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This essay explores aspects of Irish identity through the lens of the 1979 ‘Mass for Young People’ Papal Visit to Galway; I’ve threaded quotes and sprinkled section headings from John Paul II throughout. You can read the whole speech here.

Introduction: A Soft Day in Galway

On the morning of Sunday the 30th of September 1979 I was a wet, cold, bored and hungry child squashed in the middle of a monster crowd on a muddy field with the distant view of a stage - my bad mood was made worse knowing that my parents were enjoying drinks and canapés in the covered VIP section. Whereas I and my siblings were corralled into a huge open air pen surrounded by a huge crowd of excited young people. Despite this, I never felt unsafe that day; there was no drunkness, drugs or violence of any sort, the crowd was orderly and peaceable. On that misty day in 1979 we were waiting on Ballybrit Racecourse near Galway City for the arrival of Pope John Paul II on the first ever Papal Visit to the West of Ireland to celebrate a ‘Mass For Young People’.

My discomfort and boredom ebbed away over the morning as the rain cleared away and the Papal warm-up acts, Dublin priest Fr Michael Cleary and Kerryman Eamon Casey, the Bishop of Galway joked with us, and led the Rastafarian song sung by the German-Carribbean group Boney-M ‘The Rivers of Babylon’ 1I began to enjoy the waves of excitement rippling through the crowd - our eyes glued to the misty skies in anticipation -soon we heard the ‘whump-whump-whump’ of an approaching helicopter before, like a glossy red-and-black ladybird, it gingerly touched down on the soggy racetrack. By this time the crowd was ectastic and I joined in the singing, cheering and clapping that gave John Paul II the tumultous welcome of a rockstar.

I can’t remember much of what he said, we would cheered that damp morning if he had read out a grocery list. But I do remember John Paul II himself, a vigorous figure clad green, white and gold vestments who exuded a personal charisma that reached across the crowds. And I vividly recall the enormous sustained roar of mass adulation when at the end of his sermon he declared: ‘Young people of Ireland, I love you’.2

I left the racecourse that day thrilled to have felt part of something so historic but also slightly confused, what had been John Paul II’s message been? On the one hand, he congratulated us on being Very Good Catholics:

When I look at the thousands of young people here before me….You come from Catholic families…you go regularly and meet Christ in Holy Communion…(John Paul II, 1979)3

The Whole World in His Hands

Chapter 1: City of the Tribes

The Rich Heritage

The tribal feeling that engulfed us that day happened in the city, Galway, whose nickname is the ‘City of the Tribes’. These ‘Tribes’ refer to the 14 Anglo-Norman merchant families; Lynches, Brownes, Martins and others who dominated the civic life of city in the early modern period. But surrounding the city walls, although firmly locked outside its gates, were also the native Irish tribes: the Flahertys, O’Kellys and others.

This precaution by the Galway Anglo-Norman Tribes was justified because, outside settler enclaves like theirs, this part of Ireland was the last stronghold of native Irish identity and culture on the island6. In the 17th century it also became the place where Oliver Cromwell banished those from the more fertile richer parts of Ireland giving them the apocryphal choice of going: ‘to hell or to Connaught’ (although there is no evidence that he ever used those exact words, with Biblical echoes it does have the ring of exactly what he would say, and neatly encapsulates his attitude).

Watch the Sun Go Down on Galway Bay

In his speech to us John Paul II expressed his happiness at coming to the West of Ireland, with a special nod to Galway Bay. Perhaps John Paul II was hinting here at the 1947 Bing Crosby hit of the same name, the nostalgic emigrant song was an international post-war success and its evocation of a lost beloved home may have touched a young Karol Wojtyła (as he was then) living in the shattered remains of post-war Poland. ‘Galway Bay’ is one of a long line of heart rending, moving Irish emigrant songs 8in which home-sick Irish emigrants praised the beauty of their native land and poured out their dreams of return, either in this life or the next.

As well as its beauty in the early 20th century the West of Ireland was also praised for its supposed racial purity; Pádraig Pearse, W.B. Yeats, John B. Synge and others of the Gaelic Revival celebrated it as the most ‘Gaelic’ part of the island - the place least contaminated by English colonial influences. Pearse said while visiting Connemara:

He was so fond of it that he bought himself a tiny holiday cottage in Rosmuc in Connemara where he spent his summer holidays from teaching and wrote there some of his most famous stories eulogising the Irish landscape and wildlife such as his poignant children’s story ‘Eoghainín na nÉan’.

However Pearse’s belief in the racial purity of the West of Ireland may have been misplaced, as thanks to Cromwell in the 17th century, many of its inhabitants actually originated from elsewhere on the island (even Synge’s beloved Aran Islanders were recently discovered in a recent DNA analysis to be more similar to English than Irish phenotypes, probably as a result of the stationing of a Cromwellian garrison on the islands in the 17th century).10

The Moon Rise Over Claddagh

---

this Western See which in Saint Patrick’s time was ‘beyond the confines of the inhabited earth’, now is at the meeting place of Europe and the Americas (John Paul II, 1979)11

The Meeting Place of Europe and the Americas

But as John Paul II acutely observed in 1979, far from being a remote backwater isolated on the periphery of Europe, the West of Ireland has always been a meeting place between Europe and the Americas (as early as 1477 Christopher Columbus stopped off in Galway City on his way to the Americas). Event today, thanks to Irish emigration even the most remote, isolated parts of the West of Ireland often have global links.12 Despite this, in urban Ireland rural Irish accents are very often mocked as unsophisticated and uneducated and many from there soon learn to dial them down to more Anglised or American cadences (an example here).

The flip side of this is that city dwellers like Pearse(who was a middle class inner city Dublin boy) are occasionally prone to sentimentalise this supposed rural naivety through rose tinted glasses. But Pearse and the others who followed him to the West can sometimes be surprised to find there that it is no idyll, having plenty of bitter family feuds, petty squabbles, and gossiping 14

Painful Events

In the past much of this inter community aggression might be blamed on the economic stresses of colonialism and its post-independence legacy; but a quick look at Irish history is enough to disabuse anyone that Ireland was a haven of peace and tranquillity before the English arrived. Instead Irish pre-Christian mythic sagas like the Táin Bó Cúailnge16Cycle are blood soaked stories of the rivalries between the North and the West of the Ireland (the West being led by Bronze Age girl-boss warrior Queen Meabh and the Northern contingent led by the Marvel-type hero Cú Chulainn (the latter thanks to Pearse became a talisman to the Irish nationalist movement but Cú Chulainn has been more recently appropriated by Ulster Loyalists as a symbol of Northern resistance).

Our Mutual Relations

The Ulster Loyalists’ adoption of Cú Chulainn is a nod to ancient rivalries between different parts of the island of Ireland as it remains split between two different political entities, the Republic of Ireland (containing a majority of Catholic nationalist population) and Northern Ireland (containing a slim majority of Ulster Protestant Loyalists).

The creation of Northern Ireland in 1922 also left a large minority of Catholic nationalists within it and the two groups co-existed in an uneasy tension up to the late 1960s when it exploded into a civil war-in-all-but name called ‘The Troubles’. Between 1968 and 1998 in Northern Ireland over 3,720 people died and many more were injured or tramatised. These were the ‘painful events’18 that John Paul II was referring to in 1979 and in September 1979 Ireland was still reeling from its latest episode when in August just before his visit, the IRA blew up the boat containing Queen’s Elizabeth’s cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten, killing him and three other passengers in a bomb blast off Mullaghmore County Sligo.

The conflict in Northern Ireland centres around two group identities, on the one hand that of Catholic nationalist ‘Irishness’ signified by streets lined with tricolours, rebel songs and murals and on the other of Protestant Unionist loyalists with fluttering Union Jacks, songs and street murals 19 The latter, Protestant loyalists, fiercely reject the group-identity of ‘Irishness’ describing themselves instead as ‘Ulster' or ‘British’ and have their own community events like the annual Orange marching parades and the bonfires of the Twelfth of July. Outside of these occasions, the tribal shibboleths of both groups often puzzle outsiders, because on the face of it there seems to be very little to distinguish between them in either appearance or accent.

This was cleverly explored in one episode of the teen comedy drama TV series ‘Derry Girls’ where the differences between the Protestant and Catholic communities were listed on a blackboard. Some were trivial (Catholics walk, Protestants march, Protestants keep their toaster in the cupboard?) but it would be a mistake to dismiss them as insignificant, as in the opinion of Loyalist politician Ian Paisley Jnr not even his possession of an Irish passport affects his British/Ulster identity, in 2017 he dismissed his Irish passport as a ‘European document with an Irish harp stuck on the front posing as a passport’.)20

Through The Barricades

‘Derry Girls’ is set in the 1990s just prior to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which officially ended ‘The Troubles’. In it the writer Lisa McGee dramatised her own experience of growing up as a Catholic teenage girl in the city of Derry and her sharply observed dialogue is a clever juxtaposition of normal teenage anguish with the completely abnormal conditions of living in a place where soldiers routinely boarded school buses with machine guns and having to listen to adult complaints about how long it takes to defuse a bomb (‘why is it taking so long? the wee robots do all the work?).

At its root the ‘The Troubles’ was, in my view, a dispute about land; who owns it, who names it, who can walk/march on it. Another scene in ‘Derry Girls’ centred on an ‘Orange parade’ when Protestant Loyalist groups march through nationalist areas. In this the main Catholics characters find themselves accidentally caught up in the parade and have to pretend to be Australian to avoid trouble (I had a similar experience, only I pretended to be French - funny now, but not then). This was not the only lesson I learned in Northern Ireland; I found when talking to my Protestant friends that to refer to ‘The Six Counties’ drew the swift correction: ‘You mean Ulster?’ as nationalist and loyalists use different names for the same small land area occupying only one-sixth of the island of Ireland and containing just under two million people.

A Model for Living

Thus the power of a name on ownership was a lesson that Irish emigrants took with them to the US. A study of toponyms (placenames) show where many Irish emigrants settled, for example at the heart of Silicon Valley in California is the town of Menlo Park, now home of the global headquarters of internet giants Google and Meta. Prior to Spanish colonisation this town was previously an Ohlone Native American site, but in 1854 a pair of Irish emigrants settled there and called it after their native Galway village. 350 miles south of Silicon Valley is another rechristened Ohlone Native American site, accordingly to local legend this is the Californian village of Hollywood, the home of the US film industry which may have got its name from a County Wicklow village. 2324.

Gone With the Wind

From its earliest days the Hollywood film industry used both Irish actors and stories (one of the first ever films was the 1911 ‘Rory O’Moore’ about the 1798 rebellion). It also used Irish placenames, most famously in the Victor Fleming’s 1939 film dramatisation of Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ 25 in which the Southern mansion home of Scarlett O’Hara was called ‘Tara’ by her Irish-born father Gerald.26. In the film of GwtW starring the English actress Vivien Leigh and the Hollywood star Clark Gable, the estate of Tara was an iconic character in its own right; the film shoot was done entirely in California on Hollywood backlots and the antebellum facade of ‘Tara’ constructed by Hollywood stage carpenters. Of it the film’s producer the Jewish-American David O. Selznick remarked:

‘Tara’ also provides one of GwtW’s most iconic lines when Scarlett is told by her father Gerald that it is ‘worth dying for’. From my own experience growing up in rural Ireland, this line could as might easily dropped from the lips of my own grandfather; as land was, and still is, a hugely important characteristic of Irish identity. However GwtW’s Southern cotton estate run on slave labour was not typical of Irish emigrant experience. Unlike Gerald O’Hara most Irish emigrants to the US in the 19th century emigrated to the cramped cities of the eastern seaboard of the US like Boston and New York. And, despite the Irish attachment to land, they tended to stay clustered together there, and rarely ventured into the wide open prairies of the Mid West or the antebellum estates of the South28.

All Men Are Created Equal

Alongside their original identity Irish emigrants coming to the US adopted the new group identity of ‘American’ (qualifying this by the term ‘Irish-American’). The brand new identity of ‘American’ had its roots in 1776 when the original 13 American Colonies declared their independence from the British Empire on the 2nd of August in Philadephia signing a document heavily inspired by Enlightment ideals.

The Declaration of Independence with famous opening lines ‘we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal’ and its enshrinement of the rights to: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ became the foundational document of the US Constitution and remains highly influential in judisprudence and international law. However, as many have pointed out despite its lofty moral tone the Declaration was problematic from the start, as despite its high minded commitment to equality, of its 56 signatories, 41 were slave owners (and of course ‘all men’ did not include women).

The Powers of the Earth

American identity was birthed in the opening lines of the Declaration: ‘When it becomes necessary in the course of events for one people to dissolve the Political Bonds which have connected them to another and to assume amongst the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them to….’ and crystallised in the American War of Independence which followed.

God Has Played Out His Role

The American Revolution concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and it was followed in 1792 by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which carried the Enlightment ideas of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ across the European continent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While many of the Founders of the US, like Benjamin Franklin were Deist (believing in an impersonal deity who once He created the Universe, did not interfere in human affairs any further, the so-called ‘Watchmaker’ belief), but they did not seek to impose these beliefs on their fellow countryman and the First Amendment to the US Constitution in 1791 later guaranteed religious freedom to all.

The Surrounding Atmosphere

The French and American Revolutions spawned clusters of admirers amongst educated elites across the globe. In Ireland these were the United Irishmen formed in 1791 Belfast by Presbyterians, themselves victims of discriminatory colonial penal codes, and they were enthusiastic adopters of French and American republican ideals (ironic considering the present stance of the same community who are now the core of Protestant Loyalism). The United Irishmen gathered together in places like the Benjamin Franklin tavern (recently reopened in the same place in July 2026) calling themselves ‘The Muddlers’ Club’ to deter government spies.

Another crucible of republicanism in Ireland was in the taverns and coffee houses of Dublin frequented by Anglo-Irish Protestant students of Trinity College, Dublin (the Eagle Tavern in Temple Bar being a favourite). In both Irish cities men like the Belfast Presbyterian Henry Joy McCracken and the Anglo-Irish Protestant radical Theobald Wolfe Tone saw in the the new republics of the United States of America and France trailblazing examples of challenging State hegemony.

However as these ideas percolated further into Ireland they overspilled from educated urban elites into the Irish countryside gaining the attention of men like the radical Catholic firebrand priest Fr Murphy of Wexford. His incendiary sermons to his Catholic peasant congregations on ‘equality’ fell on willing ears, immiserated as they were by land enclosures of the late 18th century and the unpopular practice of tithing (a community tax where Catholics were forced to pay for the upkeep of Protestant clergy). On this fertile ground republican ideas, which were Deist in origin (belief in a Supreme Being rather than the God of traditional religions and focusing on reason and rationality) gained a tenuous foothold in the otherwise deeply conservative and religious Catholic Irish peasantry.

Practical Atheism

Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé ! (bis)

Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!

The Wearing of the Green

The United Irishmen too developed its own iconography, copying some directly from the French canon (like the Liberty/Phrygianian cap) and slogans like ‘Liberty’, or ‘Equality’ but introducing a local twist like the colour green, and traditional symbols like the shamrock and harp on flags and uniforms (although not yet the Irish tricolour). These, as well as Irish patriotic songs like ‘The Wearing of the Green’ promoted armed rebellion against the British State and became barnacled to the group-identity of ‘Irishness’.

The Year of the French

Six years after the Revolution in August 1798, the tiny hamlet of Kilcummin in County Mayo on the Western seaboard woke up to see three French frigates looming offshore and soon the 1000 French soldiers onboard were scrambling ashore through the slingle onto its beach. To the bemusement of the locals General Jean-Joseph Humbert then read out in accented English the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed the first Irish Republic, a sister-republic to the French Republic. Thus for a few short months, the West of Ireland as the Province of Connaught in this Republic, was in the words of the 19th century Thomas Davis song indeed ‘Awake’.

The West’s Awake

The Republic of Connaught/Ireland had its own native Irish President (the French wisely realising that someone with a heavy French accent would not play well locally) this was John Moore from a well-to-do Mayo Catholic family, before this brief flash of freedom was brutally quashed by Crown forces at the Battle of Ballinamuck. Moore died in a Waterford jail shortly afterwards at the age of 36; in 1961 he was buried as the first President of the Irish Republic with full military honors at the Mall in Castlebar County Mayo in a ceremony attended by President Éamon De Valera.

The Rising of The Moon

But the French landings in Mayo were not the only rebel flames that flickered across Ireland in 1798; in May Fr Murphy had led a peasant army at Vinegar Hill in Wexford; in June, in County Antrim a mainly Presbyterian rebellion was led by Henry Joy McCracken. The British State was quick and brutal in its retaliation, Crown forces quickly boxed in Fr Murphy’s ragged peasant army, carried out a field execution of Murphy himself and, it is estimated, killed up to 2,000 of his peasant followers, men, women and children (in 2017 an unmarked mass grave including the remains of women and children was discovered in Wexford). By July, after a quick trial McCracken too was dangling at the end of a rope in front of his childhood school in Belfast at the age of only 30. This was followed by the failure of Humbert’s expedition in Mayo (in contrast to his unfortunate Irish officers who were all treated harshly, Humbert himself was allowed to return to France).

Washington Succeeded, Kosciusko failed

Finally in November the leading United Irishman the 35 year old Theobald Wolfe Tone arrived on the deck of a French warship dressed in the uniform of a French officer, heading a French force of 3,000 to the shores of County Donegal. After a humilitating rout, Tone was captured by Crown forces and brought to Dublin to face a court martial for treason (despite not being in the British Army). After being found guilty, he asked to die by firing squad as a soldier and a French officer: in his speech from the dock he said:

I entered into the service of the French Republic with the sole view of being useful to my country. To contend against British Tyranny, I have braved the fatigues and terrors of the field of battle…..After all I have done for a sacred cause, death is no sacrifice. In such enterprises, everything depends on success: Washington succeeded – Kosciusko failed.

This request was refused by the court and he was sentenced to hang as a traitor (but cheated the hangman by dying by his own hand in jail first).

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The Tide is Turning?

On trips back home over the years I noticed that the churches of my youth were empty, gradually emptying or attended only by a few elderly people; I was not the only one of the ‘Young People of Ireland’ who deserted them. I also saw some of what I called ‘Bouncy Castle Catholicism’ where it seemed that the only time some Irish children saw the inside of a Catholic church was for initiation rites like baptism or First Holy Communion (the bouncy castles for celebrations afterwards). It sometimes felt, as in Matthew Arnold’s 1867 famous poem ‘Dover Beach, about the decline of religion, that in Ireland:

But in more recent times there are signs that the tide of faith may be about to turn in Ireland. Some of the next generation are becomin disillusioned with the consumerism, materialism and the empty promises of a golden technological future that so dazzled mine. The Irish singer CMAT recently sang in her 2025 hit ‘Eurocountry’:

I never understood what this way of living could do to me..All the mooching 'round shops, and the lack of idеntity..……all this pop star USA….I think we're gonna die trying, I wish we weren't this way.

Themes continued in the next essay:

‘The Crack in Everything’.

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To be continued.

(Continued from Part One available here)

1. Introduction

2. So Shines A Good Deed

3. I Sold Flowers

4. Oz, The Great and Terrible

5. Somewhere Over the Rainbow

6. He Lives Happily Ever After?

7. No Place Like Home

8.After the Same Rainbow’s End

8. Epilogue: Ninety-Nine Words for Rain.

Reading time 32 minutes

Introduction1

Before the casting of the Jewish-American actor Gene Wilder (born Jerome Sillerman) in the titular role of the 1971 ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ film, several other actors had been considered for it. Amongst these was the Anglo-Irish friend of Roald Dahl, (the writer of the original 1964 story ‘Charlie and The Chocolate Factory’) Spike Milligan, but the film’s director Mel Stuart (born Stuart Solomon) also considered members of the British comedy troupe Monty Python John Cleese and Eric Idle for the lead role.

But at the casting auditions in the famous New York Plaza Hotel in 1970, Stuart picked Gene Wilder instead for Wonka almost on sight. Wilder had just returned to the US from acting in a quirky comedy film called ‘Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx’ shot in location around Dublin in 1969. In it Wilder does a faux-Irish accent (the plot of which is that a Dublin horse manure collector (Wilder) falls in love with an wealthy American student and…..ah, I give up). Some of his co stars in it included Margot Kidder and a number of well known Irish actors, including David Kelly.

Perhaps some of Wilder’s Irish experience from this fed into his next performance as Willy Wonka, in particular his costume; a short top hat, waistcoat, velvet jacket and walking cane which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Irish folklore character, the leprechaun (as does much of the mischievous behaviour of Wonka himself). Wilder (a keen painter) wrote to Stuart with very specific suggestions about the costume, including the top hat that Wonka sports at a jaunty angle throughout:

What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?34

One of Wilder’s erstwhile competitors for the role of Wonka, the British actor John Cleese, went on in 1979 to play Reg, the freedom fighter from the People’s Front of Judea (although his bad back prevents him actually fighting) in the Monty Python comedy film ‘Life of Brian’ directed by Welsh Terry Jones where he asks his fellow PJF revolutionaries: ‘What have the Romans Ever Done for Us?’. If his question is swapped to: ‘What Did The British Ever Do For Us?’ one of the answers may be: they gave us free universal primary school education from 1831 in the Irish National School Education System (and Guinness and the roads, and the railways, and Irish county names, and…and…).

As discussed in Part One of this essay, I discussed how the Irish National School Education System gave generations of Irish school children access to a world of books, ideas and opportunities that millions would otherwise not have had. Like Reg, this has presented a conundrum to many Irish revolutionaries over the years because it may means that some of the benefits of colonisation (like education) can be so attractive that it persuades some of the colonised that it is actually a Good Thing, as Reg discovers:

But even a seemingly unambigous public good like free primary education may have a shadow side, as the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich (whose mother had Jewish ancestry) points out in his 1971 book Deschooling Society:

All My Life, Watching America9

As an English speaking country Ireland was uniquely vulnerable to this influence; US TV programs like ‘Hawai FIVE-O’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels’ acted like the cultural equivalent of weedkiller sprayed onto the smoking ruins of native Irish culture.

Not everything that flowed from across the Atlantic through Irish TV screens was shallow pap, some US film and TV productions were provocative and interesting works of art which provoked and stimulated discussions like the 1970s US TV series ‘Roots’11 about the African slave trade. In the previous essay I discussed three Hollywood musical films; the original 1971 ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ starring Gene Wilder, the 1964 Warner Bros ‘My Fair Lady’ starring Audrey Hepburn and the 1939 MGM ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ starring Judy Garland.

On the face of it they too seem to be simple moral fairy tales; the hymns to imagination and family values in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’; the valorisation of hard work and ambition as the path to social success in ‘My Fair Lady’; and extolling of patriotism and friendship in ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’. But this, in my opinion, would be a gross simplification of these multi layered and complex works of art.

So Shines a Good Deed

Gene Wilder, the Jewish-American star of the 1971 ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ directed by Mel Stuart was a ‘method’ actor who followed the acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski in the early 20th century13. ‘Method’ acting is based on real emotional responses and in ‘WWatCF’ this meant that Wilder (with Stuart’s connivance) often unleashed manic monologues and tantrums on his unprepared co-stars, most of whom were children. There were few safeguards for child stars then; several in later years remembered their terror during the nightmare boat ride scene down the chocolate river. In the penultimate scene in his office, Wilder threw a unrehearsed tantrum, drawing genuine expressions of surprise, fear and anger from the actors playing Charlie and Grandpa Joe.

The script of WWatCF is heavily adapted from Dahl’s story, Stuart liberally sprinkled it with literary quotes, including several from Irish poets and writers: Arthur O’Shaugnessy’s ‘We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams’; William Allingham’s ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushing glen. We dare not go a-hunting,for fear of little men’; and Oscar Wilde’s: ‘The suspense is terrible, I hope it lasts’ (he also included literary allusions from poets like Keats and Shakepeare’s Merchant of Venice: ‘So shines a good deed in a weary world’.)14 15

But Stuart’s adaptation of Dahl’s story of the Chocolate Factory retained some of the original’s more controversial aspects; the depiction of the Oompa Lumpas as Wonka’s obedient slave work force with strong echoes of racism, colonialism and white saviourism tropes (for instance Wonka justifies their servitude by saying he has rescued the Oompa Lumpas from Loompaland where they were in danger and pays them in cocoa beans). This theme was even worse in Dahl’s original story where the Oompa Lumpas were described as ‘black skinned pygmies….who dribbled at the mouth’ but when the film was being made in 1971 this drew criticism from the US National Association of Coloured People who threatened to boycott Stuart’s film unless this description was redacted.16. Under this pressure Stuart altered the Oompa Lumpas appearance to small orange skinned men with green pompadour hairstyles and white eyebrows (Stuart also downplayed the name ‘Charlie’ in Dahl’s original title, replacing it with Willy Wonka as ‘Charlie’ was a trope in the black community for ‘imperious white man’17).

Despite their onscreen persona of a Greek chorus critiquing the children’s bad behaviour, the Oompa Lumpas’ own onset behaviour was far from perfect, as one child star, Paris Themmen (who played the US child Mike TeeVee) recalled in later years:

This mischief was also a feature of Wilde’s whimsical acting style - pretending to have a limp in the opening scene (his agreement to do the part hinged on this) and his mercurial onscreen relationship with his co-stars shifting from charm to rage in a second (although by all accounts Wilder was a kindly gentle man in real life and his child co-stars bore him no grudge).

Like the WWoO before it, on its initial release WWatCF was a commercial flop and neither Stuart nor Wilder won any film awards in the year of its release. However since then, thanks to repeated TV screenings, the film’s reputation has steadily climbed and in 2014 it was chosen for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" (a classification it shares with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and My Fair Lady) and it is now a staple of TV schedules as a beloved children’s classic. Wilder himself considered it his best screen performance, leaving instructions to etch his gravestone with the image of him as Willy Wonka.19

But not everyone agreed with this assessment; in particular the writer Roald Dahl was deeply upset with Stuart’s film seeing that between them he and Wilder had turned his story into something far darker and disturbing than he intended. He was so upset with it that he refused all permission in his lifetime for any further film remakes of his story. His estate only granted permission 34 years later in 2005 for a remake starring a young Johnny Depp (and which also starred David Kelly, the Irish actor who had worked with Wilder in Dublin in 1969 as Grandpa Joe).

I Sold Flowers

‘My Fair Lady’ (MFL)is also a far darker story on closer inspection than its sumptous costumes and lush soundtrack might suggest (it was directed by the New York born George Cukor, who had earlier directed Judy Garland in ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and ‘A Star is Born’). In his 2026 biography of her ‘Intimate Audrey: The Authorised Biography of the Hollywood icon and film star’ Audrey Hepburn’s son Sean Hepburn Ferrer recalled that MFL was the film that best reflected her own life21. Despite her aristocratic background, as a child Hepburn lived in Holland during its Nazi occupation during the Second World War and through the Dutch Famine (known as the the Hongerwinter) of 1944-1945.

Hepburn rose from this troubled background to international success in Hollywood in iconic films like ‘Roman Holiday’ and the 1961 ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (directed by Blake Edwards), but in 1964 she did not receive the expected Best Actress award for MFL that she, and many others, expected for her, because, breaking his promise to her, during post production MFL’s producer Jack Warner dubbed over her singing in the film without her consent (Hepburn was so upset with his betrayal that she never again appeared in another musical film or worked with him again).

I am Oz, the Great and Terrible

The 1939 MGM film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz also had its troubles. It was a typical product of the Hollywood studio factory-like having multiple directors (including MFL’s director the George Cuckor) and over ten different screen writers. Despite its iconic status today, it was initially a commerical failure and took years to make a profit as its cinematography was created using a brand new, but extremely expensive three-strip Technicolor filming method (making it one of the first ever colour films). This also meant that its filming took place under powerful arc lights which produced soaring onset temperatures extremely uncomfortable to act in.

The actors’ discomfort was exacerbated by the heavy toxic make up for characters like the Wicked Witch of the West and the Tin Man who both suffered severe allergic reactions.There were several serious onset accidents injuring cast members (even the dog got hurt). According to Garland’s ex-husband Sid Luft’s 2017 memoir ‘Judy and I: My Life with Judy Garland’22, a 16 year old Garland was afraid of the actors who played the Munchkins. He claims that, as well as being rowdy and drunken on set, they sexually harassed her, saying:

Garland’s onset misery might have been compounded by the gruelling filming schedule and in order to keep up with she was fed a steady cocktail of drugs. This meant that she soon developed addiction problems and, despite being one of their most famous stars, the relationship between her and MGM later broke down and they banned her from the studio lot. She then left MGM for Warner Bros. who produced her comeback vehicle, the multiple awarding winning 1954 ‘A Star is Born’ (also directed by George Cukor). Despite this later success, Garland died at the age of only 47 in 1969: Luft in his book, blames this partially on the aftermath of her early traumatic experiences on the set of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’.

He Lives Happily Ever After?

Confusing and cruel adult behaviour to children/young people feature heavily in all three films: from his earliest appearance in the film WWatCF Wonka veers from refusing to answer simple questions, unleashing unpredictable tantrums and retreating behind a wall of impenerable legalese:

in MFL Professor Higgins is shocking cruel to Eliza on their first meeting, a vulnerable young girl who has done nothing but try and sell him flowers.

(He is not alone in his disdain and contemptous behaviour to Eliza, even her own father Alfred DooLittle when he fails to blackmail Higgins offers to sell Eliza to him as a sex slave.

Dorothy too is a victim of adult cruelty right from the beginning of TWoO, from Mrs Gulch who wants to kill her beloved pet dog Toto:

to her aunt who fails to stand up for her to Mrs Gulch. In Oz the deceptive Wizard sends her on a wild goose chase which he believes will kill her in order to avoid admitting that he is not as powerful as he pretends:

How do you like the Chocolate Factory?

None of the films have unambigous happy endings, at the end of WWatCF while they are both abroad the golden birdcage of the Wonkavator, Wonka tells Charlie that he needs to pass his Chocolate factory on to a child who will run it the way he wants. But he does not ask Charlie what he wants; he assumes that Charlie will continue Wonka’s vision for his factory. Thus Charlie has been rescued from poverty but at the price of having his adult choices taken away from him.

Even Charlie’s last name ‘Bucket’ is ambivalent, implying that that his mind is an empty vessel which needs filling, that the child lacks agency or ambitions of his own. And this echoes the fate of Wonka’s Oompa Lumpas, an undistinguished band of servants, safely confined to their factory and paid in cocoa beans. The chocolate factory itself remains surrounded by a town peopled with children less fortunate than Charlie, doomed to a shivery survival on cabbage water soup. The everlasting gobstopper in the film thus is a fitting metaphor for what has happened to Charlie himself, he cannot now complain about the man-child Wonka who has trapped him in this dilemma.

Eliza too has been delivered into a gilded cage like the Wonkavator in MFL, by its end she has become a ‘lady’ but at the price of her freedom; she cannot go back to her old life or friends and she can see no clear future for herself. Thus the chocolates that Higgins feeds Eliza with at the start of the film to entice her to learn, by the end of the film have turned out by its end to be laced with disappointment and when he offers them to her again at its end she turns on him in anger and despair. The ending of MFL is ambivalent, we do not know whether Eliza will be happy to stay with Higgins, as his glorified housekeeper/companion or instead choose a life of genteel poverty with Freddy whom she does not love.

And in at the end of TWoO, although Dorothy gets back to Kansas, it is to a place still living in black-and white, where when she tries to tell her aunt about her revelatory experiences in Oz, she is dismissed: ‘it was just a dream’. Thus, although Oz is a place full of deceptive people and terrifying experiences, it has taught Dorothy lessons that Kansas never could.

No Place Like Home

In the opening sequence of the TWWoO Dorothy sings in ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (SWotR) of a place where troubles melt like ‘lemondrops’. This lyric always puzzled me as a child, because I knew that lemondrop sweets are largeish bright yellow, hard bittersweet candies that do not melt easily on the tongue and are more easily eaten by being bitten into smaller pieces. The lyrics of SWotR were written by the lyricist Yip Harberg, who came from an Russian Jewish background, and was well known for sliding his social and political views into his lyrics (he also wrote the lyrics of the famous Depression era working class anthem ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’).

Lemons have a particular significance in Jewish festival of the Tabernacles (Sukkot) where they are one of the Four Holy Species known as Etrog. Harberg wrote the lyrics of SWotR in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War when thousands of European Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany, many, like the physicist Albert Einstein heading for the US. Thus ‘lemondrops’ in SWotR may have been Harberg’s coded nod to the bright yellow stars which Jewish diaspora were forced to wear by their Nazi persecutors prior to their bitter sweet escape to the Promised Land Over The Rainbow. Only this promised land was not Israel, but America where ‘bluebirds fly’ (his fellow Jewish-American lyricist Nat Burton got this ornithological detail wrong when he penned the poignant anthem to English homesickness in his song ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ in which he wrote ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’: but unlike the US, there are no bluebirds in the UK)

After the Same Rainbow’s End

Lemondrop sweets look quite like the toxic yellow heart of bulbs from which the beautiful tulip flower emerges in springtime; tulips being an introduced non-native species much beloved in Holland. But despite this, during the Dutch Famine in the winter of 1944-1945 the Hongerwinter, many Dutch were reduced to eating their precious tulip bulbs and over 20,000 of them died of hunger, and many more of the starving population might have perished but for Allied food drops in the spring of 1945. Hepburn who lived through it all said of that time:

Some of Hepburn’s sadness leaks into her wistful delivery in the 1961 film directed by US Blake Edwards ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s where in Johnny Mercer’s lyrics for ‘Moon River’ she sings of ‘two drifters off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see, We’re after the same rainbow’s end’. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is based on a story by Truman Capote about a girl from a poor Western background who reinvents herself in New York City as a chic girl-about-town.

Edwards (from an Oklahoma farming background himself) transformed Capote’s cynical critique of modernity together with Hepburn’s delicate performance as a fragile girl/woman Holly Go-lightly into a bittersweet modern fairytale about the seductive lure of the big city (the Tiffany jewellers of the title being the epitome of Holly’s worldview of happiness). Running away from a child marriage in rural Texas the country-turned-city girl Holly fails to find in the glittering surroundings of New York the secular redemption she expects. Her sadness is vented in Hepburn’s poignant delivery of ‘Moon River’ where she pours out her longing to escape from her present empty life and her yearnings to return to a perfect imagined home.

This is also a theme in many Irish emigrant songs like Percy French’s 19th century classic ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ or Dr Arthur Holohan’s 1950s ‘Galway Bay’ where the emigrant finds that the imagined paradise of the city turns out to be a mirage. (One of the most recent was in 1987, the Christmas hit ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues where, as Kirsty McColl sings of New York:

But what will Holly and her ‘huckleberry friend’33 (a nod to Mercer’s Deep South childhood34) find at her rainbow’s end?

Going over the rainbow is also a disappointment in TWWoO where, when Dorothy does go into the land of Oz, and finds that all she wants to do is return home again to those who love her. At the end of TWWoO she is asked by the Good Witch Glinda what she has learned in Oz, she replies:

This hard won wisdom of Dorothy’s is echoed in the many Irish emigrant songs of homesickness - including the lyrics of my favourite ‘Galway Bay’ written by Irish-born Dr Arthur Colahan written in 1947 while he lived and worked in the English East Midlands town of Leicester. In it, like many home-sick Irish people (including me) he rhapodises about his wish to:

The US singer Bing Crosby quickly picked up Colohan’s romantic lament recording it the same year with Victor Young and his orchestra (who had recorded the original WWoO soundtrack with Garland,37). Crosby changed Colohan’s original politically charged lyric ‘the language that the English do not know’ to a more internationally palatable ‘the language that the stranger does not know’). ‘Galway Bay’ instantly became a worldwide hit suggesting that Crosby’s soothing voice 38’ must have brought comfort in those troubled time to many besides homesick Irish emigrants. This was hardly surprising in the immediate aftermath of World War II as millions of soldiers and refugees (including Hepburn herself) were scattered across war torn Europe, far away from their loved ones and homes.

Epilogue: Ninety-Nine Words for Rain

Like Hepburn and Garland’s songs, this essay has been shot through with bitter sweet ambivalence about the effects of the Irish National School System and the downstream effects of American film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s on Irish society. In my view, although the purpose of the Irish National Schoool System might have been to groom generations of Irish children for the needs of the British Empire; it also offered us opportunities for personal growth and life chances that 19th and 20th century Ireland could or would not. My late father was a primary school headmaster in rural Ireland, at his funeral hundreds of his ex pupils turned up to paid tribute to the education that they received from him which laid the foundations for their lives, some scattered all over the world.

I love films and TV, almost as much as I love books, and at the time I thoroughly enjoyed some of the US TV series and films I discussed both here and in the previous essay. Looking back I now believe that in the long run this colorful wave of 1970s and 1970s US TV and films into Irish society had a much more pernicious effect on Irish society than merely stoking the desire, like Bernard Looney, to emigrate to the cultural motherlode of the US. Because instead of going over the rainbow/Ryanair to Oz/US/UK, with the arrival of mass consumerism into 1970s and 1980s Ireland Oz came to Ireland instead.

Looking back now, I think my father might have seen this danger earlier than most. I thought it was the price of a new colour TV that made him so reluctant to buy one, (and that was probably one factor) but now I think he saw that to do so would be invite into his home a powerful, almost magical, force over the minds of his children. He was, almost certainly, correct and President Éamon De Valera voiced similar fears on the opening of the first Irish television station RTÉ in 1961:

I must admit that sometimes when I think of television and radio and their immense power I feel somewhat afraid.….Never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitude.39

CISC O’SYSTEMS

This immense power and influence may be part of the reason today that the hooves of bellowing cattle clattering onto trains and boats bound for England have now been replaced by the morning engine sounds of thousands of Irish cars setting off every day on Irish Yellow Brick Roads/motorways to delivering Irish Oompa Lumpas into the bowels of US tech/biomedical/pharmaceutical/Chocolate factories deep in the Irish countryside. US influence can also be heard in the flattened accents of Irish people who work in these giant plants as Irish Elizas flex their flattened rural accents to blend into tech industries/politics/academia. One example of this is Irish countryboy-made- good Kerry born Bernard Looney, former head of oil giant BP, interviewed on prime time Amercian TV channels speaking a curious hybrid of Hiberno-US business English sprinkled with corporate buzz words.

And if so, so what, you might ask? The usual riposte is that at least we don’t need to leave Irish shores to go over the rainbow now, the rainbow has come to us, drenching Irish landscape and life in technicolour hues. If anyone objects to this saturation, the answer is usually: But We Were Poor Then And Now We’re Not (although not all the Pope’s Children are equal sharers in this recent luck, many in inner city Dublin and remote parts of rural Ireland might disagree).

Will Professor Higgins (or the Irish Tourism Board) too soon be out of a job too because no one needs a professor of phonetics in a world where everyone everywhere sounds the same? Many modern day Elizas sound now, not like a Cockney, Cork or Galway girl, but instead like a a character from the 1990s US TV series produced by Warner Bros ‘Friends’, a ‘Rachel’ or a ‘Monica’ clone? Similarily, corporate entities like Starbucks and McDonalds are now sprinkled both across the streets of New York and Dublin. Perhaps the Wizard now not only rules Oz but Kansas/Ireland too, since everywhere is starting to look and sound like everywhere else?

Cad is gá dom a dhéanamh? (what am I to do?)40

Not everyone in Ireland is happy with this globalising influence smeared across Irish landscape and culture, it was recently sharply critiqued by young Dublin born Irish singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson singer (known professionally as CMAT) in her 2025 song ‘Euro-Country’:

The opening lyrics of ‘Euro-Country’ are sung in the Irish language, as are many of the lyrics of the young Belfast hip hop band Kneecap (C.E.A.R.T.A. being one of them). This fresh upsurge of interest in the Irish language and culture is also echoed in the popularity of Irish forenames for children, Dublin crèches are now awash in Saoirses and McDaras. Another part of this new wave was the late writer Manchán Magan who died in 2023, whose last magical book was ‘Ninety-Nine Words For Rain (And One For Sun)’42 which explored the links between the Irish language, landscape and its weather (which reminds me that the nickname for Ireland in the British Empire was ‘The Raj in the Rain’).

Another much missed Irish philosopher-writer is the late Kerryman John Moriarty, (another favourite of mine) who died in 2007. In all of his interviews he speaks in a strong musical Kerry accent discussing his books, such as the 1996 ‘Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Crossing the Kedron’43 (which points to the similarity of mythologies between many indigneous American cultures and ancient Irish stories). In his work he calls for a change of heart in Ireland, a metanoia, away from global materialism towards a more generous native Irish consciousness.

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1. Introduction

2. The Chocolate Factory

3. My Fair Lady

4. The Wizard of Oz

5. Hawaii Five-O

5. The Embassy Walz

6. Epilogue: Still Singing Galway Bay

We were the last people in our neighbourhood to get a colour television - I was glumly watching our black-and-white Pye TV with its bulbous screen and mint green casing long after all most of the rest of my friends were excitedly boasting about their colour TVs. Finally my father gave in, and the first colour TV programme I ever saw was the 1970s US cop show Hawaii FIVE-O. This began with the thumping bass of its famous theme tune ‘Da-da-da-DA-DA’ backing an electrifying opening montage juxtaposing monumentary statutary, jet airplane engines, gyrating hula dancers, high rise tower blocks, sharply swivelling police officers and the famous flashing blue lights ending on the cresting surf of a giant wave.

This heady technicolour sensory spell punched such a hole into my quiet 1970s Irish childhood that I danced around our living room in excitement (even if I couldn’t remember any of the storyline)1But that sugar rush high of excitement soon gave way to the crash of dissatisfaction as I compared life in quiet, rain-sodden rural Ireland to a beautiful Pacific sundrenched archipelago filled with young, beautiful, well-dressed people firing off snappy dialogue and whipping out guns; power flexed in many different registers simultaneously .

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

The colour TV really came into its own when the only Irish TV station Radió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) started screening Hollywood blockbuster films like the ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘My Fair Lady’, and ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ around Christmas. I enjoyed these, but the last ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ (WWaTCF) left me with a vague sense of unease. This 1971 film directed by Mel Stuart was based on the English writer Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and starred the Jewish-American star Gene Wilder (born Jerome Silberman). It was financed, in a rare synergy between the US food and film industries, by the giant Chicago based food company Quaker Oats. But when first released the film was a commerical failure and Quaker Oats soon sold on the film rights to the giant film company Warner Brothers (the Warner Bros-Discovery group still own it in 2026).

Dahl himself was hired as a screenwriter for WWaTCF but soon quit in disgust: he objected to the casting of Gene Wilder for the lead role; 2; he despised the sound track composed by British composer Leslie Charles Bricusse (saying songs like ‘Pure Imagination’ and ‘Candyman’ were saccharine and trite); and was infuriated by the changes Stuart made to his story.

I sympathise with Dahl’s discomfort, because even as a child, I found Wilder’s impish performance in WWaTCF unsettling, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. In 2025, just before his death, Wilder gave a Youtube interview in which he said that, when offered the part of Willy Wonka by Stuart, he accepted only on condition that in his introductory scene he would pretend to limp and then fall into an acrobatic somersault:

On the face of it, Stuart’s film underlined the central message of Dahl’s book that overindulged appetites from gluttony to greed lead to disaster. One by one all of the other children who have won golden tickets to the Chocolate Factory factory tour give in to different temptations and are severely punished (sometimes put in mortal danger). In contrast Charlie Bucket’s humility, kindness, and family loyalty result in him being given the keys to the factory so he and his family can live happy-ever-after there as the owner and custodians of the Oompa Lumpas - the factory’s minature work force.

The Wonkvator…

Just before the closing credits, Charlie, Willy Wonka and Grandpa Joe board a glass golden caged elevator (the Wonkcavator) bursting through the factory’s glass ceiling into the open sky to the soaring strings and lyrics of ‘Pure Imagination’.4 In addition to this beautiful music WWaTCF has dazzling colourful sets, a witty script, beautifully choreographed dance sequences and was skilfully acted: both Bricusse’s soundtrack and Wilder’s performance were nominated for Academy awards in 1971 (although neither won) and in 2014 it was selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”5.

So why did Dahl hate it?

The Roll Call…

Before trying to answer that, let’s go back a bit. The theme of WWaTCF; the need to curb desires was one I had been hearing from a very early age from school. I started my school years in a Irish National School in a tiny rural, picturesque, but freezing, Victorian school building. This setting wasn’t dissimilar to the opening scenes of Charlie Bucket’s poverty striken home complete with earthen outside toilets, a wall separating the girls’ and boys playgrounds, draughty classrooms and traditional Victorian forms (although we very shortly moved afterwards to a brand new purpose-built modern school).

My tiny infant school dated from the earliest years of Irish National School system: Ireland was the first part of the British Empire, and one of the first European countries (including England itself which didn’t get nationwide primary schooling until the 1870s) to set up free universal compulsory primary school education for all children with a standarised curriculum, purpose built buildings, centralised administration and regular school inspections.

We Don’t Need No Education…….

The establishment of the National School System in 1831 was not the first attempt by the British Government in the 19th century to try to introduce education reform in Ireland. Previously it had done this at arms’ length by sponsoring organisations like the Church of Ireland Kildare Place Society to deliver universal basic education to the mainly Irish Catholic lower classes: unfortunately many of these schools used this as opportunities to proselytise and convert Catholic children and were met with fierce opposition from the Catholic Church. As a result Irish Catholic families from the working and lower middles classes had to carefully weight the wish to have their children educated in these schools against the potential disappoval of their local parish priest,8.

But in October 1831 a letter written by 9Lord Edward Stanley, the Irish Chief Secretary to Lord Augustus Fitzgerald, the Irish Lord Lieutenant swept these objections away. The Stanley Letter is still the legal basis for the present Irish National School System and in it the British State struck a bargain with the Irish Catholic Church:

The Stanley Letter inserted the twin pillars of secular and religious education into Irish primary school education by baking in the freedom for external clergy to teach religion within the Irish National School System11. Thus, although the official curriculum in National Schools was secular, alongside this in majority Catholic areas (which was large swathes of Ireland) Catholic religious education was carried out by schoolteachers trained in Catholic teacher-training schools and Catholic parish priests had free access to their local National Schools and wielded power over their management and the employment of teaching staff.12

I’d Like To Be Under The Sea…

When we were little, the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, we went to school in the sea….Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock-Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision13

This bargain between the Irish Catholic hierarchy and the British State from the foundation of the National School System not only defanged Catholic Church opposition to them, in fact they were so satisfied that in 1831 the Catholic Bishop of Kildare James Doyle wrote to his priests saying:

14This left the field wide open for the State to inculate secular values within these schools: these included punctuality, inspired by Victorian writers like Scottish author Samuel Smiles’ 1859 book ‘Self Help’. 15The English author Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ of advice to his only son John was also a favorite setpiece in schoolbooks acting as an exemplar for the prized Victorian value of time management:

The encouragement of habits of good hygiene, neatness, tidiness and social skills (colloquially described as ‘putting manners on ’ children) were also taught in National Schools but also unquestioning and immediate deference to adult authority; children caught in even minor transgressions risked beatings or caning.

The success of the Irish National School system encouraged the spread of universal primary education across the British Isles; but it was not welcomed by all. Amongst its critics was the children’s author Lewis Carroll; in his 1865 children’s book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Carroll, under the cloak of a children’s story, took aim at various aspects of Victorian society including its education system; in the scene with the Mock Turtle he tells Alice what he learns at school: ‘Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision’.

One Small Head…

And still they gaz'd and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.18

Aspects of the Irish National School System like the exclusive use of English, the stress on conformity and discipline are what Ivan Illich in his 1979 book ‘Deschooling Society’ described as the ‘hidden’ curriculum of schooling, the penumbra of values which surround the ‘official’ school curriculum of literacy, numeracy and practical skills. As Illich says in his book:

Part of this ‘advertising’ in Victorian schooling resembles martial training, from the daily school roll call where every Irish pupil had to answer to their name and be marked ‘present’ or ‘absent’ and the requirement for even the very youngest child to request permission to speak; to stay seated and quiet for protracted periods of the day in age-segregated classes and the stress on unquestioning deference to adult authority. Children were schooled to ask for adult permission to relieve basic physical needs like toileting and quenching hunger and thirst.

None of this was accidental as early 19th century Irish pedagogy was influenced both by the military-inflected Prussian education system and the ideas of Joseph Lancaster, an influential English Quaker who advocated ‘a mechanical system of education’ for the children of the poor as the cheapest form of mass education20. One of the proto-types for Irish National Schools was the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park set up in 1769 for the orphaned children of the military and which acted as a pipeline for British Army recruitment. All of this was a huge shift away from the tutoring model of earlier Irish ‘hedge schools’ in which the bedrock of learning was the teacher-pupil-society relationship (most memorably described in the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s famous poem ‘The Village School Master’).

The quality of the teaching in these Irish hedge schools varied greatly and was the subject of much criticism, but in 1826 a revealing comment made in a House of Commons debate by Sir Robert Peel, the former Chief Secretary to Ireland, and soon-to-be Prime Minister, in reply to the Kerry MP Thomas Spring-Rice (yes, Mr West Britain himself):

21hints at elite British anxiety that, rather than learning too little at hedge schools, Irish children were learning too much and that they might be incubators for rebellion against British rule.22

As in military settings, corporal punishment was regularly used in the Irish National School system up to the 1970s 23and could be notoriously brutal and taken to sadistic extremes. Although many Irish pupils left school with memories of kindly and intelligent school teachers, others were subjected to vicious emotional and physical abuse recently detailed in the 2024 RTE documentary: ‘Leathered: Violence in Irish schools’24.

Both Church and State values dovetailed on the rigid policing of gender roles and in particular on female modesty in dress and speech,prohibiting intermingling between the sexes (in my old infant school there was a wall dividing the boys and girls playgrounds and in the local Catholic church women sat on the left and men on the right). Both Anglican and Catholic hierarchies supported the social status quo imparted in Irish schools (although on a parish level Catholic bishops often struggled with independent minded priests voicing resistance to State and landlord control).25

The Chocolate Factory

Raw materials from these far flung corners of the Empire poured into British ports over the 19th century to fuel British industries in some of the original global supply chains and into British shops to provide its nascent consumer classes with a wide variety of products. Amongst the luxury food products newly on offer was chocolate, made in the famous Bournville factory near Birmingham by the Quaker Cadbury family which used cocoa beans from Africa and sugar from the Carribbean. As a child boarding at Repton, a private school in the East Midlands, the writer Roald Dahl was sent free samples of chocolate for taste testing from the nearby giant Cadbury factory, and this was the inspiration for his original 1964 story ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.

But some of these products came from much closer to home; the neighbouring island of Ireland. In pre-colonial times Ireland had been celebrated for her forests, but in the 17th century these had been clear cut by English ‘adventurers’ such as Sir William Petty in County Kerry. The cleared land was then used for cash crops like wheat, oats or sheep and cattle. After this, as Irish President Eamon de Valera once sourly pointed out in the 1960s, the island of Ireland was turned into ‘the kitchen garden’ for England; her economy over the 19th and 20th mainly based on feeding British urban populations with cheap meat, cereal and dairy products26. This economic model had a long slipstream deep into Irish independence, as late as the 1950s, the American economic consultancy firm Stacy May commissioned by the Irish government declared that in the Irish economy: ‘Cattle is King’.27

Oliver’s Army

Hong Kong is up for grabs
London is full of Arabs
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by the Chinese line28

This meant that, while most 19th century rural Irish grew cash crops like barley, oats and wheat to pay their rent to their Anglo-Irish or middle-class Catholic landlords, for their own sustenance they relied on the calorifically dense and vitamin rich potato. This nutritous diet produced generations of tall healthy Irishmen, perfect for recruitment into the British Army and deployed across the Empire , something 29many hundreds of thousands of Irishmen did (although the accusation from fellow Irish of ‘taking the Queen’s shilling’ was a common one).

Low Lie The Fields of Athenry

30Less than twenty years after the introduction of the Irish National School System in 1831 was the biggest of failure of the potato crop: the catastrophic Great Irish Famine between 1845-1851, the biggest mass starvation event in 19th century Europe from which the island’s population has never fully recovered (it is still less than it was in 1847). Sir Robert Peel was Prime Minister in 1845 when the potato crop failed first and he appointed Sir Charles Trevelyan, a senior Indian colonial administrator from an English Evangelical background and a pupil of the famous economist Thomas Malthus (author of the famous 1798 ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population31’) to oversee Famine relief efforts in Ireland.

Unfortunately Trevelyan, the founder of the modern British Civil Service (which derives from the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyn report) had a quasi-religious belief in ‘lassiez-faire’ economics i.e. letting market forces dictate the availability of food supplies. To make matters worse, Peel himself lost the General Election shortly afterwards and was replaced as Prime Minister by a hardline Liberal government in 1846. This meant when the potato crop failed again in 1847, this natural disaster was met, not with sympathy, but with victim blaming: Trevelyan saying of the Irish in 1848:

The Marvellous Boat Ride…

33In the Great Famine’s aftermath, societal norms around marriage drastically shifted, the old Irish tradition of dividing land equally between children (known as gavelkind) seeped away instead the family farm often passed to the eldest son. Marriage ages rose steeply and rigid policing of mingling between unmarried adults was carried out by a resurgent and powerful Catholic Church under the powerful leadership of the first ever Irish Cardinal: Paul Cullen. In the latter half of the 19th century he regularised and introduced many Irish Catholic liturgical practices and kickstarted a wave of church building (many of these high Gothic religious palaces buildings still scatter the Irish landscape) and his influence was so strong that he was dubbed ‘the second St Patrick’.

However this left a problem for the children of the Irish rural poor neither destined to inherit or to marry into a family farm. With few native industries to employ them, younger sons might join the army or a religious order. But for both men and women, the emigrant boat was the most popular route out of poverty and wave after wave of Irish streamed from Irish ports pushing the island’s population into a steady decline during the 19th and 20th centuries.

My Fair Lady

Just You Wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins..

The Irish National School system may have been intended by its creators like Sir Robert Peel to provide a steady pipeline of compliant Imperial subjects but, as Professor Higgins discovered to his chagrin in the 1964 US Warner Bros. comedy-musical drama directed by George Cukor ‘My Fair Lady, a pupil can outgrow their teacher’s control. MFL is adapted from Dublin born George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pymaglion, a sharp satire on the British class system, patriarchy and English education, wherein certain accents acted as a sorting mechanism for social hierarchy and life chances. As an Irish outsider into English high society (much like his earlier Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde) Shaw was well placed to both observe and critique these dynamics first hand.

The 1964 Warner Brothers film starred a luminous performance from Audrey Hepburn and swept the board at the 1964 Hollywood Academy Awards gathering multiple Academy Awards (Oscars) including best actor for Rex Harrison, best costume design for the dazzling costumes designed by British fashion maven Cecil Beaton and best colour cinematography for Harry Stradling for his luscious technicolour portrayal of MFL’s colourful costumes and sets filmed entirely in California. 35 3637

The Rain In Spain..

In MFL Eliza Doolittle’s transformation from Cockney flower-girl to pass as a ‘lady’ in a ball in high society is accomplished by Professor Higgins changing her speaking voice. In this Higgins’ well stocked library and books can only take him so far; he must personally drill Eliza via repeated vocal exercises:‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain’. Shaw’s play subtly critiques the English education system, when Higgins meets Eliza first, she can read perfectly well and is numerate enough to run a flower shop; she also takes pains to assure Higgins that she has a strict moral code: ‘I’m a good girl, I am’: Eliza has learnt her school lessons well. But she knows that what stopping her social rise is her Cockney accent, so she goes looking for Higgins’ help in eradicating this (and in ‘Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?’ he implicitly criticises the Victorian schooling which has landed her in this predicament).

Higgins’ oral tution of Eliza nod to earlier teaching methods prior to the rise of mass literacy in Ireland, where the main vehicle for the transmission of knowledge and culture was oral and politicians like Daniel O’Connell used oratory to appeal to mass crowds: 3839. But the success of the Irish National School System opened up a new channel for Irish activists to appeal to the newly-literate masses: print.

Thomas Davis a Cork born Irish/Welsh journalist, and a friend of O’Connell’s was the first to surf this wave successfully with his cheap and widely read nationalist newspaper ‘The Nation’ injecting patriotic songs like ‘A Nation Once Again’ directly into the national bloodstream. This stream of printed propaganda played a key role in coalesing a new Irish national consciousness over the 19th and 20th centuries and creating an new imagined community of ‘Irishness’ where before there had been only local loyalties (and this also happened across Europe at the same time).

The Merry Old Land of Oz…

This new political consciousness, energised by the existential crisis of the Great Famine, was channelled successfully into the campaigns like the Irish ‘Land Wars’ of the later 19th century by men like the Mayo born Michael Davitt. Davitt had been evicted with his family from their Straide farm in 1846 during the Great Famine and emigrated as a child to England. After losing his right arm aged only 11 in an accident in a cotton mill, thanks to the kindness of a local cotton manufacturer John Dean who paid for it, Davitt was sent to school. Thereafter he became an outstanding advocate of working class rights across the British Isles including Ireland.

The Irish ‘Land Wars’ of the late 19th century were fought not only through the application of non-violent protest methods (the invention of the ‘boycott’ being the most famous) but was also braided with print campaigns of speeches, sheet-music, posters, press and political pamphlets all aimed at a newly literate mass electorate. Their success was also helped by the British fear of Irish revolution, a fear fuelled by parallel movements across Europe. Thus the concessions in the ‘Land Acts’ of the late 19th century, were the British Goverment’s attempts to ‘kill Home Rule with kindness’ and thus dampen down demands for political independence: they failed.41

Despite this British intransigence and prevarication threw sand in the gears of successive Irish Home Rule campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th centuriesvernment despite mass popular support. Like their contemporaries the women’s suffragette movement, some Irish nationalists became exasperated at these failures to change the political system from within and drifted towards more extreme methods, including armed rebellion.

Words, words, words….

Amongst these was Irish educationalist Patrick Henry Pearse born in 1879, who noticed the resemblance between the Irish education system and a ‘factory’ pointing out that:

Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions.42

In Pearse’s time thanks both to mass emigration and the National School system, the Irish language was spoken only by a dwindling minority on the island. Pearse, whose mother was a native Irish speaker (and whose father was a Unitarian from Birmingham) was a supporter of reviving the Irish language saying: ‘Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam’ (a country without a language is a country without a soul). Pearse joined the Gaelic Revival movement in his early teens, in 1903 at the age of only twenty three he became editor of the main Irish nationalist newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (Sword of Light) changing his name to Pádraig (the Gaelic version of Patrick).

This Man Had Kept a School

To help reverse the decline in Irish, in June 1905 Pearse and his sister Margaret travelled to Flanders on a fact-finding mission where there was a movement to revive Flemish in Belgium dual-language schools and also to investigate the pioneering educational methods of Maria Montessori. Inspired by what they found on this trip, Pearse and his family set up their own school in Dublin in 1908: Scoil Éanna, a private school teaching Irish language, culture and history to middle class Dublin children.

But, as he watched the British political classes deflect one attempt after another at Irish Home Rule with empty promises in the early years of the 20th century, Pearse became thoroughly disillusioned with political dialogue. He began to call for armed insurrection, delivering fiery speeches at events like the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa and eventually culminating in his leadership of the failed Easter 1916 rebellion after which both he and his brother Willie were executed.

There is no education system in Ireland. The English have established the simulacrum of an education system. but its object is the precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate.43

I’ve Got A Golden Ticket….

Alongside the Pearse brothers in the General Post Office in 1916 were many of their former and current students from Scoil Eanna but also a 25 year old Corkman - Michael Collins. Ten years before as a 15 year old he wrote an essay for a British Civil Service examination in Cork City writing:

In February 1906 it seemed very unlikely that this fresh faced West Cork teenager would turn out to be one of the biggest thorns in the side that the ‘greatest power on the face of the earth’ has ever had, but back then he was sufficiently well tutored by his Irish National School teacher Denis Lyons to successfully parrot back to it official British Empire narratives for the exam. As a result Collins won a coveted Civil Servant’s job in London and and spent nine years there (nearly a third of his short life) working first as a clerk in the West Kensington Post Office Savings Bank. This invaluable experience he would later put to good use as the Irish Minister for Finance raising a clandestine National Loan under the noses of the British administration to finance the Irish independence movement.

Had he not become an Irish revolutionary, it is very likely that Collins would have, like so many other Irishmen and women before and since, climbed the rungs of the British Civil Service (as late as 2025 Sir Keir Stramer’s right-hand man was fellow Corkman Morgan McSweeney). Even at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1922 one senior British civil servant sighed over Collins’ lost potential, to Empire remarking that in the recent First World War he would have been: ‘more useful than a dozen brass hats’. 46

We’re Off to See the Wizard

Across the table from Collins in London in 1922 was another ambitious striver, David Lloyd-George, the first and only (to date) Welsh Prime Minister. Lloyd George, was in many ways very similar to Collins himself; he came from a humble background, his first language was Welsh and he was brought up by his devoutly Christan uncle Richard Lloyd after the early deaths of his parents. A brilliant student, he qualified as a solicitor (again the first and only British Prime Minister to be a solicitor) and then rapidly climbed the political ladder to the top of the British political system, a rare achievement then and now. In 1922 he was one of the principal British negotiators in the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations and played a critical part in breaking the deadlock which soon developed between the two sides.

Ever the showman, he dramatically flourished an envelope at the Irish delegation including Collins which, he said, contained a letter that would release ‘immediate and terrible war’ on Ireland if they refused to sign the Treaty within 24 hours, threatening to pass it on to a waiting messenger. Thus pressurised Collins and the other Irish delegates reluctantly agreed to sign, although Collins presciently and correctly remarked to his opposite British number Lord Birkenhead that in doing so: ‘I may have signed my actual death warrant’. 48

It has been speculated by some historians that Lloyd George’s letter was a theatrical bluff; his nickname in British politics was The Welsh Wizard, an ambivalent tribute to his political cunning which gained him as many enemies as it did admirers (Collins detested him: ‘Lloyd George … I find to be particularly obnoxious. He is all comradely, all craft and wiliness—all arm around the shoulder…not long ago he would have had me joyfully at the rope end’. 49

The Wizard Of Oz

Somewhere over the rainbow, Way up high…..where troubles melt like lemon drops…..50

Bluff and wizardy were also the themes of the 1939 musical MGM film ‘The Wizard of Oz’ starring a teenage Judy Garland, one of the first ever colour films, which begins in black-in-white with the heroine Dorothy and her dog Toto caught up in a Kansas tornado and swept ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ into the colourful fictional land of Oz. To return home to Kansas Dorothy travels along the Yellow Brick Road to appeal to the ruler of Oz, a Wizard who lives in the Emerald City, along the way joining up with her travelling companions the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion. But Oz’s all-powerful Wizard turns out to be an impostor, and Dorothy belatedly realises that she has no need of his help to go back home: she finds that she has always had the ability to return there herself: ‘There’s no place like home’.

The film was based on the 1900 book ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ by the US author Frank L. Baum which was, on the face of it like Dahl’s story, a simple children’s story delivering moral messages about the importance of friendship, courage, kindness and self-belief. But it has been suggested that in it Baum was like Lewis Carroll in the ‘Alice’ stories, using the cover of a children’s story to take aim at aspects of contemporary politics and society.

If I Only Had a Brain…

For example one of the hot button topics in 1900 when Baum’s book was published was the controversial decision to put the US dollar on the gold standard: thus the Yellow Brick Road is likely an allusion to gold leading to the Emerald City, the colour of the US paper dollar. Dollars, known as ‘greenbacks’ were originally intended as an emergency currency only, issued by the US government during the recent American Civil War: prior to this US currency had been solely in gold and silver coinage. Bimetallism is long forgotten now, but in 1900 it was top of the US political agenda: it refers to the potential for paper dollars to be redeemed in either silver or gold (in Baum’s original story Dorothy’s slippers are silver).

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore….

The Welsh Wizard, Lloyd George may have used a successful bluff to stop the Irish delegation in 1922 from achieving a full Irish Republic, but nonetheless the Treaty marked a huge step forward in Irish self government. As Arthur Griffith, one of the other Irish negotiators said:

We have brought back the flag; we have brought back the evacuation of Ireland after 700 years by British troops and the formation of an Irish army. We have brought back to Ireland her full rights of fiscal control… equality with England [and] with the nations of the Commonwealth53.

One of the first things that Griffith and his colleagues did with this new found freedom was to try and wind back the British educational project; one of the first acts of the new Minister of Education Eoin McNeill’s in 1922 was to close the new State’s only non-denominational teacher training college in Marlborough Street in Dublin (long in the sights of the Catholic hierarchy). Dublin’s Royal Military School also quickly shut, transferring to Kent in 1922. Thus from 1922, all primary school teacher training in the Irish Free State was denominational, largely carried out by Catholic religious orders (for example in Carysfort College for women, St Patrick’s Drumcondra for men or else for the few Church of Ireland schools in the Kildare Place Training College).

In practice this meant in the Irish Free State (later the Republic) that most of Irish primary school education was almost completely controlled by the Catholic Church- something that 54iIn the 1950s the Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh Rome smugly assured to Rome that with respect to education the relationship in Ireland between church and state was a ‘model’ one.55 The spine of Irish education policy after independence was the attempt to reverse the cultural assimilation and socialisation colonial policies which had systematically eroded Gaelic language and culture and which had propagated British imperial norms and values . As De Valera said in 1932:

In the administration of Irish education, it is the intention of the new government to work with all its might for the strengthening of the national fibre by giving the language, the church and Ireland’s governing political and administrative elite . . . both conceptualized the Free State as a spiritual and national rebirth of a dynamic Christian tradition that was said to have existed in the early medieval period before the English occupation of the country, typified as the land of ‘saints and scholars’, a beacon of purity in a world otherwise sullied by sin.56

(The term ‘West Brit’ is still levelled at successful Irish emigrants living in the UK from Bob Geldof to comedian Dara O’Brien). But these Irish emigrants to the UK (of whom I am one) were more often pushed there by the lack of employment opportunities in Ireland rather than being pulled by supposedly superior English culture. From 1952, the Common Travel Area agreement meant that Irish citizens could travel, work and live freely visa-free in the UK so that the UK labour market was (and still is) entirely open to Irish citizens without restriction (and vice versa for UK citizens).

The Irish economy remained deeply intertwined with the UK for decades (although the ‘Beef War’ of the 1930s was a shortlived and painful attempt by De Valera at autarky). The economies were also welded together by currencies: the Irish punt/pound remained at parity with the British pound right up to 1979 when the two currencies finally split. This economic interdependency continued well into the 1970s, the Republic of Ireland’s admittance to the then EEC in 1973 had had to wait until the French agreed to the UK’s entry at the same time because the Republic’s economy was so dependent on its bigger neighbour at the time. As an Irish politician of the time said:

Ireland’s European ambitions were firmly tied to those of the UK. Just as we could not join the EEC without them, it would have been difficult to remain outside if the UK entered.

Follow The Yellow Brick Road…

But even before its accession to the EEC in 1973, the Irish Republic was already slowly moving away from its dependence on the UK. In the 1960s the Irish Industrial Development Authority (IDA) encouraged foreign industrial investment into Ireland, mainly by US companies like the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer which arrived in 1969 and computer companies like Apple which arrived in Cork in 1980. This paved the way for many other US companies to establish their European bases in Ireland attracted both by the Irish low corporate tax rates and the well educated English speaking work force.

Although Irish independence started the long process of kicking out the pit props from underneath British colonial influence in Irish culture, by contrast the other main pillar of the Irish National School System: post independence the influence of Catholic Church swelled (unhampered by any pushback from a shrunken and disempowered Church of Ireland59). This was most visible in the ‘special position’ accorded to the Catholic Church in Article 44.1 of the 1937 Irish Constitution largely written by De Valera and mass events like the 31st Eucharistic Congress of 1932 in which nearly half a million people participated, a quarter of the entire population. This Church power lingered deep into the 20th century, although there were periodic clashes between the Catholic Church and State.

Against the Tide

The most famous of these was the 1953 Mother-and-Baby scandal which saw the popular Minister for Health Dr Noel Browne dismissed for his scheme to improve State provision for maternity care (Ireland having at the time one of the worse maternal and infant death rates in Europe) at the behest of Dublin’s Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. But the Catholic Church did not win every battle; it had opposed plans to provide free universal secondary education in the 1960s; the Minister for Education Donough O’Malley cleverly bypassed Irish politicians’ former need to solicit Church support for reform by simply announcing the State’s intention to provide free secondary education in a speech at a 1966 dinner for journalists. The widespread popular support which greeted O’Malley’s widely reported speech then made Church opposition to it impossible.60

The power of the church within the Irish State was further eroded with the 1973 repeal of Article 44.1 of the Irish Constitution, but popular support for the Catholic Church was at its most visible in the 1979 Papal Visit of John Paul II to Ireland where he was greeted by vast seas of enthusiastic crowds: over 2.5 million people attended the ceremonies, nearly every adult on the island (full disclosure, I was one of them). However, far from shoring up Catholic Church influence, this event proved to be the high water mark of Catholicism in the Irish Republic. In the decades that followed, wave after wave of scandal buffeted the Church, much of it centred on the abuses of religious orders within education and the personal misconduct of high ranking clergy for example as the 1992 resignation of the then Bishop of Galway Eamon Casey.

The Emerald City…

If free primary school education was the catalyst for mass political changes in the nineteenth century Ireland, then free Irish secondary education in the 1970s and 1980s also, in my view, had important downstream societal effects. Many of those who received free secondary education went on to be the largest cohort of in Irish history to receive university education. This caused a sea-change in views in the decades that followed when these highly educated adults burst through the dam walls of conservative values erected by their parents’ generation.

The spillways of emigration which might have previously siphoned off much of this dissenting energy became less important in the closing years of the twentieth century as a raft of well paid employment opportunities for university educated Irish people in the many international factories which opened on Irish soil (David McWilliam’s 2005 book ‘The Pope’s Children’ is an excellent exploration of the resulting cultural changes which occurred in Irish society).

But in tandem with mass secondary and university education there was another new medium saturating Irish society in the 1970s which acted as the conduit for another hidden curriculum: TV. In the 1950s the Irish government had been worried about the cultural influence on Irish society of British TV which could be received by overspill reception on the East Coast, particularly in Dublin, and decided to set up an indigeous service called Radio Teleifis Eireann in 1961. The first person to appear on the new TV station was the former 1916 veteran and Irish President Eamon De Valera. During his opening speech he expressed concerns about the potent influence of this new medium on Irish society in prophetic words:

I am privileged in being the first to address you on our new service, Teilifís Éireann….I must admit that sometimes when I think of television and radio and their immense power I feel somewhat afraid.….Never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitude.

The Angels Will Weep…

Although limits were put on Irish television and radio constricting the levels of content from UK (although soaps like Coronation Street were very popular) no such restrictions were applied to US TV, and on a limited budget for home programming RTE resorted to flooding its airwaves with hours of US TV. As a result my generation watched US police procedural shows like Hawaii FIVE -O, or private detective series like ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or ‘The Rockford Files’. Most 1970s Irish parents (apart from mine) viewed this as harmless rubbish, but what they often missed were the worldviews and cultural assumptions that flavoured this content, like Illich’s hidden curriculum.61

For example, in a country where only farmers owned guns and the police were unarmed, in contrast guns were commonly wielded on American 1970s television shows. Along with this most US TV series showed levels of male inter-personal violence that would have shocked the most seasoned Irish publican. ‘Plot armour’ (the needs of the storyline) meant that actors like Clint Eastwood walked away from fights without serious injury (apart from ruefully rubbing a sore jaw), whereas a more realistic outcome, a one-punch killing was never shown.

On US cop shows, screen villains were always bad shots, cars burst into flames on crashing and women emerged unscathed from implausible physical fights with men (Charlie’s Angels although in many ways a proto feminist series was the worse offender for this).62While characters in shows like Charlie’s Angels featuring attractive young women showed them as agentic and independent, there was also a strong sexualised undercurrent. They were often dressed in revealing clothes and swimwear: so-called ‘jiggle TV’. (In the case of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ the women’s supposed independence is undercut in the opening montage in which a disembodied male boss speaking in a Californian accent, the eponymous ‘Charlie’ presents himself to the viewer as their ‘rescuer’ (‘I took them away from all that’) and to whom they have to report to on a speakerphone, never actually seeing him in the flesh).

Shows like ‘Charlie’s Angels’ while often presenting their female leads in revealing outfits, had fairly tame sexual content but this was not the case for all US TV series. In most of these little stigma was attached to divorce or premartial sex, in stark contrast to prevailing norms in 1970s and 1980s Irish society. In my memory this generated some tension and anxious discussions in Irish society about the possible corrupting influence of these series and this had the side effect of introducing feminist issues into public consciousness (but I never remembered any discussions however on the high levels of physical violence and the easy availability and casual use of guns on US TV).

Wouldn’t It Be Lovervly….

Hawaii Five-O

Amongst those early consumer products we clamoured for, was a colour television: much to the chagrin of my late father. The first program I ever saw on it, the US cop series Hawaii Five-O (a police procedural drama to be more exact) was pioneering in many ways. It was rare for US TV shows of the time to be filmed on location, but Hawaii Five-O was an exception, filmed almost entirely on the Hawa’iian archipelageo itself.

The famous opening montage was directed by Iranian born director Reza Badiyi and used innovative and highly skilled camera work (backed of course by the iconic theme tune by the US composer Morton Stevens). In it Badiyi used fast paced freeze frames, whip-pan, arc and grandeur camera shots from helicopters to showcase a besuited Jack Lord, his equally sharply dressed colleague James McArther (‘Danno’) caught mid-stride in hot pursuit, sexy hula dancers, jet airplane engines, high-rise tower blocks and monumental statutary (from the US American Military War Cemetery) and of course the famous flashing blue police blue lights, finally ending on the totemic giant surf.

In it Badiyi cherry-picked aspects of native Hawa’iian culture to fetishize (the close up shot of a hula dancer’s waist or the muscular bodies of the native outrigger rowers). The islands themselves are presented through the grandeur camera shots of beaches, surf and forests as glamorous and exotic. The theme tune was recorded by a combination of Hollywood session musicians (called the Wrecking Crew) and a Hollywood orchestra and its barrelling drums rolls, and brass stabs was tightly coupled by Badiyi with the screen images, synchronised with the gyrating hips of the dancer, the swivelling of Jack Lord, and the strokes of the outrigger canoe63; in 2022 ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine voted it one of the best TV montages ever made.

In it Badiyi, through the repetition of successive drumbeats of US economic, technological, sexual, military and cultural power, throws the viewer into a kind of quasi-hynoptic trance, thus open to the acceptance of the show’s central premise that Lord and his colleagues are US crime-fighting heroes (which I’m not saying they weren’t) and drowning out any hints of dissent at US hegemony.

Oompa Loompa, do-ba-dee-doo

After its annexation much of the islands’ land was cleared and used for giant US owned pineapple and sugar plantations for which the US was the main export market. The native Hawa’iian population were used as a lowly paid and poorly treated workforce in these vast plantations and any bargaining power they had with their US employers was deliberately suppressed by the importation of large numbers of Asian migrant workers, thus keeping wages on the islands artifically low.

Thus the native population were gradually reduced to a minority on the islands and their cultural influence was further diluted when the teaching of native language, culture and history in Hawa’iian schools was banned by the US authorities. As a result the Hawa’iian native population became a small, disempowered and poverty-stricken minority on the archipelago, as they remain today (in 2020 they were approximately 21.5 % of the total population, but in later years there is a growing pushback against US influence and a movement to promote native Hawai’an language and culture).

In 1959 the islands were admitted into the US as its fifieth state (hence the Five-O moniker) but despite this they still had a very low profile in mainland US consciousness. At the time of accession most mainland Americans were not even aware that Hawai’ii was part of the US (much as many Americans are unaware of other US offshore territories like Puerto Rica today). The US Hawa’iian governor of the time John A. Burns decided to try to change this public perception in order to boost tourism, so he suggested to the US TV company CBS that they commission a police TV series about the islands. The original plan for this was to do most of the filming in California and only do minor location shooting (called mood shots) on the islands themselves. But Hawaii Five-O’s lead star Jack Lord, insisted that the whole of the filming be done on Hawa’ii itself (as proudly stated in the show’s closing credits ‘Filmed entirely on location in Hawaii’) and it quickly became a classic of the TV cop genre, spawning many imitators.

The original TV series is about the work of an elite police unit reporting directly to the governor himself, led by Lord,stationed in the islands’ capital Honolulu and within the former home of the Hawa’iian Royal family, the Iolani Palace. All of the men in it (it was the 1970s, so no female police) are armed and none of the main characters are natives: they all speak English with Californian accents. Despite being on a tropical island, the principal male cast members are immaculately dressed in suits and ties (which must have made filming very uncomfortable for the actors). The filming schedules were gruelling (often up to 85 hours of filming per working week) and the lead actor/director Jack Lord was a perfectionist who frequently rejected scripts he considered not good enough. Each episode cost roughly $290,000 per episode in 1975, making it the most expensive series on television at the time.

We Welcome You to Munchkinland..

We represent the Lollypop Guild…
And in the name of the Lollypop Guild,
We wish to welcome you to Muchkinland.65

What strikes me now looking at the original series, is how similar the depiction of policing in Hawaii Five-O is to the 19th century Irish experience of policing. In both, the police force are representative, not of the the native population, but of the colonial power (in the original series they were all originally from outside the islands (ironically Hawaii Five-O’s lead actor, Jack Lord’s real name was John Joseph Patrick Ryan and he came from Irish-American stock).

The RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) was established in 1822 by Sir Robert Peel when he was Chief Secretary in Ireland (hence the Irish nickname of ‘Peelers’) four years before its first English counterpart, the London Metropolitan Police was founded. In contrast to their English counterparts Irish policemen received quasi-military training, were all armed and had to work away from their local county. They lived communally in police ‘barracks’ like soldiers and, at first (a bit like the Hawaii Five-O boys) had to be single or widowers (and of course were all male). An Irish-American delegation lead by Chicago Mayor Edward F. Dunne to Ireland in the 19th century concluded that:

The Constabulary is a branch of the Military forces. They are armed with rifles, as well as small side-arms; engage in regular drills as well as small warfare.66

In Hawaii Five-O Lord too also heads an armed police unit of mainland outsiders, the Five-O men all carry Smith and Wesson Model 36 handguns (and are all apparently single, their personal lives are never revealed). The need for them to be armed is never explained in the series, but on islands full of young military personnel the potential for violence was always under the surface.

In the original Hawaii Five-O series the native population are largely presented as exotic foils in the storylines of the show’s male white lead characters (although Hawaii Five-O was no different than any other US TV series and indeed far better than most of the time ). In his chapter ‘A Cold Warrior in Paradise’ in the 2016 book ‘The Cold War and Entertainment Television’, Michael G. Vann critiques the original Hawaii Five-O as a colonial fantasy and he points to the casual misogyny and US anxiety about the perceived threats from the hippy movement and communism which undergird the plotlines. In addition societal issues like native Hawa’iian poverty are rarely touched on in the series, and neither is the degradation of the island’s natural environment by the vast US owned plantations of crops like sugarcane or pineapples intended mainly for the US market.

As a result of this extensive monocropping the Hawaii’an archipelago shares the experience of serious environmental damage with the island of Ireland. As Kerry based writer Eoghan Daltun points out in his recent 2022 book ‘An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding’ 67the present eco-system of Ireland bears little resemblance to its pre-colonial history. Instead the appearance of the current Irish landscape (the Emerald Isle tag not withstanding) is like Hawa’ii, largely the legacy of destructive colonial farming practices and similarly severely environmentally degraded, a situation that many present Irish industrial farming practices make worse.

The Embassy Walz

Over-tourism on the Hawaii’an archipelago is also a major cause of environmental damage (the runaway success of the original Hawaii Five-O series was a contributory factor in this). While Ireland does not suffer from over-tourism yet, what it does share with Hawa’ii is the screen presentation of a heavily curated and commodified national identity to appeal to foreign sensibilities and the linguistic bias associated with certain accents.

In MFL, Professor Higgins’ replaces Eliza’s original Cockney accent with a generic ‘upper class’ accent in order for her to ‘pass’ as a lady in the artifical setting of the Embassy Ball where he is happy to showcase her youth and beauty. In a similar fashion in Hawa’ii, cherry picked aspects of native identity are kept for their entertainment and novelty value (such as greetings with flower garlands called ‘lei’, or hula dancing to entertain the mainly US tourists) but from which the deeper cultural meanings of these practices have been erased.

US companies have also tried to monetise aspects of native Hawaii’an culture, for instance US business chains have tried to patent traditional Hawa’iian poke bowls: a key part of their food culture, or copyright traditional native language phrases like ‘Aloha’. The US film giant Disney caused controversy in 2002 when it copyrighted traditional Hawaii’an chants in the song ‘He Mele No Lilo’ in its animated film ‘Lilo and Stitch’. This is the controversial phenomeon of ‘cultural appropriation’ in which a colonising power lifts parts of a native culture out of its original context without consent for their own benefit.

Epilogue: Still Singing ‘Galway Bay’

Debates around lingual bias highlighted in MFL (the discrimination around certain accents) and cultural appropriation as seen in Hawa’ii have deep roots in Ireland, with cod-Irish accents and tropes being used as early as 1599 in Shakespeare’s Henry V 69 , Gene Wilder’s accent in the low budget 1970 film ‘Quackster Fortune Has a Cousin In the Bronx’ or Tom Cruise’s eye-rollingly bad ‘Oirish’ accent in the 1992 US film directed by Ron Howard ‘Far and Away’ about the 1893 American Mid-West Land Run (despite this I must confess to thoroughly enjoying the scene where Tom Cruise gives Nicole Kidman a laundry lesson available here)70 and the many Irish actors in the film like Cyril Cusack and Colm Meaney all seem to be having a wonderful time. But Cruise’s ‘Oirish’ accent in it must have made them wince as it owes more to Hollywood imagination than reality (and which makes no sense on the island itself where there are wildly different regional accents, for example Cork people sound nothing like Dubliners).

Present examples of current Irish cultural appropriation might be in the many ‘Irish’ pubs scattered around the globe; a scraped aesthetic of a community, empty of Irish people. Others might be the presentation of commodified versions of Irish culture for their entertainment value, most famously perhaps the Irish folk character the leprechaun which has been reduced to a caricature of stage Irishness wheeled out on St Patrick’s Day parades and which make many Irish like me wince as examples of ‘Paddywhackery’, a sentimentalised version of Irishness promulgated by Hollywood films like ‘The Quiet Man’. A more upmarket verision of this might be Irish-American Michael Flatley’s 1996 ‘Lord of the Dance’ touring musical where traditional Irish culture is blended with modern elements in a dazzling spectacle designed to appeal to international tastes in what has been called ‘Celtic kitsch’. (There are of course honorable exceptions to this simulated ‘Irishness’ for instance the wonderfully poignant 1987 hit ‘Fairytale of New York’ in which a duetting Shane McGowan and Kirsty McColl deliver a classic bitter sweet mediation on the shattered dreams and homesickness of the emigrant).

I grew up in a small farm in Kerry…..they would tell Irish jokes in the UK and Kerryman jokes in Ireland, we were way down in the pecking order….my dream, and the dream of many others who grew up in Ireland was to immigrate [sic] to America work on the building sites….make a lot of money and return to Ireland and buy a pub…..my mother wasn’t having any of it….she believed in education, having never gone to school herself.72

In previous essays I have jabbed at Looney for his previous leadership of a giant planet wrecking fossil fuel company, but in this intereview he made me pause, because here he clearly articulates both the sting of a perceived sense of inferiority and the glittering lure of an exciting life elsewhere that drove so many of our generation overseas like him to pursue lives far away from our birthplace and families.

But also, for an instant, I wondered if he regretted not opening that Irish pub after all: ‘Looney’s Bar’….?

The themes of this essay continue in Part Two: Light A Penny Candle available here)

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be Chrish, do nothing:
 ‘tis shame for us all: so God sa’ me, ‘tis shame to
 stand still; it is shame, by my hand: and there is
 throats to be cut, and works to be done; and there
 ish nothing done, so Chrish sa’ me, la!

Van Morrison’s Bright Side of The Road.12

[This essay is much longer than my usual efforts, but I hope you think it’s worth your time, comments and feedback welcome ]

LONG READ: Reading time approx 1 hour.

(Quotes throughout the essay are from Lewis Carroll’s classic 1865 ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’, and his 1869 ‘Through The Looking Glass’ as well using Sir John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations for both books, all quotes and images used under the Fair Use policy).

Chapters:

1. Going Back to Yesterday

2. A Great, Huge Game of Chess

3. We're All Mad Here

4. The Most Curious Thing

5. You've Lost Your Muchness

6. A Very Difficult Game Indeed

7. Post-Script

Prelude

In the late 1980s I was in the middle of a meltdown in a physics laboratory in Queen’s University Belfast when a tall sandy-haired man with glasses stepped from the darkness and rescued me. I was an engineering undergraduate trying to do a first year physics experiment but my lab partner hadn’t turned up, so I was on my own. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, close to tears and on point of giving up, but then, a man - whom I assumed was a lab assistant, came forward and offered to help me.

The experiment we did together was called Young’s Double Slit Experiment in which a green laser beam is projected through a filter with a single slit onto a screen producing a line across it. Then, a filter with two slits is slotted across the same beam and it produces a shimmering striated band of bright and dark spots pulsating across the projection screen. When we finished I wondered aloud to my helper how strange it was that the same light source behaved in such different ways during the experiment.

We chatted for a little while and he explained further that if a single light photon went through one slit of the double filter then a wave pattern will still appear on the screen, but confusingly if a photon detector was placed near this slit, the pattern would revert to being a line. I found this hard to understand and pushed him hard for an explanation. He told me that a possible one might be that the light is carried on a pilot wave; I replied that I thought that the pilot wave theory was an old one that had been discredited. He signed my lab book and I hurried from the darkened lab out into the golden autumn sunshine on my way to the next lecture.

Chapter 1 Going Back to Yesterday…

One of my favorite poets is the Irish 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Séamus Heaney. He was born in County Derry or Londonderry (depending on whether you are Catholic or Protestant) and went to Queen’s University Belfast, graduating from there with a degree in English literature in 1961. In 1969 Heaney wrote the poem Bogland (available here) whilst living and working in Belfast, inspired by the eponymous painting by his close friend the Irish landscape artist T.P. Flanagan. In Bogland Heaney freights the liminal landscape of bogs with layers of Irish history. As Heaney and Flanagan both convey in different mediums, Irish bogs are strange other-worldly places; my generation in Ireland may have been the last to have memories of going to there to carry out the backbreaking work of turf cutting and harvesting, a memory firmly in the rear view mirror of the present Irish generations as turf cutting on Irish bogs has now largely been banned.

Growing up in Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s I remember the bog as a place of big skies, shimmering watery reflections, and strange unworldly sounds floating on vast silences: a landscape like the Italian dessert tirmisau, a dusting of chocolate brown mossy peat topping layers of water-seeping spongy ground. Occasionally biting into the soft ground, the teeth of turf cutting machines hit rock-hard black fossiled bog oak which we took home as souvenirs. As a teenager I sometimes tried to dodge the backbreaking hard work of hurling sods of dried turf onto the back of rickety farm trailers by wandering off to explore the eerie landscape instead; gingerly skipping across it in search of solid spots of ground. But this was a dangerous past-time, Irish bogs are criss-crossed with deep drainage channels and more than one person has drowned there and I risked a telling off by my parents if they found out.

Afterwards, we took home the carmel coloured turf sods, rattling down narrow bog roads on grey Ferguson tractors and threw them into an outside shed. Another childhood chore was bring to bring the turf sods inside in galvanised steel buckets and heap them onto glowing bright orange fires which dissolved into powdery white dust and silver-grey smoke. Whenever I returned back in the years that followed, the sweet smell of turf smoke in the air when I got off the train at the local station was when I knew I was home again.

Just What I Choose It To Mean….

This isn’t the only lingistic residue of colonialism in the UK, there were other expressions like ‘that’s a bit Irish’ to describe something odd or strange, or ‘having a Paddy’: to throw a tantrum (again never used in Ireland). My Irish accent was gently mocked by friends or colleagues - over the years it became flatter and more neutral (although I never fully lost it) so that gradually the people around me forgot I was Irish.

People in the North of England (where I worked for many years) are warm and friendly in my experience, but also sometimes bracingly direct. English friends who accompanied me back to Ireland on trips home sometimes complained of conversations there they said were like ‘trying to knit fog’. The British political classes have also complained of Irish evasiveness, but few put it as bluntly as the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her 2008 advice to Labour politician Peter Mandelson on his appointment as Secretary of State to Northern Ireland:

But what Mrs Thatcher, or many others in England since then in my view fail to realise is that what they called ‘lies’ were often strategic silences born of necessity: in Ireland speaking truth to power under British rule was a luxury that few could afford. Better by far to be suspected shifty or dishonest than to find yourself thrown out onto the roadside or dangling at the end of a hangman’s noose.

The Mock Turtle

The English working classes in their factories may have been over-worked and exploited but in my view the power dynamic there was never as dramatically tilted as it was in Ireland under British rule. For example a childhood next-door neighbor once told me that the local landlord had once turned up her house pointing a shotgun directly at her father’s head over some minor dispute - he must have had to do some persuasive talking to descalate the situation and avoid being thrown out of his home.

This mockery, whilst often laced with affection, is in my view a far more pernicious form of oppression than the colonizer’s gun or lawyer’s pen. For, like the tap roots of weeds, it lingers long in the subsoil of culture long after after the ships and armies of the coloniser leave. As recently as 2023 in the US Oscars ceremony the host Jimmy Kimmel joked that:

Chapter 2 A Great Huge Game of Chess

Another recent (but more subtle) example in the UK of anti-Irish sentiment was the 2026 media response to the resignation of Cork-born Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister’s Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff. Most UK media reports referenced his ethnicity (the BBC’s Joe Pike dubbed him ‘the elusive Irishman’)5 whereas when McSweeney’s close colleague Matthew Doyle resigned at nearly at the same time they were silent on his background.

6

One line from the same BBC report on McSweeney’s resignation observed that:

might have drawn a wry smile from another Corkman. During Ireland’s War of Independence in the 1920s Michael Collins in the guise of a besuited businessman cycled around Dublin in plain sight despite there being a £5,000 reward for his capture by the police. Cameras were rare in the 1920s so it was far easier for Collins to avoid being photographed (but all the same he took an extraordinary risk when he posed in a group wedding photograph on the 21st of November 1920 the morning after a mass killing of British agents on his personal orders - he’s lurking on the back row looking down). But, as he was running for parliament he could not entirely avoid press attention and eventually the police got a blurry picture of him to put on a police ‘Ireland’s Most Wanted’ poster, together with a reward of £5,000 for his capture.

Collins bitterly resented this (and his monstering by the British press as a ‘gunman’ - he never personally shot anyone) and in London at an pre-talks icebreaker drinks reception before the official negotiations for the Treaty in 1921, he angrily confronted Winston Churchill about this:‘You put a price on my head!’. In response Churchill showed him his own framed 1899 Boer ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ poster with a reward for £25:‘At least I put a good amount on your head!’ and the tension between the two men dissolved into laughter.

Collins knew London well: he arrived there in 1906 as a 15 year old Boy Clerk direct from the green fields of West Cork to take up a coveted job in the West Kensington Post Office Savings Bank (where he must have been on the receiving end of some anti-Irish sentiment as some of his quotes bristle with irritation at the Irish stereotypes of lateness or drunkness). Through his work there and later at a London stockbrokers’, Collins worked right in the financial engine room of the British Empire and this allowed him to study its methods up close and to later turn them against it in the Irish independence project (he left his stockbroking job there in 1916 telling his London employers the definitely-not-the-full-truth reason that he was ‘joining up’- allowing them to think this was to the British Army).

In 1916 in the Easter Rising Collins cast a critical eye on Pádraig Pearse, the poet-turned-revolutionary leader (of half English/half Irish heritage) considering him a useful tool for propaganda purposes, but not to be trusted with the serious business of revolution saying:

Collins knew both men well, he was standing behind Pearse at the moment when he stood in front of the General Post Office on Dublin’s main street at 12:45 pm on Easter Monday, the 24th of April to read out aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a knot of bemused passerbys which began:

This document is now considered to be the foundational document of the present Irish State and its assertion of a thirty-two county Irish Republic has proved a potent and contentious issue in the years that followed. Collins, although only a junior officer in 1916, proved a natural leader in the GPO, keeping a cool head throughout. One of his first acts was to pour two gallons of beer down a drain - determined that no one was going to use the drunken Irish slur on his watch (it can’t have made him popular). He said scornfully:

They said we were drunk in ’98, but they won’t be able to say that now10

Let Us Not Waste Our Energies…

He was not an easy boss, one said of him: ‘You became aware of his presence, even when he wasn’t visible, that uncomfortable magnetism of the very air, a tingling of the nerves’. From Crow Street he chaired meetings on topics like organising a clandestine countrywide National Loan (which raised the astonishing modern equivalent of £21 million) or coolly arranging with his own handpicked hitmen (the Squad) the mass assassination of British secret agents across Dublin at precisely 9 am on Sunday the 21st of November 1920. His biographer James MacKay said of him:

Collins kept up this hard-nosed persona even after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty: on the 12th of January 1922 he turned up to the official handover from British rule in Dublin Castle smartly besuited wearing a fedora, hopping from a taxi for a brisk 45 minute meeting with senior British civil servants acting for all the world like he was the CEO in a hostile takeover (which of course to some extent he was). He made little pretence at faux friendliness with them: his brusque response to a faintly sarcastic remark from one official on his late arrival: ‘We’re glad to see you, Mr Collins’ was a snarling: ‘Ye are like hell, boy!’

Collins was impatient with his fellow Irishmen too; in particular he found fellow 1916 veteran Éamon De Valera’s habit of peppering his arguments with mathematical metaphors exasperating - during the Treaty negotiations he complained ‘How could one argue with a man who was always drawing lines and circles to explain the position?’12 In the debates in the Dáil (Irish Parliament) afterwards Collins defended the Anglo-Irish Treaty against vociferious criticism from De Valera who asked why when Collins and his colleagues had ‘three years ago declared in a most solemn manner their independence, now voluntary abandon their independence and the republican form of government which enshrined it?”. Collins answered this in a quote that hums with barely suppressed irritation:

So Extremely…Likely to Win

Collins’ arch rival Éamon De Valera, the man so keen on ideological purity in 1922, became the Irish war time leader during the Second World War when, despite enormous moral and political pressure from the infuriated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he managed to keep the Irish Free State neutral throughout the conflict. In order to do this De Valera drew heavily on his own personal arsenal of strategic evasiveness and weaponised charm, characteristics which had been earlier observed by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George who said in 1921 that talking to him was like ‘trying to pick up mercury with a fork’ (to which de Valera’s silky response was: ‘Why doesn’t he use a spoon?’)

De Valera climbed to power in the 1920s after the Irish Civil War by deftly side-stepping the parts of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that he disagreed with, most notoriously in 1926 by taking the Oath of Allegiance to the British monarch necessary to entering the Dáil, declaring it to be ‘an empty formula’ (once a maths teacher, always a maths teacher). This paved the way for him to become the Irish Taoiseach in 1932 thus allowing him, in the nick of time in 1938, to skilfully wrestle back control of the three strategic British naval bases still on Free State soil, without which Irish neutrality would have been impossible (Churchill correctly predicting that these bases would be soon be vital in the impending conflict was furious. He voiced the opinion later that contrary to De Valera’s assertions to the contrary: ‘Southern Ireland is at war, but skulking’). There was therefore a real possibility that because of its strategic location the British might reoccupy the Irish Free State during the Second World War, just as they occupied the island of Iceland in ‘Operation Fork’.

During ‘The Emergency’ as the war period was cryptically called in the Irish Free State (named after the Government Act in 1939) De Valera had to carefully tread to avoid being squashed between the tectonic plates of two warring Empires - but he occasionally badly miscalculated. He provoked widespread fury when on the 2nd of May 1945 he went to the German Embassy on Northumberland Road in Dublin to offer Irish official condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler. Since over 70,000 Irishmen served in the British Armed Forces during the war, much of the anger directed at him came from fellow Irish citizens who saw it as a betrayal of their sacrifices for freedom.

The Nazi German ambassador to Ireland Eduard Hempel was not fooled by the Irish stance, in an early, but more tactful, echo of Margaret Thatcher, he described the Irish of having the ability: ‘to say agreeable things without meaning everything that is said’.16 Despite this, Winston Churchill’s Victory in Europe speech of 1945 included a vitrolic attack on Irish neutrality and on de Valera personally absurdly accusing him of ‘frolics with the German and later with the Japanese representatives’17 and making it clear just how close the Irish had sailed to the wind on their neutrality. Three days later De Valera took to the radio airwaves in reply and in a widely admired dignified speech which took the moral hight ground saying in response to Churchill: ‘It is indeed hard for the strong to be just to the weak but acting justly always has its rewards’.

Chapter 3. We’re All Mad Here

In 1938, just before the start of the Second World War, the poet Séamus Heaney was born in the Northern Ireland county of Derry/Londonderry (depending on whether you are Catholic or Protestant) into a farming family. Heaney was a Catholic, an identity that required careful juggling in the middle of 'The Troubles’ between 1960s and 1990s. This is another typically ambigous Irish term for the nearly thirty year civil war between Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland which ended in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.18

Heaney’s Northern Catholicism has a twin: Ulster Protestantism. Until that autumn in Belfast in the late 1980s I had only ever seen it on the TV news in the rabble rousing speeches of Unionist politicians like Ian Paisley, or the burning bonfires or marching bands of the annual Orange Order Battle of the Boyne 12th of July celebrations. I had never been North of the border before and I was apprehensive about encountering Ulster Protestantism in my new life in Belfast in the late 1980s when ‘The Troubles’ were in full spate.

I did not have long to to wait. One of my new classmates that autumn term - Jim - was an Orangeman with a vitriolic dislike of Catholics which he vented at every opportunity in my general direction. One evening as I sat quietly in the Queen’s Science library working on maths questions, Jim approached me and launched into a vicious rant about the Pope, the Vatican and a baroque description of what cardinals got up to there with nuns and what they could all expect in the Fires Of Hell afterwards.

After my initial shock subsided I found myself slowly fascinated. So this was What Protestants Really Thought. Jim’s comic book fantasy bore no relation to anything that I knew about Catholicism; I had seen the then vigorous and energetic Polish pope John Paul II appear like a modern day rock star at Galway Racecourse in 1979 some years earlier but I had never been to the Vatican and knew nothing about the supposed overflowing wealth and licentious clergy that featured heavily in his lurid account.

But also, I thought in delight (and selfishly) what a great story to take home and burden my anxious parents with! My inner writer started frantically scribbling notes - the most interesting thing about all of this for me was the absolute clarity and certainty with which it was delivered - how could he be so sure? Who had told him? I had sat in silence throughout Jim’s diatribe but some of this thought process must have leaked through to him. Stopping to draw breath, he looked at me with a puzzled expression: he’d expected shock and dismay, not someone drinking in every word and looking like they’d like to stick a microphone under his nose and ask him to repeat it for the tape.

But, despite his best efforts, I couldn’t dislike Jim because I thought he was, in his own way, as out of his comfort zone as I was. He was a clever working-class Protestant boy from a tough area of Belfast trying to find his feet in the middle-class surroundings of Queen’s and I suspected that his outburst hid both class anxiety and deep shyness. And I didn’t for a moment think any of it was personal; I suspected that I was probably the first Catholic from the Irish Republic he’d ever come across in the flesh.

But something we both did have in common is that we were in a very demanding university course, thrust into a cohort of extremely clever people - a transition I was finding difficult. Jim waved at the sheet of completed maths questions in front of me and asked ‘so how did you get the answer to number six?’ And with that we became friends.

Thinking Again?

Another one of them said to me that there was a simple answer to the problem of ‘The Troubles’: all the republican leadership, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and so on, should be: ‘rounded up, taken out, put against a wall and shot’. Another tried to convince me of the ludicrous theory that the province of Ulster was originally joined to the UK mainland (a phrase that always irritates me) but someime in the distant geological past it had drifted away sometime and accidentally glued itself to the rest of the island of Ireland (yes, eyeroll, really). And I spent a morning arguing with a dour Queen’s University Registrar who wanted to enrol me as an ‘overseas student’ - but ‘I came here on a bus!’ I pushed back.

But I began to understand the subterranean roots of the conflict better when one Monday morning I stood beside a white faced and shaking classmate at the university café both waiting for our student staple of sausage-chips-and-beans and asked him what was the matter. He told me the day before that he’d been at the Poppy Day Remembrance ceremony at Enniskillen when a massive IRA bomb had gone off killing 12 people and injuring 63. I lamely told him how sorry I was - what an utterly stupid, pointless and horrific act of violence I thought it was. He nodded mutely, still in shock.

Riddles With No Answer

Although I liked my Protestant friends, I did not agree with their politics. The son of the renowned demagoge Ian Paisley, Ian Paisley Jnr. was studying at Queen’s at the same time as me and we clashed once in a student debate about the prospect of Irish unification. He told me that this would happen ‘over his dead body’ and I retorted that Irish reunification was only a matter of time: soon there would be more Catholics than Protestants in Northern Ireland.

I had seen his famous father Ian Paisley just before Christmas on a platform in front of Belfast City Hall shouting his opposition to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement (an earlier attempt to stop the conflict by Margaret Thatcher and the Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald). In his vitriolic speech Paisley railed against Thatcher, Fitzgerald and the Pope, all of whom he held personally responsible for what he saw as an unforgiveable betrayal of Ulster Protestants (all this bombast slyly undercut by the banner hung behind him on City Hall saying ‘Ulster says Noël’19, a riff on ‘Ulster says No’). I unwisely hung on the fringes of the crowd to eavesdrop, fascinated both by Paisley’s fiery rhetoric and his ability to mesmerise his audience (if curiosity killed the cat then I’m already on my ninth life).

Chapter 4 The Most Curious Thing

Part of my university course that autumn at Queen’s was an introduction to the strange world of quantum physics, something that has enthralled me ever since. In particular I was fascinated by the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. In this a cat is put in a sealed impermable box together with a vial of poison poised to shatter, a radioactive source and a Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter takes a measurement and detects radioactivity (a single atom decaying) the vial of poison shatters and the cat dies.

Conversely if radioactivity is not detected by the Geiger counter (the chances are 50/50) then the vial remains intact and the cat lives. When the box is opened then the results of the experiment are known: the cat is dead or alive. However before the box is opened, the cat may be either dead or alive - we don’t know - thus before the box is opened it exists in both states simultaneously (before you ask, no, I don’t know why Schrödinger picked a cat).

A Wasp In a Wig…

The creator of the experiment was Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian Nobel prize-winning physicist (winning it in 1933) and refugee from the Nazis who was invited to Ireland in 1938 by the Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera to help set up an Advanced Physics Institute in Dublin in 1940 (as part of the Dublin Advanced Studies Institute). De Valera’s love of mathematical physics long predated his interest in politics. His secretary Máire Ní Cheallaigh said of him in later years that:

Erwin Schrödinger spent the rest of his career in Ireland (he became a naturalised Irish citizen in 1948) living in Dublin. He had a complicated and controversial private life, living in a ménage à trois with his wife and mistress (something that might have played a part in the his previous failure to gain tenure in more prestigious universites like Oxford and Princeton Universities) and a disturbing proclivity for pubescent girls; something that the famously conservative and prudish de Valera must have chosen to ignore (this has besmirched Schrödinger’s Irish reputation in recent years and several sites previously associated with him there have been renamed)21.

De Valera’s audacious ambition in setting up the Dublin Advanced Institute in the 1930s and luring leading scientists like Erwin Schrödinger to teach in it was his attempt to establish the country as a world leader in advanced physics. To that end he secured the former home Dunsink Observatory near Dublin of one of his personal heroes William Rowan Hamilton for the Institute. Hamilton was one of the most influential and distinguished physicists of the nineteenth century whose work is foundational to modern physics.

you should say what you mean, the March Hare went on. I do, Alice hastily replied; at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know. Not the same thing a bit! said the Hatter. You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’ (Alice-in-Wonderland)

Hamilton developed a new system of algebraic mathematical notation called ‘quaterions’ to describe three dimensional space (a feature of quaterions is that unlike ordinary algebraic formations: they are not commutable that is cannot be reversed). His original insight for this came whilst he was walking beside Dublin’s Grand Canal on the 16th of Ocober 1843, and he immediately carved the equation into the stone of Brooms Bridge with a pocket knife (marked with a plaque today - the original has faded away). Hamilton later developed ‘Hamiltonian mechanics’ to describe the total energy of a system in classical mechanics (this was a golden age for Irish mathematics as George Boole in Cork University published the Mathematical Analysis of Logic a few years later in 1847 - work which is foundational to the modern computer industry).

Hamilton was working in the field of classical physics, but by the early years of the22 twentieth century the work of the German physicist Max Planck based on his work on light (specifically black-body radiation) laid the groundwork for an entirely new field: quantum physics, Planck won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. He was followed by others brilliant scientists like Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger himself. Schrödinger developed his famous Cat Experiment in the 1920s and presented his paper in 1926: ‘Quantization as an Eigenvalue Problem’ in which he presented the Schrödinger equation: the quantum equivalent of the second law of Newtonian physics. In this Schrödinger dubbed the total energy of the system the ‘Hamiltonian’ (H) in honour of Sir William Rowan Hamilton.

A time-independent simplified version of Schrödinger’s equation is: (where ψ is the wavefunction and E is energy).23

Curioser and curiouser

Curiouser and curiouser! cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English) (Alice-in-Wonderland)

But not only has this never happened, many years later in the 1960s a Northern Irish physicist both disagreed with Einstein’s ‘hidden variables’ theory and maintained that ‘entanglement’ and ‘non-locality’ were true. This was John Stuart Bell, a Protestant from a gritty working class area of Belfast, the first of his family to go to university. He is now considered one of the finest minds in physics of the 20th century; although this recognition has not yet filtered through to the general public even in his native Northern Ireland. Professor Andrew Whittaker of Bell’s own alma mater, Queen’s University said of him in his 2016 book ‘John Stuart Bell and Twentieth Century Physics’:

It was John Bell who investigated quantum theory in the greatest depth and established what the theory can tell us about the fundamental nature of the physical world. Moreover, by stimulating experimental tests of the deepest and most profound aspects of quantum theory, Bell's work led to the possibility of exploring seemingly philosophical questions, such as the nature of reality, directly through experiments.
And this was just Bell's "hobby"26

John Stuart Bell was born in 1928, working first as a laboratory technician and then studying in Queen’s University Belfast where he earned a first class degree in experimental physics in 1948 and, a year later, a second degree in mathematical physics. Later after completing a PhD at Birmingham University in England he moved to Geneva in Switzerland and spent the rest of his career working at The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) the multi governmental particle physics laboratory there with his wife Mary Bell, also a physicist who collaborated with him on much of his work.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

There is a great danger writing about quantum physics, particularly those with only a superficial knowledge of it (like me) to seem to fall into the trap of ‘quantum woo-woo’: that is to try and extrapolate from it tenuous philosophical assertions (or as some family members put it more crudely ‘intellectual b*******). But in some trepidation, I will illustrate my limited understanding of ‘entanglement’ and ‘non-locality’ with a family story (and I apologise in advance to anyone who thinks that the following is a gross simplification of subtle and difficult concepts, you are probably right).

Some years ago my brother managed a number of quarries in the border counties of Cavan, Fermanagh and Monaghan sandwiched between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. These sites were manned by a scattered workforce who were known, if his back was turned, to nip back home to milk the cows or do farm chores. On arriving at one deserted border quarry my brother rang the man supposed to be on site that day demanding to know where he was. The man hesitated for a second and replied ‘Where are you?’. In other words if his boss was on site, then he was on his way there, but if he was elsewhere, then he was on site where he was supposed to be. So where he said he was depended on where his boss said he was. For a fleeting delicious minute both men floated in a cloud of probability, neither knowing where the other was .

This, in my view, explains ‘non-locality’ (the man’s location floating in a vague cloud of possibility until he knew where his boss was) and ‘entanglement’ (his reported location depended on where he thought his boss was). The tension broke when my brother demanded ‘I asked first’ - so the man had to confess to his actual physical location (which was not at work where he was supposed to be). Thus a wave collapse/measurement occurred when his actual physical location was revealed (these days GPS tracking has probably put a stop to this delightful game of cat-and-mouse by Cavan quarry workers and the world has become a slightly duller place).

Living In a Material World 27

This is because, outside of the rarified atmosphere of a low temperature university physics laboratory or specialised industrial settings, the effects of quantum mechanics are very difficult to visualise. Point, my brother would say, to one experiment in the real world that could show a lay person that any of this stuff is true and not just something that university physics departments cook up to keep research grants flowing (or poor Substack readers bamboozled).

Break On Through To The Other Side…30

Challenge accepted, actually I can. There is one experiment which defies classical Newtonian physics, and a basic form of it can be performed without specialist equipment. It is, by chance, the one I was doing all those years ago in the physics laboratory in Queen’s. Young’s Double Slit Light Interference experiment is the fishbone in the throat of classical physics: it was devised by the cleverest man of his generation: Thomas Young, (whom I have written about previously here) in the early years of the 19th century.

One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. One side of what ? The other side of what? thought Alice to herself. Of the mushroom, said the Caterpillar (Alice-in-Wonderland)

Young’s Experiment is a tiny tear in the fabric of the normal world of classic physics that we live in - a hint that the world as we currently perceive it through our five senses, is far more complicated than we perceive it to be (and incidentally also suggests that the poet William Blake’s 1790 observation in his poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ that:

was spot on). It suggests that underneath what we can perceive with our five senses lies a far stranger substratum of reality. And that it is possible, as Jim Morrison of the US 1960s rock group The Doors (the band name taken from Blake’s poem) put it in his psychedelic inspired 1967 song, that you can, in some circumstances ‘Break On Through To The Other Side’ (a song was written in 1966 not long after he jammed with his namesake Belfast’s own Van Morrison in the famous Whisky A Go-Go club in Los Angeles on Van Morrison’s song ‘Gloria’.)31.

In Young’s experiment light behaves in two entirely different ways, firstly when shone through a single slit as a particle (Figure 1) but then when the double filter is added, as a striated wave formation (Figure 2). (Young himself performed the original version using only sunlight and a paper filter). This demonstrates that the same light source can act in two entirely different ways, behaving firstly as a particle and then as a wave, but never at the same time (this is completely at odds with conventional Newtonian physics in which it would be either one or the other).

Down the Rabbit Hole32

But the stranger aspects of Young’s experiment must be done in a modern physics laboratory with the help of a photon detector. When this is placed beside one of the filter’s slits the light changes its behaviour from wave to particle. Please read that again to let it fully sink in. This means the light changes it’s behaviour when it knows it’s being observed (and if this sounds unbelievable, then trust me, I know how you feel). If you want to go further down the rabbit hole: by changing the location of the detector it is possible to show that light changes it’s behavior in the past as well…..(yes, I know, mind officially blown).

Chapter 5 You’ve Lost Your Muchness

Young’s Experiment might be dismissed as only of interest to physicists, most of us live in the classical world of physics and quantum effects here are imperceptible. And in this world, as the Queen of Pop herself, Madonna sang back in 1984 : We Are Living In A Material World.

Or are we?

‎You’re not the same as you were before, he said. You were much more... muchier... you’ve lost your muchness. (Alice in Wonderland)

I returned to Northern Ireland a few years ago, and found an entirely different place to one I remembered from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The soldiers who crawled through the city like ants are gone, and the slate grey hexagonal pill boxes bristling with protruding rifle barrels dotted around the city have vanished. The heavy ‘whump-whump-whump’ of the twin-rotored Army Chinooks that hovered in the gray Belfast skies day and night like sinister gnats are silent. Most of all, the cloud of violence that crackled through the city air like a malevolent fog has largely fizzled out. This is all a legacy of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which completely transformed the political landscape of Northern Ireland.

On my visit Belfast was swarming with international tourists from cruise ships touring the murals of West and East Belfast on Black Taxi tours, shepherded by former republicans and loyalist prisoners (I watched a hand-over from a republican to a loyalist at a Peace Wall in disbelief, these men had been killing each other in the 1980s and now they were fleecing tourists together?). As a Japanese tourist took pictures in front of a Peace Wall (so-called because it separates the Protestant and Catholic communities and prevents attacks from either side) I tried to explain to my companions how weird it all was - but failed. It was almost like I’d fallen, like Alice, down a rabbit hole from 1987 into a new and strange world.

But the Belfast streets were quiet and peaceful which should have given me hope, and in ways it did. If someone had told me back then that Ian Paisley Snr and Martin McGuinness would have labelled ‘the Chuckle Brothers’ by the press and that when Paisley died in 2014 McGuinness would weep over his coffin saying ‘I have lost a friend’, I would have laughed incredulously. But, my former sparring partner Ian Paisley Jnr, said at McGuinness’ own funeral in Derry/Londonderry only three years later in 2017:

Despite the peace I found my time in Belfast bitter-sweet; the streets were strewn with litter, the city centre was grubby and sprinkled with Starbucks and other global corporate chains. The Queen’s Students’ Union where Ian Paisley Jnr and I had clashed all those years ago was now empty and deserted, a friend told me that students are dispersed all over the city now instead of staying in a tight bubble encircling the university in my time.

The beautiful Victorian house where I used to live on the Malone Road is now the Chinese consulate ringed by high fences and razor wire. We took a trip out to a then deserted Stormont parliament building where we were told that politics in Northern Ireland is gummed up by scandal and inertia. Its largest lake Lough Neagh is choked by green algae blooms and now on the brink of ecological collapse. I left from the George Best City Airport (named after the Ulster Protestant footballing icon) with the grim feeling that the ‘peace dividend’ from the Anglo-Irish Agreement has meant that Northern Ireland has just exchanged immediate visible violence for the invisible systemic violence hiding underneath technocracy and bureaucracy or at the beginning of supply chains in the Global South.

During my time there in the 1980s Northern Ireland was the cynosure of the world’s media with nightly reports on the latest shooting or killing. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the province was in the full glare of the media spotlight. In my view, this might be considered an embryonic form of current social media where experienced media performers like Ian Paisley (an early edgelord?) successfully knew how to milk the appetites of the international press for column inches and headlines with provocative quotes in what would now be called ‘rage-baiting’. For example this is him, speaking at a loyalist rally in 1968 following a number of attacks on Catholic homes in Northern Ireland offering a ludicrous, but media friendly, explanation for Loyalist violence:

Off With His Head…

The tightly coupled and dysfunctional relationship in Northern Ireland between the media, the protagonists in the conflict and the watching audiences was sharply observed by Heaney in his 1975 poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’:

Today the giant media jumbletron has moved on to the bigger and bloodier stages of Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind it a small statelet of just under two million people with badly frayed public services where the creeping globalist cancer of corporate blandness is spreading its sclerotic fingers all over its landscape and culture. Suicide rates amongst Northern Irish men are three times higher than in the neighbouring Republic of Ireland35 and poverty levels are a staggering 18% of the population36. But wholly avoidable deaths from austerity, poverty and addiction do not feed the voracious media audience ratings which the spurious glamour of deaths by guns or bombs provided.

As I predicted to Ian Paisley Jnr in that long ago student debate the demographics in Northern Ireland have indeed tilted - the latest population census show that the Catholic and Protestant populations of the six counties of Northern Ireland are roughly equivalent. This raises an intriguing possibility, as according to the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement:i37

I Don’t Much Care Where…

Thus at the moment the constitutional situation in Northern Ireland is a political Schrödinger’s Cat where the presumptive support for unification is roughly equally divided in the province, but, until a vote is taken, it is unclear what will happen (and it’s a situation that no-one on either side of the border seems in any hurry to change - one poll indicates that many in the Irish Republic are will only support reunification if it comes with significant financial support from the UK).39

Very Easy to Take More Than Nothing

Take some more tea, the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.I’ve had nothing yet, Alice replied in an offended tone,so I can’t take more.You mean you can’t take less, said the Hatter: it’s very easy to take more than nothing (Alice-in-Wonderland)

This isn’t the first time in Irish history where the island’s inhabitants have found themselves in an ambiguous political situation. Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, the Irish Free State still remained part of the British Empire; members of the Irish Parliament/Dáil had to swear an oath of loyalty to the British monarch and British sailors still occupied crucial naval ports on Irish soil (the Treaty ports). These concessions had been wrung from the Irish delegation because as Collins, well aware of the weakness of the Irish military situation, said in 1921:

Following Collins’ death in 1922 the disagreements between the pro- and Anti-Treaty factions mushroomed into a full-blown and deadly Civil War where it is estimated that more Irishmen were executed by the new Irish state than had been killed by the British during the earlier War of Independence: it left its scars on Irish political life for generations. During this war Collins’ arch-rival Éamon de Valera, head of the Anti Treaty side, found himself back in Kilmainham Jail, only this time imprisoned by the new Irish Free State. Whilst there de Valera allegedly scrawled Hamilton’s quaternion equations on his cell wall (perhaps this was his grim joke about the irreversibility of time for someone who found himself in the same place that he’d narrowly escaped being shot by the British less than eight years previously, or maybe he was just very, very bored).

But De Valera was released from Kilmainham shortly after, and he founded a new political party (Fianna Fáil) and then entered the Dáil in 1926, finally becoming Irish Taoiseach in 1932. He remained a towering figure in Irish politics for decades until his retirement at the age of 90 as the oldest head of state in the world (he died two years later). But De Valera was a hugely divisive figure in Irish politics, a hero to many in his own party, but the devil incarnate to those on the opposite side in Fine Gael (my late father being in that camp) who saw him as an arch-manipulator who betrayed his principles in exchange for political power.

Over the years that followed Fianna Fáil (the party of de Valera) and Fine Gael (the party who claims Collins and the pro Treaty supporters as their founders) were implacable and bitter opponents and cycled in and out of power like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. However in recent years the differences between these two parties have now faded so thoroughly that in 2020 they did something previously unthinkable in earlier generations: they went into coalition together. Another historic moment was reached when on the 21st of August 2022, the Taoiseach Michael Martin, the leader of Fianna Fáil (and de Valera’s direct political successor) attended a commemoration ceremony for the 100 year old anniversary of Micheal Collins’ death at Béal na Bláth in County Cork praising him in his speech as ‘one of the great heroes of Irish history’.42

Does the one that wins get the Crown?

The present coalition arrangement between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in Ireland is one often thrown up by the voting system proportional representation (PR) but much rarer in UK politics where the voting system is the ‘first-past-the-post’. In contrast on both parts of the island of Ireland, North and South, elections are carried out via the more sophisticated PR system (with the sole exception of elections for Westminster seats in Northern Ireland). Another difference between the two jurisdictions is that while the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution, the Irish Republic does: Bunreacht na hEireann (Irish Constitution) largely written by de Valera himself in 193743. The Irish Republic has periodic referenda on proposed changes to Bunreacht with issues like same sex marriage (2015) or the status of women (2024) - allowing the country to have societal wide discussions on changing social norms and painting them onto the law of the land.

It is not surprising that Ireland is the crucible for political innovations like Citizens’ Assemblies because it always been at the forefront of constitutional developments (and of course the first female Member of Parliament in the British Isles was the Sinn Féin MP Constance Markievicz in 1918, although she never took her seat). PR was used first in the 1919 Sligo muncipal elections where it was praised by the Dublin newspaper the Irish Times thus: ‘the election has established beyond dispute two big things in favour of proportional representation. The first is that it is a thoroughly workable system . . . The other big thing—and it is really big—is the proof that in proportional representation we have the Magna Charta of political and municipal minorities’.44 Sinn Féin, the Irish independence party of Collins and de Valera promptly adopted PR into its manifesto and it was included in the 1922 Constitution and retained in Bunreacht by De Valera in 1938.

PR has long been advocated in the UK by the Electoral Reform Commission who point out that ‘first-past-the-post’ system tends to produce large electoral majorities based on smaller voter approval, for example their website points out that in 2026: ‘we have a Labour Government with 63.2% of MPs, on just 33.7% of the votes’. 45The Electoral Reform Commission was founded in 1881: one of its foundational members was Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics, better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the writer of the Alice books. Dodgson/Carroll kept his mathematical work strictly separate from his writing persona and his proposals for electoral reform were published under the title ‘Dodgson’s method’. Along with other colleagues, this work formed the basis of the present PR voting system used in Irish elections.46

A Slow Sort of Country

So if Ireland has been at the leading edge of political innovation in the British Isles what might that mean for its potential unification? In 2007 a plotline of the American TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation stated that Irish Unification happened in 2024 - but this date has now come and gone. So, going back to that debate in the 1980s between us at Queen’s: who was right: Ian Paisley Jnr or me? Perhaps the answer is that neither of us were - maybe politics has moved on from these binary choices?

Chapter 6 A Very Difficult Game

My tentative suggestion is that the current constitutional situation in Northern Ireland is another example of ‘quantum politics’. For example the dual-citizenship of Irish/British citizenship in Northern Ireland allows people to be both British and Irish simultaneously, just as light can be both a wave and particle, like the smile of a Cheshire Cat both there and not-there.

In this reading, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 might have been like inserting the double slit filter from Young’s experiment into Northern Irish political life, dissolving the certainties of the past into a band of alternating identities - Unionists and Republicans cancelling each other out, or reinforcing each other in striated bands of green and orange: the old certainties of the past dissolved into a new fluid reality.

The gun may have gone from politics in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement, but in my view it is more reliant now on ‘vibes’ or social media memes than fiery speeches in front of Belfast City Hall. Politicians may need to harness the fickle waves of energy rising up from social media to steer it towards their own goals. And across the border in the Irish Republic the politics-by-internet-meme phenomenon is also disrupting political discourse in exactly the same way. In this new world those like President Trump who intuitively understand these fluid realities may be the political equivalents of John Stuart Bell (the concepts of quantum physics are being applied to other fields like money - something I enjoyed discussing with a fellow substacker recently - his excellent substack is here).

As well as a new type of politician, this new world may also need different political and legal structures (I noted recently that my former alma mater Queen’s University Belfast is soon to be a cross-border institution as it will have a new college in the Irish Republic). To that end political innovations like Citizens’ Assemblies in the Irish Republic are welcome, or it may be, as in Northern Ireland, that people can inhabit multiple political identities.

Go Until Till You Come To the End…

On the 1st of August 1915 Pádraig Pearse in a famous funeral oration at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery said of the British Empire:

Pearse was shortly to join these Fenian dead; his body tossed by British soldiers into a quicklime grave in Dublin’s Arbour Hill without a funeral on the 3rd of May 1916. A few short years Michael Collins was shot dead on a quiet Irish road by a fellow Irishman and was laid to rest in Glasnevin Cemetry on the 28th of August 1922. After many decades of official neglect (his gravestone erected a full seventeen years after his death); his grave is now the most visited one there, always adorned with fresh flowers. It lies not far from where Éamon de Valera, who died on the 29th of August 1975, rests with his wife and son in the modest family plot.

De Valera’s rueful prediction in 1966 that: ‘it is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time, history will record the greatness of Michael Collins and it will be recorded at my expense’ has slowly come true, Collins is now belatedly receiving national recognition (the 1996 Neil Jordan film starring Liam Neeson has had much to do with this)49. Ireland is now a full Republic and the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland are largely over since 1998. But it is not over for the family members of the 3,500 lives lost in it, as well as the many thousands more injured and maimed, there are also those there, like my friend who was at Enniskillen, who carry painful memories for the rest of their lives.

Nothing But A Pack of Cards

At the end of ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ Alice scoffs at her fear of the King and Queen of Hearts and the other characters because she has woken from her dream and sees that they were ‘nothing but a pack of cards’ - painted with the defunct symbols of the past. But there are many on on the island of Ireland who know that heads chopped off in Wonderland cannot be put back on when the story ends.

This, it seems to me, to make far more sense for a part of the earth where, on a misty day the land and sky melt into each other (my late father’s favourite expression for a particular sort of wet day in Ireland was ‘the sky is on the ground’) or to anyone who’s ever picked their way across the spongy ground of an Irish bog. Perhaps that is why it is easier to believe here that the future isn’t certain, as those strident voices from the media suggest, like a hard black lump of coal - but instead is more like a warm fire of brown turf sods whose fragrant silver-grey tendrils of smoke unfurl like a prayer into the endless Irish sky.

Post Script

While researching this essay I came across a photo of John Stuart Bell and had a jolt of recognition; I was sure I had seen him before. But he wasn’t lecturing at Queen’s University in the late 1980s: he was living in Geneva, working at CERN and beginning to gain global recognition for his pioneering work in physics.

The summit of this should have been a Nobel Prize, but he was robbed of this by his untimely death in 1990. In 2024 Gaurio and Lauroa published ‘John Bell’s Unpublished Notes on de Broglie’s Pilot Way Theory’ which showed that he was working on the pilot wave theory shortly before his death.51 (and I also noticed long after I chose the title for this piece that in 1990 John Stuart Bell had written a piece called ‘Against Measurement’ John Bell 1990 Phys. World 3 (8) 33,) However, I thought the possibility of him helping a undergraduate with a basic physics experiment were remote: I must have been mistaken.

But then I came across a press release from Queen’s University which said that in 1988 John Stuart Bell had been awarded an honorary doctorate whilst visiting Belfast. This remarking in passing that he used the opportunity to spend time with his former colleagues in the Queen’s physics laboratory where he had worked many years earlier - the same place I had done Young’s Experiment.

So it is possible that as young undergraduate all those years ago I was helped by one of the finest minds of the twentieth century and together we had pondered one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe; the nature of light. He had generously shared with me his theory about light being carried on a pilot wave (and with a twinge of horror I remembered I said he was wrong - something you might bear in mind).

I went hunting for my laboratory notebooks to see if I could find his signature (and maybe to triumphantly produce for a future BBC Antiques Roadshow) but of course I had long ago thrown them away. I will never know for certain if it really was John Stuart Bell who helped me that day, or, by some strange coincidence, someone else who was deeply interested in the pilot wave theory of light who looked like him did. But maybe, that is for the best - there is no certainty in Ireland; a place where we have always believed impossible things before breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Thank you for reading

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1(Rory Gallagher ‘A Million Miles Away’)

1. FROM THE SOURCE

2. INVISIBLE GIANTS

3. WHALES & HURLEYS

LONG READ: 1 hour

Chapter 1. From The Source

Not so long ago I walked across the Irish city of Cork while the men’s Senior All-Ireland hurling final, in which the Cork team were playing, was on. On my way the empty city streets were punctuated by choruses of delight or groans floating through the humid air - it seemed that almost the entire city was glued to their TV screens.

I caught the second half of the match when I reached my destination: Cork lost to Tipperary by a whopping fifteen points. The match was played over a hundred miles north in Dublin’s Croke Park stadium by the side of the River Liffey, but for a short spell that afternoon, it seemed that almost the whole of Cork city rode the waves of exhilaration or despair rolling through the thundery air together.

The city of Cork is the second biggest (population roughly 225,000) and second oldest city in the Republic of Ireland: it dates back to the monastic foundation of St Finbar in the sixth century ACE. I have always thought Cork an unusually tribal place: all the Cork people I know (and I’m treading carefully here) believe that Cork is the best place to live in Ireland - if not the world.

Cork’s nickname is ‘The Rebel County’ - a name which comes, not as many believe from it being the site of some of the fiercest fighting during the Irish War of Independence against British rule in the 1920s, but instead the nickname dates as far back as 1491, the year before Christopher Columbus sailed for the Americas, to the county’s strong support for Perkin Warbeck, a Belgian pretender to the English throne.

Cork’s most famous son, Michael Collins - the man most responsible for the modern Irish nation-state in many eyes - was born in its hinterlands and he spent his last night on earth hard by the River Lee’s South Channel in the Imperial Hotel delivering from there his breezy prediction that:

But a few hours later Collins’ prediction proved tragically wrong when the quiet West Cork rural road at Béal na Bláth was splattered with his blood from a shot by a fellow Irish man - thus shattering the best chance for peace that the new Irish Free State had to stop the bitter Civil War which followed.3 4 5

Today Cork is the home of several US software and pharmaceutical giants: over six thousand locals work in Apple’s European headquarters on its Holly Hill campus overlooking the city’s northside and many thousands more work in the string of US pharmaceutical plants ringing Cork’s giant sea harbour on its southside.6

My Own Lovely Lee….7

Although hurling, one of the world’s oldest and fastest field sports, is now a key part of Cork identity and pride the sport’s local popularity dates only from the 1900s and the Gaelic Revival spearheaded by writers like Pádraig Pearse and William Butler Yeats. Before the All-Ireland final started the Cork team and fans belted out in unison the team song ‘On the banks of my own lovely Lee’: the anthemic musical tribute written by Dick Forbes in 1933 shortly before the renaissance of the city was marked by the reopening of Cork City Hall in 1936, to the river which splays across the city in silvery fingers on its way to one of the biggest natural sea harbours in the world - the ‘spreading Lee’ as the great Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser wrote in 1590.8

The origin story of Cork City comes from its patron saint Finbar - legend says that in the sixth century he was a monk who came to the headwaters of the River Lee at beauty spot of Gougan Barra. There he met the local river monster9 and raised his hand in prayer over it: the creature in its desperation to get away from him, thrashed out downstream the network of river tributaries beside which Finbar founded his monastery and around which the city grew in the centuries that followed.1011 (Finbar’s right hand, with which he blessed the monster, is supposed to have glowed with divine light afterwards, a charming detail picked out in Harry Clarke’s exquisite stained glass window in the Honan Chapel situated in the grounds of University College Cork, near the River Lee’s South Channel a stone’s throw from the original site of Finbar’s monastery).

The Powers and Principalities12

Monasteries like St Finbar’s sprouted across Europe in the Middle Ages and many became rich and powerful, owning huge swathes of land and running major industries such as milling and brewing. But these valuable assets could fall into the hands of corrupt clergy or greedy local nobles, so new legal safeguards were needed for them. Therefore in the twelfh century Pope Innocent IV invented the legal term of ‘Persona ficta’ : legal though fictious personhood, which enabled institutions like monasteries, universities and dioceses to act as single legal entities holding assets and being represented in court cases.

As well as corporations, Governments too act as a ‘Persona ficta’ - but unlike religious institutions or corporations these rights were originally vested in a real human being: the person of the monarch. One vestige of this for example is that every criminal case in the UK is pursued in the name of ‘Rex’ - in other words on behalf of the man occupying the throne: King Charles the Third (of course, given the physical impossibility of these powers being exercised by King Charles personally across every courtroom in the United Kingdom Rex is now an avatar of the British State).

These powers, formerly vested in the monarch’s person and thence to the criminal barristers representing the British State, flowed to the new Irish nation-state on the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1949 - thus in the Irish criminal justice system state prosecutions are carried out in the name of a human being by virtue of their office - the Director of Public Prosecutions is the Irish state’s avatar and state equivalent of Rex.

The Sleeping Spirit of Ireland16

The creation of a ‘national spirit’ is normally a gradual and organic process spanning centuries but it also can be deliberately inflated by artistic or cultural means such as in the Irish Gaelic Revival of the 1900s. A later example of this is the 1959 landmark Irish language film ‘Mise Éire’ directed by George Morrisson, produced by Gaellinn with a soundtrack by the Cork composer Seán Ó Riada. This was, in my view, as culturally significant in its time as the 1998 Eurovision interval act of Riverdance (which I have written about here).

‘Mise Éire’ presented the origin story of the Irish Republic through a montage of rare photographs and film clips of key events such as the Easter Rising of 1916 and protagonists, including Cork’s own Michael Collins. Most of what is related in ‘Mise Éire’ are well known historical facts - but the film drew them together into a compelling piece of visual story telling powerfully underpinned by O’Riada’s wonderful music. This inserted characters like Pearse, Collins and events like the 1916 Easter Rising deep into Irish national consciousness thus bolstering the fledging Irish nation-state’s self confidence and pride. 18

The Faerie Queen19

This was not the first time in Irish history that the arts were leveraged to support a national identity. In 1590 the English poet Edmund Spenser wrote his epic 36,000 line poem The Faerie Queen in Kilcolman Castle twenty miles north of Cork city on the lush green banks of the River Blackwater. Spenser dedicated The Faerie Queen to England’s Queen Elizabeth the First and it was, in part, a propaganda effort for the nascent Tudor state - casting the aging queen as the dazzling eponymous Faerie Queen, one of the earliest examples of what, in later centuries in Hollywood, would be called ‘star-making’; the deliberate and artificial cultivation of an aura of mystique around a human being. But Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is far more than just crude state propaganda - it is a magical tour de force with allegorical characters like the Knight of the RuddyCross (with his red-and-white tabard, the same colours as the Cork GAA team) fighting a dragon who representing arrogance and hubris.

The landscape of The Faerie Queen is set in the beautiful North Cork countryside of Spencer’s Kilcolman Castle on the banks of the River Blackwater:

But this cherished place which inspired his luscious poetry, that he affectionately called ‘Hap hazard’ was not his ancestral home. Spenser was a newly arrived English government official who scooped up prime Munster land recently confiscated/stolen from its native Irish owners by the English Crown. He was one of a new breed called ‘planters’: partnering with the English State in proto public/private partnerships. The Crown’s buccolic name for the scheme ‘The Munster Plantation’ suggesting trees and countryside (in what maybe one of the first examples of what US professor Louise Mozingo calls ‘pastoral capitalism’ - countryside associated with moral virtue21) was a deliberately deceptive linguistic cloaking of the English State’s massive brutal and violent theft of Irish homes and land.22

The Smell of Tobacco in the Morning…25

Downstream from Spenser in the pretty Cork town of Youghal at the mouth of the River Blackwater lived his equally famous friend Sir Walter Raleigh - when he wasn’t off on his trips to the Americas, allegedly bringing back from there both tobacco and potatoes (legend says that an Irish servant girl doused him in water thinking he was on fire while he was peacefully smoking tobacco in his Myrtle Grove garden).

Both men were key propagandists of the new ‘English Empire’ project in Ireland and the Americas with devastating impacts for both native populations. Raleigh, Elizabeth’s glamorous court favorite, showed a different and much darker side to his character when he moved to Ireland; in 1580 as a junior officer he took part in the depraved torture and mass beheadings of six hundred unarmed Spanish and Italian prisoners at Smerwick seventy six miles north of Cork, the stomach-turning details of were like a scene from a sixteenth century version of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film ‘Apocalypse Now’ (and it is very probable that Spenser was there too). When the shocking details about Smerwick made their way to the Elizabethan court it cast an ugly stain on Raleigh’s reputation, but the queen herself shielded him from his critics.

But soon, in an echo of what happened in Ireland, dark tales of the colonists’ brutality towards the American natives filtered back to the Elizabethan court damning Raleigh’s reputation there. Later English supply ships pulling up on its beach found Roanoke deserted with no sign of the colonists; they were presumed killed by vengeful American natives. Out-of-pocket London Roanoke investors were thus added to the already long list of Raleigh’s English enemies. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603 left him unshielded from them, Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London and kept there until his execution in 1618 by James the First. His fertile Cork lands passed into the hands of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork (and coincidentally the father of Robert Boyle, the famous scientist and discoverer of Boyle’s law and widely regarded as one of the founders of the science of chemistry from which the modern pharmaceutical industry springs).

Despite setbacks like Roanoke, the fledgling Elizabethan English Empire of the 1590s was the seed of the globe-spanning British Empire; but this was not foreseeable then. In the 1590s planter brutality finally galvanised the fissparious and squabbling tribal clans of Munster to rise up en-masse to expel Spenser and his fellow planters in the Nine Years’ War: Elizabethan England’s Vietnam27. In 1598 Kilcolman Castle was burnt to the ground, Spenser’s infant son died in the flames and the poet and his family fled back to England where he died the following year, broken-hearted and in poverty at the age of only forty-six. He was honored in death by a grateful English State by being buried next to the writer Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey (and thus started the tradition of burying literary luminaries like William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley near each other in the part of the Abbey called Poet’s Corner) and his gravestone inscription there eulogises him as ‘The Prince of Poets’.28

As well being the origin of the British Empire, the English Munster Plantation project of late sixteenth century Ireland also produced in response to the brutality of men like Raleigh and Spencer a countervailing and oppositional identity of ‘Irishness’. This is not a unique response to colonisation: in his seminal 1961 book on the French/Algerian conflict ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ the writer Frantz Fanon points out that the French occupation of Algeria had the effect of coalescing a distinctive, but previously non-existent, Algerian identity.

Leviathan: Non est potestas

The concept of the modern nation-state was in its infancy in the 1590s when even the most recognisable today like Italy or Germany were still scattered collections of city-polities. But between 1618 and 1648 the catastrophic Thirty Years’ wreaked devastation across Central Europe causing many millions of deaths through war, famine or disease. This was finally brought to an end by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia signed in the German city of Münster. In it new nation-states like the Swiss confederation and the newly independent Dutch Republic were recognised and this paved the way in later centuries for the emergence of giant, but previously non-existent, nation-states, like Italy, Poland and Germany.

Hobbes’ took his metaphor from the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament Jonah is swallowed by the giant whale Leviathan and the book’s subtitle was taken from the Biblical quote ‘Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei’ (there is no power on earth compared to him). The original 1651 frontispiece engraving of Leviathan by the Parisian artist Abraham Bosse instructed by Hobbes depicted a giant crowned scaly man looming over the landscape wielding in either hand a sword and crozier - the symbols of sovereignty - to indicate the state’s influence over both the bodies and souls of its subjects (on closer examination the scales of the giant are revealed to be made up of hundreds of small people all gazing at his face).

Despite the paternalistic benvolence projected by Hobbes in Leviathan, few modern nation-states escaped painful and difficult birth pangs: most - like Italy in the nineteenth century - rose from the ashes of civil war and twentieth century modern Ireland was no exception. Michael Collins’ tragic death in 1922 was only one of the first which convulsed the new Irish state and pitted brother against brother in the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 - some of the bitterest fighting occurred in the areas around Counties Cork and Kerry and which is still remembered in local folk songs like ‘The Ohermong Ambush’.29

The Hag of Beara

The Irish Civil War was a bitter internecine war fought, not over money or land, but instead on whose ideals would be the pilot-light of the new nation-state. The choice between the sides was between the pro-Treaty pragmatists (led by Collins) or those wedded to the original republican ideals of 1916: the anti-Treatyites and it left its scars on Irish society for generations. 30

The Anti-Treatyites of the Irish Civil War saw themselves as the authentic inheritors of the legacy of Pádraig Pearse, writer of the original Mise Éire 1912 poem and later 1916 leader. This poem (after which the 1959 film was called) invoked the pre-Christian past of the island in its opening line:

which translates to: ‘I am Ireland, the Hag of Beara’. The Hag of Beara is an ancient Celtic goddess representing the union between the land and sea: in local legend the goddess is represented by a rock formation on West Cork’s Beara pennisula facing into the full force of the Atlantic Ocean .

The Walk of A Queen…

In April 1900 the aging Queen Victoria visited Dublin to a series of carefully choreographed displays of patriotic support by locals (amongst which was a visit to Blackrock College where one of the flagwaving schoolboys was an Edward de Valera a future President of Ireland). To counter the pro-monarchist sentiment whipped up by her visit the poet W.B. Yeats and his mentor Lady Gregory wrote the one act play Kathleen Ni Houlihan: the plot of this is that on the eve of their wedding an old woman visits a young couple and appeals to the bridegroom to fight those who have stolen her land the ‘four green fields’. The old woman/hag/Kathleen ni Houlihan character symbolises Ireland and she is revitalised by the willingness of the young bridegroom to leave his bride behind and fight for her freedom instead - by the play’s end she has been transformed:

(The eponymous part of Kathleen Ni Houlihan was originally played by Yeat’s muse (and romantic infatuation) the middle class English schoolgirl-turned-revolutionary Maud Gonne).

In Kathleen Ni Houlihan Yeats succeeded beyond his wildest dreams to stoke his audience’s nascent patriotic sensibilities (his 1938 poem: ‘Did that play of mine send out, certain men the English shot? hints at his astonishment at what he had unleashed). The play ran for many years in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre but its Easter Monday 1916 performance had to be cancelled because many of its cast, and audience were taking part in the doomed 1916 Easter Rebellion (the answer to Yeats’ question in The Man and His Echo was undoubtedly ‘yes’, for example the actor Seán Connolly was shot dead while leading an attack on Dublin Castle in 1916). In the meantime Edward-now-Éamon de Valera had turned from a rugby-playing loyal alumni of Blackrock to fight alongside Pádraig Pearse and Michael Collins in the Easter Rising. He was sentenced to death and escaped the firing squad only by virtue of his US citizenship (and Collins escaped the same fate probably by pure luck).

Chapter 2. Invisible Giants

A Complete Aisling32

If Pearse and Yeats successfully invoked the spirit of Éire/Ireland in the 1900s as an oppressed old woman/hag in need of rescue, in today’s Ireland she might be more likely to be an ‘Aisling’ - a popular name for Irish girls (the name means ‘dream’), the eponymous sweet country-turned-city girl of the recent popular novels by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breene.33 34

The Invisible World36

Today both nation-state governments and corporations wield enormous power over vast swathes of the planet and its human and non-human populations. These modern ens legis/non-human entities as well as having all the rights of a human being also have key advantages over one. Firstly, they do not have the temporal constraints of individual humans - a corporation or a government is not limited to the length of a single human life. Secondly ens legis have legal protections, like limited liability or state immunity from prosecution not available to individual human beings. And finally of course, these ens legis/non-human entities are not sentient beings - they cannot be subject to corporal punishments such as imprisonment, torture or even death.37

Both of these types of non-human entities/ens legis are, of course, run by people. Individuals working in vast corporate enterprises may be in their private lives morally and ethically scrupulous - but they are often as employees compelled by the narrow logic of shareholder and profit maximisation or policy decisions to take decisions which result in poor environmental or societal outcomes. In many cases the individual’s moral compass may be subsumed by the corporate culture in which they work - they can be, like Jonah, swallowed up in the belly of the whale.

Water, Water, Everywhere But Not a Drop to Drink…3839

While there are many examples of destructive corporate culture, government organisations too may be guilty of pernicious work cultures where ‘value for the taxpayer’ is allowed to trump wider societal and environmental damage. Recent UK examples of this include the egregious failure by the Environment Agency to protect British rivers and coastlines from disastrous pollution by private water companies. In addition, on the English River Lea the agency itself (without any legal authority) abstracted huge volumes of river water causing mass fish and aquatic life kills. As the chairman of the Amwell Magna Fishery group (and Irish-born lead singer of the 1970s Derry rock group The Undertones) Fergal Sharkeley said:40

Sharkey’s comments form part of a widespread push-back by disillusioned consumers and citizens against abuses by the ens legis/non-human entities of giant global corporations and government bodies. But these are often ‘David and Goliath’ situations where individuals and small groups of concerned citizens face vast indifferent and legally powerful organisations. Against these overwheming odds people may be reduced to feelings of impotency or despair (this was memorably depicted in Franz Kafka’s 1914 novel ‘The Trial’ about the arbitary and unjust outcomes for the individual faced with the pitiless indifference and power imbalances of bureaucracy).

Help Me, Obi-Wan42

But, like the biblical Goliath, the apparent power and invincibility of these ens legis/non-human entities corporations and nation-states may mask underlying weakness: what Dr Luke Kemp recently dubbed ‘Goliath’s’ curse’. Dr Kemp is a senior academic from Cambridge University’s Centre for Existential Risk who has written a 2025 book called ‘Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse’ in which he sounds the alarm on our current global polycrisis. In Goliath’s Curse Dr Kemp traces the deep history of Empires worldwide and down the millenia from the Han Dynasty, to the Roman and more recently the British Empire and the present soi-disant American Empire43.

This is the power-dynamic pattern he labels ‘Empire’ which may be either proudly flaunted in language, architecture and visual iconography (like the Roman or British Empires) but in other settings might lurk like an unseen river monster beneath the facade of a seemingly democratic society (one hint of this might be in the 1961 farewell speech of US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warning about the dangers of over-reach by the ‘military-industrial complex’).

As Dr Kemp points out in Goliath’s Curse, local autonomy is often sacrified in these modern-day invisible Empires: indeed a key clue to their presence is their tendency to centralise power structures (famously ‘all roads lead to Rome’). In the present day several commentators have observed that the UK economy is dangerously tilted to London and the South East of England44 and Cork born politician and current Minister of State Michael Moynihan recently suggested that the same imbalance exists in the Irish Republic where Dublin is similarly privileged.45

He suggests paradoxically that in the wake of these collapses the lives of the majority of the population get better. Dr Kemp contends that there is persuasive evidence that the general health of European populations improved in the years following the fall of Western Roman Empire in the fifth century ACE. But as the history of the Roman Empire was written by the descendants (and later successors) of its élites then this is all scrubbed from the historical record. He traces this rise-and-fall Empire cycle repeatedly across human history and across the globe from the Han dynasty of China to the fall of the British Empire in more recent years.

The Matrix?

Dr Kemp, along with Professor Jem Bendell (whom I mentioned in my last essay here on money) suggests that time is fast running out on the latest version of Empire and that it is likely in the near future that some form of collapse will occur. If, as they both predict, this happens then it is likely to be a painful and difficult time for all of humanity - as, unlike the past, there is now little space on the planet left for survivors to retreat to.

Adults in the Room46

This may all sound like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory and even to echo some right wing commentators on so-called ‘Deep State’ theories (or like the plot of the 1999 film sci-fi film The Matrix). But Dr Kemp (who is a senior academic) does not say in ‘Goliath’s curse‘ that he believes that present day global élites are acting in some kind of vast concerted global conspiracy to enslave the rest of humanity.47

She directed this remark to the Greek government’s representatives (which included its finance minister Yanis Varoufakis) in its debt bail-out negotiations with the EU.48 49In those negotiations the Greek delegation were forced, against the democratic wishes of their electorate, to accept a punitive bail-out package which inflicted huge and lasting damage on Greek society. Afterwards Varoufakis, who had been bitterly opposed to the humiliating deal, observed of Ms Lagrande and her colleagues:

Varoufaki took Lagrande’s patronising remark as the title of his 2017 book ‘Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment’ - later made into a film in 2019. Although this might be seen as his revenge upon both Lagrande and her EU colleagues for his country’s humiliation, in his book Varoufaki takes more philosophical view recognising that she too was trapped in circumstances over which she and her confederates had little control.51

Chapter 3. Whales & Hurleys

Call me Ishmael53

The ‘authentic tragedy’ to which Varoufakis refers to is one often portrayed in literature. One of the most memorable examples of this is the 1851 novel Moby Dick by the US author Herman Melville about the doomed pursuit of the Great White Whale Moby Dick by the vengeful Captain Ahab on the whaling ship the Perquod. Melville drenched Moby Dick in Biblical symbolism, for instance in Chapter Nine of the book the Bible thumping sermon by Father Mapple hinges on the Old Testament story of Jonah and the giant whale.

Some time ago I spoke to a man who in the 1950s had been the taxi driver for the famous US actor Gregory Peck ( ‘a lovely man’) whilst he was filming scenes from John Huston’s award winning Warner Bros film in 1956 of Moby Dick in Youghal, the small Cork town previously famous for being the place where Oliver Cromwell finally sailed from Ireland after his short but destructive rampage in 1650 (and also of course the former home of Sir Walter Raleigh). Heuston’s Moby Dick is a powerful cinematic depiction of Melville’s masterpiece in which Peck channels Ahab’s murderous rage against the eponymous great White Whale Moby Dick (the role of Father Mapple was played by Orson Welles delivering a barnstorming cameo).54

Moby Dick tackles multiple themes like imperialism (the Perquod is named after an indigenous American Indian tribe); the moral corruption resulting from the mindless pursuit of wealth (Ahab nails a doubloon to the ship’s mast to bribe the crew to join in his doomed pursuit) and the dangers of unthinking compliance with orders. Heuston’s film nods to the insanity of the nuclear age - the pursuit of the whale leads the crew of Perquod to Bikini Atholl - the site of US 1950s nuclear bomb testing.

Ahab’s first mate Starbuck fails to stop him; although he knows full well that his captain’s mission is an insane and dangerous one:

But Starbuck is the epitome of the loyal company man blindly following orders to his eventual death (and did no one from the coffee giant actually read Moby Dick before choosing the name?). Ahab too is a tragic figure - not knowing, or understanding that the natural forces he has pitched himself against are vast, impersonal, and wholly indifferent to him. As Starbuck points out, the giant whale neither knows nor cares about its puny human pursuers; the story of Moby Dick is thus a metaphor for impotency of the human condition, ranged against a pitiliess universe.

By the film’s end the only survivor of the Perquod is the narrator Ishmael, rescued from the sea by the whaling ship the Rachel. The Rachel is captained by Captain Gardiner; a man whose own son has been killed by Moby Dick, but whose shocked response to Ahab’s blasphemous diatribe against the behemoth is: ‘May God forgive you’.57 Ishmael in the Bible is the son of the slave Hagar and the patriarch Abraham who cast off both mother and son into the desert. Perhaps this is Melville’s hint that those best placed to survive the doomed projects of human Empires are its poor and outcasts? Ahab too is a Biblical name, a pagan King of Israel, the husband of Queen Jezebel. Melville may be suggesting in Moby Dick that the best response to Empires and the monsters that they throw up is not, like Ahab to sink into pointlessly rage against them, but, instead, like the Christians Captain Gardiner and St Finbar, to forgive them.

In Good Old Cork..58

So what has any of this to do with Cork? Where might you find Dr Kemp’s Goliaths or Moby Dicks/ens legis/non-human entities there? One answer might be behind the gleaming white ashlar facades of Cork City Hall mirrored onto the River Lee’s South Channel. City Hall was built in the early 1930s as a replacement for the previous City Hall burned down by the British Army in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence: this was widely seen as revenge for the humiliation of British forces in a series of recent devastating ambushes by the famous West Cork Brigade lead by Tom Barry (after Irish independence, in a concilatory gesture, the British Government paid for City Hall’s reconstruction and it was opened on the 8th of September 1936 by the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera).

Despite rising from colonial ashes City Hall’s present occupants Cork City Council can on occasions, in my view, behave just as callously as its former British masters ever did; for example, it recently drew the following stinging rebuke from the Irish High Court judge stating that it had against an individual Irish citizen:

invoked a taxation process which it knew or ought to have known was unlawful. This continued for years, with the unlawfulness of the scale being conceded “the moment it was challenged in the High Court,” the court said. Further, the court held that the Council “actively invoked, exploited and endorsed an unlawful system of taxation of costs” and the solicitors acted “arrogantly” by drawing up the tendered costs.5960

Mac The Knife61

Another example of the ens legis/Empire power dynamic lurking in Cork might be in some of the giant US pharmaceutical plants strung across the south shores of Cork’s huge sea harbour. Daily thousands of commuters descent into the Jack Lynch Road Tunnel (named after a previous Cork All-Ireland hurling champion captain and Taoiseach) beneath the harbour on their way to work in the bowels of these factories. Some of these companies hold a knife to the city’s economic throat with a drumbeat of threats of workforce shrinkage or plant closures (thinly veiled threats from the Trump White House about the lost US tax revenues presently pouring into the Irish Exchequer ‘Ireland’s been very smart’ can’t help local anxieties ).

You Were in Our Hearts62

But, you might ask (a bit wearily probably) what are the alternatives to any of this? Isn’t it inevitable when any collection of human beings join together in a common purpose - whether that is government or private enterprise? Perhaps group consciousness always dips to its lowest common denominator: we may be nice people to our family and friends, but put us together in large groups governed by rigid abstract rules and either we become subsumed into vast mindless organisational whales like Moby Dick or else we are today’s Captain Ahabs on whaling longboats futilely hurling harpoons against them. Isn’t that Just The Way Things Are And What’s The Point of Complaining About It?

When I set off on my rain drenched walk across Cork City in the first half of the match, Cork hurlers were totally dominating the match and under-dogs Tipperary were trailing them badly: I expected on my arrival to find them coasting to an easy victory. But while I was trudging across the silent city, the game’s fortunes dramatically shifted. When I arrived to find my friends watching the game’s second half the Tipperary team suddenly rose to playing brilliance that Cork utterly collapsed under. I watched in amazement as the Tipperary men repeatedly slammed the small rock-hard hurling ball (sliotar) into the back of the Cork goal net. By the end of the match Tipperary had won it by a comfortable margin: it was quite wonderful to watch (although not to the two disconsolate Cork fans that I was with).

What was equally wonderful was the moving heartfelt victory speech delivered by Tipperary’s captain Ronan Maher afterwards. It brought many of those watching (including me) to tears: he dedicated the team’s amazing victory to a young teammate Dillon Quirke who had tragically died of a heart attack aged only 24 during a previous game:

From the winner’s podium he warmly congratulated his opponents on their sportmanship, the Cork players now sprawled in disappointment on the pitch beneath him, and finished by saying:

I thought that this was, as well as a fine piece of oratory, but also an impressive demonstration that, if properly led, a group of people can become more than the sum of their individual contributions - that they could like the Tipperary team that day, face apparently insurmountable odds - and win.

Up The Rebels66

Despite Ronan Maher’s assertion that the All-Ireland final’s winner’s trophy (modelled on an ancient Irish communal drinking vessel a ‘mether’) joyfully hoisted by him that day was ‘coming home’ to Tipperary, most Cork people might question this as the Liam McCarthy Cup (named after a Cork emigrant) has been raised far more times in victory (over 30) by Cork hurling captains than most other Irish counties since the tournament began in 1888 (when Tipperary won it first, so okay, he might have had a point). This is somewhat surprising, as despite its moniker ‘The Rebel County’, Cork was for many centuries a stronghold of the British Empire: the city being one of its largest and busiest ports.

It hummed constantly with the trade of Empire - ships departed continuously from its river quays heavily loaded with grain and dairy drained from the surrounding Munster countryside. Sugar, cotton and tobacco from the slave plantations of the Carribbean and the US poured into its riverside warehouses. People too flowed through Cork: thousands upon thousands of Irish streamed onto the emigrant boats anchored off its sea-harbour Queenstown (named in 1849 after Queen Victoria’s visit - this was at the height of the Great Famine: she is still scornfully known locally as ‘The Famine Queen’ ). Most were bound for the Americas including my own granduncle who boarded RMS Titanic from there in 1912.

Cork City was thus deeply intertwined with the British Empire’s vast net of money and exploitation for centuries (and it carries this legacy in streets named after long dead British aristocrats, Anglesea, Pembroke and others). It was a garrison town and a key area for recruitment into the British Army and Navy; at the outbreak of the First World War it was known as ‘loyal Cork’. But there is another thread to Cork history - one of the biggest mass starvation events in European history, the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851 happened on its doorstep in places like the West Cork town of Skibbereen (producing the Irish rebel song ‘Revenge for Skibbereen’ in the decades that followed the Famine).67

Cork in Flames…

There is some evidence that the parts of Ireland hit hardest by the Irish Great Famine of 1847 were the ones in the generations that followed where resistance to British rule grew strongest - places like the West Cork birthplace of Michael Collins which became a hotbed of IRA activity during the Irish War of Independence between 1919-1922. Thus Cork played an outsized role in that struggle and a heavy price. For, like the death throes of St Finbar’s river monster, the last days of the British Empire in Cork were destructive.

In 1920 the Empire’s vice-like grip on Cork suddenly became vulnerable; that year the British Army and the RIC suffered a number of humilitating defeats from local IRA groups like the famous West Cork Brigade. Even former middle-class stalwarts in the business community began to turn against it, in 1920 the town council of its seaport Queenstown defiantly renamed the town Cobh. Cork City itself elected two Sinn Féin Lord Mayors, after the first was shot dead by British forces and the other died on hungry strike in an English jail and thousands attended his funeral in Cork’s Catholic Cathedral. In retaliation and frustration the British army spitefully set fire to five acres of Cork city centre (including City Hall) on the night of the 11th-12th of December 1920 and stopped the local firefighters from putting out the fires. A few days the Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood brazenly lied to the British House of Commons that the fires had been set by local people (he blamed ‘the Sinn Féiners’) but the soldiers themselves swaggered around the city’s smouldering ruins with burnt corks in their berets blithely advertising their guilt.686970

Despite Sir Hamar’s assertion in February 1921 that the success of the Irish independence movement would mean the ‘break-up of the Empire and our civilisation’ later that year he faced Cork’s own Michael Collins in London across the table in the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. The treaty was signed in London on the 6th of December 1921 and it brought the conflict to an end to widespread relief.71

Raising the Flag…

Under the terms of the Treaty British soldiers left Cork in 1922, but their sailors remained in Cork’s naval base at Spike Island across the harbour from Cobh (from which they saluted Collins’ coffin on the SS Classic on the 28th of August 1922 as it sailed past en-route to his state funeral in Dublin while the carillion of bells from Cobh Cathedral tolled mournfully across the water).

Spike Island, and its sister port Berehaven on the Beara pennisula, were two of the three Irish ports retained by the Royal Navy in Southern Ireland called Treaty Ports just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera negotiated their return to the Irish State (to the chagrin of Winston Churchill who called it ‘folly’). Éamon De Valera himself personally hoisted the Irish tricolour up the flagpole on Spike Island on the 11th of July 1938 as the last Royal Navy sailors on the H.M.S. Acasta steamed out onto the open sea72 to the sound of the cheers of forty thousand people lining the harbour the last tentacles of the British Empire withdrew from Cork shores (in a sad footnote less than two years after she left Cork, in 1940 H.M.S. Acasta sank off the Orkneys in a naval battle and 161 of her sailors drowned).

Let’s Blow This Thing and Go Home..

Could Cork survive?

Epilogue: Bury Me With My Hurley73

In other words what happens to a place when an Empire falls? Dr Kemp writes in Goliath’s Curse that after the fall of the Roman Empire many of its subjects found more communal lives rooted in their regional traditions and localities. He believes that the decline of the Roman Empire was a tragedy only for its élites (who wrote most of the historical narratives) but for the rest of humanity ruled by them it may have been a welcome relief from their exploitation and domination.

In its origin myth Cork’s patron saint St Finbar vanquished the river monster at Gougan Barrie not with violence, but, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,74 with a blessing. His new monastic city by the banks of the Lee was built on top of the destruction wrought by the monster’s death-throes.

And in my humble opinion, even if all Cork’s present Empires leave, it will survive because it has kept going down centuries of invasion, war and famine since and risen from the ashes of Empire before.

It will carry on, I think, because Cork is the place where being a ‘gas man’ is not a job description but a compliment; the place where people sing emotional songs together and men cry in public over the death of a friend without shame.75 It is the place where, for the sheer joy of it, they play insanely dangerous ball games on wet pitches suffused with the dappled light that bounces off the water that threads through its vibrant green fields and laps at its shores.

The Romans believed that each place had its own deity, its genius locii or local spirit (might this be considered another form of non-human entity/ens legis?). If Cork does have a genius locii, I am sure, like a modern RuddyCross knight that it wears a red and white GAA jersey and I think it felt it pulsating through the thundery air that day of the All-Ireland final.

Of course Cork people know all of this; they already think they live in the best place in the world - and (whisper it) they might just have a point.

But don’t tell them I said so….

Thank you for reading

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1 (Jessie J’s, It’s All About the Money)

1. I’ll See You Right

2. Golden Dreams

3. Our Custom, And A Good One

4. Put-Your-Purse-Away

Reading time : 30 mins

Chapter 1. I’ll See You Right

Is it possible to live in a modern Western country without money? Surely when people are unable to buy food, wages couldn’t be paid and businesses couldn’t take payments from their customers everything would grind to a halt?

Amazingly in the early 1970s that’s exactly what happened in Ireland during a series of banking crises which meant that for long periods of time there was no new cash issued, the banks were shut and there was no banking services (you can read about it here).

I was a child at the time but I spoke to several older people recently about how they managed to cope then - one of whom ran a business. They told me that in place of cash people used cheques: shops and pubs, in particular, operated on a system of mutual credit. You wrote a cheque or an IOU for your groceries or petrol and the shopkeeper trusted that these cheques or IOUs would eventually be honored. People went to work as usual and my parents who were bringing up a large family in rural Ireland got on with their daily lives although my mother conceded that it wasn’t always easy.

It was also possible for Irish society to continue to function despite the withdrawal of cash because in the 1970s Ireland there were lots of areas of life which operated entirely outside the monetary system, the so-called ‘gift’ economy. For instance most married woman didn’t go out to work and small children and the elderly were largely looked after at home. Additionally in the rural economy people often banded together for seasonal tasks like harvesting or turf cutting in what was known as a meitheal where labour was exchanged on a reciprocal basis.

We are the Self Preservation Society….2

In 2023 Professor Jem Bendell and an interdisciplinary team wrote a book called ‘Breaking Together: a freedom loving response to collapse’ about the various causes of the emerging crises that we find ourselves in now and the likelihood of environmental and societal collapse in the near future (and since it has been published there have been many more experts who echoed these concerns). In the second chapter Breaking Together called ‘Monetary Collapse’ he suggests that the planetary and climate crisis is inextricably linked to the global monetary system and its insatiable need for constant economic growth and he also suggests that this system itself is near the brink of collapse.

‘Breaking Together’ gives in my view gives an excellent account of why growth is so necessary to modern Western economies, and why we probably can’t escape the doom loop we are now in because of it. I can’t better his account so I recommend you go and read Chapter Two in it right now (hey, this blog might be free but I expect you to do some work too: I never said this was a beach read). You can find it here.

Since I like my cultural touchstones, this gives me the perfect excuse to talk about one of my favorite films, the classic 1969 British gangster caper ‘The Italian Job’ starring Michael Caine. The film famously ends with the bus seesawing over a Swiss ravine with the weight of gold pulling the bus down balanced against the gang bunched up at the other end of the bus. If you have read the chapter on the global monetary system in Breaking Together as I suggested you might recognise that this is an excellent metaphor for the situation that humanity presently finds itself it - dragged over the cliff by a money system that it has lost control over.

(All I can say in addition to what Breaking Together so cognently lays out is that if you want to know where the pernicious idea of perpetual economic growth came from, in my opinion it was principally caused by the invention of compound interest by Italian banking families in the early 1200s. In other words all this madness started as The Italian Job….(sorry, too good to resist)).

But Bendell description’s of the present money system in Breaking Together is miles away from what most people think of money and how it works ….

Chapter 2. Golden Dreams

Goldfinger…..4

The public understanding of money might be encapsulated in the 1964 James Bond film ‘Goldfinger’. The film’s plot revolves around an attempt by the eponynomous villain on Fort Knox the home of the American Gold Treasury; not to steal its gold, but to irradiate it because then the entire world economy would collapse because gold equals money and destroying the gold would destroy the money supply. And this would hand him enormous power and enable him to blackmail the world into doing his bidding. Or something like that.

This view of money is as a kind of shadow of a real thing, the dollar for instance being the equivalent of a certain amount of gold. This is probably how how most of us think of money; that at some point if you or I really wanted to we could march to the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve today and demand chips off a bar of bullion in exchange for wads of paper or digits in our online bank accounts.

But as anyone with an ounce of knowledge about economics knows, the premise behind the film is complete rubbish now because if all the gold in Fort Knox were to be irradiated then it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference; the government of the US hasn’t depended on the gold standard since the 1970s and neither has the UK or any other country. Currency today is instead what’s called a fiat currency, there is no precious metal equivalent which you could demand from the US Federal Reserve or the Bank of England for your wad of 10 or 20 dollar or pound notes.

A British Bank is run with precision….5

Instead a far better representation of money in popular culture might be from another film released in the same year as ‘Goldfinger’, that is the children’s film ‘Mary Poppins’. In one scene one of the Banks children accidentally causes a run on a bank by starting a rumour that it is unable to redeem a penny thus causing the bank to close its doors as hordes of panicked customers demand their money from it.

What this scene nicely explains is that money is more about belief that the bank would pay, than about the actual physical reality of coins, notes or gold bullion. This belief exists inside group human consciousness, if large numbers of people agree to accept that a bank note is an acceptable way to pay for something, then it works. But, as in the film, if this belief breaks down then the entire system collapses in a run on the bank.

If we think of money as a kind of mass hallucination that we all voluntarily participate in, then one way to break its spell might be to puncture its symbolic power by literally burning it. This provocative thesis was carried out in 1995 by the band KLF on a remote Scottish island where they burnt a million pounds and filmed it as a piece of performance art6. This thesis is also deftly explored in the excellent Substack The Church of Burn which again, I strongly urge you to read here. This probes the ways in which the abstraction which we call money has gripped our collective unconsciousness and explores ways (such as symbolic money burning) in which this might be changed.

But burning money, while highlighting important truths about it, isn’t in my view a complete answer (and to be clear I’m not suggesting that’s what the Church of Burn believe in either). Money exists for reasons, and these reasons don’t disappear when we get rid of it. The roots of our current problem might be deeply entangled with faulty belief systems about money but in the meantime we still have to find ways to live.

One way might be to explore alternatives to money as a social technology, for instance to return to the gift economy that was such a key part of rural Ireland in the 1970s. Professor Bendell suggested in a recent interview that people should investigate things like setting up babysitting or care circles or the use of time banks (this is a gross simplification of much of his detailed and thoughtful critiques on solutions to our current dilemmas and I urge you to read more about these on his site)7. The Chinese have apparently recently developed a system of ‘social credits’ which might work on similar principles but it is unclear exactly how this works in practice.

Chapter 3. Our Custom And A Good One

No fortune, no marriage!8

This takes me back to the start of this essay, Ireland and the 1970s banking crisis. Irish people then had no choice to use alternatives to money, or else to lean heavily on the ‘gift’ economy. There wasn’t money to burn, because for a time there was no money (there were of course money substitutes like cheques or IOUs but these were only acceptable in certain situations and depended heavily on mutual trust. Money as the universally accepted method of payment and anonymous lubricant of society as we know it was not available). So without the dead hand of money strangling it, Irish society in the 1970s was a haven of peace and tranquillity? Well, that’s not quite how I remember it, people still gossiped, fought and behaved much like they always had…..

While researching another essay recently on the subject of time (available here) I revisited John Ford’s 1952 film ‘The Quiet Man’ which I had for a long time dismissed as a silly piece of Paddywhackery full of cliches about Irish life seen through the lens of American sentimentality. But there was one scene in the film which I had always found perplexing: the one where Maureen O’Hara opening the boiler door silently invites John Wayne to throw her entire dowry of £350 into the fire - which he does, the money goes up in smoke.

The plot of the film for those unfamiliar with it is that a returning Irish American to a rural Irish village falls in love with a local girl and marries her. This marriage had been facilitated by the local community who had duped her older brother into believing that if he allowed his sister to marry John Wayne’s character this meant that he could also marry a rich local widow who had been resisting his proposals up to then. On finding out that he had been deceived, the widow won’t marry him after all, her brother then keeps her furniture and dowry. Under pressure from the local community she gets her furniture back, but her brother still refuses to pay the dowry to her husband. She is upset and refuses to consummate the marriage.

Her husband is exasperated, he doesn’t want the money, but she is insistent. No money, no sex (she does relent but that’s not the point). She runs away, he follows her and drags her back - and publicly issues an ultimatum to her brother: the dowry or else the marriage is cancelled. Her brother gives in and throws the money at him; she then invites him to throw it into a boiler fire in front of the whole community - which he silently does. She is happy and makes it clear that she is now his wife in the fullest sense of the word. There’s a big fight between her brother and her husband which the husband wins. Everyone is friends. The End. Roll the credits.

It’s a baffling story. Who are we supposed to root for? Is Mary Kate greedy, and if so why does she invite her husband to burn her dowry? Why does her brother use her dowry as a way of punishing his rival when he must know that he is humiliating his sister? What’s with the violence? Why did John Wayne need to beat up his brother-in-law to get into bed with his sister? And why does he throw the money that he gets from his brother-in-law into a fire (and to be clear, it isn’t a small amount, it’s £350, the present day equivalent of £22,000 consigned to the flames: it’s still the most shocking thing in the film).

Let me unpick this a little. Mary Kate (O’Hara’s character) is the spinster sister of her much older bullying brother Will ‘Red’ Danaher - living in his house and working for him for nothing for some years on the understanding that he will take care of her for the rest of her life. But she is under his control and must do what he wants. Their parents are dead, and she has few, if any, other options. She is in the gift economy not by choice, but by necessity. Her brother is a boastful bully and unpopular with his neighbours.

But then the arrival of Seán Thornton (Wayne’s character) changes everything. She can escape her brother’s domination and have a house of her own. Her new husband has money and she can live a comfortable life and perhaps raise a family of her own. Her new husband respects her (although there are some disturbing hints of domestic violence scattered in).

But there is a problem in Mary Kate’s mind. What she is bringing to the marriage is her romantic and sexual capital, she is an attractive woman with the possibility of having children. That is all her new husband wants, that and her ability to make a comfortable home for him, something she goes out of her way to demonstrate to him in the opening scenes. And they love each other - it isn’t just transactional.

So what’s with the whole ‘I won’t have sex with you unless you get me my dowry’ business? Seán Thornton is baffled by this, as are we. Why is she using sex as a lever to manipulate him (and why does she sleep with him anyway?). Is she the grasping selfish money grabbing woman that he accuses her of being? ‘Money, I’m sick of the talk of it, is that all you Danahers think about?’ And if that’s true why isn’t she bothered when he throws the whole lot in the boiler?

The village priest apparently does know the answer ‘it’s a custom, and it’s a good one’. But why is it a good one? Her new husband doesn’t care, so why should she? Mary Kate doesn’t explain, but she does make it clear it isn’t because she doesn’t fancy her husband, she does sleep with him, but runs away the day after because she doesn’t think she can be a proper wife to him without her dowry. What’s going on here?

One interpretation is that the dowry is what Hitchcock referred to as a MacGuffin, that it is a device unimportant in itself but is required to propel the plot forward (for example the piece of microfiche concealed inside the statute in his film ‘North by NorthWest’). In this view the dowry itself is not important - but it’s needed for storyline to give the motivation to the main characters. That’s one take on it.

But here’s mine. We think of the principal characters in ‘The Quiet Man’ as the two main protagonists, Mary Kate and Seán Thornton. But I think there is a third: the community of Inisfree. Thornton is not part of this community (he left Inisfree as a child) and he doesn’t understand its ways, he comes from Pittsburgh a place governed by money where if you wanted something you bought it. He has earned his money by his fists prize fighting. In his world you want something, you buy it, no negotiations necessary or taking other people’s feelings into account. It’s a cash only economy.

But the arrival of Seán Thornton changes the whole dynamic because it means that Mary Kate’s future has changed, she has an alternative happier one. But her brother’s refusal to pay the required dowry means that all the work she had done in the past was for her bed and board only, she is walking away from her brother’s house with nothing else. So the ‘gift’ of her time and effort has not been reciprocated in the way that she expected, and she’s not happy: ‘I’m no better than a servant’. Her brother ‘Red’ Danaher too has reason to be unhappy; he suspects that behind the community conspiracy to marry Mary Kate off to Seán Thornton might be a collective desire part to teach him a lesson in humility - taking away his sister and thus lowering his social standing without giving him the promised-for replacement that he expected in the Widow Tillane. But this is not Mary Kate’s fault - the community of Inisfree did this.

The community do try and intervene on Mary Kate’s behalf to get what is unequivocally hers - her furniture - but they cannot force her brother to pay her dowry. And she is deeply unhappy, because in her eyes her social capital was expended for many years (it’s hinted she may be in her mid thirties) on maintaining her brother’s prestige in the community, giving him a comfortable home, and it has all been for nothing because there is no evidence of it. Her new husband doesn’t understand that she wants this to be acknowledged, that her status as a newly married woman in the community depends not just on her sexual capital but on her bringing her social capital along with her in the form of her dowry. The money itself isn’t the point, it’s the reputation that clings to it.

That’s why she doesn’t care if it’s burnt - there is no dialogue when it’s thrown into the fire in front of the whole delighted agog village who are thoroughly enjoying the drama. She is the one who opens the door of the boiler and invites him to throw it in. But this outrageous and seemingly inexplicable action if anything raises her prestige in the village because now not only is she a woman worth every penny of the £22,000 that her new husband has received with her, he has effectively told the whole village that she’s worth far more than that to him because he’s just burnt it all. And she’s just silently told him that he matters more to her than the money because she invited him to do so. Their joint reputation in the community soars: this is a story that will do the rounds for many years to come.

Her brother ‘Red’ too has also learnt that upsetting his neighbours was a bad idea, his pride has been dented, and his only redress is to accept his defeat with good grace and become friends with his sister and new brother-in-law. As a reward and because he’s shown remorse for his previous unsocial behaviour, he is allowed to court the Widow Tillane who had refused him previously. Viewed this way the dramatic arc of the film is that the unsatisfactory and selfish behaviour of Will Danaher towards his community is ultimately resolved through the inciting incident of Seán Thornton’s arrival and subseqent marriage to his sister via the crisis of the refusal of the dowry and his retraction of his refusal.

The money is burned afterwards because it’s done it’s job and is no longer needed, so it can go up in smoke (so it is actually a sort of MacGuffin). But for a short period the money became the vehicle through which the characters communicated their desires and anxieties to each other: words had failed to do this. It is only the moment when Mary Kate and Seán wordlessly look at each other after the boiler door shuts on the burning cash that they truly understand each other.

Chapter 4. Put-Your-Purse-Away9

The gift economy portrayed in ‘The Quiet Man’ and still present in the 1970s Irish bank strike has now largely disappeared. In most modern Irish households both parents go out to work which means that childcare is carried out, if grandparents are not available, by paid professionals. Likewise care of the elderly is also done by professionals, and more and more of Irish life has been drawn into the net of being monetised. It is easy to be romantic about this; much of this work was what the philosopher Ivan Illich called ‘shadow work’ - necessary work which underpinned the ‘real’ economy but was frequently devalued in the past as unimportant and usually carried out by women.

But there was a huge advantage to this unpaid labour: it could not be taxed and quantified and took place away from the scrutiny of the state. When women started entering the workforce in Ireland in large numbers in the 1980s this work - which still needed to be done - usually fell to other women - most low paid, but taxed. Thus the state got a huge increase in income and a massive expansion into areas of life previously outside its purview.

The bribe for persuading higher status women that outsourcing the care of their children to others was the huge increase in consumer goods and lifestyles that it enabled (again, handing the state even more tax revenue). But this often came at hidden expense, the substitute care was not always as good as being cared for by those who loved you and the vast expansion of consumerism has had high costs in pollution and status anxieties. Thus there is much to ponder on Professor’s Bendell suggestion that society should consider going back to some form of the gift economy and money should be taken out of certain areas of human life.

But what role does that leave for it? Now, if you are still with me and wondering where on earth all this is leading to, I’d like to tell you a little story if I might from the 1990s TV comedy drama ‘Father Ted’ about the adventures of a household of Irish Catholic priests in rural Ireland. One episode in the 1998 third series called ‘The Mainland’ brought back some poignant memories for me. In it the priest’s housekeeper Mrs Doyle takes her friend Mrs Dineen out for tea. At the end of the meal the two women fight over who’s going to pay, both insisting that they will. The fight intensifies with both women eventually ending up being arrested and in a prison cell.

This scene made me laugh because this was only a slight exaggeration of the many, many times I had witnessed my mother and my aunt practically coming to blows over who would pay for a meal to the eye rolling exasperation of everyone around them; I called it the Put-Your-Purse-Away drama. As a teenager I found it baffling, why could they never remember who paid last, and what did it matter so much to them?

But looking back on it I think what they were really doing was negotiating a relationship, who would feel indebted to whom and how comfortable the other party was about it. Too much generosity could be as fatal as too little. The woman who never paid risked earning the dreaded name of being ‘mean’ equally the one who always insisted on paying would soon realise that others viewed her generosity, not as kindness but an unwanted imposition. Previous interactions counted, if you paid the last time then of course it was your turn to pay this time, but you had to let your opponent try, because not to do so would imply that she might not be able to afford it, so to save dignity she had to make an attempt. But you both knew from the start who would ultimately pay. This didn’t stop a whole performance of Put-Your-Purse-Away (sneaky tactics of waiting until someone went to the loo and paying the bill behind their back sometimes happened). It was all so complicated and entertaining for watching bystanders (unless you were the poor waiter who had to stand there waiting for someone to decide who was going to give in first).

The Chinese have now designed a system of social credits, where instead of money people earn social credits which can be offset against opportunities for jobs or housing. In China there would be no need for my mother and aunt to argue, they could just whip out a smartphone app which could show who had paid for the meal the last time so eliminating all the convoluted discussions - Mrs Doyle and Mrs Dineen would avoid jail. But is that really the answer? To take away money and replace it with a gift economy where you can keep track with apps of who owes what to whom. This would give you all the advantages of the gift economy without the messy emotional residue, right?

My mother and my aunt of course would never use an app to decide whose turn it was, not just because neither would ever consider using that sort of technology, but also because very sadly my beloved aunt died young many years ago. My mother and aunt loved each other dearly, but I never heard them use those words to each other - their generation rarely did. Or at least, I didn’t think I did, until I remembered all those Put-Away-Your-Purse fights; now I understand that was a coded way of each woman telling the other how much they valued each other, how important the other’s opinion was to them, in short how much they loved each other. And the way they did this was through the medium of money.

There is certainly serious consideration I think to be given to demonetise various sections of our lives - to consider whether money really should extend its tentacles into every aspect of human life (and abolishing compound interest would be a huge improvement along with its bastard offspring - endless economic ‘growth’). The gift economy could certainly be expanded fruitfully in my view so that the State could retreat to being a framework for human and planetary flourishing - not continue its ruthless march into every aspect of human life (and I’m fully aware that the chances of any of this happening anytime soon are vanishingly tiny).

But if, in a thought experiment, we did radically expand the gift economy I’m really not sure that replacing money with another abstraction like social credits is not going end with us getting into exactly the same mess that we are now. In my view the root of our problems is the illusion that we can quantify everything - that a frictionless life is possible, that the messy business of human life can be sanded down to a smooth world where you just wave away all difficulties through an app. Perhaps the elimination of discomfort, mild irritation or of pain robs us of the opportunities to grow as human beings?

We never do find out what Michael Caine’s great idea for rebalancing the bus between the gang and the gold is and whether it goes over the cliff…..

Thank you for reading

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Father Peter Lonergan: [narrating] Well, then. Now’. I'll begin at the beginnin'. A fine soft day in the spring, it was, when the train pulled into Castletown, three hours late as usual, and Himself got off. (The Quiet Man, 1952)1

1. IRISH TIME

2. COSMIC TIME

3. DREAMTIME

4. TIME TO GO

   ---

READING TIME: 30 mins

Chapter 1. IRISH TIME

One of my guilty pleasures is the US film director John Ford’s 1952 romantic comedy ‘The Quiet Man’ starring Hollywood actor John Wayne and Irish actress Maureen O’Hara about a returning Irish-American emigrant to a West of Ireland village who falls in love with a local girl. Seen through modern eyes the TQM contains some unpleasant Irish stereotypes of drinking and fighting and some shocking misogyny. And yet I have a soft soft for TQM partly because the Oscar winning cinematography of Winton C. Hoch and Archie Stout so lovingly showcases the beauty of its West of Ireland setting.

TQM seems to exist in a kind of time warp, on the one hand the costumes are from 1920s (after the establishment of the Irish Free State), but in the film’s fictional village of Inisfree either the local IRA haven’t got the memo that the British are gone and they can disband, or they are ignoring it. This blurring of time boundaries starts right from the opening lines where the train stopping in Innisfree is ‘three hours late as usual’ implying that here the railway - which in the rest of the world is synonymous with punctuality and reliability - operates in a dilatory, haphazard sort of way (giving the impression Inisfree is an Irish Brigadoon, a place outside time). This is reinforced towards the film’s end when the O’Hara’s Mary Kate tries to run away to Dublin by train, but Wayne’s Sean Thornton has plenty of time to stop her because as usual the Dublin train is late (a credibility stretching four and a half hours).

Are You Right There, Michael?

‘The Quiet Man’ wasn’t the first to lean into the trope of dilatory Irish railway time keeping - one of its first and most celebrated appearances was in the 19th century comic song by the Anglo-Irish composer Percy French ‘Are You Right There, Michael?’ available here which I will abbreviate from now on as AYRTM as I’m too lazy to keep writing it in full (hey, I’m Irish after all).

The story behind AYRTM is that on Monday the 10th of August 1896, Percy French, its composer, was on his way to Kilkee by train from Sligo (a distance of roughly 250 km) to give a musical performance in a local hotel. French was on the West Clare narrow gauge railway when - only miles from his audience at Moore’s Concert Hall in Kilkee - he sat in mounting frustration for five hours in a railway carriage behind the train’s broken down engine. When he finally arrived breathless at Moore’s Hall, he found it deserted because his audience had given up on him (even Irish audiences have their limits) and gone home and with them disappeared his anticipated earnings for the trip.

French then sued the West Clare Railway £10 for loss of earnings which they refused to pay. This act of corporate pettiness was, to quote Julie Roberts in the 1990 film ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘A big mistake, huge!’ as it inspired French to pick up his pen and write the comic song AYRTM. Across the British Isles music hall audiences rocked in laughter to the lines:

The West Clare Railway Company’s ill-advised response to this clever revenge song
(in one of the earliest examples of ‘the Streisand effect2) was to counter-sue French for libel. This gifted French the priceless PR opportunity of turning up an hour late to the hearing in the local Clare town Ennis, claiming to the court that his tardiness was because he had travelled there by the West Clare Railway3 - boom! - whereupon to peals of laughter from the delighted Dublin journalists in the public gallery the case was dismissed by Baron Palles, the presiding judge. Ouch….

Contrary to what the lyrics of AYRTM implied, the real reason for French’s delay on the West Clare Railway that August day was mechanical, weeds had got into the engine’s boiler making it unsafe to run. However AYRTM laid the fault of the West Clare’s chronic unreliability solely at the door of its supposedly lacksadasical Irish workforce. French wasn’t above bending the truth for comedic purposes, for instance his funny, but made-up excuse for his lateness: he’d travelled from Dublin that day and unless he’d taken the highly unlikely step of travelling right around the Irish coast to take the West Clare railway to Ennis, he told the court a fairly obvious fib (although you get the impression that His Honor might been waiting for an excuse to take a pop at the locally unpopular West Clare Railway).

But in AYRTM French was probably casting the blame on the wrong people. The West Clare Railway was part owned by the avaricious William Martin Murphy - a powerful Dublin businessman later responsible for Ireland’s biggest ever industrial dispute in 1913, the Great Dublin Lock-Out. Thus its local reputation for chronic unreliability was more likely to have been down to underinvestment, poor maintenance due to understaffing rather than employee incompetence.4But because stereotypes of the Irish as shifty, unreliable and lazy had already well seeded into British popular culture by then French’s AYRTM played straight into these and roars of laughter were directed at the working class Irish railway staff of the West Clare. French coming from the privileged Anglo-Irish middle classes, was punching down on them, perhaps judging that taking a direct pop at the likely real culprit, the West Clare’s powerful owner Martin-Murphy would be too dangerous (but who sued him anyway for reputational damage).

Chapter 2. COSMIC TIME

Time Lord…..?5

This slur on Irish railway staff timekeeping in both the song and implied in ‘The Quiet Man’ is ironic because it was in Ireland that the whole basis for the standarisation of railway (and thereafter all) world time keeping was conceived. In July 1867, after a pleasant day on a Donegal beach, the Scots-Canadian railway engineer Sandford Fleming turned up to the small railway station of Bundoran - only to find that the 5.35 pm train that he planned to catch back to the port of Derry was not coming, that there was in fact no 5.35 pm train at all that day, and that he had therefore also missed his ferry back to Scotland.

Either Fleming had misread the timetable (which he denied) or there was a misprint - because the only train from Bundoran that day was the long departed 5.35 am thus stranding Fleming in a tiny rural Donegal station waiting room until next morning’s train. But, like the good Victorian he was, Fleming presented with an unexpected time window spent it dreaming up the twenty four hour clock (thus getting rid of the am and pm problem that caused his hiatus). Clearly on a roll, Fleming at the same time thought up the globe spanning concept of a Prime Time Meridian and 15 standard time zones offset from it (although his suggestion of calling this ‘Cosmic Time’ was sadly dropped later in favour of the more boring Greenwich Mean Time - I’d much rather have lived in the former). He later laid out these ideas in his 1879 memoir ‘Terrestrial Time’ and became a key promoter of and participant in the 1884 Washington D.C. International Meridian conference which enshrined the Prime Time Meridian and time zones into international law, the time matrix under which the entire planet still lives.

This conference established Greenwich in London as the Prime Meridian from which all global time is measured, which it remains to this day. Not everyone was onboard with this, the French in particular saw this as a massive soft power expansion of the the British Empire, and they held out for Paris instead being the Prime Meridian until 1911 (this wasn’t just idle talk, in 1894 the French anarchist Martial Bordin attempted to blow up Greenwich Observatory in protest against the global imposition of GMT - dying of his injuries in the attempt - a tragic end to what might have been the punchline to a joke about ‘blowing up time’).

In 1972 the time set by the Greenwich Prime Meridian and its offsets was renamed Universal Standard Time and it is still the mechanism by which the lives of billions of people across the world regulate their daily lives6. Thus from the factory horns of the early 19th century which echoed across Northern mill towns, to the stop watches used on the Somme in 1916 to go over the top, to the strokes of Big Ben at the Millenium Dome in Greenwich; all these ultimately derived from Stanford Fleming thoughts in a damp Irish train station waiting room: a man who must rank as one of the most influential, yet unknown, people in world history.

The Angelus Bell o’er the Liffey swells…7

Although it had originated there, this influence was not immediately felt in Ireland itself as until September 1916 local time in Ireland (known as Dublin Mean Time) was set by the timing of the midday sun in Dunsink Observatory near Dublin- and since Dunsink is further West than Greenwich it was 25 minutes and 31 seconds behind GMT. However this changed abruptly in September 1916 when in a shock move without any prior consultation with any Irish parliamentary representatives (who only found out about it a few hours beforehand) a surprise parliamentary bill which changed the time in Ireland to be the same as the UK mainland was rushed (railroaded?) through the House of Commons despite any evidence that anyone in Ireland has asked for, or wanted it.

In Ireland this immediately generated the suspicion that the real reason for the British government’s unseemly haste in synchronising the time zones of both islands was not its official explanation (business demand, for which no evidence was ever produced) but because instead during the 1916 Easter Rising earlier that year the time difference between London and Dublin had snarled up communications between the British Armed Forces sent to Dublin to put it down and London. One person who certainly thought so was the Irish aristocrat and firebrand Countess Markievicz - who had herself narrowly escaped execution for her part in that rebellion and was currently ‘serving time’ in Holloway prison in England as a result. She complained from her prison cell there that Irish Time itself had been bludgeoned into submission and forced to submit to its English counterpart.

This added weight to the growing popular perception in Ireland when it suited the British Establishment Irish democratically elected MPs in the House of Commons were ignored and may have contributed in small part to the growing public pivot away from the parliamentary Irish Home Rule party towards the more radical Sinn Féin movemtn who advocated the creation of an Irish Republic. In 1918 Sinn Fein won a landslide electoral victory obliterating the Home Rule movement and Markievicz herself became the first ever female Member of Parliament (although as she was still in jail she never took her seat in the House of Commons).

(If you’d like to read a bit more about this here:

https://michaelcommane.blogspot.com/2014/10/calling-time.html.)

Closin’ walls and ticking clocks….8

Tensions between Irish and England timekeeping had deep roots, as far back as the early 18th Jonathan Swift, the famous author and Dean of St Patrick’s Catheral in Dublin, in his 1726 comic novel ‘Gulliver Travels’ had portrayed English Enlightenment luminaries like Sir William Petty and Sir Isacc Newton as slaves to the newly fashionable pocket watch, constantly checking it like the smartphone of its day.

The 17th pocket watch that Newton and Petty sported was the latest refinement of the mechanical clock, invented by monks in the early modern period to regulate the daily schedule for prayer. As one of my correspondents quoting from Neil Postman’s 1992 book ‘Technopoly’ said:

This shifting of the regulation of daily activities away from natural solar phenomenon to a piece of man made mechanical technology; the clock and then on to the pocket watch, was a sesmic shift in the abstraction of time which only accelerated in the centuries that followed. In the 19th century at strict time intervals factory bells and horns summoned crowds of clog wearing workers across smoky industrial cities across the UK (in the absence of alarm clocks many towns had a ‘knocker upper’ who went from house to house tapping on bedroom windows to wake workers).

In the mid 19th century the arrival of the railways with their constellation of timetables, whistles and which produced the regular assembly of individuals unconnected with each other for the sole purpose of travelling had the effect of creating a new rigid type of global time culture (much of the comic value of AYRTM came from its subversion of these societial expectations, the railways ran on time everywhere else in the UK, except in Ireland).

19th century Britain and Ireland were Christian cultures and this meant that even the most rapacious Victorian factory owner had to give their workers Sundays off for church services. But this sole break in the working week of the urban working classes gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘Saint Monday’ where workers who had used the day to go to the pub rather than church turned up the following day hungover or late for work (or not at all). In 1843 to discourage this, and also to give hard-pressed factory workers a wider window for relaxation a petition was launched in Manchester to make Saturdays a half holiday, thus allowing the city to claim the invention of the ‘weekend’ (and I cannot resist shoehorning in here my favorite 2010 scene in the ITV British period drama ‘Downton Abbey’ when Maggie Smith’s Countess of Grantham imperiously asks her family ‘What is a weekend?’).

Former railway entrepeneurs like the Scottish writer Samuel Smile’s 1845 ‘Self Help’ book transposed this new matrix of time management from factories and railways onto other areas of life, mantras like ‘time is money’ and warnings against ‘time wasting’ were drummed into every Victorian school child. Smiles’ book was hugely influential and popular in Victorian society, eagerly embraced by the upper classes and factory owners who quickly saw in it a powerful new lever to manage the supposedly idle urban working classes.

To enable this, regimes of clocks and bells in Victorian school rooms primed generation after generation of Irish and British school children to obediently fit their future lives around the disparate requirements of factory horns, drill sergeants, or railway schedules. Further cultural reinforcement came from the contemporary poems, songs and novels which valorised these values. One of the most influential was Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 If:

(which quoted at me in my school days not all that long ago).

Not even religion escaped these new rigidity around temporal norms, for example in the late 19th century under the autocratic Cardinal Paul Cullen the previously relaxed religious practices of pre-Famine Irish Catholicism gave way to his insistence on a strict regime of regular Mass attendance for all Irish Catholics. His creation of a new standard liturgical calendar tightened the iron grip of Rome on the Irish Catholic Church and made no concessions to local customs,10 weather conditions or agricultural needs like harvesting or turf cutting. Sunday Masses were held at the same times, rain or shine and every man, woman and child in the parish was expected to go (whether they wanted to or not, I remember a rebuke from the pulpit by our local priest who in a sermon remarked that he had noticed some parishioners were arriving to the church car park on Sunday, loudly banging their car doors to signal they were fulfilling their societal expectation and then quietly getting back in and sitting out the Mass in the car park, I wondered then why he was telling the church congregation rather than going out to the car park and remonstrating with them?).

A further tightening of the net of time around the lives of the urban working classes came from the Irish-American industrialist Henry Ford who leveraged ideas about time borrowed from the early 20th century US industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor to improve his factories productivity. Like Gulliver tied down by a thousand ropes, workers in Ford factories then found themselves accounting for every minute of their working day. These ideas then percolated throughout society in the years that followed until they became part of the silent drumbeat of modern life and undergirded the secular myths of ‘time management’ and ‘optimising’ cultures.

Chapter 3. DREAMTIME

Mad Dogs and Englishmen…11

These ideas about time incubated in the railways and factories of the British Isles fanned out across the globe carried by the missionaries, merchants, armies and navys of the British Empire. A 2012 book by Giurando Nanni called ‘The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire’ describes this process in depth; describing how indigenous societies like the Australian bushmen - who had previously regulated their lives by natural phenomena like the cycles of the natural world and had their own religious ontology of the ‘Dreamtime’ - were trapped inside an alien regime of bells and clocks which bifurcated their lives into ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ in ways that made little sense to them. The colonisers were as harsh on themselves as on the natives often maintaining daily schedules that owed more to far distant English weather conditions than to common sense; as the 1931 Noel Coward patter song thrills: ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’.

But this was not the only disconnection from physical reality which Nanni points out the British Empire was responsible; a particularly jarring of which was when the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere were imposed on Australia and New Zealand, despite being wildly inappropriate to local conditions ‘winter’ occurring in the hottest period of the Antipodean year. Australian bushmen had migratory hunting and agricultural patterns linked to these natural cycles but were forced out of them into regimented sedentary lifestyles under Empire, thus making it much easier for colonists to steal these hunting grounds, often at gunpoint.

But the most powerful weapon of the colonisers was education and generations of Aboriginal children were taken away from their families, put into boarding schools which trained them into a punitive alien time culture policed by bells and watches the better to shape them into obedient agricultural workers, miners or servants in the new white owned Australia. This often met with Aborigine resistance, in particular, as Nanni relates, their tendency to go ‘walkabout’ or finding other ways of subtly undermining the dominant time culture of the colonisers. This fuelled white accusations of supposed native ‘laziness’ (this might also have been an Irish strategy, as French’s song suggests) and was used as further evidence to justify the egregious theft of native land under the pretext that this land was ‘terra nullis’, that the natives merely sat around all day doing nothing making no use of it.

Colonisation had a catastrophic effect on the indigneous Australian populations whose numbers plummeted and who still suffer from its effects in the 21st century. White Australia has been very slow to acknowledge these harms to the Aborigine population but attitudes are gradually shifting and the theft of indigneous land was highlighted in the powerful 1987 protest song ‘Beds are Burnings’ by Midnight Oil:

As well as accusations of laziness, another more subtle weapon flexed against recalcritant natives across the British Empire was mockery - AYRTM is an Irish example of the genre. Another example of this punching down ‘humour’ was in 1987 when a cartoon depicting the offensive lazy/stupid native Aborigine trope appeared in ‘The Australian’ newspaper run by News Corp (owned by the Murdoch family) and sparked widespread protests. But this phenomeon is not unique to the British Empire, Frantz Fanon in his seminal 1961 book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ about the psychic effects of colonisation points out that supposed ‘laziness’ may in fact be the only form of resistance left to the colonised when all other forms are rendered too dangerous, being a form of, what is called in the American military, ‘dumb insolence’.

The colonisation of Irish time was no less thorough or ruthless than elsewhere in the British Empire or in the UK itself; the division of the island after independence likely meant that - despite periodic suggestions otherwise - the whole island remains on the same time zone as the UK mainland (although I remember the patronising English drawl of a pilot on a flight into Northern Ireland in the mid 1990s telling us passengers ‘We are arriving in Belfast - put your watch back by 300 years….)

Chapter 4. TIME TO GO

Life in the Fast Lane….13

But this imposition on Ireland of an alien time culture wasn’t always unnoticed or unchallenged. In the handover scene from the 1996 film ‘Michael Collins’ directed by Neil Jordan, Alan Stanford, playing the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland Lord FitzAlan resplendent in an ostriched trimmed hat, brandishes a pocket watch at Liam Neeson’s Collins (dressed as a general in the Irish Army) arriving for the military flag-lowering ceremony snapping at him ‘You are seven minutes late, Mr Collins‘ to which Collins retorts ‘We’ve been waiting 700 years; you can have your seven minutes’

But this is not what happened that grey afternoon on the 16th of January 1922 where the official handover had no uniforms, flag lowering, military parades or pageantry of any kind. Instead Collins and his colleagues dressed in trilby hats, ties and business suits jumped out of their taxis at the front door of Dublin Castle for a brief 45 minute meeting in a boardroom with British civil servants (where he made no pretence of bonhomie with his former enemies). Afterwards in order to avoid the waiting press - Collins dashed out of a backdoor (where happily for me he was snapped by an on-the-ball photographer). I find this brief glimpse of Collins caught blurrily mid stride very poignant since he seems to have barrelled through his short life at top speed, almost as if he knew how little time he had. This hurry extended to his personal life too: ‘In Great Haste’: the collected letters between Collins and his patient fianceé Kitty Kiernan published in 1996 got its title from Collin’s sign off to her on most of them.

But ‘Michael Collins’ doesn’t get everything about the handover wrong; Collins was indeed late for it, although Neeson’s quip to the Lord Lieutenant never happened, 14 - it can’t have done, because Collins wasn’t seven minutes late. Instead on the 16th of January 1922 at the scheduled handover at exactly 12 noon between the British Crown’s most senior Irish representatives and their revolutionary replacements, Collins and his colleagues finally turned up at 1:40 pm leaving the Crown’s most senior civil servants cooling their heels in Dublin Castle for a full hour and forty minutes.

To avoid a diplomatically humiliating wait, the Lord Lieutenant Lord Fitzalan was only summoned from the Vice-Regal Lodge in the Phoenix Park when the mandarins in Dublin Castle were sure Collins was on his way to the Castle. Collins’ biographer Tim Pat Coogan recorded that one of them, the Under Secretary James McMahon (perhaps with a touch of sarcasm) remarked to Collins on his eventual arrival ‘We’re glad to see you, Mr Collins’ to which he replied in his heavy West Cork accent ‘Ye are like hell, boy!’

The Castle’s official explanation to the waiting press was that Collins’ lateness was due to ‘travelling delays’, but I find that hard to believe, Collins was very well organised and lateness was a particular bugbear of his. In 1920 for instance he had made the grim point of scheduling a mass assassination of British police informants at exactly 9am on November 21st, 1920 by his notorious ‘Murder Squad’ because:

Perhaps the murderous determination he showed then hints at a hidden smouldering resentment against the widely disseminated perception in the British press that the Irish were unfit for self governance; that the new Irish Free State would be run like the West Clare Railway in AYRTM by charming, but ineffectual amateurs and after its inevitable slide into decline and poverty it would have to invite back its firm, but kindly former British masters to rescue it. 16

But in my opinion Collins saw right through this fiction knowing that behind its mask of benevolence the real aims of the British Empire (and every other Empire) was the exploitation of the land of Ireland and its people. He said as much in the debates supporting the acceptance of the Anglo Irish Treaty in 1922 - that the story of occupation was:

In my view a key part of that slow economic encroachment was through the gradual ratching up of an alien and punitive time culture which subtly hijacked the ability of Irish people to order their lives as they chose (which also happened at the same time to the UK working classes). This happened so slowly and quietly that few in Ireland noticed it, much as at the same time the best fruits of the Irish countryside were also disappearing across the Irish Sea without notice.

GLUED TO OUR PHONES

The British Empire has long gone from Irish shores but it is not difficult today to see its modern day parallels in its monopolisation of attention and time in the corporate giants of Silicon Valley. These companies hook today’s generations through smartphones and social media, relentlessly monetising these addictions regardless of the social and emotional consequences. Smartphones themselves are made from the coltan and colbalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo, daily ships laden with these mineral riches sail from her ports to the Global North while the local Congolese population starve, again without much media comment. Giant US social media companies also exploit other workforces of the Global South with content moderators there working for a pittance whilst being subjected to horrendous online tramatising content.

Some of the ways that today’s corporate Empires reel their users in is through viral memes like funny cat Tik-Tok short-form reels. But there was in my view an early forerunner of this insidious content where surface humour is a mask for a more sinister content - for example the comic music hall songs of the 19th century like AYRTM which painted the rural Irish working classes as ‘lazy’ and incapable of running a small country railway properly, thus subtly undermining popular support in both the UK and Ireland for the Irish independence movement (I know, I know see the footnote for caveats).17

But if this was the case what would a sophisticated response to such a pernicious and enduring falsehood look like? Perhaps in 1922 it might be to deliberately lean into it and wrestle the time of the handover back from the British - to make them wait - to underline the point that it was an Irishman to decide when it was time for Ireland to be free, that Irish time was for Irish people to live in, to spend as they chose. Collins once mused philosophically:

Or maybe that damp January day in Dublin, he just couldn’t find a taxi……

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The Skin of a Living Thought…

‘He’s not happy, he wants to do the interview again’. In the early years of the millenium I remember taking an apologetic phone call from a local authority contact asking me to return to their site to repeat the video conferencing interview that I’d just done. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely surprised by the phone call; I had a feeling that this might happen at some point. This is a story of words, silences and how they weave together in different ways.

It was the early days of video conferencing - long before Zoom or COVID - when I was engaged in a research project for a North West English town council and video conferencing at the time was confined to very few business settings, most ordinary people had never come across it. But this council had decided to experiment using it in their Trading Standards department and I was brought in to do a research project comparing the experience of a group of users using video against a face-to-face setup. (I suspect what the council really wanted to do was make a case for shutting various face to face facilities and they needed supporting evidence that remote video conferencing worked just as well). I was doing an academic project on technical communication at the time and needed a topic so of course this was a perfect opportunity to test what was then a novel form of communication (which of course became ubiquitous in the decades that followed).

I tried as far as possible in the design of the research to remove any factors which would have privileged either modality; I had worked in information technology for some years and was favourably disposed towards video conferencing believing that it would provide an equivalent experience. But to my surprise, that was not at all what I actually found.

Instead it became immediately obvious to me that the interviews using video conferencing differed significantly from face-to-face communication. For example the man who wanted to repeat his interview was in a foul mood immeditately afterwards even though he had successfully followed the script, we had got on well, and there was no apparent problem. But he was sufficiently upset to contact the council directly afterwards (they were responsible for contact details) to demand that he be allowed to redo the interview (which I duly did, although I did not include the second interview in the results). He couldn’t explain why he was so upset, it could just have been down to his personality, but it was obvious to me at that point in the research that he was not alone - that the other subjects using video also found the process unsettling and much harder work than the face-to-face subjects did. I might have, in other words, recorded one of the first instances of what is now known as ‘Zoom fatigue’.

It wasn’t the verbal content of the interviews themselves that was the problem, as these were identical in both cases and these were ficitious simple complaints. It was just that the subjects completely altered their body language, tone, pacing and posture speaking to the camera and this seemed to put them in a different and worse mood afterwards. In other words:

the technology significantly changed the way people communicated and how they felt about the communication.

My report afterwards waffled on about non verbal cues and the value of shared visual objects like documents - but I couldn’t squash the central findings that people were far less happy talking to a camera than they were talking to a person. The words used in the face-to-face interviews and video interviews were the same - but the context had shifted. People in the video settings were working much harder to convey meaning and without receiving any feedback from another person, they were less satisfied with the interaction. They spoke, but they didn’t feel heard.

I voiced my opinion at the end of the study that the council might pay for any cost savings it made with public dissatisfaction. Not surprisingly I never heard anything back, and the report probably got quietly shelved or binned.

One of the things I did notice in those ill fated interviews was the different ways that silence was intrepreted between them. When someone fell silent in the face-to-face interview it was obvious that they were thinking about how to reply, or that they didn’t wish to answer. Sometimes their silence signalled that they were tired and had had enough - the silences and pauses in the face-to-face interviews also altered the sense of the words around them, acting almost like rests in musical notation, weaving differing meanings and subtly tweaking the atmosphere.

Conversely in the video interviews, it was as if the technology drew a veil over this undercurrent in the conversation. Perhaps this is why several of them found the experience unsettling and why one of them was upset enough to demand to redo the interview. It would be difficult to find a similar cohort of people today as familarity with smart phones and video calling is ubiquitous post COVID. But the people in my study had never used video before (for some it was their first experience of computers) and their reactions to it were revealing, almost as if an uncontacted tribe had suddenly been introduced to television. They understood the language being used - but they did not yet understand the grammar of the medium (which of course brings to mind McLuhlan’s famous dictum that ‘the medium is the message’).

The Sound of Silence….

Ivan Illich, the famous philosopher and writer - who himself spoke several languages - talked about the difficulty of intrepreting silences in differing languages and cultural settings. Silence in one setting may be a sign of acquiesence, and in another a sign of resistance, it takes time and cultural knowledge to correctly decipher it and many never can. Silence can also be an act of resistance in the face of attempts to exert hegemony or dominance. One place that is acutely aware of this is Northern Ireland where the famous mantra is ‘whatever you say, say nothing’.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing…

This of course is the title of Seamus Heaney’s famous 1975 poem about how people in Northern Ireland negotiated the often complex territories of language, power and identity. What is not asked in conversation there is often as powerful as was is discussed openly - the gaps in conversations providing an undercurrent that few apart from natives can successful negotiate and intrepret.

That strategic silence was a crucial weapon well understood by those interacting with the security services in Northern Ireland, the famous mantra ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ was not just an injunction to individuals to carefully police their language, it was also a reminder of the potential of language to distract and mislead, as a cloak for reality either by active lies or by strategic witholding of information.

You have the Right to Remain Silent….

Of course the security services in Northern Ireland were fully aware of this tactic and in 1988 this prompted the hasty introduction of an order limiting the rights of suspects to rely on the previously long enshrined police caution ‘you have the right to remain silent’. Amnesty International complained at the time that:

The Order limits the right of silence of all criminal suspects in Northern Ireland. Thus the government was able to change in Northern Ireland, in short order and without public debate or parliamentary scrutiny, a well-established principle of jurisprudence which is still the subject of heated debate in England and Wales.

The ‘well established principle of jurisprudence’ they referred to in English Common law ‘the right to remain silent’ dated from the seventeenth century and it was to prevent individuals self incriminating themselves by accident (similar rights exist in the US under the ‘Miranda warning’).

But the 1988 order in Northern Ireland undermined this by the addition of the clause ‘but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court’ - thus the state weaponized silence against the citizen, and this was then extended to the rest of the United Kingdom. Thus the strategic silences of ‘say nothing’ could now be turned against those who employed it.

Words, words, words…..

Today there is an tsunami of spoken or written words - there can hardly have been a time in human history in my view where language, either spoken or written have achieved such prominence in human consciousness. The adept and fluent use of words is considered by many to be the hallmark of a civilised individual and this creation is through education.

Language in this view is an imaginal commons; the dictionary definition of words providing a set of neutral tools or tokens which can be passed between individuals as a means of negotiating shared realities. Those people who can command the most words, those who possess the most tokens are at the most advantage and can navigate the world best.

This seems like a silly question - the most obvious and common sense answer being that language is to carry meanings between different people; to convey a shared reality between human beings using verbal or written representations.

I have recently watched two interviews. The first was by the Guardian journalist Carole Cadwallar was a moving, passionate, brilliant denunication of the dangers that Silicon Valley and AI were presenting to journalism and to the world in general in a TED talk. It was brave, intelligent, crystal clear…….and futile.

She herself said that she noticed during her talk while most of her audience were supportive, there was a visible section who were openly hostile and she could feel their aggression radiating towards her.

Then I watched the second interview of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He was fluent, apparently reasonable and extremely articulate but there was one moment in the interview which stood out for me.

This was when the interviewer put to him that a cartoon produced by AI in the style of Charlie Brown, but done without the creators’ permission, was an act of intellectual theft. Some of the audience at this point started to applaud and Altman’s reaction, ignoring the question entirely - was to wave at them dismissively saying:

What was so revealing about this was what Altman chose not to do.

He didn’t attempt to defend his position, or to negotiate the meaning of the word ‘theft’ with his interviewer - which would have acknowledged it as a morally charged act.

He ignored clear public disapproval in support of the interviewer’s question - choosing instead to ignore it entirely, indicating his disdain in a hand wave both for the interviewer’s question and for the audience.

In other words, Altman apparently saw the invocation of the word ‘theft’ in the interview, not as an invitation for a serious discussion or an opportunity to negotiate the reality being invoked, but instead as part of a power play between him and the interviewer, a verbal wrestling match in which only one party could win.

And the strategy he reached for to exert dominance over his interviewer was strategic silence - to entirely ignore the question - disregarding the word ‘theft’ and thus draining it of legitimacy - if ‘theft’ elicts no reaction, then no one can be accused of it.

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a large language model commonly known as Artifical Intelligence which run on the tokenization of language treating words as individual data points in an ongoing iterative process.

But in my view there is a significant issue with this, in his model - silence or other situational cues are entirely absent, they are wholly depend on words (while this is also true in the earlier shift from oral to written cultures compensatory mechanisms like education process which provide cultural settings like schools or libraries for the intrepretations of text were developed - this is not true yet of interactions with AI).

As with the subjects in my long ago experiment - the use of AI strips language entirely away from its embodied and situational context. The human party to this interaction is at a disadvantage here - they may understand the language used in the responses given by AI, but in my view we do not yet have the tools to understand the emotional toll that it may take on us nor do we fully understand the relationship that we are co creating with. Regardless of what we believe is giving us the answer, what is the process of asking the question eliciting in us? Is our silence on receiving our answer from AI replete with gratitude or dread? And how do we intrepret the silences we might experience interacting with AI? Are they technical glitchs, or is it something more portenous? Is the instant availability of answers an advantage, or a threat to our mental well being.

This points to a more insidious danger that Illich talked about in 1982, long before the development of smartphones, remote video or Artificial Intelligence, a warning that is astonishingly prescient.

Mansfield Park (MP) is one of the most interesting and overlooked of Jane Austen’s six novels in my view - despite it being the least popular with many of her readership. Its heroine is a timid, frightened bullied child for much of the novel and its ending is darker - the sole happy marriage overshadowed by the shattered ruined lives of the novel’s supporting characters.

Many readers down the years have taken its sombre ending as an indication that MP is simply not as good as the other Austen novels - that it is an interesting, if rare failure, by Austen. But I think this is a mistake. Although Austen’s novels are superficially similar - all variations on the courtship/marriage theme - she explored a wide range of social and political issues under the hood of this plot, and this is particularly true of MP in my view.

Here I believe Austen pushed her readership into much more mature and sophisticated territory by forcing them to question their championing of characters based on their charm and wit. Witty, pretty and charming, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is an easy heroine to root for - but Fanny Price in MP is a bullied child/woman in an unfriendly and hostile environment for much of the novel. Some of this emotional discomfort I think leaks into the reader’s consciousness generating visceral dislike from some. For instance in 1917 Reginald Farrer referred to Fanny as the ‘prig-pharisee’, Kingsley Amis said in 1963 that Fanny was ‘morally detestable’. Even Austen’s own mother said of Fanny that she was ‘insipid’.

But is it possible that this is exactly the effect that Austen wanted to produce? She is after all, the only character in Austen’s oeureve where the narrator steps directly into the narrative to claim protective ownership saying -

‘My Fanny indeed at this time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing’,1

This effect is heightened in MP by Austen presenting Fanny in direct contrast with a more superficially attractive counterpart: Mary Crawford, an intelligent attractive foil who trades witty barbs with Edmund, often in Fanny’s anguished, but silent, presence. This is a high risk, but brave strategy on Austen’s part - as the readership are now presented with an easy attractive alternative and Austen must have known that some of them at least will jump ship and transfer their allegiance away from Fanny.

To compound the effect Fanny is then taken away from the comfort zone of an upper class house to the hard scrabble settings of the Price’s home in Portsmouth - full of dirt and disorder. I think Austen asutely anticipates that this may be another reason for some of her readers to project their dislike onto Fanny - who in her refusal to marry Henry Crawford and defying her uncle has put them here.2 Being around Fanny, in short is a bit of a buzz killer compared to Mary Crawford. This in itself may be a red flag that Austen is deliberately toying with her readership, the better to get us to question us our initial reactions. We may be placed in the position of an Elizabeth Bennet:

I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason.

The Portsmouth scenes in MP also dig a bit deeper under the surface of the economic realities of Georgian England - being poor then was not pleasant or easy. Some of her rich characters in MP behave badly, but in her Portsmouth scenes Austen is clear eyed about the moral risks of poverty. Fanny’s mother and father respond to the economic pressures on them by behaving in ways that invite our contempt - one a slattern and the other a drunk.

All of Austen’s novels circle around money - or the lack of it. In P&P she doesn’t sugarcoat the dilemma of being a woman dependent on male provision, but Mr Bennet is a gentleman farmer, his money comes from the land around his comfortable house and there is nothing disreputable about it.

In contrast in MP Austen hints strongly that the big house and affluent lifestyle enjoyed by the Bertrams comes from a much more morally dubious source - the slave plantations of the Carribbean. The name of the house and the novel ‘Mansfield Park’ is - I believe - a reference to Chief Justice Mansfield - whose judgement against slavery in 1772 was a key plank of the abolition movement (and since many of Austen’s relatives were abolitionists its very likely that she knew of the case). She makes a point about Sir Thomas going to his sugar plantations in Antigua (which used enslaved labour). In one of the novel’s most memorable scenes Fanny asks him directly about the slave trade - a brave question from a teenage girl to a powerful older man - which goes pointedly unanswered.

As well as the brutality of far away slave plantations Georgian England itself was not the serene, placid rural idyll often depicted in screen adaptations of Austen’s work. Regency England was a time of state paranoia around imminent Napolenic invasion and elite anxiety about the possibility of popular revolt in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Irish 1798 rebellion. The armed militia which appears in P&P in the nearby town of Meryton - although for the Bennet girls only a source of exciting new opportunities for socialising - was really there because the authorities expected either foreign invasion, or as a visible show of strength to deter popular discontent. Mrs Bennet might have loved a scarlet uniform but to the rest of the population they were a visible warning of the potential for violence.

That threat was not just a figment of official imagination - although barely hinted at in Austen’s novels where physical violence rarely features - the enclosure of the commons by large landowners like Mr Bennet resulted in vast crowds of impoverished rural inhabitants pouring into the cities and this caused regular countrywide food riots. The official response to this was often gratuitous violence like the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. The militia stationed in large ‘man camps’ dotted around the country were in themselves a potential source of drunkness, disorder and violence in the communities they were situated (Mr Bennet might not have been alone in breathing a sigh of relief when the militia left Meryton).

But the risk of being on the receiving end of violence from marauding soldiers, or falling foul of the draconian penal system where even minor crimes were punished by execution or transportation was not the only way that Georgian England exerted power over its citizens. Even those further up the social scale who challenged the existing power structures left themselves open to severe reputational damage. Women were uniquely vulnerable to this type of attack - for example Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire involved herself in political campaigning for the Whig party and thus made herself a target for outrageous sexual innuendoes and smear campaigns from the popular and gutter press (what might be regarded today as a ‘monstering’).

Austen, as a single woman from the lower middle classes without a private income was particularly vulnerable in this society and therefore had to be very cautious. She retained her privacy as long as she could, publishing anonymously as ‘A Lady’ or ‘The Author’ in several of her novels - in an attempt to deflect criticism. But Austen also had to contend with another more intimate threat - she was wholly dependent on her male relatives for support. This circumscribed what she could and could not write about - if she strayed too far outside the confines of what her male relatives approved of - by for instance, a direct critique of the slave trade then it is likely that she would have put under pressure by them not to publish (that she was even allowed to do so at all was remarkable in the circumstances).

There is a tiny sad vignette from her biography by Claire Tomalin when Austen was staying at her rich brother Edward’s mansion house in Kent and she asked him to arrange travel for her to a friend’s house because as a woman she couldn’t travel alone. This was only begrudgingly given when she had to reveal some ‘particular private reasons’ to him for her journey. In other words her brother (a rich man who had leaned heavily on his sister for childcare over the years) made her grovel to him as his price for minor help to her. This might go some way to explaining Austen’s focus on money in the novels, she knew what the lack of it meant and the price it could extract in personal dignity. But there is no evidence that she ever voiced this resentment to Edward directly - she couldn’t, because the power imbalance between them was so great (and her sister Cassandra made sure to destroy any indiscreet letters after her death).

This in my view directly informs Austen’s writing - powerful patriarchs like Sir Thomas in MP are very carefully drawn, mixing praise and cautious criticism, tip toeing around their flaws in ways that Austen herself must have done around men like her brother in real life. She does not say directly that Sir Thomas is an emotionally cold man whose income comes from human trafficking, but between the lines she does hint at it very strongly (and perhaps some of the function of the novels for Austen herself was to be a safety valve for this psychic tension, where Austen could subtly point out the flaws of the powerful men around her without being caught).

There is a modern precedent for this kind of double think - and it is brillantly described in the book by the Czech author ‘The Captive Mind’, this describes the experiences of those in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the Second World War where Soviet imposed ideological systems were internalised by constant repetition, education and state propaganda. Those who disagreed with the official line were forced by the all pervasive propaganda and constant state surveillance to adopt a kind of cognitive dissonance, saying one thing in public whilst believing something different in private. This he refers to as the practice of ‘ketman’ and he describes the cognitive juggling it requires, the retreat of the private self into limited settings amongst trusted companions (the more limited these opportunities become, the greater the pressure on the individual psyche - and Fanny’s lowest point in MP comes when her only trusted friend Edmund appears to desert her)

This is of course also a form of acting and it touches on the danger that Austen presents in the play ‘Lover’s Vows’ in MP - acting is a form of pretence which carries the danger of tipping into reality - words spoken in pretence can turn into genuine feelings. This is also a constant risk in highly authorian societies where constant repetition of the party line can become an integral part of an individual’s character, leaving those who disagree often left with a type of cognitive dissonance where they must hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time - a public and a private persona. Although this is a form of survival strategy, it can come at high personal cost as the constant cognitive juggling it requires can sometimes result in depression - something Austen herself is believed to have suffered from.

Austen in my opinion showed in her writing as well some indications of this ketman- juggling differing points of views in the ways that she draws male characters like Sir Thomas in MP. On the one hand, he is presented sympathetically as someone who has rescued Fanny from a life of immiseration and given her a comfortable home, and in the main, treats her with respect. But on the other the home he offers is paid for by the work of enslaved human beings thousands of miles away, so Fanny’s comfort is ultimately drawn from their misery - and she knows it.

But Fanny cannot afford to think or question this too much, as to do so is to threaten her own security. Her question to Sir Thomas about slavery is unanswered, because unanswerable, if Sir Thomas acknowledges that what he is doing is immoral on his slave plantations then the whole edifice upon which the economic security of the household depends crumbles. He could choose to disinvest himself of his West Indian properties and found a more ethical way of making a living - but he does not (Sir Thomas’s anxiety to have his daughter and niece marry rich men with landed estates might reflect his desire to launder his family name with more respectable sources of wealth and it might also explain his wish to have his younger son join the clergy).

The undertow in MP is of anxiety and the constant threat that Fanny feels herself under (and her enforced exile to Portsmouth shows that this threat is real). This indicates to me that Austen may have used MP to communicate at least some of the psychic reality of being a lower middle class woman in Georgian England, economically comfortable, but also vulnerable, liable to have the rug pulled from under you at any time, forced to keep silent or tell ‘polite lies’ in order to placate those on whom you both depended economically and for physical protection and security - those like her brother, whom you might fear, but also love at the same time.

I also believe Austen knew she was taking a risk doing this, that she wouldn’t take all of her readership with her on this journey and that her heroine would bear the brunt of their displeasure; but that she did so anyway. Perhaps she believed at least some of them would understand that the novel was a coded protest against powerful men like Sir Thomas (and maybe even her brother) using their economic and social leverage to bend vulnerable family members to their will.

But this ultimately fails in MP as most of Sir Thomas’s ambitions for his family are dashed, his marriage is an empty cipher, his oldest son is a failure, his daughters do not marry the rich men that he hopes they will, he does not succeed in forcing his adopted niece to marry the rich man he thought suitable for her. The only person who succeeds in his family is Edmund, the son who does not follow in his footsteps and becomes a clergyman. The niece he took in as a pity project turns out to be the one person who may provide the ultimate salvation for the family through a happy marriage to his son - although this is in direct contradiction to his wishes at the start of the novel when he worries that this might happend. By the end of the novel, this too is reversed - he now welcomes the alliance he previously feared and he has grown in self knowledge, realising that imposing his will on others does not produce happiness, even for himself (it’s an interesting parallel to his role as a slave owner).

But in the end it is Fanny’s wishes that have triumphed over his, by refusing the path that he chose for her to marry a man she didn’t love. This - like her planitive question about slavery to Sir Thomas took courage - courage Austen herself had - courage to risk disappointing and losing her readership in order to write her truth about women’s lives and women’s choices in a society run by powerful men who controlled the public narratives, who decided what could and could not be said and by whom.

This also meant having the last word and men like her brother Henry took this literally - where after her early death, he composed her epitaph for her gravestone in Winchester Cathedral - on which there is not one mention of her writing, but instead lists all the ways he thought she conformed to the societal expectations of women of the time - her ‘charity, devotion, faith and purity’. But this final patriarchial power play failed - today we remember her for those unmentioned wonderful books. I like to think that would have pleased her and that - like Fanny - it would have made her ‘happy in spite of every thing’.

Thank you for reading

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Hail Mary…

Is Ireland now a post Christian society?

Recently I have been listening to a discussion here by the writer Paul Kingsnorth and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams about whether much of the modern world has become a post Christian society (and whether they think this might be about to change) - and it chimed with my view (which I explored in a previous essay here ) that Ireland is no exception to this trend.