A breath of fresh heir

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THERE were two circuses this week to appease a populace that might otherwise complain about the shortage of bread.

One was the media circus surrounding the birth of the royal baby; the other was the media circus surrounding the first media circus.

While millions of people all over the world – all over the world – waited excitedly for yet another announcement that there was no news, the people bringing us that absence of news grew increasingly embarrassed.

The most that would happen in this case was that a baby would be born – healthy or otherwise, a boy or otherwise – and would be given a name. At best, it was only ever going to be a good news story which, as news people know, means it’s not really news at all.

And for every keen royal-watcher anxiously tuning in for harmless news of centimetres and kilograms, there was a republican (both kinds) lamenting the extent of the coverage. Even the Guardian had a button prompting ‘Republican?’, which you could press to filter out the royal content – though that would rather spoil the fun of leaving outraged comments about it.

Predictably, that was nowhere more true than in this country, where the shame of enjoying the spectacle presented by royalty is so deep and old and complicated that hardly anyone admits to it, other than women of a certain age who still never go anywhere without a hat and who apologise to no one, thank you very much. For the rest, it was a case of hastily switching over to Ros na Rún rather than be caught royal baby-watching and have to explain yourself.

There are many reasons for this shame, and we heard them all this week. Naturally the ‘Was it for this…?’ brigade were there, ranting and fuming about British imperialism in their Premier League t-shirts. There was a lot of hand-wringing comparison between the royal baby and other children born in the world that day, and their lives and their life expectancy. There was the usual weighing up of the cost of the royal family, though that needn’t concern anyone outside the UK, since we get to enjoy all the pageantry of the British royals without being put to the trouble of paying for any of it.

In fact, the whole of that secondary media circus – the media circus surrounding the media circus – seemed calculated to make everyone feel guilty. What a downer.

The truth is that, while the shame of being a royal-watcher may be complicated, the fascination is not. In an age when prying brazenly into other people’s lives is the number one televised sport, the British royals represent a welcome difference.

Unlike the participants in reality television, the royal family don’t project their feelings all over you. They remain serene, mysterious, allowing you to project your feelings all over them instead. Certainly since Princess Diana took what remained of her secrets to the grave, we’ve known very little of what these people are really like, or what’s really going on behind the toothy grins and the improbable hats and the not-very-attractive faces. There lies intrigue. You get to use your imagination. Less of a circus then, perhaps, than a dumb show, but nothing to be ashamed of. Let’s stop apologising.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 28 July 2013

Drip feed of news

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It is not sufficient merely to drip; one must be seen dripping

IN what has been otherwise a relatively fast news week, it was reported that tar has finally been caught dripping from a funnel at Trinity College after almost 70 years.

The experiment to prove the viscosity of tar was set up in 1944, no doubt in a fever of hope and excitement, but in succeeding years the funnel of tar gradually made its way into a cupboard, to be more or less forgotten about.

From time to time, it appears that drips were noticed, but because not being photographed is the surest sign that you don’t exist, the results were unsatisfactory. It is not sufficient merely to drip, you must drip on camera, so a 24-hour webcam was installed, and this week, finally, reports emerged that the tar had done the needful.

We’re used to physicists waiting years for something ostensibly insignificant to happen (to wit, the Large Hadron Collider, in which roomfuls of them were observed weeping for joy at the sight of a blip on a computer screen), but this is a bit extreme.

The results will now be written up and published in an international scientific journal. There’s bound to be some competition among postgrads to write that research report, as it will surely be the shortest physics paper ever: “An experiment was set up to establish whether or not tar would drip. It dripped.” Whoever writes it has then nothing to do but sit back and wait 60 or 70 years for the peer reviews.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 21 July 2013

It’s tourist season, yet you’re not allowed to shoot them…

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‘Tourists II’ by Duane Hanson

THIS despatch comes to you from the Loop Head peninsula, a wild, salty, blue-and-green retreat that time – and, until recently, people – never bothered with much. We had the place to ourselves and could spend our days unmolested, striding the windy cliffs, cooing over dolphins, getting ice-cream headaches from the freezing Atlantic, searching the rockpools for constellations of starfish, and talking amongst ourselves, about our own affairs.

Then, late last month, Loop Head was voted the Best Place to Holiday in Ireland. This news was meant to be greeted ecstatically by one and all, and not just because it sat well with the justifiable sense of civic pride we all share here. No, we are supposed to be overjoyed because it will lead to a big influx of tourists, and it’s thought that there’s nothing a rural-dweller likes better than the sight of another busload of unwary Americans lumbering past their house, making their windows rattle and flatulating diesel fumes all over their herbaceous borders.

“Tourism is the march of stupidity,” said the writer Don de Lillo. “You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly.”

Yes, it can be refreshing to see new faces in your home place, and to hope for novel conversation, but on the whole, tourists are annoying. They wear shorts in the rain. They expect to be fleeced wherever they go. They have worse road sense than a deranged border collie with a grudge against cars. They persist in filming stationary objects. Somehow they can never get the hang of manual transmission. Mistakenly, they thought it would be a good idea to cycle 50 miles in one day. And they complain about everything – the weather, the prices, the facilities, the roads – until you find yourself standing up for Ireland like an idiot, bursting lustily into a few bars of ‘Follow Me Up To Carlow’ and wishing to God they’d take you up on it (sorry, Carlow).

Then there’s the shocking amount of fossil fuels they burn up getting here, but let’s just let that bandwagon trundle past for the moment… there are too many people on it already.

Now that the farmers of the west of Ireland have been marginalised and its fishermen all but criminalised, tourism is presented as the great white hope for the rural economy. “Tourism is one of the ways we can fight depopulation and emigration,” said Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, when Loop Head’s win was announced.

It seems such an exaggerated claim, when you scrutinise it, but this is the prevailing orthodoxy. Indeed, the idea is so firmly established that rural tourism is aggressively promoted without even the need for prior consultation with those whose day-to-day lives will be affected by it. Naturally you must want more tourists. Why wouldn’t you?

Dissent is unacceptable, an embarrassment. And any opposition is especially unwelcome when it comes from a blow-in, who is not dependent for a living on the endangered regional industries of agriculture or fishing and who therefore has no right to complain.

But everyone is affected by this – not just privileged blow-ins cribbing about no longer having the beaches to themselves. Everyone is forced into compromises, whether they like it or not – farmers trying to complete their tasks while the caprices of time and weather are in their favour, commuters (yes, we have commuters) trying to get to work, parents worried about road safety and their children.

Tourists tend to begin and end their journeys in towns, whizzing dangerously past your house on their way to the next beauty spot, so they can say they ‘did’ it. If you’re not providing an amenity, you’re invisible to them.

Tourism brings congestion, litter, local price inflation, traffic, and even crime. At its worst, it leads to insensitive development, especially when you bear in mind the number of sociopaths that seem to populate county council planning departments. And because it puts an intolerable burden on infrastructure that was not built to cope with it, it can cause chronic air and water pollution.

In 2011, tourism accounted for 4.1% of tax revenue, according to Fáilte Ireland figures. For every euro spent in tourism, 24.5 cent is generated in tax. That would be a nice little earner for rural areas if the government were to spend 24.5 cents out of every rural tourist euro providing some basic services and facilities, or upgrading the infrastructure to cope with the strain that tourism places on it.

Around most of the Loop Head peninsula, the roads are wide enough for only one car, let alone two tour buses meeting grille to grille. There is no public transport. Until a few years ago, there used to be a lone bus that left on a Friday morning and, comically, didn’t return for seven days. If you left by bus, you had to plan to stay gone a week. But even that has now been cancelled.

The water comes from a group scheme which is disastrously overtaxed, annually, by the massive influx of tourists to the nearest town, Kilkee. Power cuts are a regular occurrence. There is no public sewage system. The broadband network is so inadequate – and so expensive – that teleworkers are at a serious disadvantage, and many local businesses don’t even have websites. The nearest Accident & Emergency unit is 70 miles away. You have to drive 100 miles round-trip to the cinema, or the tax office, or the NCT centre.

We have all the disadvantages you’d expect to find in a remote rural location, in other words, but now with added crowds. “You’ve got tourism now,” says the government. “What are you complaining about?”

Rural tourism is a very high-profile business, celebrated unquestioningly for its regenerative effects. But realistically, how many people can expect to benefit from it?

Of course increased tourism is good news for local tourism businesses. And of course you want the people who run those businesses to succeed. They work nightmarishly hard all summer, forgoing any chance to enjoy the area themselves at the very time when it’s at its most beautiful. Many of them continue working though the long dark months, when there’s hardly anyone about – not least because so many people have had to emigrate – and they get little reward for the hours they put in. These are not tax-dodging international business conglomerates, they’re neighbours, they’re friends.

Of course you wish them well, but you neither expect nor hope to benefit from their success yourself. You would want to be a slavish disciple of trickle-down theory to imagine that the profits from one neighbour’s prosperous B&B could lift another impoverished neighbour off the breadline.

Tourism generates low-paid employment for unskilled or low-skilled workers – not sufficient to persuade anyone that their prospects wouldn’t be better in Australia. And tourism businesses do well only during the summer. They and their employees must find some other way to supplement their living for eight or nine months of the year. It’s at best a sideline, for almost everyone involved.

And even in the unlikely event that your hardworking neighbour becomes as rich as Croesus off the back of his tourism venture, there’s nowhere for him to spend any of his money except in town. So the much-vaunted ‘multiplier effect’ takes place elsewhere, not benefiting anyone in the rural area.

Tourism is – or can be  – good for those enterprising people who stand to gain from it. Those with nothing to gain are obliged to put up and shut up while their quality of life deteriorates for what is described, questionably, as the greater good.

The solution, according to the dominant rural tourism ideology, is for as many people as possible to become – that hateful word – ‘stakeholders’. Fed up with tourism? Get in on the action yourself. That’ll sweeten it for you.

Theoretically, the barriers to entry are meant to be low. Any hard-up farm family can consider the opportunities presented by tourist bed nights, and take a few free courses so as to learn how to position their rashers and their polyester sheets in the global marketplace. And what about putting up a Wall of Death in the back acre? At least, that’s until they run into a Gordian knot of red tape to do with planning permission, environmental impact reports, Fáilte Ireland specifications, public liability insurance, health and safety standards and fire regulations.

Worse, though, that sort of mentality can transform the whole culture of an area for the worse. Rural dwellers have always tended to have a way of getting along with one another, because we have to. But with tourism, competition develops where there was none before. The inhabitants potentially become a colony of eager little capitalists with euro signs in their eyes, vying with one another to plámás the Yanks, and commodifying and “exploiting” everything they own and everything they stand for. The indigenous culture is replaced by one that is amenable to tourists, and so tourists end up destroying the very thing they’ve come to see. Think Killarney.

Loop Head is beautiful – I’m proud and happy to live here – but many other places are just as beautiful and moreso. The one thing that Loop Head has always had going for it – its one truly outstanding natural advantage – was that it was completely and utterly unspoilt by tourism…

The thing is, every last one of the people involved in the tourism industry on the Loop Head peninsula also desperately wants the area to remain as it is. Low-impact, sustainable tourism is the goal everyone shares here. But who gets to decide this? Who gets to shout stop? And when? Before it’s too late, or after?

 

Published in the Irish Daily Mail, Saturday 8 June 2013

Luther, and other stories

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Puffins billing and cooing, etc

Puffins billing and cooing, etc

 

IF you could choose any superpower, which would you wish for? Some people choose invisibility or mind-reading (which both seem disrespectably sneaky if you ask me). Others would like to be able to speak in all languages (a good one, especially if you could also get bonus teleportation). But most people pick flight.

Humans seem to share an indefinable sorrow about being earthbound. It’s a mourning for some imagined paradise lost, and aeroplanes don’t make up for it. Being able to fly would be a recurring dream come true.

Someone once hijacked my flight fantasy by asking, well, how far would you actually fly, if you could fly? You’re hardly going to hazard a solo run to Farranfore, are you, let alone chance anywhere interesting? So what are you going to do, if you gain the ability to fly? Look at your house from above?

It’s true – who’s fit enough to fly south for the winter? – but yet… the wish persists. It’s a gift we’ve never had, the ability to control the influence of gravity by ourselves. It’s freedom. And yes, is the answer: Looking at your house from above would be a start.

At least part of the preoccupation with observing wild birds, and the wish to protect them, comes from that bittersweet flight envy. It seems improbably lucky, having started out as a dinosaur, to end up as a bird. Many of them can’t even walk, but they move in three dimensions, whereas humans are so doggedly attached to two that, even in imaginative escapades like Star Trek, you’ll notice the spaceships never fly upward or downward…

At the age of about nine, I borrowed a pocket-size hardback from the school library called Bird Spotting, by John Holland. At once I began to fancy that I was seeing impossibly rare breeds in my inauspicious west of Ireland suburb. I wrote a fourth-class essay on the song thrush, and its habit of assassinating snails by smashing them against a stone. It was the beginning of an enduring, arm’s-length flirtation with birdwatching, and the start of a lifelong career of not returning library books. I still use the same copy of Bird Spotting today.

A few years later, I was given a present of a book of Audubon’s illustrations – matchless, detailed paintings of birds. Then I discovered Audubon’s method: first he shot the birds dead and then he propped them up with wires to draw them as if in motion. It was a common enough practice in Audubon’s day but, oh, the betrayal, the juvenile sense of wrongness it provoked. It was enough to put you off birdwatching for life.

In truth, though, it wasn’t watching birds that was offputting, it was the thought of becoming a Birdwatcher with a capital B – possessed, insanely competitive, and badly dressed. One problem with serious birdwatching is that other people’s birds quickly become more interesting than one’s own. Birders would rather travel 500 miles to catch a glimpse of some foreign LBB (little brown bird) than sit in their own garden lazily observing the commonplace rituals of a goldfinch.

Happily, where I now live on Loop Head, you’re spared the trouble and expense of travelling, because other people’s birds come to you.

You wouldn’t suspect it at first glance. The place doesn’t look promising, being all but treeless but for a smattering of stunted, wind-pummelled half-trees that reach yearningly towards the east, giving every impression that they would rather be someplace else.

But Loop Head is a pilgrim site for birdwatchers. Every year, hundreds of them alight on the peninsula in their autumn plumage, standing around in the rain for hours and poking their binoculars into people’s gardens.

They record the passages of migrant seabirds which use Loop Head as a stopping-off point on their way to and from impossibly faraway places. One year they came to take notes on a little Canada Warbler that had got blown off course. It perched shyly in a neighbour’s shrub, implausibly yellow and tragically doomed.

It would be outrageous – ungrateful – not to develop your interest in birdwatching in a place like this. It would be like living on an Alp and not skiing, or living in Los Angeles and forgoing plastic surgery.

And so your calling as a novice birdwatcher takes flight. One Arctic Tern is perhaps all it takes. Arctic terns can live to be more than 30 years old, and they mate for life. This is the bird with the longest known migration, travelling about 20,000 kilometres from the Arctic summer to the Antarctic summer and 20,000 kilometres back again, stopping off at Loop Head on the way. Before the birds begin this formidable journey the entire colony falls silent. This is called the ‘dread’. Imagine it.

Grey Phalaropes are also seen here – little duck-like waders that have subverted traditional gender roles for some reason. The female, who is prettier, competes for a mate and then aggressively defends him. Once she’s laid her eggs she takes off southward, leaving him to incubate the eggs, raise the young and generally shift for himself.

We also get guillemots here, kittiwakes, shearwaters and great black-backed gulls. We get puffins, who rub their beaks affectionately with their mates’, known as ‘billing’. We get storm petrels, the smallest of all seabirds, named after St Peter for their appearance of being able to walk on water. We get gannets, which have binocular vision and can dive into the sea to fish from heights of 30 metres, reaching 100kph when they hit the surface. We get skuas, brigands of the skies, who live by stealing the catch of other seabirds, even those that are much bigger than them.

But no matter how dazzled you are by the sight of exotic and rare species, the affection for common garden birds doesn’t wane. It’s a daily satisfaction, for instance, noticing starlings making room for each other on a telegraph wire, or watching sparrows taking a communal bath, like Ancient Romans. And every gardener makes friends with a robin.

And there’s so much to be said for the crow family, even though they tend to arouse suspicion, perhaps because they’re wily enough to build a nest in one of your ears and rent out the other one. Crows have the largest brain relative to body size of any bird. Ravens have been shown to be as clever with tools as chimpanzees, while crows can recognise and distinguish human faces. And magpies, which so many people unaccountably loathe, well, magpies are simply beautiful.

Apart from the enchantment of seeing birds, there’s the ambient thrill of their music (and it may be all you get, considering how reclusive many birds are): The mellow piping of a blackbird, the exuberance of a skylark giving its all, the able mimicry of a starling. Mozart reputedly had a pet starling that could sing the first few bars of his piano concerto in G. It’s said that whatever you’re doing when you first hear the cuckoo is what you’ll be doing all summer. (Unfortunately, as often as not you’re hanging out washing.) Then there’s the clicking-whooping soundtrack to summer, which falls silent in September when the swallows take their leave, saddening everyone.

Birdwatching brings a new vocabulary too. You learn unfamiliar, softly percussive words like passerine, pied, pelagic… A colony of collective nouns builds nests in your memory: a murmuration of starlings, an exaltation of larks, a charm of finches, a parliament of rooks, a tiding of magpies, an unkindness of ravens…

Birds are always hungry, they spend half their time looking for love, they put everything they’ve got into making a home, they’re vain in their grooming habits, they prefer not to suffer alone, and they’re always worried about dying. No wonder we identify.

Two summers ago, my cat cornered a juvenile magpie in the hedgerow by my house. Magpies are notorious for taunting cats, and are usually the victors, so this was a rare turnabout.

There was no choice, as I saw it. Risking bramble scratch, beak strike and the anger of an indignant cat – perhaps, with some exaggeration, the way mothers have been known to show superhuman bravery to save their children – I swooped up the magpie and carried him to safety indoors.

The magpie – I’m still half-embarrassed to say I named him Luther – had a damaged wing. For some three days, he lived in the sitting room, at first flapping uselessly about in terror but then gradually becoming friendly. He graciously accepted cat food from my hand, placidly surveyed the outdoors from the windows (or perhaps admired his hint-of-purple reflection), and crapped wherever he liked. Then, when his flight seemed to have recovered, I carried him, perched on my finger, to the nearest tree. Before long his parents were hovering above, calling him. When he was ready, he flew away. Like a mother whose young have flown the nest, I have nothing but the photos to prove I was ever necessary to him.

I understand wildlife experts might take a poor view of this. But what apology can you make to the sort of people who keep filming while an animal flails about in desperation and hunger, who believe that the best moral stance is not to get involved, to let nature take its ruthless course – and who believe, moreover, that they’re doing you a service by making you watch?

This year I sawed a limb off my sycamore tree because a starling was trapped in it. He was dangling, panic-stricken, from a branch, attached to a shred from an accursed plastic bag. Seeing him fly away was a fine moment, an exalted moment.

The human identification with birds, the wish to safeguard their freedom, is a reflection both of our higher selves and of our realisation that, unlike them, we are prisoners of the flat earth. So we watch them, and marvel at them, and protect them, and sometimes meddle in their tiny lives, and it makes us feel better about ourselves.

 

Published (edited) in the Irish Daily Mail, 27th April 2013

Survival of the fattest

by
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Low-paid workers are pawns in a game whose rules are being decided elsewhere

 

IT’S supposed to be the private sector that’s a dog-eat-dog world. In the public sector – union-defended and sheltered from market forces – the strong are supposed to shield the weak, because they can and because they should.

But now the Croke Park II deal, which protected low-paid public servants against pay cuts and safeguarded their jobs, has been rejected by the very unions that are meant to uphold fair play. In the public sector now, like everywhere else, it’s a case of survival of the fattest.

Public servants have to be paid for by the state one way or another (at least until the last public service is privatised). This means they’re not subject to the upsides or downsides of free enterprise. They can’t flit from job to job, demanding sweeteners wherever they go, as the rest of us were allegedly doing all through the boom. It also means most of them are guaranteed a job till retirement, recession or no, and a pension at the end of it.

To private sector workers, who know not the day nor the hour when their jobs might go, that seems more than reasonable compensation for not enjoying the perk of playing paintball with your 23-year-old boss in some bonkers corporate team-building exercise.

To those on zero-hours contracts, where you’re expected to be available for work whether there’s work or not, and be paid – or not – depending, a guaranteed 39-hour working week would be a godsend.

And to those who are flailing and sinking, jobless in a jobless job market, any position that pays looks like luxury, never mind a position you can’t be sacked from. Don’t like the thought of having your increments frozen? Tell that to a Job Bridge intern.

I worked for one private sector company for over 20 years. Unusually, I didn’t have to take a pay cut, but that was simply because I didn’t receive a pay rise at all between 2000 and 2011, despite a prolonged period of raging inflation. There were no “increments”, let alone increments completely unrelated to performance.

It wasn’t because of the recession, and I flatter myself it wasn’t because I was worthless. It was because I worked for a small, loss-making outfit to which I was unfashionably loyal. Then, in 2011, the company closed and its stranded workers were not entitled to a penny. That’s the system, out there.

Naturally the temptation is to tell public servants what most commentators have been telling them biliously in recent days: “You have a job. Now shut your trap.”

In reality, though, most public sector workers are not doing that well. Some 82% of them earn less than €60,000, and almost half of them, 45%, earn less than €40,000. The vast majority are comfortable, not rich, and Croke Park II acknowledged that. Now they can be thrown to the wolves.

Government is looking for €1bn in savings on public service pay by 2015, and €300 million this year, and it must get them, because those are the orders of our paymasters in the EU and IMF.

“Croke Park II is dead. That is democracy,” said Siptu president Jack O’Connor, suggesting that he has, well, let’s call it a quaint view of democracy.

Unions are now threatening industrial action, and some are pledging not even to talk about this again. So the union line is hardening. More significantly, and despite the illusion of unity in Wednesday’s result, the union line is splitting. An ideological fissure has been exposed.

Impact, which voted in favour, has said it “won’t accept a situation where Impact members face a worse package in order to appease members of other unions who have voted to reject”.

In a circular to members on Thursday, the union pointed out: “you can only make things more acceptable for one group by making it less acceptable for another.” There’s the rub.

Given that people earning under €65,000 were protected under this deal, we can conclude that those who thought it was a bad idea were those earning over €65,000. And the other union members who voted against it did so because that is the union way. You back up your co-workers. In other words, the low-paid have protected the high-paid.

Of course the vote also reflects an all-purpose anger about austerity and burden-sharing. Nobody is happy about having this whole business adjudicated by our overlords in the Troika. Nobody is happy that Ireland has paid 42% of the cost of the European banking crisis, or that the banks seem to be carrying on as if nothing happened, or that the accountancy firms that audited those banks are still advising Nama, or that property developers are still living large despite being supposedly in the red, or that overpaid politicians are still sitting in their warm ancestral seats, many of them claiming multiple pensions. Then there are the unsecured bondholders. And Seanie Fitzpatrick. And Bertie Ahern. If even half a dozen disreputable shysters had been cooling their heels in the slammer this week, Croke Park II might have passed.

Look what’s happened instead. Public sector workers now face a 7% pay cut across the board, together with other nasty measures such as compulsory redundancies, and the unions have ditched the protection that Croke Park II afforded to low-paid workers against this.

And where else is there to go? The unions want the money raised from a wealth tax, which might be all very well if the government had any influence over how to go about saving €1bn from the public purse. Clearly the unions think Enda Kenny is in charge; behold Jack O’Connor’s old-fashioned notion of democracy. But we’re all public servants now, in the service of propping up the euro.

Kenny told the Dáil this week that any move to tax high earners would fail, as Croke Park II failed for the very reason that it proposed to cut high earners’ pay. He neglected to mention, though, that outside of the public service, you don’t technically have to ask people first.

And if the unions do strike, how much sympathy do they anticipate? The public reaction to any action, especially by teachers, who would have some trouble scheduling a strike around their 18 weeks of annual holidays (there, I’ve said it) might shock them.

The unions are strutting like kings here, but they must know this game plan is being decided a long way away from Croke Park. The next move could checkmate them, and the pawns – the low-paid – will be hurt the most.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 21st April 2013