Meitheal Politics for the Second Millennium?

The innate spirit of generosity and reciprocity that has made up rural life in Ireland is coming to the fore to balance the cut and thrust of adversarial politics. 

 

Farmers compete at market but they co-operate to get there.

     Civil war politics may be moving on at last as we celebrate the hundred year anniversary of the 1916 Rising that also gave rise to the circumstances of their formation. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two major Irish political parties founded from each side of that divide, will not go into Government together to make the only possible cohesive majority in the Irish Dail. It appears they will, however, support each other in ensuring a working government can be formed. The Irish Dail is coming together in a Meitheal.  It seems that Micheal Martin, the leader of Fianna Fail, will support Fine Gael’s outgoing Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, to be the first Fine Gael leader to return for a second go at the role (even if he steps down mid-term as he has long proposed) and lead a minority government made up of his own members of the parliament and a number of independent parliamentarians, Irish T.D.s.

     

     The Members of the Dail are working hard in committee at putting together a framework for a new way of working in a parliament that will be much more collaborative and in tune with the spirit of the Meitheal that forms an instrinsic part of the  fabric of Irish history, society and psyche.  The farmers came together in community Meitheals to bring the harvests in or to assist in barn or shed building and similar ventures. A new structure for the Dail aims to allow and support responsible participation by all members of the House, and enable them to contribute more through debate and committees to government. The innate spirit of generosity and reciprocity that has made up rural life in Ireland is coming to the fore to balance the cut and thrust of adversarial politics. It won’t make the adversarial nature of politics go away and it should not. But it has the potential to contribute a long needed balance and so allow for a much better use of all the members of the Dail by putting their resources at the day to day service of best possible government.

     If you haven’t watched Borgen it’s time to get out the box set. This television series on the forming and re-forming of minority governments in Denmark has become part of the national conversation in Ireland, mostly thrown in by politicians, in the last week. I had thought I was one of a small minority of people watching it here.  Now it turns out the politicians have been quietly viewing all along - or maybe they’ve only just begun. The cynics scoff at the notion of a new politics. However, as one member of the panel on the Late Debate said on radio last night, it may have been Eamon Ryan of the Green Party who made a great contribution to the discussion on constructive oppposition, ‘Why can’t we change our mind-set from that entrenched Irish way of doing things and do what the Scandinavians and others are doing? We might even find we can do it better.’

     It is part of the wisdom of Fianna Fail, as well as their only real option at the moment, that they will not go into government with Fine Gael. To do so would be a step too far - with historical rivalries wagging the tail of the dog. This will hopefully be a much more desirable first step that will bring about experiences in working together – already well begun in recent  Dail Committees, including the Banking Enquiry into what happened on the eve of the Bail Out - and do more to fade out the rivalries of civil war politics than any forced co-operation in a hot-house Cabinet would do.

      We are a creative people. We can do this. It is a time of unprecedented creative endeavour in Irish Politics. The electorate have forced the change continually promised but not delivered. Research indicates that human beings are happiest when they are rising to a manageable challenge and bringing a solution to fruition as Mihally Csikszentmihaly describes in his book Flow –the Psychology of Optimal Experience. This is a good time for Irish politics and the journalists having to catch up as they are coached by those participating in discussions to change the discourse. ‘Well if you don’t mind, I don’t think that’s the language we should be using. It is more appropriate just now to talk in terms of partnership.’

     There’s some floundering going on but that has got to be good language to be moving towards at the start of a new millennium. There couldn’t be a better memorial to the leaders who produced a Proclamation to initiate an Irish State than to change the language of politics to suit the times we live in now and to shift from a conflict consciousness to the resurrection of the imagination of the Meitheal. Farmers compete at market but they co-operate to get there.  

     Yes, it is a time for rural Ireland to contribute its best while they hold a good hand of cards. It is argued the rural vote ensured the last government didn’t return. That thought helps to focus the minds of those elected on putting together a new kind of government and making sure they don’t return too soon to ask the electorate to vote again. They might not be forgiven for that. We tend to like Meitheals.

New Writers Opportunity - West of Ireland, from Clarinbridge Arts

Calling New Writers!

Clarinbridge Arts, with the support of Galway County Council, are inviting writers to try their luck in 'QUOTECARDS', a miniature publishing enterprise.

The idea is to give new writers from the west a kick-start.

"It's hard to become published," said a spokesperson. "And writing can be very solitary. So we want to give some writers a chance to meet each other, we want to celebrate them out in the open - and to micro-publish them!"

Poets, journalists, historians, thriller writers: any genre or form is welcome. "If you love writing,  are over 18, live in the west of Ireland, and have not been commercially published before - you're in!"

Here's how 'QUOTECARDS' works.

·      Send in one or two pieces of work (no more!) to quotecardswest@gmail.com by 15th May 2016.

·      A panel selects 4 - 8 pieces from all the submissions.

·      Each piece, or a line or two from each piece, will be printed on an individually designed postcard or bookmark.

·      Clarinbridge Arts print 100 of each card, 50 to go to the author, and 50 to give out free at a celebration launch of 'QUOTECARDS' in September.

·      The writer owns the copyright of the card for future use.

For further information contact quotecardswest@gmail.com

Poetry Vomit and Pleasure - from London

Bloomsbury Coffee House – was a real pleasure to visit while in London on the weekend despite long delays in the delivery of delicious porridge with a compote of prunes and apricots. It allowed time to check e-mails and read the Sunday paper headlines.  I’ve decided to cook up a compote to have on hand for breakfasts in future. My first treat in this regard was in Folyle’s Hotel, Clifden, Co. Galway, where it was a rhubarb and ginger sauce. It was Sunday morning in London though and the place was packed. The ambience was full of character and kept us entertained - and maybe the new body in the kitchen was not yet quite up to speed. My daughter thought the avocado on gluten free toast was to die for.

     In terms of design if you want to know how to make a lower basement look great this is a good place to visit. The old metal window frames remain intact. I hadn’t seen similar windows for a while. They reminded me of the home I grew up in. It’s amazing just how long a building can retain its authenticity when well looked after. White paint with shades of grey – and the bathroom which could have been disaster was an enjoyable visit with a concrete floor painted light grey and just a few lively tiles and a mirror reflecting such light as was available.  The white yard with the steps down to the entrance painted red let plenty of light into the larger two room

s of the coffee house.

     Then, naturally, I met the Irish language poet, Louis de Paor, outside - en passant. He also lives in Galway. You couldn’t visit London for a few days and not come across someone from home. He was gracious in being accosted with a ‘hi from Galway’ – just couldn’t resist it!

 

  http://juddbooks.com/  82 Marchmont Street, London

     Judd Books, justly proud of it it’s used academic books, was just around the corner from the coffee house. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday but then I had a good browse through their quality selection – both on the ground floor and downstairs - once I’d received a clothes peg receipt for the bag I’d to leave at the desk. There were large books I’d have liked but then I’d have had to carry them around so I settled for Kid, the Simon Armitage collection of poetry from Faber and Faber that ‘won the inaugural Forward \prize for Best First Collection in 1992’. I have to admit I bought it because two of the poems made me chuckle. When I flicked through it later on I discovered Not the Furniture Game within – a poem Kevin Higgins had recently given out in the Skylight Poets writing forum in the Galway Arts Centre as a writer’s prompt (great for encouraging metaphors) and that I had left on my kitchen table before leaving home in readiness for the Monday night group meeting Having the Conversation – About Celebration. I was suggesting it celebrates language. It evoked a powerful reaction in the group – for most it was overwhelming, an overabundance of metaphor, too prolific a list and insufficiently clear in its meaning. Just the kind of poem I need for the Conversation group using poetry to provoke discussion. ‘This is not a poem,’ allowing us to try to establish what criteria it doesn’t fit and whether they are in fact the criteria we want to use in evaluating a poem. Not something we could establish. Just the kind of meat and drink required. It made one participant want to vomit, for the same reason – too much. I love the poem, the cascade of language and metaphor and I wish my 'one-liners were footballs through other people's windows'. It was an evening of visceral poetry with quite a few lists including Bertholdt Brecht’s To Eat of Meat Joyously and Pleasures following on from Chana Bloch’s Rising To Meet It, a poem seen initially to be about childbirth but, taking the third stanza into account (controversial in this discussion for being included for which, again, I was thankful) more a celebration of woman’s warrior-ship invigorated by the wisdom and intuition of the body. Lines from Rising to Meet It and from Armitage’s Gooseberry Season, also found in his book, are now displayed on my Twitter title @susanhlindsay.

       Matilda The Musical at the Cambridge Theatre www.matildathemusical.com/, on Friday night was a disappointment. We should have known it didn’t augur well when three adults and a child clamboured over us to aisle seats they could have reached without discomfiting anyone. The man of the party who stood with his umbrella all but spiking my stomach and his case blocking my knees while the rest of his company flaffed around making it impossible for me to resume my seat for so long that I had eventually to ask him if he’d mind making space to enable me to sit again should have been a further warning of what was to come. The Grand Circle seats were stacked high. Despite that, at one stage a man of the party climbed over to swop seats with a child in the row before during the first Act, the ultimate distraction after continual talking and movement among the party who appeared to be explaining everything to the children as it took place, not in whispers but in loud continuous mutter and even singing along at one stage. Then the men who were now sitting together began to talk to each other.

     Initially was in sympathy with the possible need to settle the children in. But when I realised I’d missed a significant section of the first half of the performance and was no longer clear as to what was happening, that the seats had cost us sixty pounds, that others paid considerably more and our whole trip from Ireland had been initially motivated by a wish to see the event, hear the music, enjoy memories of the Dahl characters and see the children who would bring them to life it became really annoying. The usherette shushed them and stood at the end of the lines they occupied for most of the performance. Eventually I added my own entreaties. In the interval my daughter pointed out that people from all the surrounding seats had shushed and given glowering looks in the hope of enjoying the show but to no avail. In fact the group appeared entirely oblivious to the needs of anyone around them. In the interval those who had not already moved along to fill the few empty surrounding seats did so as we did. But it was too late to still fully appreciate and enjoy the show although we did what we could. I am not sure what language the group spoke so maybe they did come from a culture that doesn’t value silence in the theatre. It wouldn’t encourage me to travel to another London show, too much at stake when audience members can’t be trusted to allow others enjoy their night out.

    I can’t tell you much about the performance. It is quite amazing to see such young performers deliver such professional performances that you forget they are children and want to judge them on the same terms as everyone else and they certainly did deliver such performances. Overall I thought it was a little mechanical and had lost some sparkle. The artifice of delivering the storyline through Matilda telling it her local librarian and saviour didn’t seem to quite work but having been so distracted and trying to deal with the disappointment – not least because I knew how much my daughter wanted to enjoy it - I am in no position to judge. 

Our Sunday afternoon trip down the Thames to Greenwich did not disappoint. The sun came out while we were on the river and it was all the more appreciated for its absence earlier.

The Elephant in the Room at Corrib Toastmasters is No Weed.

 

    

‘…And I still don’t know what that elephant in the room is all about’ was the General Evaluator's conclusion to the Corrib Toastmasters meeting on Tuesday 8th March, 2016 - at the Maldron Hotel in Oranmore, Co. Galway - having begun with a comment on an atmosphere of giddiness on the night. She was to find out.

     The giddy tone may have been set when the Toastmaster of the night invited members to attend his wedding celebration. He is to marry the man who is already his civil partner. This time last year he was working on a jigsaw of maps on the kitchen floor in preparation to for Vote Yes in Co.Mayo in the campaign to legalise marriage for all in the Irish Constitution that was passed and came into law at the end of 2015. 

       

     The meeting proper having begun: the first speech made a cogent case for legalising medicinal marijuana. The liveliness was brought to earth as the speaker described the far more dangerous drugs and two year waiting list for spinal pain relief injections involved in managing personal chronic pain. Her concluding hope that by the time medicinal marijuana is legalised she will no longer need it was upbeat.

     From euphoria – the grammarian’s word of the evening that each speaker is invited to use – to the bread the next speaker has discovered it’s a pleasure to bake. Personal Oscars were awarded during the third speech. His Stage Five speech would be evaluated in relation to use of body language and expression. No question about able use of facial expression when this speaker taunted the Mayo team followers with his Oscar for the Galway team winning thrice in a row – glee and humour clear in a winning smile and sparkling eyes. His final winner is a Nun whose seventy-fourth he recently attended. In her ‘retirement’ she teaches mindfulness to people recovering from addiction.

    ‘I thank God that I have always had the gift of a great deal of energy’ the final speaker, working on an advanced speaking programme, began. He had needed it in the early in his married life while working in Australia on a major construction project. He broke his leg, his brand new machinery, worth around a hundred thousand, became bogged in a swamp as did the recovery efforts and vehicles. Three days of dogged persistence got it out. Exhausted he got home, only to discover that a close family member was critically ill in his hospital. The speech’s evaluator summed it up: ‘Resilience best describes the underlying theme of this speech’.

    Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break was the end poem read with exceptionally beautiful pacing. The reader contributed a welcome reflective pause before the final reports and evaluation asking about the elephant at back of the room. It may well accompany the Corrib Toastmasters in the St. Patrick’s Day Galway parade. Who’ll walk with the club? How can you miss that? 

Note. Corrib Toastmasters can be found at www.corrib.toastmastersclub.org

With Creative Devotion The Truly Profane Becomes Sacred

Whatever You Do With Devotion Is Sacred

Devote yourself to whatever, artistic or other, project and you imbue it with the sacred. The spirits attend. The muse shows up. Bali dancers, in Elizabeth Gilbert’s recounting of a tale, told to her by her teacher, in her latest book Big Magic – Creative Living Beyond Fear - adapted their dancing to suit the ideas of high-minded Western visitors who could only see the sacred as separate from profane. They left their sacred dances in the temples, danced - newly adapted forms considered a more suitable representation - in beach bars until they grew into such beautiful and sacred forms that they, in turn, transformed and re-invigorated the original temple dances and the dance goes on.

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/elizabeth-gilbert-big-magic1.jpg

    

Create With Devotion

       Gilbert’s book demonstrates the importance of showing up: the value of making an act of devotion and giving attention to some inkling of a possibility -  devoting yourself to fanning the development of the spark of an idea or impulse. 

Intention

      That notice of intention becomes the intent that signals the muse or spirit. It is their invitation to attend. Your act of devotion, by demonstrating intention to embark on a creative project, however frail its promise, is the starting point for artistic endeavour and true creativity.

For more on creativity and Elizabeth Gilbert see the link above and her inspiring TED talks.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/elizabeth_gilbert

People Power

     A photo shared on social media; beds offered in homes.  Bob Geldof’s offer to do the same thing on radio. Politicians catch the change in mood, change their own attitude, and act in accord.

     A thousand or more people elect to disregard false promise when their train journey doesn’t take them over the border. One man, with a megaphone, entreats his fellow desperate not to submit but to get to their feet and walk - and continues until they join him one by one. 

     The walking thousand – this time on a busy motorway - continue in hope and then the buses come, take them to a destination of hope.

     In the early 1980’s I attended a Conference in Amsterdam, titled The Spirit of Peace. The Assistant Secretary General of the UN told the assembly that people work for years to get to the top of organisations where they believe they will have power to change things. When they get there they realise they are relatively powerless, come to realise the real power is back where they came from.

    The world depends on us.

‘Cleared of wrongdoing.’ Expedient scapegoating? What Values does Ireland Want to Uphold - Leadership Questions posed by Micheal Martin and Enda Kenny.

What do the Taoiseach’s response to the Fennelly Report and an Opposition Leader, Micheal Martin’s, response last week to questions raised by the PSI, Northern Ireland, as to whether the IRA still exists have in common? And what does the RTE documentary on the training of Army Recruits have to add?

     Did the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, show presidential style leadership in 2014 in the midst of revelatory reports, official and unofficial, that were unravelling trust in the Department of Justice and the Gardai? Or did he overstep his brief while demonstrating more of the technical ethics – where the rule but not the spirit of the law is honoured – we have come to expect in public life: an expectation that continues to erode confidence in Irish and International politics?

     As with our eroding coastline that - where possible - continues to be restored when funding and the political will allows, when the erosion has gone too far nothing can be done except to shore up what remains. This is a dangerous business. When law and order breaks down it’s a long road back to restoring sufficient trust in politics to build peace.

     The slow and frustrating road to that restoration is something Micheal Martin should know about. He was a Minister in successive Fianna Fail governments engaged in the painfully slow peace process required to enable a return to the rule of an elected Northern Ireland Assembly.  Those in the front-line of organisations who took up arms (whether you call it terrorism or war) when they no longer believed the political system could, or had the stomach to, deliver an adequately just society had to be particularly patient. They had to act with painstaking attention to detail as they both negotiated peace and led their former – or present, at the time – organisations to continue to take steps for peace and to put their trust in politics instead of the bullet.

     Ironically, it may have been the now relatively normal context that led a Senior Northern Ireland police officer to choose the words he did last week, rather than the more carefully phrased sentences that have come since - familiar over the long years of a return to peace in Northern Ireland.  The Statement from a member of the PSI (Police Service in Northern Ireland) that the IRA was still in existence to a degree and that members are suspects in the investigation of a murder might not have been phrased that way in the immediate winning of a return to politics and the putting beyond use of weaponry held by the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries. 

     

     The remains of an organisation, now with strong criminal elements, is not at all the same thing as the former organisation itself. It is generally understood that former members of all the paramilitaries have variously turned to active politics or to criminality, while others have retired entirely. The failure to spend enough money to resolve the societal inequities that fed the violence or to put in place sufficient processes to help to resolve grievances and grief after years of atrocities made that inevitable. It was nothing new that one of them might be a suspect in a criminal investigation. A suggestion that the paramilitary organisation, the IRA, was back in existence was however entirely new and a grave threat to the peace. It was surprising that the PSI Chief Constable backed up his Officer. His careful statement was never going to be fully reported after the first instance. He should have been less equivocal. Again, it appears he was not as fully conscious of the political dangers as former incumbents of the post might have been.

     Micheal Martin rushed to compound that failure to duly regard politics with his expedient use of a shorthand sound-bite. It was political opportunism at its worst. There was no need to repeat the inaccuracy. He could have added critical clarification. But it served to score a point against a Sinn Fein he now has to compete against for votes in the election next year. I have been impressed by his leadership of a party struggling to make a comeback. His success so far has been impressive but last week I knew nothing had changed. The old politics are still in place. Expediency rules.

     In Ireland and many States, the call from all sides for a renewal of political structures to rebuild the trust that polls and low turnouts on polling day suggest has been badly eroded is pointless if the attitudes at the heart of the problem prevail. One could even argue that if the attitudes changed (and research shows that it is attitudes that are foremost in deciding behaviour and change) the need for structural change would be significantly reduced. 

     I hate Joan Burton’s statement that the Taoiseach has been ‘cleared of wrongdoing’ by the Fennelly Report. It may have been the required political sound-bite but it stinks of expediency. It avoids all mention of the fine line he was traversing. We will never know the ins and outs of the responsibility the Garda Commisioner in the Republic, who retired early last year, has for what was going on in a culture that increasinglyseems to be the norm throughout the organs of the State. It could be argued that with all the emerging controversies arising from his time in office he ought to retire early. But we do not have a culture of people resigning when the perception of things happening under their watch turn sour. Wasn’t that what politicians used to do? Doesn’t that make the Garda Commissioner a scapegoat? The Taoiseach can no longer have trusted the Minister for Justice or he wouldn’t have gone over his head, but it was the Commissioner he felt should be informed that he might no longer be able to tell his Cabinet he could put his trust in. If he hadn’t been put in such an untenable position, the Garda Chief could have retired anyway – in protest at the behaviour of the political establishment. Maybe that is what has happened.

     I watched with initial horror the bullying tactics and expletives, totally unacceptable in any other workplace, deployed to train the Irish Army recruits on RTE television’s documentary (11th & 12th Sept, 2015). I refused to allow myself give in to an urgent desire to change channels. Some of the recruits laughed in the first instance. It was so ridiculous it was laughable. I smiled myself, remembering going to a Secretarial College and wanting to laugh when the teacher called on ‘Miss Harris and Miss …’ to ‘stand up’ for speaking to each other in class. Even in the 1970s, (I was brought up in rather privileged circumstances, given I was sent to a liberal school)I hadn’t seen anyone being asked to ‘Stand up’ for misbehaviour since First Class in National School. But the Sergeant was serious and she made it very clear by further expletives and demands backed up by the Lieutenant and other Officers.

    The would-be soldiers were given the justification that discipline is essential. It became clear that attention to detail – taught through attending to details of uniform and dress, no button could be out of place – and the developing of an inbuilt automatic response to follow an order could save their life, or that a fellow soldier, within  a couple of years. The runner up for best recruit of the year was an exceptional  woman recruit who may have been pipped at the post because she answered back under the extreme conditions, and for the first time in seventeen weeks, on a week-long training exercise out in the mountains. It doesn’t augur well for overcoming groupthink in the Army. I presume they’d argue first things first: there isn’t time when lives are at risk to have soldiers questioning orders.

     If the attention to detail required by our soldiers was required in politics, or in other parts of the civil service and in civilian life in general, we might be living in a very different country and not find ourselves in the straits we’re in. However groupthink and the kind of discipline that doesn’t allow questions or critical thinking is antithetical to what is required for creative and just solutions to problems.

     One has to ask if it’s still appropriate in the times we live in to train soldiers with bullying and expletives. I find it hard to believe we can’t do a whole lot better. Nevertheless, if I were a soldier looking at the shenanigans of the political leaders in whose hands their lives are ultimately held I’d be concerned. Without soldiers and Gardai the State has no power and can’t uphold any values. If we are going to teach our armed forces to be disciplined we had better all be disciplined in taking care of the values and peace we are asking them to help us to uphold. Nightly we see the refugees fleeing the breakdown of politics and the chaos of war. On an international scale, it has never been clearer that we need to build and take care of the peace. Politics is critical in that care. We don’t need a new politics we need a renewal in politics. We need our leaders to take leadership in demonstrating the values in their own behaviour that we want to ask our soldiers to risk their lives to uphold for the Nation.