From top Regina Doherty and Josepha Madigan at the Fine Gael Ladies’ Luncheon last May; Eamonn kelly

The latest social services card cock-up has now quietened into a familiar waiting game as the minister goes to ground to wait it out.

Maybe the electorate will forget about it like they forgot about Josepha Madigan’s part in the Maria Bailey scandal.

And it’s a safe bet. Because the electorate do forget. They forget everything.

The electorate has electoral Alzheimer’s and the government knows it and if they just wait a week or two, the electorate will forget everything and no one will have to resign; there’ll be no accountability and the media outlets under government control can go to work on reinforcing the idea that there was nothing to remember anyway.

10,000 homeless? Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that. But wasn’t it all their own fault? Of course it was. How else would they be homeless?

Reacting to Fine Gael is like playing catch up. It’s similar, though not as severe, to the experience of American journalists with Trump. One outrage follows another and after a while it just seems easier to believe the lie. They’re working on all fronts. For instance, there is the insanely active area of stalling legislation.

This negative activity apparently has been keeping Fine Gael occupied over the last few years, devising ways to stop legislation without appearing to lose in the Dáil.

They do this by passing a bill to committee stage and then quietly smothering it there. This is how you end up with someone like Maria Bailey chairing committees on housing and ethics. The goals are not necessarily in the titles.

Then there’s the mining licenses. Mayo county council were sued for 2 million by a mining company when they refused a full license after an exploratory license was granted. The mining company acting like a jilted bride scorned by a broken promise.

Fine Gael, for reasons known only to themselves, then issue an exploratory license for mining in Connemara National Park and one of their TDs declares that this doesn’t necessarily mean that a full mining license will be granted.

However, given the Mayo experience, it would seem that they have put a mining company in a position to sue the state. Still, what’s another couple of million? It’s only public money. Plenty more where that came from.

The public services card. All illegal. 60 million down the drain. The taoiseach, I call him the automatic taoiseach because he became an automatic taoiseach once he was elected to the Fine Gael leadership. Otherwise he has no public mandate.

Anyway, his response to the services card debacle was to suggest looking at the legislation to see could it possibly be re-jigged to make the whole thing retrospectively legal.

A lawyer however pointed out that this wouldn’t work since the taoiseach’s remit doesn’t extend to re-jigging EU legislation. The only influence he has over that is in smothering it, particularly social justice legislation.

The fact that he would even think of changing the law to retrospectively forgive the political mistakes of his own ministers should tell you all you need to know about his priorities.

Remember the children’s hospital over-run? Oh yeah… Still it was nice and thoughtful of the taoiseach to try and build a children’s hospital…It must be them builders. Must be their fault. What can you do?

Remember the 170 million to JobPath for a 7% percent success rate? No. What was that? Are those the people who don’t get up early in the morning?

Remember the people dying on trolleys and the corpses in the corridors? That was all made up. Fake news.

Remember the tax breaks for the wealthy and the property market serving the landlords as people fell onto the streets or emigrated? Yeah well, people like emigrating. Irish people always emigrated.

Remember the UN report about the kids being psychologically damaged by homelessness? Oh yeah…kind of… But wasn’t it all their own fault? Shoulda bought houses. Mustn’t have worked hard enough. Mustn’t have got up early in the morning.

You will recall that with the Maria Bailey scandal the automatic taoiseach screened the whole thing off from public view – essentially privatised the problem – and then finally emerged to assert that there was no problem, no case to answer, no illegality whatsoever, nothing to be concerned about, nothing happening here, move on now it’s time for the Summer recess.

And it worked. Everyone forgot.

Even the National Campaign for the Arts, of which I’m a grassroots member, forgot; deciding in their pre-budget submission to thank both Regina Docherty and Josepha Madigan for the tweak in welfare laws that allows grassroots artists to try for a year to turn their art into a business before being dispatched to standard employment activation procedures.

Essentially, the National Campaign for the Arts agrees with Fine Gael that the arts must survive or die by the market; except, presumably, those middle-class funded institutions that the campaign arguably truly represents, who will avail of shrinking funding by being nice and complimentary towards the ministers they rub shoulders with.

Survival in Ireland, no matter what your game is, depends entirely on being accepted at some level by the exploitative elite, represented in all their cronyism by the two major parties.

As Gene Kerrigan put it, another week another scandal and the same strategy of waiting and doing nothing until the electorate forget, as they always do.

Kerrigan said that Fine Gael had contempt for the public and wondered must Fine Gael call personally to every door in the country and punch the occupants in the face for them to get the message.

But you can hardly blame Fine Gael. They know by now, from stalling and smothering legislation; from concealing and waiting, that the best way to lead a people with Electoral Alzheimer’s is to do as little as possible policy wise, working private angles to divvy public monies to favoured clients while targeting politically inconsequential scapegoats for the sleepy public to gnaw on.

Contempt works! The public forgets everything. How could you respect them?

They get exactly what they ask for.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Top pic via Josepha Madigan

From top: Fianna Fáil Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism John O Donoghue (top front centre) in Dublin Castle with members of Aosdána at the 21st General Assembly of Aosdána on February 5, 2004; Eamonn Kelly

Fintan O’Toole’s recent suggestion in the Irish Times that art should be called sport was yet another jibe at political Ireland’s ongoing neglect of the arts. It seems sport fares better in the funding game. Even greyhounds get a bigger slice of the public pie.

But this neglect may be the fault of the arts sector itself which, on the face of it comes across as politely apolitical.

Another recent article in the Irish Times said that Aosdána was an excuse for low arts funding in the broader sector, Ireland having the lowest arts funding in Europe, despite the oft-heard boast of being the fastest growing economy in Europe.

Aosdána is as quiet as a grave, politically speaking, sending out an inadvertent message to the rest of the arts community that there is a bit of the old I’m-alright-Jackism about the whole thing.

And yet, when it comes to arts funding, the government can point to Aosdána as something supremely progressive. There was an article in The Guardian recently describing Ireland as arts-funding trend-setters because of Aosdána.

But despite this apparent success – Aosdána only caters for 250 artists – the wider arts community is hopelessly under-funded and often more than a little politically obsequious.

Silence is Golden

Declan Lynch, writing in the Sunday Independent of July 28 about the recent spat between Colm Tobín and the Irish light-lit fraternity, for want of a better term, remarked on the customary silence of the Irish arts community. There was that word again. Silence. Lynch wrote:

“There is this terrible niceness about the world of books, in public anyway…”

That niceness runs right through the arts sector and is often equated with positive thinking, in conscious contrast to traditional Irish begrudgery. So, criticism becomes perceived as negative thinking; while sweetness, often concealing acid barbs, is the general tone of the arts world.

We saw some of this acid in Marian Keyes retort to Colm Toibin’s relatively innocent remark about genre literature, when she said, “Sez the lad who wrote the Maeve Binchy pastiche and managed to persuade people it was literary fiction…” Ouch.

The point Lynch makes is that the culture is the lesser for the absence of this kind of barbed repartee. In other words, we could do with more stuff like this coming from the arts community.

Instead, revealingly, this only happens when someone’s patch is intruded upon. Outside of that, everyone is smilingly nice and polite, daggers concealed.

And there are daggers in the arts community, make no mistake. A sector of diminishing funding and respect, it can become very dog eat dog in the arts funding stakes. And the only ploy people appear to have is to be upbeat and smiling. Smiles, it is believed, will eventually win favour.

This erroneous belief, taken apart in Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of positive thinking in her book “Smile or Die”, also informs worker/management relations in corporate America.

Even as wages go down or stagnate and the unions are destroyed, people keep on smiling that positive corporate smile, in the hope that this will somehow improve conditions. It doesn’t. Things get worse.

The arts in Ireland is employing a similar hopeless strategy, with similarly hopeless results. Neo-liberal politicians will eat those winning smiles for breakfast while smiling back and diverting public funds elsewhere.

Politeness suits the stalling games they like to play while they are seriously busy elsewhere, like selling off Connemara to international gold-mining prospectors.

The Political Arts

While the political silence of the arts sector might suggest a sector that is apolitical, the reverse is actually the case. The sector is deeply political. Aosdána’s very structure and foundations are permeated by political thinking. It’s day-to-day business is political.

An idea given the green light by Charles Haughey, some critics believe that Aosdána was intended to impose political silence on the story-makers and image creators of Ireland. If that was its intention, it worked.

And built into the structure of the institution is a quite brilliant political neutralising dynamic, based on the old principle of divide and conquer. Membership is limited to 250 artists. (It was originally only 200.)

Due to the limited numbers, not only does an aspiring entrant have to wait for a sitting member to die [now there’s a plot for a detective novel] but they also have to win the favour of two sitting members to nominate them.

Think of the smiling and fawning and the secretive manipulations that this encourages.

The entire structure breeds fear, uncertainty, exclusivity and, perhaps most importantly of all, relative political silence.

It creates a divide of haves and have-nots in the arts community, spreading the same political silence in a community where everyone knows instinctively that the only hope in a shrinking sector is refuge in Aosdána.

Even the art produced in Ireland seems politically neutered. Where are the plays pulpit-thumping about social injustice and austerity?

Laughably, one of the few “writer/performers” who had anything critical to say about modern Ireland from the Abbey stage in recent years was the economist David McWilliams.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised really. After all, we don’t live in a country or a culture anymore. We live in an economy. Economics is the new national drama.

And then there is that annoying subtext running through the culture that art is for kids and students, and that kiddy arts events are designed to provoke childish wonder in adults. To help them rediscover their inner child, I guess. More American positive-thinking bunkum.

This corporate infantilising of the arts is a betrayal of those who believe arts is for grown-ups; a valuable forum for individual expressions of love, liberty and community; and, in times of oppression, a place where people might speak truth to power.

But for many in the Irish arts community, the development of a relationship with a minister for culture is the prime ongoing work in progress, regardless of who the minister is or what their moral proclivities might be.

This is what happens when arts funding is withheld to the stingy level it is withheld in Ireland: the political establishment makes obsequious beggars of everyone, and political silence is the inevitable result.

Arts funding structures as they currently stand, and the networking that goes with them, don’t make artists, they make politicians; and often these political structures produce arts charlatans, whose true art is networking, jockeying for position around the public money pot, becoming the public face of arts practise.

Because of hidden class advantages in the system it is inevitable that only a certain class of people will be funded and represented.

That the wider arts community will become narrow and exclusive and will, despite its perhaps best intentions, end up producing art that reflects the interests of the political elite.

Since politicians and bureaucrats are currently scratching their heads about how to “identify” genuine artistic talent to support – presumably by funding a bureaucracy to investigate the question – the answer is plain to see: fund everyone with a basic income and leave the artists to cultivate themselves.

It’s what they do anyway, even despite the funded professional facilitators politicking for position between the artists and the public funds set aside for them.

Leading the Way

This is the only reasonable way forward, not just for arts, but in recognition of robotics and climate change and poverty and low wages and inhumane jobs and working conditions. The only reasonable way forward is a basic living wage for everyone.

From there, people can make informed decisions about what they want to do with their time. If they want to work to increase their income by taking on a mind-numbing job, let them do so, to the extent that this pleases them. .

But people so inclined or driven to respond to some artistic impulse will likely use the stipend to devote their time to their art, to the benefit of the wider culture.

Given where we are now with climate change and late-stage capitalism, the national campaign for the arts might be best widened to campaign more broadly for a basic income for all, taking cognisance of the growing need for a centralised cultivation of creative and artistic thinking and practice.

Now that truly would be leading the way.

But first…we gotta whup Brexit.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Rollingnews

From top: Members of  Fine Gael Parliamentary Party pose for a ‘family photo’ at the party’s ‘think-in’ in Salthill, County Galway last September; Eamonn Kelly

Well, that’s the Maria Bailey case done and dusted.

Basically Leo Varadkar has asserted that neither Maria Bailey nor Josepha Madigan attempted to make a fraudulent insurance claim, despite the fact that evidence exists on the record that Maria Bailey had signed an affidavit claiming to be unable to run for 6 months and then ran a 10km race three weeks later.

I believe that is by definition a fraudulent claim.

The Taoiseach thinks not, and he referenced “other documents” and “medical records” as supporting evidence for his assertion.But these unfortunately cannot be produced.

So basically, it is a simple assertion by the taoiseach that Maria Bailey and Josepha Madigan have no case to answer.

Here is a key line in the taoiseach’s statement:

“The inquiry concludes that it is unlikely that a court would conclude that she deliberately sought to mislead as other legal documents talk about her running being restricted rather than not being able to run at all.”

What “other documents”?

Given that the entire case has been reduced to a statement by the taoiseach, with all documents pertaining to the inquiry unavailable to the public, is the Fine Gael internal inquiry then, a replacement for the courts, with the taoiseach then empowered to assert what is and isn’t legal, based on evidence he can refer to without having to produce?

What’s going on? Why bother having courts? Why not just ask the taoiseach what he thinks? About everything? It would be cheaper. Because that is basically what has happened here.

Similarly, Minister Madigan is also exonerated in the belief that the courts, given the evidence of documents available to the internal inquiry but not to the public, would also find that there is no case to answer.

So the internal inquiry, namely David Kennedy SC, becomes the mind of the courts; kind of like the pope becoming the mind of God.

“It is unlikely that a court would conclude…” so sayeth the oracle.

And yet elsewhere in the statement the taoiseach and his legal team go to great lengths to minimise the importance of the issue, by claiming that Maria Bailey was not a TD at the time of the alleged fraudulent claim and that Josepha Madigan was a mere backbench TD at the time and not a minister.

So is an allegedly fraudulent claim made by a minster more serious than one made by a backbench TD?

What law is this? Murphy’s law?

Continue reading →

From top:  Kate Bush fans in Fairview Park, Dublin last weekend  celebrating ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’. Eamonn Kelly.

David Attenborough told the UK parliament that radical thinking was needed to tackle climate change. Unfortunately, most people don’t do radical thinking.

They do safe thinking. They do thinking as it has always been done, and then they vote for politicians who do the same and then you end up with an imagined future world of private electric cars, a slight tweak on the present scenario because most people don’t do radical thinking.

Artists do radical thinking. That’s what makes them artists. That’s what makes them outsiders, and that’s what makes them in the present system “worthless”, because the non-radical thinkers can’t put a price on what they do.

Some argue that it was radical thinkers; artists, creatives, who created all the goodies that the non-radical thinkers now squabble about. I believe this.

And for every invention created by a radical thinker, you can be certain that a majority laughed and scorned and called the inventor “mad”. That’s the bulk of humanity, now swanning around empowered by the inventions of “mad” radical thinkers.

Everyone agrees that radical thinking is needed to tackle climate change, but unfortunately, the world is ruled by safe people who don’t do radical thinking. They do the opposite. They do safe thinking. They think what has already been thought.

I believe it was Edward de Bono who said that companies have two states: the initial creative state that establishes the company, and then the maintenance state that keeps the company going.

The people who create and establish the company generally move on and create something else, because that’s what they do; they make things.

The people who maintain the company are generally seen as a safe pair of hands. The main thing is that they don’t change anything, because if they do the company might collapse. Their role is to maintain the thing. They are generally not radical thinkers. They don’t make things. Their strength is maintenance.

Capitalism is a kind of company. It served everyone at one stage but has now become stagnant because it is run as it was always run, by the functionaries, despite the fact that it is in dire need of radical thinking to adapt to change.

But it can’t do that.

The great machine lumbers on, oblivious to the destruction it is causing to people and to the environment. It is run by people who don’t do radical thinking and so they can’t see the problem.

That’s why David Attenborough told the UK parliament that climate change needs radical thinking.

But the problem is not a shortage of radical thinkers. The problem is an abundance of safe thinkers occupying powerful positions and actively blocking the emergence of radical thinkers, even though everyone professes awareness that radical thinking is needed now more than ever.

By chance I caught a video of hundreds of people dancing to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. A celebration, a commemoration of the artistry of the record and the dance that went with it.

This is done all over the world. This one was being done in Fairview Park in Dublin.

But the interviewer seemed intent on mining for Kate Bush’s oddity as a person. She was a “bit special”, he says at one point, a term that is often used to kindly remark on a person’s perceived mental deficiencies.

Later he observes “She’s kind of kooky though, isn’t she?” As if this were a problem to be shied away from, to be managed. Something questionable.

This is a wonderful example of a righteous square attempting to label a creative mind, a radical thinker, as odd and mad and ultimately pointless.

And the square’s righteousness is validated by faith in the economy and the great capitalist machine run by squares with eyes fixed on the bottom line who believe that radical thinking is “mad”.

Though everyone agrees that radical thinking is needed to tackle climate change.

Radical thinking is a wasted resource, its value unrecognized by the safe thinkers that run the world and who, by their lack of imagination and vision, risk running the whole planet into the ground.

That’s your future, my future and everyone’s future. End of story, game over.

Simply because some safe thinkers in power are blocking the human ingenuity required to modify the great machine of capitalism, designed by radical thinkers, which has served us so well but which now needs modification, because the damn thing is running wild, driven by people who can’t see the damage in their wake.

Radical thinking is needed to tackle climate change, but conservative non-thinking freezes in resistance, because it finds radical thinking a bit “odd”. The truth is, it finds creative thinking a bit challenging. A danger to their power base.

The ethos of the normalton also skews the definition of work into a kind of hard graft slavery, achieving little or no end – except perhaps a perceived statistical improvement to the abstract “economy” – while thinking and creativity, the very activities at the root of human progress, are generally regarded as being out of touch with reality.

Though everyone is agreed that radical thinking is needed to tackle climate change.

The problem is that so many people not only don’t get radical thinking, they think there is nothing to get. That radical thinking is simply a “madness”.

That’s the difference between the person dancing in Fairview Park to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, and the interviewer trying to tarnish the artist as a freak. The dancers get it, though they admit they can’t do it.

The interviewer, on the other hand, seems to believe that there is nothing to get, and seems determined to get the dancers to admit to the perceived “nothing” of it all. To prove that the artist and the artist’s followers are all equally “mad”.

Though everyone is generally agreed that radical thinking is needed to tackle climate change.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Rollingnews

From top: Maria Bailey and Josepha Madigan; Eamonn Kelly

In slapstick comedy and cartoons there is a gag of sequential events resulting in an injury to someone.

In one version the result is accidental; a marble rolls off a table, rolls across a wooden floor, collides with something that falls over and triggers something else into motion, and so on through the sequence until finally a mallet or something falls on someone’s head.

In another version, like in the Roadrunner cartoons or Tom and Jerry, the sequence is intentionally triggered and usually goes wrong, rebounding on the “assailant” who set the whole thing in motion, the story delivering a comic lesson in justice.

After the Maria Bailey scandal broke, the Sunday Independent did an opinion feature in the June 2 issue billed as ‘The Shaming of Maria Bailey’.

In their efforts not to join in on the shaming, Brendan O’Connor and another columnist, Liam Collins, wrote that Maria Bailey was a victim of a system they referred to as “compo culture”.

Meaning, she was advised by legal representatives who, as I understand it, make a living out of encouraging clients to sue businesses for “accidents”, knowingly feeding off the business community by helping people to make exaggerated claims for damages and taking a percentage of the award in legal fees. As a profit-generating venture it’s like some form of commercial incest.

The venture even has a snappy name. Compo culture. It’s like a brand. It’s comfortable, almost respectable. It sounds familiar and kind of roguish. You say it and you think you understand it.

Oh, that’s just compo culture. And you can park it then without worrying too much more about it. It’s a fact of life. Like rain and toothaches. What can you do?

And by the use of the word “culture”, it sounds like a cultural feature worth having, and not just for the legal profession. It sounds like a part of who we are. It’s Irish. Like Guinness, hurling and soda-bread. You have to admire it, with a nod and a wink. It’s mischievous. It’s almost…heritage. It’s certainly entertaining. Art! It’s art, of a sort.

Shortly after the Maria Baily “shaming”, it was also reported in the Irish Indo that an arts group, the ISACS, the Irish Street Arts Circus and Spectacle Network (a satirist couldn’t make this stuff up) had written to the minster for culture, Josepha Madigan, herself implicated as a possible legal advisor in the Baily scandal, making a “plea” with her to do something about the soaring insurance costs that were killing the arts.

Insurance has skyrocketed in response to compo culture and it has made putting on a show practically impossible.

It’s unlikely that ISACS were being ironic in writing to the minister, though it would be great to believe that they were. It’s more likely that the ISACS were genuinely appealing to the office of minister for culture, rather than the person in the seat.

In the same way as Leo Varadkar respects Trump as the current presidential occupant of the white house; the respect for the office superimposed onto the office-holder, regardless of who they might be.

Because the awkward truth of it is, the Irish minister for culture who might right the wrong of soaring insurance costs impacting and strangulating the arts, is also a legal person with a background in compo culture claims, implicated as being the possible legal advisor to Maria Bailey.

This neatly highlights the sequential chain of events that leads from compo culture feeding off businesses, leading to soaring insurance costs and huge profits, arguably giving rise to a monied elite that finds its way into politics until finally the mallet falls on the head of the hapless arts community.

Compo culture has to have a knock-on effect somewhere. And where better than an organization of clowns, literally? It’s likely that Cormac McQuinn, author of the Indo article, was being ironic in writing the piece.

The Minister’s office responded to the plea by regretfully advising the ISACS that the minister “…unfortunately… has no remit in this area and would not be in a position to intervene in this matter.”

Well, that’s okay so. Performance artists can presumably all go and write detective novels instead. No insurance needed there. Not political novels, mind you. That could injure funding potential, and it’s not nice. We’re all in this together, so shush now. Negative thinkers don’t win promotion.

The legal Defence

But in case you’re thinking now that the insurance companies might also be victims of nefarious legal eagles, Charlie Weston, also in the Indo, on June 13, published an article showing profits for the insurance industry are up, and not just up, but way up, like 1,318% up, since 2016.

Car owners are taking the main hit, but everyone is taking a hit.

Michael Kilcoyne, Chairman of the Consumers Association, said the situation was a “rip off” for customers. “It is time they started sharing the profits with the rest of us,” he said. “They have a captive market in motors and they charge what they like.”

While car insurance is lucrative, the insurance industry’s main profits are coming from “investment income where insurers use premium income to buy bonds and property assets….” according to Weston.

Which, as I understand it, means they are now in property, like every other greasy-till muckraker on the landscape, let loose courtesy of the bould Leo, he of caring sanctimony now for the climate, envisioning an Ireland of electric private cars rather than buses and trains.

At the same time, the insurance companies are reluctant to provide liability insurance. This has impacted arts (wouldn’t you know it) with the “Promenade Festival, in Tramore, Co Waterford, and the Ballina Salmon Festival in Co Mayo among those to have been cancelled this year, due mainly to rising insurance costs and the compensation culture,” according to Weston’s article.

This story was championed on Facebook by Anthony Carmody of Carmody Moran Solicitors, who I guess felt that the legal fraternity were getting a raw deal in the aftermath of the Maria Baily case.

That in fact, they were victims too.

Let’s see, how many victims have we now?….There’s Maria, for falling off the swing; there’s Josepha, unfairly implicated in advising Maria to take legal action; there’s Leo and the gang, unfairly suffering poor election results because of the debacle.

There’s the hotel Maria tried to sue; there’s Maria again for being shamed; there’s the insurance companies for having to pay out huge damages forcing them to raise their prices and invest in property instead and offer no liability cover for arts events, the poor things.

And now there’s the legal fraternity who feel that Charlie Weston’s article has at least brought some balance to bear on an increasingly ugly picture of the Irish public being nailed for costs at every turn by the thriving cultural elite, all of them somehow “victims”.

Carmody’s blog rant makes for interesting, angry reading. He accuses the media of being the insurance industry’s PR mouthpiece, and the general tenor of the article is that the legal profession is being smeared to take the rap for what is essentially an insurance rip off.

He writes:

“The insurance companies would like you to believe that there is an endemic (if not systemic) compensation culture in Ireland and that there are overly high compensation payments to people who have been injured in accidents through no fault of their own…”

Which is essentially what Brendan O’Connor and Liam Collins were suggesting in their Indo articles.

Carmody continues:

“If you believe this hype, then every person who takes a personal injury case is on some form of fraudulent mission to take money not only from the insurance companies, but from each and every one of us.”

However, what Carmody seems to be forgetting is that this whole thing began when Maria Baily became snagged on an inconsistency that suggested she was knowingly making a fraudulent insurance claim.

But when she was then cast as a victim of the entire thing, the blame was placed instead on the legal fraternity who are now attempting, it seems, to place it with the insurance companies.

It’s only a matter of time before the cultural elite manage to pin the blame on alleged welfare fraudsters or immigrants. It’s fast becoming that kind of white-collar political bar brawl.

The only way it differs from a classic western saloon free-for-all is that there is a distinct lack of hard-jawed heroes in the melee. Instead, everyone is either running for cover or claiming victimhood.

But the true victims in all this are the public, because clearly, wherever the blame might finally rest, the public have picked up the tab for the bank failure in 2008, are paying over-the odds for car insurance, house rents, house purchasing, and a host of other things, and are receiving under the odds in pay.

All overseen by a government who back employer’s rights to steal employee’s tips, who are busily flogging off public services to the lowest bidder and who have created, either by neglect or design – the results don’t differ – 10,000+ homeless people, who are really the true victims of what appears to be a culture of pass-the-buck political profiteering whose main interests are property and land.

Noam Chomsky, when talking about the tobacco industry’s wilful fudging of science to keep selling a product that kills people, asked, Why is this not considered violence?

Like the slapstick gag of sequential impacts, the initiation: the marketing; and resulting impact: the cancer, are separated by arguably unconnected effects. The tobacco industry made it their business to argue these arguables, creating a playbook that is still used, with relish, by climate deniers.

But everyone can see the lie, they just can’t prove it to the satisfaction of those who don’t want it proved. This strategy is also arguably a violence against science.

Similarly, in light of the recent report led by Dr Mel Nowicki, the homelessness that is having a “destructive impact” on Irish children might also be seen as a violence against them.

They are at the receiving end of a sequential chain of cause and effect. A sequence initiated by a leader who ideological policy is causing those children measurable psychological harm and stunted development.

The connection between policy initiation and the later destructive effect on these children is as clear as day. It might even be construed as a form of abuse, since the initiator can’t plead ignorance of the knock-on effect of the policies pursued. The results have been scientifically measured.

Abuse of children by policy neglect? Any legal people out there who might develop this hypothesis? If you’re not too busy chasing ambulances.

We maybe haven’t changed as much as we like to think from the days of reform homes and Magdalene laundries. Sometimes it seems it’s just a different set of authority figures; more photogenic, smoother in PR, but still damning the sinners while enjoying the perks of power; niftily avoiding accountability when things go wrong.

And still abusing children? Indirectly, maybe, through socially unjust policies, but the results are more or less the same: the kids are damaged, but the profits are healthy and the organisation is sound.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist,

Pic: Twitter

Previously: Eamonn Kelly: Not Far from The Tree

Meanwhile…

Guess you already have seen this. Sharp exhale when I saw it. pic.twitter.com/NHYHed9WCo

— Rory O'Connor (@roconnorstuff) June 20, 2019

From top: Fine Gael Td Maria Bailey; Eamonn Kelly

It is likely that the swinging TD fell backwards off the child’s swing onto the back of her head, since if she had fallen forwards from the swing she would most certainly have fallen on her face.

Attractive and all as this picture may be to some, it is almost certain that she simply fell backwards off the swing, because during the fall she also apparently hurt her back and hip, which indicates a backward fall, most likely occuring within mere moments of having taken her seat.

Representatives for the hotel contend that the swinging TD allegedly had both hands full, meaning, we can only suppose, that she was not in a position to hold onto the swing to keep her balance, and simply believed that she could sit on the swing, hands free without holding on, and trust to her safety on what is essentially a moveable seat dangling from strings. The very epitome of instability. A bit like a Labour seat.

So, with no hands, the Fine Gael TD, proud representative of a party who are sternly against litigation culture, allegedly sat onto the swing, the seat of which presumably moved forward under the weight of her TD seat, causing the TD to flip backwards onto her head as earlier described, unable, it would seem, at the first sense of danger, to grab on to anything, since her hands were otherwise occupied; though it is not clear from reports what exactly was occupying her hands, since to state exactly what she might have been holding could prejudice the case, I guess.

It might well have been a smart phone in one hand, or a handbag, or even an envelope, with something similar or different in the other hand, though what that something else might have been in the TD’s hand on “a night out”, no one is brave enough to conjecture.

Whatever was occupying the TD’s hands, causing her to flip backwards off the swing like a latter-day Nadia Comaneci, seems, in all reports, to be a secondary consideration to the fact that she was able to flip backwards off the swing at all.

That there were no safeguards in place to prevent a TD on a night out from flipping accidentally backwards onto her head.

Surely, in a civilized country that boasts a propensity to generously service landlords while leaving 10,000 people homeless, some form of protection could be provided to ensure that TDs on a night out be minded at all times and in all eventualities.

From this perspective the TD’s legal representatives implied that there should be supervisors posted next to swings to prevent such accidents ever happening, as presumably there should also be supervisors posted around all the coasts of Ireland, especially the cliffs, to prevent people falling off the country, particularly people on nights out, with their hands full.

But whatever about the implications of public service supervisors posted like guardian angels all over Ireland, the upshot of the swing tragedy was that the TD, once sufficiently recovered from her somewhat ungracious backflip, and with her TD wits regained, decided to sue the hotel for…well, for €60,000 actually, or two-thirds of a TD’s salary, or €10,000 more than a TD’s pension, or roughly 5 times the amount of the state old-age pension.

One spokesperson speculated that the negligence claim may have been the result of a fit of pique when the TD caught someone laughing as she lay bundled in a heap on her head in a classic Irish Yoga position. This theory certainly has legs.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist,

Yesterday: Losing Her Seat

From top: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar joins an unnamed busker last week while canvassing for the European Elections in Limerick; Eamonn Kelly

Seeing Leo Varadkar singing along with the late Dolores O’Riordan’s “Zombie” filled me with what they used to call, mixed emotions.  But despite the general sicky feeling, it occurred to me that here was proof of the value of the arts.

The taoiseach, for that is his title, deserved or not, thinks it politically beneficial to sing along with a pop song as he stares into the abyss of an unavoidable election.

Because a pop song reaches into the hearts and minds of many people. This is its power, and by extension the power of all arts and culture. A power recognised, when it suits him, by even the most right-wing leader this country has ever produced.

But I was thinking of something else when I witnessed the unholy sight of the singing taoiseach with over 10,000 homeless people to his name. I was thinking about arts and jobs and community employment schemes (CE).

A CE scheme is designed to seem like what is called a “real” job, in order to prepare people who haven’t had a “real” job, to take one up. CE schemes are aimed at those who are “long-term unemployed or otherwise disadvantaged.” Note how long-term unemployment is collapsed into the definition of “disadvantaged”.

But from an arts practitioner’s point of view, unemployment is an advantage, in terms of opportunity costs.

In cost/benefit analysis, opportunity cost refers to the loss from potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

For the artist it means that the forty-hour work week is forty quality hours not making art. For the artist this is the main opportunity cost paid in taking up a “real” job.

This dilemma for artists and creatives is so widely recognised in the arts sector that for many years in Ireland unemployment assistance acted as a kind of unofficial arts grant for those who had the vocation or balls to go for it.

And it’s not at all easy to choose this route in order to open up time for arts practise. The culture is set against it. But for years the political class turned a blind eye, and the economy, particularly via the pubs, benefited from the ensuing widespread arts practise supported by the welfare stipend.

Even so, the mainstream culture mocked and jeered the artist “drawing the dole”, while simultaneously benefiting from the tourism attracted to creative Ireland, a term later appropriated by our present taoiseach for his own PR machine.

Everyone knows the value of the arts. But it was never easy to drop out and devote yourself to art. To the extent that Brian Eno once said that you have to really work hard to avoid getting a “job” if you hope to have an arts career.

Charles Bukowski and many other artists and writers have said similar, because to the artistic sensibility, a “job” can often seem like a soul execution.

Bukowski wrote of “the job”:

“…People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does…What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?”

Creatives are creative because they are more sensitive than most, and when you put them in a restrictive, regimented, authoritarian system, they feel the squeeze more than most. It’s not that they hate working. It’s that they hate slavery.

But even so, employers are often attracted to artistic types. They can’t help but see the skills on offer. But they want to cherry-pick them. They want this bit at their disposal, and this bit tamed, or even eradicated.

The standard job in this respect is totally destructive of the artist. And since CE schemes are designed to shape people into getting a “job”, they themselves, unless they are specifically geared towards arts practise, are also destructive of artists, for all the same reasons.

CE schemes are arguably only of benefit to people with little or no skills. But for people who are highly skilled or highly qualified or highly creative, one must query a system that delivers the skills of such people into the service of organisations, with no cost to those organisations, as the DEASP does in its ongoing mission to create full employment in officially defined “real” jobs.

And the benefits of such schemes may be negligible or even non-existent to artists swept up in the JobPath welfare cheats witch-hunts led and orchestrated by the now singing taoiseach.

Furthermore, the opportunity cost to both the artist and the community in terms of loss of potential cultural gain, must also be factored in to the overall cost to the artists and the community as losses rather than gains.

In this respect, there comes a tipping point when the level of qualification and possession of skills being delivered to CE schemes, features a strong element of structural inequality; since the organisations are benefiting from skills and experience they had no input in creating, and don’t have to pay for; plus the opportunity costs to the artist of unrealised projects that the organisation also absorbs as a benefit, which it then wastes because it has no use for the finer skills of the creative individual.

For instance, using a trained actor to man the switchboard because they sound good on the phone. While for the artist, the opportunity cost in particular is a tangible cost in unrealised arts practise.

From this perspective, the delivery of a creative’s skills to an organisation for no pay, amounts to structural exploitation of a natural human resource – artistic potential – that is by its nature the property of and potentially to the benefit of the wider community; including even the cynical political candidate inclined to invoke some culture to garnish his questionable profile at election time.

The ongoing harassment of the arts community into “real” jobs is a crying waste of human resources on a par with the destruction of food to balance market prices.

But Varadkar thinks it “successful” to turn an artist into a McWorker and call it job creation. It’s more like soul murder. He should consider that the next time he feels inclined to appropriate a cultural artefact to aggrandise his image.

Because his “violence caused such silence, Who are we mistaken?” So sang Dolores O’Riordan in the same song. To appropriate the line, it might mean, in this context, that Varadkar’s privatisation policies have been systematically killing the arts, creating cultural silence for the sake of fake job-creation stats.

For the last few years he has been selling artists out as low-grade employees, ignoring their gifts and costing them as worthless. The other day he borrowed one of their “worthless” products, a song to ride his ego around the place for the cameras, succeeding only in revealing his own hypocrisy.

But despite the official hypocrisy concerning the arts, there is still an opportunity to create the possibility of introducing a universal basic income, not as a payment exclusive to artists – that’s unfair and divisive – but as an opportunity to recognize individuality and creativity as being worth supporting for the benefits that accrue to the greater good.

Then, let those who enjoy the routine of “jobs”, go do that, and there are many people who do like that way of life. And let those who desire to dream and paint, play music or write or dance, do that if they so wish without having to starve to death in the process, or endlessly explain themselves to some comfortably unimaginative civil servant in the DEASP happily wielding a stick handed out by Varadkar to motivate the “lazy”.

In this way it would be possible to call off the attack dogs of the DEASP and JobPath, who labour under the misapprehension that, not only is there a job for everyone, but that everyone should be in what they term a “proper job”.

In other words, that everyone should be of the same uniform weight and value, even artists, like so many human battery hens.

This old-world thinking needs to be faced head on, because the costs to the community of destroying the sensibility of creatives, to fit into such a narrow definition of work, may well have to be paid further down the line in a dearth of original thinking, at a time when original thinking is most needed.

When we reach for people with ideas, all we may find are corporate zombies.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist, His column appears here monthly

The image taken in central Dublin and shared on Facebook today came with the caption ‘Is This the Kind of Ireland We Want?’

Eamonn Kelly writes:

Facebook has arguably become the main public forum for bursts of moral outrage, like the hate sessions in Orwell’s 1984.

The idea from the point of view of the participants is to be seen to publicly express energies in keeping with the herd. From the government’s point of view, it is a controlled outlet for public expressions of anger.

Today’s outrage was the photo of a homeless man in a Dublin street, his head shoved into a drenched sleeping bag and his trousers down around his hips leaving his backside bare to the rain.

The expressions of anger ranged from castigating the government to one that caught my eye in particular saying that the Irish had lost their Irishness.

This is a brilliant encapsulation of the high regard many Irish hold the Irish nation in, coupled with the dawning realisation that we may not be quite as perfect as that high regard has led us to believe. We could even be worse.

I subscribe to the view that we are worse, though not unusually bad in a wider humanitarian scale of human failings.

But in comparison to the perfect picture we prefer of ourselves, the great little nation and the fun-loving happy, generous people and so on; in comparison to that, we’re a bunch of c**s.

The picture of the homeless man that I saw on Facebook came with the caption Is This the Kind of Ireland We Want? Well, clearly it is. If we didn’t want it, we wouldn’t have it.

The truth is, this naked disparity in wealth and social standing is exactly the Ireland that many, if not the majority of Irish people, do want.

The Irish were always fond of getting up by putting others down, and this is the logical conclusion. That sadistic streak instilled by the clergy drives the whole sorry mess of austerity Ireland more effectively than any bunch of Nazis might have done.

You deserve it. You’re a sinner. Look at you. If you had worked hard and got up early and did what you were told and conformed to power and authority the way the rest of us do you wouldn’t be in that state.

You’ve only yourself to blame. You made your bed now lie in it. It’s all your own fault. You needn’t be lookin’ for handouts from me. And so on. We all know the song.

Another commenter said that the situation was outrageous and that he wasn’t going to vote for any of them, which, given the way power is placed in a democracy, is a vote for them.

Abstaining is not a vote against the ruling power, it is simply removing yourself from the count, a count where the ruling party get every voter out to the polls. You can’t win in a democracy by not voting. In fact, you lose.

Votes count and the Irish people voted for the policies of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael which included the policy to use homelessness as a tool to get the economy revved up again and get the banks back in business.

Overall, the method has been approved of by the majority of Irish people.

Fine Gael are a couple of points up in the latest polls. The elites are not hurting.It’s the people down the scale who are hurting and the lack of concern for them is an expression of Irish authoritarian heartlessness.

This itself is a legacy of church education; combined with a modern laissez-faire sensibility of corporate Darwinian economics, courtesy of the good old US of A, where corporations, seeking to create markets, have been known to deliberately hook people on opiates in a gesture of fuck-youness that was previously only ever seen in dystopian sci-fi movies or bleak concentration camp dramas.

So, for many Irish people, seeing such abject destitution as represented in today’s outrage photo, makes them feel “successful” on the one hand, in line with the American model; and virtuous on the other hand, in line with the Irish catholic authoritarian model of seeing their “goodness”, in the form of obedience, paying off and keeping them safe.

Safe, that is, from the other Irish who seem relish the sight of people nose-diving into personal disaster. Ye had it comin’. You’ve only yourself to blame. You needn’t come lookin’ for handouts from me…

FF and FG represent the will of the people. And that man in the rain is the will of the people. If you don’t get that, you don’t get Ireland.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist.