Eamonn Kelly: The Week That Was

From top: Piglet wine bar, Dublin; Eamonn Kelly

And the new season kicked off with the reopening of the Zappone controversy, resurrected by what appears to be an internal Fine Gael leadership contest, with Varadkar one-upping Coveney by releasing text messages which his department had earlier refused to journalists under the Freedom of Information act.

Labour TD Brendan Howlin, who was instrumental in drafting the Freedom of Information act, told the IT on Friday that Simon Coveney may have been in breach of the act by deleting texts related to his office.

Meanwhile, Coveney was questioned by a committee formed to look into the controversy and, according to various commentators tasked with going through this stuff, his and Varadkar’s stories differ from earlier versions.

By Thursday, Micheál Martin was miffed at having his thunder stolen by the Zappone saga as he unveiled a new housing plan which will allow for 10% social housing, 10% affordable housing (€250,000), and 80% neither social nor affordable housing, to be bought up in great swaths by billionaires to rent back to us. You might call them anti-social housing.

Micheál called for common sense to be brought to bear on the Zappone saga, calling the reaction melodramatic, while the Irish Examiner called for a line to be drawn under the whole affair. A resignation would be a line, I suppose.

By week’s end, Leo Varadkar, not content with being ahead of Coveney on brownie points for volunteering his texts, squandered the lead by attending a music festival in the UK. Remember them? The ones we can’t have here, because of… Well, because of Leo.

Dogsbodies

Meanwhile, employers availing of the JobBrdge 2 scheme as a source of cheap labour are being outed by the non-profit organisation “ScamBridge”. The latest “lucky break” was a dog grooming service offering €3.43 an hour to a dog-washer.

The lucky candidate would have to posses the following attributes: A full driving license; confidence in handling dogs of various sizes (Ya got the job big dog); good customer service skills; ability to take instruction from the employer to help the poor crayturs with their workload; ability to work as part of a team with good time-keeping and good attitude; and, ability to live on less than €150 a week.

Just kidding, I added that last condition myself, based on a 40-hour week. But it’s more likely that such an exploited candidate would be expected to work more than 40 hours, so it’s possible that they might actually knock a living wage out of it. Theoretically there are enough hours in the day to hold down a full-time barely-paying position and make the rent, if you don’t bother with sleep. Only cissies sleep. That was Leo’s message when he became FG leader.

This idea of being “positive” is being routinely exploited by just about everyone. If you don’t have a good attitude, apparently, you’re unlikely to find an employer to exploit you. And if you are lucky enough to find an employer to exploit you, you are expected to always put their needs first. It’s only fair. They’re the employer, while you… well, you’re nobody, aren’t you?

Positivity

The idea of positivity also crept up on RTE’s Primetime when the RTE interviewer accused Sinn Fein’s spokesperson for Housing, Eoin Ó Broin, of being negative about the government’s new housing plan.

But in politics it’s the opposition’s role to be “negative”. That’s the actual engine of democracy. To ask that the opposition take a positive attitude to a government proposal is badly missing the point of parliamentary debate.

But as we have seen with the dog-washing position, this idea of being agreeable, no matter what the circumstances, is now endemic in the culture. It’s an American import, from the home of can do and fuck you, where it is widely and neo-liberally used and abused for exploitation.

The concept of exploitative positivity was brilliantly dissected by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in a series of books, among them the tellingly titled “Smile or Die”, and “Nickel and Dimed”, where she went undercover as a low-paid worker and found her confidence, positivity, money and health draining away over a matter of weeks, while her various employers thrived.

She describes washing a floor in a private house while the woman of the house stood behind her, arms folded, looking down on her, deriving clear satisfaction from being able to afford to have another Human Being literally down on their knees at her behest.

This is the promised land of privatisation promoted by our neo-liberal government. A world where the exploited worker is also expected to smile and be agreeable.

Human Rights

Simon Coveney, when asked by the Oireachtas committee about how he defined the UN envoy role intended for Zappone, replied that the thinking was around human rights in general and that he plumped for a focus on freedom of expression and LGBT rights, which also happened to conveniently match Zappone’s qualifications.

In the neo-liberal world, it is considered a human right to declare yourself LGBT, but you have no right to shelter, unless that shelter is provided by a privatised company eager to cut costs for profit. This explains the tents on Dublin’s streets, because the privatised homeless shelters are authoritarian hell holes.

Coveney told the committee that he went through the UN Declaration of Human Rights looking for ideas. It must have been a necessarily politically biased search, because if he had bothered to linger on Article 23 he’d have seen there was no place in the human rights catalogue for JobBridge.

“Article 23 (2) Everyone….has the right to equal pay for equal work.”

“Article 23 (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”

He must have missed this one. And there is a good reason why. He was likely less interested in human rights and more interested in altering the job description of “Special Envoy for Freedom of Opinion and Expression” – concepts which relate strongly to journalism, arts and social equality – and more interested in shaping the job description to match the qualifications of a favoured candidate, in this case a government crony with a background in campaigning for LGBT rights.

Reduced Freedoms

As a result, the concepts of freedom of opinion and expression have now been collapsed in the public mind to infer only those issues related to LGBT rights. A move which could be regarded as the political appropriation of the concept of gender equality, cynically used as an instrument to ensure a placement in a “glamourous” UN role for a crony, while narrowing the meaning of freedom of opinion and expression, as an unfortunate by-product of this self-serving meddling with the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Is this the first time that Irish parish pump crony politics has attempted to bluff a political appointment on the international stage? And why does the taoiseach see this as a trivial matter? Can he genuinely not see the problem? Maybe such blindness is not surprising, since Fianna Fáil has been the home of cronyism for generations.

Coveney told the committee that Zappone didn’t lobby him for the position, but rather “reached out”, another annoying American corporate-speak phrase designed to ward off truth.

When you make a complaint to a corporation, maybe feeling fit to nuke them, their representatives are inclined to twist the knife by sweetly thanking you for “reaching out”. Soon, all criticism of government policy may be handled with that same calculated eff-you phrase.

Finally…

Employers were complaining during the week that no one wants to work anymore, while it was also reported elsewhere that recorded suicides are at their lowest level in two decades. Make of that what you will.

Nanu Nanu. Smile or die.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

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