Those Dying Generations: Why I’m Voting Stephen Donnelly, Independent

It’s election day here in Ireland, as you may or may not know, or care, but given the traumatic events of the last couple of years, and the collapse of not only the Irish economy but the trust of the Irish nation in its political class in particular and authority in general, it’s arguably the most important Irish election since the foundation of the State. I genuinely believe that today marks a fresh start in Ireland, which might be an odd thing to say when it appears from the polls that the centre-right party Fine Gael, currently on 40%, is headed for an overall majority.
  In essence, though, Fine Gael is doing little more than replacing its doppelganger, the centre-right Fianna Fail; and maybe I’m wrong, but my sense is that this administration, even if it runs the full five years, will go down in history as a holding government, a bridge between the worn-out politics of the post-Civil War generations and a political outlook that governs with one eye on the future rather than the past.
  In the Wicklow constituency, where I’ll be voting, Independent candidate Stephen Donnelly (above, right) seems to me to come closest to encapsulating the coming change. His policies, as detailed below, are by turns brash, ambitious, naïve and heartfelt:

Give banking debt back to the banks.
Renegotiate the IMF bailout.
Start a National Reconstruction Bank to fund job creation.
Attract investment for jobs in Wicklow.
Improve education standards for our children.
Reform the political system - change the people and change the rules.

  Leaving aside the moral aspects of Irish taxpayers having to fund the IMF / ECB bailout, which is largely linked to the gambling debts of an elite gang of financial incontinents, I believe that the banking debt and the bailout will have to be negotiated as a matter of course, on the very simple basis that you can’t get blood from a stone. As I understand it, the mood in Europe is one that it makes no sense to run Ireland into the ground and get no money at all out of the country; better to ease the conditions and make sure that there’s some kind of constant cash flow being milked.
  The idea of a National Reconstruction Fund for job creation is a laudable one, even if it’s largely a retread of the old IDA, and I’d wonder where said funding might come from - presumably from telling the IMF / ECB to take a walk.
Attracting investment for jobs in Wicklow is again laudable, although it smacks of insularity and the parish-pump politics that has bedevilled this country for generations now. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to argue with improving education standards for children.
  It’s in the reform of the political system that I think Stephen Donnelly and his fellow independents will matter most in the new Dail. For the most part, Independents have a bad name in Irish politics right now, largely due to the pork-barrel antics of the likes of Jackie Healy-Rae and Michael Lowry, which at one point last year led to a major European newspaper running a picture of the gombeen-looking Healy-Rae in his flat cap under the headline, ‘Is This The Man Holding Europe To Ransom?’
  I’m hopeful that Stephen Donnelly represents an entirely new kind of Independent. I’m hopeful that - the ‘jobs for Wicklow’ policy aside - he’s one of a new breed that will be inclined to work for the good of the country as a whole, not just his own constituency and voters. I’ve argued in the past that too many elected Independents would be a bad thing in terms of their potential to destabilise any government dependent on their whims; now, with Fine Gael headed for an overall majority, or more likely a coalition government with Labour, a rash of Independents buzzing about Dail Eireann might well be exactly what this country needs.
  Because what this country needs in terms of true political reform is a brand new political party, one that has no ties to the Civil War, that owes no debt to either big business or the unions; one that is young, brash, naïve and ambitious, and preferably left-leaning, an anti-Progressive Democrat party to counter-balance the centre-right politics of what has historically been a Fine Gael-Fianna Fail hegemony.
  There have been a few abortive attempts to establish new parties in recent years, and there are a number of embryonic parties running candidates in this election, but the nature of Irish politics is such that it’s very difficult for a new party to gain traction with the electorate unless, as was the case with the PDs, they’re a disaffected rump of an established party.
  What may well trump Irish political history is the election of a record number of Independent candidates, enough of whom will share a common cause to establish not just a technical group in the Dail to provide it with speaking rights, but a platform on which can be established a coherent political party in its own right. It won’t happen overnight, of course, but given the number of credible Independent candidates going forward for election, it’s certainly a possibility.
  And so I’m voting for what I believe to be the most credible local Independent candidate, Stephen Donnelly. Where previously Independent TDs such as Jackie Healy-Rae and Michael Lowry had the capacity to destabilise the Dail and hold Irish democracy itself to ransom by their pork-barrel demands, a group of organised Independents have the capacity to destabilise the Irish political system itself, to prove that the tired old men (and they’re mostly men) and their tired old ideas have run their course. At the risk of sounding ageist, I’m voting for Stephen Donnelly not just on the basis of his policies but because he is young, and because for the first time in my life I’m not voting for myself, but on behalf of my three-year-old daughter.
  To mangle Yeats entirely, this is no longer a country for old men. The country of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, of Labour and Sinn Fein, is with O’Leary in his grave, even if Enda Kenny and Michael Martin, and Eamon Gilmore and particularly Gerry Adams, have yet to realise they’re little more than the living ghosts of ‘those dying generations’, the death rattle of insularity, petty vengeance, violence and power for its own sake, the last gasp of a political system that has given us ‘leaders’ of the calibre of the snake-oil salesman Bertie Ahern and the venally corrupt Charles J. Haughey.
  “Age and guile,” as PJ O’Rourke once said, “beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut.” Except Stephen Donnelly has a bald head on young shoulders. The future is surely ours.

Sheer Geneius

Gene Kerrigan is one of the finest Irish novelists around at the moment, in CAP’s not-so-humble opinion, and those of you who haven’t read his latest offering, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY – which, I suspect, is most of you – should hasten to your nearest bookstore and purchase it forthwith, sparing not the horses, James.
  I’m also rather fond of Gene Kerrigan’s columns on the back page of the Sunday Independent, which have taken on something of a quixotic poignancy in recent times, as he vainly tilts against the windmills of Ireland’s entrenched vested interests. The most recent subject of his ire is the McCarthy Report. To wit:

It’s like we’re all on a lifeboat. At one end of the lifeboat, we’re being told that things are so bad that we must choose which amongst us is to be served up as dinner, so that the rest won’t all perish.
  And, from the other end of the lifeboat, we can hear the enormous farts from the bloated arses of the Very Serious People, on the fourth course of their blow-out.
  As this column said before, this battle is about the quality of wine on the dinner tables of the elite. People who routinely uncork a €48 bottle of wine will, indeed, make sacrifices in our hour of peril. They’ll settle for a €36 bottle of plonk. But they’re damned if they’ll slum it with a crappy €22 bottle.

  Geneius. For the rest, clickety-click here ...
  The McCarthy Report, for those of you interested, is a report on where savings can be made in the Government’s public sector wage bill. It targets, for the most part, education, health and essential services – one proposal, for example, suggests closing down half the rural Garda stations.
  Here’s the situation in Ireland:
  A Fianna Fail-led government has been in power for over a decade;
  We’ve gone from boom to bust in the last three years;
  The same government who led us into the tailspin are now proposing to pull us out;
  They propose to achieve this by commissioning a report from a group of people who are ideologically wedded to the economic model that got us bust in the first place;
  The overall aim is to reassert the status quo, although possibly with more safety-nets built in for the very wealthy individuals whose greed caused the bust in the first place;
  The cost of paying for the stupid greed of a gilded elite will be picked up by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer’s children, and very probably the taxpayer’s grandchildren, because the government insists on bailing out useless, rotten banks by investing billions that could be spent on education, health, and essential services.
  Meanwhile, the opposition parties clamour for an election, pretending that they want to be in charge of the fiasco, but no one seems prepared to say that it’s the system that’s at fault; that it’s the system that has provided us with a generation of utterly useless politicians, bankers and captains of industry; that it’s the system that needs to change. Otherwise we’re just shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.
  My father, bless his heart, is no political or economic savant. But for as long as I can remember, going back to the early ’80s, when it was clear to everyone with eyes to see that Charles J. Haughey was filthy to the core, my father was saying, “We need to ask Fidel to come over and sort us out.” A benign dictatorship was what he was proposing, in effect. And you can laugh if you want to, but answer me this: with Ireland on its way to hell in a hand-basket, broke and bust and borrowing billions at a punitive rate of interest just to keep up with the day-to-day spending, this a few short years after the Celtic Tiger was roaring all over the world, at anyone who’d listen, about how wonderful the Irish economy was – answer me this: how much worse of a job would Fidel Castro have done at managing the Irish economy than Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen?

On Politics In The Irish Crime Novel, Or Lack Thereof

Our German friend Bernd Kochanowski from International Crime adds an interesting coda to the comment he left on the post On Publishing and Being Damned, to wit:

BTW: He (the reviewer) is also unhappy that the new Irish crime fiction is almost apolitical and doesn’t reflect the events that shook Ireland for years.

  The reviewer in question was casting a cold eye over Tana French’s IN THE WOODS, and is presumably referring to what we in Ireland like to euphemistically refer to as ‘the Troubles’.
  In other words – and we’re taking Bernd’s word for this – said reviewer is disappointed that Irish crime writers aren’t dealing with the consequences of the 30-year conflict that involved the Provisional IRA, the INLA, the British Army, the RUC (latterly the PSNI), the Gardai, and more Loyalist paramilitary armies than you could shake a cat-o’-nine-tails at.
  To which we reply, ‘Tosh, piffle and balderdash, sirrah!’
  Case for the Defence # 1: Adrian McKinty’s protagonist Michael Forsythe is an ex-British Army soldier. In THE DEAD YARD, he goes undercover to break up a gang of renegade Republicans. In THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD he engages with (and generally vaporises) any number of ex-paramilitaries on his return to Belfast.
  Case for the Defence # 2: Sylvester Young’s SLEEPING DOGS LIE, in which ex-IRA men travel to the U.S. and become embroiled in a complex plot involving a number of security agencies.
  Case for the Defence # 3: Ken Bruen’s AMERICAN SKIN, in which an ex-IRA man wreaks mayhem in the U.S.
  Case for the Defence # 4: Declan Burke’s EIGHT BALL BOOGIE, in which former paramilitaries diversify into more prosaic criminality, specifically coke-trafficking.
  Case for the Defence # 5: David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, in which former paramilitaries and an ex-RUC officer find themselves called to account for their actions twenty years previously.
  Case for the Defence # 6: Colin Bateman.
  Case for the Defence # 7: Sam Millar.
  Case for the Defence # 8: Authors such as Peter Cunningham, Jack Holland and S.J. Michaels, who were writing about ‘the Troubles’ as far back as the late ’80s and early ’90s.
  I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. Besides, and pertinently in the context of the reviewer’s comments being made during a review of IN THE WOODS, Tana French’s novel had a political subtext that perhaps was too subtle for the reviewer to pick up on. The novel opens on an archaeological dig, where the body of a young girl has been found, said dig being conducted hastily on the basis that the bulldozers of the property developers are due in the very near future.
  In Ireland, many such developments are highly controversial and politically charged, the most obvious example being that of the M3 motorway, currently planned to run through the Tara Valley (right), an archaeological complex dating back to 2,000 BC.
  Furthermore, the ongoing tribunals of investigation were initially set up to investigate the links – if such could be proved – between property developers and politicians, specifically to discover if politicians had been bribed to facilitate the rezoning of land in favour of property speculators. Among the many politicians to find themselves under serious scrutiny at these tribunals, to put it mildly, were two former taoisigh, or Irish prime ministers, Charles Haughey and Bertie Ahern.
  To suggest that IN THE WOODS is an apolitical novel is to deliberately ignore, or be utterly ignorant of, recent Irish history. Here endeth the lesson. Peace, out.

Cecilia, You’re Breaking Our Hearts

The Irish Independent carried a piece last weekend previewing the Dublin Book Festival, the gist of which ran thusly:

‘Aspiring Irish writers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Cecilia’
Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Dublin Book Festival, Sean O’Cearnaigh, President of the Irish Book Publishing Association, said that the market was alive and well here. “It’s certainly in a state of change, but publishers here have around 15pc of the market of books that are on sale in shops at the moment.” And the success of the market is all down to the talent of Irish writers, he added. “Irish writers are our secret weapons,” he explains. “We have everything from big writers to chick-lit authors to sports writers. There is a lot of talent. We have a lot of up-and-coming writers coming through as well, writers who have their finger on the pulse. Ireland is changing a lot and it’s just a matter of reflecting that, which many of the writers do.”

  And these writers with their fingers on the pulse, reflecting a changing Ireland? Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Ingrid Black, et al … They, unfortunately, were all too busy beavering away reflecting a changing Ireland to get along to the Festival. In fact, no Irish crime writer could tear him or herself away from the desk long enough to give a talk or attend a panel, lest removing their fingers from the pulse for even a moment might result in a national tragedy. The Festival did, of course, have a panel of true crime writers talking about crime and Ireland, but for the most part these were crime journalists promoting one-off books about a specific crime.
  Crime fiction writers? Pshaw, sir! Fie! And this despite the fact that the big news stories in Ireland over the last month were the brutal murder of two Polish men in Dublin; the ongoing farce in which an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern attempts (and largely fails) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures back when he was Minister for Finance; the largest drug haul in the history of the State; the murder of a young mother by her husband, who allegedly modelled his modus operandi on that of a previous killer; etc., ad nauseum. In other words, anyone writing fiction in Ireland today who is not dealing with crime is writing escapist fiction.
  And yet, if you walk into any Dublin bookstore today (other than the wonderful Murder Ink on Dawson Street), you’ll be faced with a bank of James Patterson’s 7TH HEAVEN, which is the worst apology for a sick monkey of a half-arsed first draft the Grand Vizier can remember reading. ‘Fingers on the pulse’, eh? Meanwhile, the Cecilia in whose footsteps Irish writers are hoping to follow? That’ll be the ever-lovely Cecilia Ahern (right), a creator of women’s fiction so insubstantial, frothy and sickeningly sweet that cotton candy may yet sue. Who just so happens to be the daughter of an taoiseach (aka prime minister) Bertie Ahern, who is attempting (and largely failing) to explain to a tribunal his, erm, idiosyncratic accounting procedures, etc., ad nauseum.
  Laugh? We nearly emigrated.

“As God Is My Witness, They’re Not Going To Lick Me.”

The Times recently made Tana French’s (right) IN THE WOODS a readers’ book-group pick, with Alyson Rudd mediating, and the verdict – or mixed verdicts – are coming in thick and fast over here. As part of the piece, Rudd had a quick Q&A with Tana, to wit:

AR: Knocknaree – is this an imaginary place?
TF: “Imaginary, but unfortunately there are a lot of places in Ireland that fit the general description: hugely important archaeological sites destroyed by development. Ireland’s at a very strange point – over the past ten years the economic boom has hit us with decades’ worth of changes, and we’re still trying to assimilate them and find a way to balance past, present and future.”

In a nutshell, Ireland today could be summarised by a couple of news stories that just won’t quit rumbling on: the impending demolition of the 5,000-year-old Tara, seat of the ancient Irish high kings, to make way for a motorway (‘Knocknaree’ translates from the Irish as ‘the Hill of the Kings’); and the (totally unrelated) appalling vista of an taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s regular attempts to explain to the Mahon Tribunal where all the cash payments came from way back when, the Mahon Tribunal concerning itself with the possibility of improper influence exerted on politicians in matters of planning and development. Sure isn’t it all great craic all the same?

Funky Friday’s Free-For-All: In Which ‘Fab’ Vinnie Browne Opens A Can Of ChateauNeuf du Pape Whup-Ass On Bertie's Pert Buns

Who says crime always pays? Not when ‘Fab’ Vinnie Browne is on the prowl and coming on like Dirty Harry on a good hair day (see vid below). Will Bertie Ahern be able to – oh yes! – get his house in order before the general election kicks in, or has Vinnie finally flithered every last shred of the erstwhile emperor’s new clothes? Or, pushing the boat out, should we just elect the arm-chancing genius on the right (nope, the arm-chancer on the right, folks - the one wearing the 'Been there, bought the Taoiseach' t-shirt). What’s that you say? What do Patrick Bartholomew’s finances have to do with our stated remit of reporting on Irish crime fictions? Erm, nothing. Nothing at all. That’s all for this week, folks – y'all come back here now, y'hear?