Was Freud a Fraud?

The novelty of Freud's thought has waned by now but the 'unconscious' was a concept which had no scientific legitimacy prior to his work whereas nowadays it is an accepted norm and regarded as a fully integrated aspect of our psyche. All schools of modern psychotherapy regardless of theoretical persuasion are indebted wholly or in part to the work of Freud as are the many analysands (clients/patients) who have benefitted from it's insights. Of course there are many lousy therapists and cowboy interpretors but his basic postulate that unconscious drives significantly influence conscious decision-making won widespread acceptance and completely changed the intellectual landscape of the 20th century - the debatable elements such as Oedipal entanglement, the reductiveness of his treatment of childhood sexuality and so on have all been much revised but the 'unconscious' is the rock upon which all his work stands.

The dream is an exemplary product of this unconscious; it produces stories, situations and dramatic contexts in which we as 'actors' participate yet cannot consciously alter - we cannot step into our dreams and 'direct' them, they remain elusive to the active rational and 'floating' awareness of our conscious ego. That they belong to a wholly different domain of subjective experience is sufficiently indicated by the fact that once we awake we seldom remember even a fraction of all the adventures into which our dreams had thrusted us. I am most often conscious of the fact that I've woken up at the tail-end of a long story in which I have been fully engaged mentally and emotionally but can usually only remember the final segments. With effort I can trace my steps backwards and on occasion recall some of the elements of the dream - I have never remembered a dream in it's entirety - but those I've managed to reconstruct partially all indicate that something other than my conscious self is producing sense and meaning in my own skull; to which "I" am often a mere bystander.

Thus, there is an 'intelligent' narrative generating agency within our minds of which we have no conscious control and Freud proceeded merely from the assumption that this was important enough to warrant investigation.

The unconscious as a concept was around a long time; Freud himself gives examples of who used it and where and in what context and then goes on to show what differentiates "his" unconscious from theirs. There's no mystery here nor is there any especial claim towards originality. What was original is that he developed techniques to investigate it. What is controversial is not the technique itself ie 'free association" (by and large) but the interpretations he has given towards the accumulated body of knowledge built up through his analytical sessions. Thus, we have Lacan fifty years later talking about the "Freudian unconscious and ours" in a move to differentiate classical Freudianism from the psychoanalysis he himself was developing.

The best antidote to scepticism would be to read Freud himself starting with the Breur correspondence and the early case studies particularly that of Anna O. Here you will get a feel for a new science in the making; the "unconscious" is the basic discovery but the notion of there being a 'libidinal' economy and the existence of 'cathectically charged' repressed elements which influence conscious thought are lesser mentioned contributions of importance. The 'Interpretation of Dreams' is a key text which, while lengthy, the gist of which can be summarised in the analysis of two dreams 'The botanical monograph' and 'The dream of Irma's injection'. Providing associations to recalled dream material is usually a failsafe way to unravel the protective skein of those nodal points/areas of 'over-determination' in the unconscious - though I don't agree with Freud that the associations which occur in analysis point necessarily to the paths taken during dream construction. He answers this crucial objection only once himself - and in a pretty flimsy footnote.

Though overall a remarkably honest, and as a consequence, clear and careful expositor of his ideas [in comparison to the obfuscations that would blight post-Freudianism] he nevertheless was prone to the occasional sleight of hand. This question of dream analysis unveiling dream construction was an important evasion however as resting upon it lay the claim to having uncovered the means of interpreting the dream extant; it was enough to show that the dream provided a portal to unconscious material, and in fact, that is what sufficed alone for the purpose of demonstrating the psychoanalytic discovery but in pushing this connection he seems to have had an eye on the ultimate marketability of his ideas.

He is similarly evasive too when this question crops up again under a different guise in the 'Psychopathology of Everyday Life' where he counters Rudolf Schneider’s objection that ‘the emergence of determining associations to numbers that occur to the mind spontaneously does not in any way prove that these numbers originated from the thoughts discovered in the analysis of them’ with the response that a critical examination of this question (and thus the psychoanalytic technique of free association) ‘lay outside the scope of this book’. As far as I’m aware he never satisfactorily addressed this problem and if I was commissioned to expose an element of charlatanry in Freud’s work I would begin with these two evasions. If Freud was incorrect in assuming (or more likely simply didn't know) that there was a one to one mapping, or parallelism, between latent thoughts and later associations this wouldn't make any difference to the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis but it would call into question some of the discipline's claims regarding psychic determinism.

I find much of Freud off-putting particularly some of his notions on human sexuality and the stages of libidinal attachment; anal sadistic, oral phase etc. and his rigid adherence to a narrow interpretation of "castration". The oedipal relationship has undergone a number of withering critiques and the eternal 'daddy-mommy-me' triangle has been put to rest by some psychoanalytic schools, notably the Lacanians. But what is the actual material available in which to construct a 'science' if not the testament of the patient's speech and how they choose to represent either their dreams, their past or their own interpretations of themselves? The material of psychoanalysis at the end of the day is composed of nothing that can be pinned down and analysed with a microscope; it's subject matter is not concrete and tangible like physics or the other hard sciences and shouldn't even be classified in the same bracket but this isn't to say that it doesn't yield discoveries which offer at times striking insights into the nature of the psyche.

There's also that other consideration that Freud's terminology itself has become hopelessly dated - in part at least because of how his own influence has altered our conceptions of the mind and human nature. We have responded to Freud in such a profound and dramatic fashion that what was once regarded as highly speculative and questionable science is now accepted as the default position of the human psyche - nowadays we simply accomodate without too much fuss behaviour and character traits that would have been previously regarded as neurotic and therefore 'pathological'; the "social structure" has loosened up considerably to admit much more diversity, a change hastened to no small extent by the identity politics of the 60's (liberation narratives etc.) itself underwritten by the academic percolation of Freudian insights

Critics of Freud get too distracted by a perceived need to apply the same standards of "scientific" verifiability towards the findings of psychoanalysis as are regularly demanded in the "hard" physical sciences. Part of the fault here lies in Freud's own manner of exposition which, at the time, was desperately attempting to secure legitimacy for a fledgling discipline which entailed the presentation to the world of an utterly unheard of methodology for curing nervous disorders.

In order to bolster his case for identifying the source of neurotic complaints which lay in hidden psychical mechanisms of causality (in the early case studies with Breur) Freud richly paraded his medical expertise and used such knowledge to systematically exclude the viability of alternative traditional explanations which were then hopelessly rooted in a fatalistic neurology.

There was for a long time a tacit understanding amongst the neurologist fraternity that cases of pathological neuroses were written irretrievably in the blood, tissues and pathways of the nervous system and as such weren't amenable to psychological intervention.

Freud upended this presumption but the question remains did he do so legitimately?

The method stumbled upon; "the talking cure", (or "abreactive catharsis") is, by a happy coincidence, almost identical to that age old remedy of relieving stress known the world over - simply listening intently and sympathetically to someone who is sounding off about their problems.

To turn this commonplace artificial extension of empathy - found among barkeeps, whores, priests and con artists since time immemorial - the best of whom have all developed the necessary antennae to perceive their clients 'inner wishes'; to turn this age old talent into a "science" and make the world believe they are listening to something new takes a special kind of genius to be sure.

Did he satisfactorily demonstrate the dream to be the pathway to this previously inexpressible domain, the unconscious?

I think it offers an approach but not the direct route or 'royal road' as he claims it does (it is highly debatable that latent dream thoughts are (re)discovered in the patient's conscious associations) - and so, in this sense, at least, I think he is being somewhat disingenuous. But overall the methodology when applied over time is wont to reveal deeply inlaid formative structures which condition conscious thinking and which in the absence of analysis our patient would be almost certainly blithely unaware of; and so the sleight of hand is both forgivable and understandable.

The biological need for food (giving rise to "the kill", "aggression"; or thanos) and sex (eros) are the irreducible constants of human nature and their recurrence in any psychoanalytical metapsychology shouldn't come as a surprise. Sooner or later, anyone who has let their normal wakeaday ego behind and melted into the surrounds of an analytic session will find themselves spouting themes centring on one or either of these pivots - that our sexual impulses for instance can be usefully discussed with reference to early childhood experiences is not something we find all that incredible today but it did constitute a revolution in Freud's day and on the whole I think this is something to be grateful for.

The Great Novelists - a few random scribbles

Once you've got the Joycean bug it's very difficult for any other writer to hold your attention. I remember saying to my professor (about fifteen years ago in one of our last seminars in Eng. Lit) that after reading Ulysses it was almost pointless to read any other novel. "I hear that every year" she says. Well, I was serious - I guess I've read maybe half a dozen other works of fiction since then but Ulysses is the book which keeps reeling me back in.   I'm really thinking Joyce's lack of popularity maybe down to one of a few things; First, there's the colloquialisms in Ulysses which make it such a treasure trove for native Dubliners but which can only be largely lost on a non-Irish audience. This gets even worse in ;The Wake' were there is so often a play on the sounds of words as they heard in the Dublin slang thus making it the most utterly untranslatable work there is. Second, the absence of any distinct plot; there are no evident lines of causation which link up the action from one place or time to another. It's there alright tangentially but you have to go searching for it. Thirdly, the human body in all it's noisome glory is stretched out on a bawdy canvas while a narrative's herd of pigs, goats and other swinery is allowed to grunt, sweat and copulate all over it. Ordinarily, this type of endeavour is not classed as 'literary' in that vague sense I suppose which aspires to capture life's "truths" in an elegant or otherwise philosophically memorable manner. No heroes and no grand themes then, on the surface at least. From the established greats and at a distant joint second I'd go George Eliot, mainly for her masterpiece Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy for his unredeeming misery - calamity lay behind every corner but not until he made you grow to love the character first (what a sadist), Dickens for his colourful characters and social commentary (Great Expectations, Hard Times), Dostoevsky for the unforgettable Raskolnikov and Conrad for getting under the skin of the colonialist worldview (Lord Jim over Heart of Darkness in this respect). Jane Austen (phwah); we were forced to read about three of her tomes - all of which were identical fluff as far as I could make out and were well teed up for a good Marxist welly; which is precisely what she deserved and got.

She's such a brutally conservative force - I mean she's writing during the Napoleonic Wars, the slavery debates, the upheavals of the industrial revolution and amidst all that urban squalor that would wind up being castigated by Dickens. I don't find any of her psychologising particularly enlightening in view of the consistent omission of all these events from her character's psyche. Drawing a well rounded portrait of a character can hardly omit significant contemporary events that must have been the stock of every conservation - rarefied and hermetic sums it up. I have yet to read Silas Marner or Adam Bede but Eliot's eye remorselessly strips bare so many pretensions I yet believe she made the likes of Joyce possible. Readers had to be first attuned to the noises that were out there in the wilderness - the utter wrenching of their world that was afoot. In elementary equivalent I devoured every work of fiction available - even the worst novel, play or poem was a thousand times greater than the utter tedium that was maths, physics, geography or whatever. I remember we had Lord of the Flies, I am David, Huckleberry Finn, Hard Times - really can't complain there - no Little Women either thank ye gods; that sounds truly dreadful. Tolkein's very popular but I wonder how he'd fare were it not for the films - they seemed to spark a massive resurgence. Favourite authors is something we always gabbled about in college and I can't recall anyone ever mentioning him; while saying you liked anything Russian back then of course gained you instant kudos. I went to see my first Lord of the Rings with a (very) - ex girlfriend and I have to say it was the most excruciating agony - the thing went on for three incomprehensible hours; I twisted and turned in mortal pain for the entire duration but she remained welded to the spot as though glued to some horrible but all-important religious ritual. Need I tell you the vast universe of knowledge which I soon discovered to be trapped inside her skull - it was as though all those neurons that happily dance away to the beat of everyday reality in the minds of most of us (death, taxes, bills, jobs, the economy,) were in her case, first inverted, dipped in mescaline then obliged to re-invert themselves and blossom forth in a bizarre fixture of unearthly parallelism. In essence I queried which of us was truly the happier

On Cynicism

A lot of cynics I encounter are people who find it hard to reach out, connect & participate in an affable manner; there is a 'people-skills' deficit there borne out of innumerable crushed hopes & experiences. Typically, they've been rejected in some form or another, not having had their talents recognised or developed from an early age - squashed in the crib by indifferent or incompetent parents.

Perhaps they over-estimated themselves from an early age and life has thrown up one road-block after another in their pursuit of happiness. 'Low-functioning' cynics of this stamp can be easily cajoled by flattery but react viciously at the slightest perceived slight as once you extend them a kindness they invest you in turn with an unrealistic amount of hope and expectation.

People generally recoil from this as it gets too 'clingy' and once again they are back nurturing their favourite grievances. Many become divorced from the main thrust of society whose rules they can never fully comprehend and they wind up begging in the streets, populating our jails or filling our mental institutes.

One thing all of them lack is real personal confidence and a capacity to roll with life's punches; having never experienced true love and affection they're incapable in turn of ever developing a social instinct that will advance them outside the narrow confines of their own wants and needs.

Being spurned or rejected or being continually presented with the worst in human nature in circumstances in which they feel themselves (or are actually trapped into experiencing) is an acid that rots away at their capacity to develop normally and in time they internalise and habituate those worst elements and pass them on in turn in cyclical manner.

Much of this socially bred cynicism occurs in the worst blighted areas of our countries; pockets of social exclusion divorced from the normal concerns of legislators and voters alike - it's very neglect drives a wedge in society as one class habituates itself into divorcing it's concerns from another.

Cynicism in it's essence is to impugn the worst motives in others which becomes easier to an extent when considered in tandem with that other great habit of the human mind to classify and bracket off different groups of people in accordance to ready made formulas which chime well with our lazy preconceptions (all politicians are this etc.. they're not, though many of them are) - but I don't have any time for cynicism as a default attitudinal stance or worldview, there are well-intentioned people stitching and re-stitching the social fabric every day and without whose efforts we'd quickly see what it means to descend into a real hell, and not just one of our own making.

Harbour a residual cynicism by all means, it's necessary after all to avoid being swallowed up by disillusionment (this is basic survival) but keep it in check and give it proportion; it's simply irrational and defeatist to lose sight of the good that is out there - a suggested antidote might be to trouble yourself in identifying that good, see how it works, marvel how it thrives, then maybe do something yourself to give it a dig out.

The Eternal Headache of the North

I've seen people I once respected traipse off into forests in the dead of night to keep themselves limber for a war that would never happen or carrying semtex to blow the bejaysus out of people they've never met for a cause they seldom understood. Tutored in the paths of righteous 'genuine' Irish nationalism by head-the-balls who didn't know their arse from their elbow. The 'conflict' became a sickening wastage of human life whose plug should have been pulled long before. It's no consolation to many that it has been the radical fringe of both sides which have clambered to power. No-one stirred more mischief than Paisley in his time or created more bigotry and hatred and the Provisionals have earned themselves the eternal enmity of their many victims; many of whom were simply innocent bystanders with no connection whatever to the British statelet or it's apparatus of power.

The North blew out a collective wheeze long ago and most of it's people are just sick of it; some of them I know could care less about identity as long as they don't have to turn on the news everyday and hear about another mindless act of carnage. There is a power-sharing executive in place for the North which has been meeting fitfully over the past decade and a half. The two ''radical' wings of Unionism and Republicanism (the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively) have been elected as the major representative parties and contrary to many dire prognostications at the time have managed to form a working alliance; Ian Paisley & Martin McGuinness (former First Minister and Deputy First Minister) were even christened the 'chuckle brothers' recently such was the new found bonhomie that apparently existed between them.

This strong relationship seems to have continued with Paisley's successor Peter Robinson and apart from the inevitable disagreements over policy the consensus cross-community opinion is that the violence of the past should be consigned for evermore to the history books. Former IRA man McGuinness has called recent attempted car-bombings and shootings by splinter republican paramilitaries as the work of 'conflict junkies' - which of course it is. The conditions that prevail today are light years removed from the civil rights era and the days of the B-Specials.

Attitudes have changed enormously in recent times and this runs in both directions - for many (if not most) people in the Republic (that is to say down south) the issue of a residual animosity in Anglo-Irish relations hasn't been at all pronounced since probably the Second World War and least not to the extent it was before the Republican constitution was introduced by Fianna Fail and the Economic Wars of the 30's. Having said that, during DeValera's dominance, which was insular, economically autarchic, nationalist in it's leanings and above all fundamentally Catholic in outlook there was nevertheless much fertile ground for nurturing anti-English sentiment. He wouldn't have promoted it himself in any ham-fisted fashion it's just that this would be the inevitably way a mind would wander given his known generalised interpretation of Irish history; and DeValera, though by no means universally admired was undoubtedly deified in some quarters. I think also of Brendan Behan who was involved in the 40's IRA bombing campaign of London being still feted in the popular mind to such an extent that he was invited to turn on Dublin city's Christmas lights in the 50's - a hugely popular figure whose brimstone past only added to the allure.

Another point to note of course is that England's stance towards Ireland historically looms far larger in the average Irish mind than any corresponding influence Ireland ever exerted upon her. The Irish historical narrative regardless from which quarter it is being made has to account for an encroaching English polity on the old Gaelic chiefdoms, their effective expulsion and absorption into that polity during the 16th c. Tudor plantations and the rejection by the old English (medieval planter English and gaelicised Normans) of the Reformation and this community's subsequent alignment and eventual merging with an increasingly anglicised native Gaelic culture on the binding pivot of catholicism. This sets the stage for the politics which was to emerge in the late 18th century, the rising, Act of Union, the fight for Catholic Emancipation, Repeal and eventually Home Rule and finally full independence - achieved through the barrel of a gun; punctuated of course by a famine where one quarter of the population were shed through either disease, starvation or emigration. Most Irish school children are more than familiar with this narrative by the time their fifteen and it unavoidably comes to them in the form of a gigantic and seemingly age-long struggle for freedom and independence littered with the bodies of martyrs and heroes who have died in the cause or have rotted in English jails.

I'm not sure how history is taught in England but I would guess that Ireland and the Irish question occupies a vanishly small space in the curriculum. There is simply too many grand confrontations to cover otherwise; the eternal wars with France and Spain, the Netherlands, the epic battle to retain the American colony, the growth of the Empire, WWI & II - it is a history that leaves little room to consider her little island neighbour's residual hang-ups about being colonised when after all, half the world has been swept up into her embrace. A piffling inconsequence; a Lord Lieutenancy in Ireland was a dreary placement for most ambitious British statesmen during the 18th & 19th centuries when the entire globe was the expectant vista & challenge to which they were expected to rise.

So, on the one hand Irish national identity is constructed as an immense and existential struggle to preserve our singular Gaelic culture and traditions, our native Church and our independent political existence whereas English national identity is constructed in light of it's successful outward expansion which incidentally also included the early absorption of said Irish terrritory. Who do you think ruminates more about the relationship of the two countries - the average Irishman or the average Englishman? Most English people who identify positively with the standard benign model of Empire's expansion don't worry themselves overly on the question of Anglo-Irish relations or any conceivable Irish grievances there might be so, the animosity (when there is any) isn't mutual or a two way street it almost entirely derives from a single direction, driven by a regrettably bona fide persecution complex.

I would regard, lest it be said otherwise, the historic struggle for independence fought during the war of independence to be bona fide, along with O' Connell's programme for Emancipation, the fight for Repeal and the Parnellite struggle for Home Rule. In so far as each of these movements were opposed in turn by the British government and secondary status within the Union was maintained for the generality of Irish then we may speak of an imposition which may be viewed by some, and taken quite legitimately, as persecutory. A public man in Irish political life in the 19th century aligned to the nationalist movement had to throw his lot in with one of these movements and for the majority of them it proved to be largely an elusive undertaking riddled with setbacks and disappointments until the convulsive outbreaks of 1916 which thereafter transformed their prospects utterly - 'the revolutionary moment'.

In so far as I sympathise with this general trend and struggle towards an independent Irish polity and the lives which gave themselves fully to it's completion I correspondingly view dimly the attempt of sundry British statesmen to reverse, halt or divert this process - including the aborted territorial unity half promised by the Boundary Commission. That half of me which stands in the past and sees the older struggle dissolve in the mists of time is divided from that half which saw the Northern troubles evolve. The same emotive network of bonding associative nationalist ties thrusts me into communion with Northern 'catholics' - thus the nationalist dilemna in our own time ... it's an inescapable bind. But we are all umbilically tied to our country's past. Historically speaking, the Irish perspective is too often narrowed down by the oppositionalist nature of our past entanglements with Britain; it's kind of like a bilateral freeze - in many ways it's hard to think how it could have been otherwise - whereas from the British perspective, looking back, there is a history to consider which encompasses a much fuller spectrum; from the earliest colonies in the New World, to Egypt, Africa and the Far East. A deeper multilateral heritage you might say, which, notwithstanding the controversies over the inherent rightness of exerting foreign control over distant people and places does at least impart a fuller, more global perspective.

We often forget in Ireland, such was the power of the nationalist re-imagining, which tended to downplay such things - and to which I nevertheless fully subscribe (such was it's necessity), that we partook fully in the spread of Empire (albeit as a poorly paid foot soldiers for the most part - but also via our engrafted, naturalised and finally boycotted landed gentry). Burmese, Egyptian and Afghan historians could readily recall the Irish captains and regiments who helped extend Victoria's domains; for good or ill, as we will no doubt endlessly debate. But this rigid oppositionalism isn't confined to that conflict between a nation struggling to be born and another which saw no necessity (if not urgency) in it's delivery - it extends, in the Irish perspective to an emergent national identity actively synthesising it's own self-image, calling upon, divining almost, it's ancient Gaelic roots - and often with all the fury of a religious resurrection - but also, infusing this quasi-'spiritual' excavation with that famed mirrored Other; the negativised us/them construction, a necessary bait to quicken it's soldiers blood but a strained polarity scarring the psyche - an unsightly birthmark to some, and requiring no end of timely sutures. Peace in the North, after all, is/was the endgame of this operation.

From the 1890's onwards with the cultural revival Gaelic language preservation becomes important but it is as yet largely apolitical (at least officially) until possibly 1912 or thereabouts with the rejection of the first Home Rule Bills - by the time of the first Dail though it becomes a pivotal element. It's an enormous shift when you consider O' Connell had no time for the language at all (though he spoke it naturally enough) saying it were well it simply vanished off the earth as English had now become the language of international discourse (or words to that effect).

I think what happened from O' Connell's death in 1847 to the 'Celtic Dawn' (in Ulick O' Connor's phrase) was ultimately linked to the wider phenomenon of 'racialised' thinking that so marked the late Victorian era; studies in phrenology, theories of racial purity, notions of various ethnic groups having distinct languages & homelands (as in Herder's 'perfectability of the species'). From Germany and Britain came umpteen learned tracts (Gobineau's most notoriously in the 1850's) vaunting the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, their especial fitness to rule etc. Many of these used by comparison the inferior 'Celtic' races as exemplary instances of backwardness and barbarity placing them only above the Mongoloid (which became the great 'yellow peril') and Negroid races.

So ubiquitous was this racialised discourse and so earnest were the Celtic revivalists in disproving the 'natural hierarchy of races' through vigorously promoting the 'genius of the Celtic race' that the assumed connectivity between language and ethnicity was taken almost as a given. The republican and separatist nationalism of the deist Tone, the unitarian Mitchel and the Protestant Davis were to some extent downplayed in the minds of many - (though not by Pearse, the high priest of Irish 'Gaelic and Catholic' nationalism, who nevertheless included them along with the (Catholic) land agitator Lalor in his quartet of exemplary nationalist figures) - as Irish nationalism increasingly took on the coloration and 'ethnic' vigour of the times.

Once this organic connectivity between language and race began to be questioned the revivalists lost much of their original steam and impetus. Nowadays of course we can read geneticists like Oppenheimer who tell us that 90% of the British and Irish gene pool is indigenous and dates from the immediate post-glacial period (c.8,000 BCE), that there was no Anglo-Saxon 'wipe-out' (ala Gildas) and that like the British and Irish 'Celts' before them they only contributed about 5% to the common gene pool. On the level of genes and physical 'ethnicity' there are no real marks of distinction between the peoples of 'the Isles' - the cleavages which exist are almost entirely cultural.

Declan Kiberd ("Inventing Ireland") had drawn attention to this early bipolarity using the example of Anglo-Irish literature - mainly Yeats, Shaw and Wilde - to stress the reciprocity. That England, according to this thesis, was also being self-imagined, was constructing too an identity which partook of it's Irish relations, and was sufficiently influenced by them to alter its ship of state - but this was to grant our poets and playwrights more ballast then they could reasonably command. The truth was less comforting, England held on to the relation - the art was too embroidered to impact political sentiment abroad - and Westminster despite being at times ground to a standstill seemed capable of leaving the Irish question forever in abeyance.

A poisoning of relations to be sure, but one on the whole more part of our psyche than England's for whom autonomous self-government was never the issue; so there was no question there of a massive divestment, the sundering was felt as a ripple; a barely perceptible shrinkage of the imperial domain, even a sense, in some quarters, of good riddance to a millstone, but in Ireland the breach was traumatic; party politics cleaved on Civil War divides while the North stood quiescent; a timebomb.

Revisionist historical writing was engendered almost immediately, attempting to suture the more fatalistic and polarising rifts which had emerged but it's trademark top-heavy emphasis on high-end administrative politics ignored the emotive context and litany of grievances which had brought matters to such an ungovernable impasse. Just because the work is 'academic' with footnotes, references and is peer-reviewed fawningly in all the 'best' journals doesn't mean it's 'objective' or captures the essence of the times; which were above all guided by an unstoppable open sluice gate of emotional discharge. Almost immediately after independence and because of partition the task of the Trinity College History department was to rapidly put a bung in Irish nationalism; this process of course never stopped with English historians who naturally continued to emphasise the positive gains made by Ireland within the Union and the Empire in general.

The weight of academic scholarship in Ireland today is overwhelming revisionist; that is to say it's aims are everywhere to deconstruct nationalist narratives and self-imaginings particularly from the mid-19th century onwards. Such was the blatant bias and favouritism towards models of positive growth under the Empire, the depiction of benign social conditions and the minimalisation of disturbance along with the tendency to demonise or degrade nationalist figures that a counter trend emerged within academia led by post-nationalist, post-revisionist thinkers who objected mainly to the notion that a contemporary political impasse over the North should so obscure and distort the basic reality.

What has happened is that one form of overarching and transcendent narrative has merely supplanted another; the first and original narrative (if you can call the combined outpourings and life's work of key Irish nationalist figures a unitary body of work) focused on bringing a certain political situation into being (such as a separate, autonomous Irish Republic) - but because this aim was continually frustrated and real lives were absorbed in it's consummation the language evoked is naturally emotive and yearning. This symphony built into a crescendo until it exploded in 1916, wound down only in the late 30's and re-emerged again with the outbreak of the Troubles in the 70's.

The counteracting narrative, the revisionist one, is deployed to tone down all the previous excesses and has the solitary purpose not of narrating history objectively but to dampen the nationalist ardour in the context of the unresolved issue of the island's partition. The difficulty of course is that a whole generation of Irish scholars have imbibed this second version as a neutral, value-free and objective assessment of Irish history without relating it to it's own historical context. So, it's well to remember there's more than one type of tribal myth in action here.

With respect to English historians in the immediate post-independence period the wish was naturally to preserve a respectable gloss on the first evidence of Empire's imminent decay, so much better we expect to bolster it's credentials elsewhere. A natural patriotic function on their part which they shouldn't be faulted on particularly, an honourable service to the Crown in fact, but one unfortunately which only distorts to our detriment the picture of Anglo-Irish relations

To the future, I suppose power-sharing in the North will inevitably make demands on 'both' communities. On the one hand, many Unionists may be reassessing their sense of 'Irishness' whereas some nationalists have been obliged to expand their own conceptions of what it actually constitutes. Much of Irish nationality was constructed for so long in opposition to the Crown that it seems difficult to reconcile the notion of their being conflated, dual or composite identities.

This is a simplification obviously as for a long period it was perfectly feasible for Catholic 'old Irish' families to promote themselves under the Crown's auspices without engendering the ire of their brethren (as in after the Nine Year's War) but this in more instances than not was simply a case of adapting as best one could to adverse circumstances. In a sense, people are always pragmatic when their backs are to the wall or more accommodating when circumstances leave them little option to do otherwise.

Anyway, we live in hope.

Third Rock from the Sun

Less alert nowadays to possible ethnic fissures (Norman, Norse and Gaelic surnames all abound in equal measure in my own roots) the Irish tend to cleave heavily on the inter county divide; being a Corkman, Kerryman etc. Dubs are 'jackeens', while conversely anyone outside 'the pale' is a bogtrotter (in many juvenile lexicons at least).

Also pronounced but still real are the old provincial loyalties - Míde (Co. Meath) was the country's referee and old royal seat for centuries of dynastic squabbling. Some 19th century Irish defendants thrown at the Queen's bench would still claim lineage from one of the 'five great bloods' meaning here the Gaelic clans who controlled the five provinces for centuries (O' Neills, O' Connors etc) - in a futile attempt at self-ennoblement and presumably the chance of a more lenient sentence.

The solidarity of 'the Dubs' then dissolves on your compass relation to the Liffey - Northsider, Southsider - and within the towns if you can't trace continuous inhabitation for at least five generations, well then; "your only a jaysus blow-in!".

Can't win, the eternal internal divisor divides eternally.

Though 'nothing human is foreign to me' should be the watchword the human mind has a propensity to habitually construct these differences (usually and the more successfully as crude stereotypes) as a tactic to isolate and exclude 'the other'.

It seems to be the default function of the human mind to categorise the various domains of reality into easily manageable segments; this, after all, is what Kant spent a lifetime investigating and though modern neurology via MRI and PET technologies have yielded us a much more complex picture of brain function this model of an essentially divisory patterning of cognitive behaviour remains, I think, largely intact.

As part of this task of initial cognitive grouping we then tend to differentiate strongly between the various elements or groupings thus erected in order first of all to recognise them more clearly as distinct entities in their own right and then secondarily to proceed to endow them with further characteristics which mark them out ever more strongly from a competing array of other entities.

I think it's in this second act of fleshing out the characteristics of the entities chosen for distinction that the mind procedes to binarise between one group and another - thus giving birth to simplistic oppositional couplets; for example and most obviously - civilized vs barbarian, freedom vs totalitarianism, capitalism vs communism, primitive cultures vs. industrialised, catholic 'papists' vs protestant 'heretics', god-fearing Christians vs heathens etc. etc. ad infinitum.

It is a fact that we cannot think without language; for even where we to dream up the most lucid images as metaphors for a sequence of events or to depict what we take to be a condensed rubric of a totality of relations - ultimately it is the word alone which can convey any sense of what we wish to express. But language is an unworthy and cumbrous vehicle in itself for conveying truths; it is very much a device for approximations, for narrowing down and shrinking the domain of the Real (that which we cannot grasp) and never in fact capturing it in it's essence. Many of the most resonant and symbolically loaded words over time have belonged to such binaries and each is stuffed with the charged loads of centuries of ideological dispute - so much so that an immense flotilla of associative signifiers have come to stick barnacle-like on each.

So, what is commonly said about a defensive reaction triggered in response to the 'other' is true, it is primal and emotive and it is physically inscribed somehow in our neural pathways through constant repetition, thus to a large extent it has become unconscious. Each of us are schooled to believe a simplistic explanatory tale of 'who we are' and 'how we came to be', what makes our pattern of life justifiable to ourselves and in many respects and by extension superior to all others around us. There is a graded hierarchy established of all peoples through time and space and an intricately woven code knitted together via these emotive binary buttons which are liable at any time to be deployed in Pavlovian fashion by opportunistic ideologues.

Likewise, I think most people are firmly aware of this and while we spend the first quarter of our lives absorbing these localised mythologies (of collective self-aggrandisement), and the second perhaps marshalling them to expertise our quiet and more reflective third quarter is happily engaged in calmly disassociating ourselves from them - thus the possibility for an occasional piece of 'transcendence'

Bottom line, we're all on this rock together I think.

The Mythology of Big Pharma

I'm quite sceptical myself about DSM classifications; there are clearly a lot of disorders being brought into being - seemingly from nowhere - and the issue here appears to be the need to create a greater fusion with pharmacological research. If there is a 'new condition' in the DSM it will have to have a corresponding drug tailored to the "client's" requirements.

There is always a way back from "psychosis". I put the term in inverted commas because (a) the experience concerned differs so widely from one individual to the next and (b) psychiatry has a very narrow definition and understanding of what that experience entails; and is likewise limited as a consequence in the methods it uses to "treat" it.

I think it was Adler who first remarked that 'we should stop classifying people as we do plants' and that treatment regimes should be based on a a more concrete specification of the individual's difficulties. The use of labels within the medical fraternity is a hot button topic for patient advocacy groups. In my country for instance Schizophrenia Ireland have renamed themselves "Shine" thus drawing attention away from the negative stereotypes that have accumulated over the years in film and the popular media.

Altering a central "signifier" can do wonders for the concepts that become associated with a particular condition and in patient advocacy it is not only a battle over (mis)representation but about how those people - who after all have, in many cases, severe 'difficulties in living' - themselves view the nature of their condition.

To be told one is a "schizophrenic" is not a pleasant experience and this "diagnosis" is often arrived at with a very questionable paucity of information; particularly within public sector psychiatry where the individual cannot financially afford lengthier consultations.

It's my experience that labelling has a very counter-productive effect. In a post-graduate course I once took in psychotherapy there was a 'field trip' arranged to visit one of the large mental hospitals in Dublin; it would supplement our textwork if we had a look at "them". After all the hours of lectures and grappling with Freud's texts it finally dawned on me that many health care professionals are utterly divorced from the fact that the people who are languishing in mental hospitals are flesh and blood individuals born into the same society as the rest of us - not representatives of "a type" who because of their 'learning' they imagine themselves to be far better informed.

The DSM resolved the overlap in symptoms between schizophrenia and bipolar by creating a new medical entity - 'schizo-affective disorder' - which is an attempt to describe people who exhibit both abrupt changes in mood as well as thought displacements or 'split linkages'. All three 'conditions' are characterised by the tendency to slip into a 'psychosis' which is universally regarded as pathological - which, needless to say I disagree with. The experience of 'psychosis' can be frightening to the experient, disturbing to observers, as well as wholly destructive and oftentimes resolves itself in tragic consequences; for which occasions I obviously concede the need for temporary interventions (drug-based if necessary) but these negative experiences and effects are not the whole story of the changes wrought in the bodily unconscious of the experient.

There are other modes of experiencing this phenomenon which can be quite enlightening - in all manner of ways - if one is not compelled to view and treat it it as a necessarily pathological condition. In days gone by the experience was sanctioned and indeed encouraged; today it has been coralled off into a medical jurisdiction and viewed as a sickness. Indeed, the imperative to view it as an illness has a determining role in how the experient himself reacts to the nature of his experience - thus a potentially rich seam of knowledge has been lost to the 'human journey'. It is my belief that we must re-excavate this domain of human perception minus the biased filter and cultural constructions that the psychiatric profession wish to impose on it.

The so-called "neuroleptic revolution" of the 70's - advances in MRI and PET technology - opened the door for the DSM diagnostic category expansion and attempted to place on a secure scientific footing the various psychiatric "disorders". The difficulty however is in ascertaining the precise connection between alterations in brain chemistry and behavioural traits. Whilst we no doubt know a lot more about what is going on physically between our ears the magician's sleight of hand of the psycho-pharmaceutical complex has been to dumbfound the populace into believing that this new 'hard' science leads to a corresponding understanding of the intricacies of people's interpersonal relations.

There is a DSM inspired bank of questions issued to all psychiatrists which they are encouraged to use when assessing the potential diagnostic category in which their client should fall. They are too subjectively slippery to merit the credence attached to them yet they often become the basis of a initial/trial drug regimen which are then afterwards perhaps tailored/modified depending on the client's responses but the suggestion that the problematic behavioural trait is being addressed specifically by these neuroleptics is a laughable fiction. The anti-psychotics - Serenase, Olanzapine, Largactol etc are all sledgehammers designed principally to douse out your fires.

There are also sweeteners given to psychiatrists from the moment they enter their medical postgrad courses - books and fees are often paid for, chairs and research departments in universities are sponsored and by the time they get practising inducements are offered by drugs companies to include their product in off-label prescriptions - symposia to discuss the latest research are often just sponsored junkets, the very clinics and offices in which they practise; their walls drip with posters advertising the latest blockbuster, cups, notepads, calendars - are all festooned with the latest neuroleptic "miracle".

As a former psychotherapy student, a former involuntary patient and a former advocate for patient rights I can tell you that the vast majority of people now taking psychiatric drugs have no need of them whatsoever - their absorption into the medical model and it's compulsory drug-taking regime is facilitated by pie charts and market spread sheets in the boardrooms of the drug majors. Along with this of course is the human tragedy - people classified as 'depressive' 'bipolar' or 'schizophrenic' are told by their psychiatrist that their "condition" is "genetically determined" and therefore ineluctably written in the stars - they can no more do anything about it than a sheep can suddenly start bleeting Latin. This is a pernicious lie. There are many alternate therapies along with a host of alternate solutions yet none are attempted or even entertained as they would upset the lucrative drugs band wagon.

A woman I once knew while I was in one of these "hospitals" slit her wrists one fine morning and was pronounced dead later that afternoon. I had gotten to know her quite well as had many others on the ward and I can say if there was even a sliver of humanity; and by that I mean a humane response to her difficulties, she would be alive today. She had taken into her heart the crucial 'killer' message of psychiatry; your condition is permanent and there is no road back except through maintaining your course of drug treatment. The majority of suicides which take place in psychiatric wards occur in the first few weeks of "treatment"; it is here, when a patient is at their most vulnerable that they first learn that they are a 'type' with a corresponding lifetime's drug regime ahead of them and all the stigma that comes associated with it.

Society refuses to deal with the problems found in psychiatric wards; many are homeless, from abusive relationships or at their wits ends living in heroin soaked neighbourhoods. One 18yr old I knew was made involuntary ostensibly because he had recurring 'psychotic episodes' - in actual fact when I got talking to him it was clear he never had experienced a "clinical psychosis" but was instead engaged in an on-going feud with a neighbouring drug gang and on the night he was arrested and referred to a psychiatrist had fired several shots through the window of one his tormentors. With the system in place he could be detained indefinitely without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

Society yet again gets to wipe its hands clean.

Some books on Celtic Mythology

Jean Markale's The Druids: Celtic Priests of Nature is the most imaginative attempt I've yet come across to explain the myths in relation to the Celtic culture and religion as well as situate them comparatively with other Indo-European pantheons. Includes a lot of at times questionable etymological detours but his enthusiasm and obvious passion for the subject makes up for the occasional academic blunders. I've only read his book on Druids and I didn't even pick it myself, my brother bought it as a birthday gift years ago; a friend of his whose steeped in all things Celtic apparently recommended it. Anyhow, I feel much the better for having read it as I just enjoyed the fact that he goes out on a limb to force linkages and impose patterns on events that otherwise remain buried in the deepest obscurity.

Even if some of his etymological work is highly questionable the mere act of attempting to impose order over all this material requires an enjoyable leap of the active imagination - I could care less if much of the academic graft is technically bogus as he suggests affinities and synergies which are highly imaginative in themselves, necessarily deepen understanding of the actual processes involved in the oral retention of myth and at the end of the day, in many instances may actually acccurately reflect what did indeed happen.

Jean Markale is in fact a French scholar whose focus is initially on Gaul but he tries to embrace the whole available corpus including cultures well outside of what we may traditionally refer to as Celtic - bearing in mind many scholars are only comfortable nowadays using this term to refer to a purely linguistic affinity. It would seem implausible in fact for any proper study of the matter to exclude consideration of other tribal pantheons who share obvious affinities on the grounds they weren't from traditional 'Celtic' homelands.

If I recall, Francis Byrne in Irish Kings and High-Kings makes several comparisons between Irish mythic characters and those found in India - so he is going in fact much deeper than the supposed Celtic affinity and looking for surviving remnants in an assumed shared Indo-European culture. I will say that I would never discount anything he says merely on the grounds that it seems far-fetched - he's far too good a scholar otherwise. But it is well to be aware that in his revised edition of High Kings he practically disowned much of the scholarship saying that recent research had it well outflanked, unfortunately he both opted to leave it largely unrevised and neglected to point out precisely which areas he now held were dubious. The only conclusion you can draw from that is that he hadn't actually followed up any of the more startling claims he had made or if he had, had discovered them to be bogus - in which case a brief mea culpa would have been appreciated.

If you really wish to torture yourself you might have a bash at Robert Graves The White Goddess which is a notoriously idiosyncratic, some might even say mescaline-boosted, wild foray into just about every extant mythic reservoir available in search of the El Dorado of a common fertility/mother goddess of which all other mythic pantheons are (supposedly) merely descendent. Graves relies heavily on Irish examples and is particular keen to demonstrate that the druidic institution here (as elsewhere) faithfully recorded origin tales with unerring accuracy over vast periods of time.

More conventionally you might try Lady Gregory's Complete Irish Mythology - still one of the best collections around which starts from the mythological tales of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, Fir Bolg et al. and completes with the Fianna and the adventures of Cú Chulainn and Oisín. Yeats wrote a fine preface for this one and it's as large a compilation as I've come across. There's no annotation, preambles or explanatory notes of any kind which does leave the tales kind of hanging in the breeze a bit.

An excellent and indispensable guide is James McKillop's Dictionary of Celtic Mythology - this is a great read to familiarise yourself with the whole corpus of what has been preserved before tucking into any particular set of tales. It's a concordance with copious internal cross-referencing with about 4,000 entries each of which is a mini-essay in itself. This would make an excellent companion to Gregory's book (as well as being logged into ucc.celt.ie where you can compare texts with the original Gaelic versions).

Thomas Kinsella's translation of Tain Bo Cuailgne is also a cracking read if you ever have the time. Definitely one my favourite books and tales from the Ulster Cycle. Also, Peter O' Connor (a psychotherapist) has written an interesting work recently entitled Beyond the Mist which explores the Irish tales from a (mainly) Jungian perspective - not wholly convincing, but opens up some interesting angles nevertheless.

Charles Squire's Celtic Myths and Legends is dated in many places being published over a hundred years ago I think but is still valuable in so far as it attempts a narrative explanation of selective tales. Includes a treatment of British and Welsh tales - Artur and the Mabinogion and so on.

Stuart Pigott's The Druids is the most sobre treatment of the lot (apart from McKillop) and it comes primarily from an archaeological perspective and from someone who is at pains to establish first of all what can be known for certain - may not be as much fun as Markale or Graves but it does give you firm anchorage in the field. Much of the discussions surrounding druidry necessarily involves a lengthy treatment of the various Celtic pantheons so it's as well to start with something indisputably authoritative.

T. M. Charles Edwards Early Christian Ireland is also a handy dip for marking some of the transitions that occurred with the advent of the new 'dispensation' and noting not only how the druidic and bardic order reinvented themselves but also what changes were possibly wrought in the nature of oral transmission as the populace began to absorb the new teaching.

Sugar and coffee plantation slavery during the French Revolutionary Wars

Initially coffee was prohibitively expensive particularly for the 'lower orders' but once the Atlantic slave trade kicked off and it could be produced for half nothing prices inevitably eased - sweeteners too could be added rather cheaply once the West Indies indigenous populations were reduced and their former lands converted to sugar plantations. The Tainos civilisation of Ayiti (renamed Hispaniola by the Spanish), soon to become (by far) the world's most lucrative coffee and sugar exporting colony, were practically obliterated within twenty years of Columbus's arrival from an estimated 1-3 million to 30,000. Columbus had boasted of finding large quantities of gold to the Catholic monarchs but when this became unfeasible saw instead money-making opportunities through slave exports - '4,000 a year' could be shipped back to Spain he claimed in one letter.

Later, when the island was under joint French and Spanish dominion there were widespread boycotts of coffee drinking in Britain during Wilbeforce and Clarkson's campaign to abolish slavery which was initially supported and approved by Pitt in order to starve the French colonies of labour. According to Mary Ann McCracken, herself a life-long opponent of slavery, Thomas Russell, one of the founders of the United Irishmen always abstained from taking sugar on account of all the miseries attached to it's production. Once the French revolution broke out and the Jacobin Assembly abolished slavery themselves Pitt reversed his decision and made a deal with the French plantation colony's white landowners to annex the island into the British sphere. Sugar and coffee were (now St. Domingue's) principal exports and Pitt relied heavily on the European sweet tooth and addiction to coffee to help finance the upcoming war on revolutionary France as well sever it's most important source of funding.

The island's half a million freed slaves had other ideas though and initially began burning the hated sugar cane plantations to the ground thinking that was the only way to put a stop to their misery. A massive British expedition was authorised in 1794 to take the island, re-establish slavery and get the sugar/coffee fix flowing again and pump up the British exchequer but by 1798 after a vicious four year war 20,000 British troops lay dead and three times that number again permanently incapacitated. One third at least were Irishmen, many of whom were forcibly pressed into naval service after the militia riots of 1794 and the on-going 'pacification' campaigns that preceded the outbreak of the 1798 rebellion. Fortescue, a British historian writing after the First World War 'rediscovered' this campaign (for very little had been written of it in the interim) and declared it to be "the darkest chapter" in British military history in over two hundred years. It was pretty dark for the African ex-slaves too - 100,000 of them lost their lives fighting a war against the world's most efficient military machine and, incredibly, prevailing, and convinced thereafter that revolutionary France would protect their "Rights of Man".

It was not to be of course as the post-Thermidor French revolution fell to reactionary conservative forces where representatives from port towns, traders and mariners (the bourgeoisie) closed ranks and lobbied hard with the remaining white plantation owners (who were nevertheless spared retribution by Touissant L'Ouverture from conviction that the island must maintain it's sugar and coffee export trade) and sought to have the island re-assimilated as a slave colony. Napoleon duly dispatched an even larger force to achieve this end matching the size of the original British expedition and comprised of many of his best generals. With the help of a crippling outbreak of yellow fever it too was beaten into submission in an even bloodier and more ferocious war.

Touissant, the 'moderate' but by any yardstick visionary former slave who had an inclusive economic and political programme that would accommodate blacks, whites and mulattos and who had led the colony for almost a decade was captured (through trickery and false pretences) and led back to France where he was imprisoned and practically starved to death under the orders of Napoleon. Dessalines, the hard-liner, at this point took over the island's revolution (by now renamed Haiti in honour of the indigenous Tainos) and his methods were brutal but effective massacring without pity any whites who crossed his path - the French, in their turn after the British, beat a hasty retreat

And so the island was at last free to slip into dictatorship (as inevitably happened when the nascent Black Republic now assumed international pariah status, endured crippling sanctions and was forced on threat of invasion to pay massive reparations to compensate dispossessed French sugar planters) - with the British the following year finally abolishing the slave trade - amidst much pious self-congratulation it may be added. It took the research of a black historian writing in the 1930's (Eric Williams) - himself the descendant of West Indian slaves - to throw into relief for the first time the economic motives behind abolition, something scarcely if ever alluded in over a hundred years of Empire's predominance. Nowadays no discussion can even begin without acknowledging his work on the reasons behind abolition.

The God Entity - Baubles of a Timeless Mind

A reasonable person cannot completely discount the possibility that there may be an intelligent entity busily involved in the on-going creative evolution of what we have come to term ‘the universe’. If there is in fact a purposive unfolding my own guess would be that the earth and its inhabitants evidently retain for this entity a particular pride of place - if only on the grounds that biological life forms display a wondrous complexity and seeming purposiveness when compared to the relatively inert forms of material found in non self-replicating matter.

Now, if this entity has gone to the trouble of seeing to such important details as, for instance, the exact binding strength required of an electron to ensure it stays fastened to the orbit of a hydrogen nucleus and once mastered this feat and countless others of like nature, moved onto cellular substances and then onto DNA and the institution of the conditions whereby life as we know it may thrive; we may pause and ask ourselves: Has S/He given leave to the life forms thereby created to go about things entirely as they see fit - the classic argument of ‘free will’ - OR, does S/He occasionally intervene to ‘tweak’ evolutionary development so as to keep things progressing more or less in the direction of a ‘Grand Design’?

Being of the belief that an entity which has gained sovereignty over the intra-atomic realm will not rest but must perforce expand ‘Its’ horizons outwards and create from this subjugated and mastered territory yet another vista - that of one whereby S/He may bind together these like atoms into compound ‘molecules’ - and so, having attained mastery of the physic therein S/He may after long aeons progress finally to our complex biological selves. Is it now conceivable that S/He will wish to stop here and rest content with this latest hierarchy - is it not more plausible to suppose that plans are already afoot to move ‘Creation’ onto a more advanced phase necessarily impossible for ‘Us’ to conceive - for are we not ourselves but bit parts to the process?

A striking binary becomes apparent; our human limitations, our need for water, food, rest and shelter makes of us beings with selfish cores - yet the entity remains resplendent, a detached ‘miraculate’- but both touching and being touched, Creation brings the Creator further into Being - and so realising our necessity to IT - we can finally allow ourselves to be nourished - but with what? The knowledge? No. It can only be the At-Traction - which can only be felt, not known.

This gets back to the phenomenology of a ‘Being’ that can either marshal, exist within or be ‘composed of’ the elements of Nature. It cannot, in any sense, be ‘like us’. There is a problematic here related to our being circumscribed by our human form, - our retinas pick up e/m waves within a certain frequency and so on - if we posit the existence of a God Entity what form can ‘It’ have - given all that science and common sense has taught us - does ‘It’ have a form that is comprehensible to us, or is S/He ‘invisible, refined out of existence’ as the empiricists would have us believe?

On the question of imposed teleology it's as well to clear up for starters that there are many thinkers and social theorists whose paradigms have been viewed as ‘teleologic’ insofar as they insist on a definite progression from some supposed primitive state to a more advanced form - Marx obviously and some of the ‘Social Darwinists’ such as Herbert Spencer. Herder’s notion of the ‘perfectability of the species’ definitely falls within this category.

Most of these ‘grand narratives’ received a stinging assault from the post-structuralists, mainly on the grounds that they excluded and suppressed other narratives, Spencer’s brand of social evolution for instance being used by apologists of Empire. This was a tendency Foucault counteracted in ‘The Archaelogy of Knowledge’ and ‘Madness and Civilization’ where he unearthed ‘subjugated’ or ‘lost’ narratives and thereby retroactively reversed the telos of the dominant narrative which had managed to establish itself as orthodoxy.

Derrida once determined narrative writing itself to be ‘the origin of pure historicity, pure traditionality, the telos of a history whose philosophy is always to come’. The science writer as storyteller is no different. He adopts certain conventions, follows trusted paths, codes and formulas. Whether the topic is the ‘big bang’, E=Mc, the microwave background or the GUT we may expect the discipline of the genre to assert itself; I have come across the same metaphor to explain black-box radiation in three separate works from writers whose sub-disciplines would lead one to expect that the phenomena would be viewed from a fresh angle. Anyway, though Derrida’s logic is often crushingly brutal it does leave us with a view of all narratives, even those founded on the most rigorously tested scientific hypotheses, to be necessarily ‘teleologic’.

Chaos theory is an interesting response when confronted with the overwhelming complexity found in those non-linear systems where there is such a proliferation of forcible variables that traditional predictive models lose their potency. I think it is being more usefully deployed nowadays to attempt to establish the range of parametric expansions associated with temperature variations on open-ended ecologies and the effects of ’runaway’ positive feedbacks on the biosphere.

If you read the earlier ICCP reports you would see that they had to assign a ‘value’ for the presumed shrinkage in income gap between the middle classes and an upwardly mobile urban proletariat in developing countries that could be used as a variable in Global Climate Models. The main problem was that the value chosen assumed a constant closing of this gap whereas in reality the income gap ratio had increased over the observed period. Thus a single ‘chaotic’ component undermined the overall predictive value of the GCMs.

The best researchers in any field have I think always borne in mind that observed effects are localised and contingent - which is why its so interesting nowadays to see just how dark matter and dark energy are being incorporated into the Standard Model. I think Nietzsche would have tremendous fun nowadays tearing strips off this process - the SM being today's equivalent of 'God' for the arch-iconoclast.

We have often heard the paradox; “Is it possible for God to create an object so heavy that he can not lift it?”. However, I can't proceed from this point since these two conditions look awfully like properties imagined by early believers as to what type of powers an original creative entity would or should possess. They seem very much like human derived mental constructs projected onto the blank canvas of our unknowing. Where did the notion that God can do “anything” emerge from to begin with? Was it with the Abrahamic faiths or did it emerge from earlier religious forms? What was the Zoroastrian conception of God's powers - was he in that tradition equally as omniscient and omnipotent? Are we basing our presumed properties of the Deity upon knowledge received through scriptures or did our notions of God's omnipotence emerge through philosophical speculation, only tacked on much later to sophisticate tribally derived genesis myths?

Personally, if there is one, I see 'Creation' going back to the big bang. Many particle physicists are struck by the distribution of properties of the various fundamental particles; not just atoms but quarks and their properties. They ask themselves for instance; well, if the binding strength required to hold an electron of a hydrogen atom where just one hundredth of a power more or less well then we couldn't have complex molecules; this kind of thing. Now, I'm not a chemist or a physicist but I do find intriguing the thought of a god entity operating on a tiny scale - at the level of superstrings - and moulding matter upwards. By the time of planetary formation when the elements necessary to life will have been created through stellar explosion I'm thinking this God has already made his mind up (broadly) as to how 'life' should be created. From this god entity's perspective the vastness of the biological kingdom and it’s self-replicating lifeforms affords a comfortably wide range of possibilities. Perhaps, in a certain sense, a self-replicating life form, once brought into existence has become already beyond His/Her/it's powers of manipulation.

It would seem to me that the act of bringing the universe and all it's properties into being, including our good selves would require, evidently, a certain degree of sophistication and complexity on the part of the Creator. Haven't we now reached the point through anthropology and the cross-comparative study of tribal belief systems where we can safely assert that all properties hitherto ascribed to gods, God etc are derived from early man's attempt to explain to himself the ineffable mysteries of the world? Given what we now know from what science is unveiling about the properties of the universe shouldn't we proceed - again assuming that we still retain "belief" - from this point? What kind of creature is this God - the one who has created the very laws of nature?

For a start S/he/it cannot (clearly?) be omnipotent, nor omniscient - but like all artists perhaps - is just learning their trade. Why create sentient organisms on millions of different worlds incapable of communicating with one other? Why is it necessary to create so many intermediate lifeforms - trilobites etc. that ran into an evolutionary dead end? Was "God" toying with the notion of letting them develop sentience and then for reasons best known to Himself scuppered their progression?

Is the human form a desirable blueprint which he had in his mind's eye; the acme of biological perfection, or are there more aesthetically pleasing forms elsewhere scattered about the heavens to which we cannot begin to approach? Was there something about the admixture of material with which S/he had to work - his artist's pallet - protons, neutrons, quarks etc. which necessitated a slow evolutionary development through the biological kingdom? Does the creator take pleasure in creating hideous killing machines like trap-door spiders? If so, why, and to what purpose? Is/was earth being used a testing ground for his experiments on other worlds? Is the creator capable of alighting simultaneously on these worlds? If so, what mode of transport does s/he use? If s/he can fashion the material world then isn't s/he in a sense a part of that physical world? Can God be detected? Is s/he bringing her own detection into being by creating beings capable of making this perception? Is God gendered - from whence or what could a being like this emerge?

Yes, I think it's plausible to say that after aeons of manipulating matter to create cellular life a certain conception of form would have developed - an aesthetic sense that propelled the diversion through the mammalian kingdom into hominids and then to Sapiens. Perhaps s/he has dispensed with physical evolution and is now actively creating the conditions for a further evolutionary leap - but this time in the sphere of consciousness?

The god entity must exist in some sense as simultaneity - time being a property of the material created and s/he residing underneath, betwixt and between; 'immanent' to all - thus the Plan 'progresses' in our eyes, unfolds through time, but is in fact, at all times, coterminous from the entity's perspective. How is it's awareness distributed with respect to it's creation, with the evolution of life forms - is there a single consciousness that can perceive all things at once, somehow grasp what is happening in the quark realm up through all the strata that finally alights on human needs and emotions; or are there multiple sensation points wherein it's awareness is distributed and s/he must determine where best to allocate it's attention.

For us, it is the overwhelming randomness to be found in nature - but we inhabit a timebound and shrivelled perspective and in such schemes it is easy to discount ourselves as having any particular importance; for we are at a loss to grasp the larger picture wherein we occupy such a smaller role. From the perspective of the god entity, however, it must be infinitely more interesting to observe human folly in action than to watch the predictable trails of comets and the elliptical orbits of the spheres. Perhaps we were brought into being merely to stave off the impossible boredom of being eternity incarnate, mere baubles of a timeless mind.

The Evolution of Mammalian Ethics

The individual members of the dominant species on this planet require a nine month gestation period after which time they are utterly helpless and dependent on the mother (or the parents combined) for a period of anywhere between six and sixteen years depending on the culture concerned. No other member of the animal kingdom has been so coddled, preened, embraced, looked after and cared for, patiently indulged and affectionately treated then a human child and likewise no other animal once mature is capable of looking out into the world with an even remotely comparable & intrinsically social driven empathic lens.

'Survival of the fittest' is a term which embraces a multitudinous range of species- specific beneficial adaptions and within the group of primates from which we have evolved none have been more important than those which have promoted intra group co-operation and cohesion; our 'rise to power' has been predicated almost entirely on our capacity to communicate complex messages to one another concerning our individual wants and needs, and nothing else other than a rich multi-layered communicative system could sustain the level of co-operation required to satisfy those needs collectively, thus as we were - it has bound us together and made of us the world's most formidable fighting force (and species destroyer) but it has also ensured throughout our development the steady accumulation of a revolutionary surplus component; the elaboration of abstract ideals (fairness, justice, rights, equality) - which are periodically tapped into to achieve consensus viewpoints amidst the overthrow of crumbling absolutist-type monarchies or tyrannous state governments and consequently, also enshrined, (and venerated) as part of our legal codes, indelibly stitched into the fabric of 'who we are'.

To discount ethics is to miss the point of evolution entirely, we wouldn't be what we are today, still less be capable of communicating an opinion on it, were it not from the onset embedded as a rudder in our primitive mammalian brains. Of course, we weren't always aware of our origins, of how much social investment was required to finally lift us from the quagmire of 'tooth and claw' individualism and, given too much to the realms of abstract speculation some presupposed as evidential the existence of variegated races, of hierarchies of fitness and adaptibility, and this chimed well for a time with a pre-existent colonial order whose imperial servants wrestled to suppress the evident, that their domestically asserted criteria of rights & entitlements were logically universal, not magically rendered inapplicable when applied to the natives whose domains they had usurped - an assumption torn asunder during and after WWII when the most egregious example of such thinking were pounded into the ground (Nazism) and international bodies established which re-asserted (theoretically & aspirationally) the universality of human rights.

The social sphere by it's nature will attempt to harness and divert the raw animal forces of which we are composed. It's a pretty intricate matrix of relations into which we are all born. The domestication of the id is reasonably supposed to occur around four years of age and there is little disagreement about what is happening here; oedipalisation is broadly defined as a self-conscious acceptance of social norms - and in homo there is a greater extended period of instinctually driven behaviour, a much longer developmental path towards the 'period of maturity' in which comparable mammals attain competence in their habitus.

I can actually pinpoint to the minute my own accession to the social sphere, i.e the Symbolic domain - I woke in a sweat (age four) with the stunning (and unforgettable) realisation that picking the family cat up by the tail and swinging it about furiously like a set of Mexican bolas before letting it go crashing into the nearest wall, (which apparently I was in the habit of doing quite regularly) was - unacceptable. I remember distinctly thinking "the cat feels pain like I do, what the hell have I done?" With this, I leapt from my bed and sought out our little kitty to give him a plate of cool milk - well he was in hiding - and all the push push pussy in the world couldn't get him to come out from his cubby hole. For a solid hour I begged, cajoled and placated - desperate for the assurance that our moggy could forgive my heinous crimes. When he did emerge, ever so cautious (and eying me with that trepidation as though I could become a devil incarnate) he somehow assured himself - against his better instincts I'm sure, that I was no longer a danger, and dipped his tongue gingerly into the bowl of báinne.

Joy uncontained. I had been forgiven.

All of this naturally preceded any notions I had of religion, God etc. Morality grew organically entirely out of my own milieu; my recognition that other creatures suffered as I do - a complex understanding to arrive at. So I think religion - with all it's codes, morals, strictures and taboos - emerges entirely from our own recognition of mortality but this recognition consists of the awareness that we are all separate and distinct beings, all perishable and vulnerable and all seeking to negotiate ourselves through the world's space with this fundamental mutual acknowledgement.
It follows then that though I agree with the classical sequence; animism - polytheism - monotheism ("soul", "gods", "god"), the 'religious complex' does not derive from an 'inability to handle' mortality or it's attendant anxieties but issues instead from a set of strategies that has conquered and transcended them.

In fact, I see the earliest religious forms, animism etc. emerging to occupy those available temporal spaces wherein there is a possibility (freed from the natural rhythms of the group) that this common bond can be formally acknowledged - a dignified locus is then set aside; certain times, places, events may become a trigger; but the effect is always to produce the consensus of their being a higher morality - the issue of verifiability in this context is immaterial. If you look at the chorus in Sophoclean drama you will see that faith in this type of morality is already being crushed - but it's there to begin with, for sure.

Christianity is extraordinarily rich in emotive archetypes and symbolism; I see no great mystery in it's longevity but whether it's the finest expression of the animist impulse I'm not too sure. However, given it itself has emerged from our innate propensity for ethical thinking, it cannot be viewed as the necessary prerequisite for morality.

Art and Artists: The Case of Oscar Wilde

The best and most productive way forward I should think, when contemplating great works of art (or even mediocre efforts such as Herr Hitler's) is to view them in relation to what is known of the artists themselves - if there is enough solid biographical material known then it becomes necessary & perhaps indispensable to make preliminary judgements as to what was perhaps the creative inspiration behind them.

Just as artists aren't hatched in a jam jar divorced from the vicissitudes of the life around them, neither should their works be viewed as such. An appreciation of any isolated work can of course be had, when it is viewed on it's own merits minus knowledge of the person behind them or what motivations guided them but it's impossible to deny that placing that work in the context of their lives makes for a more satisfying overall understanding; you might even say such an approach becomes indispensable to enriching the aesthetic experience itself.

As an example, I went through a 'Wilde' phase about twenty years ago, bored my then girlfriend to tears talking about the convoluted plotlines to Dorian Gray and bemoaned the savage injustice meted out to Oscar by a prudish hypocritical Victorian society who hadn't yet advanced far enough to acknowledge and legalise the 'love that dare not speak it's name'. I even went out and bought the 'yellow book' (Á Rebours/Against Nature) cited by Wilde during his trial just because the whole hedonistic aesthetic of 'art for art's sake' had a strange appeal for me at the time - I liked his flamboyance, his learning and his seeming capacity to hold an encrypted key of the inner workings of society; he always seemed to know which buttons to press and had a tailored response for every objection. Surely a figure like that I thought is almost excused whatever excesses he may be guilty of? I especially loathed his prosecutor Carson, not only for felling Wilde but for his subsequent role in rallying Unionist opposition to Home Rule.

Soon enough though I came to deplore Mr. Fingal O' Flaherty Wills Wilde, not merely because he was an upper-class predatory paedophile (no different from Cathal Ó Séarcaigh today) whose victims were poor and defenceless (the grotesque reality of which strangely enough never struck me to any great extent while I was actually enamoured of his work) but also the distinguished world he left behind him in Ireland and the obvious disgrace he brought on his proud family heritage.

His father was a famed opthalmic surgeon but was also chief coroner in Ireland during the famine - it was his reports that provide much of the primary documentary evidence we have today on causes of death during the period, while his mother, 'Speranza' was one of the 'three Graces' who composed stirring & influential poems for the 'Nation' and thus spearheaded the revival (or, properly speaking, birth) of anti-colonial romantic idealism which culminated in the Young Ireland secessionist Confederacy. Despite his early immersion in the rich heritage of Gaelic myth & folklore, his close proximity to the ideologues of nationalist Ireland, his unique position to affect change (his Trinity Gold Medal), he wound up like Shaw peddling his trade in London, hardly to be blamed as this was where graft and talent could be rewarded, but did so via the promotion of an art form (despite Kiberd's assertions to the contrary) that did little whatever to promote the cause of his country abroad - while all the time ludicrously pandering to the laughably obnoxious and shallow Lord Douglas and fawningly ingratiating himself with what he evidently deemed to be the acme of civilisation (London 'high society' - despite the plays which affect to hold a critical gaze of it's mores).

I don't think it's possible to detach some writers from the work they produce and Wilde is one of those creatures I've really begun to loathe over the years - maybe I need to revisit his Ballad of Reading Gaol which I had always found moving and see if there's perhaps any sympathy left in me for the man, but I'd doubt whatever I once had can be remotely salvaged. Basically, he became the worst type of social parasite in my eyes - someone who felt compelled to evolve an elaborate aesthetic philosophy to excuse an inner depravity. There is much art in Dorian Gray, if you'd like to view it like that, but it's more gripping as a frank confession of someone who'd self-consciously lost the run of himself.

The Druids and Early Christianity in Ireland

What is really intriguing is the possibility that the druidic order and their sanctuaries were absorbed in some fashion by early monastic communities such as the Culdees. Irish mythology is of course replete with references to the Druidic class. The Táin Bo Cuailgne, for instance, has a Druid, Cathbad, who is mentioned several times. His war cries and incantations are very similar to Tacitus' accounts of the pre-battle actions of the druids of Anglesey . I can understand the heavy reliance on Caesar's accounts of his campaigns in Gaul but there's so much material to be found in these sagas, it would be a shame not to consider them in assessing what kind of transformations must have occurred in the druidic sanctuaries.

Though written down in the 10th c. the language of the Táin dates to the 8th c. and obviously comes from an oral tradition that's at least a few hundred years old. Cathbad is called a drui which by the time the monks were compiling the tale would have connoted - in derogatory fashion - a magician or soothsayer, contrary to his leadership role in the epic (which is not central but periphery) - perhaps indicating already a shift in power status.

From what I can gather Irish scholars are pretty sure that the druidic class in Ireland splintered into the filid (poets) and breithemain (jurists) though how close this occurred to Christianization is a matter of conjecture but it must have been associated with the adoption of canon law.

In "Early Irish Law" T. M. Charles Edwards writes;

"In the legal texts of the seventh and eighth centuries there are distinct hierarchies for the fili 'poet-seer' and the ecnae 'ecclesiaistical scholar' as well as the ordinary hierarchy of the church. In most texts the druid is as if he had been forgotten, but some take the trouble to exclude him specifically from the ranks of those who enjoy high status through their craft"

Their marginalisation it seems was a slow and painful one which lends further credence to the thesis that they may have gradually filtered into a new form of social institution whilst retaining some of their doctrines.(One of the texts Edwards is referring to is the "Bretha Crolige".)

On the subject of the druid's longevity in Ireland it is known also that Diarmuid Mac Cearbaill (d.565) helped St. Ciarán build one of the first churches at Clonmacnoise; the same Diarmuid who is mentioned in the Annals of Tighernach as the last king to have a pagan (i.e. druidic) inauguration at Tara. The east wing of the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnoise is regarded as depicting both Diarmiat and Ciarán;

"Then Ciarán planted the first stake, and Diarmait son of Cerball was along with him. Said Ciarán to Diarmait when setting the stake, 'Let, O warrior, thy hand be over my hand, and thou shalt be in sovereignty over the men of Ireland.'"

The Celtic historian Prof. James Carney also regards Diarmiat as the last king of Ireland to be associated with a druid. I presume he's talking about Bec Mac Dé (unfortunately he doesn't specify) who is supposed to have prophesied Diarmiat's death. Interesting, given researches on the etymology of saor, saer etc that we may have a druid figure in such proximity to Ciaran and Clonmacnoise with the moniker "little son of God". I've seen Bec Mac Dé variously regarded as a "saint", "prophet" and "druid" so evidently this period in Ireland when Ciarán is establishing Clonmacnoise marks some kind of transitional phase. Carney himself regards the Cearbaill kingship as the 'last stand' of paganism.

I know it's hard to gauge how long druidism proper lasted in Ireland but if Bec Mac Dé is a genuine remnant of the old order collapsing amidst the encroachments of the church then this would surely bring us right up to the immediate pre-Christian period. It would also make sense, would it not, that he and those 'sons of god' like him would prefer to retain as much autonomy as possible and take a separate path free from the strictures of any order - an "order" exactly of the nature of the Culdees who preferred to steer clear of the dictats from Rome.

Christianity, when it came, fit the people like a glove - the seanchus law tracts weren't up to the task of protecting their rights in the same way that the message of Christianity could. If one of the druid's task was to modulate the warring tribes then his function has been usurped by the new gospels; but their habits of learning cannot be displaced into a vacuum. A new social institution needs to be created to absorb the phalanx of scholars, hence perhaps the ripeness for cenobitic orders such as the Céli Dé. The monastic theory of druidic absorption is in fact pretty irresistible

Sir John Moore and the 1798 Rebellion

Moore's diary remains a key source for the 1798 rebellion in Ireland being one of the half dozen generals involved in Lake's attempts to affect a ring of steel around the rebels encamped on Vinegar Hill. He's more often cited for his initiative in dispatching two regiments (contrary to orders) to relieve Wexford town thereby saving perhaps a hundred or more captive loyalists from certain execution at the hands of renegade demagogue James Dixon but his real merit (any good general would've done likewise) lies in the quality of commentary he provided;

"I made a speech yesterday to the troops. I reprobated some meetings of Orange boys (Protestants) which, as I had heard, had taken place. I said that if by such meetings they had intended to form a union to defend their country, they were unnecessary, as every good man had already determined in his heart to do so, and they, as soldiers had already sworn to do it; but if it was to create a distinction and second interest from the Catholics, it was wicked and must be punished. Ireland was composed of Roman Catholics and Protestants. The Government had entrusted both equally with her defence. A union of both was necessary for this purpose. Distinctions of this kind were illiberal, and for a man to boast or be proud of his religion was absurd. It was a circumstance in which he had no merit; he was the one or the other because his parents were so before him, and it was determined for him before he had any choice. Any man might fairly pride himself on being just and honest, but not on his religion. If they followed the doctrines of the one or the other they would be upright."

The government hadn't in fact trusted both "equally", as the militia, though drawn from Catholic ranks were officered exclusively by Protestants and were moreover balloted compulsorily after the disbanding of the Volunteers in 1794; leading to the infamous 'militia riots' up and down the country. It's a forgivable rhetorical sleight of hand though. Bottom line, as far as Dublin Castle were concerned, the defence of the country couldn't be left in the militia's hands with any confidence (United Irish infiltration was on-going & pervasive) which is why they authorised the raising of a Yeomanry Guard drawn initially from the Protestant tenantry of the Ascendency but increasingly in 1797/8 from the multitude of Orange Lodges which had rapidly proliferated after the Battle of the Diamond (1795).

It was to counter this negative tendency; the slide towards further sectarianizing the conflict which "Orange" recruitment inevitably entailed, that Moore principally objected. He was consistent throughout on this point and backed Abercrombie's attempts to reform the military governance in Ireland on the grounds that the hitherto dispersed regiments were at the beck and call of over zealous magistrates eager to quash any and all suspected oath takers & arms hoarders. Imbibing their bad habits this led to the calamitous over-extension of house-burnings, floggings & tortures which characterised the weeks preceding the outbreak.

All of this could have been nipped in the bud had Abercrombie been listened to; but Camden (the Viceroy) was overpowered by the ultra-Protestant cabal in his privy council (Foster, Beresford, Fitzgibbon) who pushed for an increasingly punitive military response. An Indemnity Act was passed which nullified legal proceedings against criminal acts performed by the military in their attempts to recover pikes and other weaponry but in effect it was more utilised by Protestant 'ultras' and their yeomanry hell-bent on stamping out what they took to be a generalised Catholic conspiracy to extirpate their religion and reclaim lost lands and title a-la the doom-laden prognostications of John Temple & co.

The Catholics for their part were fed a corresponding myth of Orange intentions to extirpate them in turn; circulated in handbills possibly originating in the O'Connor faction of the United Irish National Executive. When Abercromby was forced to step down Moore offered to hand in his own resignation along with that of his old West Indies colleague but his mentor would hear none of it - a good thing for the country in the grand scheme of things because Moore's level-headed liberalism & uncommon sympathy with the 'lower orders' were direly needed qualities in those days; Cornwallis restoring some semblance of sanity in July in replacing the appalling Lake and instituting the reforms both Abercromby and Moore had called for all along.

Arthur Bryant's comment seems consistent with the type of character you meet in the diary;

"Moore's contribution to the British Army was not only that matchless Light Infantry who have ever since enshrined his training, but also the belief that the perfect soldier can only be made by evoking all that is finest in man - physical, mental and spiritual".

Moore supported a fully enfranchised Catholic electorate in Ireland including the right to hold parliamentary seats so his speech to the troops quoted above wasn't mere rhetoric - and this stance certainly put him at odds with the majority Protestant landlord opinion with whom he had to work throughout the Rising. He takes a delicious swipe at some of the Cork gentry who make incessant demands of him to dispatch his troops to one troublesome spot in order to retrieve pikes on account of the amount of trees that have been felled in the vicinity. This was a sure sign that pike-making was being carried out on an industrial scale and Moore knew it; but he refused to allow his men free quarters (i.e. imposing themselves on the peasantry and using all means at their disposal to extract 'confessions') telling the increasingly paranoid squires that had they treated their tenantry better they wouldn't be in such dire need for fuelstuffs!! - this was the essence of the stand-off between Abercromby and Dublin Castle and Moore was one of his staunchest supporters in the country.

Military hard-liners like Lake were later congratulated for the 'successful' dragooning of Ulster in the spring and Autumn of 1797 and there's no doubt the methods employed (house-burning, floggings & torture) were a major setback to the underground resistance there but your essentially playing with fire adopting these tactics - in Wexford it backfired catastrophically, most people who "came out" and assembled at Oulart, Enniscorthy and Vinegar Hill did so for fear of their lives - not because they were sworn United men; "better die like men than be chased like rabbits" as Fr. Murphy of Boolavogue put it. A priest who all along compelled his parishioners to adopt the official line of the Church - which was complete co-operation with the authorities.

Militia and Yeomanry simply over-stepped the mark, hung and burnt out too many innocents; pikes were retailing ten times their face value as people were desperate to hand in something, anything to the authorities lest their homes be set on flame. Certificates were being issued in return for weaponry but Yeomanry started to attack those with the vouchers on the grounds that this clearly implicated guilt. In the end folks were afraid to hand in anything; damned if you do, damned if you don't - the transparent lack of logic behind the policies stemmed from poor discipline as Abercromby forewarned; "an army formidable to everyone but the enemy"; the regulars are always meant to hold out a higher standard to be emulated by irregular fencibles, militia & yeomanry and this leadership was sorely lacking. The other point about Abercromby's tactics in keeping the army centrally located and under a tighter command structure (as opposed to the dissipation entailed in being levelled on the peasantry) was to ensure the presence of cohesive well-drilled units if and when the widely expected French landing were to take place.

Throughout 1798, Pitt's intelligence contacts knew of a rapidly burgeoning French fleet in Brest & the Mediterranean; a launch was imminent but they had no idea the decision had been taken by the Directory/Napoleon to take to Egypt thereby cutting off the Indian trade routes - best guesses were for another attempt at Bantry, Killala or Lough Swilly - so having your army dispersed throughout the country goading the peasantry into rebellion instead of stiffening up coastal defences seems counter-productive on multiple levels. There's a logic too to the ultras position of course; inflaming an early rising by terrorist means would dismantle the underground structure on the castle's terms - a delicate question of timing, intelligence & resources - perhaps Abercromby, like Cornwallis were the 'good cops' used to placate the Whig opposition and the moderate majority with Lake viewed as the necessary mailed fist in times of heightened danger?

Either way, if he hadn't before, Moore certainly cut his teeth in Ireland.