"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.

The meaning of pro-life abortion argument in Ireland -- what happens once these children are born

Pro-life billboard in Dublin

If you’ve been in Dublin recently, you can’t have failed to notice the throngs of audacious billboards and public transport ads that, well, advocate a stridently pro-life point of view, let's put it like that.

In a year that will be so important for the future of children’s rights, it’s disconcerting in the extreme to see the way in which the discussion has been pivoted onto such a narrow and divisive fraction of the debate. But even more disconcerting is the fact that the image of being pro-life exists as it does in the zeitgeist.

When you hear the term “pro-life”, it automatically conjures certain images, and usually those images are of fetuses on large placards, being carried by the most ardent single-issue campaigners in politics, picketing family planning clinics and challenging politicians about their stance outside Mass. And in the US it’s much more intense.

But not only does the term, and those who vocally self-identify with it, construct a false duality (there are, I daresay, very few people in favor of legalizing abortion who are generally pro-death) it also falls horribly short in scope. Pro-lifers of the kind we have placing billboards seem inordinately focused on unborn babies, but once they emerge into the world, then what?

This is the question we have been failing to ask ourselves for far too long, and in failing to answer it we have done our young people a serious disservice. In the last thirty years we have had innumerable schismatic debates on abortion, but what point is shouting about when life begins if we can’t provide a fundamental quality of life to our children?

In this country far too many children are born to poverty, to social deprivation, to effective pariah status because of who their parents are. In this country far too many children can’t get access to a good education or the basic resources of bettering themselves. In this country far too many children are voiceless when it comes to being given a say and a role in how their communities should be run. In this country far too many children have to grow up too early. And in this country far, far, far too many children are neglected when they should be looked out for the most. Throwing up billboards is doing nothing for them.

It’s easy to say you’re pro-life, but without a fidelity to tackling the problems that face our young people throughout their development then it just boils down to nothing more than emotionally charged, histrionic sloganizing. No matter what their age, children deserve much better than that.

Ireland Government's women trouble - why we badly need new gender quota

Irish female politicians past and present

Last week while browsing this website I came across an op-ed from our esteemed political analyst, Patrick Roberts, about his displeasure that gender quotas will be introduced in the next election. And I could not have disagreed with him more.

In theory, I get why quotas might be discomforting, even to avowed feminists. There’s a danger it codifies rather than breaks down the glass ceiling, merely giving women in politics a slightly larger cordon than they already have.

But a 30% quota shouldn’t be seen as the solution, but as the introduction of a bare minimum of standards. At the minute, there is a pathetic dearth of women in the Dáil, and an even more pathetic dearth of candidates. Only three constituencies had five women candidates running (none had more than that) and some constituencies had no women running in them at all. Unless you think women are physiologically less able to run for and hold elected office (i.e. insane), that means the current system is failing them badly.

There are all sorts of reasons why there haven’t been enough women in politics over the years, fundamental to them all though was a default patriarchy, a patriarchy that thanks to the 1937 Constitution has been both followed in the breach and the observance. But past practice and policy is no justification to perpetuate it, and in modern times it’s simply not acceptable to call for anyone to call for a fair race when you have a head start of miles.

The thing is, people can say they’re all for equality until their hair turns blue but it requires people to do something about it to actually achieve it. As it stands, political parties are not doing enough to shake off their just-for-the-lads mentality and seek out women candidates, women who are put off by the system as it stands and have taken their much-needed skills elsewhere. And even the ones that are in the political system are in a pitiful minority in the top jobs: three out of fifteen full cabinet ministers and four out of fifteen is a risible number in 2012.

But it’s not just a case of upping the numbers for the sake of it, we badly need the views and expertise of a wide range of people at government level and we only do ourselves a disservice by not listening to them. It’s absolute lunacy that half the voting public don’t even account for a quarter of the representation.

Not that the drive for equality should end with women, it’s just as vital that people of different cultures and creeds and classes participate in the political process and shape it to wider benefit. That requires a level of diversity and outreach that some may find unsettling or PC gone mad or what have you, but if the political system shook itself out of its’ monolithic torpor in the first place the question of quotas wouldn’t need to be broached at all.

In the landmark British sitcom Yes Prime Minister, when an idea very similar to this was proposed at a civil service meeting, all the (male) heads of department wholeheartedly agreed with the idea but one by one suggested problems implementing it. The Foreign Office couldn’t appoint women ambassadors to Arab countries, the Home Office wasn’t suitable because women couldn’t run prisons, Employment was a no-go because of the difficult to manage, burly trade unionists and Defence was out because a woman wasn’t really suitable to run security or rough it with Admirals. As sure as art imitates life, hegemony will always put up a fight, but they’re on the wrong side of this one.

Having traipsed up and down the country as a youth worker, I’ve done projects with a great many fantastic young women, young women who if they were so inclined could go right to the top of the political ladder. A lot of them come from constituencies where women were all but non-existent on the ballot paper, and so the question we have to ask ourself is, will we stand for another generation of talented young woman having obstacle and stymie thrown their way? Quotas aren’t perfect and they aren’t a solution, but we need political parties finding these young women, and we need them too. Our future depends on them. 

Che-nge the record, it's just a statue

Every so often you see a story and think “How the hell is this still a thing?” The furore around Galway’s proposed Che Guevara statue is one such story.

You’d think that the chair of the House Foreign Relations committee would have a loaded plate, what with North Korea in a dangerous state of flux, the war in Afghanistan in its final throes, a cataclysmic situation in Syria ongoing and a band of nuke-happy lunatics purporting to be concerned about Israel getting more baying and mobbish by the day. But Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has still managed to find time to warn of the terribleness of Galway, a city thousands of miles away one eighth the size of a US congressional district, erecting a monument to Che Guevara. It is, she says, “an outrage” that such a thing is being proposed. An outrage! Some would say that a senior congresswoman placing a hold on millions of dollars of development aid funding for Palestine because of their audacious plan to become a country outrageous, but we won’t judge.

She is joined in her outrage by Iron Man wannabe and selector of antique causes celebres Declan “Senor Burns es El Diablo” Ganley, who warned that putting up the statue would be disastrous for tourism, credibility and Galway’s chances of getting a nice summer. And the story trundled on with a comment from the magnificently monikered historian Carlos Eire, who skilfully invoked both the “Bad as Cromwell” card and the “This is pure like denying the Holocaust, so it is” card.
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For the past few weeks people seem to be jumping out of the woodwork any time Che is mentioned in any half decent way, a bit like when someone on Irish Central says something positive about multiculturalism and we get insane rants from...well, you know. What is most galling of all though is not even the arguments themselves, but the double standards at play within them. Lehtinen blasts Guevara as a monster (as many Cuban-Americans understandably do) but the real problem was he wasn’t an American-sponsored monster, of which there have been many. Similarly, Ganley fulminates about the dangerous terrorist who murdered people, but when 2016 comes and the Easter Rising centenary comes around, it’s unlikely he’ll have such strident words for brave rebels Pearse and Plunkett.

Personally, I wouldn’t be in favour of the monument. Not because I have serious objections to Che’s character (I’m actually quite ambivalent about him) but having seen the drawings of the thing, it’s so gawky and out of place I wouldn’t be in favour of it if it had someone unanimously awesome like Steve Allen or Carlton Banks been emblazoned on it. But, monster or not, monstrosity or not, it’s still Galway’s decision to make. Perhaps they should take a leaf out of the American book on this one, and pursue their own interests vigorously, first and foremost.

Has the time come for Celtic Independence? - Scottish win could spell seismic shift

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is currently embroiled in a power struggle with British PM over a referendum for Scottish independence, but if he wins the dominoes won’t just stop at Hadrian’s Wall.

If the Scottish win independence, then it spells a seismic shift in not just how the British Union works, but the European one. Salmond’s Scotland has much more in common with the Nordic countries in terms of social provision and much more Europhile than Cameron’s England, and independence would not only copperfasten these differences but create a new diplomatic entity on the EU stage. Especially so, if Scotland win the custody battle for the oil off their coast.
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If Scotland and England do take divergent paths, that leaves Wales and Northern Ireland essentially in a “back me or sack me” situation, stuck between siding with their Celtic brethren (and to a lesser degree Europe) and the Westminster government who supply the block grant for their respective assemblies. And if they do, then it may be the best chance proponents of a United Ireland will have in decades. 

If the UK becomes more of a loose confederation as would be likely the case under Scottish independence, then Northern Ireland’s closeness to the Republic of Ireland will come under closer scrutiny, in terms of trade, services, culture and a host of other things that will suddenly become relevant if such a debate ever arises. Of course, that means it will energise both sides of the argument. 

Already you can see the Unionist side in particular sharpening their swords. This Tuesday on Spotlight, a Northern Ireland current affairs discussion programme, DUP Health Minister Edwin Poots claimed First Minister Salmond was like a dog agitating to get off the leash and went on to essentially claim that the fundamentals of the Union were strong. But United Ireland advocates are getting more nuanced in their approach, with younger members of Sinn Féin like Pearse Doherty providing a counter-balance to old irredentism by considering a range of ideas about how the arrangement could work, even how to accommodate hardline Unionists in an Irish parliamentary setting. More interesting still, they’re focusing on a referendum of their own for around the 2016 mark. 

As I’ve said before, the case of a United Ireland is something I’m intensely ambivalent about and would be of the opinion that an independent Scotland would more likely precipitate a kind of Celtic alliance, each country becoming more independent of London but still under the kind of loose confederation I mentioned earlier. But, the political sands are changing and changing quickly, and for those who dream of a United Ireland they should make their case extremely well for the debate ahead. Their day may finally be coming if they do.

The Ian Paisley paradox - considering the career of Dr. No

As I write this, Ian Paisley remains in the intensive care unit of the Ulster Hospital, and like everyone else in the media I’ve been reflecting on the career of an incontrovertible political giant of these islands.

But it’s incredibly difficult.

Ireland is no stranger to high-profile politicians with mixed legacies who split opinions; Parnell is revered now but his relationship with Kitty O’Shea split his once monolithic party down the middle. Eamon de Valera was a demi-god or a treacherous wretch depending on who you talked to. Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern are grand lads in the eyes of their deathly loyal supporters, but it wouldn’t have taken you long to round up a pitchfork-wielding posse to picket their houses either. But Paisley is in a different orbit altogether.

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At the time and place I grew up, the word “Paisley” was synonymous with terror, even loathing. I used to dread hearing his booming voice on the radio on television, fulminating recklessly about something or other. It’s been said Bill Clinton could make you feel like the only person in the room, with Ian Paisley it seemed like he could make you feel like the focus of all his hostility and hate. For someone from Donegal in primary school in the nineties, Paisley felt like a genuine bogey man.

Yet, even then you’d hear stories that bordered on urban myths about him that confounded the obstreperous image. He was lovely in person, apparently. Catholics in his constituency supposedly felt well treated if they ever went to him about local business. According to legend he once met some Cork students playing a game of rugby against Ballymena, and gave them a hearty welcome and money to buy fizzy pop or some such.

In more recent years, that side of him seems to have shown itself publically, with his moderated attitude on power sharing and his surprisingly good relations with Martin McGuinness. Last year I even saw him giving a kind of flash mob sermon outside Belfast City Hall, a pious elderly man far removed from the gulderer famed for shouting “Never!” in that very same location a quarter of a century earlier . In a very short space of time, he’s gone from Ireland’s greatest monster to avuncular bridge builder.

While there’s something fitting about the evangelical preacher’s Damascene conversion on the road to redemption, and it’s better late than never that he turned heel, it’s important that when it comes to legacy, recent good doesn’t altogether overwrite past bad. Had Paisley not forced Terence O’Neill from office over One Man One Vote, or poured kerosene on the Ulster Workers Council Strike over Sunningdale, heaven knows how differently things could have developed.

Northern Ireland is in a situation now, mercifully, where past rivals can put aside hostilities and attempt to work together. But when it comes to considering legacy, it’s crucial that we take the whole picture, rough and smooth. Especially so with Ian Paisley.

What the Republican Presidential candidates can learn from Donegal teenagers

Rick Perry

The only thing that is preventing the Republican primary race from becoming a complete head bang is the sheer comicality of it. There’s Mitt Romney, who is only marginally more popular than smallpox; there’s Rick “EPA?” Perry, a man who is to memory and general regular behaviour what Mr Magoo is to eyesight; there’s Herman Cain, who I’m not sure could name any more than five other countries in the world; there’s Newt Gingrich, a man whose opinion of himself is in orbit, for no compelling reason. And then there’s the most hilarious of all, John Huntsman, the one sane man among them and the only one who could actually bring a fight to Obama, but his numbers are so low they can only be measured by the Kelvin Scale.

While the Republican base are amped up to stiff peaks of mental at the minute, the last two years in particular have not been good ones for political sanity in the States in general. Warped ideological fidelity has trumped practicality. Bloody-minded obstinacy is now apparently official policy. Every word spoken is either advancing or casting aspersions on some political agenda or other. It’s toxic in the extreme.

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Even at home, as election promises are still ringing in our sardonic ears, the feeling that we’ve driven down a dead end is pervasive.

Thank the baby Jesus and his farmyard ensemble cast, then, for the Donegal Youth Council.

Last Saturday I took twelve of the councillors for a politics day, a day where we’d discuss hot-button topics, moral dilemmas and discover what their opinions meant in the context of political groupings, parties and philosophies. The fact they were there on a Saturday morning/afternoon at all made sure I’d leave happy, but the manner in which they took to the issues left me elated.

They have previous form on this sort of thing, having asked questions of election candidates both in the general and Presidential elections earlier in the year questions you wouldn’t habitually expect from 13 to 18 year olds. But just as impressive as their grip on issues as varied as military intervention or economic policy was the method in which they had the conversation. They were measured, reasoned, and all their positions came from a basis in fact. In other words, several times more mature than 90% of the world’s elected representatives. When they disagreed, even on the contentious issues like abortion or drug legalisation, they took each other on earnestly and without animus. Nobody was out to win, or more to the point beat anyone.

I’m not sure what it is that makes so many candidates for high office the way they are, I’m not sure if the system moulds them a certain way or if the kind of people who run for those kind of things are just unusually venal, hysterical or straight-up bananas. But whatever the hell is the problem, maybe it should be young people running branches of government, while the Perrys and Newts of this world take a weekend class or two.

Former Naas Mayor Darren Scully and 'black Africans' - ignorance is no excuse for racism

Darren Scully's political campaign poster

The town of Naas in Kildare is a sort of second home to me, as it’s where a good friend of mine from college now works and lives. As such, whenever I hear the town's name on the news, my ears tend to prick up.

Imagine my dismay then when I heard the unholy reason my ears pricked up earlier this week. The town’s erstwhile Mayor, Darren Scully, made the extraordinary announcement – on local radio, no less – that he was no longer going to be dealing with the constituency issues of "black Africans".

His reason? He had experienced aggression and bad manners from black constituents. When it was put to him that what he was doing was the essence of racism, his defence was that he was just being honest and forthright, that he didn’t think of himself as racist, that he has black friends and has great craic with the black taxi drivers talking about football, basically crossing off every square on the “I’m Not Racist But” bingo card.

Now there are some flat out, irredeemable goons in the Irish political sphere, but Scully really does shine out among them.

For starters, if he had a problem with rude people at clinics, he should have said so. If he’d said “I’ve been getting some grief at clinics, and I won’t be taking that anymore” then that would have been fine, so why the arbitrary targeting of black constituents?

I absolutely refuse to believe that black people are his or anyone else in professional politics’ sole transgressors. After all, without white people being aggressive and ill-mannered about political issues there’d be no such thing as talk radio.
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And then there’s the issue of a public representative literally making discriminating decisions about who he serves based on a prima facie judgement which is as repugnant to his vocation as it is to humanity. His attempt to justify himself (there were some people from “other backgrounds” living in the area that he also did not deal with) only goes to show how ridiculous his views are.

Sadly though, Scully’s views are emblematic of a way of thinking that still exists, however outdated. A way of thinking that maintains it’s OK to say whatever drek you like so long as you’re “just expressing your opinion” or “just being honest”. A way of thinking that carelessly throws monstrous generalisations around in reference to the industry and motives of entire nationalities and ethnicities. A way of thinking that luxuriates unashamedly in its own narrow-minded conceit. I see it and hear it in all sorts of places, sometimes even within the comments section of this very website. It’s pathetic.

The most galling thing of all though is the sickening hypocrisy that lurks around the corner from this kind of feckless, witless bloviating. A friend of mine told me this week that there are reports in some local conservative media outlets in Canada that have been hostile to recent Irish arrivals, questioning their work ethic and such. If those reports became plentiful enough to be covered back home, those same fools who castigate the blacks and the foreigns here would be up in arms about how shoddily the proud Irish people are being treated, how at least when we went places around the world we worked for our keep dag nabbit, and how the Canadians are just a bunch of Brit lovers anyway, before rallying for a boycott of maple syrup, bacon, Due South, ice hockey, Gordon Lightfoot, politeness and Robin from How I Met Your Mother.

And while Darren Scully as Mayor jettisoned black Africans who live in his own town, if Paul McGrath was signing his book in Naas, or Samantha Mumba was opening a club in Naas, you know full well he’d be over to them so quickly he’d leave a plume of cartoon smoke behind him, with a corral of photographers in tow.

Naas is a commuter town, and as such it is inhabited by great swathes of people who originate elsewhere, both from other countries and from other parts of this country. Far from diminishing your environs there is great joy and value to be had from people living and working and playing with people who aren’t all necessarily from the same townland as you. And, in the same way Irish people have brought that joy and value to all corners of the world, my own life would have been a whole lot duller without the wide cultural influences I’ve been exposed to as a child, things like British TV, American politics, Jewish comedy, oriental cuisine, Latin music or black culture in general.

This week marks the anniversary of JFK’s death, and in an all-too-pertinent clip about Civil Rights he said no country can be free unless its citizens are free also. As Irish people and citizens of the world who know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of unfair and unfounded abuse, we must not tolerate such blind, mendacious prejudice when it happens to other people. It’s time for the likes of Darren Scully, and the woodwork emergers backing him up, to step out of their caves. They might learn something.

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The Democratic Unionist Party neurosis - dribbling while Northern Ireland burns

DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson

There are times when I look at the Northern Ireland I remember as a child and marvel at how far we’ve come, how in so many ways we’ve managed to look beyond old obstinacies and petty rivalries and create a more open, tolerant society.

This week was not one of those times.

Despite making great strides since their bogeymen days, to the point where they seemed positively reasonable during the last Assembly election, the DUP have managed to consolidate all their crazy into one manageable weekly repayment. Exhibit A: the ever-tiresome capital punishment debate.

A recent law in the UK means that if a public petition gets more than 100,000 signatures, it has to be debated in parliament. Inevitably, hang ‘em and flog ‘em got on the agenda, but among those most keen for the debate were DUP MP’s David Simpson, Gregory Campbell, Jeffrey Donaldson, Jim Shannon and Sammy Wilson, who tabled a parliamentary motion on the matter.

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Never mind the fact there isn’t a shred of evidence that the death penalty does anything but regularly kill innocent people, never mind the fact that the state reflectively killing people is an inherently bad idea, not least in a state with its fair share of ruthless killings over the years, never even mind the fact that the death penalty is expressly against the rules for any country in the Council of Europe. Then again, if some of the DUP MPs weren’t known for being mad, they wouldn’t be known for anything at all.

One of those MP who’s never had a problem with notoriety is Jeffrey Donaldson, Enoch Powell’s apprentice and Daniel O’Donnell lookalike. For most of his career he’s been known as one of the great intransigents, although he’d mellowed somewhat in recent years. That was, at least, until he took issue with a new rule affecting the Royals and their marital choices. Basically, Jeffrey isn’t happy future monarchs can now marry Catholics, so much so that he and a group of other Orangemen delivered a letter to Downing Street about the matter on Remembrance Day. This is in the same week that a Spotlight documentary on Northern Ireland TV revealed that the Orange Order reprimanded two senior Ulster Unionists, leader Tom Elliot and Minister Danny Kennedy, for attending a Catholic requiem mass for murdered PSNI officer Ronan Kerr.

And if that wasn’t enough Peter Robinson gave us a brief glimpse into the past by threatening his resignation this week. The reason? The Justice Minister David Ford is considering a new emblem for the prison service, one that may not have a crown on it or any reference to Her Majesty. That’s it. In an atmosphere of enormous social and economic problems, it’s good to know the biggest party in Northern Ireland have got it covered.

Ireland's unemployment crisis - job bridge scheme and the future

Dole queue in north Dublin

Ireland’s recent chastened economic woe has not only hit pockets and confidence, but also language and action. More and more, people aren’t so much “working” as “keeping busy.”

In my parents’ time, there were certain jobs available to people (the civil service, the bank, the farm, teaching or nursing) and most of them were long-term, secure and pensionable. The world we live and attempt to work in is now unrecognizable.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not yearning for the fadó fadó days of narrow vocationalism by any stretch. It’s a marvelous thing to have not only a greater choice of jobs but better knowledge transfer and employment mobility, but as is often the case with Ireland we have oscillated from one extreme to the other with no concern for balance.

Currently, we have all the insecurity and uncertainty of mobile employment without the range or variety of jobs to make it work. Therefore, we have a host of young people struggling to find any job in any market, not least the one for which they’re qualified, and often multi-qualified.

With so much demand and so little supply, hiring practices have taken on a moral dimension. More and more young people trying to advance their careers are having to do more for less. With employers holding the cards and graduates desperate for experience, remuneration often amounts to “a lovely time and a good reference.”

The lines between serving your time and being outright exploited are being horribly blurred.

Instead of the pillars of employment of old we now have Job Bridge, a catastrophic attempt at a work scheme that has rightly drawn snorts of derision for being laden with jobs either too ridiculous (waitressing and cleaning) or too advanced in their requirements (a whole host of the media ones) to warrant a (much too long) nine month stretch of an “internship” for the princely price of the dole and a little bonus sprinkled on top. It’s not how they do things in Holland.

While I was in Brussels at the EU Open Days event, I attended a seminar that showcased the Dutch policy for tackling youth unemployment. Some of the proposals were a bit out there, and it’s far from a perfect system either, but on the whole their approach was multi-faceted, well coordinated and well targeted.

Amazingly, it’s illegal to leave Dutch school at 18 without a qualification of some kind, and people younger than 27 have to comply by the rather rigorous rules or they don’t receive dole at all. The flipside is there is a large structure in place to avoid that happening. The job fair circuit is an industry all of itself, along with a multitude of other initiatives such as work coaches, youth covenants and subsidies and premiums for business owners who co-operate actively in the process, as well as a robust internship and training sector. As a result, their unemployment rate among young people is half that in the BMW region (borders, midlands, west) of Ireland. The Dutch themselves sum up their plan thusly: partnership, personnel, political prudence and pressure. The Irish plan brings to mind another word that stars with “P”.

While in Brussels I also talked to Connie Hanniffy, a county councilor from Offaly and senior member of the Irish delegation on the Committee of the Regions, being appointed to the continental committee by three different leaders of Fine Gael and with a particular interest in enterprise, business and employment. She claimed that we not only have to concentrate on more funding for skills and jobs, but we have to concentrate attention on who gets that funding.

“We’re missing the very people we need to get at” claimed Hanniffy. “We need to be getting to people with traditions of unemployment in their family and their community and provide schemes for those that haven’t had the direction. We need to engage with many people on a partnership basis.”

She also pointed to the role EU funding can have in job creation and re-skilling, pointing to the globalisation fund for erstwhile construction workers and funding for people wishing to start up their own business and mentoring. “You can’t subsidise your way into business but a structure is needed for business to survive. They may have good ideas but they may need help getting access to markets. Businesses need to interlink and find new ways of doing things.”

On the more general question of the job market and the sort of jobs people do and the way they do them, Hanniffy pointed to the fantastic example she saw in Berlin, where more and more jobs were coming from the burgeoning creative sector. She also saw an important role for educational facilities. “It’s up to colleges and universities not to try and pack courses, to provide balance and offer different boxes. I think this is what has been wrong in the past”.

Of all the things Ireland is currently short on, talent is not one of them. And any future prosperity the country has will be determined by how serious government, business and all other interested stakeholders take the job of building a structure where that talent is valued and put to best use.

The EU and Ireland - the importance of being close to Boston and Brussels

During the tremulous time following the 1992 general election, the embattled Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was handed a lifeline. With his grasp on power hanging in the balance, Reynolds went to an EU summit in Edinburgh at the end of that year and secured £8billion in European structural funds. Even his most optimistic supporters were expecting something closer to six. Emboldened, Reynolds told his press secretary, “Now watch me put a government together”.

That money was not only was an instrumental element in keeping Reynolds in power, it also became a vital element of policy. In the years since 1992, all manner of capital projects have the EU’s starry prints all over it. From the Luas and the M50 to research facilities and local enterprise boards, and whether it’s widely known or accepted or not, the EU’s structural funds helped build an entire national infrastructure.

Small wonder then that the EU’s Open Days event, run by the Directorate General for Regional Policy, is such a big draw. It’s the single biggest event the EU hosts every year, with thousands of interested parties coming from every townland in Europe. This year, I was one of them. 

A couple of things struck me from the start. First, structural funds may not be the silver bullet they once were, both because of relative year-on-year improvements and the banking cataclysm, but they’re still vital as a means of realising key investments. The second thing I found striking was how clear the focus was on what those key investments would be: emerging business and research. It may have been roads in the past, but from here on in, it’s SME and R&D.

There were other talking points and debates that ran through the week. “Macroeconomic conditionality” became the unlikely catchphrase of the whole event, with a strenuous debate revolving round whether sanctioning regions or countries that don’t use their funds properly would disproportionately affect the poorest countries who needed the money most. Then there was the issue of credit. For once in a European context, we weren’t referring to the debt kind.

Often, money distributed to the respective government departments of Europe is appropriated as such. Since any structural fund money has to be matched by national governments, the European influence can often be underplayed or lost altogether. In a time when passive Euroscepticism is becoming more and more fashionable, the way the EU asserts itself in this regard is becoming more and more important. 

Plenary sessions and debates aside there were also a host of seminars where people could showcase the ways they used their funding. One particularly interesting session involved Holland and its approach to tackling youth unemployment, the scope of which puts our own much-maligned Job Bridge to shame.

Over the next weeks I’ll be considering the finer points of some of the issues brought up in Brussels, and with the announcement in the last week of The Gathering in 2013, it’s important to balance the relationship with our friends within and without Europe. Being close to Boston doesn’t mean we have to ignore Berlin.

Martin McGuinness' run for presidency may insult some but we can't run from our past

Presidential candidate Martin McGuinness

I had to admit I was slightly surprised at first that Sinn Féin were seeking an internal candidate to contest the Presidency, on the basis that the touted names wouldn’t exactly be setting anyone’s world alight.

Mary Lou McDonald? As electable as diabetes. Michelle Gildernew? Barely known south of Aughnacloy. But then, they pulled the rabbit out of the hat: Martin McGuinness. I can’t imagine for the life of me why.

Of course, on a certain level it makes a lot of sense: a republican heavyweight recognised around the world attempts to become President bang on time for the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. But of course the flipside to that is the whirlpool of questions about his role in some of the darker corners of his and the country’s history the Presidential race has become.

McGuinness himself seems to have been genuinely surprised at the focus on his time in the IRA while he falls over himself to be statesmanlike and magnanimous, which demonstrates either surprising naiveté or a man so post-nationalist he’s genuinely forgot all about it.

While you have to wonder at the wisdom at the move, and how prepared all concerned were, his candidacy has unearthed the curious double standard at the heart of Irish politics.

First of all, to put my own cards on the table: I’m as much of a republican as James Connolly was a Progressive Democrat. I can’t think of an issue I care less about than the physical unity of Ireland: as long as I can talk freely to my friends in Belfast who grew up in different communities to me or roam into Derry whenever I want I don’t care if the place is governed by Ireland, Britain or Tuvalu.
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While the resurgence of the IRA didn’t happen in a vacuum in the late 60s and it’s easy to understand why people joined in those early days, I’ve never thought what they considered to be their war to be anything but counter-productive, misguided and ultimately malevolent. In many ways, I’m probably typical of the West Brit media types Martin McGuinness has been railing against in the last couple of days. But while I don’t have any intention to vote for him, and while I think he was mad to run in the first place, I have no inherent hostility to his candidacy either.

The whole point of the drive for peace and reconciliation is that it’s infinitely better for republicans who were violent in the past to be brought in from the cold, to categorically accept the mechanisms of a democratic state and reject and condemn their past sins and work towards a situation where that can never happen again, rather than be isolated for ever more. Taking everyone who had a damaging role during The Troubles and winging them into a far-flung cave might make certain people feel better, but it solves no problem.

It’s only right that McGuinness is rigorously taken to task over his past now he’s resolved to try and become head of state, and he really should do some manning up and react to these concerns in a less tetchy, victimised manner, but there seems to be a case of historical statute of limitations among some of his critics. Eamon de Valera became Commander in Chief of the defence forces less than forty years after prompting a civil war and promising to wade through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government.

Sean Lemass, generally feted as one of the best Taoisigh the country has ever had, famously referred to Fianna Fáil as a slightly constitutional party at the start of his career. Some FF TD’s had guns in their pockets on their first day in the Dáil. Michael Collins, father figure of Fine Gael and heralded on television by one Michael McDowell as Ireland’s greatest ever figure, hardly lived a bloodless life either. And even excluding all that, in five years time there will be massive nationwide celebrations of the anniversary of a small minority of the Irish Volunteer Force unilaterally declaring insurrection while a programme for Irish self-determination was agreed upon and ready to be enforced by elected Irish officials. To the best of my knowledge, the men and women of the Rising didn’t fight the Brits by lobbing water balloons at them.

The sad fact of Irish history is that it is drenched in blood, and that has left a legacy we all struggle with, but we have to deal with that legacy in its entirety: if we deplore the use of the gun in 1972, we can’t intellectually detach ourselves from the fact the use of the gun was deplorable in 1922 as well.

Whether McGuinness’ run for the Presidency was a naive political miscalculation, a case of ego clouding better judgement, or even a deliberately high risk strategy to wipe Fianna Fáil’s eye, the announcement has opened up an uneasy and ill-tempered argument. While disappointing, if for no other reason than so much time is being spent discussing the last 40 years of a man who isn’t going to win anyway rather than focusing on what the candidates can do in the next seven, if the debate makes us think more widely about the leaders of our bullet-riddled past and acts as an ultimate last stand for sympathy of any kind for those sort of politics, perhaps it will be worth it.