Harry Browne | ukwatch.net

Ireland Shows the Way

Ellie Keen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:42:52 +0000

Dublin

In the midst of a growing economic crisis, Ireland’s urban working class and struggling rural people have united to deliver a blow to Europe’s ruling elite.

The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty in yesterday’s Irish referendum has tossed out years of efforts by the European Union to come up with new, “streamlined” procedures, and to get the increasingly unitary EU an (unelected) president and foreign minister.

The Treaty was itself a modest rewrite of the European Constitution, rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

As the counts came in from around the country today, the Irish people’s decision was, in the end, not even close. The momentum for a No vote displayed in last week’s opinion polls continued right through polling day. With a turnout bigger than in any previous Irish Euro-referendum, the electorate smashed expectations that a big vote would boost the Yes side and defied the advice of 95% of the country’s elected politicians, who supported the Treaty.

The politically disparate No campaign had rained blows from left and right, defending workers’ rights and defending low corporation tax, against privatization and against abortion; the Yes side could scarcely defend itself, let alone fight back.

Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte today compared the plight of the Yes campaigner to playing a video game: “You pop the bad guy, two more pop up.”

The various No elements avoided arguing among themselves during the campaign, but the battle to claim the victory has now begun. All analysts agree, however, that as in the 2001 Nice Treaty referendum, Irish people’s concern about military neutrality and the growing militarization of the EU was crucial.

Many of the issues and energies in the Lisbon campaign have been addressed already in CounterPunch. The X factor in this result was the effect of the prevailing economic catastrophism: would voters take the conservative option of voting Yes to avoid the danger of deepening the crisis with political uncertainty? In the end it was the most at-risk sections of the population who delivered the most decisive No.

The problem for the Treaty was that it was all too easy for voters to connect Ireland’s present economic woes to its role in Europe. As unemployment leaps, it calls attention to all the east-European immigrants working here; as previously astronomic house prices collapse, the president of the European Central Bank announces a coming rise in interest rates; as farmers worry about their futures, the EU negotiates at the WTO to allow more South American beef into European markets; as fishermen despairing of high fuel prices stage protest blockades at key ports, they complain about EU-imposed fishing quotas that force them to dump tons of their catches.

A No vote does nothing to address any of these issues; indeed few of them even figured prominently in the campaign. But voting No was the means at hand to complain about them.

Much of the media credit for the No win is being given to conservative businessman Declan Ganley and his new Libertas organization, with its respectably neoliberal campaign focusing on taxation and voting weights in EU institutions. But the results so far indicate that better-off Irish voters, from the fat farming regions of the south midlands and the prosperous suburbs of south Dublin, stuck with their traditional Europhilia. The Yes side won solid victories in well-off areas and a near-draw in prosperous rural regions. The No victory came with unprecedented turnouts in poorer areas of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and other cities, and with large No margins in more marginal rural areas in the west of the island and around the Border with Northern Ireland. Fishing communities delivered an overwhelming No. Former prime minister Garret FitzGerald has described the result as the most class-divided in Irish history.

There is, without doubt, some space for the Left in Ireland and across Europe to exploit this huge victory in a tiny country against the European Union’s neoliberal elite, especially if EU leaders try to drive through yet another version of Lisbon. But the reasons that an uneasy Ireland voted No are not simple, and the complex and contradictory story here gives that elite the chance to shrug off the result and just live with the institutional status quo ante.

Is Europe a regulatory threat to business? A military threat to peace? A liberal threat to traditional morality? A driver of climate-change enlightenment? A hungry vulture in third-world markets? A counterweight to US power? Take your pick: unlike the US, the definition of institutional Europe is up for grabs, internally and globally.

I was speaking last night to a prominent left-wing politician and No campaigner. He spoke of hearing a No voter give her reasons: “If the Lisbon Treaty goes through, Europe will bring in abortion, gay marriage, legal prostitution, euthanasia…” The campaigner was glad to have another No vote, but conceded: “If I believed that myself, I would have voted Yes.”

Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology. His book, ‘Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares disabled a US war-plane – with Ireland’s blessing’, is forthcoming from Counterpunch Books. He can be reached at: harry.browne@gmail.com

Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

Ellie Keen — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:55:10 +0000

Dublin

The more the Irish people know about the Lisbon Treaty, the less they like it. That’s the message of the opinion polls as we draw close to Ireland’s June 12th referendum, which is decisive for the future of European Union institutions.

It’s going to be close. The media panic about the possibility of a No vote on Thursday hasn’t dwelled on such details as polling-margin-of-error and the huge body of undecided voters. But there’s no doubt that the momentum toward the No side has been real, and Ireland could well force the EU governments back to the old drawing board—for a second time, after the rejections of the similar EU Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

The main problem faced by a virtually complete assortment of the Irish and EU powers-that-be is that there is no obvious positive reason to vote Yes. “To Make EU Institutions Function More Efficiently” is not a slogan to stir the blood, especially when folks suspect those institutions are up to no good to begin with.

What’s more, the ‘reforms’ envisioned by Lisbon—e.g. more majority voting instead of unanimity, fewer commissioners—were allegedly required after the expansion of the European Union to 25 countries in 2004 (it’s now 27). But no one has noticed Brussels and Strasbourg seizing up with legislative gridlock under the current arrangements—and again, most people think they wouldn’t much mind if they did.

The underlying issues, and the reason that Ireland alone is holding a referendum on this treaty, have been dealt with previously in CounterPunch. What is notable as the voting approaches— it has actually started already on a few offshore islands—is that the Yes side has moved its argument forward from “come on, we like Europe” to “we’ll make a terrible mess if we vote No and this is no time to be getting Europe annoyed”. Ireland’s always fragile self-esteem has already taken a blow over the last year or two as the Celtic Tiger limps off the scene; and new Taoiseach (prime minister) Brian Cowen seems to be shouting breathlessly every time he comes on TV, all about the trouble we’ll be in if No emerges victorious.

That shouting could yet work: if I were a betting man I’d stick a few euro on a narrow Yes victory. The main farmers’ lobby has joined the Yes side, after strong-arming the government into a commitment to veto any WTO agreement that isn’t favorable. Moreoever, the prime opinion-forming media outlets are amplifying the elite’s panic. (A couple of British-owned papers backing the No side have kept the press wars interesting, if not honest or well balanced.) Ad hominem attacks on the No side have been stepped up.

But the No side, which ranges right across the political spectrum, has kept throwing up objections to the Treaty and stayed on the offensive. Some of the objections are dubious—abortion will not be brought into Ireland thanks to Lisbon, however much this prospect seems to have engaged and enraged some conservative voters. And the fuss about keeping ‘our’ commissioner at the EU table and ensuring Ireland can continue to have the EU’s lowest corporation tax is neither very progressive nor based on a sound reading of how most Irish people’s interests have been served historically.

Sinn Fein, which had a terrible election last year, has virtually led the No campaign and deftly plucked arguments from left and right alike. But it would be fair to say that it has kept its emphasis to the left, and the party has helped to boost the left’s No voices, raising objections relating to workers’ rights, the possible privatization of public services and the militarization of the EU. It has made for an interesting month of debate: it’s rare, for instance, to hear so many, and contending, trade-union voices in the media.

And the popular energy is on the No side. While establishment politicians use the referendum campaign, and the accompanying relaxation of the litter laws, to stick up photos of themselves on lampposts across the State, sometimes beside the tiniest of “Yes” pleas, a motley assortment of No campaigners has plastered the island with slogans.

That energy, and a decision by the electorate that the burden of proof should be on those who wish us to change existing political arrangements and power structures, could yet yield a No victory when votes are counted on Friday. Whoever wins, the arguments about who wields power in Europe and to what purpose have only just begun.

<>Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology. His book, ‘Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares disabled a US war-plane – with Ireland’s blessing’, is forthcoming from Counterpunch Books. He can be reached at: harry.browne@gmail.com

Ken Loach's History Lesson

Alex Doherty — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:39:50 +0000

“Our film is a little step in the British confronting their imperialist history. Maybe if we tell the truth about the past we can tell the truth about the present.”

The leftist British director Ken Loach has been nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes many times. On Sunday we finally found out that he makes a great victory speech, as he drove home the link between the British occupation of Ireland and today’s occupation of Iraq. More importantly, as we already knew, he makes great films, and ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ is perhaps his very best.

The greatness of this tale of the Irish War of Independence and ensuing Civil War has little to do with parallels to the present day. Viewers may eventually find themselves talking with each other about how occupying armies behave, about the right to resistance, about the relationship between religion and political violence, and about how all this relates to present-day Iraq and Afghanistan. But the movie gets us to that point by treating its immediate subject matter with unstinting care and integrity, and for two hours the audience is nowhere except Cork, 1920-22. The texture of life, language, love and loss are all here, with almost breathtaking, unglamorous ‘reality’. The director’s famous method, whereby actors are shown only their own lines, and those only briefly, helps lend this verisimilitude. Loach’s Cork-born star, Cillian Murphy, emerges quietly but definitively as the finest screen actor Ireland has ever produced, and also as part of an ensemble of otherwise little-known performers bringing fully realised individuals to life.

As some critics have noted bitterly, these rounded characters don’t really include the British troops, but this is not a failing of the film. It is clearly part of the point being made by Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty: these soldiers have been dehumanised, partly by their experience in the World War I trenches, but also by the contemptuous racism that occupation breeds. For them “Irish” is a dirty word, even in Ireland. The Irish rebels, in contrast, are at home in this beautiful landscape: we are constantly reminded that to commit acts of violence in your own home breeds ethical and psychological dilemmas in otherwise healthy people, and they make efforts to maintain some principle and even courtesy amid the carnage.

The carnage and brutality are brilliantly, awfully portrayed, especially as they continually revisit one emblematic rural homestead. But what really sets Loach apart, of course, is his respect for the political agency of ‘ordinary’ people. Again and again characters connect their own lives to wider issues and struggles. And they argue. A Dublin-born train driver (Liam Cunningham) joins forces with the Cork rebel column while quoting William Blake and James Connolly and pressing for a full social revolution in Ireland. A republican court, led by a rebel woman judge, jails a shopkeeper for charging extortionate interest to a poor customer in arrears, but the local IRA leader insists businessmen should be kept sweet because they are needed to fund the armed struggle. The Treaty sets off more honest, impassioned argument before it finally sets off more war, this time setting brother against brother.

What a contrast it makes with Neil Jordan’s absurd ‘Michael Collins’, which treats broadly the same set of historic events as the enactment of a psycho-sexual drama among its handful of prominent protagonists.

Although the various arguments are well ventilated, Loach’s heart is clearly with the left-republicans who opposed the Treaty. The split in 1922 gave rise, eventually, to the two largest political parties in the southern state that was left by partition, Fine Gael (the pro-Treaty side) and Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail, founded by Eamonn de Valera, has been the main party of government in Ireland for most of the time since it was first elected to power in 1932, and its current arts minister has been quoted as saying, presumably with some glee, that Fine Gaelers won’t like this movie. There is probably some truth in this: the gut politics of people whose ancestors opposed the Treaty are likelier to be inspired by Murphy and his ragged republican band than Fine Gaelers will be by their own more strait-laced, petty-bourgeois political antecedents.

Nonetheless, the politician’s view says something about the shamelessness of Fianna Fail. The film portrays that party’s anti-Treaty progenitors sympathetically, sure, but it also portrays them, accurately, as social and economic radicals who wanted to see the ownership of Ireland and its resources vested in its people. In 2006 the party is, e.g, helping Shell drive an unwanted gas production pipeline through the fields of small farmers in Mayo, with no royalties whatsoever going to the Irish state or people. Fianna Failers should see this film and hang their heads when they see how far their movement has come from its original ideals.

No, though the country is now knee-deep in corporate money, the story of Ireland in the 90 years since the Easter Rising has not ended happily, and neither does ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’. (Indeed, the film’s radiance fades slightly with a stagy moment or two in the last reel, before an ending of raw, terrible pain and futility.) Nonetheless, it should be seen not only by Irish people, but by everyone who wonders about this anti-colonial struggle, so near the imperial centre, that reverberated through the 20th century; and who also wants to know how a deeper revolution was almost made here, how it was halted, and how it might be made again, anywhere.

Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology and writes for Village magazine. Contact him at harry.browne@gmail.com

RED Light District - Bono's Independent

Alex Doherty — Tue, 16 May 2006 21:43:29 +0000

“I have no embarrassment at all. No shame.” Bono says it himself, in the course of his luvvie interview with comic Eddie Izzard, and that’s a typically ‘disarming’ tactic. But don’t be disarmed: Bono’s shamelessness is of a whole different order from anything we’ve seen before, and it crosses new frontiers in the edition of the London Independent that he allegedly ‘edited’ today (16 May).

For a day, you see, it’s the RED Independent. (The capital letters in RED are obligatory, for some reason.) Much of the paper is given our to plugging Brand RED, this corporate PR strategy that sees a few big companies buy Bono-bestowed credibility in return for some shillings to Africa. If the word for Bono is indeed ‘shameless’, then the word that comes to mind in relation to the newspaper itself (a usually credible outlet in Irish mogul Tony O’Reilly’s media empire) is ‘prostitute’.

Much of Bono’s RED Indy is online, but its special qualities are best appreciated on paper. RED is somehow related to the colour red anyway, so we get a front-page created by celebrity artist Damien Hirst, soaked in red and declaring “NO NEWS TODAY” and an asterisk leading to the small print: “Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease. (HIV/AIDS)” So far, not terrible, highlighting the issue and its absence from the conventional Western news agenda. But why does it say “Genesis 1.27” on the cover? That’s the line about how “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Since Bono is responsible for creating this paper in his image, does that mean he’s God?

It’s not an entirely facetious question. Certainly this edition, largely given over to Africa and AIDS, creates an image of a continent in dire need of an outside Savior. On page after page, in stories, photographs and advertisements, Africans are presented as pathetic victims, often children. No Africans write about Africa. Only one is presented in an interview as having any agency at all, Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. It is remarkable that even for the sake of appearances Bono is incapable of hiding his essential paternalism.

A colleague points out that there is nothing here about the arms trade. But perhaps this is not surprising given all the advertising and editorial space given over to endorsing RED mobile phones from Motorola, a military contractor. Nothing either covering mineral exploitation in Africa, perhaps something else Motorola might be sensitive about, given the importance of African-extracted materials in cellphones.

The self-crafted character of Bono, on the other hand, is never far from the page. Justifying his commercial fundraising strategy, he writes: “For anyone who thinks this means I’m going to retire to the boardroom and stop banging my fist on the door of No. 10 [Downing Street], I’m sorry to disappoint you.” Frankly, we hadn’t noticed any fistbanging: the butler is always discreetly ready to open the door unbidden for a welcome guest like Bono.

Bono’s status on Downing Street, at No. 10 and No. 11 (where Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is to be found), is underlined by the cozy, snoozy interview Tony Blair and Brown “teamed up” to do (by phone) with the U2 frontman. Bono’s hard-hitting line of questioning includes: “Chancellor, I’ve just got back from a trip to Washington, where your announcement of $15bn over 10 years for education for the poorest of the poor created a real reverberation. Are you worried that some of your other G8 partners and finance ministers are not coming up with new initiatives to match this?”

Bono is still reverberating when he talks to Blair: “Prime Minister, I want to just take you to a more personal place in your trips to this terrible beauty that we call Africa now—to an inspiring moment, a person you have met, or a moment of despair.” Bono likes his Yeatsian “terrible beauty”, repeating the phrase in his editorial.

Half the proceeds from this edition supposedly go to fight AIDS in Africa. Given all the extra advertising for cool products, gigs and charities targeting the day’s once-off buyers, you can be sure those proceeds will be considerable.

No outing with Bono would be complete without licking-up to the White House as well as Downing Street. So we’ve got Condoleezza Rice naming her “ten best musical works”. Condi, it seems, is a “big fan” of Bono and names “anything” by U2 as number 7 on her list, just ahead of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’. As for Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ at number 2 (after Mozart): “I love to work out to this song. Believe it or not I loved acid rock in college—and I still do.”

What a long strange trip it’s been. And that’s before you open the supplement and find, after some grim monochrome photos of Deep South poverty from Sam Taylor-Wood, another hard-hitting interview. “She’s the bright young star breaking all the rules. He’s the grand master whose influence on the way we dress is felt around the world. In a rare interview, Stella McCartney asks Giorgio Armani about fur, fashion and film – and why RED is his new favourite colour.”

Indy associate editor Paul Vallely is Bono’s luvvie for the day, with his full-page ‘big question’ feature, “Can rock stars change the world?” arriving at an ever-so-British qualified Yes “Oh all right then. But with a little help from their friends. Which includes all of us fans, activists, politicians and now as Project RED so clearly demonstrates shoppers too.”

The edition is themed around this notion. Even “The 5-Minute Interview”, with BBC radio DJ Zane Lowe, finishes with an incongruous, not to say idiotically phrased, question, “Can big corporations make a difference to people’s lives?” Lowe sings from Bono’s hymnsheet: “The only thing people who are trying to make a difference can do is work alongside corporations. We’re not going to abolish big business, people aren’t going to stop drinking Starbucks and buying Nike, but you can say to them, ‘There’s a big difference you can make and if we find a way to make it easier for you, would you contribute?’”

This notion of lowest common denominator activism is the keynote of Bono’s signed, somewhat tetchy editorial: “So forgive us if we expand our strategy to reach the high street, where so many of you live and work. We need to meet you where you are as you shop, as you phone, as you lead your busy, businessy lives.”

Two more signed opinion pieces, by Geldof and Niall Fitzgerald (chairman of Reuters, former chairman of Unilever) both advocate more or less neoliberal solutions to Africa’s crisis. In fairness (and believe me, it’s tough to feel fair about these egomaniacal creeps), Geldof, like Bono in the Blair-Brown interview, does criticise “enforced liberalisation by the IMF, the World Bank or the EU”, but in both cases it’s pretty parenthetical.

Not much new ‘news’ makes the paper at all. There is room for a rubbishy Google short declaring that “Irish are top users of ‘lonely’ search term”, but no room at all for the story convulsing Bono’s hometown of Dublin: 41 Afghan men have been on hunger and thirst strike inside historic St Patrick’s Cathedral to prevent their deportation to the dangers of their home country. Since this story clearly involves the West’s role in the suffering of people from the poorer world, and it also involves poor people taking their own, desperate measures to defy a Western government’s prescriptions, it fails to fit Bono’s world-view.

Young fogey Johann Hari interviews Hugo Chavez with reasonable sympathy over two pages, pausing to wring his hands about Chavez’s admiration for Castro and Mugabe. The interview appears to be shorter than the online version because of the big ads for Unicef and the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids.

One weak attempt at self-mockery is John Walsh’s unfunny column about some of the “less successful guest-star interventions in history”—Groucho Marx addressing the Pentagon War Room on the eve of D-Day, Margaret Thatcher guest-editing teen-mag Jackie—“the usual questions about petting, bra sizes and periods were replaced by enquiries about the public sector borrowing requirement”. (Did I say unfunny?)

Bono is obsessed with justifying Live8, and the centre-spread is given over to a board game called “Gleneagles Crazy Golf” (“Will the G8 keep their word?”). The biggest move available in the game is “Move Forward 3: Independent goes RED”.

Much more can be said about this low point in the history of journalism and public culture, but the final word should go to Julia Raeside on Megastar.co.uk: “We wonder if Simon Kellner, the editor of the Indy, will get to spend a day being a self-important, whining rock bore in silly pink sunglasses and trousers that are ever so slightly too tight.”

__Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology and writes for Village magazine. Contact harry.browne@gmail.com __