Review of Famine Literature

There's been an explosion of titles since the 150th anniversary of the Irish famine; some hum-drum that follow the same worn and beaten path but others again shining a much needed light on previously under-explored areas. The best of the lot has to be the "Atlas of the Great Irish Famine", (eds. Crowley, Smith, Murphy) not just for the detailed parish-level mapping but the sheer enormity of the collaboration required with some 60 odd separate specialists providing explanatory essays on their area of interest.
http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Great-Irish-Famine-Crowley/dp/0814771483/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424261071&sr=1-1&keywords=atlas%20of%20the%20great%20irish%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Provincial and local studies are a boom area in famine studies these days and that's reflected in much of the content here. As a visual guide its second to none (750pgs of maps, illustrations & primary documents) and the absence of a single authorial voice allows the multiple perspectives gathered within tell their own story. Can't recommend it highly enough - just don't drop it on your toe, it weighs a ton!

For single author general surveys published recently the best would be -

J.S. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine
Peter Gray, The Irish Famine

-- where the narrative viewpoint is detached & neutral for the most part. Both are highly respected famine historians & taken together these two tomes would give you a good feel for what is considered the "consensus" viewpoint.

My own preference is for "personality" writers who make little effort to conceal their viewpoints yet still retain that crucial element of academic rigour. Christine Kinealy has written two solid overviews of this nature;

"A Death-dealing famine" & "The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion" - the latter particularly has a ground-breaking chapter on the vexed question of food exports.

John Kelly too, fresh from a study of the mediaeval bubonic plague has given us what I think to be one of the most thoughtful and well-written accounts of the famine so far; The Graves are Walking which actually opens with an account of one of my ancestors being hung for Whiteboyism!

http://www.amazon.com/Graves-Are-Walking-Famine-People/dp/1250032172/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851601&sr=1-1&keywords=john%20kelly%20graves%20are%20walking?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Ciaran Ó Murchadha's The Great Famine is a solid enough account which excels in its attempt to convey community breakdown via Irish language sources (something of a lamented novelty among historians)

Enda Delaney's The Curse of Reason is a very readable survey told through the eyes of three key protagonists (John Mitchel, Archbishop John Machale, Charles Trevelyan) and an ascendency diarist, Elisabeth Smith.

While Tim Pat Coogan's The Famine Plot is a welcome leap into the famine era from Ireland's most popular historian; giving us a re-casting of the Mitchelite thesis and a fresh demonization of Trevelyan (always popular among Irish audiences who've adopted Fields of Athenry as the new national anthem).
http://www.amazon.com/Famine-Plot-Englands-Irelands-Greatest/dp/1137278838/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851666&sr=1-1&keywords=famine%20plot%20coogan?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

The best from the fiery Irish-American stable who point an unequivocal finger of blame at British policy-makers is undoubtedly Thomas Gallagher's Paddy's Lament: Prelude to Hatred which, despite its many shortcomings, contains some very powerful passages indeed along with, at times, a very skilful handling of primary sources.

Then of course, there's Cecille Woodham Smith's now classic The Great Hunger - the bestselling Irish history book of all time. Forget about all the trot about 'anti-British' bias, this is narrative history at its best for the simple reason that she gave a voice and an identity to the countless thousands who perished + made you feel what it was like to wrapped up in an epic struggle for survival. Despite this "emotive bias", it is still referenced as an authority to this day. The major flaw is that the narrative draws to a close prematurely with only cursory treatment of events after mid-1847.
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Hunger-Ireland-1845-Famine/dp/B002SM33Y8/ref=sr_1_sc_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851704&sr=1-2-spell&keywords=great%20hunger%20cecille?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Outside of these general surveys there are numerous indispensable specialist studies which have made intelligible many previously under-researched areas -

Peter Gray's Famine, Land and Politics tackles the nuts and bolts of Whig ideology (Providentialism, laissez faire, Malthusianism) while tracking the debate between orthodox economists (Edinburgh Review, the Economist, Nassau Senior) and radicals like J. S. Mill and Sharman Crawford to the unfolding land crisis in Ireland via a detailed analysis of responses to land commissions from the 1830's up to and throughout the famine period. Most thorough analysis so far of the divisions within the Russell cabinet throughout the crisis.
http://www.amazon.com/Famine-Land-Politics-Peter-Gray/dp/0716526425/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851757&sr=1-4&keywords=peter%20gray%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration

I can't do better than Seamus Deane's comments here; "On the 150th anniversary of the Irish famine, no memorial could be more fitting or more moving than Robert Scally's spectacular recreation of the life and death of the community of Ballykilcline. Painstakingly researched, lucidly written, his work provides a sudden and intimate access to a world and a series of individual lives cruelly destroyed during the terrible forties of the last century". This, in addition to the work of Estyn Evans and Kerby Miller represent the most solid treatment we have on the true nature of rundale clachans and, by extension, the real grip that possession of the land had on the Irish psyche.

http://www.amazon.com/End-Hidden-Ireland-Rebellion-Emigration/dp/0195106598/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851803&sr=1-1&keywords=scally%20end%20hidden%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Robin Haines, Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine is the most spirited and tightly argued defence of the controversial civil servant we are ever likely to see in print. Masses of detail on the intricacies of the workings of the Labour Rate Act, Poor Law, Soup Kitchens and even the previously untouched Commercial Crisis of 1847 make this a powerful (and largely unmet) rejoinder to the archetypal nationalist critique.

http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Trevelyan-Great-Irish-Famine/dp/1851827552/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851846&sr=1-1&keywords=robin%20haines%20trevelyan%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Donal Kerr, A Nation of Beggars: Priests, People and Politics in Famine Ireland, 1846-1852. The standard work on the role of the Catholic Church during the famine with special emphasis on the entire behind the scenes embroglio in Rome as Palmerston attempted to sway Vatican opinion during the early heady revolutionary months of 1848. Again, indispensable.

http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Beggars-1846-1852-Clarendon-Paperbacks/dp/0198207379/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851878&sr=1-1&keywords=donal%20kerr%20nation%20beggars%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Leslie A. Williams, Daniel O' Connell, The British Press and The Irish Famine: Killing Remarks Fascinating & revealing study of the British media focusing on a wide range of journals, broadsheets etc. Illustrated London News, Punch, The Times, the Morning Chronicle, The Spectator, The Economist etc.. Usually ridiculously priced but picked up a cheap 'discard' edition. Unique & worthy study.

David P. Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine - A social geographer who meshes post-colonial theory with Foucauldian insights on bio-politics and current research models on resource stress (Amartya Sen etc.) this works opens up a lot avenues for future research. Unlike many present-day writers on the famine the colonial context is taken as a given and explored as such in terms of prior land re-structuring & social engineering (exhaustive analysis of suppositions which lay behind Irish Poor Law). Attitudes of post Union 'colonially embedded' travel writers are also extensively explored and how they conveyed to a British reading public certain stereotypical 'dispositions' which became templates for policy formation - very 'high brow' at times but again, original and indispensable. Nally provided the article on "Colonial Context" in the Atlas - a wise choice.

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Encumbrances-Political-Violence-Famine/dp/026803608X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851910&sr=1-1&keywords=human%20encumbrances%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity - her magnum opus, which took some 15 years to research. This is the most sophisticated treatment to date of the workings of the Poor Law and as such the focus is on that period from mid-47 on, when the onus of relief was transferred to the workhouse system. Has been reprinted several times, the latest containing an excellent review of famine literature and a meditation on the contentious subject of revisionism in the context of famine studies.

Christine Kinealy, Repeal and Revolution: 1848 in Ireland - as it says on the tin. The first modern study of the fluctuating effects of continental upheaval on the politics of Repeal and how the devastating progress of the famine radicalised so many Young Irelanders; the linkages are clearly drawn between government policy (or lack thereof) and the slow brewing of revolutionary discontent within Ireland culminating in ultimately failed alliances with Lamartine's revolutionary French government and 'physical force' English Chartists.
http://www.amazon.com/Repeal-revolution-Ireland-Christine-Kinealy/dp/0719065178/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851943&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=repeal%20revolution%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

Christine Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland - again, another groundbreaking study; the definitive account of private philanthropy, public donations & the exhaustive attempts to mobilise life-saving "goodwill" from the Choctaw Indians, the Turkish Sultan, founding of the British Relief Association and the sterling work of the Quakers. How it was mobilised and how it all unravelled.

There's also 'classic' studies you can get in e-book format free of charge -

John Mitchel, Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps) - the most highly charged political prose from the country's most effective ever political polemicist conveying in black & white terms the ineluctable evils of foreign governance. A staple of Fenian literature for generations to come and consummately devoured by 1916 leaders such as Pearse, Griffith and Markiewicz (the latter having 'wept' on reading it). Mitchel was editor of the country's largest circulating newspaper throughout the famine (the Nation), led the radical wing of the Confederates, and was eventually charged with high treason after calling for open revolution from the pages of the United Irishman. It may be said, more than any other book or writer, has influenced the course of Irish history (perhaps).

http://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Ireland-Perhaps-Classics-History/dp/1904558364/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426851985&sr=1-1&keywords=last%20conquest%20mitchel%20famine?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

John O' Rourke, The Great Irish Famine of 1847 - written in the 1880's this account is still valuable as a Parnellite expression of discontent with the Union; analysis focuses on Parliamentary debate and includes many first hand testimonies from survivors.

Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years in Ireland - like Mitchel's, an invaluable first hand account of the famine years from an actor wrapped up in the thick of it. Duffy co-founded the Nation with Thomas Davis and John Blake Dillon, led the conservative wing of the Confederates and was arrested for treason with fellow plotters of the 1848 uprising.

Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland - this is an extraordinary and very unique account of an American woman (ostensibly a bible-bashing proselytiser) who bravely set forth in the midst of all the distress in 1847 to traipse around the country, alone and with minimal funds, to offer what succour and relief she could - often bedding down in impoverished mud-cabins and participating fully in all its horrors . She had earlier written an unusually sympathetic account of the Irish peasantry in 1845 called Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger. This was likewise, a priceless anecdotal archive.

http://www.amazon.com/Annals-Famine-Ireland-Aesnath-Nicholson-ebook/dp/B00APDTPYO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426852026&sr=1-1&keywords=asenath%20nicholson%20annals?tag=upsideout-20&tag=viglink21135-20

James Fintan Lalor, Collected Writings - his letters to the Nation in early 1847 represented a sea-change in attitude, demanding as they did a reversal in policy, placing land reform before Repeal as a political objective. Lalor struck an unforgettable chord with the radical wing of the Confederates and the powerful imagery of his fiery prose completely altered the landscape of future nationalist agitation placing the ownership of Irish soil as the first and primary objective; the "God-Father" of Irish tenant right and ultimate progenitor of Gladstone's Irish land policy - all carved out of an apocalyptic vision of the famine years.

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There's literally dozens of other well known studies; mainly academic essay compilations (Moody & Williams, Chris Morash etc..), highly technical econometric studies (O' Grada, Mokyr ), sundry travel writers, novels, poetry collections, biographies of key figures but the above is the best of the lot for my money.

Amazon.com: Famine Land and Politics (9780716526421): Peter Gray: Books

Tory and Whig Responses to the Irish Famine

The first thing to note is that the crisis confronting Peel and the Conservatives was of far more manageable proportions than that with which Russell and the Whigs had to confront in the winter of 1846/47. Whereas the first crop failure was partial in 1845 the following year was a disaster - the soup kitchens were only rolled out in early 1847 after the abysmal failure of the Whig's 1846 Labour Rate Act; jobbery, low pay, unwieldy bureaucracy, high grain prices and the absence of an integrated cash economy all conspired to render ineffectual the Board of Works schemes. A set rate of 8d a day was maintained while bread and oatmeal prices were allowed to treble in accord with the dictates of "political economy" i.e. free market laissez faire.

Workers simply couldn't earn enough to feed themselves and by December/January 1847 they were actually dropping dead by the roadsides of exhaustion & starvation. At this point, private charity subscriptions were encouraged and promoted and the exchequer costs of maintaining the public works were being grilled fiercely in Parliament which is what led the Russell administration to adopt the successful Quaker schemes of direct relief via soup kitchens but this in itself was only a stopgap measure until the burden of relief could be shifted from British exchequer funded schemes onto the Irish Poor Law system supported by taxing Irish landed property (c. Sept 1847).

In essence, the Whigs had displaced the entire burden of relief on Irish landed proprietors whose property was now taxed to support the overflowing workhouses. The "rate-in aid" scheme of the 1848 legislative session which was one of the few material concessions to indebted Irish Poor Law Unions via a redistributive extra tax on less encumbered other Irish Unions was typical of their thinking at this time - i.e. no English Poor Law Unions were forced to make a contribution. "There is no legislative Union without joint responsibility", came the cry from the Irish nationalist, Repealer and even some sections of the liberal British press e.g. the Morning Chronicle. All the money, in other words, from mid-47 on had to be raised solely out of the pockets of Irish ratepayers; a complete abnegation of responsibility which led to the mass evictions of 1848/49 as landlords struggled to clear their estates of tenanted "paupers" whose poor relief dues they wished to discharge themselves from.

Now, its reasonable to assume that Peel and the Conservatives would scarcely have done things a whole lot different as they supported by and large most of these measures while sitting in the opposition benches. Peel's template for relief was, in fact, with some slight tweaks by Trevelyan, lifted wholesale by the Whigs in 1846 - local relief committees, public works, encouragement of private philanthropy & non-interference in the market.

Peel's "brimstone", the Indian 'flint' corn, £50,000 of which was purchased surreptitiously and released into the most needy areas by Relief Commissioner, Randolph Routh, in niggardly dribs and drabs in 1845/46 was claimed by Peel to be a novel food source and therefore strictly speaking not interfering with any pre-existing market - but this nevertheless was an inventive way of circumnavigating laissez faire orthodoxy. But this was a "one-trick pony" which couldn't be repeated by the incoming Whigs unless they were prepared to ignore the threats of Irish grain suppliers to not buy any grain whatsoever unless they received guarantees by the government that they wouldn't compete with their trade by purchasing food for distribution.

The first point then is that the Whig approach was fundamentally similar to the Conservatives - insofar as both of them completely ignored Irish opinion which was summed up in the recommendations of Daniel O' Connell's November 1845 visit to the Viceroy which was -

(1) to close all the ports from exporting Irish food; the enormous quantities of wheat, barley, oats, pigs, sheep, cattle, butter which in an ideal "entitlements" framework would have been more than enough to feed the starving populace. (Christine Kinealy's recent research over O' Grada, Donnelly etc. on this matter which estimates a domestic production capacity suitable to the wants of over 11 million).
(2) The diversion of all grain for brewing - Ireland yet exported colossal quantities of grain-derived spirits abroad throughout the crisis.
(3) Proceeds from the sales of Irish forests to contribute to relief.
(4) The raising of an international loan; "to scour the world's markets for food" - on the assumption that the ports were not allowed close,
(5) the taxing of absentee rental. and (among other measures)
(6) legislation to safeguard tenant right from eviction.

Secondly, neither government paid the slightest attention to any of these requests/demands not because they were hopelessly locked into a philosophy of laissez faire orthodoxy; the relative effectiveness of which was still the subject of much contention (for what was the recent Corn Law debate about if not the variant merits of Free Trade vs. Protectionism?) - but because there were higher interests to serve; to wit -

(1) the security of the domestic British food supply (Irish produce fed two million English and kept grain prices in the manufacturing districts artificially low - a perennial hotbed of Chartist grievance) and

(2) the demands for a re-structuring of the Irish agrarian landscape into a pyramidal schema of landlords, small farmers and a mobile proletarian labour force; i.e the extinction of the cottier and conacre farming class via their forced removal by eviction, starvation, emigration or proletarianisation.

In the eyes of many influential orthodox economists this bottom rung class were simply Malthusian 'human encumbrances', surplus to the requirements of modern, mechanised, large-scale farming and a preferred post-Corn Law Repeal switch from tillage to pasture as the ubiquity and cheapness of imported American corn now demanded a re-orientation of the Irish agricultural market towards cattle and sheep export. The research of economist Amartya Sen, notably his concept of an "entitlements framework" which focuses on 'democratic deficits' in afflicted famine zones, highlights the breakdown in distributive food channels & consequent 'starvation in the midst of plenty' where this deficit is classically pronounced; as it clearly was in Ireland.

The Whigs Encumbered Estates Act (1949) was part of the machinery used to clear the small-holders and conacre labourers from the soil and given their total lack of representation in Westminster, outside of a small coterie of Repealers, their plight may be said to be consequent to and illustrative of the 'entitlements deficit' thesis. Nobody, publically at any rate, argued for the replacement of "Irish landlords" with "English" ones - what orthodox economists, and later, the bulk of the Russell cabinet argued for was the dissolution of insolvent estates, their speedy processing via the Chancery land courts and their 'encumbered' titles to be passed forthwith to "men of capital" irrespective of their provenance so that they could provide the investment necessary to transition the hotch-potch amalgam of small-holder plots into "viable large farms" geared for pasture.

Classic 'disaster capitalism', in other words, and opportunistic economic re-orientation of the Kleinian "Shock Doctrine" mould which paid scant attention to indigenous conceptions of land-ownership. The impetus to affect meaningful land reform (on the line of the "Three F's" - Fair Rent, Free Sale & Fixity of Tenure - and borrowing from the principles of the Ulster Custom) came far too late on the Repeal side, but even if O' Connell had put it on the agenda earlier it's doubtful whether any Westminster administration (Tory or Whig) would've risked alienating Irish landlords by jeopardizing "the rights of property".

William Smith O' Brien and Thomas Davis are credited with the Repeal Association's working paper on the land issue in 1845 and this was in part to counter the Devon Commission's recommendations which were essentially 'assisted emigration', 'land reclamation' and the proletarianisation of conacre labourers - sweeping the surplus population from the soil in short - by converting small-holdings into larger, more 'sustainable' agricultural conglomerates geared towards intensive pasture and cattle export as opposed to tillage and grain production (now rendered redundant in the face of eliminated tariffs post-1846 Corn Law Repeal).

Davis had written an important article in the Citizen prior to joining the Nation called 'Udalism and Feudalism' extolling the success of owner-occupied small-hold farming where a 'vested interest' in the soil ('a sturdy yeomanry') would erase many of the evils of an otherwise precarious tenantry subject to rent hikes and summary eviction. Russell actually came under the influence of Sharman Crawford and J.S. Mill both of whom (along with Davis, and later, Lalor and Mitchel) rejected the Edinburgh Review consensus of a tripartite re-structuring of Irish agriculture along these lines into landlords, comfortable farmers (20 acres plus) and paid labourers with no stake in the soil (i.e. the elimination of cottiers and the conacre system).

In these circles, Malthus was typically invoked to highlight the population explosion among the 'lower orders' and this I think is the key to grasping the net beneficiary effect which was commonly perceived & uttered among relief officials and policy-makers as the crisis unfolded and hearts hardened; Nassau Senior and Trevelyan particularly have left on record several statements to the effect that a mass loss of life would ultimately provide a necessary "Malthusian correction" as well as, and by extension, a boon in the long run to the Irish economy.

When you couple this undercurrent with the more fundamentalist strains of Clapham Evangelicalism (the blight being "the stroke of an all-wise Providence") and the natural prejudice of policy makers to regard Ireland's woes as rooted in the 'feckless, lazy habits' of its inhabitants you have a strong impulse, however unconscious it may be rooted in some, to simply turn aside and declare the famine "over" - as was done to all intents and purposes when the soup kitchens were wound down in mid-47.

From this point on the British purse strings were shut tight and the Irish Poor Law Union rate-payers were left to fend for themselves financially but with the important caveat that the land laws and workhouse relief requirements favoured mass evictions via the Gregory Clause - that the cabinet and astute observers in Parliament didn't realise the ultimate by-product of this composite of measures in advance, beggars belief; the long sought for idealised pyramidal structure in land tenure.

Gladstone's revolution was to belatedly concede that all along there was contested rights in the soil; what he referred to as "tribal customs" that merited legitimacy. And of course, the predominantly Gaelic speaking labourer & conacre class who comprised 3/4 of the pre-famine agrarian population whose vibrant oral culture still had a tenacious hold never allowed them to legitimise an historical dispossession - hence the parallel law codes and land "rights" of Whiteboy 'moral economy'.

John Mitchel and the English Chartists

John Mitchel was an Ulster Presbyterian barrister whose first cases involved defending Catholics in sundry land-related law suits; evictions, disputes over improvements, the general skewered relationship between landlord and tenant which typified the heart of the malaise of Ireland under the Union. It seems this is where his nationalist sympathies were first aroused, in addition to which, his family were one of those few among Ulster Protestants to still retain a proud memory of "the men of 1798".

Daniel O' Connell's preference to distance the Repeal movement from all association with the United Irishmen and its "ungodly French republicanism" was yet another reason why he baulked under the "Liberator's" authority. William Dillon's biography of Mitchel, still the most extensive treatment, quotes extensively from his Nation articles and the tone for the most part is nothing like what you'll find in Last Conquest or Jail Journal, or especially History of Ireland since the Treaty of Limerick (which is far less polemical than either) - as he is under supervision by editor Charles Gavan Duffy and reined in by the need to keep the Repeal movement from fracturing.

He cannot diverge in other words too much from the O' Connellite line which, after the election of the Whigs in the summer of 1846, was to be broadly supportive of government policy. By the winter of 1846 these tensions were coming to the fore. Next you had the Confederate Association which was formed in January 1847, the death of O' Connell in March 1847 and the first appearance of Fintan Lalor's letters to the Nation around the same time - each of these events acted as an accelerant in the tone of his writing. When the Poor Law Act in Autumn 1847 (complete with Gregory Clause) switched the burden of relief entirely onto the Irish landed proprietors he takes another switch in gear, this time spearheading the radical section within the Confederates who sought to foment a North-South Land League as protection against the escalating cases of eviction.

In early 1848 Mitchel resigned from the Confederation to set up his own newspaper (the United Irishman) with help from Lalor, Martin, Mangan, "Eva" of the Nation and Speranza, so that by the time the French Revolution breaks out in February and all the promises it may entail for a similar combustion in Ireland his rhetoric reaches a firebrand crescendo. Finally, after referring to Clarendon as His Majesty's "chief butcher and executioner" its offices are closed and in the words of John O' Leary "the thunder and the thunderer were gone".

Now, as anyone who is even fleetingly aware of the nature of government in the 1840's realises, what you are talking about is a small unrepresentative coterie of aristocrats who are determining policy. The British working class, as represented by the Chartists, were actually in favour of Repeal
unlike either the Tories or the Whigs, and even when O' Connell repudiated the Charter, many individual Chartists still supported his Repeal campaign nevertheless.

Potential synergies were already in place for a cross-channel working class alliance due to the high outward flow of Irish immigration to England even before the famine struck. The relatively high wages to be had taking in the English harvest is what initially drove so many Irish cottiers and labourers across the channel in the first place. For many, it was just necessary seasonal work, where they could top up the 'hanging gale' in September after the spuds had been picked - 8d per diem was the going wage in Ireland - while others would no doubt stay in England, drift into the towns and try their luck.

Thomas Carlyle in his essay "On Chartism" is quite savage about this Irish demographic, blaming them in fact for all sorts of evils; under-cutting wages, crime, prostitution, lax morality - feeding the very discontent Chartism (of which he disapproved) thrived upon. The Tithe War in Ireland (contemporaneous to the Swing Riots) was perhaps triggered by a rejuvenated sense of optimism over the recent granting of Catholic Emancipation and a perception perhaps that all reform would now come at once, including the hated agrarian tax to uphold the Anglican Church of Ireland - the O' Connelite and Whig alliance at this time was a key juncture for both countries as it attempted to absorb the radical energies being expressed in both country-sides. The 1834 English Poor Law was bitterly opposed by the progressives, the trade unions, the movement for the free press etc.. out of which grew Chartism, but all along they cursed O' Connell for enabling Melbourne to dilute the reformist plank of the Whig's programme.

There was also a radical ideological undercurrent borne of the French Revolution which, given the right circumstances, could have provided the basis for a more lasting cross-channel working class partnership. These linkages were exemplified in the figure of Thomas Paine in exile becoming an honorary United Irishman not to mention Pitt's exasperation with the founding of the United Britons and the continual suspicions of Fox dabbling with the "English Jacobins" - all of whom dedicated to promoting Jacobinical French republicanism in both islands. Conservative fears were well grounded as cross-channel plotting and republican networks were being rapidly consolidated between Paris, Dublin, London and the free port of Hamburg; the O' Connor brothers in particular (uncles to Feargus O' Connor, the Chartist leader) were associates of Brinsley Sheridan & Francis Burdett, a central reform figure in the post-Napoleonic period of discontent in England that would lead to 'Peterloo'.

However, the Catholic leadership in Ireland quickly repudiated French-style republicanism and O' Connell (a witness of the violence of 1798) became a committed pacifist - though many working class Irish (Bronterre O' Brien et al.) who emigrated to England became quickly embroiled in trade union politics and reform agitation underpinned by republican principles that were more easily accommodated in the English towns. Dorothy Thomson, in fact, has a few good chapters on this in one of her Chartist studies where she notes the strong disproportionate presence of Irish among their ranks.

Feargus O' Connor's argument was that the "Six Points" if granted, would naturally lead in any case to a dismantling of the Act of Union as a fully democratised parliament would return an overwhelming majority of Repeal MP's in Ireland. It's interesting to trace the disillusionment of the Repeal Association with Russell's Whig government over the course of the famine - first manifesting over the Viceroy's rejection of its proposals in October 1845 - inaugurating the Repeal split into the Young Ireland Confederates in early 1847 and then, later that Autumn when the entire burden of relief was thrown onto the Irish Poor Law system another split again between moderate and "physical force" Confederates.

This latter fissure hinged on the attitude of Irish landlords with the moderates (Duffy, D'Arcy McGee, Smith O' Brien) still insisting they had a positive role to play vis-a vis Repeal but the physical force group (the 'Mitchelites' - Lalor, Devin Reilly, John Martin) denouncing the widespread evictions which threw them as a class 'beyond the pale' in their estimation; more part of the problem than the solution.

So, to whom does English Chartism reach out to among these three disparate groups (O' Connellite Repealers, Moderate Confederates & Mitchelites) - when its gathering a head of steam to present the Third Charter at Kennington Commons? The latter in fact and the most radical of the lot, the Mitchelites. By the time the French Revolution breaks out in February 1848 you have radical Confederates and 'physical force' Chartists sharing platforms in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Bristol - there are five Confederate clubs set up in London alone, with their presses re-producing Chartist speeches & literature (and vice versa).

When Mitchel was arrested, Chartist candle light vigils and solidarity marches are organised, while the British government, increasingly wary of a triangular relationship of solidarity developing between Lamartine's republican government, Irish Confederates and English Chartists, sets spies into all their camps and hardballs the French into repudiating both of them. As mentioned, the whole alliance between the Irish Repeal movement and the English working classes was the very synergy that the Whigs hoped to destroy in 1834 when the Lichfield House Compact was made - something many English radicals never forgave O' Connell for as it set back the programme of democratic reform in England for another decade at least.

The Irish leaders were much more conservative politically and socially and took a long time to warm to radical British working class ideas mainly because like O' Connell they were drawn from the ranks of the Catholic gentry and middle class but when the famine crisis emerged and intensified it tended to crystallize things for many of them, eventually seeing in Chartism via the stimulus of the French revolution a republican mandate that was conducive and made sense to them both.

As a postscript, in modern times, Mitchel has been maligned unfairly on two scores; his opposition to abolition and his supposed "rabid Anglophobia" (bizarrely for a self-confessed 'proud Saxon'). The context of his support for slavery is at first baffling; his father belonged to the "New Light" Presbyterians (who were the most radical and republican Ulster grouping) and a sworn United Irishman who subscribed to the tenets of the universal "Rights of Man" and the levelling principles which underpinned the French Revolution and the US Constitution.

It is thought Mitchel came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle (who himself grew to support slavery) and possibly a perverse strain of German Romanticism and was only emboldened in his defence of it when O' Connell refused to accept donations from Southern Planters. Nevertheless, the conditions which awaited immigrant Irish in America played a part too as there was a widespread perception that abolition would drastically undercut wages for working class Irish labourers - Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White is the lengthiest treatment you'll find of the inherent racism of many among the Irish community in Philadelphia, Boston and New York during this time. Smith O' Brien visited him in the South a decade after the famine and gave him a right tongue-lashing for supporting this "hideous institution", this crime "against all things human" - but still the pair remained life-long friends.

To renew the link with Carlyle. His "Reminiscenses of My Irish Journey in 1849"
is a disgraceful book full of bile and condescending hatred devoid of empathy. His description of the workhouses as piggeries, their inhabitants as sub-human, his repulsion with beggary etc. almost defy belief coming from the pen of such an honoured scribe. Its a wonder in fact such a disagreeable character as he clearly was by then was taken in so much by the Young Irelanders.

Carlyle's "French Revolution" had sealed his reputation as one of England's greatest writers and Mitchel and Gavan Duffy clearly held him in the highest esteem. The only qualifying remark you can make is that the "Journey" was published posthumously from unedited manuscripts. Charles Gavan Duffy himself produced a memoir of their tour together and in it remarked that Carlyle would never have allowed some of his "less diplomatic" remarks see the light of day.

Tellingly however, Mitchel wrote a favourable review of Carlyle's collection of Oliver Cromwell's speeches and writings in the Nation prior to Carlyle's earlier visit in 1847 - a review which Carlyle was pleasantly surprised to find was devoid of the usual nationalist invective as Mitchel was quite even-handed in assessing Cromwell's brief period in Ireland as well as demonstrating a firm grasp of all those qualities in Cromwell which Carlyle came to admire so much. So much for Mitchel "the rabid Anglophobe".

To counter the charge of emotiveness in Mitchel's writing is more straightforward and explicable. Mitchel is not a 'passive academic' but an active participant in all these events who is simply putting on paper (i.e. transcribing in blood) the thoughts and more importantly "feelings" of possibly the bulk of those forced to flee to the States. The welcome receptions in New York for Smith O' Brien, Meagher and himself were truly staggering - each of whom could have landed plum jobs on the back of their popularity with Irish-Americans.

Last Conquest is a polemic written only a few years after the 1867 Fenian uprising and is intended to rouse the spirit of Irishmen both at home and abroad in America not provide a definitive "factual" account of the famine. It also has to be balanced with the highly sanitised versions of the famine coming from many British writers, chief of whom, Trevelyan's widely read The Irish Crisis - declared the whole thing to be over in Autumn 1847!

So, context is everything when reading what he has left us from the famine years - even, and especially, the later published works which were written while he was editor for the Southern Citizen and defending slavery up to, during and after the American Civil War.

Uganda's Anti-Gay Laws and the Western Liberal Reflex

It's a fact of life, probably in most of the globe as we speak, and usually in so-called 'underdeveloped' countries that being gay is frowned upon, oftentimes savagely. There's no value judgement whatsoever implied in saying this; my default position here being perfect neutrality - but with what speed & assurance we all alight on our liberal hobbyhorse propounding the best way forward, pointing fingers and denouncing wholesale laws which are clearly 'savage and backward'!

I think what's missing here is the corresponding intolerance of people in these countries who are of the honestly held viewpoint that homosexuality is an unwanted and undesirable factor in their family lives. I personally have no difficulty getting my head around the fact that some people's environment predisposes them to view homosexuality with nothing less than abject horror - this attitude is reinforced by everything said and done around them and little by way of progress is ever going to be gained by telling same folk they are deficient or lacking in some respect vis-a-vis our own 'remarkably, tolerant and wonderful society'.

Anyway, the progressive liberal agenda then, the 'movement' that is, which I by and large subscribe to as exercised here in the West - as obviously there's ethical & human rights issues involved in forcibly constraining the expression of innate sexual urges & genuine feelings of love and affection which clearly do exist - this 'movement' simply needs to re-assess it's self-confident onwards and upwards momentum when it seeks to apply it's own standards in the wholly different context of developing countries where traditional mores prevail.

There's a time-lag dissonance here that can't be cured merely by pointing the finger & howling 'oh how barbaric' as clearly the (anti-gay) attitude is culturally embedded and to a large extent derived from (a) an often harsh living environment (b) strong 'tribal' traditions and (c) the greater power and authority of religious leaders.

Whereas wealth, secularisation and an atomised & 'individualistic' metropolitan life are probably the strongest factors in promoting more liberal sexual attitudes over here, in myriad working class, rural or 'traditional' societies the reaction received 'on being gay' of an age mate of said vintage will differ enormously. Even within our own Western metropolitan pockets of 'enlightenment' the matter is scarcely viewed as typical or mainstream whatever way we choose to play on the semantics.

I wouldn't be so sure on people (from 'developing' countries) 'gradually coming around' either although it's always a distinct possibility. Can we lay claim though to have discovered the correct path for all communities everywhere to regulate themselves? There are in place many hard to define 'folkways' which amount to a corroboration of what's taken to be acceptable 'masculine' behaviour - and these don't usually emerge out of thin air but are tried and tested formulas which account for much group cohesion and solidarity. An influx of open-minded liberalism foisted down a community's throat under the guise of catching up with the modernity express can rapidly backfire in spectacular ways.

In addition, I would be quite surprised if there wasn't a large element of social conditioning involved in many individual's transition to homosexuality. I'm not saying it's anything like a lifestyle choice which a person can pick and choose at whim and drop just as conveniently if the need arises - there is obviously a large innate biological determinant at play - but for many folk perhaps wavering on the brink of an undetermined (possibly bisexual) disposition it will be the readily available social re-inforcers (mores & folkways) which sway them one or the other. In the West we are currently riding a wave of liberal acceptance.

Hollywood, which is extremely influential and the media in general have sanctioned in unprecedented fashion over the past twenty years a 'gay lifestyle' and this has brought many into the 'pink' fold who would have otherwise knuckled down and gotten on with their (to them) private and personal 'deviations'; bearing them stoically for want of disturbing the familial applecart. In some sense there is attached to it all a culture of rebellion - in the absence of any other discernible political & social cause around which to rally a disgruntled youth may at least don the mantle of disaffected sexual outcast.

Given this, as it appears to me, somewhat transient and possibly short-lived cultural phenomenon who are we then to inculcate the mix any further by declaring an all out war on the recalcitrance towards (a moreover dictated) change on behalf of traditional societies?

On the level of down to earth human impulses you have to feel for anyone undergoing the torture of what is (ostensibly at any rate) the pain of social ostracisation on account of scarcely alterable, strong sexual preferences and the banishment of said individual from their nearest and dearest wholly on their account. This is a tragedy of weighty existential proportions which few mothers regardless of how hard they've tuned their heart will fail to respond.

Fathers though are less inclined and such is the male transmitted 'folkway' in many traditional cultures that some can stoutly proclaim 'your dead to me' without a flicker of remorse as in many ways the avowed choice of sexuality is a running insult to everything he has set his heart on teaching the boy. This is just the stark presentation of the case but it probably runs true in many instances - there's something within 'homosexuality' itself in these places which is an affront to people's basic notions of family life and much of what it comprises

The fact of the matter is that homosexuality is viewed as abnormal in many of these areas and no amount of de-stigmatising talk sessions will ever erase that reality. Growing up confessing a tolerance for homosexuality will get you demoted very rapidly amongst your circle of peers in most post-pubertal age sets within traditional societies.This set of attitudes simply mushrooms outwards and becomes the de facto attitudinal stance of all and sundry come adulthood. It takes an exceptional character in such 'harsh environments' to buck that trend and effect a rapport or a means by which the community at large can accommodate the emergence of homosexuality.

There's such a thing after all as 'cultural cringe' whereby earnest Western-orientated progressive liberal folk in these countries try their hardest to emulate our norms, reject almost wholesale the traditional milieu from whence they sprang and basically sputter with embarrassment when asked to explain the 'entrenchment' of anti-gay attitudes - but most sensitive, thinking types (in positions of power) who are truly attuned to Western liberal advances must also pay attention to local constituencies and domestic populist sentiment.

They will be acutely aware and in most cases proud of their own traditional heritage, it's long-held customs and so on (certainly not all of which can be construed as 'backward') - and won't bear lightly charges of 'barbarism' being applied to them.

The attitude has an in-built logic more perceptible to the native and it's through the offices of the more open-minded sort that change can be best secured; as opposed to blundering into a complex foreign environment all guns blazing and demanding instant realignment with our own value systems - which smacks of a patronising, almost neo-colonial type assertion.

In places like Uganda they want to do things their own way first and foremost and the most promising avenues it would seem in protecting gay rights in this instance would be to understand the culture in it's own terms; establishing links with informed locals and not making unilateral uninformed chauvinistic assertions of right.

The real factors which contribute to the anti-gay attitude in these places should give us cause to reflect what type of 'education' would be more effective would they not? There's just no point in approaching it from a singular plane of understanding as we seem to be doing at present.

The following video is pretty informative vis-a-vis the type of struggle which lies ahead. Some of the ostracised gays in Uganda are living in unimaginably dire conditions with zero government support or sympathy, in fact, legislation there is becoming increasingly intolerant -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV0tS6G8NNU

In a lot of respects the cultural diffusion of Western mores asked for, demands transplanting an alien 'liberal' orientated attitude into the mindset of parents of a traditional community - in practice the difficulties to be surmounted in terms of accumulated stigma and 'negative' moral sanction are insuperable. The individual so afflicted with his 'confused' sexuality will most likely bolt elsewhere and/or hide it indefinitely. Sure, in theory cultural mores can be malleable and subject to constant revision but in practice they are stubbornly reinforced. Your talking about overcoming feelings and attitudes ingrained from the earliest age without any corresponding rebuttal from the predominant media or traditional leaders (local chiefs, imams, religious guides etc). This is an extremely sticky web of prejudice from which to extricate and ultimately successfully project oneself.

More often than not parents in these environments will be unsympathetic to their child's sexual conversion - life is tough enough without your first or second born son suddenly declaring himself a 'whoopsy'. Cross-dressing shamans were common among some of the North American Indian tribes and the role of village necromancer traditionally soaked up many with a 'liminal' sexuality - kind of like the social structure opening up to provide a function in the absence of any other socially approved variant. I don't downplay the nobility of best intentions in providing a safe haven of love and understanding for your offspring; just questioning how widespread these intentions may actually be found among traditional communities.

Uganda anti-gay death penalty bill reintroduced - CBS News

Uganda is by no means the only country to have adopted such measures either nor will it be the last and the harsh penalties adopted are ultimately populist by nature - they correspond very much to grass roots frustration at effeminisation in all it's forms. As said previously a harsh living environment tends to produce a ground swell of intolerance towards perceived 'bullet-dodging limp-wristery'; possibly if some calamity afflicted us in our own affluent abodes we too would respond with equal harshness. This only reinforces the point I am making about family's not wishing to be 'bothered' about the whole issue of homosexuality; you keep it to yourself or naff off out of town. It drains their resources as it usually takes an able hand out of circulation as he will now be unable to show his face any further for fear of violent physical reprisals. It's very much a chicken and egg situation but until you address the underlying economic constraints which force behaviours into the aforementioned prejudicial boxes little reform of lasting merit can be achieved.

I'm not sure whether I enjoy seeing standardised ready-wrapped liberal sensibilities recoil in horror at a social structure which lies beyond their comprehension but that indeed appears to be the recurring theme here. Homosexuality, whether you like it or not is an abomination in most of sub-Saharan Africa and illustrating legislation by governments as an attempt to keep it in check as an example of 'backwardness', 'lack of development' or anything else as the solitary criterion from which to base an 'analysis' would stretch any man's patience. This is clearly an "embedded" phenomenon that has to be dealt with using different tools of analysis and understanding.

By way of illustration this sort of stuff is not far behind us here in the 'enlightened West'. I think we in Ireland were in 1982 or thereabouts when homosexuality was decriminalised. I remember at least in school at the time there seems to have been a frantic rush to "acclimatise" people to the new "arrangements" as when our religious teacher organised a couple of pep-talk sessions (obviously dictated from above) with our class. We were given newspapers with stories of "queer-bashing" episodes and asked to comment and expand on our feelings about the whole issue of homosexuality. Very patriarchal culture back then where 'men were men' and women's place was still in the home, as in corporal punishment was still widespread and kids definitely knew their place in the larger scheme of things - as in step out of line and any sundry adult could give you a whack, or a twisted ear, or a slap on the back of the head.

All very brutish at any rate compared to today. But I distinctly recall that this issue of "quares" (as then called) was all over the headlines due to a spate of savage attacks by roaming gangs picking on the "suspected" and literally beating the crap out of them, merely for their inclinations, much like Uganda today - so, our whole society badly needed a crash course in human rights management. Its not something I followed closely with any great attention but its only as you passed into the nineties that you realised a massive sea-change had occurred, slowly beneath the surface; helped largely by imported TV and film, mainly from America.

But lingering prejudices yet remain .. after all, we are not so non-traditional as yet to say that a son or daughter's "announcement" would not come as a shock, if not a body blow in many instances. You can erect in it's defence the whole principled panoply of modern enlightened liberalism but few parents deep down will accept with good grace a revelatory clanger of this nature. Dress it up any which way you please but for most folks an unsuspected ceremonial outing (as in a drum-roll "de-closetting") will be a downer of cataclysmic proportions.

What too, if he's an only child?

Automatically the thoughts of cossetting prospective grandchildren into the final years of dotage are scuppered on the rocks of biological caprice. In generational terms it's the virtual annulment of one's lineage whereas on the social plane it becomes an unmentionable albatross. Conversations are now steered away from your offspring instead of towards them.

But who cares what people think, right?

Wrong, we're social animals with exquisitively tuned sensibilities - a pack of jackals are now let loose in the tearoom with cake and crumpet on their hungry unforgiving tongues. And this is only the knee-jerk response among the 'respectable' urban middle classes - think of what it's like in rural farming communities? Or in traditional industrialised working class areas where labour power & family wealth comes from the strength of a man's sinews - here more often than not it's an unspeakable abomination. And now, where the social fabric is loose to the point of non-existence amidst a city's atomised high rise apartments there will be the cradle of our outcast sons and daughters.

A lot of parents are emotionally disconnected from the inner lives of their children particularly when it comes to sexuality which is often shoved under the carpet and banished from the realm of broach-able subjects. The event when it does fall is often like a hammer blow particularly when your children do not exhibit the stereotypical behavioural responses of your 'typical' gay person.

In general though a healthy open relationship with one's children should elicit much by way of forewarning. I have something like sixty odd first cousins most of whom were born within fifteen years of one another and regular gatherings of extended family meant we all grew up feeling fairly close & intimate. Out of all of us (ages 35-55 now) only one of us has emerged to be gay (we're all either married or have been in long-term heterosexual relationships) and that was scarcely an eye-brow raiser.

As far back as I can recall she used to be a tomboy; playing football, cowboys & Injuns, horsing around play fighting, keeping a tight crew cut - anything in fact but act the part of a little girl (to the disbelief of her mother at times). A beautiful blonde too all her life - extremely attractive, not 'butch' in any sense. Despite all the evident signals which should have amounted to sufficient forewarning I gather this came as a bit of a shock to both her parents (now divorced) - she flew off to Vegas and got married to her long-time lover about five years ago. She couldn't be any other way really, it's simply who she's always been as far as I can tell - even before the hormonal scattering of the pubertal years announced themselves. I don't think there was ever much of a blowout with her parents - it just kind of triggered the readjustment of certain mental parameters and expectations.

Where I grew up (a typical Dublin suburb in the 70's) being 'gay' was practically unheard of and those who were became pitiable objects of derision. There was no instinctual sympathy whatsoever with the 'condition' and were somebody to announce they had any sympathy (let alone be gay themselves) life would have become rapidly unliveable. Your talking here about getting a hiding every day for the rest of your school days.

Tough guys, macho wannabees and would be hard men lurked on every corner & kids instinctually gravitated towards what was good for their own security - this meant invariably the sorry projection of what their own germinal notions of 'manliness' consisted; all for the sake of street 'cred' and survival. You can attribute much of this testosterone boosting behaviour to group dynamics & psychology but you can also rest assured that it's an inwired propensity of the typical male psyche; evolution wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

So, there you have it, on an instinctual level and certainly for the more red-blooded males among us homosexuality is at it's core inescapably and vaguely repulsive. The beauty of (some) civilisations is that they attempt to soak up all that testosterone by channelling and displacing it elsewhere - martial ideologies, armed forces, packed football terraces fulminating an us/them mentality & even provide us with a hard-working liberal media which does it's utmost to chip away at instinctually derived prejudices. Softening up in the process our more cruel and unforgiving natures. "Nature (after all), is what we are put on this earth to rise above", as Hepburn told Bogie.

Many churches do promote homophobia but as mentioned earlier when 'queer-bashing' reached outrageous proportions here in the mid-80's the official condemnatory stance of 'adultdom' came to us kids not in the form of guards or secular teachers but through the auspices of the church - it was priests & Christian Brothers who piped up & told us it was wrong, some from the pulpit, others in the classroom; they were the traditional 'voice of compassion' who took the lead in such matters.

Christianity, for all it's faults does have an official ideology which looks after the downtrodden, the poor and the oppressed and many of it's public practitioners have happened to take this aspect of it's role seriously - some of the world's great social reformers were after all priests. This levelling principle explains it's longevity more than any other factor in my opinion; it's why the public cling onto it and it's why they expect them in return to be the voice of the voiceless when the need arises. In many regions of the world and throughout time if you couldn't get sympathy from the Church then you wouldn't find it anywhere. Unhappily, as we're all aware, the inverse to this proposition has also been true.

On the subject of values & instincts. I was brought up a Catholic (now happily lapsed) and this is I presume where I get many of my moral compass points from (aside from my father who never attended mass) and my understanding of the Christian message up to the point where I reached my teens was that it was wrong and incompatible with Christ's teachings to bully or discriminate against anyone on account of any sexual proclivities that they may have. I never heard any priest ever condemn homosexuality and I've never heard any of them speak with anything but compassion on sundry social issues.

It seemed to me, if anything, that the church's presence provided a civilising rudder which helped keep in check the natural propensities of teenage kids to run adrift altogether. Priests kept us on the straight and narrow, they were the respected voice of moral authority. Dubliners of a generation previous may well dispute this but in our time many of the excesses (corporal punishment and so on) were being rapidly expunged and becoming unacceptable. So, whereas my value system predisposed me to view homosexuality in a tolerable & compassionate light the same cannot be said for my instincts which have been honed through millenia's sludge of crimson tooth & claw evolution.

And frankly, the sight, thought or mention of two men kissing each other turns my stomach and no amount of social engineering will ever erase that gut instinct. Do I need to apologise for that? Most probably - as though I can do little about it, yet it still amounts to an in-wired evolutionary snobbery. A few of the male gay people I know tell me that the attraction towards the same sex was something that was always there even before the years of puberty. They just never had any inclination towards women whatsoever, fullstop.

This is probably the case with most gay people. Another guy on the other hand who is the brother of a friend of mine always behaved in your stereotypical red-blooded male fashion, had a string of girlfriends in his teens but then met calamity in the form of a she-bitch who shattered his heart and initiated a deep depression from which he emerged professing a new found sexuality. Today, he appears as happy as Larry with a live-in lover half his age.

Different strokes for different folks.

I personally am not inclined to regard this as the result of a natural inclination but rather the result of him having received a battering in the often brutal quest for a 'normal' heterosexual mate. If the signals your receiving from the opposite sex disincline you to fancy your chances the need for intimacy and sexual relations will nevertheless oblige you to look elsewhere for fulfillment. I've seen borderline cases of this nature in two spheres; one in College where I studied English literature & Anthropology where there was a higher proportion of openly gay students than in any other faculty and the other in the pub trade where I once managed a bar for an openly gay publican.

In the first case, in college, I've seen one or two openly professed straight guys getting 'sucked in' gradually into the social whirl of the Gay & Lesbian Society of which one of our lecturers was a prominent member (though he himself was a self-confessed 'pendulum'). "I come from a very balanced family", he'd say. "My brother's gay, my sister's lesbian and I'm bisexual".

Anyway, to cut a long story short I've seen instances of folk getting very confused about their sexuality in their early days and emerging from it all years later wishing no-one could remember their 'experiments'.

The openly gay publican I worked for would hire attractive looking young men with what I would describe as, to put it charitably, "weak and impressionable personalities" - malleable and suggestible types who would have a hard time of it asserting themselves anywhere. They would be 'groomed' in one of his boozers for a couple of months until they were dispatched down the road to his other pub - an openly gay bar - where their heterosexual dispositions would be test to their limits. Needless to say, some of them were here on working visas and were open to exploitation on several levels.

Once you put your hand in that honey jar ..

In a nutshell though, I see the social structures created by these necessarily harsh and abused environments (i.e in Uganda) as tending not to give a lamplighter's fig for the liberal West's 'luxurious' adoption of homosexuality as a bona fide lifestyle or otherwise choice - survival alone is too immediate a deal to be ultimately concerned with such perceived wanton frivolity and the professions of being 'gay' in such environments are often likewise perceived to be the final acts of capitulation of determined foot-draggers who are wont to spit in the eye of everything their family has hitherto struggled under - though the examples I have in mind are admittedly more circumscribed to the African context where economic matters in the form of basic bread & butter subsistence tend to over-ride all other concerns.

Families just don't have the patience to be dealing with what is essentially to them a life-sucking & counter-productive pre-occupation; sexuality in short is an unimportant side issue which most folks who are irretrievably bound towards the expression of their 'inverted' sexuality tend in all respect to keep to themselves and so spare their kin the unwanted headache of having to digest it.

If it must happen, keep it private seems to be the rule.

Irish Water and the Commodification of the Commons

Omission, distortion and minimization.

Only one thing on the average Irish person's mind that morning (Mon, Oct 13th) & that was the previous Saturday's 100,000 strong march against the commodification of our commons.

The Times begged to differ and told us instead what we should be thinking about. "Oh Dear, were we all wrong; shouldn't we be thinking about the Universal Social Charge? Isn't that what's important now?

Not a bit of it.

Simply put, there's no feedback loop any more in this so-called democracy.
And two 'serious' broadsheets has always been a farce. You want two editors telling the country what to think?

Give me a break.

Government are reeling on this one and I think its finally dawned on them that the next election could be lost over it - hence all the embarrassed row-backs with talk of price caps, anti-privitisation legislation & the muscling of Irish Water itself to apologise for its multitudinous cock-ups. Up to October 11th, before the second big march was held, the Fine Gael/Labour coalition were haughty at best, contemptuous at worst at the demonstrations.

Sunday's opinion poll (12th Oct) in the Independent sobered them up pretty sharpish (showing a massive surge in support for Independents, Sinn Féin and the Socialists) and all in all I'd say its illustrative of top tier contempt for the struggles of lower income groups who are being whacked disproportionately. The last time the Irish rose in such numbers was to see the Pontiff in the Phoenix park so "people power" is a total novelty for them & they're slowly digesting that reality.

The infrastructural revamp "requiring billions" is more an IMF imposed neoliberal mantra who've always coupled austerity with hocking off state assets. Shoddy pipes, leaks, conservation problems all exist but no-one talked about it in such panicked terms until Anglo black-holed us and debt repayments had to be prioritised.

Metering is mainly optional in other international semi-state partnerships and when installed its usually intended to bring down the base charge (as in England) at customer request - whereas here its presented as a fait accompli and the confusion over pricing structure, allied with the germinal signs of a price-gouging operation on the make (company bonuses, sub-radar rail-roaded Bills) all give sinister overtones to a compulsory metering regime.

Bolivians rose up over a decade ago to overthrow a government who allowed a fully privitised water utility (Bechtel) to re-write state contracts which everyone presumed protected against hiked municipal water rates but the reverse danger here is another stuffed quango leeching the exchequer via under-regulated outsourcing - junket culture and the mentality of prolific public sector wastage being a highly developed skill-set here.

Then its the principle of the thing; its a forced debt repayment commodification (a money-raising gimmick basically, tapping into the veins of those least able to afford it) - of life's most basic ingredient on the heels of (and ultimately because of) a prior "socialised" multi-billion euro bailout for roulette wheel capitalists - the electorate ultimately will decide whether these two issues are unconnected but the line in the sand, and the apparent obviousness of this, is a lot clearer now than its ever been.

People have had enough, end of.

Oh we'll survive, these are first world problems at the end of the day, and at least we don't have cholera outbreaks to top it all off (as yet). Countries with stressed water-tables, not permanent rainfall, are the ones in real long-term difficulty. I heard a World Bank Vice President announce once that if the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, the wars of the 21st will be fought over water. At the end of the day, on the global front, dwindling freshwater supplies has corporates salivating.

"Under the current model of globalization, everything is for sale. Areas once considered our common heritage are being commodified, commercialized and privatized at an alarming rate. Today, more than ever before, the targets of this assault comprise the building blocs of life as we know it on this planet, including freshwater, the human genome, seeds and plant varieties, the air and atmosphere, the oceans and outer space. The assault on, and defence of, the commons is one of the great ideological and social struggles of our times." - Maude Barlow

Fairtrade Conceived as a Species of Charity?

What is Fairtrade?

Y'know, if I were a smart young West African and given our region produces the raw material for half the world's chocolate I'd make it my life's goal to destroy Cadbury's, Hershey's and all the rest of them plucking up our cocoa beans on the cheap ...... I'd have a "No Bean leaves the Country unless its in a Chocolate bar" campaign.

At the turn of the century in Ireland, D.P. Moran and Arthur Griffith argued English manufacturers were strangling Irish growth as cash-strapped Irish consumers bought cheaper imported foreign goods while indigenous nascent industries were strangled in the crib as cottage home-spuns couldn't compete; likewise little incentive was provided by Westminster to alter the status quo. And why should they? Many of the British Liberal and Conservatives owned the very English manufacturing interests which would be threatened were they to do so. Land was our greatest resource but post-famine consolidation favoured ranching to satisfy a foreign export market - "Ireland had fulfilled her destiny and become an English pasture and sheep walk" as Marx caustically observed.

Our hands were tied and as a result small farms haemorrhaged all but the first born; the post-famine exodus from the land till the Great War tripling that of "An t-ochras" with 20 million Americans claiming 1st/2nd generation Irish descent by 1900. Bled from the land of their birth just like today in West Africa where doctors per head of population is 100 times less than the European average facilitating an Ebola outbreak which no-one gave a flying proverbial about until it threatens to land on our own doorstep.

Sweet, sugar-coated irony indeed; by with-drawing supports for indigenous enterprise, by crushing a domestic tertiary sector centred on the un-tapped resource of cocoa processing, denying funding for dedicated University departments, the IMF/World Bank system of "structural adjustment" - raw material export in short - crushes, for the benefit of Western corporates and our own engorged portfolios any chance that that young West African hopeful has of carving out a life for himself in the land of his birth & when he comes over here confabulating tales of political oppression, as the Geneva Convention makes no allowance for "economic war crimes" which our Refugee Commissioners dutifully background to exchequer exhaustion, we give him 20 euro a week & stuff him in a hostel for eight years. Corporate/bureaucratic vampires need only give them back their country, and peeps - buy the fair feckin trade chocolate bar. Not a lot to ask.

President Higgins criticises Direct Provision - RTÉ News

Under EU law and the Geneva Convention asylum seekers are "our own" and its farcical that some families have had to wait for up to ten years to have their applications processed while living on the 19 euro pittance - I know several families in this position and its soul-destroying for them; particularly the men, who often come from cultures where it is an abomination for them to sit about idly. Leaving aside the humanitarian dimension, it doesn't even make sense to keep them in limbo from a narrow "penny-pinching" economic perspective as the vast bulk of them are itching to get working and will take any employment offered once given the opportunity; they simply want to get on with their lives.

Some refuges/asylum seekers here are even working voluntarily in charity shops and actually helping to raise money for the Irish homeless along with other worthy causes .. more initiatives of this nature, encouraging rapid integration and language acquisition via voluntary placements would be progressive I think; even manning evening soup kitchens for our own homeless.

Most asylum seekers are smart, get up and go types with proven initiative (getting out of war zones and sundry hell-hole situations takes a bit of savvy) and represent an untapped resource under our very noses - extend them a bit of responsibility and they will be an undoubted asset to this country in the years ahead; do the opposite, let their communities rot and disintegrate and we'll wind up like France and England with an alienated, ghettoised sub-culture & the rise of an unbearable quasi-fascist far right led by Kevin Myers et al. squawking "Ireland for the Irish".

On the wider front, I reckon the battle was lost when they wound down UNCTAD and turfed out the dependency theorists in the mid to late 70's. Once the Prebisch-Singer school lost its forum and the WTO came into existence in tandem with Reaganomics and Thatcherite "TINA", corporates got to under-write trade rules and dismantle those protective barriers behind which grass-roots led, resource-based, indigenous tertiary industries could develop - "kicking away the ladder" as Chang would have it.

Ricardo's "Comparative advantage" had long upheld a veneer of respectability for 19th C. exploitative imperial economics marching under the banner of "Free Trade" but with the collapse of the socialist Non-Aligned Movement it has now become an accepted truism within the entire discourse concerning "development", shrunk (and conceived in the popular domain at least), as a SPECIES OF CHARITY - thus the perception that everything revolves around "fund solicitation". Privately funded or NGO/bilateral partnerships for micro-projects (bore-holes, farm inputs, medical centres etc.) are in the short-term commendable but a drop in the ocean and actually counter-productive when you think of the greater needs for (drum-roll cliché) "long-term sustainable & equitable development".

Africa needs to industrialize on its own terms, like South Korea did - not be force-fed SAP programmes (or their thinly veiled derivatives) which merely reproduce the same skewered patterns of structural dependence. Generally speaking, IMF/WB led development actually encourages the creation of corrupt elites who monopolise licensing contracts and oversee resource extraction while the "debt model" ensures dependency on balance of payments support. We'd all like to see a broader, multi-disciplinary approach to conceiving development but for myself much of the diversity that is there is still constrained within the straightjacket of the Western-led neoliberal model.