FFGP February 1, 2021
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I quipped on twitter yesterday that the Dublin and young voters who are said have shown increased support for Fianna Fáil obviously don’t know that Stephen Donnelly is a Fianna Fáíl minister.
That set me wondering about how much ministers in the current government are perceived as being from their party. I’d day the three party leaders are clearly identified as being of their parties, in the case of Martin and Varadkar because they’ve been leaders for so long and party leaders nowadays are the face of their party’s brand, and in the case of Ryan because of a combination of that and the fact that he has the ‘green’ department. Coveney and Donohoe have been in office for long enough for their political identity to be well established in the public mind, but after those ministers I wonder.
Of course, the question is complicated by more general anonymity: I can imagine many with no particular interest in politics might ask “Catherine Who?” or “Who’s Darragh O’Brien?”. And that ‘general anonymity’ extends to the “F” parties. Now that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are in government together it genuinely is difficult to tell them apart. Donnelly could so easily be a Fine Gael minister for health. The only thing that tells you Simon Harris is not FF is his posh accent.
Nor have the Greens managed to stand out as different. O’Gorman’s equality and children brief doesn’t offer much in the line of environmental show-casing, but his — I’ll be generous — clumsy handling of the Mother and Baby Homes report and the GDPR rights the victims of that system showed that he was missing either the values or the competence (if not both) needed to claim that the Greens were making a difference. He is just like so many other apparently brilliant but ultimately mediocre politicians who were given a department of state to run over my life time.
It really is the FFGP party in government at the moment.
ILA Podcast #17: Sarah Clancy: Poetry, Activism, Politics, and the Contemporary Left February 1, 2021
Posted by leftarchivist in Uncategorized.5 comments
Mp3 format (55.57 MB)
Ogg format (47.92 MB)
In this episode we talk to Sarah Clancy. Sarah is a poet and activist from Galway, and currently based in Clare. Her published collections include Stacey and the Mechanical Bull in 2011, Thanks for Nothing, Hippies in 2012, and The Truth and Other Stories in 2014. Sarah has often performed her work both at literary and at political events.
We discuss Sarah’s background and how she came both to political activism and to poetry, how the two inflect each other, her experience of activism and analysis of the political Left. We also discuss the challenges for the contemporary Left in Ireland during the pandemic crisis.
During the episode you can hear Sarah recite her poem, “And Yet We Must Live in These Times”.
You’ll find a video of Sarah performing “Cherishing For Beginners” at the Stand for Truth rally during the visit of the Pope in 2018 on Youtube (thanks to the WSM).
Lyrikline.org has the text and a recording of the Rita Ann Higgins poem, “Some People” , which Sarah discusses.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, please subscribe. If you use a podcast app, it should come up in most of them if you search for “Irish Left Archive Podcast”, or use one of the links below.
Left Archive: Smash Racism, Smash Capitalism Festival, Socialist Party Youth, 2000 February 1, 2021
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To download the above please click on the following link.
Please click here to go the Left Archive.
Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive.
This document was issued by Socialist Party Youth in Summer 2000 publicising their Smash Racism, Smash Capitalism Festival which was held in Wexford that year.
Events listed include:
A SOCIALIST CHALLENGE TO THE CORRUPT SYSTEM with Socialist Party T.D. JOE HIGGINS & invited speaker from Tipperary Workers and Unemployed Group, SUSAN FITZGERALD, Socialist Party Youth
SATURDAY 12TH AUGUST-Morning meetings -11am
SHOULD IRELAND BE A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY?
FRAN KENNEDY -Refugee Support Group Wexford & MICK BARRY, Cork Anti Racist Activist
And
“SMASH THE CITY” -WHAT’S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS
NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT?
Eye witness account of London May Day protest from ANDREW FLOOD of the Workers Solidarity Movement along with ROB CONNOLLY of Socialist Party Youth.
As well as a discussion asking:
SHOULD CUBA BE DEFENDED?
with Declan McKenna -Cuban Support Group and Socialist Party General Secretary Dermot Connolly
UFO’s, 7ft telepathic aliens… now that’s more like it! January 31, 2021
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.3 comments
Only a while back we were discussing how UFO sightings seem to have diminished radically in an age of smartphones and ubiquitous cameras. But not completely gone, and thanks to Joe Mooney for forwarding the link to this for the Star – a report on how a ‘shaggy haired warehouse worker’ saw “an “evil” seven-foot tall telepathic alien mantis and drawn a picture of the bizarre creature for the Daily Star”.
Not only a drawing, but also photographs of an orange glowing object he saw before the encounter with the mantis. Now that’s the way to do it.
Frustratingly the report ends like this – as he details meeting the alien mantis:
“I felt like it could read my mind and I could read its mind,. “My fear was replaced with completely alien thoughts of utter hatred and evil I felt projected from this thing. “I suddenly snapped out of this hypnotic kind of state and it made a step back as if it was gonna pounce on me.”
And then? What happened next? How did he get away from a creature with telepathy, a glowing aerospace craft and perhaps, just perhaps, an ability to leap huge distances?
Sunday and other Media Stupid Statements from this week… January 31, 2021
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Stephen Collins is preparing for the next political war…
Massive extra spending on this scale was required to deal with the war on Covid but, like all wars, it will have to be paid for in time. With luck, economic growth will reduce the proportion of debt to national income but a return to prudent spending policies when circumstances permit will also be required. Finding a way of doing that will be political challenge when the Covid war is over.
Mark Paul continues, yet again, to argue everyone is apparently living in ‘biting fear’ and make the (inexplicable and) unsupported case that indoor dining is being ‘blamed’ for the spike in Covid-19 around and after Christmas.
All of this judgment and aspersion and blame spews from a place of anxiety deep within us. It isn’t normal to have a six-foot commute to work, from the end of your bed to the desk just inside the door. It is depressing. It is upsetting for parents to keep their young children away from their little friends, replacing precious socialisation with awkward interactions snatched on tablet screens. We all miss friends and family. There is a climate of biting fear, even if a little bit of it is logical in a pandemic. This fear and anxiety manifests in us lashing out, often with questionable justification. Recently, every woe currently befalling us supposedly was all down to the decision to reopen indoor dining for a few weeks. That decision may have errant, but it was never on its own a plausible explanation for the scale of the current carnage. Now, all our fingers are pointing at tourists. But nobody can credibly argue that the UK strain could have been kept out of the country. It is unrealistic. We share this island with the UK.
Any other examples welcome…
Television sensation January 30, 2021
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Too weeks behind the zeitgeist I was when it came to Lupin, the French Netflix production which this month became extremely popular on the streaming platform. It’s very likeable and watchable – apparently coming out in a season split into two lots of five or so episodes. And here’s a good interview with Omar Sy, the lead role and Louis Leterrier the director. It is, of course, utterly escapist fare, and perfect for the second year of the pandemic in its depiction of a world that seems so recent and yet so different. I guess in tone it is a bit like Sherlock but with considerably more charm.
It’s not alien to the political as the following notes – btw not a spoiler but some may prefer not to read details of scenes:
While using the original stories as a blueprint, by putting Sy’s Assane at the centre of the story, it makes the century old tales feel entirely modern. He is a con artist with a conscience, his target is the wealthy establishment, and he’s happy to use people’s prejudices against them in his scams, while rarely resorting to violence. One particular scene really hammers this home. In a flashback, Assane poses as an undercover detective who persuades an elderly woman to hand over her most valuable items, including a rare Fabergé egg. She shamelessly admits that her husband “assisted with the extraction of diamonds in the Belgian Congo”. “The good old days,” Assane says with a wry smile. “The locals were sitting on a fortune, and they didn’t even realise it,” the woman continues. Assane is just playing the white establishment at its own game, one rigged from the very beginning.
The treatment of race and class is something Sy and Leterrier were both very conscious of, and works well.
Monster(s) movie January 30, 2021
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.7 comments
What’s that you say, that two multi-tonne monsters couldn’t actually stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier as they slug it out with one another? I’m actually really looking forward to this latest addition to the Monsterverse…
This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… Springsteen Covers January 30, 2021
Posted by irishelectionliterature in This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to..., Uncategorized.8 comments
Heard the Low version of “I’m on Fire” recently and really liked it. So a selection of other Springsteen Covers….
Irish Election Projections Site January 29, 2021
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Uncategorized.21 comments
Interesting new site giving analysis, projections on seats and so on. Lot’s to agree and disagree on in the constituency analysis but worth looking at.
Signs of Hope – A continuing series January 29, 2021
Posted by guestposter in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:
<blockquote>I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.</blockquote>
Any contributions this week?
