between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I was just at a protest for Salvita Halappanavar. Protest. Rally. Memorial. Gathering so spontaneous that no one had liaised with the gardaí to much extent, with the result that as the crowd - which numbered over 1000, and I'd eyeball the estimated on the far side of 2000, actually - gathered, we choked off traffic in front of the Dáil, temporarily trapping at least two buses and a taxi in place until the Garda Traffic Corps got matters sorted.

(I spoke to one garda afterwards, and he said no one had said anything to him about expecting any number of people.)

Fast-off-the-block activists had arranged a microphone and speakers, but not much else: it was more of a fuzzy coalescing of national anger and shame, surprising almost everyone there with the numbers present. There was a black woman speaker, whose name I wish I'd caught, who was electrifying and said everything I wish I'd had the courage to catch the RTÉ reporter (who seemed almost too young to be out of school) and yell into the camera. This fucking government thinks we are sheep who will sit down and take this but we won't. (I want to vote for her. Or someone like her. Please be a TD?)

RTÉ news report.

(Although I think maybe someone mentioned there was a protest already arranged for today for something else? I do not know.)

"Cry havoc, and let slip."

Flags on a billboard like a washing powder ad:
"Vote yes for stability!" - we'll give you samples
of new improved political detergent
gratis, free: and freely launder sticky fingers
for the banqueting class. Let Kenny fiddle, go
cooking the books, basting his mates: for us, too late.
In back streets and broken new estates some trampled
tinder-sparks of our eternal conflagration
are forced out the pressure valves of emigration.

Remember twa corbies, the twa named Brian?
And one unto the other one said, "I wot
we'll find ourselves behind the dyke (with our boney
hoors) long before the waters flood. No Tribunals
will sit next year. Not here." Irishmen and Irishwomen
- but see, old traditions of nationhood are dead:
by hooks and crooks we'll cling to treaties that can't bring
either peace in our time, or plenty. Still looking
east for a saviour, or south, or west: devil's deals
pass for miracles if alternatives look worse.
Curse Labour, and their so-shattered promises!
Those dole-swingers grow lazy now, so Burton said,
and washed her hands, and shook her head. Name of God!
Of the dead generations, so easily forgot.

But they are liars and the truth is not in them.
I come to bury Caesar - should Caesar swiftly die:
only let Caesar die and pass like other men,
then we will move. Then we will recognise our chains,
and cast them off, and make new peace with the world to come.

---

A terrible political poem. Still, prose does no better on this subject.

Monday, met a rysmiel for lunch on what seems to have been the last day of summer. Said rysmiel was, as on our previous meeting, a scholar and a gentlebeing. That was a very pleasant afternoon.

Since then, I have occupied myself with work and with an unusually high proportion of suicidal ideations. Sometimes it seems as though the most painless option would just be to lie down and wait to die - but I can't do that, since it would leave the IIHSA in the unenviable position of having to find a replacement co-guide for the study-tour on uncomfortably short notice. Likewise with having a screaming frothing nervous breakdown.

Therefore, onwards.

It turns out that things can always get worse.

Apparently - the relevent article is behind a paywall at the Sunday Business Post (.ie), but the general outlines are clear enough - the present government intend to remove all postgraduate support in the next budget. That means no fees contribution and no maintenance grant.

Aside from the Logic Fail inherent in this - Government! It costs you less to pay postgraduate fees at the EU rate for research students than it does to maintain those same students on the jobseekers' allowance over the course of a year! And have you seen the unemployment rate? - there's a large degree of cruelty involved in yanking the rug out from under the feet of people who were counting on remaining in education (or chose to return to education) until the jobs market picks up an eensy-weensy bit.

Because, people? Let's not forget that Ireland has no system of student loans comparable to the UK, Canada, or even the US. For the people whose education will be cut short by such a measure, there is nowhere to apply. Do you imagine AIB or Bank of Ireland will give an unsecured loan to a student?

There might be work-arounds. I have (based on last year's numbers) a one in nine or ten shot at a scholarship whose applications open in January. Otherwise, I don't know. I might be fucked. I hope I'm not, but I might be.

In which case, I'm going to have a nice, messy nervous breakdown. The rage and despair has to go somewhere - and right now, I'm holding off on putting my fist through a wall only because a)there is still a chance that this will apply only to new postgraduates and b)I'd only have to pay to fix the wall.

And my fist, but what the hell do I need that for, anyway? Maybe I should put it through my own face.

O honourable friends, I bring you some facts and some figures.

As of September, the percentage of persons signing on to the Live Register stands at 14.3%, down 0.1% from August. Let's round up and call it 15% of adult persons, or approximately 440,000 people from a nation of just over 4.5 million. (Statistics from the Central Statistics Office.)

That means 15% of people are unemployment or underemployed. Just under 42% of these people - that is, approximately 6% of all adult persons - are long-term claimants on the Live Register. That is, they have been signing on for over a year. This percentage has risen - from approximately 34% to approximate 42% of claimants, or from approximately 5% to approximately 6% of all adult persons - within the space of a year.

The Consumer Price Index records average inflation of 2.6% to date this year. As of July 2011, almost 9% of households with mortgages are ninety days in arrears. According to figures from the Central Bank of Ireland, approximately 30.6% (or c. 145,400 out of 475,000) of mortgaged properties were in negative equity as of 2010, a figure representing 47% of outstanding mortgage balances. I have no data for 2011, but I suspect this figure has, if anything, dis-improved.

The minimum wage has been cut from E8.40 to E7.20. Social security has been cut. All earned income over approximately E. 3,000 per annum is subject to the Income Levy. Tax brackets have not been adjusted for inflation. The government is introducing a property tax for all households from January, and unmetered water charges are also in the works.

Meanwhile, GDP has risen 1.6% and GNP 1.1% in the second quarter of 2011. Companies such an C&C show pre-tax profits of over 64 million euro, up from 58 million last year. No one has been prosecuted for the financial shenanagins that led to the 2008 crash. Bankers, politicians, and senior television analysts still form a cosy circle-jerk. The National Asset Management Agency has turned into yet another government quango, whereby we reward the incompentents who fucked us over in the first place and provide jobs for their friends and relatives.

Government policy is set by elected hacks and sell-outs (yes, Labour, I'm talking to you: no, I will never vote Labour again) - at least, when it's not being set by unelected Financial Policy Wonks from the IMF and the ECB, who are far more concerned with protecting bondholders and the French and German banks who exposed themselves by lending to banks whose balance sheets are now composed mainly of toxic assets and government bailout funds than with protecting the most vulnerable citizens of our society.

Let us pretend, O honourable friends, that our European Financial Policy Wonks have heard of John Maynard Keynes. Let us pretend, O friends and fellow citizens, that they possess at least a modicum of logic; let us grant them adequate reading comprehension, and the ability to follow historical evidence. Have they not read The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money? Have they failed to grasp its essential points?

Let the record show that classical economics, balance-sheet economics, supply-side economics - all this, when faced with a market recession, significantly fails. It fails to improve matters for any but the richest of the rich, and it actively makes things worse for anyone in the middle class on down. (And let us not be sidetracked into defining that amorphous beast, the "middle class".)

Why, then, are we faced with failed policies, toxic policies, when Keynesian economics demonstrably works? Why is the cry of "Balance the Budget!" raised when the chattering classes - yes, even they, even the Policy Wonks and the Political Hacks, for they stand or fall as we do - should be clamouring "Provide Employment!" "Build Infrastructure!" "Invest!"?

We cannot have democracy without hope. We cannot have hope without economic improvement - for who can hope for the future when the vast majority of us are entirely focused on surviving the now? And we cannot have economic improvement without government action, without government investment.

Now is the winter of our discontent, and I see no summer sun ahead of us.

I've never desired wealth for wealth's sake: the sum total of my life's financial ambitions has always been a tolerable, secure position with a pension. A position wherein one could afford a house, a dog, a foreign holiday once every couple of years; a position where one could hope to be treated as a being worthy of dignity.

(It's odd to admit to always having wanted to work in the civil service. But there you go. Civil service functionaries perform useful and necessary functions to the running of the country, and at least in the civil service, one is not solely serving the aggrandisement of private profit.)

But it seems as though our country is to be reduced down to the bare apparatus necessary to qualify as a functioning nation. I don't have hope anymore. Hope, like anger, is a distraction. If I focus on just the things in front of me - on just trying to spend less every week on food, on not fucking up and needing an extra tenner at an inconvenient time, on not thinking more than a month or two in advance - maybe I can avoid dwelling on the fact that my country views me as just one more fungible resource - and one surplus to requirements, at that.

I've started reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and less than ten pages into the Penguin edition, I've found a passage which I want to share.

"...[S]uch phrases as 'self-government', and 'the power of the people over themselves', do not express the state of the case. The 'people' who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the 'self-government' spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power." (Boldface mine.)

Mill's branch of nineteenth-century liberalism can be read in support of a number of different modern political stances. He's a utilitarian, and his arguments can be taken as easily in support of libertarianism as anything else. But his emphasis on individual autonomy and the need to protect individuals not only from the tyranny of despotism, but from the potential tyranny of either the most active part of society, or the part which succeeds in making themselves accepted as the majority, seems to me to be not only vitally important, but also, all-too-easily ignored.

Where Mill writes, "the most numerous or the most active part," here, today, I read "the wealthiest or the most established part."

He writes also:

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tyranny of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to... compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condtion of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

The tyranny of the prevailing opinion.

In these days, when the prevailing opinion all-too-often means the opinion of the Invisible Hand, market forces and GDP, I think it might be a good idea to revisit the idea of protection against the tyranny of the "most numerous or the most active part" of society.

I really do.

"Not In So Many Words A Manifesto"

Have you heard the voices on the radio?
Have you seen the Sunday headlines?
They say tomorrow will be worse than today
They say the golden age is dead.

So heave, boys, and haul away
cut another hole in your belt and buckle tight
leave your dreams and book your flights
for China and America, London and Bombay
for freedom and choices have all gone far away.
The rich have all your money in their shiny fashion bags
And they're not sharing with your tattered rags.

Cut another hole in your belt and buckle tight:
that old record playing late into the night
tired and scratched and broken and sore
and we can repeat it all, word for word,
because we've heard every line a thousand times before:
Be grateful for what you have.
Don't ever dare to ask for more.

So heave, girls, and haul away
(sell your souls forget your dreams default your lease)
The world won't let you speak, or give you peace -
and in the end you'll go a bridge too high, a pill too far
dying in quiet desperation at midnight on your bathroom floor.
Because speaking Truth to Power only keeps the lights on
inside your aching head. And the golden age is dead.

Sell your souls. Forget your dreams - The politicians sigh,
We're all in this together, and you know it for a lie
tired and stupid and ancient and sore
but we can all repeat it, every line:
we've heard it word for word so many times before:
Be grateful for what you have.
Don't ever dare to ask for more.

What I have is a belly full of rage
and fire, and spite: I refuse
to be caged by Capital and the nonsense
theories of an age where no god lives but Mammon,
no virtue but avarice. Workers, unite!
The Invisible Hand is giving you the finger:
It's not going to ever make nice.

What I'm asking for is empathy, reason, common sense:
it's not treason to acknowledge
humanity in poverty, justice in anger,
the future in an open hand.
I'm not a company woman: I won't chant your refrain.
I want a future free from chains, from too big to fail;
free from desperate towns in a haunted, frightened land

What I have is a belly full of rage.
What I have is a stomach full of dread,
and it's too late to turn away
and it's too late to pretend
that our day is coming, our hour -
The golden age has always been dead
and speaking truth to power
won't keep the lights on. Not even in your head.

---

Yes, I'm a bad poet. And yes, I'm a socialist.

I believe that a government has a moral duty to guard the best interests of all their citizens. I believe that moral duty includes a duty of care which begins with the most vulnerable: the poor, the very young, the very old, the disabled, the discriminated-against. I believe that the vast majority of governments are consistently and willfully negligent in this duty.

I believe that a more just society is possible. I believe the path to achieving a more just society is to stop valourising capital, to refrain from using GDP as a measurement of a society's success, and to reinstute public liturgies for persons of significant private wealth.

That would make a fine start.

Normally I post my poems under f-lock, but right now? I'm an angry socialist. And, dammit, I want to be heard.

(I am not resigned.)

...You know, though I vote Socialist/Labour/Green?

I don't actually support most of their party economic positions. Just more than of the others. I suspect I'm more of an agrarian small-s socialist, with a smattering of (really old) Tory economic protectionism thrown in for good measure.

None of this free-market laissez-faire nonsense. Regulate! Regulate! Regulate!

With 24 seats to go, the Blueshirts have 64 TDs, expecting to claim between seven and eleven more, and the Redshirts (I kid. But Labour's colours are red) are at 33. The Ould Establishment is down to 16 seats, and may pick up a few more: the (former) terrorists are on 13, and the Socialists and People Before Profit have 3 between them.

(Independents at 11, Greens at zero. You should have known better, lads. Coalition with The Man will never get you anything but discredited.)

A majority is 84 seats. I am hoping that Labour is going to be smart, and either stay out of coalition or demand serious influence in any government which includes them. Because unless things turn around pretty damn quick, I don't see anyone acquiring much glory from the next sitting of Dáil Éireann.

And Fine Gael (the Blueshirts) are parroting the same old tired rightwing market tropes. No, boys. You won't save the country by selling it off piecemeal. (Although if you want to sell RTÉ, it's a useless dynastic dinosaur anyway.)

Won't actually know any real outcomes for at least day or so yet.

It may have crossed your awareness that Ireland is in the throes of an election to decide who gets to deal with the fallout of mortgaging our nation on behalf of private banking debt.

The interest payments on that debt, according to economist David McWilliams - who, while not always right, is less stupid than most of our homegrown economists - could amount to 85% of government income by the end of 2011. Just the interest.

Let's just take a moment of silence and consider that.

This is not a sustainable model for going forward, and the major question of the coming days is whether the new government (looking likely, at this moment, to be either a minority Fine Gael or Fine Gael in coalition with... somebody) will have the spine to alter the equation.

It will require a lot of spine. Because in order to do so, the incoming government will have to stand up to the combined pressure of a lazy and incompetent establishment in the Department of Finance, an establishment in the Irish Central Bank which is part of the problem, the loud shouty mandarins in the European Central Bank, and France and Germany, who are still ecomonically robust and determined to remain that way, even at the cost of the peripheral EU nations. Like Ireland. Greece. Portugal.

I'm not optimistic about the amount of spine any Irish politician is possessed of. And Fine Gael is home the most diehard Europhiles in Irish politics. Even Labour seems to own a sense of obligation towards the EU. I'm not much of a nationalist at the best of times, but the ECB/IMF deal that was agreed to? It's not good for the country. It's not even good for Europe, because saddling the peripheral nations with un- or barely-serviceable debt burdens, in the long wrong, will do more harm to the grand European experiment of economic and diplomatic co-operation and the furtherance of human rights than just eating the losses will.

This is not a balance-sheet argument, by the way. It's partly an ethical one, too.

Universal human rights are important. So is the continuance of a representative democracy in the face of forces determined to create kleptocracy. Oligarchy. Kakocracy.

---

The ratio of women to men in the outgoing Dáil is on the order of 1:8. The ratio in the incoming one, looks, as of this writing, to remain as one woman for every eight men.

The voting population of Ireland is slighty more female than male. And yet, in my constituency, out of ten candidates for election, only one - and not one from the larger parties - was a woman.

I happily gave her my first preference vote, since she is also the Socialist Party candidate and a useful person (and now, thank heavens, elected) - but really, people. This is the twenty-first century. I expect better.

---

Also in "I expect better," I am grieved to report that foetal personhood remains a sticking-point for far too many Irish voters. Even the Labour Party must deny that they support "abortion-on-demand" and make waffling noises about passing legislation on the 1990 "X" case precedent.

Oh, yes, I'm a godless supporter of the right to choose whether or not one must provide an organ as life-support for a tiny ball of overactive cells.

---

At least the bishops are mostly quiet this time around.

February. The weather is caught between winter and spring. Sunlight and rain and the peculiar thin quality of light I associate with winter falling on spring-greening fields, brown furrows sprouting viridian, turning grey estuary-water to brown depths that ripple and go still.

The towns along the railway line are ugly as ever, without the silvery patina of frost or the golden warmth of summer to elide their flaws. They crawl like fungus up overlooking hills, sprawl out across the landscape, and the city itself looks damp and tawdry and grey.

The lampposts are bearing fruit. The same men's faces stare down from election posters, the same tired and desperate sloganeering married to features it would take a mother to love. Women candidates and the occasional man who lacks a ferrety smirk - who actually photographs well, or can at least manage not to look smug or embarrassed or both at once - stand out for their astonishing rarity.

As usual, I'll be voting for the Socialists and the Greens. And possibly the non-incumbant Labour candidate in my constituency - the incumbant having somehow managed to keep his seat through at least the last two elections without ever having done anything good or useful to bring himself to my notice, and having made himself noticeable this election by the possession of a particularly unpleasant smirk. (I should not judge men by their faces, but really? He looks like he's leering.)

I know the Greens are implicated in the shoddy state of the nation, but I've met their candidate. He's as sensible as politicians hereabouts ever get.

---

Tonight, I attended a German jujutsu class. It was intense, and radically different to the hit people and run away ethos of Shotokan karate, which is what I'm used to. (If Shotokan is good for anything, it's for teaching you to hit people so they really know they've been hit. On the other hand, in real life, if you don't hit someone hard enough to kill them, you mostly just make them angry. So it will be good to train in a different style - one that includes grappling.)

Fun, but exhausting. We'll see how long my enthusiasm for getting myself beaten up lasts.