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What you want to say – 23rd March 2016 March 23, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

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1. Tomboktu - March 23, 2016

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Gewerkschaftler - March 23, 2016

You lucky, lucky….

I’ve always wanted to go there.

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Tomboktu - March 23, 2016

I know. Bloody hard work though, and very little freedom. The programme was: arrive, training, go to your region, observe and report, back to base, debrief, fly home.

Kazakhstan is big: Put the western tip on Dublin, and the eastern tip I’d past Moscow. I was luckyvl to get back to Astana with a little time to go to the square to see the sorting festival and buy some CDs, and to have a flight back at midday giving me 1.5 hours in the historical museum (about the only institution of any significance not named after Nazerbayev).

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2. Gewerkschaftler - March 23, 2016

Michael Hudson is an excoriating critic of austerian counter-factual junk economics and speaks with the authority of an ex-insider in the investment banking business.

His books could use a more assertive editor, I find, but this interview covers his main assertions pretty well.

His main thesis is that capitalism has moved from M-C-M partly facilitated by banking as it’s principle mode of accumulation, to rent-extraction through debt peonage, asset stripping and the enclosure of what remains of the public economic sphere.

He makes parallels with the kind of accumulation that took place in the war of creditors and debtors that led, according to him, to the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Some extracts:

On debt-deflation:

JR: What is your vision for the next few decades of the global economy?

MH: The financial overhead has grown so large that paying interest, amortization and fees shrinks the economy. So we are in for years of debt deflation. That means that people have to pay so much debt service for mortgages, credit cards, student loans, bank loans and other obligations that they have less to spend on goods and services. So markets shrink. New investment and employment fall off, and the economy falls into a downward spiral.

On the ‘free trade’ doctrine of junk economics:

Trade theorists start with a conclusion: either free trade or (in times past) protectionism. Free trade theory as expounded by Paul Samuelson and others starts by telling students to assume a parallel universe – one that doesn’t really exist. The conclusion they start with is that free trade makes everyone’s income distribution between capital and labor similar. And because the world has a common price for raw materials and dollar credit, as well as for machinery, the similar proportions turn out to mean equality. All the subsequent assumptions are designed to lead to this unrealistic conclusion.

But if you start with the real world instead of academic assumptions, you see that the world economy is polarizing. Academic trade theory can’t explain this. In fact, it denies that today’s reality can be happening at all!

A major reason why the world is polarizing is because of financial dynamics between creditor and debtor economies. But trade theory starts by assuming a world of barter. Finally, when the transition from trade theory to international finance is made, the assumption is that countries running trade deficits can “stabilize” by imposing austerity, by lowering wages, wiping out pension funds and joining the class war against labor.

Does the financial sector add to GDP?

MH: The financial sector is a rentier sector – external to the “real” economy of production and consumption, and therefore a form of overhead. As overhead, it should be a subtrahend from GDP.

JR: In the way that oil industry funded junk science on global warming denial, Wall Street funds and endows junk economics and equilibrium thinking?

MH: Falling on your face is a state of equilibrium. So is death – and each moment of dying. Equilibrium is simply a cross section in time. Water levels 20 or 30 feet higher would be another form of equilibrium. But to the oil industry, “equilibrium” means their earnings continuing to grow at the present rate, year after year. This involves selling more and more oil, even if this raises sea levels and floods continents. That is simply ignored as not relevant to earnings. By the time that flooding occurs, today’s executives will have taken their bonuses and capital gains and retired.

That kind of short-termism is the essence of junk economics. It is tunnel-visioned.

What also makes economics junky is assuming that any “disturbance” sets in motion countervailing forces that return the economy to its “original” state – as if this were stable, not moving down the road to debt peonage and similar economic polarization.

The reality is what systems analysts call positive feedback: When an economy gets out of balance, especially as a result of financial predators, the feedback and self-reinforcing tendencies push it further and further out of balance.

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makedoanmend - March 23, 2016

Synchronicity?

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CL - March 23, 2016

“The most fictitious assumption is that Wall Street and the FIRE sector add to output, rather than extracting revenue from the rest of the economy….

The main financial innovation by Apple has been to set up a branch office in Ireland and pretend that the money it makes in the Untied States and elsewhere is made in Ireland”…

If you read Adam Smith and subsequent classical economists, you see that their main concern was to distinguish between productive and unproductive economic activity….

The IMF acts as the collection agent for global bondholders…

The left and former Social Democratic or Labour parties have dome to focus on political and cultural issues, not the economic policy that led to their original creation. What is lacking is a focus on rent theory and financial analysis. Part of the explanation probably is covert U.S. funding and sponsorship of Blair-type neoliberals….

So the political choice today is much like the 1930s, when the global economy also broke down. The choice is between nationalism and populism on the right, or socialism reviving what used to be left-wing politics….
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/junk-economics-and-the-parasites-of-global-finance

(Same interview,-I think- with MH)

The so-called Fourth Volume of Capital, ‘Theories of Surplus Value’, written before Vol 1, casts considerable light on these issues.

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3. makedoanmend - March 23, 2016

Sans comment

Michael Hudson on Debt Deflation, the Rentier Economy, and Coming Financial Cold War

snippets…

“For starters, when I studied economics in the 1960s there was still an emphasis on the history of economic thought, and also on economic history. That’s gone now.

One can easily see why. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and other classical economists (‘Marx’) sought to free their societies from the legacy of feudalism: landlordism and predatory finance, as well as from the monopolies that bondholders had demanded that governments create as a means of paying their war debts.”

&

“Thorstein Veblen pointed out that vested interests are the main endowers and backers of the higher learning in America. Hardly by surprise, they promote a bankers’-eye view of the world. Imperialists promote a similar self-serving worldview.

Economic theory, like history, is written by the winners. In today’s world that means the financial sector. They depict banks as playing a productive role, as if loans are made to help borrowers earn the money to pay interest and still keep something for themselves. The pretense is that banks finance industrial capital formation, not asset stripping.”

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Gewerkschaftler - March 23, 2016

Snap and Synchronicity, all at the same time. 🙂

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FergusD - March 23, 2016

I must point out my post elsewhere here (And still it continues….) yesterday pointing to the same interview on Naked Capitalism (A great site) which higlighted Greece and Ireland as new model economies for the debtor nations.

What I don’t understand is why “productive” capitalism isn’t pissed off with rentier capitalism. Are they so emeshed there is no possibility of division?

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gendjinn - March 23, 2016

The individuals are invested in both. Any new member of the club is welcomed with open arms and rapidly goes native as they diversify their wealth.

Rare is the individual that resists.

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Gewerkschaftler - March 23, 2016

Sorry for double linking Fergus – I missed your comment.

That’s a good question about conflict between sections of the capitalist class.

I don’t number many (actually any) of the seriously rich among my friends and acquaintances, but I assume they don’t care how they, or more probably their fund managers, hang onto their money and ideally accumulate more. The time horizon of capital has narrowed as Hudson points out.

There is resistance among small to medium manufacturers who aren’t heavily financialised. But despite much lip-service even in Germany it isn’t they who call the tunes in terms of policy. Such is the ideological capture by finance capital of government that the demands of, say, Deutsche Bank, outweigh those of the Mittelstand (productive SMEs) by an order of magnitude. So when DB needs a few tens of billions to avoid going under again it’s partly funded by the owners and wage-dependant in those productive firms.

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4. makedoanmend - March 23, 2016
5. irishelectionliterature - March 23, 2016

Mass cards, GAA talk, mention of child’s confirmation and ashes spark fear in Orange Order civil service workers, report claims…
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/mass-cards-gaa-talk-mention-of-childs-confirmation-and-ashes-spark-fear-in-orange-order-civil-service-workers-report-claims-34565484.html

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Logan - March 23, 2016

Hmm, seeing as the Church of Ireland has Confirmations too, there must be plenty of Catholics working in offices up North who have to endure a Protestant talking about a Confirmation in the family the odd time…just hope they are not too traumatised…

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benmadigan - March 23, 2016

Just the OO wanting to silence catholic chit-chat at work as they cannot bear the sound of their power-base in the NI Civil Service crumbling away to nothing.

PS remember the OO has far fewer numbers among ordinary dacent protestants than they had in the past

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6. Michael Carley - March 23, 2016

Can I get a `hmmmm’?

Today, 1916 is often a vague banner to be waved amid side-eyed talk of betrayed ideals and “was it for this?” So it’s about time we confronted a few awkward realities about 1916 and its aftermath.

Firstly, the country we are living in is pretty much the state the men of 1916 envisaged. We know this because many of them ended up in the Dail, running the show. Throwing the king out and then twisting in one smooth pivot and falling down to kiss the Archbishop’s foot? That was the men of 1916, that was.

Not all of them, but enough to matter. WT Cosgrave, Éamon de Valera, Seán Lemass; from 1921 to 1966, with the exception of John A Costello, this country was led by 1916 veterans.

As for the women of 1916, here’s the really awkward bit. It’s arguable they’d have gotten more rights if we’d stayed in the UK, and yes, I appreciate how mortifying it is to admit that. See Constance Markievicz? The fabled first female cabinet minister? Her successor came in 1979.

The British were appointing female ministers in every decade from the 1920s, and that was to real ministerial jobs. As soon as we had actual power, the men of 1916 banned Irish women from the cabinet table for 60 years. British women had access to the contraceptive pill from 1961, brought in by that paragon of progress, Enoch Powell, then the health minister.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/irishnews/opinion/article4718501.ece

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FergusD - March 23, 2016

Who is to say those progressive changes would have aplied to Ireland. The CAtholic hierarchy would have resisted most of them surely and the UK government would probably have bowed to Irish exceptionalism, to keep the hierarchy on-board. At teh end of the day it would still have required a strong labour/socialist movement in Ireland to make progressive chnage, in or out of the union.

Bit like the EU really.

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Dr. X - March 23, 2016

I’d go further than that. I’d say that there’s no good reason to think those progressive changes in UK politics would have happened if Ireland (or most of it) had not achieved independence. From the coming of mass politics, the Irish question had been a major destabilising factor in British politics, and there’s no good reason for thinking that that would have stopped if Ireland had remained part of the union.

And a general situation of instability strengthens the hand of the reactionaries – not the progressives.

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EWI - March 23, 2016

Seeing as the men who chiefly planned the Rising were all shot, and most of the leadership during the War of Independence died too, then no, London Times, we can’t tell. We could maybe glean something from the fact that the surviving women recoiled first from Clan na Gael, and later from de Valera’s Fianna Fáil.

As to what-ifs, we only need to look to the North to see how the welfare state and other social reforms might have been blocked for ‘special’ Ireland. The Irish Party were certainly hostile to giving women the vote.

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Starkadder - March 23, 2016

“As to what-ifs, we only need to look to the North to see how the welfare state and other social reforms might have been blocked for ‘special’ Ireland. The Irish Party were certainly hostile to giving women the vote.”

Interesting old thread here about how Commonwealth membership was no barrier to Maurice Duplessis setting up a nasty right-wing Catholic regime, and suggesting the same could have happened here
if 1916 hadn’t occured:

Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

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7. oconnorlysaght - March 23, 2016

To paraphrase an old French (Third) Republican adage: ‘How beautiful was the Republic under the union.’

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oconnorlysaght - March 23, 2016

Joking apart, The article seems to be a typical piece of liberal idealist wishful thinking. its passage on women ministers is especially misleading. There were British women cabinet ministers, for one year in the twenties, one year in the thirties, two years in the forties and three in the fifties. Only after harold Wilson took power was a woman a regular at the table, and, even then, John Major’s first cabinet (1990-2) was exclusively male.
Above all, as FergusD’s contribution pinpoints, there is no suggestion that an alternative and freer society was a potential factor in the rising, a factor given its quietus by the Labour leaders’ desertion of the national struggle after the Rising.

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8. CL - March 23, 2016

“Jacobin is also tight with Sinn Fein, which has shed its past as the electoral arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and become the leading left-wing party in Ireland — both the North and the Republic.”
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11265092/jacobin-bhaskar-sunkara

Any reports from the Jacobin launch at Liberty Hall last Saturday?

Analytical marxism meets populist nationalism, and the result is….

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Alibaba - March 23, 2016

The Irish Times had an article on the Jacobin magazine and its take on the legacy of 1916. The publisher, Bhaskara Sunkara, says:

“There’s something to be said about having a real rigorous socialist analysis of the Rising that is, at the same time, not a totally fawning thing . . . We don’t just want to publish propaganda.” I couldn’t agree more.

“People like Connolly, for all their faults, were truly democrats committed to a vision of mass politics. The Rising was meant to spark a deeply democratic republic. They had to use certain tactics, and people either denounce or fetishise those tactics, but I think the mass democratic-socialist politics that inspired them should be remembered too.”

I beg to disagree about James Connolly; but that reflects the way in which there are so many varied interpretations of his politics.

The columnist says:
“The pieces in the 1916 issue are celebratory in places but not uncritical. They include articles on Connolly’s affinity for German imperialism; how he was influenced by the Paris Commune; the role of women in the Rising; the reactionary forces at work in 20th-century Ireland; the historic ineffectiveness of the Labour Party; and two pieces about contemporary Sinn Féin.”

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/from-james-connolly-to-bernie-sanders-1.2578792

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Alibaba - March 23, 2016

More from Jacobin on Sinn Féin, as well as James Connolly

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/sinn-fein-gerry-adams-irish-republican-army/

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EWI - March 23, 2016

I could write a report, if WbS is interested in publishing it.

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WorldbyStorm - March 23, 2016

That’d be great EWI. Much appreciated.

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9. EWI - March 23, 2016

I have a question: Jim Larkin, as quoted in William O’Brien’s BMH statement, supposedly claimed in July 1916 (in The Masson) that:

‘Out of the fourteen men who were shot to death, five were members of the Irish Socialist and Labour movement’

I count four – Connolly, Mallin, Ceannt and maybe Pearse (who had the reputation of being sympathetic to labour). Maybe Clarke as the fifth, likewise to Pearse?

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Logan - March 23, 2016

Dublin City council just bestowed the Freedom of the City on Michael Mallin’s son, who must be the last of the children of the 1916 leaders still alive: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/freedom-of-dublin-for-executed-leaders-son-34560621.html

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Joe - March 23, 2016

Just read the first chapter of a biog of O’Hanrahan by Conor Kostick. He was a corkcutter by trade and a founder of the Carlow Workingman’s Club (resigned from it when they allowed a British soldier to join). Don’t know if that qualifies him as a ‘member of the Irish Socialist and Labour movement’.

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Brian Hanley - March 23, 2016

Thomas MacDonagh was a founding member of the ASTI.

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oconnorlysaght - March 24, 2016

Sean Heuston was a member of the ITGWU.

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10. Brian Hanley - March 23, 2016

The latest issue of the ‘Revolution Papers’ looks at the impact of the Russian Revolution in Ireland and includes a nice facsimile of Irish Opinion (later the Voice of Labour).
The new issue of SIPTU’s Liberty is also a 1916 special and worth getting your hands on.

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Joe - March 24, 2016

Ah flippin heck. Cabra and Phibsboro in Easter Week 1916, a talk by Brian Hanley in Cabra Library tonight is fully booked out. They’ve put me on the waiting list. Wonder if I said I’m an online warrior ‘friend’ of the lecturer, would that do any good?

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Brian Hanley - March 25, 2016

I hope it was worth the effort Joe! Sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you after.

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Joe - March 26, 2016

Well worth it Brian.

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Eric - March 25, 2016

He ruffled a few feathers among the artistic community at the Jacobin launch anyway. Seems like an angry fella.

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Brian Hanley - March 26, 2016

You don’t know the half of it pal

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1798Mike - March 26, 2016

Really enjoyed your Central library series of talks. Great for all us senior citizens that you were so willing to answer questions and discuss issues.

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11. Tomboktu - March 24, 2016

When is the outgoing Seanad dissolved? I know the election to it are held within 90 days after the Dáil is dissolved, but does the Sranad cease to exist before then or is it with the election that it ceases to exist?

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12. sonofstan - March 25, 2016

I guess, going on recent conversations, there will be people here mystified by comparisons between the late Johan Cruyff and the Beatles, Bowie and (thanks Ken Early) Karl Marx. But he was that important (ok, maybe not Marx)

Despite the wholesale takeover of football by the most repellent forms of capital, the game itself is immeasurably better than it was 50 years and, while it’s not all down to Cruyff, his influence in Holland and Catalonia pretty much made the modern game. Unlike rugby and tennis where physical power and athleticism have made them less than engaging as spectacles, and ever more like the US model, football remains a sport where the best player in the world is a 5’7″ light weight and where art can still beat brute force more often than not. And, as Leicester march towards the title, ahead of the plutocratic playthings at Chelsea and Citeh, one of Cruyff’s Bon mots resonates; ‘I never saw a bag of money score a goal’

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Ed - March 25, 2016

+1. I’m guessing you’ve read that David Winner book, Brilliant Orange? Fantastic stuff. And makes the kind of football Holland have played in the last couple of tournaments all the more infuriating …

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sonofstan - March 25, 2016

Apparently Cruyff himself started supporting Spain instead, so disgusted was he at his own country’s betrayal. I haven’t read the Winner book. On the list for years, need to pick it up…

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Liberius - March 25, 2016

That book sounds good, on the list for sure.

As a Barca fan I’ve benefited disproportionately from the effects Cruyff had on the game, so I’m deeply grateful for that contribution. That emphasis on skills and tactics lifts it above what might just be a borefest of bruisers with lots of machismo and little else. Maybe Oranje will reflect now on what they could be.

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ejh - March 26, 2016

Winner himself though is also infuriating, being a particularly aggressive Decent Left will-you-condemn type.

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Joe - March 26, 2016

Yep. Ajax 1971-73 and Nederlands 1974. Johann Cruyff RIP.

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13. dublinstreams - March 25, 2016

so the answer to who’s leaving the Irish Times politics dept is Stephen Collins, soon to retire according to the thephoenix (although he doesn’t seem that old)

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EWI - March 25, 2016

Patsy McGarry has been making a strong challenge so far this year for Collins’ crown as silliest Irish Time journo: I admire his work ethic.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/easter-disappears-from-nestle-and-cadbury-egg-packages-1.2586118

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14. sonofstan - March 26, 2016

Counterpunch asking ‘Who Were Connolly and Pearce”
Well, indeed…
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/25/easter-1916-who-were-connolly-and-pearce/

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Michael Carley - March 26, 2016

I gave up at “Irish Republican Brotherhood Volunteers”.

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15. Sloe_Jim - March 26, 2016

On my way to a Rising commemoration in Orange County CA tomorrow purely out of curiosity – will be interesting to see how the Ir-Am right interpret things. Anyone have any experience with them in the US or Irish incarnations?

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16. Sloe_Jim - March 26, 2016

Meant to specify – an Ancient Order commemoration. Not just behind the Orange Curtain.

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17. Michael Carley - March 26, 2016

BBC Radio 4 from Dublin better than I might have feared.

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sonofstan - March 26, 2016

+1
Poised for the off switch throughout, but didn’t need it

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Michael Carley - March 26, 2016

On the whole a reasonable selection of people interviewed, though I couldn’t help thinking that Nick Robinson wasn’t quite up to the job discussing the rising without continually referring back to the place of violence in Irish politics. He couldn’t really deal with Michael D. at all: I had the impression the president was going easy on him, though he didn’t compromise on the question of Ireland being right to win its independence.

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18. Joe - March 26, 2016

Two articles in today’s online IT. One with headline that Minister Humphreys says that commemorations will be ‘inclusive’. The other a piece with quotes from three heads from RSF, 32CSM and Éirígí.

Put me thinking about the Prods in the north (when am I not thinking of them?). The only comment I’ve seen from unionists on telly on this whole commemoration thing was from Arlene Foster a few weeks back. I think she was with members of our government at something or other and I think Enda had invited her to attend or participate in some commemorative event. Her response to the RTÉ questioner was along the lines of: “Well I don’t think that the Easter Rising should be commemorated at all.” To her and to unionists it was an attack on their state, on their country. Why should they commemorate much less celebrate it?

It brings me back to a line I’ve often used when debating with nationalists/republicans on the north down the years. “What about the Prods?” is the line.

Seems to me they’ve been pretty much completely ignored in all the hoo ha down here. It’s very much a commemoration of 1916 and a celebration of this state, this 26 county state. I am, as they say, ok with that. And I know a lot of nationalists/republicans would say they are not.

But I kind of get a consensus emerging which accepts the status quo – the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, as set out in the Good Friday Agreement and subsequent agreements and the institutions that followed. It seems to be working quite well. We are talking, not fighting. We are muddling along.

So four years after 1966, the north was ablaze.
Four years after 2016, the north will continue to muddle along, please god or marx or whoever you are having yourself.

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EWI - March 26, 2016

It seems to be working quite well. We are talking, not fighting. We are muddling along.

It generally muddles along until it goes up in flames. Who can tell what four years might bring? The U.K. might be out of the E.U., and Scotland might be out of the U.K., for all we know.

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Joe - March 26, 2016

It doesn’t have to ever go up in flames again though. We are not prisoners of history. Work the institutions, support the Peace Process. The price of peace is eternal vigilance. Workers unite!

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19. CL - March 26, 2016

“Donald, you’re a sniveling coward,” Cruz said. ”
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/24/as-tensions-escalate-cruz-calls-trump-a-sniveling-coward.html

“Let me be clear: Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him.”-Cruz.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a43332/ted-cruz-donald-trump-rat-copulate/

Cruz has pledged to vote for the Republican nominee,-even if its Trump. And so it goes….

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20. roddy - March 26, 2016

Joe,there will be tens of thousands commemorating the rising up here and we won’n need the permission of Arlene,the Indo,RTE or the staters to do so.

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Joe - March 26, 2016

Roddy, I wouldn’t doubt yis. I hope you enjoy the commemorations. I’ve been totally engaged and positive about it down here myself. All the old cynicism washed away on the tide. I gave three bilingual talks on the Fingal Campaign and the Battle of Ashbourne in local libraries. I’m mcing a commemorative night in my GAA club in April and on May weekend I’ll be leading a walk around Phibsboro focussing on Phibsboro in Easter Week 1916.
So you and me, we’re from the same tribe so to speak and the same memories lift our hearts – to a point anyway!
So again I wish you and the tens of thousands of others in the six counties who are commemorating the Rising only the best. But I also wish the other tens of thousands who at best are ignoring it all and at worst are cursing it, I wish them the best as well. They are entitled to their nationality and history and loyalties as much as the rest of us are

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Brian Hanley - March 26, 2016

Joe, I have some stuff on Phibsborough if you want it- WBS has my email.

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Joe - March 27, 2016

Very generous of you Brian. Will be in touch.

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EWI - March 30, 2016

That reminds me – on the subject of Phibsborough and 1916, I’ve stuff which I’ve promised yourself as well.

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21. botheredbarney - March 26, 2016

So who in ‘the six counties’ and who in ‘the republic’ is going to publicly commemorate the centenary of The Battle of the Somme over the coming summer then? Will there be agonising discussions about the morality of that battle and the war of which it was a part? Will Jesuit theologians be writing for the Irish Times and US academic magazines?

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22. Joe - March 26, 2016

Here they are in a pub in Kerry commemorating Easter Week and the Somme. Was it for this Edward Fitzgerald died? Yes it was!
Full video is on today’s Indo website.

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botheredbarney - March 26, 2016

And not a Jesuit theologian in sight!

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23. CL - March 26, 2016

“When we decide to address the issue of violence, let us speak of the violence of empire, the violence of state, the violence of insurrection,”
-President Higgins.

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24. Aonrud ⚘ - March 27, 2016

Don’t worry if you’re after losing an hour last night. It wasn’t the drink this time. They took one off all of us to mark the centenary of 1916. That’s five minutes for Connolly and the Citizens Army, five for the Volunteers and five for the IRB, five for John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party for the fright, five for Irish Water, five for all the popes in Rome, five for the glint in the eye of a priest brandishing a hurl in a classroom, five for Constance Markievicz and Cumann na mBan, five for the suffragettes (and the fright they gave John Redmond as well), five for a dark-haired, shawl-shouldered cailín coming out of the mist on a bog, five for those who fought in the Great War, and five for proportional representation and the democratic parliamentary process (that’s four for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, and sure the rest of you are Others). None left for yourselves now.

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Joe - March 30, 2016

🙂

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25. Tomboktu - March 27, 2016
26. yourcousin - March 28, 2016

Jim Harrison has died.

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yourcousin - March 28, 2016

Should add this as well.

http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/interviews/a29511/jim-harrison-interview-0814/

As for the love of dogs, not Harrison but one of the best ways to articulate it that I have ever seen.

http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/mans-best-friend/2012/03/words-wisdom-unlikely-place

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27. Starkadder - March 28, 2016

All this talk of 1916 has reminded me: this July will be the 80th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War. Wonder will there
be any commerations of the likes of Bob Doyle and Charles Donnelly
here?

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EWI - March 28, 2016

Do you really want to let Inda and his advisors loose for ‘respectful, inclusive’ commemorations where fascism will be treated as just a legitimate point of view?

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Starkadder - March 28, 2016

“Do you really want to let Inda and his advisors loose for ‘respectful, inclusive’ commemorations where fascism will be treated as just a legitimate point of view?”

Oh God, yes, I can imagine what the Spanish versions of
Ruth Dudley Edwards and Kevin Myers would say.

“Is it wise to remember the victims of Guernica and Badajoz?
Do you want ETA to start bombing people again? “

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CL - March 28, 2016

Delmer Berg, the last known American survivor who fought fascists in 1930s Spain, has died in northern California. He was 100 years old.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/02/delmer-berg-dies-last-living-american-fought-fascists-franco-spain

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CL - March 28, 2016

Enda Kenny praising Michael O’Riordan?

Here’s Senator John McCain’s tribute to Comrade Berg.

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28. Jolly Red Giant - March 29, 2016

Cork City Council postponed the co-option of Fiona Ryan to replace Mick Barry tonight by 14-13 on the grounds that an ‘interested party’ objected.

This is a disgraceful attempt by the Labour Party who have been roundly hammered in Cork in both the locals and general election to sneak back onto the council by using a stunt to take the AAA seat on the council with the help of FF and FG.

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WorldbyStorm - March 29, 2016

Wow, sounds underhand JRG. What’s the process they’d use to take the seat?

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EWI - March 30, 2016

I’d say the technical term here is ‘brass neck’.

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Jolly Red Giant - March 30, 2016

Because Mick Barry was elected as an AAA candidate and Fiona Ryan stood as an AAA /PBP candidate in the general election.

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WorldbyStorm - March 30, 2016

Seems unreasonable, let’s hope it goes nowhere.

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