the fishermen, have relatively little to do with competition from ‘foreign’ fisherman. I campaigned for a 50 mile exclusive Irish limit back in the '70s, but frankly I do not believe things would be any better today if we had one. I watched Donegal Bay and the north coast of Mayo being reduced from a very rich fishing ground to a virtual desert with little help from abroad.

The reasons for this disaster are deeply embedded in our whole cultural set-up, which has been orientated to the ruthless exploitation of nature within a regime of cut-throat competition and unbridled technology. Visible manifestations of this culture include global warming, ocean acidification and plastic pollution, and the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.

Perhaps the most serious loss of all is that of the restraint which has been known to prevail in wiser and  more holistic cultures, born of the awareness that while there is sufficient in the world for everyone’s need, not so for their greed. Let us hope that the culture of exploitation has reached its apotheosis with the present incumbent of the White House. Whether the European Union is capable of rising to the challenge of developing an alternative remains to be seen, but the principal of competition, of having bigger and better ships than the other lot and so on, is built into that kind of nationalism.  ‘There is no luck in greed’ used to be said in Ireland, but to overcome it calls for humility and rationality and objectivity, all qualities that are vital in the building up of any community.

On a purely geographic level, what we are talking about in the case of our sea fisheries is the management of the continental shelf. This must be managed as a whole, if it is to be managed effectively - though to do so demands both of those foundational principles of the EU, solidarity and subsidiarity, and the latter in particular remains in many respects more aspirational than otherwise.

We may however recall that, given a supply of fish, the economic success of any fishing industry depends above all on the markets that are available to it, and in particular those of Britain and Ireland depend heavily on continental markets. Grimsby for instance functions on the European level as a hub for processing and distribution. One may easily imagine the damage that delays at ferry ports could do.

The astounding technology employed by even small boats is of course produced on a global scale, but even so, there are many advantages in distributing and supporting it, if not actually producing it, at a continental level. Allied to this is the whole matter of research. Again, the development of effective management very much depends on a great deal of research, better undertaken within a continental context; however, it also depends on a sense of stewardship and indeed ownership at the local level, and in this respect one may well question whether the EU has succeeded in living up to its own principle of subsidiarity.

Big industrial fishing companies tend to have a degree of political clout wholly lacking to coastal fishing communities; to counter such bias strong counter-measures are called for. Some fairly simple ground rules would go a long way to do this, such as not allowing vessels over 10m l.o.a. to fish within 6 miles of the coast, nor vessels over 20m within 12 miles of it. Also needed are strong coastal organisations, which involve local stakeholders in conservation measures such as the establishment and maintenance of marine reserves. The present situation, whereby artisanal coastal fishermen find themselves prevented from fishing even where foreign industrial trawlers are doing so, or compelled to dump certain species back into the sea, is intolerable and must be reversed.

 

Mounting a net in Nazare.

Such unjust competition fosters the mindset of nationalism, which has competitiveness built into it. We are at a point in history where it is absolutely imperative to replace competitive exploitation with shared stewardship. It is a whole new culture that we have to develop, and if we do succeed, there is no doubt that, not alone, our coastal communities will recover their vitality and health!

A handy craft!

Meanwhile, the Fundit campaign to restore the 'Anna M' (from which the above photo was taken) goes on, and urgently needs support. See:

​

https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1