Be sure your shins will find you out

The news that Bertie Ahern has broken his leg comes as no surprise to this writer. It was almost inevitable that slipping the net the way he did would have consequences of one sort or another.

We've all seen The Sopranos. If you accept unsolicited dig-outs from businessmen who go informally by names like Fat Tony, Big Patrick and Earless Joe or put yourself in hock to the nuns and then renege on the vigorish just because you've been forced into early retirement and can't make the payments on your pension, you have to expect some kind of sanctions, now don't you? After all they can't repossess a house he never owned in the first place or drag the wee bollix through the small claims court for failing to live up to expectations.

Alternatively, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Brian 'biffo' Cowan either. There's a man with a motive after the mess he was left to sort out. A wee camán-assisted tib and fib re-alignment would be small beer to that lad I'm after thinking.

As for the 'fell down the stairs' story that FF sources are pushing, sure haven't we all heard that one before? It rings about as true as the old 'walked into a door' explanation for a black eye.
If we hear sometime soon of a former Taoiseach turning up at low tide on the Liffey wearing a pair of concrete wellies with a couple of house bricks in his pockets, then it probably won't be Albert Reynolds is all I'm prepared to say.


I nicked today's picture from green ink Liam-Bob says check him/her out

Black skin, brown envelope

A recent report from the the Migration and Citizenship Research Unit above there at UCD condemns the neglect of ethnic minority inclusion shown by the major parties on this island. As its authors note:

..... the integration efforts of Irish political parties are, as of yet, minimal. This is a crucial issue. Politicians are key actors in debates about immigration and integration. They are expected to provide leadership. Yet their own specific institutions, the political parties, remain amongst the least diverse, the least responsive, the least capable of leading by example when it comes to representing the diversity of twenty-first century Irish society. This is unsustainable and potentially dangerous to social cohesion in the long run.

Ever an organisation to grasp an opportunity (not to mention a brown envelope or two), I understand that the Fianna Fáil political machine has immediately swung into action and responded to the challenge of integration and equal opportunities.

Spooky Glockenspiel Music and dissolve to:

Party Headquarters,
Mount St Lower, Dublin 4
where a candidate selection interview is taking place

INTERVIEWER: Top of the morning to you Miss...er O' Benjamin. Will you take a cup o' tay or a drop of that Nigerian lager I hear is popular amongst you people.

CANDIDATE: Good morning, it's Obenjwe-Amin, actually. Tea would be fine thank you.

INTVR: Sit you down, sit you down. That's a chair over there or you can just squat on the floor if that's more comfortable for you. Sure we'll not stand on ceremony here. So now tell us a bit about yourself. What part of Nigeria are you from?

CAND: I'm not from Nigeria, I'm from Crumlin.

INTVR: Would that be anywhere near Lagos, then? I hear that's a fierce wild place for the old brown envelopes, if you follow my drift.

CAND: No, it's in Dublin, near Drimnagh.

INTVR: Ah, Der-im-in-ah, is it? They're such exotic names you're after having beyond there in Africa. Sure can't I only see the lions and the monkeys up the palm trees and the dusky maidens with the long necks doing the fertility dances. So, how long is it since you left Nigeria, then?

CAND: I told you. I'm not Nigerian.

INTVR: Of course you're not, me darling girl (WINKS THEATRICALLY). Like the last fellah before you wasn't Rumanian, either. Told us he was a Bulgarian, so he did, but we all know they like to do that before they put the grip on yeh for a copy of deh Big Issues, hah?. (MIMES A NUDGE AND WINKS AGAIN)

CAND: I'm from Crumlin, it's in Dublin, that's in Ireland. Not Nigeria, not anywhere in Africa.

INTVR: So it is, so it is, ye fine thing, yeh. Anyway so, must press on. Time's a divil and waits for no man, hah?. So what would a fine Nigerian lassie like yourself think you could bring to the Fianna Fáil party?

CAND: Well I have a degree in law and a Master's in political science. I've worked with NGOs in my local community on adult literacy and welfare rights and I was auditor of my college Cumann of Fianna Fáil. I'd say I was pretty plugged in at a grass-roots level.

INTVR: Well an education that grand must have cost a fine penny or two. I expect the family pulled some strings to get you in, did they? Would there be diplomats or former dictators in the family then? Maybe an ex-Government minister?

CAND: No. I took the Leaving Cert like everyone else.

INTVR: Nothing to be ashamed of a bit of the old nepotism, eh? Sure there's many a man not an asses roar from here who wouldn't be where they are but for having a Daddy or an Uncle in the right place at the right time (WINKS AGAIN). Anyway so, back to the interview script, them maggots at the Equalities Authority give us a divil of a time if we don't treat everyone the same.

Would you be after playing any sport now? Sure a fine thing like yourself would be a wonder to behold in a camogie kit.

CAND: Well I played a bit of soccer and tennis at college and .....

INTVR: (Nods slowly and prints, even more slowly, 'NO GAA!' on the sheet in front of him). Perhaps you like watching the lads play rugby or the old golf then?

CAND: I don't really have much time to watch sport because of the advocacy work I do with Asylum Seekers in the evenings and weekends.

INTVR: Asylum seekers, is it? No votes in them lads worth speaking of, hah? Still they'll do a good job building a conservatory for the right price should the need arise. Or would that be the Poles? I'm always after mixing them up.

CAND: I think that would be Polish people. Asylum seekers aren't allowed to work.

INTVR: No, and a good job it is too. Sure wouldn't they be after taking the bread from the mouth of the honest Irish working man who fought the Tans to free this nation from the Saxon yoke. (His eyes glaze over and he begins to hum A Nation Once Again).

CAND: Could we get back to the interview, please?

INTVR: Ah yes, the interview. Well, as you know what with the forthcoming election and all, there's going to be a major drain on the auld finances. Them street posters aren't cheap, even with them asylum seekers on nixers to put them up for us. The ideal candidate for our party would be someone who has the kind of talents that could give us a dig-out when the time comes. Would you be that sort of candidate Miss O'Benjamin?

CAND: Well I've done several fund-raising campaigns for the local hospital, fun runs, sponsored walks, that kind of thing....


INTVR: Very good, very good. But I was after thinking of something that could pull in a more substantial contribution. Would you ever have done anything with the auld emails, perhaps? You know the kind of thing, hah? Your people are past masters at it, so I'm told. (PUTS ON A BAD NIGERIAN ACCENT) 'My name is Joseph I am orphan whose parents died in famine. I need money to make sure I get good Christian Catholic education. Please sponsor me Only $200 a month.' Pulls on the auld ones' hearts-strings and their purse strings at the same time that one does. My favourite's about the 11 Million Dollars belonging to the deposed fellah in a numbered bank account. Send on your bank details and the vacuum cleaners have gone to work on it before you can say 'Mazarawe's your uncle'.

CAND: I don't think I could condone that sort of behaviour. It's unethical and almost certainly illegal.

INTVR: Don't be after getting on your high horse with me now, wee girl. This party was built on a lack of ethics and a disregard for the letter of the law. Didn't old Dev start it with the Hospital Sweepstake? Wasn't Charlie the beneficiary of many a brown envelope? And isn't deh current leader after hiding a few skellingtons in his fiscal wardrobe even as we speak? We're a party of tradition but we're not afraid to move with the times. You don't think we're interviewing Nigerians and Rumanians for the fun of it, do yeh? It wouldn't be for the votes you'd bring in that's for sure. It's the scams me dear, the scams. We could do with a few new ones, now the tribunals have copped onto us. The brown envelope has gone the way of the dinosaur. We need fresh blood and fresh ideas if we're to keep the coffers full. And there's always the fact they'd never go after a black face for the fear of being called a bunch of racists. Liberals, hah?

CAND: (Leaves with only the slamming of the door behind her)

INTVR: And what would be the problem with her I wonder? Come in, Mr Caecescu.

Election Smelection Part 2



Sorry Enda, the mean streets of this fair city were a fuck of a lot safer before some eejits started sticking up posters at just the right height to take an unwary pedestrian's eye out.

And just who came up with that slogan anyway, the wife's cousin?

We don't have class in Ireland

I was recently much engaged by a discussion over on Bock the Robber's blog regarding the notion of class in Ireland. It brought back a number of memories for me from around the time I began to associate with middle class Irish people for the first time.

Now as any Marxist schoolboy knows, class is not an attribute of an individual. It is a social relationship to the means of production through which we live our lives. In the most broad and abstract Marxist terms, if you operate the means of production you are working class, if you own them, you are middle class. But even old Charlie recognised that there were more than two classes in society at any given time and that the subjective experience of class varied considerably.

The problem of revolution often boiled down to how you got working class people to recognise their common relationship to the means of production under capitalism and unite as a means of changing that relationship. This is sometime referred to as the problem of 'false consciousness'.


In the industrialised societies of the 19th Century it was relatively easy for workers to recognise their common experience. They were all pretty much treated like shit, excluded from political power, education and the other trappings of citizenship we nowadays take for granted. With the top down reforms that came from the end of the 19th Century and continued during the 20th Century as a means of heading the revolution off at the pass, it became harder and harder to consider class in this clear cut kind of way. So much so that by the 1960s some deeply confused and ideologically motivated sociologists were talking about the 'end of class.'

Nonetheless, the basic principle of seeing class as a social relationship rather than a characteristic or attribute of the individual is as true now as it was in the mid-19th Century. Understanding class in this way is less a matter of what you work at, what you own, or how you label yourself in the here and now than how you experience the world and act in it in largely unconscious ways learned very early on in life. As Anthony Wilden once said 'Class is something you don't grow out of.'

When we start to think about it as an attribute of individuals, the problems and confusions around the concept really begin to escalate because, again as any Marxist schoolboy knows, we are confronted by a series of contradictions and misrecognitions about social relationships that as human beings we don't handle very well. They make us feel uncomfortable and uneasy when we experience them.

The situation becomes even more complicated and contradictory in colonised and post-colonial societies because class relationships typically get obliterated by national ones. The nationalist middle class typically horizontalizes the class structure and induces people to think of themselves as, say, Irish first and everything else second, if at all.

The Irish political structure, the practices of clientilism, stroke politics and the high degree of centralised control and localised surveillance, not to mention emigration, kept people toeing the national line and made the Irish ruling class probably the most successful in Europe at maintaining control over its people. Paradoxically, it made Irishness and the concept of identity amongst Irish people a very fragile and inward looking thing indeed.

Anyway, I digress. Until I went to work at the Institute of Irish Studies in Liverpool I had never met middle class (as defined by occupational status, access to education, and income) Irish people. My day to day experience of Irish-born people was pretty much restricted to folks from the same background as me and my parents (manual workers from Coronation St neighbourhoods) and relatives from similar backgrounds in Belfast and Dublin. The issue of class was a non-issue in such company because it was patently obvious what class we came from, raised no contradictions and therefore needed no discussion.

However, in the more socially rarified environment of the Institute I began to meet people who became increasingly agitated when I raised the issue of class politics in an Irish context. Seemingly intelligent people such as academics, journalists, diplomats, artists, and other professionals would have coniptions when Liam the Red introduced a class dimension to the discussion of phenomena relating to contemporary Irish society and culture.

They would almost inevitably and invariably resolve their unease with the same phrase: 'Ah now, Liam, you can tell you're not Irish. Everyone knows we don't have class in Ireland.' After a while I gave up trying to argue with this apparent truism in the spirit of rational debate and would simply resort to saying something like: 'Perhaps you'd be kind enough to inform my cousins in Ballyfermot and Ballymun of that next time you're passing that way, assuming you know how to find your way there.'

The illusion of the absence of class and class relationships in Ireland is precisely that, an illusion. What's more it is an illusion historically maintained by the privileged as a means of maintaining their privilege. If you speak out about it you run the risk of losing your claim to Irishness altogether, letting the side down, or otherwise being less than a credit to your race. This is a very powerful means of ideological control in a post-colonial society and when it's backed up by the sanctions of social exclusion and the threat of the emigrant boat, it doesn't take long for most folk to get on the programme.

Anyway, that's the sociology rant over. If anyone still doesn't believe me then I suggest they take this little test from the English Daily Torygraph. If the results can be relied upon, I'm expecting my invitation to the Duchess of Devonshire's next 'at home' to arrive any day now.