Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week November 24, 2013
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Irish Politics.trackback
Again Garibaldy isn’t able to do today’s post due to unforeseen circumstances and not a lot of time due to other issues to devote to it… but this caught my eye… from Reform Alliance TD (though – curiously – still member of Fine Gael), Lucinda Creighton:
“I don’t believe the Government is deliberately leaving people behind but it does appear the concerns of middle Ireland are being forgotten,” she said.
“Increasingly middle-class and working people who are not wealthy, who live prudent lives, who might once have aspired to own shares, the sort of citizens who want to pay for their own health insurance, are finding it impossible to cope,” she added.
Well then, she’s talking their language, no doubt about it… and I missed one last week from Miriam Donohoe entitled ‘Having a baby is no barrier to Lucinda’s ambitions’. That phone line between the S. Indo and her appears to be in very regular use.
Then there’s a classic Harrisism, which in the course of praising Doris Lessing (and rightly so) and her novel The Good Terrorist (which I have to admit to having a particular liking for myself) he writes:
Lessing had little time for feminism, or any other ism, following her late break with communism, whose seductive power she always acknowledged. In a 1992 essay she showed how the puny ideology of political correctness tried to fill the huge hole left by Marxism.
Whatever one’s thoughts about Lessing’s relationship with feminism which appears to have been vastly more complex than the reductionism of ‘having little time’ the last statement is even more contestable. That’s right, a relatively marginal approach sought to ‘fill the hole left by Marxism’. Hmmm…
He continues:
She also noted how communist thinking pervaded modern literary criticism, by implicitly calling for commitment to some fashionable cause. “The demand that stories must be about something is from communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.”
But Lessing’s most acute insight is that a misguided search for ideology may be part of the permanent make-up of humanity: “I am sure that millions of people, the rug of communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.”
Though I wonder if Lessing demonstrates her own prejudices and perhaps misconceptions if she thought that ‘modern literary criticism’ demanded stories be about something, or is that merely a misinterpretation on the part of Harris.
As for the ‘misguided search for ideology’, well… given the peripatetic journey he has taken… and the remarkable inability to recognise that he hasn’t moved beyond ideology… if anything quite the opposite…
Odd then, that there’s actually a not half-bad piece elsewhere in the S. Indo which positively references one R. Barthes who made some contribution to critical theory and in his own way ‘modern literary criticism’.
…maybe it’s also time for some hard-nosed reappraisal of the emotional attachment to Kennedy – and indeed the Democratic Party.
For example, many middle-income Irish voters, if they were actually living in the US, might well identify more with the Republicans. Their mantra is, after all, low taxes above all else.
Though there’s a bit of a problem…
Yet there remains a massive cultural challenge when trying to identify with the Mitt Romneys and Sarah Palins of this world.
That’s one way of putting it…
Any more instances of wit and unwisdom gratefully accepted.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
The wealthy bore the brunt of the financial meltdown, but were largely able to take the hit, says Carol Hunt
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/carol-hunt/carol-hunt-a-growing-wealth-gap-puts-burden-on-the-poor-29779457.html
quoting Sean Healy with approval.
Who are you and what have you done with the real Sindo?
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That’s what it means to live in an aspirational society? To be in a position to pay for my own health insurance? Screw that! When they said they’d pay for my health insurance in my job I was turning figurative cartwheels around the room. Given the choice between the money and the group scheme, give me the latter every time. As for owning shares, we already have bookies.
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+1
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In as much as there’s any thought behind what Lucinda Creighton says, what she’s doing here is what she often does, and what her whole Reform Alliance is based on (the bit that’s not based on some Mayo based form of personal pique with Kenny). She’s mapping an American trope on to Ireland.
There is a constituency in America who pride themselves on a form of self-reliance and whose suspicion of getting involved with the state is based perhaps on the historical fact that the way the country was settled meant it was very lightly regulated in certain states. Hence the obsession with stopping the government from taking your guns, the idea that no taxes at all might be a good idea, the desire that state’s rights trump the federal government. The legacy of the Civil War has something to do with this. So there are people who have this distaste for Big Government, even when BG is giving them something. This is encouraged by crafty forces on the right but the tradition is there nonetheless.
We don’t have the same thing here. Back in the eighties a survey showed that almost half the population were in receipt of some kind of welfare payments, the agricultural sector build itself up through payments from Europe resulting from the CAP, EU structural funds built a lot of the country’s infrastructure. And the generous social welfare payments, free stuff for pensioners, widespread access to medical cards etc. were seen as a credit to the country not as some sinister plot by Big Government to sap our willpower and lead us to socialism by proxy. The idea that there’s a big bloc out there who’d prefer to buy their own private health insurance rather than have proper care provided by the state makes some kind of sense if you’re talking about Texas but doesn’t really apply to Ireland.
The main reason I don’t think Lucinda Creighton and her acolytes are serious is that much of their policies seem to result from thinking, “If I was a right-wing American what would I do,” rather than addressing the political reality of Ireland. Even this invocation of Middle Ireland? Who’s ever heard of anyone claiming to come from Middle Ireland or anyone defining what it is? It’s just taking Middle England and changing one word.
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It’s often observed here that a problem one section of the Left has is to quote something Lenin said about the situation in the USSR in 1921 and imagine it has some application to the current situation in Ireland.
But the Right are just as bad with their insistence that Ireland has something in common with the present day US or, worse again, their nostalgia for the Thatcher takes on the Left era of 1979-1985 and fantasy that this can be recreated here.
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The U.S right wing’s notions about the U.S. govt’s role in agriculture, infrastructure and in social welfare provision should not be taken as historically accurate.
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Agreed. That’s why they went bananas, or at least affected to do so, when Obama pointed out that the self-reliant small businessman actually did depend on the state to some degree.
But their mythology does have a certain resonance. The cult of the frontiersman is something they use for that reason. But I don’t think a similar appeal has any purchase in this country which is the point I was making.
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There are other imported American tropes which are also used here by bright young things like Lucinda while being divorced from their original context. Attacks on social welfare recipients for example have a racial connotation in the US which is probably the main reason for them.
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There is no need to be nostalgic for Thatcherism; Thatcherism is being implemented by the Labour/F.G. govt.
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True. But there is a nostalgia among the kind of commentators who are pushing the claims of some new force involving Creighton and McDowell for some kind of Miners Strike battle ending in the humiliating defeat of the Public Sector and workers in general.
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The fact that this won’t happen, of course, has more to do with the fact that SIPTU aren’t the NUM than with Fine Gael not being the Tories.
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Harris believes in the ‘success of social democracy’; that the coping classes can no longer cope suggests otherwise.
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I realise that I’m preaching to the choir here, but I still need to vent:
How the fuck do people like the lovely Lucinda mange to come to a conclusion that it is more important that people who might have bought shares or VHI policies during the boom find themselves in a situation that lesser paid people were at during the boom, than the fact that those who were paid less during the boom have now sunk below the poverty line?
Why do some people “count” more than others in her mind?
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Because she assumes that those are the people who work harder, want to “get on”, and so on. And so do they.
Incidentally, such people are precisely the social group which during economic difficulties are most prone to fascism.
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Why do some people count more than others?
Perhaps because a lot of them live in Dublin south-east and they are likely to vote in the next election?
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Or because they’re Lucinda’s ‘kind of people’?
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anything about the panorama documentary? eerie silence about that the last few days.
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Tom McGurk has a piece in the SBP today which I haven’t read yet. I agree, amazing how low key the response has been.
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http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/britains-secret-terror-force-broke-law-by-firing-on-unarmed-ira-suspects-in-north-29773083.html
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there was a few previews alright.
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will have a look, in fairness to him its an issue he raised before.
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Was there anything new in the programme?
This imperial counter-insurgency tactic has been around at least since Frank Kitson used so-called ‘pseudo gangs’ against the Mau Mau freedom fighters in the 1950s and probably long predates the Kenyan uprising. General Kitson served in Ireland in the early ’70s.
And there is the infamous example of the U.S-backed Contras in Central America.
Today in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere?
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yeah for people that have been following it for years, a minority i would thing, no there is not much new in it. up to now some people have applied an understanding of kitson to situations and extrapolated information, some dismissed these results as fantasy and called for more proof. what is new is soldiers themselves describing kitsonesque scenarios and admitting they shot civilians. Up to now the official narrative was that the british squaddies where deployed in ireland to reestablish law and order. A lot of the documentary is dressed up and there are a lot of inferences in it, i suspect myself the censor pen may have been put to alot of it but we essentially have the british soldier shooting british citizens in drive by shootings in belfast in 1972. Odd that the irish media is disinterested.
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“Increasingly middle-class and working people who are not wealthy, who live prudent lives…”
If only that were true what a difference it could have made. There might have been a bit of moderation in the pursuit of property instead of the disasterous intoxication around property ownership which seems particularly central to our culture. So many Irish can never be satisfied until they own a house. But then once thats achieved it always has to be a bigger one or more valuable. Then one is’nt enough.
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There’s an element of truth there that prudence is not a virtue associated with the past ten or fifteen years and nor was it something the S. Indo was championing…
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I’ve never really understood this desire to “own” a house.
You could rent one for the rest of your life and save a bit
of money- in Europe, a lot of families never bother to
buy a house, content with renting one.
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You could, and I have as my parents did before me. The one caveat I’d have would be that you meet an inordinate amount of assholes when dealing with the private rented sector. But then again that largely derives from the fact that they tend to find something suspicious about someone who is renting rather than buying.
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Whether you save money or not depends on the level of prices, rents, and interest rates. Right now, in this country, if you can get a mortgage, you’d probably save money in the long run by buying rather than renting. It was the opposite during the boom years. And I second Eamonn’s point: lots of cowboy landlords out there. There’s also nothing more demeaning than having to walk around the place with them when you move out just to verify that you haven’t gone and soiled the carpet or whatever to get your deposit back.
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But then again that largely derives from the fact that they tend to find something suspicious about someone who is renting rather than buying.
It comes back to the media perception too and links to Creighton’s stuff at the weekend that only those who ‘aspire’ to ‘more’ than renting/state provision/insert whatever as applicable are truly worthy. It’s an absolute curse… not least because functionally I wonder if the distinction between renting and ‘owning’ a house which in reality a bank/financial institution has a greater claim on when the chips are down is quite as great as boosters for the latter claim.
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There is a touch of we are all to blame here. the vast majority just wanted a decent life, a home and a holiday once a year. A number of self employed (eg taxi drivers, self employed builders) bought a flat or their pension. You cannot lump all thses in with the gombeen class who brought the banks and a few of teh credit unions down.
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[…] There is something rotten in the state of Ireland. […]
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Well worth reading folks.
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How long before Michael McDowell says: ‘Up the RA’?
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