"Guns & Roses" - How left wing coalition might be Ireland's Labour Party's only hope

Eamon Gilmore discusses the Algerian hostage situation on Irish TV

I was in a hotel room in London last week, and switched on the TV for the news at the time the Algerian hostage crisis was being covered. Half way through the bulletin, I see Eamon Gilmore being interview by a press pack in his capacity as Foreign Affairs Minister. My first instinct was to think, "Oh yeah, that guy. What ever happened him?"

For a while now - specifically, since February 2011 - that question has been reverberating round my head. "What ever happened to Eamon Gilmore?". Or indeed, "What ever happened to the Labour Party?". Despite their best ever showing in an Irish election ever in 2011 they have since gone into hibernation, choosing to prop up the political status quo by going into coalition with Fine Gael rather than taking their place, for the first time ever, as Ireland's main opposition party. Now, you might say that nobody achieves anything in opposition, but then again they haven't achieved anything in power either. Seriously, can you think of anything worthwhile Labour have done in the last two years? Answers on a postcard please.

Their choice to take the leather of ministerial Mercs and office chairs poses a serious problem for the party in this, the year of their 100th anniversary, and indeed beyond. As people cast their minds back to the nostalgia-doused heroism of Connolly and Larkin, today's Labour top brass will look all the more ridiculous and feckless. And as for the next election, the problem gets more serious. If Labour couldn't properly assert themselves with 37 seats at the height of their powers, how will anyone believe they can get anything done after five risible years in power and an inevitably diminished parliamentary presence?

At this stage, there seems to be only one option, one that isn't all that palatable to some, but it's not like Labour have a choice: alliance with Sinn Fein. It won't be easy for the ex-Stickie dominated Labour to countenance a move jokingly referred to as a "Guns & Roses" coalition, but ultimately what choice do they have? The long wished for unification of the left  in Irish politics should and could have happened a few times over in the last two decades, but for Labour to maintain any relevance in the next decade and beyond, they need to become a senior partner in a cogent force advocating genuine social democratic principles. Once the old embarrassments of the Sinn Fein parliamentary party finally stand down, and it's only a matter of time before they do, the only obstacle remaining will be outright snobbery. But if Labour can't detach themselves from their death grasp with Fine Gael for the "politically naive" or "economically illiterate" Sinn Fein, then pride will surely come before a very large fall.

2012 a tale of two Northern Irelands - from the celebrations of the Queen's Jubilee and the Olympics to the violent Union flag protests

Protesters with covered faces object to the removal of the Union flag from Belfast City Hall

I lived the vast majority of this year in Belfast, and a very happy time, for the most part, it was too. It was a very busy year, with "Our Time, Our Place" posters strewn about the place, Titanic and Solemn League & Covenant centenary celebrations, and a Diamond Jubilee revelry in there for good measure.

In July, Martin McGuinness even shook hands with the Queen. At the height of summer, City Hall was baked in sunshine as it blasted out the Olympics from their jumbo screens. It seemed that Belfast, and Northern Ireland as a whole, had genuinely moved on and was realizing its potential as a modern, vibrant, confident city. But just under the surface, something was amiss.

In the aftermath of Belfast City Council's decision to only fly the Union flag only on special occasions, what quickly became known as the "Flegs" debacle soon exploded in everybody's face, and still drags on as we speak. The effects are palpable and varied. Not only is it having an adverse affect on business, the Christmas market, shopping and a general ability to get on with life, but the violence was so bad at one point that Childline had to vacate their building for a time. Sure, some vulnerable kids might not have been able to get through to someone they needed to talk to, but hey, it'll be worth it if those brave loyalist souls get their flag back!

While the violence and laughable uproar has caused a flare-up the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time, the underlying problems did show themselves earlier in the year. In May, perennial agitant Willie Frazer sounded off about a primary school in Tyrone having an Irish flag outside, suggesting the IRA was training kids to use weapons in there. Except, possessing narrow vision to match his narrow mind, it wasn't the Irish flag he saw, but the Italian. It was there as part of school project, along with the Polish and Turkish flags which he somehow missed.

This year also had people on the other side of the fence fulminating over Rory McIlroy daring to say he felt British. Honestly, the gall of him! You'd think a man raised Catholic would know better! Following his revelation next came the inevitable boycott campaigns, which mercifully gained negligible purchase. And in fact, amdist the depressing elements of community relations this year, that is something we can take a positive from.

In times past, such altercations and conflagrations such as this would carry with it a certain degree of community justification, as ammunition in an eternal rally of "Whatabouttery". But in today's Northern Ireland at least the daft actions of the 1% are ridiculed by the rest of us. All progress, so it's said, depends on the unreasonable man.Northern Ireland has made great progress in this last year, sportingly,civically, commemoratively, things we can be proud of and build on for 2013. It's important we don't let the unreasonable flag-beaters undo it all.

Being Young And Irish - what are Ireland's young people saying about their country?

Michael D Higgins and Ireland's Youth at the Being Young & Irish launch

This weekend is going to be an eventful one for me. Not only are my home country of Donegal playing in their first All-Ireland since before I received my first holy communion, but it's also the northern leg of President Higgins' series of Being Young & Irish seminars, with Monaghan following on from Dublin and Cork. So what have been young people's priorities so far?

On a daily basis the Being Young & Irish Facebook page post submissions made by young people all over the country and they range from impassioned ideas on how to improve mental health awareness and facility, equality and preserving cultural identity, but on both seminar days so far some large themes came to the fore.

One of the striking areas where ideas and interest was high was in education, where there was a near unanimous wish for wholesale reform of the educational system. Specifically, young people wish to see a change to the stultifying status quo, especially at secondary school level, with a more holistic approach that would integrate life skills, creativity, debates and innovation, as well as taking a fundamental look at how subjects are taught, what is covered on the curriculum and a focus on political education. It's clear based on the reactions of the young people that they see changing the fundamentals of education, by altering they very way we interact with the education system, it is from there that further new ideas and innovations can come in other facets of life.

The second, very encouraging element was the willingness of the young people not just to passively postulate on the issues of the day, but to take active ownership of them. In Dublin, the young people succinctly proposed a "Get Up Off Your Arse Day" and the Cork meeting also emphasised a push towards volunteering and putting plans into actions by strengthening the bonds in their community.

Related to that was the need for young people to challenge and refute stereotypes that dog them, especially in the media, and the best way to do is to make clear how willing they are to contribute, both locally and nationally. To that end there were calls for a national youth panel, to consult on affairs of state that substantially affected young people, and the more general call for accountability between the state's citizens and its' government was a very popular one.

Even though the Being Young and Irish consultation process is only half way through, there's still time to add something to the discussion. If you think have something valuable to contribute to the conversation about Ireland's future, share it with us at www.president.ie/makeasubmission. You never know where it might lead.

Being Young and Irish - Our disappointed generation should learn from past mistakes and make Irish education something to be proud of

During tough times in Ireland education is key

Being a young Irish person is hardly something that lends itself well to a one size fits all definition. But there is one unifier this generation does have in common: a collective sense that things aren’t quite going as well as we’d hope.

For young people in their twenties, there’s an overriding sense that the life we’re living wasn’t in the script. When people of my age went to college just as the century turned, Ireland was reveling in a Gilded Age where it seemed opportunity and prospects and hope were going to be plentiful for ever more. Emigration was something you saw referenced on Reeling In The Years, and foreign travel didn’t have the specter of necessity about it. For those in their teens they face a situation where, through no fault of their own, their chance of enduring employment at home after third level education is starkly diminished. That is assuming they’re able to afford third level education in the first place.

It’s not that young people want or feel entitled to instant success, far from it. Success is something you should work hard and strive for, but it should feel within reach eventually. It should be difficult to get your big break, it shouldn’t be impenetrable. Chasing dead ends and living with disappointment is just part of everyday life for this generation.

But even despite our current difficulties, resilience and positivity will always shine through. For President Higgins’ upcoming Being Young & Irish seminar young people are making suggestions on how to make Ireland’s future better, on a wide range of topics. For me, with such challenges for young people finding their way in the world, and the best way to use their skills, my main priority is education.

If Ireland is to advance in the future, it needs to seriously overhaul what we teach and how it’s taught. 100 years since Pearse blasted the murder machine, it’s still fully functioning. The Leaving Cert, the results of which had thousands of students nationwide up to high dough this week, is a pathetically inefficient method of measuring achievement, value or talent. In a world of high speed bullet trains, the Leaving Cert is a pony and trap. But mild-mannered reform of the Leaving Cert won’t be worth a hill of beans unless the lead up to it is also drastically overhauled.

In my experience, every ten year old I’ve ever known has possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of something. Sometimes it’s football, music, a particular TV show or film or something more academic like history or geography or dinosaurs, but I’ve never met a 10 year old who can’t rattle off knowledge about their interests at the drop of a hat. By secondary school, that instinct to learn what interests you is blunted. In focusing such rigor on exam preparation, the whole education system funnels people into a format which seriously undermines creativity, independent thinking, open discussion and deeper exploration. Knowledge, such as it is, is crammed into the short stay car park of our minds for the purpose of splurging it on as many pages as you can as quickly as you can. You literally have no time to think, and there’s our problem.

Now more than ever, Ireland needs people of skill, talent and imagination to speak up and share the ideas that will shape and influence the way we think, act and work well into the future. We owe it to ourselves and to generations ahead to build an education system that helps encourage that, and all the incredible things borne of such a system. Ours is a generation that faces disappointment regularly, but we have to use that disappointment to strive to do better for ourselves and the young people that come after us. Ireland needs to learn from it’s mistakes, and then become a better teacher.

Being Young and Irish - President Higgins wants to know your vision for Ireland's future - VIDEO

President Michael D Higgins at the launch of the 'Being Young & Irish' campaign

This time last year, President Michael D Higgins was making his case for becoming the ninth President of Ireland. All through that campaign, in many different places and in many different ways, he stressed the importance of embracing the young people of the country as being the key to a prosperous future. By encouraging them, by empowering them, by inspiring them to, as the President said at the landmark SpunOut youth debate during the campaign, "be the arrow, not the target". The President wants to hear young people's opinions. And not just hear those opinions, but put them to good use too.

For his upcoming Being Young & Irish seminar that will take place in the autumn, President Higgins is eager to see the vision of the future held by Ireland's young people aged 17-26, what they have to say and what they hope to do, by sharing their views on his website. If you do, you could be featured on the Being Young & Irish Facebook page, where ideas on topics from health and education to the economy to the arts are pouring in. Whether you contribute in text, audio or video, or whether you're in New York or New South Wales, your vision for the future of Ireland is welcome and wanted. By doing this, the young people of Ireland have a chance like never before to not just shape a Presidency, but the direction of the nation.

Ireland's young people are living in a time of profound uncertainty and contradiction. They are well educated but struggle to find the career prospects they deserve. They are bright and engaged but regularly portrayed as amoral and apathetic. They care about their communities but their attempts to stand up for them are often ignored. They are proud of their country but feel let down by it, and more and more feel that they can only fulfill their potential by leaving it. They don't want the tag of "Lost Generation" to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But, beyond the all-too-publicised gloom, there is a broad beam of hope. Over the last decade Ireland has witnessed a quiet revolution among its young people. It is a revolution of civic duty, of participation, of activism, with human rights and advocacy and community at its heart. This quiet revolution has found its way to youth councils, community groups, action groups, after-school clubs and summer schools all over the country. They reward creativity, embrace difference and bolster confidence, and they all have one thing in common: the notion that young people deserve to have a say and a hand in shaping the places where they live, and that their opinion matters. Long before he was President, Michael D Higgins was a long-standing champion of that ideal.

Over the next while, I'll explore the issues President Higgins wants to address in greater detail: the power young people have for transformative good, the power of generating positive debate, the power of the diaspora in this discussion and how in sharing ideas and rejecting passive cynicism for a more rigorous sense of active citizenship, truly great things can be achieved. In the meantime, if you're a young person, whoever and wherever you are, if you have ideas for Ireland's future and feel passionately about them, follow the link and share them, the President would love to hear about it. As the famous Margaret Mead quote goes, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world". Imagine then what a whole nation could do.

Support rallies for Sean Quinn is everything that's wrong with Ireland -- we're addicted to local sugar daddies

Sean Quinn

There are many things in Ireland that are popular that I can’t quite get. The government’s insistence on selling off our natural resources to highest bidder, for example. The Saw Doctors. Ray Foley.

But the thing I don’t understand the most also seems to be our biggest problem: the inability to divorce a positive personal interaction with a powerful bigwig, and the egregious wrongdoing they’ve committed.

We’ve seen it with Charles Haughey. For years and years and years his fabulous wealth and the origins thereof was all but an open secret, and yet he was Taoiseach over the course of four parliaments and had the most hysterically loyal following in Christendom.

We’ve seen it with Bertie too, when everyone knew full well he was a devious little gurrier, but sure wasn’t he just an ordinary man who liked a pint and a football match, loved his mammy and got his ashes at the start of Lent?

We’ve seen it with Lowry, who in spite of resigning from the cabinet and his party due to the overwhelming smell of rat, has topped the poll in Tipp North for fifteen straight years, and will only be displaced when his head is chopped off in a sword-fight at the top of a mountain.

And now, we’re seeing it with Sean Quinn. Last week, thousands turned up to a rally in Cavan in support of their friendly neighborhood beleaguered ex-billionaire. Several respected luminaries were in attendance, among them Fr Brian D’Arcy and Tyrone manager Mickey Harte, and a letter was read out from that known paragon of virtue, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. The great local conglomerato himself was there too, he even gave an emotional speech to his adoring public, Irish Citizen Kane style. Throughout the rally people paid tribute to his generosity, loyalty, decency and the fact he provided employment for a troubled, deprived area, and he’s been given an awful unfair hard time of it. Paying tribute to someone is perfectly fair and fine, but everyone seemed to be willfully blind as to why he’s in trouble in the first place.

He put a monster bet on Anglo Irish Bank shares that would have seen his fortune go stratospheric, but it didn’t and instead lost billions. To give the whole thing a metaphysical, Alice in Wonderland feel, the money he used to amass a 25% stake in Anglo was borrowed from, eh, Anglo. Worse yet, he borrowed another half a billion to buy some property to use as security. To compound matters, the company siphoned off funds from the profitable sectors of his business to keep the struggling ones up, and played an extended global game of Hide The Assets with the Irish courts, which is what landed his son in prison, made his nephew a fugitive and makes Quinn’s freedom shaky at best.

So in other words, an uber-capitalist takes a massive gamble and loses, to the extent that everyone with an insurance policy in Ireland has to pay an extra 2% because of it, broke the law explicitly and engaged in a flagrantly obstructive and obtuse game of chicken with the courts. But sure, isn’t he a decent fella?

Sean Quinn is merely the latest exhibit to prove that Ireland will never be a country free of corruption, gombeenism or a near-feudal loyalty to parochial heroes. We simply love our blameless, imperious regional sugar daddies too much. People in Cavan and Fermanagh decry the Anglo swine who ruined the country and why aren’t they being put through the ringer, though they’re perfectly blasé about the fact that, at a 25% stake in the company, Sean Quinn *was* Anglo. They hold asinine placards like “Bring back Quinn and let him create jobs”, apparently unaware of the connection between his actions and those like him and the state of the economy that makes expenditure cuts and layoffs the order of the day. Sean Quinn’s net contribution to Irish society at this point is firmly in the red, and it’s an absurd case of mental reservation or blind, bewildering, unwarranted loyalty to say otherwise. But, loads of people are, and why? Because he’s local, and a good honest man he is too. 

How the IMF are killing the Irish patient -- more austerity cuts are the wrong diagnosis for ailing Irish economy

IMF fail to fix what ails Ireland

When I was about ten, I was diagnosed with asthma. I was given an inhaler, one of those tubes you have to blow into to measure your lung capacity, and an amount of information and fact sheets along the lines of “So, you’ve become dust’s bitch” that would have stunned an ox. There was just one problem: I wasn’t asthmatic.

After the initial diagnosis my health was getting worse if anything, and every time my mother and I protested as much, I was fussed around by confused doctors like I was The Six Million Dollar Technology: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology...we just have to give him more asthma stuff.” Eventually we just decided to unilaterally stop using the inhaler, the lung capacity thingamajig and everything else, and sure enough, I got better.

Turns out I had just a standard level of childhood sickness for a kid with glasses as thick as mine, but after I was diagnosed something weird started happening. Loads of children who I knew from school also started being diagnosed with asthma. Like, loads of them. It seemed if you had a cough, splutter, took a drink and a bit went down the wrong way or got a bruise in the shin, asthma was probably the problem. People started to wonder what the hell was going on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it feels like some of those childhood diagnosticians have given up medicine for economics, and ditched their MDs in favor of the IMF. Recently it was announced that the International Monetary Fund, Ireland’s economic proctologist, wanted more cuts to social welfare payments, child benefit, raising a property tax and, their most bristly resolution, removing the automatic right for old age pensioners to have a medical card.

The IMF was set up after World War 2 with the intention to help and invest in countries in perilous economic situations. In more recent times, it has become the ultimate arbiter of asymmetric free market policy, the adherents of which believe they are the only show in town. So, when the IMF detail countries to make such structural changes, they do it not entirely out of sheer bean counting necessity, but ideological prerogative and zeal. Ireland is sick alright, but asthma medicine isn’t going to make us better.

What Ireland has needed for years and needs now more than ever is wise investment made in the right areas. The free market notion that if you throw enough money at it things will cascade into their natural positions is simply not viable or practical. Every decision made at government level effects many others and all a cut in the dole payments will do is make it harder for people to live rather than easier for people get a decent job, because the investment simply isn’t there. A wiser use of the government’s time and money would be to make the social welfare system more comprehensible. As it stands, if I was on the dole but got a couple of weeks of stand-alone, temporary work, I wouldn’t have my money deducted for the few weeks, as would be the rational thing to do. Instead, you have to sign off, and then undergo the whole desperate rigmarole again when you’re done as if you’ve never been in the office before. It’s a small example but one that exemplifies the wider logic gaps and inefficiencies of that department, and the government as a whole.

To paraphrase the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”. But, in even given the IMF’s best intentions, their fundamental wrong-headedness in dealing with economic crisis is doing just that. Cuts, hikes and universal entitlement revocations is the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms, at the wrong place at the wrong time. I truly hope the IMF will realize that flinging an inhaler at us will not solve all our ills, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Beauty pageants for children in Ireland - Maybe one Americanism too far

As the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, the other side of Atlantic catches cold. And while we have benefited immensely from certain elements of American culture being introduced over here – rib joints, Dr Pepper, Neil Patrick Harris – there are a few things we could be doing with not traveling over. Child pageants, for example.

This week it emerged that the Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant would be hosting an event in Ireland in November this year. And on a very fundamental level, that really weirds me out.

Case in point: there are, apparently, three rounds to these things. The first is the gown, the second is the talent and the third is freestyle I guess, where in the words of the organizer Annette Hill, “the children can wear whatever they want to wow the judges”.

Furthermore, she also countered the notion these things are hyper-competitive, mini-Barbie fests by saying that everyone gets a trophy and “When you get to a certain age group, four and up, we do like a certain amount of hair and makeup, but just enough to accentuate their natural beauty.”

Annette Hill is, according to her website, available to “teach your child modelling lessons” and offers a photo retouching service that “can add teeth, eyelashes, change backgrounds, remove blemishes, change colors, and lots more. We offer a low price for our retouching services, regardless of how much retouching your photo needs”.

I will now allow about ten minutes for your brain to reset, so you can process the lunacy of that last paragraph.

Welcome back. Apart from wanting me to take out my premise bazooka and blowing all this pageant business to kingdom come, I’m also full of questions. Confused, angry questions. Why should kids of five be actively trying to impress anyone, much less judges? Why does natural beauty need to be accentuated by any make up? Especially when you’re five bloody years of age? Why would you send photos of your child to a stranger to have them retouched? What the hell is wrong with you people?

I normally don’t like saying things like “kids should be kids” because that line has been essentially hijacked by culturally reactionary Ned Flanders types who use it as a means of sheltering young people from pretty much every fact of life beyond “Jesus is a smashing bloke”, but I will say it now: kids should be kids.

Below the age of ten, kids should fundamentally preoccupy themselves with the following:

1) Running for hours in no particular direction, just because you can.
2) Orchestrating a military-style climbing mission to get something from a high press.
3) Asking teachers can you spend the afternoon drawing.
4) Waking up bewildering early at the weekend to watch cartoons featuring unlikely animal friendships
5) Staying away from bloody pageants.

Here's some footage from a 2012 Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant award ceremony -