Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss (sort of, maybe?)

Something I was working on before life got in the way. I post it it now only for posterity.

 

Micheál Martin has been elected as the new leader of Fianna Fáil. His acceptance speech is interesting in its choice of rhetoric and as a guide to what direction Fianna Fáil may take when it is most likely replaced as the governing party of the neoliberal oligarchy at the next election.

According to Martin he and his family is ‘republican nationalist’. This is, on the surface, tautological. Traditionally in Ireland republicans have been nationalists by default and only in the sense that they are the only ones who advocate that the the nation should have it’s own state, conceived as a sovereign republic, and governed according to the principles of liberty, equality and justice for all. Traditionally this has been opposed by Unionists who wish to be joined to Britain under the British Crown. Republicans have also been opposed by Home Rulers (who would also call themselves nationalists) who conceive of a state with limited self government under the ultimate authority of some foreign power. Since the 1916 Rising and subsequent fallout, Home Rulers were all but destroyed. However, to paraphrase that immortal phrase, they never went away you know. Instead they mutated into a virulent strain of neoliberals and now wish to see Ireland ruled by the diktat of Europe rather than the British Crown.

This tautology by Martin is an attempt to create a bridge between the old republicanism of Fianna Fáil (sovereign independent Republic) and the new neoliberalism (vassal state of the EU/IMF). What it means in plain terms is that Martin and his family are good Catholics who want the Brits Out (someday, eventually and only because that what we’re supposed to say…), what it means in ideological terms is that we will be ruled by a native oligarchy financed from Europe and committed to turning the population from citizens into consumer drones.

The fact that Martin name-checks past Fiann Fáil grandees such as Sean Lemass, Patrick Hilliary and Donagh O’Mailley can be seen from this ideological position to be unsurprising. Among the ‘intelligentsia’ Lemass has become the icon of neoliberals. In the mythic narrative of Celtic Tiger Ireland, it was he who opened the floodgates for the ‘new’ ‘modern’ Ireland that washed away de Valera’s ‘old’ traditional’ Ireland. However, the reality is that a good portion of the work was already undertaken by de Valera’s last government and indeed little changed in how Ireland did its business during ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ over the next thirty years or so. Hilliary can be seen as representing the victory of neoliberalism over republicanism. For it was Hilliary that helped stare down, and ultimately eradicate, the last great show of republicanism in Fianna Fáil. The Boland/Blaney attempt to oppose the leaderships position on the north can be read as the last time members of Fianna Fáil saw the conflict in the north in expressly republican terms and highlights the opening of a gulf between the republican wing and the newly emerging neoliberal wing. In most readings of this conflict within Fianna Fáil it is represented as a case of hawk vs doves. Yet, the hawks were militant only because they saw the situation in ideological terms as one were Irish citizens were first of all being denied their rights as Irish citizens by a tyrannical and sectarian government opposed to the principles of citizenship and republicanism. It was the doves who were beginning to read the conflict as one where coreligionists were were being ‘oppressed’ and merely needed a ‘friend’ to lobby on their behalf.

http://www.fiannafail.ie/news/entry/6259/

‘Cancer man’? An exploration of some of the themes found in Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is an exceptional piece of Television, beautifully shot, well acted, well scripted with a tightly wound plot. It is undoubtedly a piece of 21st Century high art. As such Breaking Bad reflects many of the topics and issues that concern everyday life of 21st Century America.

The show’s protagonist, Walter White (played superbly by Bryan Cranston), is a chemist genius working as a high-school teacher. In order to support his family and make ends meet White also has to work after school at a car wash. He is down trodden, under appreciated, underpaid; completely degraded in every way. He cuts a frustrated and pathetic figure one who is completely emasculated. To compound matters, in the pilot episode, he finds out he has cancer.

Inspired by a drug raid he sees on the news, he accompanies his DEA agent brother-in-law on a similar bust, only to see an ex-student flee the scene. Walter later meets up with this student, named Jesse Pinkman, and convinces him to help Walter make and sell his own crystal meth, ostensibly to raise money to look after his family should he succumb to his cancer. Through the following 3 series, White, the drug dealer, seemingly overcomes his former state of degradation and it is at this point that Elizabeth Greenwood sees Breaking Bad primarily as ‘explor[ing] masculinity through the role of the father’. This leads her to remark in conclusion that: ‘what made Walt so endearing, especially compared to the many self-serving male TV protagonists, was his awkward, reticent Dad love and the unimaginable lengths he went to to provide for his family. With his body count racking up, Walt’s paternal rationalization is harder to buy.’

Seeing Breaking Bad primarily through the lens of masculinity-as-father would indeed render Walter’s paternal rationalization problematic. However, seeing Breaking Bad, and Walter’s actions, in a wider context makes the rising body count and the evolution of his identity far more understandable (if not excusable). It must be remembered that Walter’s initial reasons for getting involved in the drug trade are not so much about being a father, but, as a way of making quick money to provide security in his absence as a father. His true motivation throughout the show remains this goal of making money. Of course, this can be taken as Walter fulfilling a traditional masculine role of ‘bringing home the bacon’ but he does so throughout the series at the expense of other aspects of being a father/husband or indeed man; his son gravitates more towards Walter’s borther-in-law Hank as role model and father figure, Walter becomes more and more estranged from his wife, he even neglects initially to tell his family about his condition and he abuses the proto father/son relationship with Jesse.

All these suggest not a person regaining confidence and embracing a new found masculinity as a father. Indeed, the issue of masculinity could be said not to be tied up primarily with the role of father at all and could be seen perhaps as masculinity-as-entrepreneurialism. In this way, masculinity itself  as a theme, could be seen to have been wrapped by the end of season 1. Undoubtedly, at the beginning of the show Walter is portrayed as emasculated. This can be seen best in the interaction between him and his wife. For his birthday, his wife gives him a handjob. This act of physical intimacy (used loosely as Skylar does not even appear to be interested in the matter at hand, so to speak) shows Walter at his lowest ebb in terms of his masculinity. Here, he is completely stripped of his manhood and virility. However, by the third episode, after he strangles the drug dealer Krazy-8 with his bare hands, he proceeds to have sex with Skylar, almost forcing himself on her unsuspectingly taking her from behind. This act and sexual position conveying that he is in control, dominant and that he has regained his virility and manhood. He regains his masculinity, then, not as a result of his acting as a father but as a result of him killing a man. It is the violence of this act that allows him to regain his masculinity. This sense of confidence and masculinity recurs later in the encounter with Tuco where Walter is not afraid and deems himself to be in control because he is assured of himself being able to do more violence (through his explosive chemical concoction) than Tuco.

Breaking Bad then is not primarily a commentary on masculinity through the role of father as it is a commentary on masculine identity in comtemporay neoliberalism. Walter is a middle class family man who still cannot support his family and when he is diagnosed with cancer cannot even afford his treatment. The drug industry that he  turns to stands as a metaphor for a pure form of capitalism (unregulated, dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest free market). His immersion in it and the high body count that results are simply evidence of the industry (and thus capitalism’s) dehumanizing effect.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Jane’s – Jesse’s drug taking girlfriend – death.  Walter and Jesse have through the course of their adventures developed a proto-father son relationship where Walter does indeed seem to care for Jesse. However, by the end of the second season, this care is thrown into sharp relief as Walter allows Jane to choke on her vomit rather than save her. Part of the reason for this could be argued as out of a misplaced fatherly love for Jesse but also it could be construed more sinisterly. Jane is a competitor for Jesse’s attention but perhaps, more importantly, she gets in the way of Walter’s business by blackmailing him into giving up Jesse’s share of the drug profits. This end was perfectly ambiguous and in keeping with the well plotted nature of the show.

However, with the events of the third season, we can see this moment as a turning point. Walter’s beginning total immersion into the drug trade and the dehumanizing effect it has on him. By the end of the third season he abuses his fatherly position in order to get Jesse to kill Gayle another competitor. This time a business competitor who is replacing him as the chemist in Gus’s operation.

In this way seasons 2 and 3 could be more described as masculinity-as-entrepreneurialism. Indeed, seen in this way, the emasculation of Walter’s DEA brother-in-law Hank is evident, not in his need for his wife’s help with going to the toilet, but in his dependence on Walter’s financial support for his rehabilitation. Thus echoing Walter’s similar predicament in season 1 whereby he refused Hank’s offer for financial assistance for his cancer treatment. He is now more of a man because he is able to not only take care of himself, but also his brother-in-law. However, it is at the expense of his overall humanity.

Breaking Bad is a commentary on middle class male identity under late capitalism. Walter’s immersion in the drug trade initially gives him a sense of confidence helping him reclaim his manhood. However, the evolution of the show (and Walter) is not someone regaining a sense of manhood through being a father, but, of a man slowly descending into inhumanity in the pursuit of profit.

London’s Burning

Seeing the news of such extensive rioting in England is surprising if, perhaps, not unexpected. The context within which these riots erupted being very important and just when I thought I had something interesting to say about them, I find someone goes and says it for me.

Alex Hiller, a marketing and consumer expert at Nottingham Business School, points out that there is no conflict between anomie and consumption: “If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it’s a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world.”

The reaction to the riots have also been enlightening in this respect. Most that I have come across on twitter and facebook have been proto-fascist cries for extermination of the rioters. Most can be ignored as your typical reactionary nonsense that comes about during these types of periods of social unrest. Some, however, cannot be defined in this way and can only be, perhaps, understood in terms of consumerism itself. Of these proto fascist commenters none have questioned the state violence which ostensibly started the riots, none have questioned the policies that have created this underclass seething with anger. Instead there has been just mindless vitriol.

Perhaps, rioting ”scumbag” Wayne looting that 50′ plasma tv and iPhone 4 is such an affront because he is refusing to play the game of working in a shit job he hates to pay for these things that he doesn’t really need? Likewise little knacker Britney walking away with the Ugg boots and Gucci handbag instead of maxing out her credit card?

Perhaps, there is so much ire as a kind of misplaced envy. These people, that we are led to believe by the tabloids are subhuman, are really getting what we desire but without the shedloads of debt and mind numbing toil we have to put in?

Somebody died tonight…

Brian Lenihan wasn’t a great man. He wasn’t even a good man. As someone who put the interests of banks above those of the people, he wasn’t even much of a republican. He failed the state and the people, that will be his epitaph.

The Lack of Reality

This is a startling piece of intellectual depravity. One wonders at the febrile imagination that could come up with it. Basically it is an attempt to rehash the ‘old’ backward Ireland with the imagined ‘new’ shiny better Ireland. That this binary is all in the head is immaterial. The point is not to be intellectually rigorous: for example that houses are better built today than twenty years is not on the face of it actually true. Sure there have been progress in terms of say, insulation or even heating systems, that are more efficient but the replacement in quality of building materials (concrete block vs timber frame as an example) means one is forced to wonder will all those shoebox houses that went up still be standing in a 100 years time? However, what good is the technological progress in building houses if a) one cannot afford one or b) if one does it’s only because  one put oneself into massive amounts of debt that will seriously decrease the quality of ones life in other areas?

This is the crux of today’s Ireland that among neoliberals is supposedly a shiny beacon of everything that is right with the world: twenty years ago a person who had a decent job could afford to build their own house and not except to spend the rest of their natural lives repaying the mortagage. Today they cannot. This is what the neoliberal order has done. For the small so-called ”intelligentsia” the material conditions of, and quality of life, for ordinary people – outside the buying of mindless consumer goods – does not matter.

Gobshites in the Media

Ireland, at 90 years old, is a teenager compared to the rest of Europe and the developed

world. We got our hands on a large pile of cash for the first time ever and, like all teenagers, we blew it.

We have learnt an expensive but valuable lesson for the future. Throughout the rest of the world, most people admire our gutsy attitude and strong sense of our own history and identity, together with our achievements to date.

 

The above is nonsensical. Ireland as a landmass was formed 440 million years ago. It reached it’s current geographical position 65 million years ago. Ireland as a Nation was formed some thousand years ago and has been developing ever since. Ireland as the name of a state has been in use since 1937, some 73 years. Ireland, therefore, cannot be described as being 90 years old in any sense. Are the people of the rest of the world who ‘admire our gutsy attitude and strong sense of our own history and identity’ therefore stupid to do so, if on the evidence of the above an esteemed (well he must be to have gotten into the Irish Times) media commenter some of ”us” don’t even know the history of the country?

 

Beyond parody

I think if we are genuine republicans, if the Orange panel on the flag means anything, we have to consider building an inclusive society.

None other than former Tánaiste Michael McDowell said the above. The same Michael McDowell who also stated that inequality was necessary for Irish society. The same Michael McDowell who served in Government during a period of unprecedented economic growth when the gap between rich and poor actually grew.  Now Michael McDowell wants to call himself a ”republican”. It’s beyond parody given that one of the main principles of Irish republicanism is equality.

Of course, should one question Michael McDowell on his republican credentials you will be called a ”psycopath”. Perhaps all those unemployed as a result of the backwards nonsense that passed for McDowell’s ideology are also just psychopaths too?  According to McDowell, their misery is necessary for the Ireland of the incentives which McDowell strove for during his time in office. That Ireland of the incentives which saw tax breaks for the rich, jobs for the boys and now bailouts for banks and property speculators.

Should one question McDowell’s republican credentials further no doubt they would be told about how McDowell is the grandson of Eoin MacNéill, the man who was chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers (of which the Irish Republican Army is partly descended). If one was to be uncharitable, they could point out the facts that MacNéill tried to stop the Easter Rising, supported the Treaty which usurped the democratically established Irish Republic, and was the inept Irish delegate who presided over the disgraceful boundary commission which cemented the sectarian partition of Ireland. Being uncharitable these facts would suggest that MacNéill was actually viscerally anti-republican. However, that is history and many men of that era saw the world according to certain lights and had to deal with pressures none of us will ever have to deal with.

Yet, if one was to use this defence of McDowell, it would show just how far this state is from being a republic. Any republic needs a certain amount of meritocracy. If Irish society was in anyway meritocratic would someone as mediocre as Michael McDowell have risen to the office of Tánaiste? A man who did nothing to distinguish himself in office or one who took a relatively well positioned political party and destroyed it? I think the answer is a resounding no. What McDowell’s hereditary republicanism shows is the rotten base of Irish society.

McDowell, as a ”mover and shaker” in today’s Irish society is not alone in having family connections to people who were ”movers and shakers” in times past. This is because the class based nature of Irish society. Not only is it shallow but also very inbred. This class based hierarchy, which puts mediocrities like McDowell at the top, has created an oligarchy and  is responsible for the current economic mess. It is thus the duty of republicans to oppose this oligarchy. McDowell as a member of this oligarchy has a special interest in defending it, his power and prestige depend on it. This makes him an enemy of true republicanism.

To go back to the above quote, especially the bit about an ‘inclusive society’. Again this is beyond parody as Irish citizens are forced once more to emigrate as a result of the disastrous policies pursued by Irish Governments (which included McDowell) over the last decade . One presumes in McDowell’s world Irish society is to be inclusive only of the chosen few.

These people are liars and idiots

The 1980s were circumscribed by the clash of conservatism and liberalism, articulated through a series of referendums on abortion and divorce. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed the blistering transformation of conservative social attitudes. In the space of a generation, Ireland has witnessed a dramatic rejection of traditional authority structures. A liberal emphasis on individual moral responsibility, on equality rather than hierarchy, on participation rather than submission to authority has occurred.

The myth of change is a seductive one for those hankering after the heady days of the Celtic Tiger (RIP). However, a cursory glance at the state of today’s Irish society would rubbish most of the above. There has not been a widespread rejection of  ‘traditional authority structures’. While the Catholic Church’s authority has come under fierce attack, its power still remains a potent, if dormant, force. The State’s deal with the Catholic Church over compensation to victims of abuse being but one example, the recent blasphemy law being another. Another ‘authority structure’: class, remains. The Authority of the State and government remains, not only unquestioned, but completely submitted to, as the lack of serious opposition to its recent cutbacks shows.

In this way Ireland still remains a  fiercely hierarchical society, deference for someone’s supposed class position is still there, as in the old days of pre Celtic Tiger Ireland, it’s just that now the person of ‘superiority’  will likely be no longer dressed in a dog collar. This hierarchical society means inequality is rampant. Indeed, Ireland is one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Wealth is concentrated in a small oligarchy and official government policy is designed to buttress this oligarchy.

The supposed demise of the Catholic Church’s power plays a very important role in the mythos of pseudoliberalism and the idea of equality. Notions of justice, equality and fairness etc. in Ireland have been traditionally the preserve of the Catholic Church with Catholic social teaching being to the fore. The erosion of the Catholic Church’s power has led to the destruction of the basis for these notions. While those notions were never particualrly strong or evident in Irish society and their implementation far from perfect, they were rhetorically alluded to and all decisions, policies etc. and responses were framed by them. With their destruction has come the destruction of this frame work.

This, of course, begs the question: what is the framework that has replaced them? Neoliberalism and the unrelenting deference to ‘market forces’ is that replacement. The 1980s, far from being a decade of ”culture wars” between reactionary conservatives and  enlightened liberals, was instead  a kind of coup d’etat whereby a newer less Catholic bunch of reactionary conservatives came to power. Far from being enlightened or liberal these people simply hated the Catholic Church and those of that particular faith, one thinks here of the anecdote in one of John Waters’ books of his friend, from a certain side of a certain river in a certain city who, campaigning down the country during one of the referendums, simply berated the ‘boggers’ for not being ‘enlightened’. Waters was left to conclude that his friend had no interest in the actual referendums, or even trying to change peoples minds, but simply wanted to make himself feel better when compared to those who he viewed as inferior.

This anecdote captures perfectly the values in operation during the 1980s and which eventually fueled the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Waters’s friend (and he was not a one off) only principle was of the ‘I had my fun and that’s all that matters’ variety. This principle is the injunction of the Big Other to ‘Enjoy!’. (In philosophical terms that such a Big Other still exists rubbishes the idea that traditional authority structures have been obliterated.) As Zizek notes this principle (of total jouissance, as he calls it) can be mobilised in  many different ways. In Ireland today it is mobilised at the behest of neoliberalism.

This, in political terms, is bad news for democracy, liberty, equality and solidarity. As Zizek has it the neoliberal order: ‘ tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.’ Recently, the neoliberal party calling itself Fine Gael outlined it’s vision for a ‘New Politics’. What these proposals boiled down to was a reduction in democratic representation instead favouring technocratic representation confirming the accuracy of Zizek’s description. On RTÉ’s Primetime recently this technocratic consumerist vision was propagated by an economist. Whereas 40 years ago the Priest would have backed the established political parties from the pulpit, today we have our great economists pontificating from their media perches. One preached deference to God through them, the other deference to the markets. That these economists got things mindbogglingly wrong during the ”boom” doesn’t seem to matter.

For the most part, these economists all come from the same social class and the universities were most of them received their training institutionalise their class prejudices. Throughout secondary school students are instilled with the idea that education is a result based business. By the time they get to university this mentality is total, meaning that, far from learning for the sake of learning, students merely learn that which will get them the best results, in practice this means saying whatever you think your lecturer wants to hear. As access to third level education was traditionally restricted to certain social classes the majority of university lecturers will come from that class. Far from open minded critical thinking, we get a stuffy group think whereby universities merely serve to reproduce the class hierarchy. Within this group think we find a stultifying intellectual culture that superficially resembles the ideal of a liberal education but merely masks the deference to the traditional authority structure that is the class hierarchy within Irish society. It is no coincidence that recently there have been calls to reintroduce fees erecting another barrier to participation in third level education and entrenching deference to class further.

The dominant myth of the Celtic Tiger was that of  ‘change’. What this change was, and whether or not this change was in and of itself a good thing, was never examined. Instead the squawking heads of the media and academia merely shouted it. The myth along with the superficial image of a ‘new’ Ireland against an ‘old’ Ireland became a powerful rhetorical device that could be used to delegitimise any opposition to the construction of the neoliberal order.  That these ‘Ireland’s’ didn’t exist was never the point. Instead, the point was to legitimise the construction of the neoliberal order. The myth acts as a  limit on what is acceptable thought. It buttresses the oligarchy, destroys democracy, freedom and equality. It is the ‘intellectual’ AK 47 of the oligarchy and their class war. That someone would propagate this myth means they are either an idiot or a liar. Either way they are the enemy of Truth.

Myths of the Celtic Tiger

A fragment I found from a year or so ago:

So, the Celtic Tiger has finally died and currently the inquisition is vigorously underway as to who should be the fall guy. Media discourse on the matter has come to a consensus and it’s the public service which should take a hit. However, despite the Tiger’s death and the search for a fall guy, what has so far escaped any detailed treatment are the myths that helped sustain and distort the Celtic Tiger’s life and meaning.

In last Sunday’s Sunday Independent Joseph O’Connor was responsible for a piece interesting only as an example of these myths. O’Connor is a novelist and brother of singer Sinéad O’Connor. His best known book is probably Star of the Sea, a book set during An Gorta Mór in the year of 1847. Born in 1963, O’Connor is part of a generation who, along with their children, probably benefited most from the boom years. As such O’Connor is a perfect representation of the biases and prejudices of these two generations.

O’Connor’s generation was one that came to maturity at the end of the political life of the so-called revolutionary generation, those who had fought in the Irish Revolution and formed the political class that dominated life in the newly independent 26 county state for the guts of 50 years. O’Connor’s generation felt caught between the stifling embrace of so-called “traditional Ireland” that was represented by the politicians and political nationalism and an undefined urge to reach some form of “modernity”. Part of this meant rejecting what they deemed to be “traditional Ireland” as “backward” and ultimately the ideals of the revolution. This would eventually emerge as an intellectual fad known to some as revisionism.

However, some key features of this ideological fad can be found in O’Connor’s piece – the false binary between old/new, the inherent provincialism – which form the basis of Celtic Tiger era myths.

O’Connor’s piece begins:

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how we’re returning to the past. Take it from me: we’re not. As a child in Ireland, I felt I lived in a place that didn’t exist: a country that didn’t matter to anyone except its own sad inhabitants, to whom, I should add, it didn’t matter much. Ireland in the Seventies seemed a rock on the edge of Europe, lashed by the Atlantic, forgotten by the world, where the rain came horizontally, all the time.

Nobody ever fixed anything: I remember that. A park bench would break and be left there to rot. Street lights rusted, bus-shelters fell to bits, whole blocks of cities rotted, communities were abandoned. Life played itself out in gloomy black and white, like a flickering old movie but without the redeeming glamour.

We were famous for a couple of long-dead writers whose work was notoriously difficult to understand, and for a war in Ulster that was every bit as mystifying. It seemed to me as a child, and I scarcely exaggerate, that the only time an Irish person got into the newspapers was for planting a bomb.

My granddad used to read the News of the World. In it was printed the weather map for the coming week. There you would see the island of Great Britain, and, to the west of that, the territory of Northern Ireland, but printed as though it were an island. The Republic of Ireland was actually missing from the map. The country in which I lived was completely invisible. The absence seemed to illustrate what many young people felt. Nothing exciting would ever happen in Ireland, unless you were a sheep, a terrorist, or a nun.

The thing to note about this is the sense of dilapidation and inherent ‘oldness’ of the second paragraph as O’Connor will later develop this into a comparison with ‘new’ Ireland of the Celtic Tiger. This is the revisionist gesture par excellence to set up a completely superficial binary between (what are ultimately only imaginary) ‘old’ vs ‘new’. However, O’Connor does at least provide an honesty that is to be welcomed when he relates that ‘life played itself out in gloomy black and white, like a flickering old movie but without the redeeming glamour’ for black and white thinking is the hallmark of this perverse kind of revisionism and it highlights the completely unsophisticated worldview that would come with it.

This unsophisticated viewpoint is developed further in O’Connor’s concentration on Ireland’s place seemingly ‘forgotten by the world’ and compounded by the fact that the 26 county state didn’t feature on the weather map of the News of the World. This could probably be taken evidence of the post colonial nature of the 26 county psyche but it also represents a far worse disease: the provincial nature of Irish intelligentsia always looking outwards to someone else. This deeply damaging provincialism means that any and all attempts to create the so-called ‘Knowledge Economy’ will ultimately be scuppered. An Intelligentsia that is always looking outwards at what others are doing will never be creative or innovative and will be doomed forever to copy others. This need, on O’Connor’s part, for recognition from the outside world is quite sickening in this context as it represents the ultimate repudiation of the revolution. For here is displayed in all its glory, what Michael Collins would have called, the slave mind.

The most startling thing about this discourse is that ultimately it is incapable of ushering in any kind of change because central to it is the idea that the ‘change’ has already happened, the best has already come. That this is not actually true – not only in philosophical terms – but in empirical terms as well which means that propagating these myths can only serve to steal the future from those young people now beginning to feel the very real squeeze of the death of the Tiger. It creates a buffer between the official (and false) narrative and the realty of their lives. This, however, was always true to a degree and was indeed felt by those who experienced the Celtic Tiger only as a mythical figure discussed among talking heads on the TV or in the papers. It can be no coincidences that drink and drug consumption soared among those O’Connor labels ‘the best-fed, best-dressed, best-educated generation of Irish people’ or that suicide is prevalent to such a high degree among young men.

Essentially this mythic discourse has become a kind of meta-narrative, one completely divorced from the reality of life in modern Ireland as experienced by the vast majority people living on this island.

Choose your ‘monster’… and some notes on neoliberal propaganda tricks

This article in the Sunday Independent displays some of the simplistic tricks used in neoliberal propaganda. Ostensibly it is [a rather poor] attempt at comment on a recent dispute between workers and the Green Isle food company. However, a few interesting things should be noted. First off is the reference and importance given to the fact that some workers in the company had accessed inappropriate material on the internet (this wasn’t what the dispute was about): ‘That issue was the sacred right of employees to look at internet porn without facing disciplinary action from their boss.’

The introduction of ‘porn’ into the equation is predicated on the idea that there is a grand mass of conservative minded people who would be abhorred by the idea of workers accessing porn and therefore immediately view said workers and their struggle in a poor light. The writer herself, however, takes a decidedly ironic detachment that chooses to showcase their own ‘maturity’. However, this ‘maturity’ is skin deep and merely an ideological device in that it plays up to the prejudices of conservative minded people  and thus reinforcing these prejudices in society at the expense of more liberal attitudes. Of course, this is not true liberalism but a kind of pseudo-liberalism particular to a generation that, rather than promote genuine social liberalism, merely wanted to wrest state power from Catholic conservatives.

This generation – of which the writer belongs – bought into the ideology of neoliberalism. In this they used their new found state power to create a neoliberal society. The failure of the Celtic Tiger is the fruits of this endeavour. The top down structural inequality, the concentration of wealth in a small privileged group, the rolling back of the already limited welfare state and atomisation of community life are the fruits of the neoliberal society.

This ideology puts it at the opposite spectrum to Irish republicanism, thus for neoliberals Irish republicanism became a kind of bogeymonster, one to be conjured up as a warning in much the same way a mother might warn a child not to play in certain areas in case the bogeyman get them. This is grossly immature and infantilises the reader. The article states:

It’s difficult to hear any republican use a loaded word like “struggle” without feeling a chill shiver down the back. Dalton represents a party which does not even recognise the legitimacy of this State to exist or the Dail to represent it or the Garda Siochana to police it.

Now while it is quite correct to state that the republican named in the article subscribes to a party which does not recognise the current 26 county Irish state, what is left unsaid is far more interesting. The party in question subscribes to the view that the current 26 county state is illegitimate because it was founded by a British act of parliament and that it ignored the already existing and democratically founded Irish Republic. The Free State, as it was called, was a negation of the democratic wishes of the Irish people and a usurpation of the democratic Republic. Furthermore, the Irish Republic that republicans would like to see exist is one based on the Proclamation where:

The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

This is anathema to neoliberals. Firstly, neoliberals do not recognise the existence of an Irish nation or community of Irish people, following the Thatcherite idea that there is no society. (It is interesting that in seeking to deny the Irish nation’s existence they will plunder arguments and tropes from historical British Imperialism making them a kind of neoimperialist. This has the further irony of making them look rather archaic as the British Imperialism they plunder is very much historical and has fallen – for the most part – out of fashion in modern Britain.)  Instead, they see just a collection of individuals whose purpose in life is to ‘consume’ or, to borrow a quote: ‘to work shit jobs you hate to buy things you don’t even need’. Secondly, and following on from the first, they therefore don’t believe in any form of greater good or equality as a means of benefiting the greater good. There is only individual consumers who can ‘consume’ services, in other words you buy access to services such as healthcare or education whose only purpose is to generate profit. Thirdly, having disavowed the idea of an Irish community, society or nation and any need to look after the greater good of this community, neoliberals can then favour those people who can afford to buy services or consume goods i.e. wealthy people thus creating structural, top down inequality that benefits the wealthy elite above the nation.

Given the above, it is easy to answer the question posed at the end of the article:  ‘Are these really the people [republicans] you want on your side in an industrial dispute?’  The answer is a resounding yes. Neoliberalism is directly responsible for the current sorry state Ireland finds itself in and the only antidote to this is an Irish Republic based on the principles of Liberity, Equality, Solidarity.