Tag Archives: Eamonn Kelly

 

From top: The Launch of The launch of GAA Athletes for a No Vote on Saturday, in Ballyfermot, Dublin 10; Father Ray Kelly on Britain’s Got Talent

There was a time back in the 1980s when I truly believed that Ireland was on a progressive trajectory of cultural change. I had a severe case of optimism back then, cured by a divorce referendum, an abortion referendum and the moving statues phenomenon. Ireland, it seemed, was slow to change.

One afternoon about 10 years ago, I came across a gaggle of drunken rag-week students, all male, ladding it around the town. Something about the familiarity of their Irish features and their general demeanour caused a kind of epiphany.

It occurred to me that the reason why Ireland had failed to take that progressive trajectory is because most people, for the most part, become like their parents, since this is the trajectory of least resistance.

It takes real effort to make a break with the past, and the truth is, most people can’t be arsed.

The macro result is that the culture, any culture, remains more or less the same from generation to generation.

In Ireland this sameyness is helped in great part by emigration and the departure of the majority of adventurous spirits, leaving the dull and the lazy to tend to the culture, with predictable results, like RTÉ programming and Country and Irish music.

Even the much-lauded Celtic Tiger period was essentially more of the same in Ireland except there were better cars and holidays and cocaine, but under the hood of souped Celtic Tiger decadence, things remained pretty much donkey-and-cart Irish in the bars and parlours of the wet old sod.

For instance, during the Celtic Tiger period some obscure saint’s “relic” came to Ireland for a “tour” – it was a splinter of bone I think, a kind of Elvis’ toenail for serious Catholics.  People turned up in their thousands to pay homage to this old dead thing, proving that Ireland had one foot still very firmly planted in the European medieval period. There was a long way to go yet for anything that might look like a progressive cultural trajectory.

Now we have another Groundhog Day-like referendum and the same cast of dubious characters are haunting the cultural landscape with essentially the same regressive doctrines and fear-mongering. It’s a wonder that they’re still here.

The progressive nature and success of the marriage equality referendum bodes well for the advent of an age of cultural enlightenment at last. Though I may be losing the run of myself a bit here and slipping dangerously towards unabashed optimism. And we all know where that leads.

Apart from the complexities of the abortion issue – it is in these complexities that the fundamentalists make the most hay by generating confusion, fear and uncertainty – I personally don’t see this really as being about abortion as such.

Abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage and so on are just the ball in a greater game; diversions from the core issue of all the debates that have plagued Ireland around sexuality.

That core issue is the grip on power the catholic church managed to wangle in the formation of the new Irish state, courtesy of de Valera who used them for some much-needed political stability, but maybe got a little more stability than he bargained for.

We’re still severely stabilised here in Ireland. The latest referendum, like the ones that preceded it, is really a question asking: Are we ready yet to risk thinking for ourselves?

It seems now that the church deliberately set out to indoctrinate the Irish people into a system of social, political and personal control, using the free access to the minds of children they enjoyed in the new state, to deeply embed ideas of shame, guilt, fear and uncertainty regarding questions of sexuality, establishing a kind of totalitarian power over the new state, to provide a foothold in a Europe in which the church was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The greatest irony of this campaign of oppression, as we all know, was the fact that the church itself provided cover for sexual predators who preyed on children in that church-generated climate of fear and uncertainty, causing cowed Irish adults to turn a blind eye to their activities.

This was the oppression in action. The generational inculcation of fear and guilt and tipping the hat to a clergy that behaved abominably, betraying the trust of an entire people’s mistaken respect, while clerics engaged in activities that included the rape of children and the selling of children for profit, among other “caring” preoccupations that have since been revealed to appall the world.

Two of the legacies of that campaign to oppress the Irish people were the divorce and abortion referenda where the church and its lackeys, and often with help, training and money from fundamentalist Christian organisations in the US, set out to manipulate those old fears and uncertainties embedded in Irish people in previous generations, their goal similarly to achieve social, political and personal control through shame, guilt, fear and uncertainty.

A Yes vote in the upcoming referendum is a Yes to releasing the grip these fanatics continue to hold on the minds and hearts of many Irish people and continue to hold on the Irish constitution itself.

This continued grip on power was achieved over generations through clever and underhanded manipulations, in a campaign of oppression that was designed to trick Irish people into democratically locking these oppressive ideas into Irish law, and by doing so, locking the church’s influence into the secular state.

When you vote Yes, you vote Yes to undoing the damage these shameless manipulators have inflicted on the Irish Constitution. You break their hold on power once and for all.

Nevertheless, they do persist, and the game continues. Yesterday a group of GAA footballers came out to launch a campaign for a No vote on the grounds that abortion is a failure of team-work. They say:

“…the proposal fails the test of teamwork. This is a society of people of many talents, with boundless potential and vast resources. If we work together, we can come up with a better solution than to cast away the rights of our unborn children and call it a solution. We can, and we must, do better.”

Suggestions on a postcard please, I guess.

Talk about simplifying the complex. But since they’re raised the metaphor of teamwork, you have to wonder if allowing a woman to die because the medical team’s hands are tied by the legalities of the 8th amendment is not also a failure of “teamwork”.

The statement also says:

“The proposal the Government has put forward is not inclusive. It specifically seeks to exclude one group of people, the unborn, from our society. It strips them of rights, it declares that they are not on our team.”

As this government routinely does with the homeless, with patients on hospital trolleys, with the disabled, the immigrants, the emigrants, the low paid worker and the unemployed.
It might be a greater demonstration of social concern and practical benefit if the GAA players went campaigning for the housing of the 5,000 homeless children the state also does not include on the “team”.

The statement ends with the brilliantly oblivious,:

“We respect and cherish women. We support them, and we believe that as a society, we have much more, so much more, to offer our women than the death of their children.”

Really? Like what, for instance?

Some right wing Christian think-tank may have put the GAA players up to this. But the concept is spun so poorly that it is likely that the GAA players dreamed it up themselves.
For instance, the core principles they cite are; inclusiveness, compassion, respect, dignity and teamwork.

But realistically each of these comes with a barely concealed gender prejudice and might more honestly be presented as, Inclusiveness (except for the girls.); Compassion (except for the girls.); Respect (except for the girls); Dignity (except for the girls.); Teamwork (Except for the girls.)

Then, just in time for the referendum, to cap it all off, like a fresh gag in a bleak divine comedy, Ireland coughs up, like a miraculous intervention, a singing priest crooning “Everybody Hurts” (they sure do, father) on Britain’s Got Talent.

This is a performance that has been fulsomely praised on Facebook by young Irish people who really should know better. But the strangest thing of it is. When the priest finished
singing there was a deathly silence in the auditorium until Simon Cowell rose to his feet and generated an ovation. Cowell sees money in this and he’s clearly backing the crooning cleric for a big payoff.

This, for those of a medieval mindset, appears to indicate that the singing priest has made a pact with the Devil.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer

Pics:  Rollingnews/ITV

 

From top: A scene from RTÉ’s What Are You Working For?; Eamonn Kelly

The Phillip Boucher Hayes documentary What Are You Working For? Screened on RTÉ on April 9 demonstrated that the jobs being created in recent times, particularly low paid jobs are not only not achieving what they were supposed to achieve – more funds in the tax net – but are apparently designed in such a way as to deliver neither security or a realistic living wage to those who hold such jobs.

They are in a way McJobs; all appearance and no sustenance.

Early in the programme Boucher-Hayes asked one of the participants, a low-paid retail worker, if she would be better off not working. This is an interesting question and something of a trap in a way, though there is no suggestion that it was intended as such.

To be better off not working alludes of course to the welfare system and the case is then usually made that welfare is too “generous” if some people can only be marginally better off by working.

The participant in this case was working part time in retail, earning €15,000 which left her tax free and also eligible for state supplementary benefit. But the period of entitlement to this state benefit was coming to a close, leaving her in a situation where her weekly earnings did not cover living costs.

This impoverishment of low-paid workers is a familiar scenario in the US where the systems of exploitation of low-paid workers is far more sophisticated, leading to situations where homeless people work full time but remain below the first rung of the so-called accommodation ladder.

It used to be called the housing ladder, but the homelessness crisis has created a new sub-zone requiring a new ladder. Soon we’ll have people struggling to get on the first rung of the deep-black-pit ladder.

The Irish retail worker the RTE documentary, when asked would she better off not working, said that she was earning €15 more for her 15 hours than she would earn if she went on welfare, which she refuses to do because she doesn’t want to take handouts from the state, despite the fact that she is working in a job that doesn’t actually cover living costs.

She went on to say that claiming welfare would set a bad example to her children, and adds:

“They need to have that self-worth to get out there and earn their own money.”

This is a sentiment we would all agree with, and one that is often made by low-paid workers who take pride in asserting that they could not and would not take state “handouts”. It is interesting too that the concept of self-worth is often factored into such sentiments as a quality only deliverable by working in a “job”.

But the idea of “getting out there” and earning “your own money”, while admirable in its fighting intent and moral chutzpah, takes absolutely no cognizance of the realities of finding decently paid occupation in a system seemingly deliberately designed to minimize worker’s benefits and protections.

To have a concept of personal self-worth tied into and dependent on success in such a system seems almost tragic.

These decent, moral qualities expressed by this woman are unfortunately just more sustenance for the dinosaur-like corporate entities roaming the planet. They’ll eat that stuff up all day. It serves them to have moral, honest hard-working people playing by traditional rules and moral codes.

Have you ever heard a multi-national corporation declare that it was too proud to accept state handouts? Corporations take all the handouts they can get and actually have systems in place to trawl the globe looking for state handouts.

They’re no mugs, that’s why they command all the wealth. That’s why we have so many multi-national corporations here in Ireland, and the majority of them are US vampire-like companies who parked their gargantuan arses here, tax free, to avail of state handouts, in exchange for “jobs” they would provide.

But the concept of “job” in this Faustian pact has clearly come to have two separate and distinct meanings for the parties involved.

The state may understand a “job” in the old-fashioned way of an occupation in manufacturing that delivers decent wages to its workers which will filter back into the local economy and into the national tax base in terms of income tax, VAT and so on, with the rising tide lifting all boats and so on. This understanding of “job” is predicated on the assumption that “jobs” are by their nature, well paid, a dangerous assumption as it turns out.

A multi-national company however may view a “job” in an entirely different way. If for instance a company is entering a deal of job provision in return for a tax-free base allowing access to the lucrative European markets, it may create as many jobs as you desire.

But don’t expect them to be “jobs” in the sense you understand the concept. Expect them to be occupations involving the use of the time and labour of local individuals in a setting that looks like the type of setting you assume a “job” belongs in.

A place owned by the employer that provides some service or other and which pays a minimal wage to an employee who is kept there against their natural inclination by the traditional moral imperative of getting out there and earning your own money.

Stick a paper hat on it and presto! It’s a “job”.

But if this “job” doesn’t pay enough to contribute to the tax base and the local economy, as was the case with all of the low-paid jobs featured in the RTÉ documentary, almost 400,000 of them, it is not a “job” in the sense in which you understood when you entered into a tax-exemption deal with multi-national companies in return for the creation of “jobs”.  They’re jobs, Jim. But not as we know them.

Such jobs are deliberately designed to be precarious, particularly jobs created by the US companies who have decades of experience in feeding off workforces as if people are just so many tubes of toothpaste to be used up and discarded.

The effect of engineering precarious employment is to destroy the concept of unions and worker protections and to leave individual workers bearing the costs of creating employment while the corporation takes all the profit.

This creates a situation where the projected tax take from increased employment that was understood as part of the “job” creation deal doesn’t materialise.

Everyone is working, but everyone is losing except the corporations. And that’s the way it is arranged. Workers can never win. It’s like gambling in a casino. The games are rigged. The house always wins.

So, what’s being taken from people, in real terms?

Their time. Their energy. Their skills. Their education. Their autonomy.

Here’s the IDA’s sell of Irish workers to lure foreign companies to Ireland.

International reports rate Ireland’s workforce highly for factors such as educational attainment, productivity and flexibility

These qualities are assets and are being sold on the international market by the government to lure so-called foreign investment.

But if the workers then hired in the deal of tax breaks and an educated workforce in return for “jobs” are then essentially cheated by these companies by being hi-jacked into precarious employments, as was demonstrated on the RTÉ documentary, it is clear that the initial deal is being poorly misunderstood by the deal-makers in government.

It’s a bad deal that fails to achieve what it set out to achieve, leaving Irish people essentially footing the bill for multinational profiteers, whether through low wages and the sacrifice of their skills to the cause of the multi-nationals’ business priorities, or by paying tax for social services some of which will supplement the living costs of the impoverished workers who are simply not being paid enough to live on and must resort to welfare top-ups.

Many short-term contracts create a situation where workers are on permanent call at the whim of the employer. Such a situation has further hidden costs in basic human needs and the effect on family relationships. Plus, you can be sure there are people who are simply not sleeping as much as they should for best health, and not eating properly.

These too are costs paid by the employee that directly enhance corporate profit while incurring health deficits that will inevitably mean future costs on the health service as over-worked people’s health breaks down. Costs which will again be paid by the Irish tax-payer.

All these “assets” are being turned to capital by the multi-national companies invited by a government still essentially exercising the tricks of the Lemass era.

It even could be that this ongoing dependent behaviour on multi-nationals to do our job creation for us has left our governments relatively guileless in the ways of business, and now prone to cutting deals that are damaging in their naivete.

Though I’m not sure the Irish establishment is that naïve. It’s more likely and fits more with anecdotal evidence and personal experience that they simply have no real respect or esteem for the native citizenry.

The way these multi-national companies operate is a bit like strip-mining the human workforce. All the skills, talents, qualifications and experience are turned over to the companies by the government in the interest of “job” creation.

But the “jobs” created are immediately stripped of profit by systems already in place and the workers and all their assets in the form of education and skills is immediately turned into a kind of human pulp from which the companies crush time, expertise, labour and fundamental health into profit for the company.

These profit-harvesting machines create wastelands of people and places, like those desolate US urban spaces you see on Louis Theroux documentaries where junkies roam like zombies until such time as they step foul of the law and are washed and dressed in cotton whites and consigned for life into fridge-like cubicles in privately run prisons where, in their permanent captivity they still miraculously generate profits for private companies.

This pact of tax breaks and selling off an educated workforce to multi-national companies in return for “jobs” is not only a poor deal, it also seems like an ongoing statement of a national lack of self-confidence. An Achille’s heel that is being mercilessly exploited by international profiteers.

All the creativity of a highly educated workforce is being burnt up to serve the production really of multinational company profits, with skilled people being pressed to take “proper jobs” that are often a waste of their talents and that are so poorly paid that they don’t qualify to contribute in any meaningful way to the tax base.

I came across an article recently where someone said of the US job market that wonderful art works are being lost because the artists and musicians are being pressed into low paid employment flipping burgers and so on. The same is happening here because the same principles and the same players are being let loose here too.

The talents and qualifications being wasted in the service of these companies is also a loss of potential real capital, since it has been demonstrated in study after study that the arts are a huge source of income to any country and are of particularly lucrative potential here in Ireland where the native talent is the envy of more culturally sterile but wealthy countries, like Germany for instance.

In the long-term, raw creative talent will not achieve its potential, because its energy and gift is being squandered to serve the creation of corporate profits for minimal benefit, in the name of the creation of an old-hat understanding of “real jobs”.

The waste of native talent in exchange for McJobs is tantamount to a crime against culture. A dated initiative for job-creation that is selling us all out and burning up future potential in exchange for nothing really, except a statistical boast for a government who then claim a raise for a job well done.

If you demonstrated the tax-breaks for jobs deal in a kindergarten with squares of chocolate, the five-year-olds would look on with total derision at the obvious cheat of it all.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer

Top pic: RTÉ

From top: Propoganda for one of the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plans; Cabinet members at the Project Ireland 2040 launch at the Institute of Technology, Sligo last week

Eamonn Kelly writes:

The five-year plans of the Bolsheviks were partly designed to deflect criticism from the ruling party. Later Stalin finessed this by simply killing the critics.

To introduce a 20-year development plan as Fine Gael have done is partly genius, since many of the present critics of the party’s policies are likely to be either dead or in nursing homes by the time the 20 years rolls around and everyone is finally permitted to say, “Well, that didn’t work!”

The idea combines early Bolshevik thinking of using the long-term plan to deflect criticism, but by extending the term of the plan it also gives a nod to Stalin’s propensity for silencing criticism, but with a more civilized approach by arranging for the passage of great swaths of time itself to be the executioner of opposing voices.

I know it’s a bit strange to be lumping Fine Gael in with the Bolsheviks, especially given the taoiseach’s contempt for what he calls hard-left politics, but these are strange times and everything is not always as it seems.

Because what Varadkar’s Fine Gael and the Bolsheviks have in common is a propensity to engage in wide-ranging officially sanctioned deceits designed to mislead the public.

In the Bolshevik’s case this was done to ward off a counter-revolution, in the Fine Gael case it is being done simply to ward off criticism that might undermine their hold on power. In Russia it was called censorship, in Fine Gael it’s called “controlling negative narratives”.

The thinking behind all this may be sincere. Perhaps the taoiseach genuinely believes that he is tackling head-on the native Irish propensity for negative thinking by trying to push through more positive thinking models, marrying positive thinking with economics, like they do in the US.

But you have only to look at the US to know that while positive thinking economics might be good for certain sectors of the economy, the top 1% for instance, it tends not to be so great or positive for blue-collar workers, most while collars workers, the poor, the destitute and everybody else really who isn’t either a tech billionaire or a movie star.

But whatever the degree of the taoiseach’s sincerity on the subject of positive thinking as a generator of economic recovery, the fact remains that, like the Bolsheviks, Fine Gael are investing public money in a team to control the news and the perception of the government, in order to hold onto power. And like the Bolsheviks are using the concept of a long-term economic plan to deflect criticism.

Varadkar has also to date targeted a minority social group for scapegoat treatment through the welfare cheats campaign, which he personally led, voluntarily making himself the official face of intolerance of the poor in direct contravention of an EU directive which his party have failed to implement: namely, to add discrimination on grounds of socio-economic status as a protection during austerity.

But if this right were implemented, the smirking minister with the welfare cheats sign would be on the wrong side of the law, as would the entire JobPath employment activation programme, which is predicated precisely on discrimination against those on welfare, or the poor, or those of low socio-economic status; something the then minister for social protection, now taoiseach, was fully aware of when he set out to pit low-paid worker against the unemployed, by scapegoating the latter as the cause of high taxation.

The number of artists who were also transferred into the JobPath system could also be viewed as a direct attack on the imagination of the culture, the system essentially degrading artists into a pool of menial labour from which two private companies hoped to profit.

This is not quite the gulags of the Soviet Union, but the results in silencing oppositional viewpoints are very similar, and much easier to defend, since the economic argument can always be raised as a justification for silencing art in the name of recovery.

What joins Fine Gael and the Bolsheviks is naked political power and the willingness to bend laws or neglect their implementation to retain power. The use of the long-term economic plan seals the similarity, despite the politics being, on the face of it, on the opposite sides of the spectrum.

There is little difference between Varadkar’s PR team running paid “advertorials” in the national press in order to combat what it terms “negative narratives”, and the Bolshevik’s all-encompassing control of the news in the soviet states, except in terms of degree.

Both are ultimately concerned with silencing opposition, and both justify repressive actions on the grounds of economic progress.

While Fine Gael’s form of control is not bare-faced censorship, they are quite open about their intention to silence dissent as being merely “negative”, and government control of the main organs of news creates a form of censorship by omission, with the concept of “advertorials” now merely adding to the flavour of a government-controlled Tass-like Agency in our midst.

The Fine Gael party’s secret weapons are “progressive” Varadkar as their public face, and the “religion” of positive thinking, which they hope will be enough to appeal to a majority of the electorate, enough to consolidate their grip on power. The twenty-year plan is perhaps a direct appeal to millennials.

But the wild introduction of that 20-year plan also seems to suggest that Fine Gael are not at all confident of success in the next election, where arguably all their focus truly lays, despite all the bumph of 2040. In other words, Fine Gael appear to be privately entertaining a few negative narratives of their own.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer

It has been said before that there is a kind of denial of class division in Ireland. But everyone knows that there is a class system, a lower and upper and so on, though the insistence appears to be that there are mainly “normal people like us”, who are annoyed for the most part by “skangers”, “scumbags”, “posh fuckers” and the “super rich”.

The socially unfortunate are explained away by seizing on a kind of Catholic throwback understanding, part karma and part divine retribution, which amounts to the judgment that they “brought it on themselves” by, usually, “not working hard enough”.

The new homeless fall into this category, a kind of secular damned, suffering the torments brought about by original economic sin of borrowing too much, and, presumably, “not working hard enough.”

The various prejudices that hold the whole thing together are supplemented by selective readings of the news. Stats are particularly good for propping up the illusion that everything is hunky dory. Just don’t contrast stories from different ends of the spectrum or they’re likely to ignite and blow up in your face.

Take today for instance, December 15th 2017.

The Irish Times had a story reporting over 10% growth in GDP, with the strong pick-up due to “personal consumption”. If you want to support the system, Leo’s Ireland, and pat yourself on the back for being of optimistic outlook, you’ll seize on that reported 10.5% growth figure and think no more about it.

But if you read down through the article you’ll find that the figure isn’t as solid as it might first appear to be, due to difficulties in acquiring accurate measurements of GDP. By the end of the article the true figure for GDP growth is somewhere between 6.5% and 10%, maybe.

Goodbody analyst Dermot O’Leary is quoted as saying:

“the headline GDP growth estimate of 10.5 per cent year on year is not a realistic gauge of the pace of growth in Ireland in Q3 2017…”

That the article leads with the headline “Irish economy surges to double-digit growth,” is a fair indication that the Irish Times believes that this is what we should believe. But the headline is an inaccurate exaggeration of the true story, almost tabloidy, so, proving that in mean times even the formerly urbane may become a little calloused.

Meanwhile, over in RTÉ, Fr Peter McVerry was also quoting figures to Cathal MacCoille on Morning Ireland, the dialogue reported in Broadsheet. Fr McVerry was calling for a rent freeze, describing the current housing crisis as “beyond crisis”. He warned that within months all available hotel accommodation would be used up.

He said:

“In January this year, there were 410 families in emergency accommodation. In July, there were 659 families in emergency accommodation. The numbers are just going up and up and up. And I would describe the situation,

it’s like a boat that’s drifting, it’s drifting towards the rocks and there doesn’t seem to be any engine that’s trying to drift it away from the rocks and there doesn’t seem to be anybody in charge. The problem is just getting worse and I see no measures being taken to try and address that problem in the short term.”

Fr McVerry added:

“The primary cause now of homelessness, of 90% of the new people becoming homeless is the private, rental sector. Their rents have gone through the roof. People can no longer afford them…”

Wait! Didn’t the other article in the Irish Times say that the GDP was up due mainly to personal consumption? From the times article:

“The latest quarterly national accounts show gross domestic product (GDP) accelerated by 4.2 per cent in the third quarter alone amid a pick-up in personal consumption…”

Hmm… Could these stories be connected?

Fr McVerry said that he and others have been calling for rent freezes for over a year now, but these calls have been ignored, and while rents have increased dramatically, rent supplement from the department of social protection has decreased.

He said:

“The rents, nationwide, in the last three and a half years have gone up by an average of €50 per week. In Dublin they’ve gone up by over €90 per week on average and the rent supplement has been reduced by 28% – there is just no correlation now between the rent supplement and the rents that are being demanded by the landlord.”

Fr McVerry added that Alan Kelly, Minster for Environment, Community and Local Government had promised a rent freeze last February:

“…he said he was going to do it – he actually said he was going to introduce emergency rent freeze. We’ve heard nothing since.”

If there were some correlation between increasing rents and “surging GDP” due to “personal consumption”, a rent freeze might mess up the surging GDP, effectively freezing the recovery.

This leaves the government really with a choice on what to freeze, like so many economic housewives. Given that many of them are landlords we shouldn’t be too surprised that they often choose, by neglect, to freeze the homeless. Sure, they probably deserve it anyway. If they’d worked harder when they had the chance they wouldn’t be homeless.
They’ve only themselves to blame.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, someone shared a Christmas card from President Michael D. Higgins. The president’s Christmas Message was:

“To give protection, food and water to those who are fleeing war, oppression or starvation is a matter of fundamental, universal human solidarity. The refusal to do so goes beyond that remarkable phrase coined by Pope Francis – ‘the globalisation of indifference’, as indifference is slowly turning into mistrust and hostility.”

If the sentiment of that rubs you up the wrong way, there was consolation to be found further down the news feed, where someone shared a clip from the Dáil debate on homelessness, with Richard Boyd Barrett quoting the Taoiseach as saying “There is no such thing as a free home.” Which stands as a nice contrasting Christmas message to Michael D’s perhaps dated sentiments.

As you can see, with careful selectivity, the news always has something for everyone.
I was a bit inspired myself by the Taoiseach’s quote, and I made up a Christmas card meme (top) in keeping with the sentiments and priorities of Leo’s New Ireland.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer

Rollingnews

From left: Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government Eoghan Murphy TD and Damien English TD at the Housing Summit in the Custom House, Dublin last September.

We all know about the €5million the Taoiseach set aside for a PR team. It is generally assume that they advise the Taoiseach on his “look”, but it likely goes a little deeper than that. To paraphrase a Tom Wait’s song, you can’t help wondering “what are they building in there?”

In November 2017 the Taoiseach suddenly took another tack on the subject of homelessness. He decided to downplay it, to describe it as normal, to as good as deny its existence.
This was taken up by others in the government. There was outrage on the internet, but it seems to have burned itself out. Maybe that too was an idea. To be outrageous and burn off the outrage.

An idea that featured in the sudden re-evaluation of homelessness as “normal” was the term “negative narrative”. I first heard it in a quote from Damien English. In the context in which the phrase was used by Fine Gael, and in the new “beliefs” about homelessness that the phrase appeared to inform, the implication appeared to be that homelessness was a consequence of negative thinking and behaviour.

Homelessness was being presented, in a sense, as the result of a failure to think positive.

This seems exactly like something a PR team would dream up. It’s quite good too when you look at it. By attaching the concept of positive thinking to the homeless crisis the aim of the 5million club appears to be to tap into those Irish people, a sizeable minority, if not possibly the majority, who genuinely subscribe to the idea of positive thinking as a progressive strategy for improvement and change.

Positive thinking is seen by many Irish people as a corrective to Irish begrudgery, and is enthusiastically championed by people who genuinely wish to shuck off their inherited Irish pessimism.

The phrase “negative narrative” is essentially a mechanism, which could conceivably be attached to any number of issues, ensuring more or less the same outcomes, i.e. blame the victim for having created the problem.

This time it is homelessness, next time it may serve similar functions attached to some other issue. Such a phrase can imply, across the board, that all problems ultimately are a failure on the part of those with the problem to practise positive thinking.

But, might this be true? Would social conditions improve if everyone thought more positively?

Studies have shown that the concept of positive thinking is very similar to religions in the manner in which it promises positive returns for certain rituals and practises. It is for this reason that the belief system, which is essentially what it is, is often regarded as a cult. The system has garnered a host of critiques, mainly in the US, questioning its claims. It’s no accident either that President Trump is a big positive-thinking aficionado.

But Trump, like Fine Gael, often cynically uses the concept of positive thinking to deny uncomfortable truths, much as Fine Gael appear to have cynically used the concept to downplay the severity of the homelessness crisis.

But positive thinking, when allied to politics, has been described by some critics as “political gaslighting”. Kitty S Jones describes in the web blog, “Politics and Insights” how the Tories in 2015 used the concept of positive thinking to discredit jobseekers when George Osborne installed cognitive behaviour therapists in job centres to “support” people.

The insinuation being that the causes of unemployment are “psychological rather than socio-political” and that the jobseekers simply weren’t thinking right. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is designed specifically to modify so-called negative thinking. Still, there is a potential growth market in this, creating employment for cognitive therapists “fixing” poor people’s attitudes.

On top of the cynical use of the concept for political ends, an article in the New Yorker in 2014 by Adam Alter cited studies that appeared to demonstrate that even the concept of positive thinking was questionable as an effective agent for the improvement of anything.

“The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking” cites several studies that appear to show that positive thinking may actually be detrimental to positive outcomes, for reasons that are similar to talking up a plan so much that you’ve talked all the energy out and the thing never gets done.

One of the more popular and scathing books on the subject is Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America” (Review here).

She takes issue with some of the main tenets of the belief system, the idea of shutting all “negative” people out of your life; the idea that the poor make themselves poor by not thinking “rich”; and that most cruel and disgusting idea, the notion that cancer sufferers create their own cancer through negative thinking.

All these questionable ideas from Positive Thinking are quite similar to Eileen Gleeson’s assertion that the homeless create their own homelessness through “bad behaviour”. Similarly, Damien English’s use of the phrase “negative narratives” seems also to be pitched in the spirit of positive thinking as a progressive cure-all.

It is likely that the Taoiseach’s 5million club have identified the popularity of positive thinking in Ireland – it could even be that the concept has filled the vacuum created by the decline in church participation – and have set out to cynically exploit the popularity of the belief system to deny the existence of homelessness.

In much the same way as the Trump administration use denial, often flagrantly, in the face of direct evidence to the contrary, in order to discredit all opposition and “equalise” irrationality with common sense perceptions. But the key strategy appears to be, in the Irish case, to hook into those in the middle ground who subscribe, with genuine good intentions, to the concept of positive thinking as a progressive tool for change.

Taken to absurdity, the concept could be invoked to claim that all political opposition is simply negative thinking in action. Maybe the government could install a team of cognitive behavioural therapists in the Dáil to try and modify the thinking of the left Alliance in order to arrive at a more agreeable political consensus.

Maybe instead of giving food and support to the homeless, which Eileen Gleeson suggests is a bad idea anyway, why not just give them copies of “The Secret”, and let them positive-vibe their way out of the hotels and off the streets?

This amalgam of right-wing religious type cultishness, based on a belief system that identifies a righteous elect and excluded defectives responsible for their own misery through “wrong thinking” is about as dangerous a mix of irrational bullshit as any government or ruling elite could possibly conceive of.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer

Rollingnews

 

From top: Leo Varadka at the Dublin Pride festival last month; Eamonn Kelly

After Enda Kenny became Taoiseach, the liberal left immediately launched into a social media campaign of ridicule and invective against him, using memes and comments and so on, and not holding back in the least in terms of insult.

In contrast, there has barely been a whisper of dissent against Varadkar.

It occurs to me that people may be afraid to criticise him for fear of their criticism being misconstrued as closet homophobia. (Either that or the liberal left are all for the right-wing Taoiseach).

I was accused of homophobia in a comment on one of the JobPath articles in Broadsheet. It took me a while to figure out where on Earth the person had drawn such a conclusion from, and I went over the text with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, but could find nothing incriminating.

Then I remembered that the Taoiseach was gay. I responded with something like, ‘Oh, I get it, the Taoiseach is gay, and I’m criticising him, so therefore…’

This response was then seized upon by a third party who said something like, ‘Thanks for reminding us of the Taoiseach’s sexuality. Makes me wonder what your agenda is…’

This is a classic lose-lose situation.

It seems that the election of a rabidly right-wing but forgiveably gay Taoiseach has had the effect of hoisting the liberal left by its own petard. I’m sure Fianna Fáil must be taking careful note of this puzzling turn of events.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer.

Rollingnews

Previously: JobPath And Class Discrimination

JobPath And The Reality Of Employment Activation

JobPath: The Great Social Proetection Swindle

 

Is RTE Lol-ing At Its Own Since opening our doors in 2003, has delivered thousands of web and digital experiences, across a multitude of website platforms alarge enough to offer HZZGJT.COM you the knowledge and expertise we’ve gained servicing the Corporate and http://hsexweek.org/ Government sectors, yet small enough to care. .


From top: Fr Peter McVerry; Eamonn Kelly

Eamonn Kelly writes:

In today’s Irish Times Fr Peter McVerry takes the Taoiseach to task for implying that homelessness does not exist, that what we call homelessness is really only a kind of aspiration for better homes. That those who complain of homelessness are really saying that they’d like nicer places to live.

Here’s the quote from the Taoiseach that Peter McVerry angrily takes issue with:

“There are 90,000 people on the housing list but very many, if not most, have houses and apartments. However, these are houses and apartments that are being provided to them through rent supplement or the private rental sector and they want different houses or apartments that are more appropriate to their needs.

It is important to recall that, of those 90,000 on the housing list, the majority are in houses or apartments, just not the permanent homes they would like to have and which we would like them to have.” [Leader’s Questions, July 12, 2017]

So, according to the Taoiseach, the homeless have houses and apartments, but they are simply being fussy and want better ones.

And since he is the Taoiseach, and leader of the free world as we understand it here in this soggy corner of Europe, the Homeless Crisis has now been officially downgraded to the much more manageable Fussiness Crisis.

A crisis where taste is not, unfortunately, being matched by reality. Something a good bucket of paint and a joss-stick might solve. A problem that a simple shift in mental attitude might dispel.

Fr Peter McVerry’s article produces enough hard evidence and figures to show, just in case anyone was in any doubt, that we really do have a homeless crisis and not just a “Fussiness Crisis” as the Taoiseach appears to be suggesting.

The article includes a graphic incorporating figures from the central statistics office that clearly show there are 6,906 homeless people in Ireland, 73% of them in Dublin. According to the Taoiseach, and this now exists in the Dail records, “very many of these, if not most, have houses and apartments.”

Where I come from, this is called a bare-faced lie. But I come from a relatively humble working-class background and I’m maybe not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a bare-faced lie and some complex housing/social policy thingy that someone like me might not be fully capable of grasping.

The Taoiseach’s suggestion that there is no homelessness also implies that rough-sleepers and kids living on fast food and crisps in hotel accommodations, as reported in the Irish Times yesterday, are only figments of the collective imagination, like some kind of mass delusionary experience.

The idea also appears to suggest that the work Fr Peter McVerry and people of his ilk have been doing all these years, against increasingly ambivalent odds, is also delusional in its assessment of the problems they are addressing every working day of their lives, and the political policies that appear to be creating these problems.

There was an old joke in working class Dublin to describe tough neighbourhoods. You’d say “They ate their young in that place!” This came to mind when I noticed yesterday’s census reports that 1 in 4 homeless people are under the age of 18, and that the largest homeless age group was children under 4 years of age.

People may soon be saying of Ireland. “Sure, they ate their young in that place.”

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer.

Rollingnews

From top: Mountjoy Prison: Eamonn Kelly

Writer Eamonn Kelly’s investigation of job activation schemes in Ireland prompted him to look at the prospect of another foreign import: prisons for profit.

Eamonn writes:

I remarked in one of the JobPath articles that we here in Ireland enjoyed an advantage in being able to assess the effects of particular trends in Britain, with a two or three-year time lapse before they landed here.

The advantage of foresight we enjoy by looking at developments in social policy in the United States can be counted in the decades.

A story that recently emerged from New Mexico contains a salutary warning for us here in Ireland in our current blind rush into the privatization of public services.

Last week, an article about a US detention services provider called CoreCivic, (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), the second largest private prison operator in the United States, described how the company found itself short of prisoners at one its facilities in Torrance County, New Mexico, after legislative reforms began to dry up the supply of convicts coming on stream.

The company were demanding that the government come up with 300 prisoners within 60 days, or it would close the facility, resulting in 200 job losses.

The company, which has been providing prison services in the area for almost 30 years, and which has been repeatedly sued for various offences, including “sexual harassment, sexual assault, deaths, use of force, physical assaults, medical care injuries and civil rights violations,” is now essentially holding the government to ransom to provide prisoners for its private prison system.

While looking into that story, I came across this article from France, that more than concurs with the thrust of my suspicions concerning the puzzling “criminal” question that was put to Irish Jobseekers in November 2015, as reported in the Irish Sun. (I know, not exactly the paper of “record”).

I hypothesized a scenario that showed there might be a profit motive in casting the unemployed as criminal, which I explored in my article “The Investment Potential of Criminalizing the Poor.”

The French article begins:

“More than a third of prisons in France are partly run by private companies. The trend towards privatizing the prison system, which began three decades ago, is gaining in momentum.

A handful of companies are capitalizing on this very lucrative market, providing services that include catering, receiving visitors, building detention facilities and organizing prison labour…”

The French, as the article shows, currently pay almost €6 billion a year to private contractors for such services.

Both Working links and Seetec have strong backgrounds in detention services, through contracts with Sodexo Justice Services, which provides prison services around the world, including the 34 French prisons mentioned in the article quoted.

Rehabilitation services was the main business of both companies awarded the JobPath contracts in Ireland, which may explain the tone and attitude of the JobPath service, where unemployed people are treated as “guilty” of being unemployed and in need of rehabilitation, in an atmosphere with more than a whiff of incarceration about it.

With all the signing in and out, the policing of time, the questioning of character and integrity, the deliberate parole officer style relationship, it is as if the main thrust of the JobPath model is in grooming Jobseekers into becoming accustomed to prison-like protocols.

This is not quite the “training” that many people might regard as being conducive to the development of grassroots entrepreneurial zeal.

An entrepreneurial spirit that might, if it were cultivated and invested in, help lift the economy with local enterprise, rather than us always having to depend solely on the Big Apple’s of the world to hire us as poor, hapless economic eejits.

Instead, we fund a system apparently deliberately designed to destroy self-motivation and personal initiative, in order to create people in need of “help” and “rehabilitation”, who can then be serviced by private corporate interests in exchange for public funds collected and set aside by the community for the provision of social protection.

The model is a kind of economic vampirism, and may, for you lit students out there, cast some light on the sudden popularity of vampires in recent decades that, as far as I can tell, appears to have originated in the US.

Could be a decent subject for a thesis: is there a relationship between the trajectory of blue-collar wage cuts and the rise in popularity of vampire fiction?

In New Mexico, a spoksperson for CoreCivic said,

“The city of Estancia and the surrounding community have been a great partner to CoreCivic for the last 27 years . . . a declining detainee population in general has forced us to make difficult decisions in order to maximize utilization of our resources.”

That quote encapsulates an aspect of the approach I remarked upon in Part Four of my JobPath series: the gaining of public approval for the private company’s operations.

Here the community are described as a “great partner” in the system. The other part of the concept, gaining the “agreement” of the subjects to participate in the system, in the case of JobPath this was acquired by coercion, as shown in Part 5 in the series, has long since evolved in the US system into simple management of prison populations, with stringent Federal legislation, such as the three strikes law, providing plenty of raw material to the private prisons system.

Ironically, it was as a result of reforms in the justice system in the Obama era, that the supply of “raw material” to the private prisons began to dry up, leaving the private company in New Mexico having to make “difficult decisions” to ensure its own economic survival.

Difficult decisions like, blackmailing Torrance County to provide them with more prisoners, threatening job losses for failure to comply.

Journalist Steven Rosenfeld writes,

“This is a perfect snapshot of what’s upside-down with privatization: the lack of economic opportunities and politicians who genuflect at providing jobs, regardless of the larger social implications, pushing law enforcement into the dirty business of ramping up arrests and convictions so private firms and shareholders can make more money.”

The town of Estancia, New Mexico, now finds itself in a dilemma. If it does not come up with 300 fresh prisoners for the private company, the company will close the facility as unprofitable.

If this happens, the town will lose 200 jobs and an estimated $700,000 annually in commerce, while the surrounding Torrance County would lose $300,000 dollars in tax revenues, and will also be left with the problem of accommodating the 700 Federal prisoners that the private facility currently caters for.

Torrance County, New Mexico, desperately needs an “investment” of 300 fresh prisoners.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer.

Pic: Rollingnews

 

From top: Dublin unemployment queue; Eamonn Kelly

Writer and activist Eamonn Kelly this week concluded an investigation into job activation schemes in Ireland.

Many thought he lacked positivity..

Eamonn writes:

I noticed that one of the criticisms leveled at my articles about JobPath was that they were “negative”.I’m aware that there is a view that negative thinking is destructive of “good” ideas, to the extent that some overly-enthusiastic positive-thinkers appear to believe that negative thinking needs to be stamped out in the name of progress.

The concept of positivity is one that is held dear by Irish people who regard themselves as “progressive”, and is a common badge of honour sported among the artistic elite in Ireland, and often regarded as a necessary antidote – or even as a challenge to – traditional Irish “begrudgery”.

The underlying assumption being that begrudgery and negative thinking are the same thing. Which they’re not. One is destructive envy; while the other, critical thinking, seeks ultimately to be constructive.

There is a strain of positive thinking abroad in Ireland that originated in the US, and it is not as wholesome as its smiling presentation might suggest. If this were a self-help manual we might dub this particular strain of positivity as Toxic Positivity.

The US journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote two books on this type of positivity: “Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.” and “Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.” Their titles alone shed light on the problem inherent in certain basic assumptions concerning positive thinking.

Ehrenreich shows how positive thinking has its roots in corporate America, where it mingled with US-style Christianity, to produce a strain of delusion that leaves people believing they can think themselves rich by smiling and adopting a positive mental outlook.

The downside to this idea of course, is that you can also “fail” to think yourself rich, by falling into negative thinking, a kind of Corporate original sin that causes not only poverty, but also cancer and brain tumours and all the other awful maladies that life can throw at people.

This idea, that people are architects of their own misfortune through “wrong” thinking, is a very convenient fiction for the various power entities that rule the world.

At its most cynical, and even darkly comical, a corporate spokesperson might claim that people who were say, poisoned by arsenic in the sugar brekkies, have only themselves to blame for not thinking “correctly”. (The spokesperson might be right. They should be eating natural oats.)

The concept is genius really, because it also contains an in-built guilt system that gnaws away at some unfortunate people who may truly believe that if they had thought more happy thoughts, in a more consistent manner, that their lives mightn’t have turned out to be quite so miserable.

But the basic, wildly magical assumption that you can think yourself rich, and that you can think the world into being a better place, by affecting constant contentment, is a travesty of the knowledge that imagination, perhaps more than any other human trait, has the power to shape reality.

Such a power is of course dangerous to certain entrenched powers.

The toxic positive thinking model, appears to deliberately set out to destroy these “dangerous” imaginative and creative attributes, offering a more childish positivity, one that results in the creation of good and obedient workers who smile and smile and smile, toiling away in non-union working environments, suffering decreasing wages year on year, and longer working lives and decreasing pension benefits.

But they smile on, smiling as big as they can, in the vain hope that their forced positive mental attitude will somehow change the awful world their corporate masters are imposing on them.

This kind of positivity has been sold so effectively that it is now almost a religion, and one of its mortal sins is, you’ve guessed it, negative thinking. Once an attribute is considered a type of “sin”, it really needs to be watched closely, particularly in Ireland, simply because we were so deeply indoctrinated by the Church over so many generations that we’re likely to be a little over-sensitive to things like sins and sinners and judgements and commandments and so on.

This is perhaps why it has been so easy to convince the public that the unemployed are economic sinners deserving of being penalized by the JobPath system.

Given the prevailing unquestioning acceptance that positive thinking is a social “good”, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine a scenario where a law might be passed designed to reprimand people for expressing negative opinions, on the grounds that such opinions might be undermining a perceived national or regional success story.

Orwell anticipated this in “1984”, and called it “thoughtcrime”. The political intention of the authority in “1984” was to destroy opposition at source by destroying imagination.

The strategy was to simplify and reduce language, destroying its richness and its complexity, reducing concepts to one-word or one-phrase simplicities, depriving the imagination of the tools to think.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer.

Previously: JobPath: The Great Social Protection Swindle

JobPath And Class Discrimination

JobPath And The Reality Of Employment Activation