Sean Connolly (2022) On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World.

My mother’s maiden name was Connolly. As a child, she was sent ‘home’ to Ireland, during the Second World War, with her sister (my Auntie Phyllis) to safeguard them from German bombs and to make their Roman Catholic faith bombproof. She didn’t talk about it, certainly not to me, but there were whispers of predatory paedophilic attempts. And as outcast Irish, they were treated like cow shit. My Auntie Phyllis and my mum had a lifelong-bond based on shared hardship. They were Irish immigrants of a different kind, but they faced the same kind of prejudices and poverty.

My dad was born in Northern Ireland. But he came here as a child. His dad was here and his mum died early. He went to Our Holy Redeemer’s School (still going strong) in Whitecrook. He had a Scottish accent. Not Irish, like my Uncle Charlie and my godmother, Auntie Josie. Or like Pat McDaid’s dad, or Sporter Sweeney or Boxer Toi’s dad. We’re second or third generation and experience the cultural fade of fitting in and marrying into the existing population. Most of us remain mad Glasgow Celtic fans.

In the United States, it is evident that there is little or no difference between the second and third generation Irish who voted Republican and for Trump, the moron’s moron. A generation ago, when John Kennedy won by a very slim majority (and a bit of electoral cheating) Catholics were demonised and if it wasn’t for the electoral blocks delivered wholesale by Capos of the Irish-Catholic, Democratic, immigrant machine, he would have lost.

The Ireland my Uncle Charlie and Auntie Josie left a lifetime ago was rural. What little industry there was in the North, in Belfast, weaving and shipbuilding. The population halved after the Irish Famine (there was also a Scottish Famine mostly in the Highland and Islands) but it was in Ireland were subsistence farming meant the humble potato was breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions that famine took around a million lives directly and indirectly.

Ironically, the root cause may have been a cargo of seed potatoes from across the Atlantic in 1845. The population of Ireland had doubled from 4.4million in 1791 to above 8 million in 1841. Almost 90% of the population depended on the potato. The more prosperous tenant farmer who could afford a cow had assets to sell. Most did not. All they could offer was cheap labour.

An estimated 109 000 sailed for North America in 1846, almost double the total of the beginning of the Famine. What we now know as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina were less popular destinations. For those with little or no money, the short hop across the Irish Sea meant that tens of thousands a week ended up in the ports of Liverpool and Glasgow.

In their poverty and need, we were caricatured as sub-human and disease stricken. There was some truth in the latter. Ships bringing export goods from America and the British colonies filled their holds with human ballast, which they could charge a fee, and make the return journeys profitable.

For babies, one-in-seven did not survive the journey. Those packed below deck had a nominal space of 6 feet by 3 feet for married couples. Toilets were rudimentary. Women, in particular, crouched down and shat and urinated wherever they could. Water and food were rationed. Typhoid and dysentery were not. Coffin ships delivered their cargoes to cities that started asking for bonds to offset the cost of treating the ill, but which pushed up prices and more ships towards Canadian ports. But more than 90% made it ashore and became citizens. Women, in particular, became a prized asset.

When my Uncle Charlie left Ireland the population was still haemorrhaging the young and fit, but the destination pre-and-post War—with the Hungry Thirties as an interlude—was to British cities. Cities that were crying out for cheap labour the Irish specialised in. Labour that dug canals with pick and shovels, connected railways across continents, created reservoirs and build road after road and house by house helped make Britain and its former colonies Irish enough to have St Patrick’s Day parades and indulge the bonhomie of a green and pleasant land usurped by British rule. Step forward President Joe Biden, following in the footsteps of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and even Ronnie Reagan whose aspirations were more Protestant blue blood.

Ireland, that Irish tiger that has become a parking space for big corporations—with promises of low taxation—inside the EEC has seen its population double from when my Uncle Charlie left Ireland to around five million. It has more Polish immigrants than Britain. And to my great shame has also played the race card. Demonising immigrants while most of its wealth, like in Britain, goes to the rich and Irish 1%. The most oppressed people ever banner, once worn with pride, is now a rallying cry to deport and demonise those at the bottom. Cultural fade. Not for me. I’m not buying into that propaganda. We’ve a different kind of famine in housing and public services and it’s the rich that we need to pay their way. Not the poor, oppressed masses that America once claimed to represent as a sanctuary and offer a welcome. I’m not ashamed to be part Irish. I’m ashamed of such policies finding fertile soil in whatever side of the Atlantic you happened to be standing on. Sean Connolly offers a comprehensive account of what it means to be Irish, but that doesn’t mean the story is ended. It’s still being written by us now and I don’t like what I’m seeing or hearing.

https://amzn.to/48khBJ5

• 😈 “Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie
•  📚 Share the Magic, Share the Page! 🌟 #BeastieNovel #BookBuzz” 😈

https://bit.ly/bannkie

.

Putin vs The West, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Narrator Caroline Catz, Editor Toby Marter, Director Tim Stirzaker, and Series Producer Norma Percy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlz7tz/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-1-my-backyard

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzcrb/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-2-back-with-a-vengeance

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dlzdwr/putin-vs-the-west-series-1-3-a-dangerous-path

The Doomsday Clock sits 90 seconds to midnight. The closest the clock has been since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists established the clock in 1947, when two superpowers first developed the means of ending civilisation and life on this planet. The USSR and USA faced off. With around 200 000 dead in the latest war in Ukraine, Putin is in the dock.

The BBC has assembled a star-spangled cast. No Putin, but a Putin representative. Putin’s ‘special military operation’ is now acknowledged formally in Russia as a war, but because Germany are finally offering tanks, it’s rebranded by Putin as another German invasion. A re-running of the second world war in which Russia lost around 20 million combatants. Later called The Great Patriotic War. The difference here, of course, is Putin is the invader. Ukrainians the patriots. But truth tends to be complex.

Boris Johnson. ‘Putin is a very difficult and calculating man. It was very, very difficult to find leverage, and to find ways of constraining him. You know, he threatened me and at one points said, you know, “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute”’.   

Boris Johnson is an equally difficult and calculating man. Let’s not forget he adopted Brexit. Three years later it has proven to be an increasingly disastrous economic and social policy based on nationalism and racism, but which got him the office he coveted as Prime Minister. The Conservative Party received donations of millions from Russian billionaires and oligarchs who had looted the former USSR and managed to escape with their wealth largely intact.  Boris gave a life peerage to a former USSR spymaster and a seat in the House of Lords. Nigel Farage channelled money from the KDP, Russian security services, and into mainstream politics. Johnson was the figurehead that was going to redirect £150 million a week to the NHS. The erstwhile hero that got it done, while enriching himself and promoting brand Johnson. Here he plays Putin’s nemesis while trashing British democracy. Don’t forget, among his lesser crimes, he tried to illegally suspend British Parliament and ride roughshod over the Anglo-Irish Agreement with the EEC.   

Jose Manual Barroso, President European Commission. 

‘I’ve met Putin 25 times. And to me Putin is someone who knows how to manage risk. When I saw him in the days before the invasion of Ukraine, I think emotion was stronger than rational thinking. Now he’s expressing and very, very deep frustration and resentment against the West—but not only against the West, against the past, against history.’  

No President Barrack Obama. His remark about Russia being ‘a regional power,’ was meant to have chaffed at Putin’s pride. Gorbachev was meant to have experienced something similar. But we don’t know because this programme is told from the side of the right and the true.

No moron’s moron and 45^th American President. Trump’s election victory in 2016 was celebrated in the Russian Whitehouse.  He favoured dogmatism over dialogue. In other words he lied, lied and continued lying as he faces multiple charges ranging from fraud to rape. Money was funded directly to the Trump brand via Russian players in the Great game. Facebook and Twitter aren’t Russian stooges, but Russian bot factories churning out propaganda for the Trump brand proved not too good to be true, but to be true.

Instead we have a low ranking official from Obama’s administration giving the official view, which is Putin is a dictator. We know that. Trump is a would-be-dictator.

Petro Poroshhenko,  Former President of Ukraine.

‘After the election, I called the Whitehouse for congratulate Trump. And definitely, er, I tried to prepare for this, er because I doubt Ukraine was among his first priorities. My message to the Trump, was exactly this, from the very first conversation, “Don’t trust Putin”’.    

Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister, Poland.

‘Eastern Partnerships were not always attended by everyone. This time everyone came, including the Prime Minister of Britain, because we knew this would be a historic moment.’

If President [of Ukraine] Viktor Yanukovych signed, it would be his country’s biggest step towards the West since his country leaving the Soviet Union in 1991.

But after a recent trip to Moscow, rumours had started that he was feeling the heat from Vladimir Putin about joining the EEC.’

Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative.

Simon Smith, UK Ambassador to Ukraine.

‘He really had the frightners put on him.’

Dalia Grybustkaite, President of Lithuania, ‘I and Merkel, we had been speaking to him eye-to-eye, And, because we spoke Russian, he was more sincere. And he gave us some kind of understanding that he was under pressure personally, under pressure.’ 

Christoph Heusgan, Merkel’s Diplomatic Advisor, ‘Chancellor Markell told Yanukovych very clearly, we expect you to agree to it. We believe that also, this is what your population believes. This is what we have been striving for, for the last few years, actually. And not you are backing down. This is incomprehensible to us.’

The same incomprehension could be attributed to Boris Johnson and his decision to leave the EU.

Simon Smith UK Ambassador to Ukraine.

‘There was this expression in the Ukraine about milking two cows.’ Boris milking two [or more] cows?

Radek Sikorski, Foreign Minister, Poland.

Putin was offering cash, virtually the next day. The kind of opportunity Farage, Johnson and David Cameron have recently jumped at.

David Cameron.

‘I was pretty clear that everything I heard from Yanukovych that he wasn’t serious about a partnership with the EU.

I spoke with President Aliyev from Azerbaijan, who I always who I always thought was quite a good reader of the situation.’

David Cameron was clearly not a good reader of the situation in Europe, Ukraine or at home in Britain. After thirteen years of taking money from the poorest in Britain and giving it to the richest, including recent Russian billionaires buying fast-streamed citizenship and property.  Cameron and Osborne, the Laurel and Hardy of British politics, without due diligence, pandered to Farage and his rich-wing, Putin-backed, gang of xenophobes. Later, the former Prime Minister of Britain was caught trying to milk his former comrades and contacts for public money to enrich himself—tens of millions—and his chums, hundreds of millions sterling in dodgy deals.  Here he’s shown as a great world leader, who is worth listening to. The British version of Viktor Yanukovych.

Obama. The White House, 28^th February 2014.

‘Putin has now crossed a line. And there will be costs for any military intervention in the Ukraine.’

Caroline Atkinson, Obama’s Adviser for International Economics.

‘The President was very keen for action, but not military action but economic action- which can be very powerful if the US is doing it. And the natural thing was to turn to sanctions. But we also wanted to be joined together with allies in Europe.’

Kim Darroch, Cameron’s Security Adviser.

‘One country has literally seized a chunk of territory from another.’

[When was the last time Israel has done that?]

‘Number 1, if you talked about energy, a lot of European countries, particularly central European, but also Germany had quite a heavy reliance on Russian oil and gas. Some European countries, notably Germany and Italy, sold a lot of stuff to Russia.’

Francoise Hollande, President of France. ‘in the Italian political class there was a certain indulgence towards Putin.’

‘in London, a number of Russian oligarchs had been welcomed there.’

As there was towards Le Penn. Her nationalistic party and racist agenda came close to the highest office of French political power, and it was recently funded by Putin’s KDP in terms of ‘loans’. Leaving the EU is no longer part of Le Penn’s party appeal. The UK has proven a cautionary tale.

Putin’s invasion has also proven a cautionary tale. His triumphant march towards Kyiv didn’t happen, but might still. The threat of nuclear war increases. But most of his military hardware was found to be outdated and not fit for purpose. His troops unmotivated and ill-used. For very little US investment in money or manpower, the Russian army was largely taken out. Win-win for the US. Another geopolitical win in Europe’s reliance of Russian gas was overstated. Putin’s leverage slackened. Win-win for green-energy policies that took up slack. But with energy for sale at cost price, a closer alliance between Putin and President Xi brought other threats.

But in the same way that even Le Penn would no longer countenance leaving the EU, another dictator President Xi has been shown what could happen if his plans for the reunification of Taiwan with China, despite the increasingly volatile rhetoric, might well be left to wither.  Another win for the US.  

Dalia Grybustkaite, President of Lithuania.

‘The reaction of Europe at the time was very upsetting. The cheap energy was so comfortable. And so addictive they were not able to overstep their pragmatic policies.’

Obama.

‘Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours…not out of strength, but out of weakness.’

Jose Manual Barroso, President European Commission. 

‘He said that Russia was a regional power and this is not helpful, because it feeds on resentment. And for me, Putin is essentially a product of resentment because of the decline and also humiliation of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’

 What is to be done? As Lenin asked in 1901-02.

NOTES

‘This first episode tells the story of how, when Putin first attacked Ukraine in 2014, Europe’s leaders clashed over how to stop him. Amidst massive demonstrations demanding closer ties with the EU in Kyiv, Ukraine’s president flees to Russia. Putin exploits the power vacuum to make the most audacious move of his presidency to date: sending troops into Crimea.

We go behind the scenes for the critical summits and fraught phone calls as the west tries to find a way to push back. The crisis heightens as the fighting spreads to Donbas in Eastern Ukraine and Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 is shot down. Key players including David Cameron, Francois Hollande, Jose Manuel Barroso and Ukraine’s then-president Petro Poroshenko relive the EU’s indecision and the all-night negotiations with the warring parties: a ceasefire is signed in Minsk, but Russian forces remain in Donbas.

Putin, meanwhile, appears more confident than ever. The lesson is clear, says French president Francois Hollande: ‘When we do not punish at first, we are forced to punish more severely later

Putin turns to the Middle East. After Gaddafi’s overthrow in Libya, Putin shows just how far he’s willing to go to keep his ally, President Assad of Syria, in power.

Leaders including Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and Volodymyr Zelensky discuss how they confronted Putin and manoeuvred to try and prevent his invasion of Ukraine.’

David Gange (2019) The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel.

Historian David Gange journey by kayak around the coast of Scotland facing the Atlantic in winter sounds like madness. Takes in Ireland in spring time. He crosses the channel to the less ragged coast of Bardsey in Wales and Bristol and Cornwall in the summer.  He offers a low-down view from the sea that mimics E.P. Thompson’s bottom-up view of class history.  

Gange rejects a London-centric view of the world. An imperialistic vision that for example classified Scottish islands as empty land until the English arrived.  Scotland was close to home, but full of Scotsmen, women and children that insisted on speaking in their own strange tongue and had strange customs and culture. Scots Gaelic was the mark of a marked man. Similar to Irish Gaelic, or even Welsh, the language of Atlantic trading routes that predated Britain and British as a unifying narrative.

Hanoverian kings in London outlawed kilt and tartan. Daniel Defoe, a spy for the English billeted in Edinburgh before the union of Scotland and England in 1707, wrote to his paymasters and claimed that for every Scot in favour of Union, ninety-nine were against. Riots were quelled. King George, after 1745 Culloden, punished all Highlanders even his would-be supporters. ‘Butcher’ Cumberland imposed a reign of terror.

‘the English forced a union on Scotland that was as violent and unwelcome as that of 1801 would be for Ireland.’

Oliver Cromwell spoke in terms many English kings understood, ‘hell or Connact’, coastal Galway, Connemara. In Munster, in a splintery rockbound stronghold of Gaelic, 300 mainly women and children were killed by Cromwell’s troops.  A holy man, Dairaid O’Sullivan, run through on Scarif Island. Cromwell forced half the population (his troops hadn’t murdered) west, towards the coast and regions thought to be sparsely populated such as Connemara.

The brutal Sutherland clearances. Its population reduced and redistributed. Pushed from valuable pasture land towards the coast.  

‘The modern population of Sutherland is half what it was in the early nineteen century.’

Many of those that clung onto their holding or crofts were undone by the famine of the late 1840s.

‘Potatoes were the miracle food of the early modern coast. Visitors to the Scottish and Irish islands in the eighteenth century describe a population living in abject poverty, but who were tall and strong. These tubers carried far more nutrients and were more efficient, damp resistant and voluminous than the grain on which the islanders had previously relied.’

 Gange rallies against the unifying influence of Enlightenment and the notion of progress leaving those outside it in the dark. But he’s not anti-science. Just its overarching hegemonic influence that doesn’t allow other, coastal, dwellers to tell their stories. ‘The Highland Problem,’ was not an invention of Highlanders, but of the big cities, London, Edinburgh and even Dublin that managed their decline from afar and claimed the high ground. Enlightenment is not singular, but plural and many of the questions and answers for how we should live comes from the watery shores and poetic view of the world Gange champions, based on observation and direct experience.

In saving the world, you need to save the story of that world.  The British Education Acts 1870 and 1872 which aimed to unify the nation around a common curriculum and the currency of the English language excluded the Gaelic languages of the coastal people.

Gange describes their effect ‘as an unmitigated disaster for many coastal zones’ with many young people leaving and not returning. Others returning but unable to speak their native language. But here there is a happy ending of sorts in economic recession (which should be useful during the current rolling recession) which saw an island renaissance and return to the innate languages of the peoples and the myriad and enriching connections that entails.

Famine, clearances and Educational Acts are part of the narrative of who owns the land owns the narrative of what is said about the land. The languages of the people on the periphery are growing slowly back to life. Gage identifies a contemporary problem of multinational companies like Shell who buy up Britishness and Irishness and pollute the water and land for profit. They kill people in Nigeria for oil.

Ireland can be bought wholesale. (I’m thinking here of the Irish government knocking back the 14 billion euros that Apple should have paid in back taxes to the state).  And while the Irish state makes a net profit from the EEC (it receives more than it contributes) selling off Atlantic resources leaves a nation indebted.

‘Corporations registered in Norway, Russia, Canada, the Netherland and Spain draw greater profits from the waters west of Ireland than do Irish interests.’

Small and local might be better. But the paradox that Gange doesn’t address is such interests are easily brushed aside by big business, multinationals. Sometimes we need more, not less government. The explosion of poetry in the 1930s during the Great Depression didn’t change the world. W.H.Auden, Stephen Spender, Louise Mac Niece anti-war poetry didn’t prevent the Second World War. Community versus Commerce (whisper it, it used to be called Communism versus Capitalism) and we all know how that went. I’m on David Ganges side. He’s optimistic. I’m pessimistic, but I hope his vision is the one that endures. More power to the community. Less power to the rich that own the people on the coast land—and mainland—and stir our fears for their own financial gains.

Taking a bite out of Apple, what did the EEC ever do for us?

Imagine someone handed you thirteen billion Euros, approximately £11 000 000 000, as the European Commission tried to do, claiming that Apple had acted illegally in Ireland and paid an effective Corporate tax rate of 50 Euros for every 1 000 000 Euros they took out of the country. In a deal known as the Double Irish, Apple claimed they did not take any money out of the country, but simply moved it between different offices with no staff and an online address of undertherainbow.com. This was perfectly legal they claimed as little people had been doing it for years. And with sleight of hand they pointed to the thousands of jobs they created, mainly in Cork, but not made of cork, but making things that people think they need, but really don’t.  You think that would be the end of it. Picking on the richest company in the world, just because you can isn’t really fair. Then there’s the Apple threat. The blight of those 6 000 jobs. They want to protect the little people too.

Well, some simple arithmetic here. Take the thirteen billion Euros and give it to the imaginary 6000 worker and then ask them what they’d rather have, their share in the Apple jackpot or a job, sometimes for the lucky punter, paying above the minimum wage?

In the real world of, course, that’s not the way it works. The Irish Government spokesman, finance minister, Michael Noonan, said he would appeal against the EEC’s ruling, because they were protecting the real interests of the little people, and begorrah, if multinationals wanted to create fake jobs with real money then Ireland was just the place to do it. Sure, didn’t they invent Guinness, which nobody likes but everybody drinks and claims is the greatest thing since Jesus walked on water.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, threatened Applexit from the EEC and has courted Boris Johnson, our Home Secretary, for campaign advice. That’s Irish.