Booming Back

What about meeeeeee? (Competing in the Olympiad of Middle Class Guilt - Part II)

2012-02-23T21:09:00.019Z

We Are All Clowns Now, part of a series by CANVAZ
Temple Lane South, Dublin, 23rd February

Possibly the best catchphrase in the world was recently taught to me by the four year old son of a good friend, who upon seeing any of the grown-ups in the room talking amongst themselves would sidle up to one of them and with big anime doe eyes enquire, "What about meeeeeee?". I know not whether this comes from an epilepsy-inducing cartoon, a tale of anthropomorphic trains or is the product of his own overachieving mind, but it lodged in my brain like a photo-op of a skipping Taoiseach gamboling across the street eager to have his head patted by any passing European technocrats.

While I do not like to give my parenting friends advise on child-rearing (or rather, they do not like to hear my marvelous suggestions, no matter how many times I tell them that children are the key to competing with China's prison labour factories), I do believe this lad has a bright future ahead of him in print media, possibly as the editor of The Irish Times, for in essence their recent "Ireland's Squeezed Middle" series that set out to "examine how Ireland's squeezed middle is coping with wage cuts, job losses and debt" amounted to nothing more than one long plaintive cry of "What about meeeeeee?"

Over on his blog Richard McAleavey took the paper to task, accusing it of:

"trying to fashion a depoliticised readership … with a newfound sense of common identity, forged amid recession, which can be easily and productively targeted by potential advertisers… [that] instead of creating political engagement on the part of citizens, concerns are fostered and appetites are stimulated… [for] the function of the Irish Times, along with that of other Irish newspapers, is to present a political programme, the imposition of mass unemployment and the destruction of the welfare state, which is being conducted in the interests of the wealthiest groups in Irish society, as a moral imperative, divinely ordained."

He argued that the ultimate goal of the series was to remove the working class from the equation altogether in the minds of the readers, to extinguish any questions of class conflict by denying their existence (as in the US mantra that "we are all middle class now") or focusing attention elsewhere. I found myself nodding along with McAleavey's assessment, grumbling to myself about those damn petty bourgeois with their private health insurance and their newspaper buying ways, shaking my fist angrily in the air with a loud "Harumph! Harumph!", and then suddenly I realised, "wait a minute, I'm middle class! I have health insurance, I read newspapers, what about meeeeeee?"

Back in the early days of #OccupyDameStreet I found solace in the nominally apolitical nature of the protest, writing somewhat naively that:

"What attracted me to #OccupyDameStreet in the first place, and keeps me coming back day after day, is the fact that it has dispensed with the language and trappings of the old political order and is unafraid to try something new. Hierarchies and leadership, manifestos and party dogma, simple majority rule and the language of class warfare have all been discarded for something far more inclusive, organic, and yes, very messy at times. This is not about Nineteenth Century notions of Left and Right, of workers and bosses, of Socialists and Capitalists, it is about social equality, fairness, justice and inclusivity."

and McAleavey quickly challenged me on this approach, arguing that:

"a frequent rite of passage for any neoliberal technocrat who aspires to a position of political power is to disavow the idea that politics involves a differentiation between left and right, but requires in its stead a coalition around a vague consensus (which leaves prevailing power structures untouched)"

which stopped me in my tracks and prompted a major rethink on the language of protest, leading me to ask if:

"by avoiding the language of those traditions from which [the Occupy Movement] has evolved is it playing by a set of rules created by the very system it is trying to overthrow? By shying away from terms like "workers" and "bosses" because they are too loaded and alienate many is it simply refusing to confront a system that has attempted to relegate the historical language of struggle and resistance into hollow pastiches? When we look for more inclusive words suitable for the 21st Century are we tacitly acknowledging the victory of the 1%, the bosses, over the resistors of the 20th Century, and the 19th, 18th and 17th and so on back to the dawn of the first hierarchies? By changing the words we use are we already acknowledging the supremacy in the 21st Century of the 1%, of the bosses?"

Nearly four months later it now seems that the global Occupy Movement has lost a significant amount of steam, somewhere along the way as we crossed over the artificial barrier between 2011 and 2012. It's certainly not done, dusted and ready to be relegated to the dusty annals of history, but unfortunately it cannot be denied that it is not the vibrant force for change that it once promised to be - hopefully this is just a lull and Spring will see it bloom once more, but...

Now I've lived through this roller-coaster of hope and disappointment before, a decade ago with the alter-globalisation movement. After the Battle for Seattle the attention shifted to Europe, with mass demonstrations in Prague, Gothenburg and finally in Genoa where the deaths of Carlo Giuliani at the hands of a police bullet and Susanne Bendotti, struck by a vehicle as she tried to cross the Italian border at Ventimiglia to join the protest, shocked the world. Two months later the Twin Towers fell, and George W. launched the global War on Terror that silently added anti-capitalists to the Axis of Evil, classifying their actions as the work of domestic terrorists along with environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and anyone else who dared to stand up to a morally bankrupt system that oppressed the majority for the benefit of a tiny minority.

The collapse of the alter-globalisation movement came at the hands of an external event and the opportune neo-liberals who capitalized upon it. The slow-down of the Occupy Movement has no such obvious external influencers, it just seems to have run out of steam, and this is what causes me to revisit my early struggles with the language used, of the 1% and the 99%.

My biggest fear around this is that the global Occupy Movement will turn out to be nothing more than a release valve for the tension built up by Western middle classes over the last three years of recession, an opportunity for them to vent their frustration, feel like they have accomplished something by taking a stand, and then turn their heads back to the grind of daily life and the dilemma of where their next mochafrapachocaccino is going to come from, with the status quo remaining firmly in place. I also fear that the language of the 99% has allowed them to express their resentment at being excluded from real economic and political power without having to question their own roles in facilitating the oppression of the working classes.

Like white suburban kids adopting the clothes, music and language of marginalized inner city African-Americans, affording them a sense of rebellion without either having to experience real hardship themselves or acknowledge the deprivation of others from which the appropriated music and language originally emerged as a response, do cries of "We are the 99%" allow those same suburban kids (and their parents) to clothe themselves in righteous indignation without having to face their own culpability in the marginalization of others?

Back in April of last year, long before the word "Occupy" was ever heard raised in triumph above a single tent, Conor McCabe wrote about the need for the middle classes to awaken:

"It is probably a waste of time telling the middle class of Ireland this - smugness and entitlement and all that - but class is not about choices or purchases or consumption or decking. It is about power. Who has it, and who doesn't... Class is not about choice. It is about power. And the power of the middle classes is just that: middling."

Six months later the middle classes awoke and joined the proletariate on the streets, but by ignoring the traditional language of Class War in favour of something altogether fluffier and more inclusive were the protests neutered from the start because they failed to challenge the fundamental inequalities of the Capitalist system explicitly?

I know that here in Ireland #OccupyDameStreet was/is explicitly an anti-Capitalist movement, though at times it may have struggled to articulate that, but elements of the much larger Occupy Movement in the US shied away from such terms, arguing that they weren't anti-Capitalism, just anti-corporate greed. In this way they gave the appearance not of seeking to change the system, but simply complaining that others were getting a greater piece of the pie than they were, in effect their part of the Occupy Movement was nothing more than one long plaintive cry of "What about meeeeeee?".

Thus for the middle classes are Occupy and The Squeezed Middle just two sides of the same coin, two ways of dealing with the sudden realisation that they, as Conor McCabe suggested, have no power and never really did, with one side allowing anger to be expressed in an ultimately harmless way, the other providing solace and comfort in the form of shared commiserations expressed over a renewed consumerism?

Even with all this on my mind, I'm not prepared to abandon the terminology of the 99%, I still feel it has a unifying power and articulates so much in such a simple phrase. Then again I would say that, for I am part of The Squeezed Middle.

This is a very pessimistic picture that I am painting here, of course, driven partly by my own middle class angst and my uncertainty over my own role in both the causes of this crisis and any possible solutions, and it is far, far too early to write the epitaph of the global Occupy Movement. Even if nothing more were to come of it, it is still something to say that for four months millions of people around the world stood up and said "Enough!".

I just hope that what we are witnessing is not the epilogue of this story, but its prologue.

Solve for OmNomNom

2012-02-22T12:39:00.001Z

Seen this morning at The Cake Cafe, apparently it is the equation for making a cake rise.

On an unrelated but related note, and although I haven't actually been yet (given that I normally make it down only for the last day), the current exhibition on in the Science Gallery is entitled Edible, is all about food, and looks rather good.

I'm only posting about this now because someone complained that I only ever write about things after they've closed, so you have no excuses now, off you all go.

Citius, Altius, Maxima Culpa (Competing in the Olympiad of Middle Class Guilt)

2012-02-21T19:16:00.023Z

We Are All Clowns Now, part of a series by CANVAZ
Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin, 15th February

While wandering home late last night I bumped into a few of the #unlockNAMA folks pasting up posters on a disused building, and dressed in my business finery I think they all got a bit of a fright as I stopped to greet them. Thanks to the amazing Pancreatitis-plan fitness regime (TM) wherein one can lose 25% of one's body weight in under twenty weeks I no longer appear as garda-like as I once did, but for those used to seeing me only in my Lenin-stepping-off-a-train-in-St-Petersburg Dame Street attire, meeting me in the Really Real World can still come as something of shock. Even though for four months now I've started every media interview with the phrase "Well I'm a business man...", it is becoming apparent that most folks sharing the barricades with me thought that was all just a big fib, an elaborate ruse to hide my secret shame of standing at the bottom of Grafton Street all day in a giant foam leprechaun suit separating gullible tourists from their hard currency in exchange for a glorious green Kodak moment.

For once it has been work and not illness that has kept me from the barricades, these last three weeks have been something of a blur as I have been simultaneously advising an internet start-up on their online revenue plan whilst conducting due-diligence on a second start-up on behalf of a potential investor, leading to some very jarring segues as I moved from a three hour revenue-modeling workshop to a two hour session on facilitating autonomous leaderless resistance. My life has become a nineties' Michael Mann thriller where the action cuts between two parallel stories that you know are destined to collide - and that's the best case scenario (the alternative being that I am Tyler Durden, and have been all along, dun-dun-duuuuun!). One of these projects has now come to an end, and hopefully the second will finish up this week, so with any luck next week will see my gallant return to the streets rallying against the evils of Capitalism, and I will steadfastly ignore the fact that this week I was Capitalism's pimp.

This is the juxtaposition that I find myself in, I have worked for twenty years now and been a boss for the vast majority of that. If call centres are the factories of the 21st century, then I have spent most of my working life as an unwitting paragon of post-Fordism, and while I finally said "enough!" four years ago and removed myself from the shackles of the globalized flat earth nightmare that neo-liberals would foist upon us all, I still earn my living in that grey area called "consultancy" that is the very embodiment of the "What I do/What my friends think I do" internet meme (I might as well say I'm a transpondster for all the good it does).

Helena Sheehan (who published a great essay yesterday asking "Is history a coherent story?") once asked me what my politics were, and I described myself as a Watermelon, green on the outside, red on the inside with black seeds running throughout. I see myself as planted firmly on the hard left, but I am a political agnostic in that I espose no single creed, drawing inspiration from many theorists and ideas. I have spent the bulk of the last four years attempting to educate myself as much as possible on the causes of, and solutions to, social injustice and looming over me from the clutter of my shelves are the many thoughts of an array of ideologs from Kropotkin and Bookchin, Gramsci and Agamben, to Rancière and Gorz, Virilio, Žižek and more Badiou than any one person should ever try and digest, and all that this has taught me is that while I still have no solutions to offer I now know in infinitely greater detail exactly what we are all doing wrong, especially me.

*sigh*

The last four months have been, for me, a concerted effort to move beyond an academic appreciation of the issues and confront the reality head-on. More than this they have also been an attempt to identify solutions and concrete alternatives. I have transitioned from grumpy misanthrope hurling sarcastic barbs on a website to a grumpy misanthrope hurling sarcastic barbs on the barricades (and then recounting those barbs on several websites), and no doubt even as we speak Jim Fitzpatrick is preparing to transform my confused visage into an iconic image that will adorn the bedroom walls of sullen youths for generations to come, but still I worry that each encounter with my fellow revolutionaries will end with me volunteering for my own show trial because sadly (but predictably) I will accept their inevitable accusations that I am nothing more than a running dog of capitalism.

According to Alex Butterworth's curious The World That Never Was, the gentleman revolutionary was all the rage in the twilight of the nineteenth century, with well-heeled anarchists, communards and socialists cutting a dapper swathe through the gentrified Victorian society. While I am certainly no gentleman and am incapable of cutting a swathe, dashing or otherwise, even if you gave me a pair of garden shears and a roadmap, I wish that I wasn't so self-conscious about arriving to a rally straight from work and wearing cufflinks. While a quick trawl through the internets shows that at least one enterprising person has a solution to this dilemma (which seems like cheating although Spanish anarchists during the Civil War weren't so afraid to wear their colours on their sleeves), cufflinks are but a symptom of my psychological malaise, and not the illness itself.

The problem is that after four years of study and four months of action I have yet to identify what my role in all this is, to find something or someone that speaks directly to me and articulates my own vision of what is wrong, and what can be done to remedy it. Many things have come close, but then the language of Class War erupts or worse, something akin to Blair's abhorrent 'Third Way' is mooted, and I shift uncomfortably in my seat and cast my gaze downwards.

I struggle with the language of Class War, not because I disagree with the sentiments expressed, but out of a sense of exclusion born from my position as a medal contender in the Olympiad of middle-class guilt. When Jeffrey Sachs gets up and says, 'The IMF is bad, m'kay", I find myself saying, "of course you know the IMF is bad, you helped them destroy Russia, Bolivia and Poland, all the Millenium Development Goals in the world won't make up for the fact that you perfected the Shock Doctrine". Similarly although I myself have never knowingly exploited workers, I was nonetheless part of a system whose very existence engenders exploitation, and thus I find myself shuffling nervously at the back of activist meetings when talk turns to class politics, staring intensely at my phone like a schoolchild avoiding their teacher's eyes in the hope of not being called on to answer the difficult question, "And what did you do in the Class War?".

As you can see, with my existential angst, cufflinks are the least of my problems. Seriously, the sooner Mary Davis gets the IOC to approve the Middle Class Guilt Pentathlon the sooner I will help Ireland return to the golden days of Michelle Smith, Cian O'Connor and Denis Lynch.

This is why I find myself drawn to the language of the 99% vs the 1%, for I can say without equivocation that I am most definitely not part of the 1%, but during his recent talk at the #unlockNAMA event on Great Strand Street, Conor McCabe expressed his hatred for the phrase "the 99%", saying that it masked the real failures of Capitalism and obscured the genuine Class War, that the only people that couldn't see that there was a Class War were those who were on the wrong side. It made me seriously question whether the use of the "99%" phrase was simply a way for middle-class folks to let themselves feel like they were the oppressed, and not the oppressors.

I struggled with this notion back in the early days of #OccupyDameStreet, but put it on the back burner as something to be tackled another day. However as this new year has progressed and my time on Dame Street decreased in correlation to my increasing workload, my daily sojourns at the Camp collapsing into weekly flying visits as we hit February, the smell from the imaginary kitchen at the back of my mind tells me my saucepan of guilt is threatening to catch fire if left untended for too much longer.

What my role in all this is, what my contributions to the ongoing struggle for Social Justice can and should be, and how I square this all with what it is that I do to put food on the table and a roof over my head, are all issues that I need to resolve in my own mind, and soon.

These are the thoughts that paralysed me during the nano-second that elapsed between meeting the lads out plastering up posters last night and their friendly greeting, "Howerya Dave, see you at the next one, right?", demonstrating clearly that no one but me gives a damn about what I have done, only what I am doing now to take a stand and to try and make things better.

That said, with the Olympics less than a 158 days away there's still plenty of time left for me to get some training in for that Pentathlon.

Yay!

Oh, its also worth stressing that the CANVAZ piece above has absolutely nothing to do with the #unlockNAMA posters I refer to, the image of a sad clown in a business suit just seemed apt. The #unlockNAMA posters look more like this:

Things to do in Dublin when in Debt

2012-02-18T12:05:00.009Z

#unlockOmNomNom, because nothing says autonomous resistance like baked vegan treats
#unlockNAMA, 66-67 Great Strand Street, 28th January

Once again laid low by chronic pancreasness, I will not be attending today's solidarity rally outside the Greek Embassy, nor will I be marching with the single parents of SPARK! in their campaign against the Government's austerity measures (despite being the proud son of a single mother myself), or even today's meet-up of anti-authoritarian groups in Seomara Spraoi (Dublin's answer to the Italian Centro Sociales). Instead I will be spending the day, like most of the last three days, in bed, contemplating the nature of existence and why bad things happen to reasonably inoffensive people. This week, and thanks to my faulty pancreas, I have a particularly annoying migrating pain, hopping up and down through my innards like a checker on its way to be kinged. Most of the time it rests just below the base of my sternum, but occasionally it dives south an inch or two to just above my navel, and as these two locations are equidistant from the seven-inch scar left behind from the last bit of surgical pruning my pancreas received, the whole experience is like watching a very slow game of Pong take place within my tum-tum.

In fact I am reminded of a story from the first day or two of #OccupyLondon, when the police arrived in force to prevent more people from camping on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, forming a line of Bobbies separating those on the steps from the growing crowd attempting to join them. While the police were expecting the restive crowd to turn hostile at the kettling exercise, instead folks pulled out a few racquets and started to play a giant game of badminton with the police line as the net. Sadly no record exists of which side won.

Thus with my body yet again betraying me at a most inopportune time, and while I await the fugue of pain medication to envelop me in its velvet tentacles, rendering me incapable of anything more intellectually stimulating than watching a Come Dine With Me marathon (ironic, given that I am also incapable of eating at the moment), I thought I would misquote G. Bernard Shaw in an appalling fashion, for since today I am unable to "do", I might as well write. While today's adventures in horizontal autonomous political activism will go on without me, I shall instead regale you with a tale of the last such action I participated in, way back in the heady mists of time we like to call "three weeks ago today".

Our current political and economic morasse has provoked a number of reactions, mostly on a very small scale, from the weekly Ballyhea Bondholder marches in rural Cork through to the ongoing #Occupy protests in most major Irish cities. While not huge in numbers, the spirit of the autonomous self-organised action groups existing outside of traditional political structures has nonetheless succeeded in capturing the public imagination in a positively disproportionate manner. The latest of these activist collectives that I have been following is the #unlockNAMA group in Dublin.

In case you have been living on the moon for the last year or two (the moon behind shorthand for anywhere outside of Ireland), NAMA is the National Assets Management Agency, a special purpose vehicle established by the last Fianna Fail/Green Government to take all the distressed commercial properties off the hands of the banks and the developers so they didn't have to worry about them anymore, and place them on the shoulders of the citizenry who apparently didn't have enough to be dealing with at the time. Where developers were unable to pay back the banks on outstanding property-related loans, instead of sending them to jail like they do ordinary citizens in financial difficulties, the Government used the public purse to buy the affected loan book and properties at a reduced rate, wiping away the developers' debt and then hiring those developers at six-figure salaries to manage their distressed properties supposedly on behalf of the Irish citizenry, with a view to selling them on at some mythical point in the future when they become something other than worthless. Although NAMA was created by the Government and funded entirely with money from the public purse it insists that it is a private institution and thus not subject to pesky little things like the Freedom of Information act. This makes it impossible for the citizenry to know things like who exactly is being paid by NAMA, what properties it is managing, or how exactly it is planning to get any money back for the people of this country that are unfairly shouldering the massive burden.

This lack of transparency and accountability have caused a small group of activists in Dublin to rise up, and on the 28th of January the #unlockNAMA group launched their first public action with the seizing of a building managed by NAMA at 66-67 Great Strand Street in the city centre, with the intent of holding it for a single day and transforming it into a pop-up cultural centre, before retuning it to the State in a better condition than they found it in. Identifying a NAMA building wasn't an easy task, for there is no complete and public registry of properties transferred to NAMA, even though the public now own them. Originally owned by the Quakers in the 19th Century and run for a while as an educational institute, in the 20th Century the site became the headquarters of St John's Ambulance before being sold on to a series of commercial owners in the 1960's. In 2006 Anglo Irish Bank provided a mortgage for the building to developer Hugh O'Regan, who owned the nearby Morrsion Hotel, and during his ownership it was essentially a vacant building, acting as a sometime storehouse for the hotel while it rapidly fell into a state of neglect. By 2010 O'Regan's property empire had collapsed, and NAMA took possession of most of it, including the building at 66-67 Great Strand Street, appointing the solicitors firm Martin Ferris to act as the agent for the property, and it was this bit of legal smoke and mirrors that allowed NAMA to deny that it was the owner of the building, as they do when questioned about most properties on their books. While the Morrison has since been sold to Russia's richest woman for a reported €20 million, there is no word on whether the property on Great Strand Street was included in the transaction.

Posing as potential buyers for the property members of the #unlockNAMA group were able to scout out the building a number of days in advance to identify what could be done with it during the planned day's event and how much work would be needed to done to make it safe for members of the public to enter - it really was in a terrible state of disrepair. Gaining access through means as yet undetermined they entered the building a day or so before the event and set about tidying it up, and then at 9:30am on Saturday morning they announced to the world their location and that they were open for business, and thus I moseyed on down with my camera to have a look-see.

Conor McCabe explores the hows and whys of NAMA
#unlockNAMA, 66-67 Great Strand Street, 28th January

Now I wasn't involved in any shape or form with any of the planning or execution of the building repurposing, but when I arrived I was delighted to see that I knew a good few of the people who had been, and I think that a large part of the day's success was due to who its organisers were. A small group, the planning for the event seemed to have been both extensive and meticulous, with everyone involved knowing exactly what their role on the day was, and where they should be. The media team had been alerting the public and the Fourth Estate for a few days in advance to prepare for the location to be announced, and by the time I got there a number of journalists were already interviewing both the organisers and folks who had just wandered along. A single floor had been reclaimed for public use, repurposed as a large lecture hall with a media anteroom and working toilets. A full day of talks were planned, with author and academic Conor McCabe speaking on the history and role of NAMA at lunctime, and economist Michael Taft and academic Andy Storey due to speak later in the afternoon.

The morning went very well, radio and online reports of the event brought in curious and supportive members of the public, and the room was packed by the time McCabe invoked the Book of Habakuk to explain NAMA (always a crowd pleaser, when your crowd contains Consulting Theologians like myself), and posed the question, "If residential property caused this crash then why aren't residential properties in NAMA?", and as we broke up shortly afterwards for lunch a feeling of overwhelming optimism and positivity filled the building, a feeling that, as we would soon learn, neither Martin Ferris nor An Garda Síochána were too happy about.

Once word of the takeover hit the airwaves, Martin Ferris, the firm appointed by NAMA to manage the property, sent down a security guard to see what was going on. He entered the building, switched on and off the fire alarm to make sure it was still working, and then he headed off to report back in to Martin Ferris, who subsequently called the gardaí. Interestingly enough it was not uniformed officers that arrived, but a number of plain clothes special branch officers, who wandered in to have a look around, ask folks what was going on and then, presumably after checking back in with their superiors, returned to order everyone to leave, and it was at this point that the #unlockNAMA group called their own solicitors.

As uniformed members of the gardaí arrived to seal off the building, preventing anyone entering or exiting, negotiations began with the group inside, made a bit more complicated by the fact that the gardaí kept asking to speak to the group's leader, not fully grasping the concept of an autonomous leaderless resistance movement. However certain members of the #unlockNAMA group had been tasked with liaising with the gardaí, and so began shuttling back and forth between the 50 or so people inside the building and the gardaí outside. According to the gardaí, Martin Ferris claimed ownership of the building, denying that it was held by NAMA, and accused the group of both trespass and intimidation of the security guard that dropped by earlier (apparently the fact that there were 50+ people, even when acting entirely peacefully and non-confrontationally, classifies as intimidation). The group inside the building collectively discussed a response, and consensus was reached on agreeing to leave the building, but the gardaí were asked to give the group an hour to allow them to remove all their equipment and return the site to as pristine a condition as possible (and a far better condition than it was found in).

As the #unlockNAMA solicitor negotiated with both the gardaí and the solicitor from Martin Ferris, a curious thing happened, while initially the gardaí had just asked everyone to leave, they now demanded that everyone inside give their names, addresses and dates of birth as a condition of being released without charge, failure to do so would result in arrest for trespass and intimidation. When asked why this was necessary, the gardaí replied that it was for "insurance purposes", that they needed a record of all who were inside to prevent future bogus injury claims from people who were not present. On the advice of the #unlockNAMA solicitor, who said that he had agreed with Martin Ferris that no charges would be made then or at any future date against anyone who complied, those remaining inside collectively agreed to these terms and started to pack up the lecture room and all the other equipment, then proceeded to file past a number of gardaí who jotted down everyone's details before they were allowed to leave the building. While I was unhappy with my own details being taken, I thought that protestations of "but its my day off, I wasn't even supposed to be here" would have rung hollow after spending the previous four hours tweeting updates and photos from the scene.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining how it came to pass that as I emerged from the building carrying a stack of chairs I walked straight into a media throng with reporters and tv crews, and how my face subsequently ended up being splashed up all over the Six-One news that evening.

My first perp walk. My mammy must have been so proud.

The media pounce on exiting activists
#unlockNAMA, 66-67 Great Strand Street, 28th January

Given that the intention was never to hold a prolonged action, repurposing the building for but a single day to raise public awareness, I think it is safe to call the event a success despite the abrupt ending facilitated by the gardaí. But what is to be learned from the day as a whole?

Well, we now know where the line is as far as the Government and An Garda Síochána are concerned. The Central Bank have been happy enough (and by "happy" I mean "not very happy at all but the alternatives would be a PR disaster") to let #OccupyDameStreet remain camped at their gates for the last four months, with similar reactions from Cork and Galway City Councils to the Occupations there. NAMA is a different matter altogether, for while there may be elements of the public and media who dismiss the Occupy groups as a bunch of scrounging hippies, there surely can be no-one in the country that has a good word to say about NAMA (except for the developers and the 68% of Green Party members who voted in favour of it at their special conference back in October 2009, the only citizens who were given a chance to reject it, and who sadly put their own short-sighted interests ahead of the country as a whole, driving another nail into our collective national coffin), thus it would appear that those in authority fear that NAMA may become a flash-point for public discontent, and moved very quickly to stamp it out.

This level of public support was very much in evidence, both on the ground at the time and in subsequent reports of the day's action. I spoke with one of the organisers who had been interviewed later on a TV3 chatshow, and at the end of the interview the host finished up by saying, "well good luck with the next one", ignoring or uninterested in the fact that a building takeover was potentially a criminal act, not a mildly diverting weekend hobby. Nobody save the banks, developers, the Government (and the Greens) wanted NAMA, and the presence of so many deserted and crumbling buildings is a daily reminder of the humiliation that we as citizens have been made to face to cover the private gambling debts of our nation's elites.

Shortly after this event, the City Council announced details of a scheme to encourage landlords with vacant buildings to let them out on a temporary basis to artists and cultural groups. This will be a voluntary scheme, and all the Council are doing is putting prospective tenants in touch with landlords, no reduction in rates are being offered and rents are a matter for negotiation between tenants and landlords. While any initiative to boost the city's cultural sphere is welcome, when so much of the nation's vacant property is in fact owned by the State and is set to remain unoccupied for many years while NAMA waits for the property market to pick up before reselling, it seems ludicrous that the government itself doesn't throw open the doors of these buildings to the citizenry that has paid for them, offering them rent free as cultural, artistic and community centres.

#unlockNAMA has three main demands, to make NAMA properties available for social and community use, that NAMA publish full addresses and details on all properties under them, and that NAMA publish full details on all sales of NAMA assets. The takeover and repurposing of 66-67 Great Strand Street was just the first in a series of actions designed to highlight these demands, and I will be watching with great interest to see how their campaign unfolds.

(hopefully it will involve less footage of me on the TV)

For #unlockNAMA's account of the day, check out their post on Irish Left Review. For more information on the mysterious and macabre twilight world of NAMA, check out the anonymous blog Nama Wine Lake. It predates and is unaffiliated with the #unlockNAMA folks, and it is currently the best resource for understanding how NAMA works and how the Government is using it to pull a fast one on the Irish people.

A musical interlude to cleanse the palete

2012-02-15T21:52:00.002Z

Here's something of a palate cleanser to remove the mental image of Enda, Biffo et all lipsticking-up a pig, courtesy of those nice people in Warp.

First up is Cracking Eggs taken from In Ghostlike Fading, the debut album from Brooklyn five piece My Best Fiend, out on the 20th of this month. Yes, they're from Brooklyn, but we won't hold that against them, especially as they take their name from Werner Herzog's disturbing cinematic account of his love/hate relationship with his long-time collaborator Klaus Kinski.

Next up, and altogether more Warp-ey is Set Loose from the vinyl/digital only EP Endless Paths from Vancouver-based Babe Rainbow released back in June of last year, which is odd, because somehow this completely passed me by. It's almost as if I had something on my mind in June, some sort of distraction that kept me from noticing new music.

I hope that makes you feel better now, I promise I won't refer to pig-kissing again.

Probably.

She's got her lipstick on, hit and run, then I'm gone

2012-02-13T12:34:00.004Z

A Fiscal Compact, a Bank Guarantee, or possibly Austerity Measures for which there are no alternatives
(because we all partied too hard)

Back in the deep dark mists of time when I worked for a giant Internet multinational I had a boss who, although Irish, had spent most of his working career in the US and was more attuned to an American corporate culture than an Irish one. A good man, nonetheless he never met a buzzword or a tortured metaphor that he didn't like. Meetings "went off track" and "down rat holes" until we "parked" issues temporarily, sensitive topics were discussed under a "code of Omertà" and we had to be careful not to "open the kimono" too soon. By far and away his favourite expression, and one that took us many weeks to finally understand, was when he compared something to the futility of putting "lipstick on a pig".

An updated take on the silk purse/sow's ear scenario, the idea behind this is that you can put as much lipstick on a pig as you like, but it's still a pig, and presumably you wouldn't want to kiss it.

But what happens when you know its a pig, and you are still forced to kiss it?

In the first episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror trilogy, a fictional British Prime Minister is literally faced with that exact dilemma. A popular Royal is kidnapped and the sole ransom demand, uploaded onto YouTube, is that he perform an act of gross indecency with a pig on live television. The program follows the rapid disintegration of a man faced by an inescapable outcome and all the lipstick in the world cannot mask the fact that it is a pig that he will be, um, kissing.

Black Mirror is an examination of the dehumanizing and alter-humanizing effects of new media on society, in this first episode the Government reacts immediately by banning traditional print, radio and television companies from mentioning either the kidnap or the terms of the ransom, a futile move in the age of social networks where the ransom video goes viral in a matter of hours. Once viral the international media picks up the story, thus the rest of the world and anyone with a smartphone can see the horror for themselves while terrestrial television reports nothing but bland celebrity gossip.

Last night Greece burned. Tens of thousands of ordinary Greek citizens took to the streets to protest at the EU-mandated austerity measures being debated in Parliament, and as night fell and the families had been replaced in the squares by more hardened activists, the night erupted in tear-gas and flames as the police moved in. Live on screen Lukas Papademos, the Goldman Sachs technocrat hand picked by the EU as the Greek Prime Minister, stood in Parliament and followed the EU's demands to the letter, pushing through further austerity measures that threaten to rip apart the fabric of a Greek society already teetering on a knife-edge, battered and bleeding from existing measures already imposed at the behest of their fiscal masters. Papademos talked about recovery, he talked about national solidarity, but all the lipstick in the world couldn't mask the fact that it was a pig he was being forced to kiss.

Live on television for all the world to watch a Prime Minister was being forced to kiss a pig, and RTE News lead with the death of a faded American diva.

While Black Mirror also examined the all-too-close relationship between Government advisors and their friends in old media, what interested me more was the exploration of the public's role in this fictional tragedy. At first they are disgusted by the proposition, public opinion urges the Prime Minister to resist, but then their Princess is threatened further and they turn against him, demanding that he pucker up. As the appointed hour arrives and he prepares to do the deed the entire nation tunes in, at first in locker-room braggado and car-crash voyeurism, but then as the act commences it slowly dawns on them that the humiliation is not the Prime Minister's alone, but theirs as well for being willing participants through this act of silent watching. They try to look away, but guilt and shame hold them transfixed, and when the ordeal has ended they all shuffle away, a nation unable to meet its own gaze, and try to forget it ever happened.

There is something so quintessentially English about it all, a 21st Century stiff upper lip, a quiet acceptance of their awful fate and an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again, for discussing it would be to admit that it happened, and to admit that it happened would be to acknowledge that they all stood passively by and let it happen. Shame and guilt are the twin axes on which the English world revolves and, if our own recent history is anything to go by, they are yet another gift of our colonial legacy.

We have had our own lipsticked pig moments, televised on national television. We saw the bank guarantee be issued at the behest of the ECB, demanding that no bank be allowed to fail, forever welding our fate to that of the cancerous Anglo Irish Bank. We saw our Taoiseach come before the nation and publicly hand over our economic sovereignty to the ECB/EU/IMF Troika to cover the cost of that ECB-mandated bank guarantee. We watched as the talk of "Our way, not Frankfurt's way" was quickly replaced by "Frankfurt's way, or the highway" and the next in a series of austerity measures was forced upon the Irish people. We saw our new Taoiseach patted on the head by everyone from Der Spiegel to Sarkozy for being such a good boy, for taking one for the team, for lipsticking up that pig and planting a big one firmly on its snout.

We watched. Silently. At first in locker-room braggado and car-crash voyeurism, but then as the act commenced it slowly dawned on us that the humiliation was not An Taoiseach's alone, but ours as well for being willing participants through this act of silent watching. And now we all shuffle away, a nation unable to meet its own gaze, trying to forget that it ever happened.

In Greece the citizenry are not ruled by shame and guilt, when they as a nation are ritually humiliated and publicly degraded they rise up and forcibly resist it. 'We are not the Irish" they say.

In Ireland the citizenry watch as successive leaders are forced to kiss a pig, remaining silent as we, as a nation, are once again ritually humiliated and publicly degraded. "We are not the Greeks" our leaders proudly say, as they reach for fresh lipstick.

If we are not the Greeks, then who are we?

Waiting for the dust to settle

2012-02-11T10:36:00.009Z

A pirate ship sails through an obfuscating dust storm
Burning Man, August 2008

Over the last four months on the steps of the Central Bank an interesting experiment has been taking place, one that has drawn many academics, sociologists and political theorists to the makeshift shanty town of shacks, yurts and tents known as #OccupyDameStreet to observe and record what happens when a disparate group of strangers attempt to create an autonomous, non-hierarchical community with only the vaguest of shared goals or ideals. At times it seems the anthropologists have outnumbered the photographers, crouching Attenborough-like behind the Occupiers, observing their eating rituals and attempting to understand their faltering attempts at communication.

Five thousand miles away in the salt flats of Nevada another sociological field day is unfolding in a far more established counter-culture movement, providing a deep insight into what happens when the invisible hand of the free market is let loose upon an autonomous, self-organised and moneyless society, and it is not a pretty sight at all, at all.

Burning Man is an amazing festival that occurs every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. An exercise in radical self-sufficiency all participants must bring everything they need to survive from a weekend to a week (including food and water) in an environment that ranges from 35C+ during the day to below freezing at night. Nothing is available for purchase on site, where goods or services are exchanged it is done so purely on a system of gifting, ie given away for free as a gift, the person receiving the goods or service may offer another item or service in return, but the original gift is offered with no expectation of exchange. Unlike other festivals there are no scheduled events or attractions offered by the organisers, save the construction and burning of a giant wooden sculpture, "The Man", the centrepoint of each festival. All other attractions or events are created and provided by the participants themselves, many of whom spend months each year building the so-called "theme camps", that often look like something from a post-apocalyptic film. The organisers provide the space for people to create things, and the spirit of participation is what makes the whole thing work.

Due to the challenge of being radically self-sufficient in an extremely hostile environment, and the reputation it has for attracting those on the furthest edges of the West Coast counter-culture, Burning Man has never been something that appealed to a wide audience, however in recent years its profile has been raised by coverage in the mainstream media, leading to an increase in attendees. Last year's event sold out online for the first time, in previous years tickets were generally available at the event itself, and this led the organisers to try something radically different in 2012 to meet demand, an online lottery.

Large festivals like Glastonbury normally sell their tickets online on a first come, first served basis. This leads to a huge rush the moment tickets are released, and has lead to buyer frustration as they try in vain to log on to the site as it experiences huge volumes of traffic. Burning Man rejected this system and decided to try the London Olympics approach, to allow for people to apply for tickets over an extended period of time, and then randomly allocate tickets amongst all applicants once the closing date for applications was reached.

This is where things started to go wrong.

A mutant vehicle struggles to find its way in the desert. Also a metaphor.
Burning Man, August 2008

By introducing the element of chance into ticket purchasing, they had transformed a ticket from a mere commodity into a very scarce resource, and when capitalists see scarce resources they immediately see an opportunity for enrichment at the expense of others. Demand for tickets far exceeded anything seen in the festival's history, 40% of those applying for tickets said that they had never been to Burning Man before, an unheard of number of newbies, and almost immediately after the lottery results were announced the ticket scalpers went public, with tickets being offered for resale at many times their original $390 face value. The upshot of this is that those veteran Burners, the volunteers who spend many months every year creating the Theme Camps, mutant vehicles and all the other elements that actually make Burning Man happen, only managed to secure about 25-30% of the tickets they need to have enough people to construct and maintain their Theme Camps on site, and so many camps have been forced to pull out of this year's Burn.

No Theme Camps means that there will be nothing to do in Burning Man except stare at mile upon mile of salt flat, and without the veteran Burners there will be no one to help all the newbies lost in the dust storms, or instill in them what the Burn is all about. It's like travelling thousands of miles to the World Cup when you've never seen a football match, and when you get there you find that there's no stadium, no pitch, no teams, no balls, and no-one even to show you how to organise your own five-aside kick-about (a bit like the Delhi Commonwealth Games by all accounts).

We went to Burning Man in 2008 at the end of an amazing journey that started in Ethiopia and ended up in San Francisco via Mexico and Central America, and although the Burn wasn't the transformative experience for me that it seems to be for a lot of suburban American kids, it still was amazing to see such a radical alternative kicking and screaming at the heart of American ultra-Capitalism. The thought that the free-market that the Burners sought to reject for one week a year could be the very thing that destroys it is both ironic and sadly predictable.

At the moment they don't seem to have a firm plan in place on how to remedy the situation. No extra tickets can be allocated as they have reached the capacity set by the Federal Bureau of Land Management (who manage the Desert on behalf of the US Citizenry), and they won't recall the tickets already sold. Glastonbury faced a similar crisis with angry, violent and ticketless New Age Travelers back in the early nineties, and its solution was to erect the Mother of All Separation Barriers around the site and embrace commercialism with gusto, it would be a shame to see Burning Man reduced to just another broken ideal poisoned by capitalism.

Capitalism - it really does destroy everything it touches.

Voyages to the Moon

2012-02-09T14:28:00.005Z

As I walked down O'Connell Street last Saturday night I passed through a bizarre musical juxtaposition, outside Penny's on the GPO side of the street were a small but enthusiastic group of Hare Krishnas, doing their chanty-chanty thing (technically the Maha Mantra, through which they attempt to elevate themselves and all those in earshot to a higher state of consciousness, which is rather nice of them). Across the road, spilling forth from the external speakers gracing the walls of Clery's Department store, came the soothing tones of Air (specifically La Femme D'Argent from Moon Safari, through which they were attempting to penetrate my subconscious mind and make me more susceptible to buying their window-displayed consumables, which wasn't very nice of them at all really).

For the briefest of moments the two merged and my mind was indeed lifted to a higher state of consumable conciseness, simultaneously freed from the burdens of the material world and primed to fill this gap with even more material burdens and then, Coleridge-style, my moment of idyllic calm was shattered, not by a passing salesperson knocking on my door but by the realisation that a once loved album had become that passing salesperson.

1998 saw the release of two down-tempo albums that shaped much of my lazy Sunday afternoon listening habits for years to come, Austrian duo Kruder & Dorfmeister's sublime The K&D Sessions came out in August, but for me much of the year belonged to Air's Moon Safari with the deliriously squlechy sounds of Sexy Boy and Kelly Watch the Stars, and the gorgeous deep enveloping sound of the omnipresent Moog was no doubt a factor in my own acquisition of a Voyager some years later.

As I stood on O'Connell Street what depressed me most was the sudden feeling of age that came with the reduction of a much-loved memory to a muzak-esque elevator tune of commercialism. Other albums of the era, Moby's 1999 Play and St Germain's 2000 release Tourist were both instantly destroyed by the rapid adoption of almost every album track by marketeers and television commercial directors, but somehow Moon Safari retained a warm place in my heart (no doubt artificially for I am sure its track-list was as thoroughly plundered by the ad industry as the others).

Apart from the soundtrack for Virgin Suicides almost every other release has been a disappointment, some painfully so, and hearing Moon Safari so neutered by Clery's tannoys I had to ask myself whether it always had sounded so bland, and was the regard with which I held it more a product of the status it held as the soundtrack to a memorable year than an indicator of genuine quality?

I still have no answer to this, but I am rather happy to say that 14 years later they have finally released something else that I don't think is completely poo, perhaps on par with The Virgin Suicides. Coincidentally arriving just in time to ride the post-Oscar nomination wave of Martin Scorcese's Hugo (a film about which I have not a single bad thing to say, even the 3D actually added something of value to the story, it was simply the best film I have seen in ages), Air's new album is a soundtrack to the restored hand-painted colour version of Georges Méliès 1902 groundbreaking Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which features heavily in Hugo, though the Air soundtrack is a completely unrelated project.

It is worth buying the extended edition of the album, which also includes a DVD of the restored sixteen-minute film with the accompanying new soundtrack, or as I looked at it, it is worth buying the DVD, which just happens to come with an album of extended versions of the soundtrack.

Back in January the Guardian did an interesting feature on the production of the album, in which Nicholas Godin (one half of the duo) said "It's like a loop. Fifteen years later we find ourselves still on the moon… although this is a very different piece of music". Le Voyage Dans La Lune is a nice bookend, making it deceptively easy to forget all the rubbish that came between Moon Safari and it.

You say "project champion", I say "tax-avoiding plutocratic scum-bag"

2012-02-08T13:51:00.004Z

You turn your back for a hermeneutical minute (slightly longer than a New York minute, somewhere between 2,500 years and two days) to focus on the obviously engaging topic of an exegetical analysis of the monetary and political fallacies behind the make-believe stories that parents tell their children (and The Wizard of Oz) and the Government go and do something so completely beyond the pale that were you a coffee-drinking man your computer screen would now have moved from the "slightly worn" category to "shop soiled", the remnants of your morning caffeinated beverage of choice now cascading down the LED-backlit glossy widescreen TFT display faster than the meltwater from a retreating Greenland glacier, the room still reverberating to the sound of your spluttered, "Whaaaaaa?"

News reaches us this morning of the imminent publication of the 2012 Finance Bill, the legislation that would enact most of the measures outlined in the December budget. While An Taoiseach is in the US for a two-day whirlwind "investment drive", seeking to bring more multinational companies to our shores to avail of our light-touch regulation and low-tax regime, no doubt he has been scratching his head trying to figure out how he can make Ireland even more attractive to tax-avoiding foreign plutocrats. Good news for him then that the big-ticket item in the Finance Bill is The Special Assignee Relief Programme, mentioned in the Budget but only getting a proper airing now with the publication of the Bill.

Why is this Programme of particular interest to the type of multi-national CEO An Taoiseach is seeking to lure to our Dutch-Sandwich-Republic? Well apparently the ability to evade billions of dollars in Corporate Tax is no longer enough of a motivation for these captains of industry, who feel that they themselves are being unfairly discriminated against because corporations are being given rights that are not readily available to them as individuals. Thus our progressive Government, well known for its strong human rights record, will take the only course of action morally justifiable and extend the Irish tax avoidance regime to individual tax payers, not all tax payers mind you, just foreign executives and CEOs.

(its funny how when the Citizenry complain that corporations have more rights than people, no one listens, but when CEOs complain, our Government rewrites the tax law)

According to The Irish Times:

Tax incentives aimed at luring senior multinational executives to Ireland, in a bid to boost job creation, will feature in the Finance Bill which is due to be published today.

The special tax breaks are aimed at so-called project champions who would relocate to Ireland to oversee significant investments and will apply to indigenous as well as multinational firms...

... A Government source said yesterday the tax breaks were required to ensure high-earning individuals who could play a vital role in job creation were encouraged to come to Ireland. The tax breaks are designed to tie in with incentives to encourage the expansion of research and development and intellectual property projects in Ireland.

“The incentives are there for the appropriate specialised job creation initiatives but we also need to have tax incentives to ensure that the right people who can develop these kinds of projects come to Ireland,” said the Government source.

He emphasised that the incentives would only apply to people involved in new product development and could not be availed of by people already working here.

The qualifying individuals will have a significant proportion of their salaries exempt from tax."

Seriously? This is our grand plan to bring ourselves out of the recession caused by the tax-exemption schemes of Section 23 property development and the IFSC? Well at least this is aimed at foreign tech-firms who arguably do provide some employment, and not the gambling houses of the IFSC.

The scheme will be a boost to the International Financial Services Centre although the Government says it is not designed to lure highly paid London bankers to Dublin.

Poo.

It's not enough that successive Governments have kowtowed to our own indigenous tax-exiles, the modern day Earls who have fled our shores for sunnier climes in Malta, the Bahamas and, um, the Netherlands, now they seem to have decided that the road to recovery starts with the importation of a new set of tax-exiles. If I were Bono, 'Sir' Tony O'Reilly or Denis O'Brien I would start to fear for my cherished position in Irish society, now that An Taoiseach has decided to import foreign workers to fill their roles. Expect the next Global Irish Forum to be filled with Irish fat cats crying out in bloated unison, "They turrrk errr jerrrbbbs!"

"The solution to our economic crisis is for rich people to pay less tax"

That's your Government, that is.

Ain't about the Cha-Ching Cha-Ching (well, actually...)

2012-02-07T19:10:00.002Z

Continuing on down our exegetical yellow brick road we arrive at the marvelous land of Oz. The most common explanation for the nomenclature of this mythical land is that author L. Frank Baum looked over his shoulder at the filing cabinet beside his desk, where he saw two drawers, one marked 'A-N' and the second marked 'O-Z'.

As the man behind the screen might say, "How wonderful".

However David Graeber, in his cheery little coffee-table book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, posits a different origin for the land of Oz, and all its fantastical inhabitants. It's all about the money, specifically the conflict in the US at the dawn of the 20th century over the Gold Standard.

Without getting into too much detail (not wishing to repeat the mistakes of yesterday's biblical epic), once upon a time in a land far, far away, money was backed by an actual real thing, a physical tangible thing our ancestors used to call 'Gold'. When times got tough a Populist movement arose in the US calling for the Government to devalue the currency, believing that this would put more money in people's pockets and allow the state to spend more on job-creation programs. Since the Wicked Wizard of the West, "Tricky Dicky" Nixon took the US off the Gold Standard in 1971, the usual way to devalue a currency is to simply artificially peg its exchange rate against other currencies at a lower rate, however when the currency is pegged to a single external commodity with its own intrinsic value, this becomes a bit harder. The Populist Movement of the 1900's argued that the US dollar should be pegged to both Silver and Gold, and called for the rate of exchange between these two metals to be artificially set at a rate advantageous to Silver, increasing the value of Silver and thus increasing the domestic spending power of any holders of Sliver (including the US Government).

William Jennings Bryan ran for President twice (unsuccessfully) on this Free Silver platform and, according to Graeber, his tale was immortalized by Baum in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:

"One of the main constituencies for the [Free Silver] movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy's, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promotors of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn't have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat (who didn't have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn't have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. "Oz" is of course the standard abbreviation for "Ounce." As an attempt to create a new myth, Baum's story was remarkably effective. As political propaganda, less so. William Jennings Bryan failed in three attempts to win the presidency, the silver standard was never adopted, and few nowadays even remember what The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally supposed to be about."

- David Graeber, Debt: the First 5,000 Years, p52-53

The point here is that in less than 100 years the original intention of the author was completely forgotten in the popular consciousness. What would have been immediately obvious as biting political allegory to a contemporary reader became a soothing fairy tale to their children.

And if this can happen in a single generation, just think what could happen over two and a half thousand years.

(yup, that's right, all this while you thought you were reading a new post when in fact this is just a sneaky continuation of yesterday's piece. Never trust a Consulting Theologian on a mission to proselytize his godless atheism)

I'm not trying to reduce Deuteronomy to the level of a soothing fairy tale (there is far too much fire and brimstone in it for that ever to work), I just wanted to illustrate why I feel it is so important to try and understand what the original motivations of a text's author were, to place a text in its original context divorced of any current values placed upon it by our own contemporary society. That does not mean that these current values are without worth, just that they must be viewed independently from the original intent of the text.

Deuteronomy and the initial books of the bible were written to serve as the constitution and foundation myth of a 7th century BCE Judean state, to tie together different socio-economic, religious and ethnic groups under the leadership of a figurehead king and the wealthy elite that placed him on the throne. Deuteronomy and its associated books were the Fox News of the Judean 1%, a propaganda machine to protect and promote the interests of a tiny minority by rewriting history as the citizenry were still living it, and the thought that over two millennia later people would still be drawing on them as the basis for their faith would have flabbergasted their authors.

The 'why' of a text is often far more interesting than the 'what'.

And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more presumptuously

2012-02-06T20:53:00.005Z

Why aren't the Irish protesting, why haven't we taken to the streets and why are those who do openly mocked? Where is the anger? Where is the action?

That is the billion-euro question, isn't it?

I was asked this a week or two ago after spending the day with a small group of protestors who chained themselves to the gates of the Department of Finance on the day €1.25 billion was handed over to holders of unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bonds. 40 protestors out of a country of 4.58 million stood up and took action.

Forty.

"Where are all the rest?" I was asked, "Why aren't the Irish protesting?" and for once I gave an answer.

"Deuteronomy"

The causes of our national passivity can all be traced back to the kingdom of Judah, one half of what we think of today as the biblical land of Israel, to the reign of King Josiah in the 7th Century BCE. Some time after Josiah ascended to the throne in 639 BCE, a "Book of the Law" was found apparently by accident in the temple in Jerusalem during renovation work. Upon reading this Josiah was seized with a religious fervour and embarked on a series of ecclesiastical and secular reforms that now bare his name, The Josianic Reforms. The "Book of the Law" is largely assumed by biblical scholars to refer to Deuteronomy, the oldest book in the Judeo-Christian bible, which contains an extensive list of commands to govern the behaviour of adherents to Yahwism, 34 chapters of "we all partied too hard", and the austerity measures needed to win back god's love.

Discounting the possibility of a Deus Ex Machina "discovery" of the text (a plot device so clumsy even Damon Lindelof would baulk at using it), the question arises as to why Deuteronomy was written as part of the Josianic Reforms, by whom and what purpose did it serve?.

Josiah became King of Judah at the tender age of eight, his elevation "facilitated" by a group referred to as "the People of the Land", which Rainer Albertz in A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Vol II describes as "a middle class among the land-owning farmers of Judah which became politically active... however, this political activity... would hardly have had any prospect of longer-term success had it not been supported by part of the Jerusalem Upper Class". Those of you who are not Consulting Theologians may find it helpful here to imagine this group as the Fine Gael of ancient Judea, I know I do.

Having raised their preferred candidate to the throne they then set about consolidating their hold on power, and their allies in this were the urban literate elite referred to as the Scribes, who could be thought of as the Media of their day. The Scribes set about cannibalizing the various oral traditions of the disparate groups that called Judah home, with the purpose of forging a national foundation myth, a written document that would unite everyone behind the throne of the young Josiah, and settled upon the figure of David as a suitable candidate. The story of the shepherd boy who rose to unite the land a good 400 years earlier was seized upon, for in the person of David a Covenant between god and the people was forged, in return for their worship god agreed to give the people the land, administrated by his chosen agent, David, and his kingly descendants.

For the Judean Fine Gael this was a master stroke, conferring divine legitimacy on their boy Josiah, and instilling obedience to a strict hierarchy at the heart of their new centralized religion. With the aid of the Scribes they set about a series of reforms designed to abolish all competing secular and religious centres of power, and by combining this new foundation myth with the conveniently rediscovered 'Book of the Law", created the basis for what we now refer to as the Deuteronomic History, the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, the earliest written parts of what has come to be the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Deuteronomy served as a Constitution for a new state, one with a centralized power structure that brooked no opposition. History was rewritten to suit the needs of the new ruling class, which looked pretty similar to parts of the old ruling class but still managed to find a way to blame the last guys for all of their current woes, and the people were prevented from rejecting their new rulers because to do so would break the Covenant with god, and no Covenant meant no land.

But what has any of this to do with our current national tragedy?

Whether we like it or not we Irish are a very conservative, Catholic country. Despite (or perhaps because of) being a Consulting Theologian, I view all organised religions with a healthy dose of skepticism. I see no inherent superiority of one faith over another, but I cannot escape the thought that the engrained Catholicism at the heart of our history has had a disastrous effect on the sense of individual autonomy held by the citizenry, for to be Catholic is to submit to authority. To be Catholic is to submit, whereas the core of Protestantism is "to protest".

The essence of the Protestant Reformation was that the kingly authority of David was unnecessary, no mediator was needed between god and man. The people needed neither priests nor kings to intercede with god on their behalf, and this is what terrified Europe's dynasties the most. Their right to rule, their divine right, drew its legitimacy from the Davidic Covenant, the foundation myth manufactured by the Josianic "people of the land" to consolidate their own hold on power, and used by Judeo-Christian monarchs to isolate and disempower their subjects ever since. The Protestant Reformation passed us by, partly due to geography, though mainly because we held fast to our religious beliefs in defiance of the attempted imposition of the Catholicism-light of English Anglicanism, itself Protestant in name only as its real purpose was to position the English Monarch, and not the Pope, as the sole embodiment of the Davidic Covenant. The true Reformation of Europe passed us by, and with it went the spark of rebellion against authority that defined the subsequent history of most of the continent.

Our Catholicism perverted our own rebellions with their unflinching loyalty to foreign kings (James II) and Popes, our rebels seeking to throw off the chains of one Divine Monarch and hand them over to another. Our history is one of "Great Men", modern-day shepherds elevated by god to lead their flocks, Wolfe Tone, O'Connell, Dev, Collins, all reborn as warrior-kings, anointed leaders, and only through them can the people of the land reclaim that land. The people cannot save themselves, only their leaders can intercede on their behalf.

In modernity we continue to define ourselves by our servitude, our acquiescence to authority, our democracy is nothing more than shadow-play, we elect and re-elect the scions of the same dynasties as our fathers and their fathers, our Taoisigh but the latest embodiment of the Davidic Covenant. Keep our heads down, don't resist, accept our medicine and maybe we'll be allowed to keep our land, but only by the grace of our divine King-Taoiseach.

When people ask me why the Irish aren't protesting, why we haven't taken to the streets and why those who do are openly mocked, when people ask where is the anger and where is the action, I shrug my shoulders and say, "that is the billion-euro question, isn't it?". But if you press me, push me hard for a real answer, I'll reply with just one word.

"Deuteronomy"

Damn their youthful enthusiasm and misplaced punctuality

2012-02-04T17:20:00.006Z

That Mr Fawkes guy is back, and it appears he brought some friends.
Anti-ACTA March, Kildare Street, Dublin, Saturday 4th February

History, they say, is written by those who show up. Well today I can confidently say that not only was I not its author, I barely even managed to be its ghost writer.

It is an unwritten rule that Dublin marches start at 2pm. 2pm outside the Garden of Remembrance. 2pm outside the Garden of Remembrance, with time for a few speeches, a wee spot of chanting, then setting off for the Dáil sometime after 2:30, arriving at the Dáil between 3:00 and 3:30pm depending on the size of your march, 4pm if you've really bused the crowds in.

Unfortunately nobody told the kids that, the kids that organised today's anti-ACTA march (ACTA being the EU's version of SOPA). They got the general idea right, gather at the Garden of Remembrance before marching to Kildare Street, they even set up a Facebook page. Well done, gold star, go to the head of the class. However for some reason they decided that 1pm was a good time for marching, and by all accounts that meant they actually left the Garden of Remembrance pretty much bang on time at 1pm.

I say "by all accounts" because I, of course, was nowhere near Parnell Square at that time, for who ever heard of a march being organised for 1pm, let alone leaving on time? Sometime closer to 1:50, as I sat on a bus approaching O'Connell Street, I decided to double check the Facebook page, and the sound of my resulting "Oh, bugger." could be heard the length and breadth of both decks of the bus, even over the bell I was frantically ringing to stop the bus and let me escape before I got carried further away from wherever it was that the march actually was by then. I'm pretty sure the bus driver was less-than-amused by my panicked bell-ringing, but no-one could mistake the "oh my god, I am such a moron" look of anguished embarrassment on my face, so I think he just took pity on me and let it pass.

By the time I made it up to the Dáil the march was long over, but according to folks I talked to there were maybe 250-300 folks there at the start, which had dwindled to maybe 50 by the time I arrived. One thing worth highlighting though was the demographic of those who remained, almost overwhelmingly under 21, in fact a sizable number looked like they weren't even out of school yet. This was interesting because over the last few months the number of young people (a phrase impossible to write without hearing Pope John Paul II's silken tones wrapped around it, as in "Young piples of Aye-a-land, aye laaahv you") participating in the various protest movements has been depressingly small, so obviously all we need to do is show them how the Government paying €1.25 billion to unsecured Anglo bondholders will affect their ability to illegally download My Chemical Romance tunes and we'll have them on the streets in their thousands.

Or dozens, judging by today's effort.

So what have I learned from today? While young piples are not as apathetic as I thought, they are, however, far more punctual. Their heady mix of hormones and faux-jaded-weariness-hidden-under-eyeliner-and-stupid-haircuts also means that they move faster on their stumpy little legs than you would imagine, Parnell Square to Kildare Street in less than 30 minutes is possibly a record (maybe there was a Jedward signing at 3 that they all wanted to get to?). It is also worth mentioning that just under four thousand people said they would attend on Facebook, and not even 10% of those showed up, I'll let you draw your own conclusions on the effectiveness of Social Media in promoting actual activism.

ACTA is a serious issue (I've written about ACTA and other similar copyright protection/net censorship legislation before), and everyone involved in today's march is to be commended, especially those who have never been involved in any sort of a protest before. Now if only we can get them to care about things in the Really Real World as well...

... and I'll try to make it to their next march on time.

And who by fire, who by water?

2012-02-03T18:07:00.005Z

Dublin's Burning. Well, smoldering maybe.
Camden Street, Dublin, Friday 3rd February

There is an agreement I have with my circle of friends, not so much a tacit agreement as something outright explicit, that we are collectively done with the whole "bad things happening to good people" stuff. Given the appalling year that many of us had, at the end of December we all agreed to leave the Bad Things behind us forever in 2011 and enjoy nothing but Good Things in 2012.

At least until the world ends in December.

With that in mind I am delighted to tell you all about a Good Thing that happened this morning.

As I sat around this morning looking forward to all the joy and wonder life had to offer (hopefully bundled up in the form of a small cup of hot chocolate) I was rocked by what felt like a small earthquake, or a very large tumble-drier, but turned out, in fact, to be neither. Three buildings away an interaction between a cigarette, piles of combustible material and a gas heater resulted in a little light exercise for four engines of Dublin's bravest.

Yes, it's true. Fire Trucks are very cool.
Camden Street, Dublin, Friday 3rd February

Seeing the unmistakable signs of a burning building (smoke, exploding roof tiles, flames, more flames) and noticing with some alarm how rapidly the conflagration was approaching I hot-footed it out onto the street to see just what exactly was going on.

As it happened the fire was burning two floors above my old studio. Throughout 2010 I had an artist's studio in a space shared with a group of painters and book-binders, and although the studios themselves were thankfully undamaged by the fire, my old one seems to have taken the brunt of the water run-off from the fire hoses.

At first glance it would appear that the fire started when an untended cigarette came into contact with bundles of papers in an office on the top floor of the building (though the Fire Marshall's report might turn up something completely different) and the explosion I felt was the result of the fire reaching a gas Superser heater, blowing out the windows and a good portion of the roof. The remains of the cylinder were located by the fire brigade and brought down to the road for later inspection.

The gas canister that caused it all. With some help from a lot of combustible material and possibly a cigarette (not shown).
Camden Street, Dublin, Friday 3rd February

Luckily no one was injured in the explosion or the subsequent blaze, though as you can see the building itself is in a pretty bad way. This is why this morning must be classified as a "Good Thing", because it all could have been so much worse.

There are times when living in a wooden building above a paper warehouse seems like a good idea.

Today was not one of them.

(I would put up more photos but I am still relying on my back-up Internet, powered by a none-too-athletic hamster in a wheel, who's looking a bit tired after pushing these three online, to try and upload any more would almost certainly kill him)

Come, ye children, hearken unto me. I will teach you the fear of the lord

2012-02-02T15:29:00.002Z

The Internets are broken. Not all of them, just our one. Our ISP is working on it, apparently our uncongested broadband is suffering from, um, congestion. A lot of congestion. More congestion than The Grand Canal at rush hour (the road beside Dublin's Grand Canal, not The Grand Canal in Venice, though that too can get pretty congested, it just looks nicer while doing so). Of course I have a back up internet, I had to take it down of the shelf, dust it off, and place a fresh hamster on the wheel inside (luckily for me I remembered to remove the old hamster the last time I finished with it. You wouldn't believe how nasty it is to remove corroded hamster from your internets, rubber gloves and vinegar just won't cut it). So while my ISP takes up to three working days to flood my Internet tubes with decongestant, my browsing habits are somewhat disrupted.

However in the brief time today that I have been online, I found enough news in my Internet's Feeds (the stuff the Internets eat to keep them going, normally slopped up in huge troughs) to make my blood boil, and thus have slipped a shot of Red Bull into the hamster's drinking bowl to crank up my back-up Internet to 11 and let me upload a post.

We learn this afternoon via The Irish Times that last year €3.4 million was paid out by the State to help disadvantaged families cover the cost of their children's First Holy Communion. For the non-Catholics amongst you, First Holy Communion is the church ceremony when little children first get to eat the body and blood (well, mostly body) of Jesus, normally when they are about seven years old. You are never too young, it seems, for ritualistic cannibalism. To celebrate this momentous occasion parents dress their children up like little brides and grooms, that's right, seven year old girls are placed in wedding dresses and then handed over to a priest to receive instruction on how to eat the flesh of an undead god.

Now as a Consulting Theologian I find all religious traditions equally farcical, if not outright repulsive, but there has always been something particularly repugnant about the sight of little children being "married" to the Church, even ignoring the Manson-esque ritualistic use of blood and human sacrifice to bond a community together, and this was all before wave after wave of abuse scandals broke forth into the public consciousness. The thought that after decades (if not generations) of mental and physical abuse of the Irish people by the Catholic Church, abuse that for some reason still unfathomable to me the State itself has been forced to pay out compensation for on behalf of the Church, that the Citizenry themselves are being forced to pay for children to be indoctrinated into the Church.

It is important to say that the €3.4 million was not to cover the cost of the ceremony itself, nor to pay the Church for its munificence in accepting these latest devotees, rather it has largely been to assist parents in covering the costs of dressing their children up like tiny porcelain Brides of Christ. Even if the Church itself was unwilling to cover these costs, it could help out its flock in disadvantaged areas by insisting that the children simply wore their school uniforms (most First Communions are still arranged through the local primary school). When pressed on this issue the Church often responds that it is the parents, not it, that insist on dressing their children so extravagantly, that it is powerless in the face of such parental sentiment.

Which seems odd, given how comfortable the Church is with telling people what they can and cannot do with each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

No matter, the ludicrous foibles of any given religion are not my concern here, rather it is the thought that we the Citizenry are, once again, being forced to pay for such foibles. I am not foolish enough to believe that here in Ireland we enjoy any true measure of separation of Church and State, the preamble of our Constitution begins with:

"In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions of both men and States must be referred, We the people of Eire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial"

which is unsurprising given that final approval for the text was given by Dev to John McQuaid, later Archbishop and Primate of Ireland, and coincidentally the subject of a number of later serious allegations concerning abuse (The more superstitious of you would be forgiven for wondering how much of the State's historical and contemporary abdication of its responsibility to the most vulnerable and marginalized of its citizens stems from the fact that its foundation document was co-authored by an alleged perpetrator of physical abuse, cursing the institution of the State itself from inception with his allegedly unspeakable crimes, but as a Consulting Theologian I, of course, dismiss all such notions of witchcraft and voodoo). However I would have thought that in light of recent abuse scandals, the payments made by the State on behalf of the Church to the countless victims of its abuse, and the economic crash that we seem to have found ourselves in by collectively partying too hard*, the matter of payments for Holy Communion might have been reviewed at an earlier stage.

As I finished digesting this nugget of ecumenical joy, my eyes then fell on the next nugget of mystery meat in the Feeds trough of my back-up Internet, a report that a meeting of Fine Gael TDs (at which An Taoiseach Enda Kenny spoke) unanimously called for the decision to close the Vatican embassy to be reversed. The Vatican is a city state approximately 110 acres in size, entirely surrounded by the city of Rome, a city which, being the Italian capital, already contains an Embassy of the Republic of Ireland, an Embassy that, according to a popular online map service, is a 1.8km walk from the other Embassy, the one for the Holy See. Two Embassies within two kilometers of each other, and Fine Gael votes to keep them both open one week after deciding to hand over €1.25 billion to the holders of unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bonds.

Let us take a moment to review this: 1) The Catholic Church abuses thousands of Irish citizens, 2) The State decides that the Citizenry will cover the cost of millions in compensation on behalf of the Catholic Church to victims of its abuse, 3) The State decides that the Citizenry will pay out millions each year to cover the costs associated with the indoctrination of children into the Catholic Church, 4) The Citizenry are forced to cover the costs of having a dedicated representative to the Catholic Church in Rome.

Insult, meet injury. You two are going to be the bestest of friends.

Maybe it's a good thing that my Internet is broken. A steady diet of morsels like this from my Feeds trough would kill me.

*While we're on the subject of partying too hard, the thought occurred to me that when the property bubble burst and the developers all went bust, the Government bailed them all out, then set up NAMA to seize and manage their assets supposedly on behalf of the Citizenry. When the Catholic Church abused thousands of children, the Government also decided to bail the priests out, so where is the clerical NAMA to seize the Church's assets and manage them on behalf of the citizenry?

Books I should have read last year - Reamde

2012-01-29T14:31:00.002Z

Continuing on with the next in our occasional series of "Books I should have read last year", we arrive at the first work of fiction in our list, Neal Stephenson's Reamde.

Fiction is a rarity for me, ten years ago it was probably all I read, but spending a few years in a college town in the US with a pretty good second-hand bookstore or two while hanging around with a group of ridiculously knowledgeable post-grads flipped a switch somewhere in the cavernous recesses of my then pop-culture-obsessed brain and I began to devour knowledge with a thirst that would have put my own post-graduate self to shame (my Masters was something I did by accident, not even my supervisor could explain why studying the Reformation and the Enlightenment would be a good idea), beginning with many of the books I should have read as a student and then expanding out into other topics, philosophy, history, politics, sociology, linguistics, theoretical physics - my bookshelves are littered with the remains of temporary obsessions as the index of one book would lead to the purchase of several others, most of whom loom down over me now as a constant reminder of all those things that I do not, and will never, understand fully.

With so much guilt radiating from my shelves, I find fiction problematic, a consumption of time that could so very well be used for something more fulfilling, a problem compounded by the fact that when I do read fiction I somehow seem to fall into the trap of reading ridiculously long books. While I do read fiction at a much faster speed than non-fiction, I cannot escape the nagging thought that in the time that it took me to finish all 1,042 pages of Reamde I could have zipped through a Badiou or two (or several Virilio).

Reamde is best described as a thriller, a return to the style of novel Stephenson first explored with Cryptonomicon, and just as that earlier book dealt with the then exotic world of off-shore data havens, electronic currencies and encryption, Reamde combines an exploration of the economics of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORG - think World of Warcraft) with the War on Terror, though not in the usual red-top "terrorists training in Second Life" meme. I'm not a gamer (not a computer gamer at least), and have never played a MMORG, but I do understand enough about the business model behind them to appreciate this aspect of the book, and in the end it serves more as a vehicle for the interpersonal relations of the characters than as the main plot element of the book. In fact the MMORG mainly acts as a massive Deus Ex Machina to bring the characters together (and keep them together), then gets left somewhat awkwardly on the shelf in favour of some large explosions and a climax that manages to be both abrupt and maddeningly long in its execution.

I enjoyed the book, but have to admit that at times it struck me as an over-long airport thriller desperately in need of a good editor. I don't read airport thrillers, yet anyone who has ever spent time in an airport bookshop knows the type - think Tom Clancy or Dan Brown - and it has always struck me that these books seem to have a fetishistic approach to brand names, every car, gun and watch is described in great detail with make, model, year, colour and accessories as if the author cut and paste directly from the dealer's catalogue. My political awakenings coincided with the publication of No Logo, and twelve years later I still bristle at the unthinking worship of brands, almost inescapable now in a world of "promotional considerations" and "marketing synergies". While there is an unhealthy does of gun-fetishization in Reamde, it is the constant name-dropping of mass-market Web 2.0 giants that really got me down. It's not enough for the characters to look at an online map, they have to use Google Maps (and they do, a lot), and Wikipedia is name-checked almost as frequently.

I appreciate that "to google" has entered the English language, but reading the phrase "he/she looked it up on Google Maps" sounds as linguistically clumsy as someone saying "I searched for it on Bing" (which nobody says except on TV when Microsoft has paid them to do so, and even then they look pretty embarrassed about having to do so). When used as extensively as it is in Reamde it seriously jars, I just cannot understand what contribution to the story repeated reference to a specific brand actually makes.

It is not just technologically-inclined business folk who love the web-giants, a post-lecture conversation with Susan George (Grande Dame of the alter-globalisation movement) about my then web-giant employer lead to an invitation to join her group for dinner, and our own Grande Dame of Ireland's Occupy Movement, Helena Sheehan, has embraced Facebook whole-heartedly and regularly holds online salons on her page. Both George and Sheehan spoke to me in glowing terms of the difference to their research abilities made by the web-giants.

Working at the centre of this all for so many years, it could just be a case that I can no longer see what a transformative effect these companies have had for many folks (in fact I often find myself frustrated by how poor some of their offerings are, at least in comparison to the internal-only versions I remember with fondness from my time as an employee). I am reminded of the Simpson's episode where Bart captivates an audience far in the distant future by showing them a yo-yo, to which a man gasps, "What's normal to him amazes us. He will be our new god!", where things that only serve as a frustration for me because of their limitations are for the majority of users so great an improvement over what came before that it instills an emotional response beyond simple loyalty in the user.

It still doesn't explain Zune Guy though, nor does it explain why Stephenson felt the need to pepper Reamde with so many brand names - did he do it because he loves them or because he thought his readers do?

Anyway, its a reasonably good book, certainly not as strong as Anathem, but with less made-up words.

Unless you count 'Google'.

You can find out more about Stephenson here, and Reamde is available from Amazon here.

#OccupyDameStreet - What is it going to take?

2012-01-26T15:04:00.008Z

Taking a break during the Carnival of Resistance
Former Anglo Irish Bank offices, Stephen's Green, Dublin, Monday 23rd January

RTE Six-One News, Wednesday 25th January. €1.25 Billion had just been paid to holders of unsecured Anglo Irish Bank Bonds, €1.25 Billion that would literally just disappear with the click of mouse, the equivalent of all the cuts announced in last year's austerity budget to Health, Social Protection, Education and Overseas Aid vanishing into the ether, never to be seen again. In between the twin smokescreens of a partial return to the bond markets and the arrest of a bilocating phone-loving Senator, RTE illustrated public outrage against the bond-payment with footage of two dancing pigs on Merrion Street.

Two dancing pigs.

Less than one hundred meters away around the corner forty people had chained themselves to the entrances of the Department of Finance since six am that morning. The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, TV3, 4FM and many others had all run with the #OccupyDameStreet protest as one of their main stories during the day. RTE showed two men dressed as pigs, dancing all alone on the street.

On the other side of the Dáil, on Kildare Street, four hundred farmers protested over septic charges. This RTE Six-One dutifully reported. Four hundred people outraged that the government would dare to ask them to ensure that they are not polluting the land with their own human waste. Four hundred people, ten times the number of those protesting the theft of €1.25 Billion a hundred meters away, angrily proclaiming that a €50 charge would destroy their way of life.

On Tuesday night at the first public meeting of the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' coalition, I sat in front of a journalist from the Financial Times. He wanted to know why the Irish people weren't protesting. He talked to two women in their late fifties, who then left the meeting during the coffee break, muttering that it was "just another talking shop". The first half of the meeting saw Tom McDonnell explain the history of the Anglo bailout and the apocalyptic effects that ongoing payments of the promissory notes will have on the country, the second half was a call to arms asking the audience themselves to identify ways to resist the payments. The two women who left seemed unwilling to make their own contributions, they wouldn't even give the journalist their first names. They wanted something to be done, they wanted action to be taken, but they wanted someone else to do it for them.

For three days a Carnival of Resistance was held outside the former Anglo offices on Stephen's Green. The Anglo name may be long gone and its business transferred to Burlington Road, but the shadows of the Anglo sign can still be seen on the ESB International building and for many it remains a potent symbol of all that went wrong with our country. From early Monday morning and continuing on until nearly 10pm on the night of the bond-payment itself, bands played and speakers rallied on the pavement, children danced and drew pictures with chalk on the ground, passers-by stopped, listened and engaged with writers and academics from the #OccupyUniversity program, artists, musicians and, most importantly of all, each other. Outrage was expressed but the message was one of positivity.

As I stood on the street uploading pictures from the Carnival from my phone, I saw a series of comments from a member of Dublin's underground Street Art community decrying that it all looked "a bit amateur", that the public would never respond to a bunch of guitar players and home-made signs, that no movement could succeed without a strong and visible leader. He believes in action, but not in protests, "Protest in Ireland was kidnapped years ago, rendered harmless and pointless. It's all a token" he said.

#OccupyDameStreet activists locked-in to cement filled barrels
Department of Finance, Merrion Row, Dublin, Wednesday 25th January

For seventy-two hours I resisted the Anglo bailout. I stood on Stephen's Green through sunshine, rain and dark of night and bent the ear of any passer-by who stopped to listen, and when the speakers and musicians had packed up for the night I swept the pavement clear. I educated myself and attempted to educate others, I attended meetings and publicized them to all and sundry, live-blogging from within for those who could not be there in person. For the day of the bailout itself I stood outside the Department of Finance with forty Dame Street activists who had chained themselves to concrete-filled barrels and watched Alan Dukes walk by, eyes firmly fixed ahead to avoid any contact with the cold harsh reality of the situation.

I have done everything in my power to resist what I believe to be an act of heinous injustice, and the feeling I am left with today is what was the bloody point?

Dancing pigs on RTE. Self-interest more likely to bring people onto the streets than public calamity. A wider population eager to highlight the problems but unwilling to get up off their own backsides and do something about it themselves. The radical underground telling me we need hierarchies and leaders.

I don't mean to criticize the two costumed performers, they are to be wholeheartedly commended for the effort they went to. Similarly the septic tank charge is a serious issue, yet another stealth tax like the Household and Water Charges that will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, imposed by a Government bent on taxing the marginalized to bail out the wealthiest in our deeply unequal society, and while some sectors of the street art community may not believe in the effectiveness of current protests, others actively engage in their own protest as shown by CANVAZ on the city's walls at the start of the week.

What depresses me though is that there were only two pig performers, not thousands. That RTE treat the bailout like the "and finally" story of a water-skiing squirrel at the end of the news. That the people only take to the streets when they can feel their own money being taken directly from their wallet. That it is fifty quid they shout about, not €1.25 billion. That it is one wall, on one street saying "Not Our Debt", and not every wall, on every street, in every town and village in the country.

Where are the people? Where is the anger? Where is the action?

What is everyone waiting for?

"We do not have the resources to mount a national campaign" said 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' on Tuesday night, "but we will give you all the information you need to mount your own". The information is out there for people to educate themselves, why must they wait to be told what to do? For nearly a year the villagers of Ballyhea have been staging their own weekly protests, come rain or shine, they didn't wait for an external group to organize something, they didn't wait to be given permission, they just did it, and they haven't stopped. For three weeks a small group of activists planned to blockade the Department of Finance on the day of the bond-payment, none of whom had ever done anything like this before. They reached out to others with more experience and learned how to make lock-on barrels and passive-resistance techniques (not that they were needed in the end). They had an idea, commitment and educated themselves, then they took action.

Just before Christmas Vincent Browne visited the #OccupyDameStreet camp and for twenty minutes he asked the Occupiers, "Why aren't the Irish people protesting?". On Tuesday night the Financial Times asked me the same question, "Why aren't the Irish people protesting?". I had no answer then, and I have no answer now.

All I know is how sad it all makes me feel. What is the bloody point?

Four months ago I was a passive observer. On October 8th everything changed. I stood on Dame Street, skulking in the background, snapping pictures and trying not to be noticed, then someone handed me a guy rope and said, "here, hold this", and suddenly I was protesting.

When will the rest of the country have their own Dame Street Moment?

What is it going to take?

Give a man a loan...

2012-01-23T12:14:00.003Z

Dublin-based street artist CANVAZ was out and about last night adding his latest stencil-work to the city's Outernet.

Appearing this morning on the corner of Abbey Street and Capel Street, the piece reads "Give a man an education and he will build a new world but give a man a loan and you can own that man forever", and signs off with "Not Our Debt", a reference to the €1.25 Billion payment to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders scheduled to be made by the Government on Wednesday, part of over €9 Billion that will be paid on behalf of Anglo from the public purse this year alone, in addition to the countless billions that will be paid directly to the ECB and IMF for gambling debts that the citizenry had nothing to do with.

CANVAZ was also responsible for the "Occupy All Streets" piece last year, and the response to our current economic, political and cultural crisis from artists has been an amazing thing to follow. You can see more of CANVAZ on his Facebook page and on lusciousblopster's Flickr set.

Surface Tension at The Science Gallery

2012-01-20T13:02:00.003Z

Somehow I seem to have developed a nasty habit of only making it down to The Science Gallery on the last day or so of their current exhibition. This is a difficult thing to do for I am actually in the Science Gallery quite a lot, both to attend lectures and for meetings (The cafe is a great place to meet clients when its not too busy), but somehow lately I never seem to find the time to actually walk through whatever exhibit is currently being staged until the volunteers are starting to take it all down around me. This means that taking the time to write about their current exhibition is almost a waste in bits and bites, for you can do nothing with this information beyond saying to yourself, "well that looked great. Pity you didn't say anything about it at any stage in the last three months when I could have actually gone to it".

No matter, I took some time on Wednesday afforded to me by a surprisingly light calendar and a strong case of the AhFeckIts to head on down and make up for lost time.

The current Exhibition, entitled Surface Tension took 'Water' as its central theme, and had a wide range of pieces ranging from an exploration of Dublin's water table and the various ways of producing potable water (even from Dublin's canals) through to prototypes for cleaning up oil-spills. As I wandered through I was, as usual, intrigued by many of the pieces while wishing some had something more tangible, and at times found it hard to distinguish between the Art and Science, which I suppose is the whole point of The Science Gallery.

Take The Sea Chair Project for example, illustrated with a rather nice series of plastic models (above). The ocean contains an awful lot of plastic. Every day tons and tons of plastic gets washed into the sea, or lost overbaord from shipping containers. It gradually breaks down into tiny 2mm plastic pellets called nurdles and these are everywhere, approximately 13,000 nurdles float in every square mile of the ocean according to the UN. These get into the aquatic food chain and as they are indigestible cause untold problems for marine life. The Sea Chair Project envisions a trawler being repurposed for harvesting these nurdles from the ocean, then using the plastic to manufacture chairs, boosting decimated fishing communities across the South-West coast of the UK. "Brilliant" I said, but as with many works exhibited at the Science Gallery I couldn't tell if this was an actually work-in-progress, a workable concept, or just a science-fiction artwork designed to provoke thought.

Even if only a concept, it is still pretty cool though, giving rise to notions of giant oil-rigs being repurposed to decontaminate the sea while feeding our insatiable thirst for plastic.

One piece that definitely wasn't science fiction, and my favourite of the exhibition, was David Bowen's Tele-Present Water. Using data relayed from an ocean buoy, a lattice suspended on moveable wires recreated in real time the movement of waves. The model was built to a scale of 1:12, meaning that for every inch of movement by the model, the corresponding wave was moving by a foot. During my visit the peaks and troughs were separated by at least a foot, meaning that wherever the bouy was it was experiencing waves of at least 12 feet high. I say "wherever" because its exact location isn't actually known, for although it was originally moored 205 miles South-West of Honolulu, it broke free of its moorings in April of last year and has been wandering the oceans ever since. The volunteer that I spoke to reckoned it was currently near Alaska based on a correlation between the size of the waves a few days ago and a massive storm that hit the Alaskan coast at the same time. Like Silent Barrage in last year's Visceral exhibit, there is something about telepresence that really captures my imagination.

While sadly now closed you can find out more about the exhibition here, and find some photos that I took here.

Overall I have to say that it did indeed look great. Pity I didn't say anything about it at any stage in the last three months when you could have actually gone to it.

Anglo: Not Our Debt

2012-01-19T17:57:00.014Z

The launch of the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' campaign
Central Hotel, Dublin, Wednesday 18th January

I have written more than once on the subject of Anglo Irish Bank and the ongoing repayments to holders of Anglo bonds, both secured and unsecured, and of the crippling situation we find ourselves in because of these private debts that have been socialized onto the public purse. It should come as no surprise to you therefore that I found myself yesterday morning in the audience at a press conference announcing the launch of a new coalition-based campaign calling for the Government to cease paying these bondholders and the associated Anglo promissory notes immediately.

Organised under the banner of the Debt Justice Action coalition, the 'Anglo: Not Our Debt' campaign (or #NotOurDebt with the obligatory hashtag) brings together academic, political, economic, development and religious groups from across civil society all calling on the Government to suspend Anglo-related payments immediately, beginning with the €1.25 Billion payment to unsecured Anglo bondholders on January 25th (less than a week away). This payment, which we are under no legal obligation to make, is almost exactly equal to the cuts of €475m to Social Protection, €543m in Health and €52.9m in Overseas Aid, and "savings" of €132.3m in Education announced by the Government over the course of two budget days back in December. #NotOurDebt is not calling for the Government to default, rather they are calling for a suspension of payments to bring the ECB back to the negotiating table with a view to adjusting the principle of the debt, and the repayment schedule.

The #NotOurDebt campaign argues that a) the Anglo payments, and in particular the nearly €50 Billion in Promissory notes, are not part of the EU/IMF memorandum, so non-payment will not affect our wider bailout or relationship with the Troika, b) Anglo is not a pillar bank, and it is highly unlikely that suspension of payments would lead the ECB to retaliate by punishing our pillar banks as this would lead to the same sort of contagion they have been fighting to prevent since this crisis began, and c) with our Government bonds already rated as 'junk', it is hard to see how the markets could have any less confidence in us than they do already, suspension of payments realistically could not make the environment any worse for external investment than it already is.

There were a good few familiar faces there, with John Bisset from the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope speaking at the launch, and both UNITE's Michael Taft and TASC's Tom McDonnell doing a lot of the number crunching for the campaign. Mrs Browne's Boys (Harry and Vincent, sadly no relation to each other but its still worth trying to coin a phrase) were also there in the audience, and #VinB had both John and Michael on his show last night to discuss the Anglo fiasco.

There will be a public meeting of the #NotOurDebt campaign next Tuesday 24th in the Teachers' Club, Parnell Square in Dublin, at 7pm, the night before the next Anglo payout. This falls nicely in the middle of three days of planned defiance around the bond payment, which sees a broad alliance of groups come together for joint actions, as well as autonomously-planned events.

The country sat by last November and quietly watched the government hand over €720 million to holders of five-year Anglo Irish Bank bonds. Next week's payment will be almost double that. We cannot afford another week of silence.

You can find out more about the #NotOurDebt campaign here, read their full statement from the launch here, and watch #VinB's show from last night here.

Tell me now, how do I feel - Redux

2012-01-19T17:06:00.004Z

New piece by Solus
Corner of Drury Street and Fade Street, Dublin, Wednesday 18th January

And we're back. Bet you didn't even notice our SOPA inspired absence, did you?

*sigh*

Well here at Boomingback we took advantage of an enforced day of rest from the internets to get out into the Really Real World (you remember, that place that is permanently AFK) and do the things that ordinary folks do, ordinary folks without anything else more pressing to do. The day started off with a press conference (more about that later), followed by a brief sojourn on Occupied Dame Street and a more lengthy visit to the second last day of the Surface Tension exhibit in The Science Gallery, all wrapped up in an impromptu walking tour of Dublin Street Art.

At the start of the week I wrote about a new piece by Dublin Street Artist Maser commissioned by the First Fortnight program in aid of Mental Health awareness, but Maser was not the only artist to contribute new work to the festival. ADW (right), CANVAZ, Aidan Kelly and Solus (above) all picked up their spray cans and stencils and set to work in Temple Bar and Drury Street.

Street Art is definitely more The Very Understanding Girlfriend's cup of tea than mine, but through her I have come to have a healthy appreciation for the work of a good few Dublin-based artists, and seeing their work around the city has a tangibly softening effect on my often antagonistic relationship with Dublin (I can no longer call it a love/hate relationship since I find there is so little to love, it's more like a "can't-afford-to-ever-move-away-thanks-to-the-property-crash-so-I-might-as-well-grin-and-bear-it/hate" thing).

The irony/synchronicity of being cheered up by Street Art commissioned by a Mental Health campaign is not lost on me.

You can find a map of the pieces here, First Fortnight's Street Art blog here, and my own photos of the pieces here.

Books I should have read last year

2012-01-17T15:11:00.008Z

Something odd happened last year. Well, actually, many odd things happened last year, but the thing of oddness that I am specifically referring to here is the fact that I lost the ability to read books. Now I don't mean that I suddenly went blind or developed dyslexia, rather as a consequence of pain and medication I lost the ability to concentrate long enough to finish anything longer than a few pages at a time.

I am a voracious reader, my not-so-secret vice is book buying, real dead-tree books, and a typical month sees the purchase of far more books than I could possibly read in the same period even if I treated reading as a full-time job (which at times I have). In Nassem Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan he recounts an anecdote of a vistor to Umberto Eco's house remarking on how big a library Eco had, asking him how many of the books had he actually read, to which Eco replied that the real question was how many of them he had not read. That is the way I treat my library, all the books on my shelves that I have not read serve as a constant reminder of how much there is that I do not know, how small and insignificant my understanding of the world around me really is and this helps keep my easily inflated sense of self-worth in check.

However last year was particularly poor for pushing the read-to-unread ratio on my shelves in a favourable direction, as I lost the ability to concentrate and absorb anything of weight for most of the year, and it is hard to convey just how great a loss this was. Slowly my powers of concentration have come back to me, and my mission this year is to catch up on a good deal of what I failed to read last year, and in the interest of having something to write about I thought I might share some of these lost books with you all in the first of an erratic series of posts entitled, "Books I should have read last year", and as a special bonus we'll start this series off with not one, but two, Books I Should Have Read Last Year.

Sins of The Father - Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy, Conor McCabe

I have had a chance to meet Conor a few times on Dame Street, even chatting with him on one particular day before he went down to the launch of this very book, and I really wish that I had been more familiar with it before talking with him, because then I possibly would have upped my conversational game beyond the "uuuurgh, Capitalism Bad" level. Many of the recent explorations of our current economic woes have focused solely on the Celtic Tiger years, on the property boom, light-touch regulation and crony-capitalism of the last two Fianna Fail administrations. While McCabe explores these themes as well, it is in the context of a broader examination of Irish history from the foundation of the State, and an analysis of the near-universal myopia that affected successive Irish governments.

Beginning with the rule of the Cattle Barons, who saw Ireland's role both pre-and-post Independence as predominantly to supply England with beef, continuing on with the abandonment of any serious attempt to form a large scale native-owned industrial sector in favour of the courtship of foreign Multinational Corporations (MNCs) who would treat Ireland primarily as a tax haven, through to the creation of an actual tax haven in the form of the IFSC and the subsequent property boom fueled by tax-avoidance legislation such as Section 31 Relief, McCabe shows how the one constant in Ireland since Independence has been governance by a hereditary minority in the interests of the wealthiest citizens. The political and economic inequality of the Celtic Tiger years was nothing new for Ireland, just merely is most extreme manifestation.

A very accessible book, it deserves a place on your shelf beside Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools, and Shane Ross' The Bankers as an examination of how we arrived in our current dystopic fantasyland, providing a much broader context than either and complimenting their more in-depth analysis of recent events.

You can read more by McCabe at Dublin Opinion here, and Sins of the Father is available at Amazon here.

Vultures' Picnic - In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores, Greg Palast

Journalism-noir from everybody's favourite misanthrope. Its been five years since Palast's last book, Armed Madhouse, the examination of voter-caging and other political skuldugery that led one student brandishing it at a meeting with John Kerry to be forceably subdued by security, uttering the now immortal line, "Don't tase me, bro". While the Bush era may long be gone, Palast has not been resting in the subsequent years, but perhaps paralleling the Occupy Movement's focus on our economic rather than political masters, Palast has turned his raincoat and hat away from election fraud and towards the much murkier world of Big Oil, Big Nuke and the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs.

Travelling from Alaska to Azerbaijan by way of New Orleans and Ecuador, Palast explores the dominance of BP in global affairs (ironically linked via our own Peter Sutherland to Goldman Sachs) and the countless lives destroyed by their ultra-capitalism. It is also, somewhat surprisingly, a love story, but any good noir tale needs a mysterious love interest.

I love Palast's writing style, unapologetically polemical with a healthy swathe of grumpy, a man critically aware of his own failings but somehow reveling in them all the same. Highly informative, wrath-inducing and exceedingly entertaining at the same time and while perhaps not as focused, a worthy companion nonetheless to Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

You can find out more about Palast, watch his video reports for the BBC and others, and read more of his investigations on his website here, and Vultures' Picnic is available at Amazon here.

Tell me now, how do I feel?

2012-01-16T11:57:00.002Z

Good news everyone - the most depressing day of the year has arrived!

Blue Monday is here, scientifically proven by a guy who works in a building to be the saddest day of 2012 (once December 21st and/or 22nd are excluded, depending on how many credit card bills you are planning on not paying this year).

What everybody needs of a morning like this is nice cheery positive aphorism, which for those of you in the Camden Street area has been supplied courtesy of street artist Maser (he who loves you). As part of the First Fortnight program that ran for the first two weeks of the month, "seeking to challenge mental health prejudice through creative arts", Maser was invited to contribute a piece and the Simon Community donated their wall for the project. The piece went up on Wednesday of last week, and while the First Fortnight program is now over for another year, hopefully Maser's words will be brightening up many a Blue Monday for weeks to come (and blue Tuesdays, and Blue Wednesdays etc, etc).

What pleases me most about today is that while January 16th is traditionally the most depressing day of the year for me, today everyone gets to share in the misery. And if misery loves company, today I am a Mormon fundamentalist.

Speaking of which, it occurred to me that since in America corporations have the same constitutional rights as people and are treated as citizens under the eyes of the law, Mitt Romeny's aggressive acquisition of companies and their subsequent gutting is a) staying true to his ancestral Mormon practices of polygamy and b) possible spousal abuse. But I digress...

On this, the most depressing day of the year, spare a thought for those of us who have just entered the twilight of their thirties. Winter is coming, my friends, our youth is disappearing over the horizon on a galloping steed, its place by my side being taken by a pale horseman with a fondness for garden implements and size -1 dresses. While there is still far more ahead of me than behind, I fear that much of it will involve incontinence, jazz and Inspector Morse, and the survivors, as they say, will envy the dead.

Happy Blue Monday to me,
Happy Blue Monday to me,
Happy Blue Monday Unkie Da-aaaave!
Happy Blue Monday to me.

#OccupyDameStreet - The First 100 Days

2012-01-15T20:56:00.001Z

And we don't look a day over 39
#OccupyDameStreet, Dublin, Sunday 15th January

I've been very under the weather these last few days, hence the tumbleweeds blowing through the pages of this blog, however I did make it down to Dame Street this evening for an hour or two to share in the celebrations of this, the 100th day of the #Occupation!

I wrote my own summary of the year to date back in December, but for an alternative perspective I recommend you take a look at lusciousblopster's post over on No Fixed Abode, or take a look through her extensive Flickr album chronicling life on Dame Street since day one, way back on October 8th.

I don't think any of us would have thought that we would have lasted even ten days, let alone make it to 100. I wonder if the President will send us card?

Can drumming circles be that far behind?

2012-01-11T17:01:00.000Z

When you take away alcohol, caffeine, carbonation and fat, what is there left to drink really?

The answer, of course, is tea, or rather, herbal tea-like beverages. While all the fun in my life may have indeed been surgically removed, that doesn't stop me from trying to find a reasonable alternative. High on the list this month has been Teapigs, a UK-based speciality tea blender, introduced to me by my sister over the Crimbo period.

Abandoning the traditional paper teabag design in favour of a biodegradable corn-starch "tea-temple", these lads veer dangerously close to skinny jeans and NHS-glasses worn in an "oh-so ironic, but before it was cool, like" hipster way, but given the lack of other fun stuff on my menu I will allow them these transgressions. My favourite so far is liquorice and mint, which leaves an amazing aftertaste that coats the back of your mouth and throat like a friendly oil slick covering a stretch of wilderness with a warm, gooey blanket of love.

You can get a reasonably large selection in Listons on Camden Street, but I'm sure your own local overpriced, can't-believe-the-celtic-toiger-is-dead-roish foodmongers might stock it as well. This morning I didin't even have to go that far, courtesy of a care package sent by the amazing sister whose tea-temples I depleted over Crimbo while she wasn't looking.

Going to hospital is great when people send you prezzies afterwards.

What's your favourite scary movie?

2012-01-09T11:05:00.012Z

To the B-movie horror pantheon of zombie banks, ghost estates and the grasping, mauling tentacles of the bloated vampire squid that is Goldman Sachs, we can now add Lisbon 3, the Treaty That Would Not Die! As the initial shock of this revelation subsides and the beads of perspiration begin to cool, it slowly starts to dawn on us all that we have found ourselves in the final part of a scary movie trilogy.

"...here's the critical thing. If you find yourself dealing with an unexpected back-story, and a preponderance of exposition, then the sequel rules do not apply. Because you are not dealing with a sequel. You are dealing with the concluding chapter of a trilogy. That's right. It's a rarity in the horror field, but it does exist, and it is a force to be reckoned with. Because true trilogies are all about going back to the beginning and discovering something that wasn't true from the get-go. Godfather, Jedi, all revealed something that we thought was true that wasn't true. So if it is a trilogy you are dealing with, here are some super trilogy rules. One: you've got a killer who's gonna be superhuman. Stabbing him won't work. Shooting him won't work. Basically, in the third one, you've gotta cryogenically freeze his head, decapitate him, or blow him up. Number two: anyone, including the main character, can die. This means you, Sid. I'm sorry. It's the final chapter. It could be fucking Reservoir Dogs by the time this thing is through. Number three: the past will come back to bite you in the ass. Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it. The past is not at rest! Any sins you think were committed in the past are about to break out and destroy you."

- "The Rules of a Trilogy" as explained by Randy in Scream 3

Of course it is not actually going to be called Lisbon 3, currently going by the far more technocratic "Draft Agreement on Reinforced Economic Union", but the fact remains that for the third time in four years the people of Ireland may be called upon to vote on the future of Europe. I say “may” because the Government is currently doing everything in its power to avoid the inconvenience of taking this Treaty to the people, and odds are it will all end up in the courts or with the President before a single ballot paper is printed.

So as we all wait with bated breath it might be worth taking a few moments to prepare ourselves for the horror that lies ahead.

Forewarned is forearmed!

Rule One: We've got a killer who's gonna be superhuman

We voted 'No' and it rose from the dead, we voted 'Yes' and were told it was gone for good, and now as we rummage around in the attic looking for some old junk to sell off on Ebay so we can pay our heating bills it leaps from the shadows, knife gripped tight, ready to rip and slash its way through the pitiful tattered rags of economic sovereignty that we have wrapped around our shivering body, leaving the rest of our family downstairs wondering where we've gone and why we've been so quiet since we told them, “I'll be right back”.

While the more cynical amongst you might reason that given the mess successive governments have made of the economy, handing over economic control to someone else might not be such a bad idea after all, but the type of control imagined amounts to a prescription for permanent austerity with minimal room for Government spending on such luxuries as education, welfare or health, even after such time as we have managed to pay back the private bank debt that has been socialized onto the public purse.

As we learned the hard way at the start of Lisbon 2, voting 'No' the first time wasn't enough to lay this beast to rest. Its going to take something special this time, and we might not be able to do it on our own.

Rule Two: Anyone, including the main character, can die

When Greece decided to have a referendum on their own EU bailout, the EU forced them change the wording to be on the subject of Euro membership, and by implication EU membership. "The referendum must be on whether Greece is to remain in the euro," Angela Merkel said, Sarkozy (Kodos to her Kang in our Treehouse of Horror) said that he knew the Greeks would "make the right choices". The threat was clear, take the money or leave the EU, vote the right way or die.

The stakes are even higher with Lisbon 3 and the unavoidable truth is that no one, despite all the predictions and assertions made by a veritable rogues' gallery of talking heads, no one knows how this all will end. We will hear talk of impending Euro collapse or a full-on global financial meltdown, of a Europe without Ireland or a total disintegration of the EU, and most of all of the Irish people who selfishly dare to put their own interests ahead of The Grand European Dream. While “there is no alternative” sounds just as hollow in German and French as in English, talk of reprisals is not entirely misplaced for while there may be no mechanism for pushing a member state out of the EU, as David Cameron learned there is nothing to stop all the others carrying on without you.

But even if the Irish behave like responsible European Citizens and do what Kang and Kodos tell us to do, even if the referendum is passed and the Treaty is enacted will it all be enough to prevent the collapse of the Euro? And if we sign away the tattered rags of our economic sovereignty and the Euro still collapses, what then?

As the man said, “It could be Reservoir Dogs by the time this thing is through”.

Rule Three: The past will come back to bite you in the ass

As Conor McCabe helpfully pointed out last year in his book Sins of the Father, we have a lot of bodies buried in our national cellar, from the construction and development of the IFSC where morality was as light on the ground as regulations, through to the introduction of Section 23 tax relief on investment properties that fueled a property boom as a method of tax avoidance. Our light-touch financial sector attracted inward investment from European banks eager to cash in on the Celtic Tiger, and when the house of cards upon which the property sector was built collapsed and the corpses of our national sins started popping up through the crumbling foundations, the true horror of the situation began to dawn on them. Their reaction was swift and, for Ireland, catastrophic.

"No Irish bank will be allowed to fail", the ECB told the late Brian Lenihan, and thus the disastrous Bank Guarantee was issued, staple-gunning the fate of Ireland to that of Anglo Irish Bank forever and the Government was forced to surrender the bulk of its economic sovereignty to borrow money to pay back the European banks. While events in Greece and Italy have overshadowed our own misfortunes on the global stage and Lisbon 3 is as much a response to the actions of Burlusconi who bunga-bungaed while Rome burned as it is to the antics of Fingers, Seanie and our own 1%, we will not be allowed to forget that we were the first to answer the ECB's late night phone call, its raspy voice asking with glee, “What's your favourite scary movie?”

As for the big revelation at the end of this particular frightfest, the rules of a scary movie say that you can never have sex, drink or do drugs, for sin equals death. If greed was our sex and property our drugs then, boy, did we sin as a nation. From the start of our own economic collapse we have been told that it was of our own devising, that we lost the run of ourselves as a nation and partied too hard, but true trilogies are all about going back to the beginning and discovering something that wasn't true from the get-go.

When the dust settles and Lisbon 3 has been passed (for surely that is the only outcome we will be allowed to deliver), and we stand looking over the costumed killer of Irish economic and fiscal sovereignty, my money is on the mask being pulled back to reveal not the grizzled visage of Seanie or Fingers, but the razor-sharp beak of the vampire squid itself, Goldman Sachs.

The Grand European Dream that Lisbon 3 is fighting to preserve has been replaced by the Nightmare of The Vampire Squid, for after engineering the financial collapse of two continents Goldman Sachs now finds itself wrapped as tightly around the EU as it is around the US Federal Reserve. ECB head “Super” Mario Draghi was a former Goldman Sachs executive, current Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti was an international advisor to the firm, Lucas Papademos as Governor of Greece's Central Bank colluded with Goldman Sachs on the massive €2.3 billion Credit Default Swap that was a major factor in Greece's current economic crisis before being hand-picked by the EU as his country's new Prime Minister, and our own Fine Gael draw inspiration for their economic policies from their patron Peter Sutherland, Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who back in June of last year declared that Ireland must give up control of its budget to Brussels to save the EU in a manner uncannily similar to the propsed "Draft Agreement on Reinforced Economic Union".

Follow the money, as they say, and if you do you will normally find a bloated tentacle of the vampire squid wrapped tightly around it.

Lisbon 3 is a very scary movie indeed. Even scarier, however, is the thought of not being allowed to vote on it at all.

Update: 11/01/2012
Interesting article this morning on RTE that suggests US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner put direct pressure on the Irish Government not to burn bondholders. While Geithner himself never worker for Goldman Sachs (he is a lifelong public servant), he was head of the New York Fed (a close partner of Goldman Sachs) where he oversaw the bailout of AIG that substantially benefitted Goldman Sachs, and both his predecessor as Treasury Secretary and his current Chief of Staff are both ex-Goldman Scahs employees.

The mask is slipping and the tentacles are crawling out!