It's SNAPP for 2020.

The feast of Christ the King today marks the end of the Church year, and we start to think in terms of the coming new one. For myself 2020 will be make or break with what I am now calling SNAPP - the Sherkin-Nazaré Alternative Power Project. I have modified the name in this way to give it a more explicit Sherkin dimension, for various reasons but above all because, besides being my home, this is such a splendid microcosm in which to set about applying the technologies we envisage.

However my mind was concentrated on the matter by the visit to Sherkin yesterday of our Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Simon Coveney, as well as the Minister for the Gaeltacht and the Islands, Seán Kyne. I also met our new MEP for Ireland South, Billy Kelleher, a couple of nights ago in Cork. It is one of the beauties of living in a small country that one has a better chance of effective access to senior politicians. The rest of this blog was written as an outline of SNAPP, with a view to sounding out what effective political advice and support may be forthcoming....

The day-to-day problems of island living have very much to do with transport on both land and sea. While access for mainland-based vehicles, vans etc, is difficult and expensive, it is rarely practical for an individual person to run an expensive vehicle on an island, and neither would it be doing much good taking up space in the car park by the sea on the mainland. Fiona and I have been happily living without a car for six years now, but this is much easier with the children grown up and a pensioner’s free travel pass.

Bangers' End

What happens in practice is that old bangers are drawn out to islands to die; visitors are treated to lungfuls of foul exhaust as they walk up the hill from the pier, which is usually congested with them, and when they finally conk out they are inclined to litter our beautiful landscape. Meanwhile we are dependent on an unreliable old island bus, while we do not know how it is to be replaced when it finally conks out.

     Undoubtedly in general electric power will eventually replace internal combustion engines, but not necessarily in the extremely expensive and flashy vehicles offered by big industry, and preferably without lithium-ion batteries. We need very basic and rugged electric vehicles that can be maintained here on island - preferably a fleet of them owned and operated by a coop. They would be available for its members to drive, while overseen by someone charged with monitoring their use and location.

With regard to lithium-ion batteries, which are expensive, messy to produce, of quite limited durability and difficult to recycle, I would bet on hydrogen fuel cells for powering the future. While there is at this stage a wealth of scientific research and knowledge on all alternatives to oil, practical applications are falling very short. There is something that could be done to ameliorate the situation quickly, radically and relatively cheaply, which is to fit every diesel engine with a hydrogen generator, which would reduce their consumption of diesel oil by up to 30% and radically clean up their emissions. It is with the development and production of such units that SNAPP will most probably set to work.

     Many of the same considerations that apply to vehicles also do so to boats, though of course there are whole new dimensions involved. With regard to electric power in a sailing boat, there is the advantage that batteries can be recharged (or hydrogen produced) by the power of the sails transmitted through the propellor and electric motor functioning as a generator. It hardly needs to be said how attractive the idea of quiet, pollution and smell free electric power is for boats.

In the case of both my associate in Portugal, Alec Lammas, and myself, our boats are the prime focus of our interest in electric drives. Alec owns a small steel trading schooner that he built himself, and I have a 50 year-old Illingworth schooner, the Anna M, that I am renovating with new laminated ribs. Both vessels are fairly ideal for the reach between West Cork and Galicia. Having cruised extensively between Scotland, the south of Spain, Rome, Venezuela and the Caribbean, my main interest now would be to use the Anna M as a test bed for various forms of alternative power and to demonstrate their utility. While Alec is very busy in the boatyard at Nazaré, he has a fine workshop in which he has been experimenting with hydrogen and electric motors. Here on Sherkin a similar workshop could also function as a place to experiment with and try out different techniques, while also training technicians to service them.

     The critical considerations for electric power are always going to be where and how is all this electricity going to be generated, and how will the power be stored and distributed? Our islands have multiple potential sources of renewable energy available, and surely there is massive potential for ‘cottage industry’ hydrogen production. Maybe farmers in the future will produce it much as they do milk today. Techniques might also be developed that would also provide massive opportunities for sunnier countries using desert land for solar power, and enable their populations to thrive in their own places rather than considering desperate means to migrate to Europe.

     The concepts referred to above give some little idea of the many areas ripe for the research, development and application of the kind of techniques that are urgently required everywhere if we are to manage to build the new sustainable society. The challenge is so huge that the more widely the response is connected, the better. SNAPP envisages a strong connection with Portugal, which has very many advantages to offer in terms of, for example, lower production costs and access to Africa and Latin America, not to mention the Iberian markets.

It happens that sailors have been trading between West Cork and Portugal, mostly under sail, since time immemorial, while at this point in history it seems a good idea for Ireland to renew such ancient links. I am seeking sponsors who would be interested in nailing their colours to this project, while first of all am seeking political advice and support, in the hope of effective corporate and state collaboration.

Good Morning Galicia.

A Year of Paralysis

A year ago, I was full of enthusiasm for The Nazaré Project. What seems to have ensued mainly is paralysis. Indeed, as 2019 begins to slip away from us, we might have to call it 'the Year of Paralysis', so widespread has been this experience, brilliantly exemplified of course in our part of the world by the B saga. It is a dead weight weighing down not just on Brits trying to do things and go places on the Continent, like our Alec, but on the whole of Western Europe.

     I am just back home on Sherkin after another fortnight in Nazaré, where I did little besides getting the Anna M lined up for another year there, which involves moving her off the concrete apron to the cheaper part of the yard. I am sufficiently worn down to enjoy my visits there regardless of 'progress'; it is a very pleasant place to be! While I was there, we went from late summer to a very mild early winter:-

One thing about going away now and again is that it is very lovely to come home again, especially with Fiona being here. Meanwhile I do hope that, deep down, things are happening. Certainly our thoughts about what we want to do, both technically and in general, are maturing. And for all the lack of actual progress and political movement, surely there is a much more widespread understanding that the environmental crisis simply has to be addressed; the question is, how?

     The General Election in Britain promises only more and indeed worse paralysis, as far as I can make out. Of the two men who are apparently contenders for the top job, enough has been said about the present incumbent. If he were to win a viable majority (which I hope is most unlikely), the likes of me would have to write the UK off for the duration. But I shall also make just one little observation about the other fellow.

     "My whole strategy has been to try and keep the party, the movement and the country together", says Mr Jeremy Corbyn. He has a brilliant way of doing so - simply deny the split! So as far as he is concerned, as he informed his Shadow Cabinet, "The debate (about Brexit) is over." It's all crystal clear - his government will negociate a new agreement with the EU (though most of his party say they do not want it and it is very hard to expect the EU to take such negociations seriously) and then 'put it to the People to decide if they want it'!

     How a devastating dereliction may be dressed up as responsibility! The pretence of unity where it does not exist, canonized in the name of 'the People's decision', is actually a recipe for tyranny, and especially so if it happens to wangle some sort of 'democratic majority'. In the same breath as the above quotation, gleaned from the Guardian*, we find Mr Corbyn apparently proud of the fact that he took the decision to go for a General Election entirely on his own. “I put it to them (the Shadow Cabinet) quite clearly: I said, our objections are now gone. We are now supporting a general election – and everybody gulped. I didn’t alert anybody in advance – it was my decision. On my own. I made that decision. And they gulped, and said, Yes Jeremy.” This is the same guy who says he 'would share power out to everyone who helped build the Labour movement'.

     If Mr Corbyn cannot build consensus in his own party, what hope for doing so in the whole country? In the circumstances, one must hope for another hung parliament, who would put a stop to the wild imaginings of either of the Great Leaders on offer. Yet, one can only tolerate so much paralysis, and reluctant as the EU may be to cutting the mooring ropes and letting the good ship Britannia drift away, in the end Europe is likely to be wound up into insisting on one of the dreaded 'binary decisions' that the fashionable anglophone chatterati profess to disdain- Yes or No, Oui ou Non. 

     Those who disdain 'binary' politics seem generally to assume that any of life's many polarities necessarily entail adversarial behaviour, even as in the relationships between men and women. This is a counsel of despair. I insist that actually the correct application of polarities is the basis of all creativity (based on the most fundamental of them all, the relationship of the Father with the Son, from which the Holy Spirit springs). But one does not get there, to creativity, by denying the polarities.

    Is there then any chance of leaving the sorry adversarial politics behind? What would an holistic politics look like anyway? Is it not struggling to take shape in Europe? Instead of claiming the EU is falling apart, would it not be so much better to participate wholeheartedly in this immensely exciting project? But in Blighty, having reformed the voting system, one would need to furthermore turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum, and build a purpose-built, round parliament in, say, Brum, wherein the seats might be allocated to the constituencies in alphabetical order!

     Meanwhile, the best most of us can do is to build away at an holistic world in our own little ways. It is pressure from below that will bring about change, not just some great political project!

 *https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/03/obey-brexit-jeremy-corbyn-warns-cabinet-dissenters

War in Heaven

Johnnie Andy who was our neighbour in Glencolmcille would not let water into his house - as another old man put it, 'aren't we all our lives trying to keep it out!, meaning out of their old thatched cottages. However, much more rashly I would have thought, he did let in 'the jigger', which was his name for the television. Now one day I came up with some bright-but-trite anti-war comment, as we absorbed yet another bit of footage of people trying to blow each other up, but I was stopped in my tracks by old Johnnie's comment - 'Ah well now war's allowed. Sure wasn't there war in Heaven?'

     Let us hope that, if war there must be, it should not be a matter of trying to blow each other up; because I'm afraid the forthcoming general election in the UK does have to be a matter of war. It will be a generational battle to determine the nature of the outfit for years - a battle, one might say, for the soul of the nation.

Another frontier.

     Who am I to say such things, or care as I swan around the Gannetsway? It should be obvious to all by now that, not for the first time, this battle is liable to be largely fought out in or over Ireland. It was in 1969, in the wake of British troops, that I first went there in earnest, trying to figure out what was going on, as opposed to sailing about the place or visiting a friend. It was above all the British attitude to Ireland that made me baulk at the idea of spending my life banging my head off those old brick walls.

       One little illustration of what I mean will suffice, that an Irish seaman forwarded to me from his FB page:-

In disbelief that people could still think like this, I asked was this someone just trying to take the mickey or stir, but was assured that this is the way that a lot of the Brits he works with really do think, they now think that their wretched xenophobia carries endorsement on high, and moreover there's much worse stuff going around in the dark recesses of Facebook. It is one of the more nauseating habits that the Brexiteers have, invoking ww2; mostly by people whose actual idea of it was derived from those dreadful whizz bang take that Jerry AAAch Himmel actung the English svinehunds! comics of the '50s. People like my father who actually fought in the war were much more inclined to value the European movement and regard it as a degree of consolation for all the misery that brought it about.

     For my part, I find myself irreversibly Europeanised, and I suppose there are not a few people like me in that. It is simply unthinkable that we should revert to an English nationalist mindset. Cosmopolitan elite be damned - we just know where we came from, where we like to go, and cherish peace. The same can be said from an Irish perspective. It should be obvious by now that the fragile equilibrium which has been built in Ulster is very much dependent on the EU. If this stupid deal of Johnson's goes through, it is going to cost lives in Ireland.

     There is another side to all this, intimately bound up with it. It is no coincidence that Brexiteers are inclined to deny the climate crisis. I saw a nice lady representing the People's March talking to Mr Farrage the other day on LBC. Having gone through the usual rubbish, trying to cast doubt on the science, he said 'anyway, we only represent 2% of the problem; what can we do about it?' The lady really missed a trick when she didn't respond with - 'that's one big reason why we need the EU'!

     So how can this battle be fought, with such fragmented forces? Mr Corbyn, bless him, is not the man to lead the fight, and at the moment there does not appear to be anyone else who can either. There is no time to go trying to found a new political party, even if it were desirable. The basic issue however is  simple, and of such importance that it must come before any party loyalty or ideology. My name for what is needed is the European Solidarity and Environmental Movement - ESEM or even just SM. I hasten to add that I do not mean 'solidarity' in any exclusive sense. 

     Coupled with environmental degradation is a rising tide of human misery in the world. The challenge is to address both. ESEM should work in tandem with Mrs Gina Miller and RemainUnited*, but go further and find a leader with the potential to form a Government on the twin essentials of ESEM. After all the rest is largely hot air, especially so if the country insists on impoverishing itself (and the air keeps getting hotter!).

     

     Increasingly as old age creeps up on me, I sometimes feel saddened at the prospect of my old country going down the tubes, and even regret that I did not find a way to 'fight the good fight' back in the day. I'll see if I can do a bit for it now by pushing this idea. Will you, dear reader, if you like it, please do the same; send it on and let us see where it goes! Tell them about it, post a comment below if you would support it, and let's see if there is a catch to be made!

Bringing Home the Catch.

*https://www.remainunited.org

Anyone up for some 'technical adaptations'?

Sometimes it seems that the only viable attitude to the world is... silence - at least as far as any meaningful response to what passes for politics these days. We can be grateful to the Brits for spelling it out. All that pomp and circumstance attached to the Queen's speech, setting out the program of a zombie government that everyone knows is on its last legs!

     That Government clings desperately on to whatever little credibility it retains by dangling the prospect of 'getting Brexit done'. It is astonishing how we all tend to get sucked into the farce. Even if this famous deal is cobbled together, by means of a classic piece of the Sulk's favourite food - cake kept and eaten - a border down the Irish Sea such as the Maybot claimed 'no British prime minister could accept', it is obvious that the Brexit saga will in fact only be beginning. So far we have only been in the preface, exactly as happens to be the case with the climate crisis.

     Insofar as the Sulk has a policy in both cases, his priority appears to be to find any way at all of enabling his electorate to get their heads back in the sand. How on Earth can any serious progress be made by any one country on its own? How can we plausibly make progress unless it be in cooperation with our neighbours? The challenges of building international and environmental responsibility, of enabling the requisite global responses to our global problems, are all essentially one and the same, and the European project is but a step on the way to such a global ambition. 

     Logically, the Brexiteers would rather leave the planet; the Sulk may well tout his British space project! Here is another instance of the Brexit delusion, that it could be better than playing a full part in the European one! Is it so very hard to see that the individual nations thrive by playing in the game? At the same time, an effective global response is one that would empower individuals and local communities. But what's logic got to do with it anyway, you say? Very well, wait till you see! Meanwhile, I shall mainly hold my silence on our peaceful little island, though beavering away in my own little way on the practical level.

Doggie Heaven

     It's taken years, but our little extension is nearing completion at last, and with no loan attached to it - just buying a few materials here and there as we go along, and with the support of friends. When that's done, I intend to concentrate on the sea-faring end of things, and getting the Anna M going again in a carbon-neutral mode. I will head for Portugal again next week, saying byebye to some lovely autumn weather here on Sherkin, but I hope to return two weeks later with a little hydrogen generator to test out.

     Kevin Davis, a lecturer at the Cork Institute of Technology, has pointed me in the direction of an excellent resource for accessing research papers - www.sciencedirect.com - with regard to using a diesel/hydrogen mixture in an internal combustion engine. One can find there, for example, 'A review on the technical adaptations for internal combustion engines to operate with gas/hydrogen mixtures', 'Hydrogen combustion in a compression ignition diesel engine', and 'A review on the technical adaptations for internal combustion engines to operate with gas/hydrogen mixtures.'  This research is encouraging, but there remains a chasm between such work and actually rolling out practical applications. 

     Given all the hype about the 'Extinction Rebellion' and so on, one might have expected that it would be easy to garner support for any such effort. Such is not my experience. Even more than our politics, our financial structures are out of kilter with the real challenges, so much so that according to Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, existing global investment carries the implication of global warming 'probably north of 4C'.*  Something is going to have to give! 

     If anyone out there is interested in participating in a little effort to power a boat without contributing to this catastrophe, and helping in some little way to build an alternative future instead, please get in touch - email gannetsway(at)gmail.com
*see https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/15/bank-of-england-boss-warns-global-finance-it-is-funding-climate-crisis

'Escape to the Mountains'? On Staying Sane When the World Is Mad.

The impulse to escape to the hills is as old as humanity, but received a particular edge through Jesus' warnings of the end times. As he says in the 24th Chapter of St Matthew's Gospel, 'when you see the disastrous abomination..., then those in Judaea must escape to the mountains.' 'In Noah's day before the Flood people were eating, drinking, taking wives, right up to the day Noah went into the ark, and they suspected nothing till the Flood came and swept them all away.' Yet 'as for that day, nobody knows it, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, no one but the Father only.' Jesus' conclusion? - 'So stay awake, because you do not know the day when your master is coming.' St Luke adds - 'praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.'

     The advice to 'stay awake and survive' at least is encouraging. All through history, there have been times that felt like The End, as famine, plague, persecution, war or natural disasters swept the land and evil seemed to triumph. In my young days, it was widely expected the human race would finally blow itself up entirely, a threat that has by no means gone away though we are on the whole looking another way. Anyway, here we still are, with a new wave of apocalyptic foreboding sweeping humanity. What constitutes a sane response - an alternative to going mad ourselves?

     We need to begin by recognising that such is in fact the human condition. The Earth is but a passing home, yet this is by no means a reason to disown it. Referencing simple, practical things like giving someone a glass of water, Jesus goes on to urge us in the strongest language to care for those who are already actually suffering the breakdown of human society - the hungry, the thirsty and the homeless - they are the very ones with whom the Son of Man identifies - 'whatever you do to them, you do to me'. The challenge of the 'End Times' is the very challenge to live fully human lives. Jesus characterised the terrifying events as 'the beginning of the birthpangs'. Yet their coming is associated with that of 'many false prophets'.

     How do we recognise false prophets? By their fruits of course, but these can take a while to come in! Possibly it will do to reject anyone who claims to have The Answer, to offer salvation, short of the Son of Man, who when he does come will probably catch us by surprise, and yet be the unmistakable culmination of the human project. We Christians accept that the end will come, even look forward to it, albeit rather hoping not to be there when it happens, as Spike Milligan said about death. But let there be no doubt - in the meantime, we are committed to living life to the full.

     So how did leaving all the 'fleshpots' of London behind, and going to live in the hills of Donegal in 1973, work out for Fiona and myself? Well you can read about it if you delve into this blog, especially the From the Fractal Frontier reports - but in a word, for all its difficulties, very well. It is fair to say that we have lived through the disintegration of the cultural set-up we were born into, even if we now look out cosily from our kitchen window on Sherkin with an old hurricane rattling away at it. It's definitely a good idea to be behind glass this morning, rather than out there on the sea, the mountains or King Lear's heath!

     The truth is that, culturally speaking, we find ourselves back in many ways to where we came from, but nothing like as dismayed as we were when we started out. I am sure that some people encountering us would consider us way behind the times. I'm inclined to the conceit that we are way ahead of them. Anyway our lives have been very good, though of course full of difficulties to be overcome and so by strange, unforeseeable ways to help us on our way. 

     This is the first storm in a long time when no drops of water have been getting into our house somewhere, in which respect we have just had some great help from a young American from Virginia, one of those wonderful Americans who combines intelligence with practical ability - a wonderful antidote to the Ducky's antics. Sadly, one needs to keep reminding oneself that the current President does not represent the USA, any more than the Sulk represents the UK*. Meanwhile we can make a start in

overcoming the madness of the world by concentrating on the basics - food, shelter, power - and taking as much of their production as possible into our own hands, which in turn provides a good basis for the essential business of enjoying life and good company!


  *If you don't know who The Sulk is, see John Crace's articles in The Guardian.   

           
     

        

So the Bill Is Coming In!

What an autumn we are facing! Especially here in Ireland, as we find ourselves once more in severe danger of being the cockpit of Europe. All the good political progress of the last thirty years is in danger of being undone. With excessive complacency, we assumed things would only get better. Now Brexit is bringing to light multiple fractures in the culture that I grew up in, which transcend Brexit itself. 

     It has long been commonplace to regard England as a particularly class-ridden society, albeit one that is adept in putting a respectable face on the now drastically aggravated chasm between rich and poor. Less noticed are related fissures between, for instance, the immediate physical facts of life and those who live their lives largely concerned with them on one hand, and the abstract world that the well-to-do mainly inhabit on the other, which is dominated by wealth rather than mere money.

      While feeling oppressed as I grew up by the class divisions that infest England, I was threatened with complete paralysis or breakdown as a young man by the fractures in my own personality, notably between that abstract world in which I was largely educated and the physical one which both enchanted and exasperated  me. Sailing the sea, both as a yachtsman and a fisherman, greatly helped me to establish some kind of sane balance between them. So it is that I only allowed this blog somewhat reluctantly to be drawn into the Brexit maelstrom, and then have tried to always relate my comments to the physical circumstances of my life. I hope my views are not unduly influenced by the fact that my boat and sailing days are under severe threat!

     The maelstrom is certainly real enough, and it is about a

lot more than Brexit. It is as real as the autumn gales here in Sherkin, sweeping destructively over this garden with which Fiona and I try to make a little prayer together each year, and likely to bring a similar wave of destruction to this country of Ireland.  It is true that the declines of our plants go hand in hand with their fruition, and we may enjoy the fruits for the rest of winter before the cycle starts again; yet the decline remains painful and to be combatted, like old age.  

     It is likely that Ireland would be even more grievously affected by a 'no deal' Brexit than England. Aside from the estimated 8% reduction in GDP, amidst all the disruption of so many vital supply chains, the border is a political and cultural fault line with unparalled potential for nasty eruptions. Anyway it is an outstanding reality of the modern world that no one 'people' can shape their course without impact on their neighbours, any more than a skipper can sail on his way without paying attention to other sea-farers.

     To most Brexiteers no doubt this image does not stand. For the wealthy minority that fancy themselves as world-treading buccaneers, evidently it would depend what you mean by 'paying attention'; no doubt a predator pays attention to its prey. But one suspects that the greater majority of Brexiteers would prefer the image of retreating into their island fortress and pulling up the drawbridge. If they get their way, it will be interesting to see how the tension between them plays out; amazing as is the ability of the present British Prime Minister to pull the wool over people's eyes, I find it very hard to believe he and his spurious invocations of 'the people' can prosper for long.

     Unlike Clement Attlee, father of the NHS, the buccaneers of this world do not of course really respect their crews; they regard them as so dim that they can find a way to manipulate them. They count on their ability to play on their susceptibilities, fears and passions. Such truths are becoming clearer by the day. A healthy ship's company will indeed have good empathy between the officers and crew, with commonly accepted goals, and moreover it will be accepted that the officers are necessary because while the crew actually mans the ship, someone has to be guiding it. This calls for a kind of effort distinct from actually doing the hard work. All sorts of information has to be gathered from far and wide before important decisions are made. It would of course be madness to expect the crew to make those decisions. 

     This is all the more true with the ship of state, and is why the likes of Clement Attlee was so emphatically opposed to the 'use of a device so alien to all our traditions and so beloved of fascist dictators'. It needs to be recognised that referenda have no place in a parliamentary democracy. We may furthermore ring our hands at the failure of our democratic officers to bear their responsibilities, but there are other fashionable notions that will have to be firmly renounced if things are to change for the better.

       Good leaders need to be somehow schooled in an holistic way. The posh schools may have largely failed to educate people beyond their personal and class egoism, but the alternatives are mainly geared to the labour market, as are the so-called universities. Specialization may be good for the honing of particular skills, but if a person's horizon is limited to one field of vision, they cannot make good officers; and yes, some kind of an officer class is necessary in the real world, where people have to fight battles and vile weather, while it should of course be open to recruitment from the lower deck. It will be dangerous if the officers lose touch with the crew, where anyway some individuals are likely to be much wider awake than the officers. I consider that the Catholic Church has been noticeably successful in this respect, as one would hope since the Most High founded her in the flesh of a humble man, and in spite of her many abuses of power. There are very many examples of humble men achieving the highest offices, including that of Pope.

     A common sense of purpose is essential in overcoming the alienation of the crew. Here we come to perhaps the most important unfashionable realisation:- religion is not a voluntary extra. It is indeed the ground of humanity's most spectacular successes and failures alike, rather like gardens, but if you try to write it out of the picture, it will only pop up in another form. Surely it is the void left by the decline of the languages of meaning with which people grew up that drives contemporary mayhem and madness. However, spilt religion is no substitute for the real thing. The sad fact is that the British officer class have not succeeded in realising, let alone communicating, a common sense of purpose, to replace the British Empire and inspire commitment to the European Project, along with, let us say, the transition to a just and sustainable society. Why, according to the Tory goddess Mrs Thatcher, 'there is no such thing as society'!

     You can only sustain such illusions when things are going reasonably well. They tried to fall back on a mere promise of greater individual wealth and security to motivate the crew, but clearly this does not stand up when it comes to addressing our present predicaments. Mr Nigel Farage has it that 'the father of Brexit' was King Henry VIII. I maintain that to really find a good way forward, the English need to start by recognising that the two related events, of King Hal's Reformation and the Referendum to leave the EU, were frankly mistaken; and even if you say there was something inevitable about them and all that happened in between, meaning in particular the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, these projects were severely and radically flawed too.  Does it really take the Irish to point this out? The bill is coming in now! 

     

     

The Middle Way

There is a little strip of gravelly sand between rocks down on the shore in front of our cottage. It faces south and when the tide is out provides a glorious suntrap, on the very rare occasions when I get to take advantage of it. But even then I am conscious of Spain across that sea to the south; I also find myself frequently conscious of St Michael's Way, the mysterious line that originates on Mount Carmel where the prophet Elijah called down the fire of Yahweh, flies to the Northwest by Delphi in Greece, and on by way of various special sites associated with St Michael, up through Italy and France to Mont St Michel, Mount St Michael in Cornwall and finally by Sherkin to Skellig Michael in Kerry.

     Paris and London, Rome and Jerusalem, probably most great cities are inclined sometimes at least to think of themselves as the Centre of the World. Since I conceive of the world in dynamic rather than static terms, I consider an arrow to be a more appropriate image than a point, if one is to seriously envisage this Centre; and a Centre of some kind there needs to be, if we are to conceive of some kind of united humanity. However the transition from a static concept of 'The Central' to a dynamic one is perhaps the essence of our contemporary crisis, because such 'Central' images that we have inherited tend to be stuck in a 'static' mind-set. In this context, and it may be nothing but my fanciful conceit, I have found myself conceiving of this St Michael's Line as a powerful physical emanation of the flaming central arrow of human consciousness, from the Holy Land by way of Greece and Rome and on to where the summer sun sets on old Europe.

     I say that the old business of a Centre that can 'hold', and which our Irish poet Yeats averred not to be holding, has tended to assume a somewhat anaemic complexion too much of the time because our understanding of it is still moored in the static concepts of the past. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity'. With English politics stubbornly installed at the forefront of our minds these days, it seems more critical than ever that the political Centre pulls itself together and finally finds its voice. There has to be more to it than the ususal 'bread and butter' stuff, but here is a voice that dare not speak its name, for fear of being called arrogant, imperialistic etc. It is however the one and only voice that can genuinely rise to the challenges, for instance, of climate change, of keeping the world safe from nuclear weapons, of developing the stable economic and social conditions necessary for humanity to flourish, of motivating us to overcome our differences and do the great deeds that we are at last being forced to recognise as essential to humanity's very survival.

     Even as I lie on that strip of sand, feet to the South, I am vaguely aware of America over to my right, and China away to my left. America may be fixated on the individual, and China on the collective, while of course in fact neither can do without the other and so they more or less cancel each other out and neither of them provide a satisfactory narrative of what human life is about. We may wonder at them and their great achievements, but I for one cannot admire either of them as a polis or wish us in Europe to emulate their societies. The question is, how can our tired old Europe hold the balance; and so we come back to this business of the Centre. I will no doubt stand accused of a blinkered arrogance, but  I do believe that it's as true nowadays as when Teilhard de Chardin said it that Europe cannot escape the responsibility of bearing the spearhead of human consciousness; the question is, how do we recover the strength and dynamism necessary to do so?

     Most of the time the wisest of us are only very faintly aware of all that is involved in sustaining our individual existance. We delude ourselves if we think politicians or anyone else is really capable of being in control; this perhaps is the reason why intelligent and balanced people have a tendency not to take politics seriously and to consider politicians most likely to be dodgy chancers with delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile we can find ourselves assuming that 'the Centre' is a boring place where everyone is trying to see everyone else's point of view and getting nothing done; full of intellectual, wishy-washy types, 'losers' as the Ducky would call them. So it is exciting to see in London politicians of the Centre showing real conviction lately and doing bold things. For myself, I cannot even vote for them, but they are making a difference even for us here in Sherkin; I would like to send them my good wishes and my prayers.

A Sea of Troubles.

What with looking after Fiona, with her broken collar-bone, doing the work that she usually does as well as trying to keep my own projects going, I have been working harder than I have done for a long time. Like so many people, according to what one hears, I am sick of following the twists and turns of British politics - it takes too much time and intellectual effort. Most of us would like to live our lives 'above politics', like the Queen. The royal example however is not good, and a Head of State that cannot call conflicting parties back to dialogue is of no use. The fact of the matter is that politics have a profound effect on the lives of everyone, and it's worse it's going to get; they are an essential dimension of our lives, and while most spirituality directs our minds beyond them, the Lord's prayer kicks off with what is surely a political statement - 'thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth....', even if at the same time that Kingdom is 'not of this world'.

     The trouble starts where politics descends into a mere power struggle, as it always tends to do on account of the prevalent narcissism of the human race. Why should we be bothered with that? Well, do we want to be slaves? The life-blood of real democracy is the sharing of both power and responsibility, and resolving conflict through dialogue and rational argument; it begins and ends with the sincere quest for truth and justice. What then can one say to power when it becomes the mere expression of will to dominate and manipulate? Which is about where the present British Government evidently stands - and this the first occasion I have had to say this in my lifetime. 

     No longer even truly rooted in the political tradition from which it sprang, or even in the collective mind of its boot-licking members, it is being driven by a shadowy and ruthless unelected individual and clique, who even have the previously bumbling and ineffective Prime Minister in hand - not that he has been elected to that office either. They really seem to believe that redemption can only come by way of disruption and indeed chaos. Whatever happened to 'the party of business'? One day it will all make a good film - not yet though, for it is actually happening now, though one has to pinch oneself to realise it.

     Yet such a will-to-power cannot get anywhere unless it taps in to some deep and widespread condition in the minds of its victims. In the backgoround of the present drama is deep and widespread anxiety about the way the world is going, and this is an intolerable and paralysing condition. It is so much easier to take refuge in the past than to set out against the 'sea of troubles' that confront us now. How nice the 1950s of their childhood appear to so many old voters now. England was full to the brim with complacent self-satisfaction, and a rosy future beckoned with all the goodies of technology. Pull up the drawbridge; let us get back to the good old days! The odd gent with a posh accent, a plausible way of talking, a smattering of learning and preferably a double-breasted suit is all to the good. 

     But what's in it for the men with deep pockets behind it all? Oh for the days when one could be a real capitalist, with none of your damn social and environmental responsibility! The world will go to Hell if it must - but in the meantime let those of us enjoy it who are smart enough to do so! And if swathes of industry is destroyed, along with the livelihoods that depend on it, well the little people can just get on their bikes. Not, however, to saner parts of Europe! But the real rich of this world have better ways of making money than actual production, and they don't even know what real patriotism is, in the sense of putting one's country before one's own interests.

     Clearly all this must be combatted, but what can we poor powerless people do about it? Well, we can start by listening to people who know what they are talking about and recognising the facts of a world so very much more inter-connected than it was even in the 1950s. We can insist that politicians are called back from mere power struggling to facts and to real dialogue about them. No grand and specious merely national aspirations can possibly deliver the goodies we all desire in the line of the quality of life. 

     The way ahead lies not in less inter-connectedness, but in much more of it, deeper and richer. We must not give way to anxiety, paralysis and laziness, along with the preference not to think or talk about how we can possibly get there! Discussion, meetings, strikes, demos, online efforts, they all have their place, but we must not forget to listen to those with whom we disagree and must insist on non-violence; non-communication is always the prelude to violence, so when people will not genuinely talk to to each other, watch out! There is plenty that can be done, - get out there, you young people, and do it - it's your future that is at stake!

Ut Migraturus Habita

The summer proper ended on Sherkin on the evening my Fiona fell off the style and broke her collarbone. It was one of those perfect evenings, August 11th; then the old west wind set in, cool and pleasant, but blustery and with the odd bit of rain. In addition to working away at finishing the West Room, I now find myself nurse, cook and housekeeper; it is my privilege and pleasure to be looking after herself for a change, but a shock to the system nonetheless, and a reminder of our mortality.

     When Ken Thompson came to visit us in our cottage in Somerset nearly 50 years ago, he spent most of his time chiselling Migraturus Habita across the large stone chimney breast. It means something like 'Live as one about to migrate'. I suppose he had the final journey in mind, but perhaps he didn't want us to get too comfortable where we were either, though I doubt if he foresaw that we would up and go to live in Ireland. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that we would have done so without his influence. I remain most grateful, even more so lately. I always felt that I was banging my head against a brick wall in Blighty. Nowadays, bad and all as it is to be watching the B saga from here, it would simply do my head in to be so arbitrarily deprived of my European citizenship. Had we stayed, I would not rate the chances of either my sanity or my marriage being in one piece very highly.

     Ireland is far from perfect, but especially here in the West I find myself on firmer ground. Our island home is better still.  Then there is the sea, which prevents us from getting too

Landfall, Galicia, 2007.

introverted. Over the horizon as we look out to the south is Santiago de Campostella. I find that very many people these days do not even know where the South is, but you may be sure the dear little swallows do, as they head that way so bravely; and just as surely, there is a sixth sense in every human being that tells them of that City over the far horizon which they yearn for even if they do not realise it. In fact every human society worth the name is like a ship's crew, bent towards that goal; otherwise they will soon be nothing but a mere brawling rabble, and their destination will be wreck upon the rocks.

     The inescapable life-task of a person, however dimly perceived, is to understand that far city more clearly and to relate to it more nearly, which necessarily entails sharing this perception with our fellow crewmen. Like any image of God and His Kingdom, such perception is necessarily very partial; but we have to try to share it with everyone whom we encounter, while respecting any concept they may have which enables them to steer a good course in more or less the right direction. As a Catholic I may believe that the Church actually holds the coordinates, though even this fact can bring on a kind of pride that takes us astray. As one approaches the Port of God's City, the entrance is fraught with danger; yet we have available to us the Supreme Pilot, who will not let us down. The wise ship's captain will trust this pilot, listening for his commands!

     Yet a funny thing happens, in any ship that is under good command, the crew working well together as they sail toward that far haven - which actually as it were comes to meet them, materialises even in their midst. The good ship already partakes of the life of her distant destination. That destination turns out to be something more than a city - it takes on the form of a person with a face. We may become caught up in the dynamic of the Trinity. God is both in His far, transcendent city, and in the here and now. But meanwhile vessels tack about with all kinds of strange ideas born of the longing deep within the breasts of their companies.

     I used to think that the 'Roman' bit added to the term 'Catholic' was rather an unfortunate prefix born of the need to distinguish us English Roman Catholics from our 'Anglo-Catholic' brethren, with their insistence on the outstanding classic English formulation of  'having one's cake and eating it'. Now I think it is much more valid and important, for it is this little prefix Roman that actually and genuinely situates the universal religion in history and the here and now. If we cannot identify it so, in our story and our human relationships, Heaven becomes pie-in-the-sky, hardly to be preferred to the fantasies of, for example, some workers' future utopia, a consumerist cornucopia or a myth of National Destiny.

     Messrs Johnson and Farrage are correct in identifying the EU with its Roman predecessor; there is a noble aspiration there that keeps cropping up in different forms. It's such a pity that they, and so much of contemporary culture, cannot appreciate the wonderful formula whereby the essential and positive spirit was in principle long since detached from the will of proud men, and remains available to form the basis of a new world. It is interesting that even the British Empire, having turned its back on 'the ghost of the Roman Empire', nonetheless continued to educate in the Latin language, to use it for mottos and scientific terms, and even to copy classical architecture. The awareness lingered that it remained embedded in the foundations of our later buildings. It was only in the death throes of the British Empire that the requirement to study Latin was dropped, if one was to study in the leading universities; it hardly helped in my working life that I was just in time to learn it, but I am grateful now.

    Our blessed Saviour drew a red line in history - no more narcissistic rulers setting themselves up as god-kings-emperors. However, they keep trying. Prophets who stand up to them and criticise them are being jettisoned again, though in this part of the world at least, they generally keep their heads on their shoulders nowadays. But must ships be actually wrecked before they are found to have been right? It's rather like watching drunken alcoholics going on a bender - how bad does it have to get before they pull themselves together? Or will they even manage to do so at all?                                                         

     

     

The Prize.

A world at peace with itself, mankind working in harmony

with nature. No more greedy individuals seeking to manipulate and dominate the rest of the world, everyone taking their share of ownership and along with it, responsibility, within renewed families, communities and indeed nations. Humanity cured at last of narcissism, orientated rather to the common good, to beauty, truth and justice. This prize, this dream is as old as human consciousness. Usually it has remained but a dream, more in the line of a fantasy than a firm vision upon which most people act. The difference today is that there are only a few short years left for us to actually make it happen, the alternative being unthinkable.

      Which presents us with the gravest of problems. Because this alternative is so unthinkable, we desperately avoid admitting that it is what we are currently heading for; added to which contemporary culture finds it very difficult to get a serious and practical handle on notions like 'the common good' and any vision that might sustain them. We are now way ahead of Narcissus, and we don't have to gaze into a pool to reassure ourselves with looking at our glorious reflection therein, to polish our 'image'; nowadays our mobile phone will do. Mighty corporations, with Facebook at their head, feed our narcissistic dreams. Small wonder that we find ourselves with narcissistic leaders. The cult of the individual, celebrating autonomy above all, has brought us to the very brink of massive self-destruction, with deranged individuals already and increasingly acting this out.

     This is the end of the road for 'progressive liberalism', now hopelessly compromised by the neo version. I do not mean for believing in human progress and freedom, but for the mistaken idea that these can be achieved by stripping humanity of all context and reference points beyond those dictated by the cult of individual autonomy, the markets and the survival of the fittest. As liberalism became neo-. we have watched on as progress came to mean deconstruction, a zero-sum game, till madmen gun down their sisters and brothers for no reason but the anti-logic of evil, while, by no coincidence, we find ourselves increasingly subject to leaders who take that narcissistic cult to levels beyond the constraints of your normal, sane and decent person. The results are coming in. For instance the Ducky, who set out 'to make America Great Again', has much diminished the standing of his country in the eyes of sane people all over the world. As for what Mr Johnson bids fair to do to his country.... 

     Our dilemma may be becoming more acute by the day, but such observations as the above are very far from being new. Sometimes they have sent people crazy, ricocheting off into other forms of madness, be they of the left or right wing variety. One institution, one tradition, has managed to keep more or less a sane balance down two millenia. I refer to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet trying to extract a viable political stance from it remains problematic. I had a go in the 1990s, as a parliamentary candidate for the Christian Solidarity Party here in Ireland. Among other things, I got myself called a fascist by some for my trouble. Indeed one finds that the very mention by Catholics of the term 'the common good' sometimes provokes this reaction, from people who of course have not bothered to look up the term in, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which begins by stating 'First, the common good presupposes respect for the person as such.' Such is the difficulty that contemporary culture tends to have with what the Catechism calls 'the social nature of man'! We are however in the process of getting a crash course in this, a lesson which will just get tougher and tougher until we take it aboard. Evidently the last such course, at the time of World War II, was suffered and taken much more to heart by our continental neighbours than by the English.

      Uppermost in the minds of the founders of the European movement, many of whom were influenced by the social teaching of the Catholic Church, was the absolute desire that such a calamity should never be repeated.  They proceeded on the basis of mutual respect and negociation between the parties, which of course was the opposite of the way the British Empire was founded. Meanwhile our Brexiteers evidently care to ignore the stupendous fact that the European nations have been living an unprecedented degree of peace and prosperity since it was initiated. Mr Johnson of course pays lip service to this unity, and indeed, at least in that iteration of himself which produced a tv series and book entitled 'The Dream of Rome'  back in 2006, is fascinated by it and its historical pedigree. One reviewer states:'his points on the free movement of goods throughout the Roman Empire contributing to a sense of commonality of identity among Europeans are well taken'. 

     Meanwhile nowadays Mr Johnson even trashes its fruit of peace in Ireland; however, I shall grudge him a little credit for at least taking an interest in the relationship between Ancient Rome and the EU.  We seem to have reached very different conclusions, yet even from an Irish perspective, one may well ask whether it is desirable, having recently (more or less) escaped one empire, to get involved in another? How are we to disentangle the common threads, and the radical difference, between the Roman and the British Empires and the European Union?

     I came across this very amusing transcript* of a conversation between Mr Johnson when he was researching that book of his and an archaeology professor, Andrea Caradini, who was excavating a Roman Imperial Palace at the time:- Professor Caradini: "You would like to be an emperor, I can see it in your eyes." Johnson: "I can see a worse fate." The very essence of empire after all is top-down rule - command and control by the great Emperor. Is this the kind of rule that Prime Minister Johnson aspires to? There are signs that this is so, in the way pioneered by his friend The Ducky, which nickname, I would remind you, is my way of rendering Mussolini's title of Il Duce, the Leader or Fuhrer or whatever, into Donald Duckese. 

     Perhaps in its dependence on love of the Supreme Leader, we may actually also divine a positive side to the concept of empire, as it came down to us with so much influence from the Roman version, pace Asterix. A Protestant such as Thomas Hobbes found it aposite to dismiss it as a 'heathen empire' and along with it the 'kingdom of darkness' that was the papacy as 'the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof'. Not that he eschewed the concept of empire itself - in his dismal and materialistic world view, 'The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone', so the only alternative to life being 'nasty, brutish and short' was a strong monarch. 'To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.' How could this conceivably describe an empire that was supposed to be not 'heathen' and the opposite of 'a kingdom of darkness'?

     Such thinking had a dire but formative effect upon the British Empire. Thomas Hobbes and Mr Johnson would seem to have this in common: they lack a genuine, interiorised sense of good and bad, right and wrong, and are good at standing words on their heads. The one seems to have studied  well the other! But that ghost of which Hobbes speaks in fact performed the amazing feat of disentangling from any narcissistic ruler the personal love, upon which any transcendent commitment of our fealty, and hence sense of truth and good, must depend, if it is not to diminish us and destroy our integrity and freedom as a an individual person. Instead supreme fealty was invested in the Lord Jesus Christ. Did this entail the end of the Roman Empire? Maybe; yet it left that vital positive force for love of our fellows and the whole world available to future societies, and to ourselves in the here and now. The history of Europe since could be seen as one attempt after another to embody it. Now it is looking as if we shall not last much longer unless we make a better fist of it!

     
*https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1197612/