From top: Tanaiste Leo Varadkar leaked confidential documents to his friend and political supporter Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail (right), a president of the now defunct National Association of General Practitioners (NAGP); Eamonn Kelly

The Village article saga will likely dominate the news this week. Following the article and the statement by the Tánaiste in which he acknowledged that he “had provided a government document to a medical organisation through informal channels,” as reported in The Journal, the next question is, Is that illegal?

Village contends that it is illegal, while the Tánaiste rejects this and admits that it was “not best practise”. This line “not best practise” has been taken up by the taoiseach and others like a shield to deflect the awkward legality angle.

The ins and outs of whether or not this practise is or isn’t illegal is way beyond the scope of my abilities to discern or decide and will be thrashed out over the next week by better informed heads. But the story is fascinating on a number of levels, not least the level of unprofessionalism involved.

It would appear that the recipient of the confidential document is a social friend of Leo Varadkar and was the beneficiary of a favour. It is almost as if one of the perks of being a friend of a politician is that you may have access from time to time to confidential documents which might normally only be available to certain people in government.

The gesture of sharing the document might also be a form of showing off to a friend the reach of your powers. Whatever the motive, the act itself, the sharing of the document, is basically unprofessional, whatever about its legality or otherwise.

Unprofessional Standards

This kind of unprofessionalism is not uncommon in Ireland. People often appear to break from their roles for the sake of interpersonal showing off or advantage.

The point though is not so much the legality or illegality of such actions, as it is the casual abandonment of the person’s role, position, duties and obligations by the standards of professionalism, which you would imagine are held in high esteem by those in high positions.

But as was demonstrated by the church scandals, that may not necessarily be the case, while the current mother and baby controversy seems to amount to a form of human trafficking in which the state is implicated.

And it is here that the Varadkar story is both very Irish and very average. Because here is a former taoiseach who apparently, while taoiseach, by his own admission, abdicated on basic professional standards in order to facilitate a friend.

A friend who was engaged in establishing a rival union to an already existing union representing people in the same sector. The fact that unions are involved, coupled with Varadkar’s neo-liberal ideology, makes the whole affair seem even more intriguing.

The careful repetition by other politicians of the phrase the Tánaiste used in his defence, “not best practise”, while being politically wily, manages only to project a suspicion of complicity in the practise, suggesting perhaps that the practise is fairly common in day-to-day political activity.

Certainly, the general view of politics in Ireland is that it is rife with cronyism. But what hasn’t been made so abundantly clear until now is the likelihood that one of the perks of governing is that you may share inside information with friends and acquaintances, presumably for any number of reasons: from a desire to impress with your power, to even perhaps issuing subtle business tip-offs. Who knows?

The point is, the impression given is that there doesn’t seem to be any moral reason why you wouldn’t engage in such practises. On the contrary, by Irish standards, it seems almost expected of you. You might even argue that the only reason for acquiring political power in the first place is that it gives you access to the inner sanctums of government from whose secrets you and your immediate circle of friends may derive benefit.

Again, such an attitude, which might be framed as “clever” by a certain type of person, is actually a lack not only of professionalism, but also of even the belief that professional standards matter. It’s an acknowledgment that cute hooerism is the accepted Irish professional standard.

Whose Government?

There was an article recently published in the Irish Times by the American writer Richard Ford which oddly sheds some light on this. Ford described Americans as being affected by “a deep, colonial-inherited suspicion of government.”

A similar suspicion due to colonialism perhaps exists in Ireland too, where the acquisition of political office often appears to be seen more like a hi-jacking of the levers of power than an acquisition of power to benefit the wider community.

This sense of an Irish politician using their position to facilitate a crony is what makes the Varadkar story so tawdry, so familiar and so disappointing.

Prior to this there were many who believed that Varadkar was a break with the kind of brown envelope past which, despite Michael Lowry and his supporters, was a culture (or lack of) that was always most strongly associated with Fianna Fáil.

Now it appears that this parish pump form of cronyism is not confined to one party, or even to the occasional cross-party bad apple, but actually appears to be a standard of unprofessionalism that informs much of Irish political life.

Rogue Element

The next week may be less about interrogating a system that encourages clientelism, less about finding out whether or not the Tánaiste’s actions were legal or otherwise, and more about a display of political manoeuvres designed to extricate Varadkar from this awkward tangle, without him having to resign, and without inadvertently implicating the entire system in the lack of professional standards that gave rise to the situation in the first place.

This kind of game has its place in our dysfunctional system, and a ready audience eager to admire the escapology of the rogue, which is how we, as post-colonials possibly understand the true meaning of politics.

Was it illegal? is not the question. Will he manage to get away with it? That’s where the sport is to be found.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

From top: Irish Examiner’s front page last Monday; Eamonn Kelly

Aoife Moore’s article in the Irish Examiner on Monday  “Single Mothers on Welfare Feel ‘Bullied’ by Inspectors” reads like an extract from “The Lives of Others”, the 2006 film about the East German Stasi.

While the article cited privacy intrusions of a grotesque nature, the stories also had the effect of strengthening the case for the introduction of a universal basic income.

One single mother described two female welfare inspectors ordering her out of her own bedroom where they then went through her underwear, apparently intent on discovering if there were any signs of male presence to be found in her underclothes or, presumably, in or around her bed.

Lots of odd questions spring to mind from just this one incident, not the least of them being the apparent policing of sexual activity by state officials, along with the perplexing question of the right of DEASP officials to enter and search people’s homes without notice or warrant as described in the article.

These intrusions are justified by a suspicion or possibility of welfare fraud. But this raises another question. Does claiming a welfare payment equate to a surrendering of certain fundamental rights and freedoms?

This question alone gains even further significance today since an estimated 150,000 people are likely to lose their jobs as a result of the new lockdown. No doubt they will all be interested in hearing of any hidden “costs” associated with claiming a welfare payment.

The question of a potential threat to democratic freedoms due to Covid, is further complicated by the government’s apparent attempt to railroad through, without consultation or debate, an extension of special powers for the minister for health, as reported in today’s Irish Times. This also suggests that observance of democratic niceties are not deemed a very pressing priority.

Detectives

In Aoife Moore’s Examiner article one woman describes a social welfare inspector regularly parked outside her house all day and into the evening, keeping her under surveillance, even following her to and from the kids’ school. Was this official some kind of Walter Mitty cop, brightening up his public service day with a bit of make believe?

A similar kind of faux “investigative” persona was turning up in JobPath and in the department after Leo Varadkar’s welfare cheats campaign. Welfare officials playing TV cop with the welfare recipients, the “suspects” helpfully framed by Leo Varadkar, the then minister for social protection.

At the time, Bernadette Gorman, a former social welfare officer, said that in her experience welfare fraud was “miniscule” and that she believed minister Varadkar was deliberately demonising the vulnerable in his bid for the Fine Gael leadership.

But all this needless investigative activity, in combination with the current Covid crisis, has the effect of reinforcing the argument for a basic income. Because the intrusions described by Aoife Moore’s article seem a lot like “work” being created by people with nothing better to be doing.

A basic income, a living payment to the amount of the current Jobseeker’s Allowance, would have the effect of saving millions of euro on these pointless faux “secret police” operations.

But there is a far more disturbing potential to this type of surveillance by a state bureaucracy than just a waste of tax-payers’ money.

Functionaries

Back in the early 1960’s when the political philosopher Hannah Arendt was studying the former Nazi functionary Adolph Eichmann, on trial by Israel for war crimes, she could see nothing remarkable about the man at all.

In her controversial book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, she came to believe that evil is not some monstrous, dramatic entity, but is far more often found in the ordinary, complacent, faceless, number-crunching servant of a vast bureaucracy. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to explain what she perceived as Eichmann’s utter lack of remarkability.

The ideas she developed about the effect of bureaucracies on individuals, both as functionaries and as objects of the bureaucracy, stand as a warning about the nature of bureaucracies, which tend to develop lives of their own, independent of the individuals that supposedly run them.

This comes about as a result of what Arendt called “the rule of nobody”.

No one person is committing the acts of the bureaucracy, no one person is responsible or accountable, everyone is just “doing their job”, “following orders”, ticking boxes, gradually becoming dehumanised themselves by the cold logic of the needs of the bureaucracy.

“In a fully developed bureaucracy,” Arendt writes, “there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

“The Department”

When Aoife Moore contacted the DEASP for a reaction to the stories cited in her Examiner article, a “spokesperson” for “the department” said “If there are specific examples, we would ask that these be brought to the department’s attention.”

But the problem about bringing a complaint to “the department” about the activities of social welfare inspectors “just doing their jobs” is that the social welfare inspectors are the department. What if the person you complain about also takes the complaint? Or is a colleague of that person?

“The department” itself is an abstract entity. As such it doesn’t actually exist. It is an entity made up of people who appear to be subject to Hannah Arendt’s “rule of nobody”: faceless individuals quietly ticking the boxes, serving the abstract entity’s wants and needs, which gradually take precedence over the needs of the “nobodies” the bureaucracy was initially designed to serve.

Almost without anyone noticing, the bureaucracy itself is soon referred to as if it is a person. In this case “the department”. When questions are raised about the behaviour of servants of “the department”, the “will” of the abstract entity is always invoked, and no one person is ever accountable for its actions.

Solution

A basic income would release people from the violations reported in Aoife Moore’s article, which were undertaken on a pretext of cost-cutting.

A basic income would also release those well-intentioned public servants who may have become mindless cogs in the bureaucratic machine, finding their own lives reduced in significance in service to the needs of the bureaucratic machine.

There are many books and studies on the toxicity of bureaucracies and their softly softly threat to democracy, from Kafka to Orwell and Arendt and beyond. But perhaps the most entertaining and convenient primer on the subject is the film “Brazil” by Terry Gilliam.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

From top: Tanaiste Leo Varadkar at Burke Joinery in Kylemore, Dublin 10 last week; Eamonn Kelly

Leo Varadkar was photo-opping the other day with a huge machine that planes and finishes sheets of prefabricated timber. Leo walked alongside the machine with his hand on the edge of the sheet of timber as the machine did its thing. It was bit like standing at the rear of a vehicle and leaning on it with your hand as the vehicle begins to move, taking credit for the “skill” of the engine causing the vehicle to move.

Apart from the photo op being a compelling demonstration of advanced automation, further supporting the argument for an introduction of a basic income, the photo op was rich in numerous unintended messages.

One, it demonstrated that Leo Varadkar knows nothing about manual labour, which tends to involve a little bit more than walking beside a machine, calling instead for investment of muscle, sinew and bone that, over time, leads to a consequent shortening of life.

It also demonstrates that the now Tánaiste’s PR team are still active on public money in using that money to play perception magician with the public.

Sexy Apprentices

The idea of sexing up trade apprenticeships comes with the realisation that the higher aspirations of college credentials and the types of white collar careers such credentials used to deliver are now suffering from the fact that there simply aren’t enough white-collar careers to go around.

The idea is also attractive from an elitist political point of view in that you with your college career – despite what you may be hearing about the value of “skills” – will always be a step ahead of those who don’t have a college education. College education matters. It matters a great deal. It matters particularly in money management and business skills.

Like most things party political, this idea that apprenticeships are a credible alternative to further education only looks to a short-term future.

While it is true that having a manual skill in the trades is a good thing, it is only a good thing in an ideal world. And while the promise of apprenticeships in the trades sounds good on the face of it, the fact is the trades are being decimated by automation and by the privatisation of housing development.

Education is also being decimated by monetisation, so now it barely even delivers the founding promise of the academy, and instead often traps students into long term debt. Both are being decimated by neo-liberal policies, the very policies that Varadkar stands for.

Back In The Day

Back in the 1960s and 1970s Fianna Fáil generated employment in the trades by embarking on vast social housing programmes, something Fine Gael are ideologically opposed to. Which begs the question, what are all those apprentices supposed to do when they acquire the skills of whatever trade they plump for?

The answer of course is, emigrate. Which is probably the idea anyway since emigration has served Ireland’s ruling class so well over the last fifty years, acting as a safety valve that kept their political seats and business interests safe from youthful, hungry competition.

So what is this photo and this encouragement towards the trades all about? Well, in the parlance of building workers it’s called “blowing smoke up your hole”.

It’s designed to make the politician look good and make it seem like he’s looking to the future, but is in fact a ruse to make people lower their ambitions and expectations and be willingly redirected towards lives as manual workers in an automated neo-liberal world that will in all likelihood have no real use for them.

It is a short-term distraction to take away from the fact that in reality all the seats are taken – there are only so many professors the world needs – and the fact that a basic income is the only realistic way forward to ensure a stable society, something neo-liberals like Varadkar simply cannot countenance.

Class Consciousness

Ultimately Varadkar represents a class interest that depends for its superiority on the existence of malleable lower classes. This promotion of apprenticeships and manual work looks to create and enhance an uneducated service class.

The alternative, given the realities of automation and the sheer lack of career opportunity, which will also, by the way, apply to manual work, is to introduce a basic income and to make third level education free to those that want it, in order that the ideals of the academy be honoured, and the bankers preying on students be run off the campuses.

Further to this, a public works programme should be embarked upon, to provide homes for people and the opportunity of practical application for apprentices who wish to learn a trade. Not providing such realistic opportunities in the field for apprentices creates another monetized education system, which is probably the idea.

Varadkar and other neo-liberals will not even consider these options since these would have the effect of removing the only thing that gives them status: the existence of an uneducated underclass.

The result is this short-term stop-gap idea designed to keep them in power in the short term while they think up ways of ensuring their ongoing survival as a political class, even despite their antiquated ideas.

The problem is that their determination to pretend that it is still 1960 is to create a widening split between haves and have-nots and all the social inequality and unrest that this entails.

Suggesting that everyone learn a trade because the white-collar seats are already filled is a stop-gap measure for politics lacking in vision suitable to the times.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

From top: Arts Minister Catherine Martin at the Jack B Yeats exhibition in The Model in Sligo on last week; Eamonn Kelly

Leisure the Basis of Culture

One of the arguments frequently put to government by the arts fraternity when seeking arts funding is that the arts create revenue. While this is a good argument, it has the unfortunate effect of placing the arts squarely in the economy’s utilitarian tool-shed, making of the arts what Thomas Aquinas called the servile arts, as opposed to the liberal arts.

The difference between the two is that the liberal arts have no end but their own end, while the servile arts are those arts and sciences that are essentially appropriated by the state to achieve specific goals for the state.

In literary terms it is like the difference between the Soviet literature of socialist realism, designed to glorify the revolution, and Solzhenitsyn depicting awkward to explain hardships in the Siberian wastes.

The reason why the money-making angle seems like the only concrete argument to be made for arts funding is because the world of the economy is now so all-encompassing. We live in a time where every activity must serve the economy. As soon that happens, the liberal arts virtually cease to exist.

So, the argument that the arts is good for the economy, as a way of convincing hard-nosed and often ignorant politicians that arts funding is justified, has the effect of destroying the very ground on which the liberal arts is of any use to the common good.

Because it is precisely in their perceived “uselessness” that the arts are “useful”; but only if they are permitted to be “useless”. The point is, you can’t understand the value of the liberal arts by the yardstick of the economy, or, what the philosopher Josef Pieper calls the world of “total work”.

While right-wing enthusiasts of hard work for others like Leo Varadkar might claim that getting up early in the morning is a “good”, the book of Job tells us that “God giveth songs in the night.”

In this respect the coronavirus has thrown us a life-line, an opportunity to avail of Pieper’s “power of leisure” to maybe find a way of dreaming up some climate disaster escape plans.

Leisure and Culture

Josef Pieper’s book, “Leisure The Basis of Culture”, published in 1947 when the world was rebuilding after the war, provides a sustained argument which sets out to show that the modern world, the world of “total work” as he calls it, is actually having the effect of pushing the arts and humanities towards extinction.

His argument is, generally, that a concentration on utilitarian ends will have the effect of hollowing out the human experience, essentially creating a kind of rot in the culture.

The irony of this is, that in the ongoing degradation of the arts and other methods by which people use the power of leisure to gain perspective and transcend the workaday world, the ability to even perceive the prison walls that the world of total work creates, also becomes dimmed.

Evidence of this rot of culture he sees in the changed aspect of the academy.

Pieper writes:

“Perhaps the reason why ‘purely academic’ has sunk to mean something sterile, pointless and unreal is because the scholar has lost its roots in religion. And so, instead of reality we get a world of make-believe, of intellectual ‘trompe l’oeil’ [optical illusion], and cultural tricks and traps and jokes…”

It is exactly this type of intellectual trickery that informs post-modern argument and cancel culture. While the universities themselves, site of these linguistic games, far from being academies of free thinking and intellectual exploration are often little more than economic traps, where banks prey on youth to deceive them into lifetimes of debt.

In that regard, Pieper’s world of “total work” has already completely over-run the academy, turning free thought and intellectual exploration, and arts and culture in general, into commodities for the market to feed on, in a marketplace devoid of any pretense towards acknowledging the divine in cultural activity.

You Are Your Own Detective

In a New Yorker article from 1996, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible’”, Arthur Miller distilled the essence of the problem posed to freedom of expression by both the Salem Witch trials and McCarthyism. In both cases, he said, it was never so much about actions being taken by individuals, as it was about the uncovering of hidden intentions.

This, ironically is also, according to Aristotle, the aim of art: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” It is as if cancel culture is a distortion of artistic aims.

The idea is also very similar to Orwell’s thought crime, where even the person committing the “crime” may not be aware of their own thought crime.

A similar idea is found in Milan Kundera’s “The Art of the Novel” when discussing Kafka’s “The Trial”. The black joke at the heart of Kafka’s novel is that K is never charged with a specific offence, but is left to guess what his offence might be. He must find his own hidden intention. His own crime.

These days however, we can’t even trust the accused to do that much. What if they don’t find their crime? What if they don’t even try and just continue along as before, brazenly saying anything they please?  What then? This is why, presumably, we must have a process of “cancellation”. Is that not like a euphemism for death?

Flawed Individuals

While thinking this through I happened also to be thinking about Heather Humphreys’ suggestion that artists should retrain for different occupations, and it occurred to me that this might simply mean sending them through JobPath.

The fundamental idea that JobPath is predicated on, that the unemployed must be “helped” to see what it is about them personally that has caused them to be unemployed – in other words the discovery of the personal “flaw” that is causing their unemployment – is similar to cancel culture’s fundamental idea that anyone who speaks against cancel culture or offers any criticism is only doing so for ulterior motives, and are most likely harbouring hidden misogynistic, racist or sexist intentions.

The point is, whatever the critic of an accusatory ideology might be, whether they are criticising Senator McCarthy or the crazed dot-joining of a witch-hunter, they can never be seen to be right. Because if the accused is right, then the accuser is wrong. But the accuser simply can’t be wrong, otherwise the entire edifice of the ideology collapses.

Denial is Guilt

So, like in Salem or in McCarthyism, everything a person says in their defence, once accused, intensifies the suspicion that they are merely hiding a negative intention.

With JobPath if you argue that automation or over-competition, or too few opportunities etc is causing unemployment, this is taken as evidence of your personal laziness. No cognizance can be admitted pertaining to the realities of the external world. The customer is always wrong. The system depends entirely on this one idea.

Similarly, if you critique cancel culture and radical feminism this is taken as misogyny. Again, the flaw is perceived as residing in the individual, who must then be “fixed”; and not in the ideology that is imposing itself on the individual.

It’s like the floating witch conundrum. If she sinks, she is not a witch. She is, however, unfortunately, dead, not to put too fine a point on it. It’s a lose-lose situation. As Senator McCarthy might have said, Of course you deny you’re a Russian spy. What else would a Russian spy do but deny the charge?

Ultimately the hidden intention must be dug out of you, as O’Brien digs the confession out of Winston Smith in 1984. And even then, it is not enough to confess in order to put an end to the interrogation. You must come over to the other side, willingly. You must abase yourself. You must be shown to be empty of meaning at the feet of the triumphant ideology.

Compliance

What is interesting is that on this question of insisting that the individual is flawed and not the ideology, both right-wing conservatives and leftist social justice advocates, appear to be of one mind in the view that opposition to their respective ideologies is driven by a personal flaw or hidden agenda in those who critique their ideologies.

It is in the protection of flawed ideologies from scrutiny or critique that extreme right and extreme left appear to meet. But the situation closes down the possibility of development of an argument, since all arguments are ultimately perceived as fake or phoney, the very thing that ideologies tend to be.

Ideologies, no matter how different or politically opposite they may seem, are always opposed to rationality and creative thinking in favour of habituated systems designed to answer all questions, even before such questions are even asked. All the individual has to do is to agree that the flaw is in themselves, like original sin.

In this type of arrangement, creativity and free thinking are problems. Compliance is favoured.

It would appear that all sides, regardless of the political spectrum, are playing by the same fundamental rules. The goal is to discover those who are deemed undeserving of promotion due to personal limitations or potential hidden negative intentions.

The cause of these increasingly desperate selective procedures may be simply due to over-population and a consequent narrowing of opportunity, leading inevitably to conflict.

Much of the pressure and desperation could be relived immediately with the introduction of a basic income. It really is the only thing to do, and would have the effect too of freeing up the dreamers to go to work dreaming a way out of this fine climate mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Conclusion

Use it or lose it, they used to say, and in a world of granite ideologies there is no time or space for creative thinking. The ideologies supposedly have all the answers.

In the world of total work as described by Pieper, the capacity to transcend that world through the traditional methods of religion and the arts also atrophies.

But it is from these sacred places, as people commune with the divine in active leisure, that all the progress and technical perks of the modern world were initially dreamt up.

Pieper describes how we may even delude ourselves into settling for the fake.

He writes that worse than the extinction of spiritual and imaginative experiences that transcend the world of total work,

“is their transformation, their degradation, into sham and spurious forms…Religion can be debased into magic…prayer can be perverted into a sort of technique whereby life…is feasible…love can assume a debased form in which all the powers of devotion are bent to serve the ends of a limited ego…pseudo art and a spurious poetry, instead of bursting through the vault of the workaday world, merely paint deceptive ornamentation…these spurious forms combine…to close every window…and then man really is imprisoned in the world of work.”

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

Photocall Ireland

From top: Supermac’s founder Pat McDonagh; Eamonn Kelly

One of the angles frequently used by Irish employers when confronted about underpaying people, is that they have heard no complaints.

Complaining is hard for Irish people, as it must be after holding your tongue for 700 years. You might say that the Republic itself is founded on a letter of complaint in the form of a Proclamation that, simply put, says, we’ve had enough of being second-class citizens.

We all know how that went down.

Irish history is littered with the bodies of people who complained. Naturally many people have learned the wisdom of silence. Irish people tend to be really, really good at not complaining. Even going so far as to stand with authority against those who do occasionally complain. As if to say: ‘Shush, you’ll get us all in trouble.’

Not Complaining

Not complaining is repeatedly relied upon by various authorities to justify the liberties it often so casually takes.

Pat McDonagh of Supermacs when he was asked on RTÉ radio recently why he charged staff for food, whether they wanted it or not, replied that the staff seem “quite happy” with the arrangement. And possibly “quite fired” if they did complain.

Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty when asked about complaints concerning JobPath said something similar, basing the perception of “happiness” on a carefully worded satisfaction survey, the work of a private contractor, paid gazillions by the taxpayer, which helpfully delivered stats for minimal complaint and maximum satisfaction.

However, there still remained a small percentage of unusually stubborn people who complained anyway. Of these it was generally implied that such people are “trouble”, or just plain contrary, if not mentally retarded.

Diversions

Still, it’s not normal to never complain. To get around this we appear to have evolved ways of complaining without actually complaining by deflecting our attention elsewhere to complain about something else.

Most recently the Dominic Cummings case fulfilled this role by taking all the attention away from the revelation that Fine Gael’s job creation claims seem to be based on 240,000 jobs that don’t deliver a living wage. But that was okay, because the jobs in question don’t deliver a living wage to people who are apparently “quite happy”.

This habit of deflection is like a national tic. In an earlier article of mine on Aosdána, I wrote about Aosdána being largely absent from the local political scene, though some of its members were very visible in international justice campaigns that invited zero personal blowback. The old “the situation in outer Mongolia is getting bleaker,” stratagem.

It was the wrong thing to do, writing about Aosdána, since some of the members felt victimised by the attention. As one poet wildly exclaimed, You’re going to wreck it for everyone!

Really? How? By mentioning its existence? Is it in hiding? Is it like Irish austerity’s Anne Frank?

Aosdána has only 250 members, many of them elderly, and it seemed unkind of me to be harping on about it when it was clear that the artists simply wanted to be left alone.

But the institution stands as a model for arts funding, and it seems clear by now that in the ideal Ireland that Fine Gael would have, there would only be a couple of hundred funded artists, with the rest fed into the JobPath machine, which needs all the bodies it can get to keep its corporations in clover. It feeds on live tissue you see, and will take any old body: writers, musicians, butchers, bakers…

The silence of funded artists in a situation where unfunded arts practitioners are being sent through a process that is chiefly designed to degrade them, sends out the message that the established arts community are in favour of neo-liberalism’s dividing of the arts community along lines of privilege.

This is too familiar, in an Ireland too often defined along such lines.

The Rigged System

The American economist and author Robert Reich in his book, “The System: Who rigged it, How we fix it”, makes a distinction between the old paradigms of “left” and “right” and the situation we find ourselves in today, which he sees as a divide between Oligarchy and Democracy, the two sides currently featuring in running street battles in the US, thanks to real life Goldfinger himself, El Trumpo.

It is a situation where you are either with the systems of economic inequality, the Oligarchy, or you are for Democracy. The two positions are by now mutually exclusive, since, as Reich shows, the Oligarchy acquired the policy-makers a long time ago.

Anyone who goes finger-jabbing about the dangers of “socialism” is badly missing the fundamentals of the new world order.

Quietly supporting neo-liberal policy makers, like our own Fine Gael, who work primarily on behalf of business and corporations, in the hope that political circumspection will guarantee the retention of personal privileges, perpetuates the creation of social inequality through economic systems that are enriching the few at the expense of the many.

The only way to reclaim democratic freedoms lost to neo-liberal policies designed to favour business, is for people to stand unified on behalf of all who are being degraded by the neo-liberal system. Because in time, all will be degraded by that system.

Economic Apartheid

What appears to have happened in Ireland is that an elite inherited not just a republic, but a lower class perceived variously as sinners, rebels, petty criminals and uneducated labourers and skivvies, who were to be watched, managed, corrected and exploited by the elite, much as the vanquished elite had done.

It’s a kind of economic apartheid, helped in its effectiveness by a fee-paying education system that favours the middle-classes, resulting in wealth and privilege being passed on from generation to generation; as poverty and disadvantage is passed on, with unerring precision, further down the social scale.

[Independent Senator] Lynn Ruane, in an article in the Journal.ie from 2018, talks about how difficult it is to even raise the issue of class in Ireland. She writes of how a politician accused her of bringing class into everything:

“This was not the first adverse reaction to raising the issue I had received but I refuse to be made feel like I shouldn’t. The devastating impact of social class in Ireland is not an abstract concept to me and hundreds of thousands of others all over this island. People who have had their lives determined by a class system that they wore born into; by luck and luck alone.”

I met similar resistance following an article on Gerry Ryan when I mentioned, almost in an offhand way, my own working-class background. It was deeply resented. As if I was proffering some unfair gambit.

What came across very clearly to me was the middle-class assumption that disadvantage is totally about cash.

But disadvantage is about living in an environment where no one knows anyone of influence or of academic or business achievement; where university is for “them”; and where no one knows anything really of how the world works beyond finding a “boss” who’ll treat you fairly.

Robert Reich says of structural inequality:

“Today the most important predictor of someone’s future is the income and wealth of the family they are born into.”

And though Reich was speaking of the United States, all neo-liberal states are fractals of the US, and all social inequality works by the same basic globalised monetary principles of neo-liberalism, as was clearly demonstrated in 2008.

Ultimately it is up to those people who are being short-changed by the neo-liberal system to break through their ancestral reticence and start complaining against what is essentially, in Ireland, an entrenched, comfortable cartel of politics, business and landlords that has grown complacent and casually contemptuous in the silence of non-complaint.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

Rollingnews

From top: Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty,  Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar and Minister for Buisness, Enterprise and Innovation Heather Humphries; Eamonn Kelly

Leo Varadkar told Newstalk the other day that nearly 40% of Covid-19 payees are better off than when they were working. That is so interesting, given that the Covid-19 payment of €350 was arrived at as being just about enough to live on.

Almost 600,000 people are receiving the Covid-19 payment. 40% of 600,000 is around 240,000. Dare we ask do these include the jobs created by Fine Gael, jobs that don’t pay people enough to live on?

Jobs for All

Job creation is a big plank of Fine Gael boasts. And though the manner in which figures are arrived at is notoriously slippery, Heather Humphries did claim in Dáil questions in March 2019 that 49,900 jobs were created in 2018.

The overall boast is that by 2020 Fine Gael hoped to hit a target of 200,000 jobs created since the launch of the first action plan for jobs in 2012. By 2016 it was a regular claim that 135,000 new jobs had been created since 2012.

But if 240,000 people are now saying that they are better off on the Covid-19 payment than they were at work, and Minister Docherty is saying that less than €350 is not enough to live on, what standard of job has Fine Gael been creating all this time?

If people are working for less than enough to live on, can such an occupation properly be counted as a job?

What the taoiseach’s own words seem to suggest is that the concept of a “job”, as argued by many advocates of basic income, is an outdated fetish favoured by right-wingers who still can’t get beyond the idea of ordinary people being supported with some form of regular basic income, without pain being imposed upon them.

Bullshit Jobs

The anthropologist David Graeber realised that the consequence of this right-wing jobs fetish was the steady and ongoing creation of what he termed “bullshit” jobs. Jobs whose only value was in the existence of the job itself, as perceived by a system that valued the possession of a job.

What the Covid-19 payment demonstrates, is the real face of this entire bullshit jobs cycle that Fine Gael have been busying themselves with all these years to no real benefit to anyone apart from their own statisticians and their employer friends availing of job-creation grants.

And to those who say that there was a surplus created by Fine Gael in government, have a look at where that surplus was drawn from in the frozen lives of the 10,000+ homeless, among other less inspiring stats created by Fine Gael policy.

And that figure of €350 for the Covid-19 payment. How was it arrived at? Was it in any way influenced by the fact that the minister who proposed it had just lost her seat in the general election? Might it have been a tactical act of generosity that might be remembered by the electorate in the event of another quick election, given the hung Dáil?

Free Money

One of the main oppositions to the concept of a universal basic income is that it is free money.

But as Leo Varadkar pointed out last week, not for the first time, there is no such thing as free money. Though Varadkar himself and his cronies appear to live in a world swimming in free money.

In August 2019 the Sunday Independent reported that the new taoiseach…

“…has clocked up a €400,000 bill for food, drink and entertainment since he took office two years ago…”

The report went on

“Mr Varadkar also treats his Cabinet ministers to evening suppers in Farmleigh House, the State’s formal residence, and in the National Gallery of Ireland…Last September, ministers gathered in Farmleigh House, for an evening of dinner and drinks at a cost of €2,075.

In December 2017, the Taoiseach hosted a Christmas dinner for his ministerial team in the National Gallery of Ireland beside Leinster House which cost €2,102.”

With his €185,350 basic salary plus his €118,981 in personal annual expenses, there is clearly no such thing as a free taoiseach either.

In January 2020 The Irish Post revealed that…

“…Leo Varadkar reportedly spent €1.8 million on propaganda during his first year-and-a-half as Taoiseach.

This included €50,000 on videos featuring Varadkar which were designed to hopefully go viral and make the world say, Wow, Leo is cool.

This is in stark contrast to the €16,000 spent by Enda Kenny in his first 18-months in office.”

As Brendan Howlin pointed out at the time:

“Leo Varadkar’s spin unit spent well over 100 times more on PR than Enda Kenny did.”

Howlin went on to say that Fine Gael spent…

“…€7million of public money on glossy advertisements in 2018…They will spend nearly €2billion on the National Children’s Hospital, which will be the most expensive hospital ever built on earth…

Fine Gael gave €700million in 2018 to private landlords because they refused to build homes on public land…They spent €900,000 every day on private agency staff, because they refused to employ permanent public workers.”

Who Pays These Bills?

Where is all that money coming from? Well, it’s coming, in a roundabout way, from all those workers, 240,000 of them, according to Mr Varadkar’s own stats, who are working for less than enough to live on.

It is coming from the poor and the homeless and the pensioners and the tax-payers and the health service and the farmers and the arts workers.

Because Varadkar is right. There is no such thing as free money. It has to come from somewhere, including the free money that he flings around the place to make himself look good, paid for by ordinary people in reduced wages, reduced medical outcomes, reduced life chances and reduced equality of opportunity.

That free money he disposes of so generously is coming direct from the pockets and expectations of low paid workers who, by the admission of his own minsters, are working below the rate of what they need to live on in Varadkar’s Ireland.

The caretaker taoiseach is, for once, perfectly correct: It is not fair. But not in the way that he means.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

DISCLAIMER: Broadsheet does not condone the use of the word ‘shit’ in this article which thankfully does not include other off-colour words like ‘fuck’, ‘diddies’ or ‘wankipants’.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

Rollingnews

From top: Ryan Tubridy (left) and Taoiseach  Leo Varadkar on RTÉ One’s  The Late Late Show last Friday; Eamonn Kelly

Last Friday, May 1, International Workers Day, Caretaker Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, addressed the nation, outlining a wind-down of Covid-19 restrictions. There was consternation in some quarters that the address had not been followed by a press Q&A.

This aspect of proceedings, the questioning, would be taking place on RTÉ One’s The Late Late Show that evening, with Ryan Tubridy acting as a kind of nominated journalist invited to grill the leader.

Varadkar’s spin unit burn up an estimated €100,000 of public money per month to make Varadkar’s neo-liberal Fine Gael look good.It’s instructive that even with that type of funding they somehow always fail to put on an entirely convincing show.

This show was no different. That’s what happens when you don’t value or respect the arts; you think if you fling enough money at it that any bozo can act the clown.

The setup, ironically enough, sounded like something from Chavez’s Venezuela or Putin’s Russia. The great leader cocooned with just one selected media person empowered to ask questions.

A carefully managed Q&A featuring an RTÉ stalwart who, strictly speaking, isn’t really a journalist per se, but more of a light entertainment personality with impeccable political establishment credentials.

Afterwards, social media pounced on the fact of Varadkar having to consult his notes during the interview, which probably pleased the FG spin unit no end, since the moment, whether intended or merely happy accident, acted like a magician’s distraction, sending many critics of Varadkar’s neo-liberalism in the wrong direction.

Because this show was about schmoozing the Irish electorate into swallowing the idea that neo-liberals were the best gang to tackle climate change, despite the truckloads of evidence rolling in from laboratories all over the world that neo-liberalism, the ugly face of late-stage capitalism, is actually an aggravator of climate change.

What Neo-Liberals Do

Neo-liberalism has two main goals: rolling back the welfare state and privatising everything. To sell these goals as good ideas it schmoozes people into believing that the return of “lots of good jobs”, which neo-liberalism is forever promising, and which Varadkar promised on The Late Late Show, will be worth the trade of personal freedoms; potential homelessness; lower wages; higher rents; private medical services and climate catastrophe.

Naturally neo-liberals tend to thread carefully while trying to sell this bag of goodies. Their moves are like the moves of cat-burglars, or comedy camouflage experts, encroaching with minute advances after long periods of apparent stillness.

The surprising thing is, they are often successful in selling the awful package. For instance, in the last election, despite the evidence of mounting social injustice, homelessness, emigration and suicide, a full 20.9% of the electorate still went out, presumably of sound mind, and voted for Leo Varadkar and Fine Gael.

But why would the spin unit think it a good idea to attempt to sell the party as the best bet for a Green future on a light entertainment show?

The Sell

This idea of The late Late Show being a light entertainment show was in fact a bone of contention back in the mid-1960s when Gay Byrne, the innovator of the show, had made it more than a simple light entertainment show, turning it into a forum where the Irish people could meet and talk about issues that affected them and the society.

But, as I mentioned in a previous piece, this aspect of the show was deeply resisted by some, among them Ryan Tubridy’s grandfather, Todd Andrews, who wanted Byrne off the show, intent on making the platform an apolitical light entertainment vehicle.

I mention this now because it was Byrne’s innovative development of the show as a forum for a national conversation that now made it valid for Leo Varadkar to appear on the show, having decided against a press conference, to avail of that understanding of The Late Late Show as a national forum.

The opportunity to sell the big idea opened up when Tubridy asked about the ongoing talks with the Greens to enter coalition with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.

Leo Varadkar had just begun his answer to the question when Tubridy, who has a tendency, unlike Gay Byrne, to pay more attention to his questions rather than his guests, dived in with another question.

But Varadkar panicked and pulled him back saying that the previous question was important and needed a bit more time for a fuller answer.

And so it proved to be, because the question had opened up the interview to allow neo-liberal Leo to argue that neo-liberal politicians are better equipped to meet climate targets than left wing parties would be.

Because, according to the neo-liberal view presented by Varadkar, the Left would spend their time “fighting” with the business community.

Isn’t that just wonderful? The very flaw at the heart of neo-liberalism, essentially enriching business at the expense of community, and by doing so, contributing to global climate devastation, is offered as the solution to climate change, because neo-liberals get on well with the business community, the same community whose hunger for perpetual growth is contributing to climate change.

And this wonderfully slippery message delivered direct to the Irish people with their guard down, from the cosy homely hearth of The Late Late Show, where the nation had gathered to hear the government plan for the lifting of restrictions, and to sympathise and empathise with the victims of an ongoing health emergency.

We Are…Not the Left

The claim betrays the vacuity of ideas at the core of Varadkar’s neo-liberal ideology.

Lacking the ability to define themselves by any particular standard other than neo-liberalism, which must remain a partially hidden agenda, since its outcomes are so damaging to fundamental social justice, Varadkar’s Fine Gael instead define themselves by repeated reference to leftist ideas.

In other words, what Varadkar’s neo-liberal party stand for is, not being the Left.

Varadkar suggesting, with a straight face, that Fine Gael’s relationship with the business community is a safer bet for meeting climate targets than anything the Left might initiate, is either a statement borne of ignorance of the damage the ideology he champions is wreaking on the environment; or, he simply doesn’t give a damn about the climate, no more than he ever seemed to give a damn about the 10,000 homeless he smilingly helped conjured into existence.

Nevertheless, here he was, claiming that he would somehow out-left the Left, despite being hopelessly Right, and somehow become Green while also creating “lots of jobs”, predicated on the out-dated neo-liberal model of limitless growth in a finite system.

He was, in other words, like old Fianna Fáil, attempting to be all things to all sectors.

The Schmooze

Ryan Tubridy helped with the schmooze like an awkward well-intentioned youth trying to help a blind man across a busy road; but in such a way as to suggest prior briefing.

His contribution was concerned with reassuring those voters who had concerns of a Left nature: specifically, concerns related to social housing and the Covid-19 welfare payments.

When the topic of construction workers returning to work was brought up, Tubridy rushed in to mention social housing. To which Varadkar replied, as other Fine Gael personnel have been doing in recent times, that social housing is continuing and ongoing. Even apparently despite the lockdown.

That must be amazing news for the 10,000 homeless now quarantined in hotel rooms, with their landlords happily exporting buckets of public cash to the Cayman Islands.

The second contribution by Tubridy came when he asked Varadkar about the possibility of extending the Covid-19 welfare payments, to coincide with the return to work of various sectors, as outlined in the resuscitating the economy plan.

The answer was in the affirmative, to which Tubridy helpfully chimed in: and that’s a nice gift for May Day. May Day being worker’s day and a red-letter day for the Left (excuse the pun).

However, as soon as Tubridy had so helpfully underlined the apparent coincidence of a rare Fine Gael promise to condone a welfare payment, the promise delivered on May Day, a backstage light flickered and the Fine Gael spin unit was momentarily revealed in silhouette, pulling levers.

Varadkar’s Neo-Liberalism

Varadkar’s neo-liberal Fine Gael are probably not engaged on some grand plan towards world domination. It’s likely more mundane than that. They have simply chosen sides and basically do all the things that you’re supposed to do when following a neo-liberal agenda. It’s like following a recipe: first you privatise the public services….

Presumably after you’ve dismantled all public services and impoverished everyone but a few billionaires, something wonderful is supposed to fall into place, inaugurating some neo-liberal Shangri-La.

Fine Gael’s particular political machine is designed to pursue these old models based on out-dated and discredited capitalist and neo-liberal ideas. It runs clickety clack on neo-liberal tracks. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t continue with “business as usual” and hope to avert climate catastrophe.

But they do understand simple logistics like “meeting targets”. That’s why they love the Greens’ 7% emissions target. They could politic that kind of thing all day and on through the night.

It’s right up their alley, since it consists of figures that can be bent and twisted and hidden and “re-clarified” until… well, until doomsday. It’s the very thing they do exceptionally well.

Fine Gael entering into a coalition with the Green Party will place demands on the Fine Gael party that the party has never had to face, since such a coalition will require the party to totally reappraise and reform its core neo-liberal ethos, which conflicts so profoundly with the aims of the Green movement and climate repair.

Many people are now coming to the realisation, particularly since Covid-19, that it is time to lockdown capitalism itself for a while, to allow the climate to literally breath and recover from the virus of capitalism. This type of thinking immediately reveals Fine Gael policy as hopelessly out of date and out of touch.

Plus, the last election clearly showed that there is little appetite in Ireland for the ruthless American style brand of neo-liberalism that Leo Varadkar represents.

On this score it might be wise of the Greens to insist, as a condition of entering coalition, that Varadkar steps down from the Fine Gael leadership, to allow his own party to more easily adapt their political model to the rapidly changing times.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

Rollingnews