Where We Stand.

So Britain has exited the EU, though nobody seems to know what this will in fact entail! The concepts advanced by its proponents are as vacous as ever, but they appear to involve a yet deeper dependence on the Big Brother Chinese state for internet technology and on a pyromaniac President of the USA for security, in a relationship wherein the Brits will have the privileges of eating dodgy food and paying more for their drugs, all the time claiming to be 'taking back control'. This is what Mr Farrage calls 'fighting globalism'!

     Far from being 'done', Brexit has hardly begun. Sooner or later, the lies will be exposed. Poor Sir Keir Starmer claims that 'There are no leavers or remainers anymore', but it is no use just papering over the cracks. European minded Englishmen may be forced out of positions of influence and responsibility while a vacuous but uneasy calm is imposed in England, but the real choices remain. 

     Unfortunately the battle is likely to be fought out in Ireland and Scotland. It won't be the first time that England, and indeed Europe, has thus exported its conflicts, such as that between King James II and William of Orange. What it will involve this time round is frankly beyond me, but meanwhile it is clear what we have to be doing.

     Lies cannot really be combatted head-on. They are by nature devious. Neither is there much point in trying to confront directly rogue or foolish powers that be. While we do have to resist and expose them, perhaps the best way to do so to work around them as best one can, and work all the harder at what is true and positive. Many valuable relationships have been built up in the last half century, in all sorts of ways, let them be personal, academic, industrial or whatever. We must keep doing our best to sustain and improve them.

     In some ways politics can be a mere mesmerizing distraction from this real work. For my part, I am applying myself as best I can to SNAPP, the Sherkin Nazaré Alternative Power Project. We are trying to develop electric and hydrogen drives, especially for boats, between Nazaré in Portugal and Sherkin Island in SW Ireland. Please email me if you are interested in participating - gannetsway(at)gmail.com.

Here I am!

The Sun is Getting Stronger

The sun is getting stronger, and at last the long spell of wet and windy weather has abated. The daffodils will soon be out and I have started to work in the garden. Here are some that are already out in Baltimore (photo by Ger Kavanagh) -

      Meanwhile a nice boring Irish general election beckons. Boring elections are surely a good sign of a country. None of your Westminster high drama! I like it this way. Foreigners say, 'but what are your politics about?' I say well think rugby for Fine Gael, G.A.A. (Gaelic football and hurling) for Fianna Fail  and soccer for Labour. There's a little bit of harmless tacking to left and right, but the main thing is to be able to shuffle the pack regularly - throw out one crowd and have the other lot in. This strikes on the whole me as reasonable and healthy.

     If one can only avoid such monstrous miscarriages of democracy as Brexit! Yet maybe the absence of high drama here does indicate a rather large dose of fudge! For example, is not national security at least one of the most basic responsibilities of Government? And what have our Irish politics to say about it? We support the UN! Beautiful, but meanwhile we basically leave it to the Americans and British to come between us and any real badies. 

     Unfortunately the USA seems to be in danger of becoming a rogue state itself. Even the Tory Minister of Defence has said he is kept awake at night by it. The EU has the potential to become an alternative, but the Tories are committed to demolishing the political, industrial and technological ties that have been built up since WW2 and which might provide the basis for this alternative. Mr Johnson claims to want to continue working with Europe, which appears to be both insincere and irresponsible. Anyway so much of British defence capability is dependent on the Americans. It also seems to me that the emphasis on aircraft carriers and submarines is a matter of still fighting the last war. They do not constitute a basis on which to build real security today, which highlights  the fact that the Brexiteers' famous idea of national sovereignty is downright obsolete.

     By far the greatest threats to our security these days are in connection with digital technology and climate change, and again, the EU constitutes our main hope of doing anything effective about them, at least on the political level. One can only hope that things do not have to get too drastically bad in Britain for the lies about a bright future on the basis of Brexit to be revealed in all their lurid fatuity, but in the meantime we just have to keep banging on doing our best to expose them. 

     I have been reading a little book of my grandfather's, recently liberated from a dusty fish box: 'Prophets, Priests and Kings' by A.G.Gardiner. It consists of biological sketches of prominent figures of the early 20th century, before the Great War. He describes 'a time of change and disturbance and fickleness', when the outlines of modern Britain were already emerging.  There were of course great hopes, even while standards were being turned upside down, for example by Lord Northcliffe, founding owner of the Daily Mail. 'The principle to which his loyalty never falters is to be on the side of the big battalions.' When he found himself in danger of being 'left in company with that dismal thing, failure,'  he found the 'thing unthinkable, and he leapt the fence on the instant.' Distinctly reminiscent of some leading Tories today!

     Mr Gardiner proceeds to deliver this philippic:- 'It is this commercial conception of journalism which is Lord Northcliffe's contribution to his time. Journalism was a profession: he has made it a trade. It had a moral function: in his hands it has no  more moral significance than the manufacture of soap. The old notion of a newspaper was a responsible adviser of the public. Its first duty was to provide the news, uncoloured by any motive, private or public; it's second to present a certain view of public policy which it believed to be for the good of the State and the community. It was sober, responsible, and a little dull. It treated life as if it was a serious matter. It had an antiquated respect for truth. It believed in the moral governance of things.
  Lord Northcliffe has changed all this. He started free from all convictions. He saw an immense unexploited field. The old journalism appealed only to the minds of the responsible public; he would appeal to the emotions of the irresponsible. The old journalism gave news; he would give sensation. The old journalism gave reasoned opinion; he would give unreasoning passion.'

      Thus Mr. Alfred C. Harmsworth, an archetypal 'man in the street', became Lord Northcliffe of the Daily Mail. The elite had to realise that there was 'a better way of dealing with the office-boy than to drive him into revolutionary movements. It is to give him a vote and the 'Daily Mail'. Yet one cannot help feeling that Mr Gardiner paints perhaps too rosy a picture of 'the old journalism', even though he had no illusions about the Tories, describing their 'fundamental policy' being 'to hoodwink the people, bribe them, drug them, use them as tools.'

     Even if they were misled by 'irresponsible emotion',  it was hardly their own fault that they proceeded to be led off to the killing fields, was it, a few years afterwards? They surely were most (ir)responsible who found it more politic to exploit nationalism than to anticipate what a modern war would involve. The people fell into the trap. Have their grandchildren and great grandchildren managed to learn anything at all? 

     These days we might justly refer to the likes of the Daily Mail  as 'the old journalism'. Just look at the alacrity with which they have turned from serious questioning of the new Government to the Royal Soap Opera! It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but we must hope for a new journalism and a new facility for critical thought on all sides. If we don't cop on and get a new grip on ourselves, we could end up in a situation that makes the World Wars seem like tea parties. In order to do so, we need a new leadership whose method is reason and whose focus is truth, but it's hard to see how it can emerge when the mere pursuit of power is so difficult and all consuming. Meanwhile, I'm off to get some seaweed on the garden.

First fine evening in the heart of Sherkin.

     

What Will It Take?

It's grey, damp, windy and very mild for January on Sherkin. Everyone seems to have coughs and colds, but I am lucky enough to be able to take it easy beside a warm stove. How lucky indeed one is to have a good home, when the wide world hardly bears thinking about! The USA, Britain, Australia, all in trouble, and all places where we have close relatives. 

     The Ducky seems finally to have lost it, demonstrating that in the unlikely event that he does actually keep his word to pack in the Forever War in the Middle East, he will make sure to leave even more chaos, mayhem and ill-will behind. Boris' Blighty is sloping off into a hall of mirrors and Australia is burning. Welcome to the 2020s!

     Denial is a common thread that links these three disasters. We have seen long-term denial that the American 'war on terror' and intervention in the Middle East has overall been one long counter-productive disaster, as has (most dramatically in Australia) the attempt to ignore  climate change - both cases of disasters fertilised by lies, as indeed Brexit will prove, unless I am much mistaken.

     Many people, most notably the Ducky, have tried to suppress all reference to climate change or 'the climate catastrophe'. Now Mr Johnson is even trying to suppress this word 'Brexit'. The hope is that people will not be able to hold them responsible for the results coming down the track, which will all be other people's fault. It makes it very difficult for anyone, especially civil servants, to call out their lies; the merest reference to such forbidden words is put down as divisive, unpatriotic, negative etc. They will even pride themselves on 'avoiding confrontation'.

     But after all, isn't that what we would all like to do? Especially within ourselves? We hear from the Ducky that he doesn't want war, in pretty much the same breath that he virtually declares it, just as we see so many people who want to 'do something about global warming', while living lives that stoke it more than ever, but 'actions speak louder than words'. Meanwhile those who point to the reality of what is being done and expose the hypocrisy of so much that is said are accused of being 'divisive and negative'.

      We Irish are of course pretty good at doing hypocrisy with the best of them. Indeed, can anyone be sure they are free of it, or even survive in a world that is full of it without keeping their mouths shut and playing along for much of the time? On the other hand, to be aware of and to articulate the truth even about oneself is very difficult, though surely it is the first duty for anyone with pretensions as a thinker or writer; needless to say, to do so about others is not a great way to win friends. The world is full of people who prosper by way of telling others what they want to hear - hence the tendency of thoughtful people to shun it!

     Nonetheless, there is no use in 'speaking truth' unless one tries to do so in a way that others may hear.  Gentle and respectful diplomacy is the honourable way to address others and indeed the only way if we are to avoid mutual self-destruction. It would be nice to think that Ireland has a unique and special calling to find ways of speaking to people from opposing camps who are no longer able to hear or to speak to each other, since we have suffered this situation so long and so dramatically on this island. But sometimes such attempts at reconciliation just do not work, and one is left wondering what it will take to bring it about, enabling us to see ourselves and our world as we really are? 

    After a decade in which denial has trumped all efforts to do something about global warming, will even those fires in Oz turn that country around? And what about us? The joy of living on a little island is that it defines a world that one may just hope to leave more beautiful in some small measure than one found it, yet I would not wish our lives to be inward looking. At least let us hope that along with making our corner as joyful as we can, we also find the space to see the world more truly, and to say it more or less like it is! New Year's Resolution - let us try to deal in truth!

The West Room finished and in good use at last!