I graduated from the Trinity College Dublin M.Phil. in Creative Writing in September 2016. Over the last decade a number of people have asked me if the course, or a writing degree generally, is worth doing. I’ve also spoken to many people who did Creative Writing MFAs, MAs or M.Phils in the U.S., Ireland and the UK. Their structure and quality vary wildly, and these observations are not to be taken as gospel. I offer advice only because for me the degree was a big step forward in my writing, and what worked for me might well work for you. Some of this advice is stuff that I didn’t do, but wish I had. What’s that line from the Sunscreen Song? Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Should you do an MFA?

Do you want to do an MFA? Having one is by no means a requirement for being a working writer, though when done deliberately and conscientiously, it can be useful. If you want to, do you have the financial and personal resources to do so? Many MFAs offer full scholarships (and these are worth seriously pursuing if you are not independently wealthy), but you will still need to feed, clothe and house yourself and your dependents for 1-2 years. I was fortunate enough to have my tuition and housing paid by a scholarship, but still had to spend the entirety of my savings and borrow a modest amount just to eat and drink. If you are in the U.S., it is worth looking at the options for in-state tuition wherever you live, which are often substantially more affordable. Exploit governmental and other funding sources to the maximum. There is much to be said for doing the cheapest reputable degree. I would venture that no MFA is worth going tens of thousands of dollars into debt for, no matter the famous names above the door, but that’s a personal decision. Please don’t be obnoxious about getting into or attending a more prestigious MFA. The discourse is bad enough as it is.

What you get from an MFA is a credential which allows you to teach writing in most universities, especially in the U.S. It is very far from a guarantee of employment, considering that there are many, many fewer positions available than people with terminal teaching degrees. It offers the possibility of acquiring a network of writers and editors who may be professionally useful in the future, though it is something of a dice roll as to just how much. I liked my classmates and our teachers, but none of us did very much for each other on a career level.

Most importantly, a program gives you the space and legitimacy to write full time for 1-2 years. This is not to be underestimated. If you use your time well you can turn yourself from a talented amateur to a professional working writer, albeit probably not one able to support yourself from writing alone. You will finish your degree with a thesis that for many forms the spine of their first novel, pamphlet, or story collection. That is no small thing. The world of publishing has never been more competitive or hostile to serious literature, but that is not a reason not to try.

I began the degree after a year of living in San Francisco. My visa, job, and relationship all came to an end within a few weeks of each other, and I was faced with the prospect of returning to my mother’s house in Dublin for the foreseeable. I had always intended to do masters, but had it in my head to do something more “useful”. Perhaps to prove to myself I was a real writer, I wrote a novel the year that I was away. As such, applying for the Creative Writing degree was a vote of confidence in myself; that what I was spending hours of my scarce free time on was worthwhile, even if any financial stability was a long distance off. That confidence may be something you feel you need too. I would only caution against getting an MFA because you feel that without one, you are in some way inadequate.

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- Sandymount Strand, August 2016

Preparation and Community

More important and less explored than the question of whether one should do an MFA is the question of how one should comport oneself while doing it. At the most basic level, a writing masters usually involves the creation of substantial amounts of original material for submission to a workshop-style class, and likely some other, more specific classes, like a class on voice or a visiting writer series. You might be writing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, or some combination thereof. Your responsibility is not only to write, but to read and critique your peers’ work in a series of structured, usually in-person meetings. Depending on the program, there may be a teaching component, typically in your second year. You may also be permitted or required to complete or audit traditional academic classes. My own degree offered a mandatory class on the publishing industry, and optional classes in Irish Literature, Big House Literature, and Irish Poetry. I took none of the optional courses, and regretted it. Free learning is free learning!

You should be prepared to write consistently both freely and within the boundaries of various writing exercises that some teachers like to assign. This is usually somewhere between 1000 and 5000 words per submission, but it varies. Notwithstanding a crisis in your personal life, you should be sure to make your writing deadlines, and read everyone’s work fully. If you don’t, you will get a reputation as someone who doesn’t bother. It will foster resentment and gradually your own work will be taken less seriously. If you don’t want to read others’ work in progress, do not do an MFA.

I would personally not recommend going in with a novel project that you dedicate all your time there to. My own biggest steps forward came when experimenting with different forms, genres, and perspectives, something that would have been impractical if I were pursuing a novel to completion. None of our cohort who were working on a novel published that novel. Many of them were talented writers imprisoned by a few encouraging early chapters in a project that was fundamentally misconceived. My first workshop teacher, Carlo Gébler, took one look at my sketchy book ideas and bluntly told me to drop them. Instead, I wrote eight short stories, two non-fiction essays, and two short plays. Most of this work was poorly received, but all of it was immensely generative, fun, and ultimately useful. Nothing was too precious, and nothing became a burden.

Try not to write a novel about the experience of being in an MFA workshop while still in said workshop. There are many already, some of them are even excellent, but this will be self-limiting, and no one wants to read a roman à clef of themselves in real time. Not every teacher or classmate will understand your work, and it’s quite possible that none will. That does not mean there is nothing to be learned from them, nor does it mean that your work is fatally flawed. Your work is flawed in some way however, do not be the person who ignores all advice, regardless of source or seriousness. The odds that you are an undiscovered, misunderstood genius are low.

Your cohort will probably seem odd, a mixum-gatherum of ages, styles, backgrounds, and personalities. Sixteen or twenty or fifty people united by only the desire to write and the resources to do so. You will not gel with everyone. The presence of North Americans is a fact of life. The sheer size of their population and high cost of postgraduate education means that there will be a number of Americans and Canadians in any English language MFA, regardless of whether it is in Ireland, Britain, or anywhere else. Writers from your country and social background will know too much about what you are depicting, others, too little. Avoid making your mind up about people and their writing for as long as possible. The woman whose writing you cannot stand at first glance will turn out to have insightful, empathetic things to say about your poems. The 21-year old writing pompous autofiction will turn out to be a dry and witty diarist. Try to approach them as people first, regardless of how worthy you think their work is. Much of what you read and write will be very bad - that is the nature of a training degree. Good prose is not proof of moral fiber, nor bad prose a lack of it.

Make an effort. Go to the pub with your group, even if just for a sparkling water and a pack of crisps. Get a coffee with the man writing cat essays. Go to launches, go to events, be part of the literary community, whatever that looks like. Yes, many will be boring or awkward, but even those you’ll look back on fondly. People will sometimes be rude to you, and this means virtually nothing. All creative fields attract a certain number of unpleasant narcissists, but fewer than you’d think. One stray conversation with an editor will end up being more useful than fifty cold submissions to magazines.

- March 2016

Keep your ambition at least partially in check. That means taking every opportunity that comes your way to get to know people, but refraining from sorting them too callously in your mind. For the love of God, do not do the Terminator-scanning stare at every event as you try to figure out exactly how useful the person will be to your eventual career.

Accept that much, probably most, perhaps all of what you write during your MFA will not be published. You are likely a talented, flawed, somewhat ill-disciplined writer with an interesting perspective and a lifetime of bad habits and lacunae that are invisible to you. At 24, I was quietly confident going into my own workshop as someone who had written a novel over the previous year. Unfortunately, said novel was also a big pile of shite: overwritten, confusing, tonally bizarre and lacking a clear sense of why it existed in the first place. When I read it now, I feel some minor embarrassment, but mostly empathy for a young writer who thought the big leagues were just around the corner. Your next thing will be better. The thing after that? Better still.

There are writers who have the combination of talent, discipline, and ambition to turn around a project during their MFA and sell it quickly afterwards. If you are one of those people, I salute you, but you probably have nothing to learn from this essay. For everyone else, do not feel as if you have to be this kind of person. You are still a writer even if you don’t get the agent. You’re still a writer if you never publish a damn thing. More likely, your career will be long, interesting, and full of false starts. Success can be as simple as the question of whether you’re still writing.

How to Write During an MFA

If I had only one piece of advice, it would be to use the time you get during an MFA to develop good writing habits that can sustain beyond its artificial conditions. Set regular hours, especially if you are uninterrupted by childcare or other serious responsibilities. Limit your drinking to a few days a week; writing hungover is twice as hard. Do not get too hung up on being a tortured artist: it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Try to shake loose some of the preconceived ideas you have about what sort of writer you are. You may find them out of date, incomplete, or perhaps with no firm basis at all. Going into my degree I regarded myself as a minimalist, someone who wrote exclusively fiction with hyper-realistic dialogue and virtually no ornamentation. I recall having to give a presentation on our writing style where I had a slide that read: Use fewer words. How much of that was true, even then? And even if it were true, it was a description of what I had done, not what I could do.

Read widely outside of workshop material. The things that are discussed in class will be, by and large, not very good, and not especially relevant to your own work. It is easy to accidentally disenchant yourself with literature simply through the act of reading yet another ponderous, lightly-edited section of memoir, or short story about an awkward dinner party. Take recommendations seriously; even when they’re wrong, you might discover something interesting. Read great stylists and great plotters. Read the ones everyone recommends: Flaubert and Mansfield and Achebe and Chekhov and Maupassant and Baldwin and Babel and Carver. Read Toni Morrison and Edith Wharton. Read Pinter and Beckett and Tom Murphy. Read John Barth and Donald Barthelme and Denis Johnson. Read Moby Dick and Mason and Dixon. Read translated works, and a bit of poetry. Read the Iliad and the King James Bible and the Qu’ran. Read Hillary Mantel and Frank O’Connor. Read Eric Hobsbawm and Shirley Jackson. Read Joyce, he’s funnier than you think! Throw this list out, write your own (with more women on it), and read that. Go to art galleries, go to see plays, even bad ones. Listen to some new music. Go to protests. Live in the world. You need stuff in your head! Limit your social media usage, you’re not being paid to be on it. Don’t fucking use AI, are you kidding me.

- Body and Soul Festival, Summer 2016

Writing guides and books are most useful as jump leads to get you started, not lists of rules to make you stop. I have read many of these and they are frequently banal, contradictory, or inscrutable. When they aren’t punishingly vague, they offer false certainty that will take years to unlearn. Read them only with an entire salt shaker at your disposal.

Keep a notebook that is just for the MFA, but containing everything related to it: stray ideas, character sketches, feedback notes given and received, quotations from any kind of art. Be serious about what you are doing, and be intentional. Talk to people who are not writers, even if that’s your mother. If it’s your style, sit in a coffee shop and eavesdrop. Cliche though it may be, I find inspiration easiest to find with a full notebook in an empty room. Your immediate surroundings are clear, your inner life is replete.

In general, write what feels urgent and natural in the moment. If you feel a sudden calling to write some poetry, write some poetry, even if you’re not a poet. It might help you to get that idea out of your head so that you can decide if it deserves further exploration. If you are getting words down consistently, you will find you have accumulated enough material to submit, and then some. If a story is really not working, put it in a drawer for a week or two. If it still doesn’t work, forget about it. You might come back to it later, and you might not, both are fine. Do not feel in thrall to some notion of “seriousness”, either externally or internally imposed. If something feels fun to write, just write it, even if it teeters on the edge of silliness.

Experiment with the expectation of failure. If you read a book you really adore, try to write in that author’s style, even just for 500 words. Take writing exercises seriously, and do not become overly attached to any one piece of writing you have done. Do not save your “best” work for someone else or some other time. Submit whatever feels fresh, what will generate the most interesting conversations. Know that people will likely not have the same idea of what is your best work to you. The present tense will annoy some people. The second person will annoy most people. That is not to say you shouldn’t ever employ them. Prose writers will not understand poetry very well, sorry. Some people will want you to be Hemingway, some will want you to be Didion. Some people will want you to stop using quotation marks, or start using quotation marks. Some people will panic because they have nothing particular to say that afternoon and suggest a major, and misguided transformation to the work. Develop an ear for when someone has really connected with the work and when someone is just talking.

Some of the best writing will happen unexpectedly, in places where you didn’t think you cared or exercises that you thought were artificial or pointless. The most accomplished writer in our program (he had published multiple novels prior) wrote polished and professional prose on subjects that I didn’t much care for. But in the guise of a workshop exercise he produced a beautiful story of childhood and loss that was, to my mind, the best thing he wrote all year.

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Critique, feedback, and the workshop

The workshop is an artificial space with arbitrary rules. Some of these rules will make instinctive sense, some will be innocuous, some annoying. No two workshops are exactly the same. Many teachers use a system generally referred to as “the box”, meaning that the author of a piece has their speech restricted in some manner while it is discussed. The most extreme of these is a total blackout: you may say nothing for the twenty minutes or hour in which people pick apart your work, taking only notes and giving only nods. More common is a policy where one can only ask questions, not give responses or rejoinders, or cannot respond during the first go around the table. Are such systems useful? I have no idea, but you are likely to encounter them and should be prepared.

When approaching criticism, try to determine exactly what the writer was attempting. Generosity comes from understanding, even when the piece has clearly failed. Always remember that you are not trying to get the person to write like you, or even write something that you would like. You are trying to help them bring out the best version of whatever they are doing, the version that will help them learn the most about the craft. Don’t be offended if someone doesn’t take your advice, you probably ignored theirs last week and didn’t even notice. Standard classroom rules apply: assume good intent but attend to harm caused. Twelve year olds understand it, and if you pretend not to, you are being disingenuous.

Try your level best not to start any individual feuds, especially early on. They are draining, undignified, and a waste of your precious time. If the aggressive memoirist savages your stories every two weeks, just put him on the pay-no-mind list and move on. If you wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.

Brutality, sadness, depression, violence, cruelty, these are facts of life but they are not the only facts of life. They should be neither off limits artistically nor the basis of every piece. They are not an inherent mark of seriousness or quality. Kindness goes both ways here: understand that your fellow writers may be working something painful and personal out, approach in good faith. On the other hand, if you’ve submitted two emotionally taxing stories in a row, it’s fine to take a break with something lighter. Writing something genuinely funny – that makes people laugh in class – is the most impressive thing I can think of.

Here’s a story: I went into my masters as, first and foremost, a fiction writer. Though I had written plenty of academic work, student journalism, and ponderous op-eds, I saw my greatest strengths in short stories and novels. Our second term workshop leader was the late Belfast poet Gerry Dawe, may he rest in peace. Gerry was a genial, kind, and generous man who also happened to find my work consistently baffling and inadequate. The first thing I submitted was a personal essay about a very serious subject in my own life.

As we sat down to discuss the piece, Gerry was overflowing with critique. He had heavily marked up the manuscript and handed it across the table as he opened the discussion, saying that he had really struggled with this short story. He hated the main character, feeling that he was self-centered and solipsistic, and he struggled to care about the stakes of his life. I failed several times to gently interrupt to tell him that it was in fact a piece of non-fiction, and that the main character was, simply, me. When I finally got my point across he very carefully slid the manuscript back over to his side, and began removing some of the more pointed critiques. It was not my finest hour in a workshop.

What is the point of this story, besides perhaps, indicate clearly what genre you are writing in at the top of the document? Criticism is easier to take if you adopt a sense of slightly detached humour about your own work, and your writing career. You will be misunderstood, again and again, and that is not necessarily the fault of either your reader or yourself. Such criticism will not kill you; in the decade since I have published much non-fiction of which I am proud. And crucially, despite his misunderstanding, much of what he said was correct! The piece was never published, thank the good Lord.

- Trinity College, 2016

The Autobiographical Question.

We are all, to a lesser or greater extent, writing from our lives. If you are writing a romantic epic set during the time of Emperor Trajan, this is somewhat less the case. If you are writing about people in Crown Heights in their twenties and thirties, perhaps more so.

The closer your characters’ superficial resemblance to you, the more people will assume that you are writing autobiographical fiction. They will, gently or forcefully, but with one hundred percent certainty, pry into your personal life in order to understand the work better and from simple curiosity. You may end up revealing more than you intended, and you may end up feeling much more defensive than you would have predicted going in. If a reader identifies a narrative problem with a piece of fiction, saying “well, that’s the way it happened” is not a sufficient response. Reality does not equal interesting narrative. If you want to quickly minimize your reader’s identification of writer and subject, change the age or gender of the main character. Not only will people rarely identify you in your newly minted protagonist, but you will find yourself writing away from and towards your own life in interesting and useful ways.

Above all else MFAs have a simple rule: You get what you put in. It is very easy to slack off, barely bothering to write, read, or critique, and still get your degree. This is doing yourself a grave disservice. You have an opportunity to make enormous leaps in the quality of your work and you should wring every drop you can out of it. Write more than you need to, go to events that you feel too tired or unmotivated for. Send cold emails, host literary readings, put out an edited collection. Take care of your health, but don’t be afraid to burn the candle at both ends a little, when necessary. Enjoy it! Work is worse.

Overall, I feel positive towards my degree. I may be slightly biased, because on the very first day a stranger sat down beside me, and we’ve been together for ten beautiful years now. So keep your wits about you, and be nice to people, you never know where it might lead.

- Connemara, 2016

Phil Ochs died this week, 50 years ago.1 The last year of his life was cruel, undignified, unworthy of his gentle self. He was 35 years old, the same age I turn this year. He was born in El Paso, a Texan like Alan Lomax. Like Lomax, he took New York into his heart. He was a folk singer, and a socialist, and a writer of beautiful, funny, sad songs. He felt deeply, and he was someone to whom bad things happened.2

Won’t see the golden of the sun, when I’m gone
And the evenings and the mornings will be one, when I’m gone
Can’t be singing louder than the guns, while I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
- Phil Ochs, When I’m Gone, 1966

Ochs came to New York in the early sixties already full of music from the great socialist folkies: Guthrie, Seeger, and the Weavers. His beat was what he called “singing journalism”, playing his way through the issues and bringing the news in a humane, digestible form. He believed passionately in the power of music to change the world, until he didn’t any more.

- Poster for a 1966 performance in Berkeley, artist unknown

Like a lot of people, then and now, Ochs was caught between revolution and reform, not from a fear of what would come from upheaval, but a terrible knowledge of the misery of now. Whether it’s nobler to push towards a better future or to try to make the one we have a little less awful for those on the bottom and the sides is a question he never managed to answer, but who has? He wept when Jack Kennedy died, and loved John Wayne despite his cheerleading for the war in Vietnam. Like Lomax he believed in both America and socialism, but unlike Lomax he didn’t manage to live with the contradictions. One of his most famous and enduring songs is 1966’s Love Me I’m a Liberal, a nasty, funny satire of the classic Cold War liberal: genial and progressive at first blush but a hardened anti-Communist underneath.

In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.

Ochs isn’t a household name these days, but he was everywhere in the sixties. He testified at the trial of the Chicago Seven/Eight, singing I Ain’t Marching Anymore in the courtroom. He was close with Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the rest of the Youth International Party, and took part in countless demonstrations against that era’s great crime: the war waged on Vietnam by the U.S. and its allies. I Ain’t Marching Anymore links together all the American eras of conquest in a single, mythical soldier, now refusing to fight.

It’s always the old to lead us to the wars
Always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun
Tell me, is it worth it all?
- Phil Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, 1965

- From The Looper, July 1969

- Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro, 1971, (Photo: Robert Stebbings. Sincerest thanks to Robert’s son Matias for the use of this photo)

Ochs’ life was driven off course by three tragedies, a mix of the personal and the political. The police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention destroyed any faith he had left in the American political system. He sought hope in the victory of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular alliance in Chile, and even travelled there, befriending fellow socialist singer Victor Jara. Augusto Pinochet’s coup in ‘73 and Jara’s subsequent murder by the military authorities shattered Ochs. In both Chicago and Santiago, the left had found that their critique of the state and its ruthlessness, far from being too harsh, was too soft. They had underestimated the willingness of the right to kill and maim, not merely to compete for power, but to destroy socialism and socialists utterly. While travelling around south and east Africa he was robbed and strangled by a group of assailants in Dar es Salaam, losing much of his singing power in the process. The attack intensified an already growing paranoia, as Ochs suspected the attack had been planned by intelligence agencies.

Discussion of Ochs paranoia and the gradual dissolution of his mental health is a difficult subject. As the old joke goes, I’m not paranoid, they really are out to get me. Phil Ochs was extensively monitored by various intelligence agencies throughout his life. His FBI file is phonebook-sized, and in his friend Jara he had a vivid example of what the state can do to a socialist singer if they feel a threat to their power. Ochs was dependent on alcohol, as well as Valium and a number of other substances. The tough irony of it is that the mental health issues, the paranoia, the personal breakdowns, they all make it easier for a genuinely hostile state to destroy you. Gentle people are battered by tragedy, random and planned. By the vagaries of illness, of addiction, of their own minds, and of the terrible power of the state. For such people there is an awful moment when the eye fixes itself squarely upon you, and endurance becomes nearly unbearable. The music from the end of his life is increasingly drained of humour and ease, disconnected from community and comrade. Ochs was a favourite of the writer Breece D’J Pancake, taken even younger, and with an even more downbeat view on life.

My life is now a myth to me
Like the drifter, with his laughter in the dawn
My life is now a death to me
So I’ll mold it and I’ll hold it till I’m born
So I turned to the land where I’m so out of place
Throw a curse on the plan in return for the grace
To know where I stand
Take everything I own
Take your tap from my phone
And leave my life alone
My life alone
- Phil Ochs, My Life, 1969

Endure we must. I think often of those of Och’s contemporaries who lived long beyond his 35 years. Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Barbara Dane, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan. These were lives lived in full; some are even still hanging in there. I have a space in my heart for all those who got dealt a bad hand like his. Jackson C. Frank, Maeve Brennan, Danny Whitten. There but for fortune, go you or I. I was moved this week to hear Matt Christman on the Chapo Trap House 10th anniversary show reading a brutal, hopeful poem that Ochs himself would have been proud of. I’ve quoted a little of it here:

It’s easy to sink into despair
To hide behind iron bars
from ICE raids
from bombing Iran
from Years of Lead poisoning
To drown in a despair
as the light dims the dying of the empire
Infrastructure leached into your bloodstream.
Acceptance
and self loathing.
Chanting you love to see it, you love to see it
I’m actually laughing.
But every ear is a heart
is a hearth
stoking the fire
eating the air
sharp and clean
hope last breath
for a better world
we are not crazy.
Break the dowsing rod and remember
“Ka is a wheel and there will be water if God wills it.”
Sit in the doorway
and huddle next to the fire
and listen and breathe.
Taste the burning wood
and listen to the rhythm of your heart’s beat
clear, blameless, saying in a flat monotone
I am here
I am feeling
I am warmth
I am laugh
I am alive.
- Matt Christman, 20263

Survival is the great challenge of our age. For some this is the struggle of actual, physical living. For the rest of us, the survival of the soul through the witnessing of terrible horrors. We cannot succumb to either despair or total numbness. Either will make us useless for the future we hope to make. Sometimes I think that an abundance of empathy in a dark world is what killed Phil Ochs: the inability to live with the injustices and the loss of faith in the possibility of fixing them. One of his very best songs is called There But For Fortune, a call for empathy not only with the marginalized in our own society, but those that our country bombs and kills overseas.

So stay in touch with humanity, but stay alive. Stay with us. Keep fighting. Rest in power, Phil.

Show me a prison, show me a jail
Show me a prison man whose face is growing pale
And I’ll show you a young man with many reasons why
And there but for fortune may go you or I

Show me an alley, show me a train
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain
And I’ll show you a young man with many reasons why
And there but for fortune may go you or I

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me a drunken man as he stumbles out the door
And I’ll show you a young man with many reasons why
And there but for fortune may go you or I

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I’ll show you a young land with so many reasons why
And there but for fortune may go you or I, or I
- Phil Ochs, There But for Fortune, 1964

The large section of the public that opposes Trump and this war are beaten down and burnt out, exhausted after 10 years of relentless right-wing dominance of public life. Many have disengaged from news media, and if they think of the war at all, it is with a mixture of resignation and disgust; a hope that it will end soon, but with little idea of how to bring that about.

I don’t have any more coherent writing on the war as of yet except that everyone involved in the decision to do it is deserving of criminal prosecution. In January I wrote about ICE. Here is an essay about the meaning of work that I have been writing on and off for several years.

2007. I am fifteen or sixteen and work at a cafe above a GAA clubhouse somewhere in posh-ish South Dublin. A man tips me a packet of cigarettes, extracted from the carton he brings back from apartment hunting in Eastern Europe. A woman throws a drink in my face because I brought it to her in a cracked glass. My boss is a nightmare, but this is not her fault. She is an undiagnosed diabetic, and experiencing chronic, severe hyperglycemia. Unbeknownst to us all, we are in the last throes of a period beginning in the mid-nineties where the Irish economy expanded over a precipice in Wile-E-Coyote fashion. I earn the legal minimum wage of €8.65 an hour, which I spend instantly on Friday and Saturday nights on cans of six percent cider, vodka, and cigarettes, occasionally saving €3.50 for a demi-baguette filled with crisps, and a bottle of blue Powerade.

I do not hustle, and I do not grind. I do not build generational wealth. It is extremely unlikely that I will retire early. In Junior Certificate Business Studies – my last interaction with the world of high finance – I received a C. The subject was an unintentionally historical discipline where children in the mid-2000s were taught about even-then ancient practices like Double Entry Bookkeeping. Any trace of that ineffable acquisitive spirit in me was crushed during our school “Young Entrepreneurs” evening. Declining the usual vocations of brownie baking, friendship bracelet weaving, personal portrait creation, or Christmas Card construction, I instead devised an innovative scheme to buy boxes of chocolate muffins through the café supplier at wholesale rates and arbitrage them for double the price to a captive audience of students and parents who had forgotten to eat dinner. My teacher declared it “unfair”, as I had no hand in the creation of said muffins, which were baked by another anonymous node of Capital in an industrial park somewhere in West Dublin. His conception of business was a pleasantly foggy notion of empowered small artisans, competing on an even playing field. As an embryonic Marxist, I knew this to be a fantasy; that there was money to be made for those with the ruthlessness to undercut the hopeless inefficiency of my classmate’s pastries. Having been banned from the school gym, I took my boxes to the car park, where I sold them at a healthy markup to fleeing fathers. Rather than becoming a Randian shut-in and devoting myself to ridding the world of government meddling, my response instead was to declare that I didn’t give a fuck, and that business was for dorks and arseholes. Since then I have never made my money “work” for me. I have only ever worked for it.

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Harvesters at Rest (1888), Léon-Augustin Lhermitte (1844-1925), National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

2010. I work as a car park attendant at a large hospital during a major renovation, helping the desperate and the irritated find a spot. I overhear myself being referred to one day, not without cause, as a “glorified traffic cone”. I am not permitted to listen to music or read, as that would imperil the already tenuous sense of professionalism of a nineteen-year-old who looks fifteen. There is frequently nothing to do but make laps of the concrete fishbowl and construct elaborate memory castles in my mind. Can you name all the U.S. Presidents in order? I can. This job is where I develop my still-strong fear that I am wasting the priceless minutes of my beautiful life. But you can’t argue with €13.36 an hour, not in an economy where the minimum wage is being cut by over ten percent. The recession is bottoming out, and the government (an official client state of the EU/ECB/IMF 2010 – 13, an unofficial one thereafter) are trying to deliberately lower the standard of living, in an effort to increase Ireland’s competitiveness without devaluing the Euro.

This is not to say that I’ve earned every penny I’ve got, as Nixon once said. I have done lots of degrees and have been the frequent recipient of scholarships, grants, stipends, awards, special awards, bursaries, benefits-in-kind, and even, on rare occasions, an emolument or two. I’m good at filling out forms, good at exams and more than anything, good at recognising which of those will provide maximum remuneration. At its best, this is like temporarily becoming a feckless child of privilege. Rent paid, free dinner in the evenings, a bit of walking around money. But they have a way of leaving you a few Euro short of the basic needs of life. In college, such a thing is contented poverty. After college, such a thing is merely poverty.

2011. I work as a “retail inspector”, travelling the country with my kindly neighbour. He used to play Santa in the local community hall at Christmas, if that gives you any indication of his nature. We are a two-man team, dedicated to removing the scourge of people being served beer underage at off-licences. My unnervingly youthful looks finally pay off as I, now twenty, still look questionable enough to be carded. Those that fail to demand proof in exchange for six Tuborg face the full wrath of whatever organisation I was working for (I never get the name). That is to say, they get retested in six months before they can get full accreditation. I don’t know, I’m the talent, and not privy to all the backroom stuff. Eventually, like a teen starlet, I age out of the profession, and am ushered through the stage door to my own personal Sunset Boulevard.

The Irish economy, an insubstantial mist of property speculation and bad debt, evaporated in 2008/9, leaving behind mass unemployment and even more underemployment. During the years of the bailout – roughly the same as my undergraduate degree – one took whatever work was out there (kids these days etc. etc.). These jobs were not always back-breaking labour, but they were frequently very strange. You might spend a few weeks manning a failing bookshop during its final liquidation sale, serving at a burger restaurant that became a nightclub after ten P.M., or fulfilling some obscure but constitutionally-mandated government duty like guarding ballot boxes overnight. More than one friend worked at a call centre, polling people on how they felt about the government (not good) or trying to get them to participate in a confusing promotion for a multinational dairy corporation. What these jobs shared was the sense (justified or not) that they existed only because no one had gotten around to closing them down yet. They were also determined mostly by who you knew. You could walk around like Yosser Hughes in The Boys from the Blackstuff saying “Giz a job” all you liked, but the most likely place you’d get one was an unlikely personal connection

The Gleaners (1857), Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Musée d’Orsay, Paris

2013. I am a door-to-door fundraiser for a major charity. This is known as charity mugging, or “chugging”, but as I work the neighbourhoods rather than the street, I prefer to think of it as charity home invasion. The summer is a scorcher, the air is fresh, and I get plenty of exercise! This is the worst job I have ever done. It seems obvious in retrospect, but when you knock doors, you knock on every door. If someone is in the habit of answering their door naked (and they are!), you or your unfortunate colleagues are going to see them. You will be propositioned. You will be threatened. You will be called archaic insults that require extensive googling afterwards (jobsworth gurrier shitehawk). You will hear sentences, tossed off in a moment of passionate dislike, that will nonetheless stick with you for decades. But what you will mostly hear is “no”. Hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a week. As the great Gaius Baltar once said, there are limits to the human body, the human mind. One can only take so much rejection before one begins to find the fault within.

The pay is complicated, based on a commission system with targets only achievable by the truly soul-destroyed. It is impossible to maintain a robust sense of self-esteem while wearing a bib. Babies wear bibs, and if they could talk, I have no doubt that they would ask not to. This is one of the few jobs that, by virtue of its truly unbelievable attrition rate, is always available. I am interviewed alongside two others, one in a t-shirt and shorts, the other in a full suit and tie. We are all hired. The t-shirt man lasts two days. The suit does not show up at all. I collapse from heat stroke in Kildare and quit after six weeks as one of the relatively senior members of the team.

In Irish slang, a nixer is a job that pays cash in hand, lasts a few days or weeks, and does not involve interaction with the tax man. This was a far more common way of supporting oneself in the decades before the big boom of the nineties, when Ireland went from a poor country with few jobs to a rich country with many jobs, some of them even real. Ireland in the grinding, recessionary eighties was divided between those in steady careers that allowed one to live some kind of life, maybe a good one, and a large surplus population getting by on a few days a week, a few jobs a month. As a country we, understandably, traded this untenable position for a much more lucrative one as Northern Europe’s top tax haven: a place to park your cash, or perhaps just let it zip through (with a faint whooshing sound) on its way to somewhere else.

2013 (cont.) I work as a tour guide and pub crawl for one among the vast archipelago of phoney businesses that make up most of the Irish tourism industry. The structure is thus: one brave and non-tax compliant entrepreneur stands at the helm of a rickety rust bucket called, let’s say, Diarmuid MacMurrough Tours LLC. Beneath them, a scurvy crew of hungover students, half-dead forty-year-olds and a cabin boy from America lured with the promise of an “internship”. A pay structure that would make a Gilded Age industrialist gasp. Things like Employment Contracts and Revenue Commissioners like dark and dangerous sea monsters, to be avoided at all costs. My job is to deliver the same two-hour walking tour, full of bullshit history and eye-watering jokes, to the unfortunate crowd of people who have accidentally missed the far more popular Sandeman Walking Tours starting location. By night I lead them to many of Dublin’s most anonymous and abominable pubs, to be served shots of whatever has been sitting next to the oven too long. This is truly heart-breaking work: to be a professional friend to the lonely crowds of men and women who could have gone to Barcelona for the same price. At midnight my watch ends, and I make up some almost plausible excuse to leave. Over a two-year period I have, perhaps, one hundred “girlfriend’s birthdays” that I must show face at. What a pity. What a shame. We were having such a nice time, too.

Jobs, jobs, so many jobs! The protagonist of Bruce Springsteen’s Downbound Train has three jobs in as many verses, but nothing on me. And what did I do in between? Endless rounds of education, some of it satisfying, most of it completed, none of it vocational, as such. I’ve always faintly distrusted the word “career”. I’m not really against having one on principle, it’s just that growing up in Ireland’s largely fake economy, careers always took on a sort of unreality to me. People would tell you about a wonderful new position at a start-up and you’d wonder, how does that make a profit? Most of the time of course, it didn’t. But the mid-2010s were the age of free money, especially in an economy as exposed to global capital flows as Ireland. This was a time when there was no idea so dumb that you couldn’t be the brand manager at the Dublin office and get free donuts on Fridays. It was hard not to subscribe to a kind of vulgar Graeberism when the country was so chock-full of bullshit jobs. This was also when my mother held a sunny optimism about my employment possibilities. There is no job for which I was unqualified, from actuarial statistician to Prime Minister of Latvia, that my mother could hear about and not turn to me and say, “Would you think about doing a job like that?”

2014. I work as the Events Intern at a mid-sized LGBTQ rights non-profit in San Francisco. The organisation is one woman’s vanity project, a gigantic pinkwashing operation for fossil fuel companies, financial services firms, and media conglomerates. The focus is on equality in the workplace, so of course the office is an absurd cauldron of sexual harassment cases and illicit affairs. I am sexually harassed by two separate people senior to me in the organisation, one of whom is responsible for whether I get a contract extension. I do not. At Christmas, the CEO forces all employees to sing a version of Feliz Navidad with her name replacing a key word. At $36k a year, this remains the most I am paid for almost a decade.

In my confused class position (most people in Ireland have a confused class position, blame the English) perhaps it flattered my self perception to only take jobs that paid total shit, to remind myself that I was not workshy, not afraid of hard work, wouldn’t turn my nose up at a job. But at the same time, any one of these jobs were disposable at a few days’ notice. You can’t say take this career and shove it. There are few factories in Ireland; we are a postcolonial nation whose industrial capacity was intentionally suppressed. The working class have long been, relative to the rest of Europe, in the service industry, in precarious work, underemployed. Before call centres and fast food emporia, a disproportionate number of Irish people worked in domestic service; hired help in the houses and estates of the landed gentry and merchant bourgeoisie. Before “zero hours” contracts existed, some nascent form of them filled the pockets of our petty capitalists. Today, much of our low-paid, low-status, repetitive, work happens in tourism; to feed the insatiable hunger of our local bosses for American dollars. All that effortless charm and magical blarney is built on the unseen labour of hundreds of thousands of workers. We smile, joke, bow and scrape for the fat wallets of the world’s wealthy. Some of this work has become so mechanized that it has taken on a sort of Fordist quality. At the entrance to the Guinness Storehouse, the citadel of Irish tourism, a facsimile of the original 9000-year lease signed by Arthur Guinness in 1759 sits in the floor beneath thick glass. Every five minutes, a real human being repeats the same 90-second introduction word-for-word to a new tour group. Five minutes a cycle. Twelve times an hour. Eighty four times a day. 1848 times a month. Two hundred decades of the rosary said for Ireland’s most famous capitalist, so celebrated they made a Netflix series about him.

2017. I work as the “Social Programme Manager” at an English language school. I am back to being a professional friend, being mostly responsible for making sure no poor befuddled Italian boy gets hit by a car crossing the street, and ferrying groups to Dublin’s underwhelming tourist sites. The job is almost inhumanly easy, with a repetitive rhythm that slowly wears a groove into my brain. I visit the Guinness Storehouse thirty-three times. Near a personal breaking point, I implement a blanket ban on the playing of Despacito and Zombie in the student room that is also my office. At the end of my first year, I receive a two percent raise. My boss, a not unkind person, shrugs slightly when I question it. What did I expect?

The work varied, but the jobs shared one essential quality: they lacked dignity. They involved, like all alienated labour, some form of self-abasement, large or small, for the simple necessity of making the money needed to survive. In industries where little physical is produced, what the job requires of you is mostly performance. You must pretend to your boss that you are busily typing away even when no work remains. The rich visitor must look at you and see a busy, bright young man! And you must grin shyly back and say something like, no rest for the wicked! These are the lower rungs of our economy. At the higher levels, no real work is being produced either, but it is more excitingly not produced, with many meetings, much strategy, copious slide decks, and a great post on LinkedIn to finish. Ireland’s teeny-tiny corporate tax rates and succession of pliant governments are the reason that international capital is there, not any special qualities you might possess, but that doesn’t mean you can’t congratulate yourself on a job well done!

2018. I begin four and a half years of a “fully funded” PhD programme. The inverted commas are there because full funding, in this case, comes to approximately seventeen thousand euro a year, or considerably less than minimum wage. This brings a different kind of humiliation, a different flavour of alienation. The work is long and solitary but offers occasional cloudbreaks; moments of discovery that would almost certainly be denied me in most better paid work. PhDs are the preserve now mostly of the unfortunate and the wealthy; the indebted or the tourist. The first hurdle in trying to improve the appalling pay and conditions is to convince people that a PhD is a job. It is sometimes difficult to convince the PhD researchers themselves of this.

But surely, you say, writing is a career? Theoretically, anything is a career, but until you start regularly making your rent with it, calling it one feels somewhat overoptimistic, like declaring yourself CEO at Me on LinkedIn. I am additionally unconvinced that my writing, or anyone’s writing, is making much of a difference in halting the many catastrophes that unfold around us, like bats at dusk. I write my little essays, my little stories, my little reviews. Mostly, mercifully, I am paid. Sometimes a few hundred people read them, occasionally tens of thousands. The net effect of either is more negligible than you would imagine. The few times that work of mine has reached a wider audience and provoked a few thousand responses has, frankly, made me deeply uncomfortable and paid precisely the same. But though I might doubt the effect of my writing on the world, I can’t deny the effect it has on me. I am not a tortured writer and I do not hate most of what I write. It gives me immense joy to do this craft to the standard that I can. I feel like a contented baker or a respected carpenter. Not a genius, but equal to the task. Not bored. Not wasted. A friend once told me that a piece I wrote made their father mad for weeks. He would refer to it repeatedly at mealtimes, shaking his head and saying who does he think he is. The memory, even now, makes me smile.

2019. For three blessed weeks I teach nine to five at a program for bright, kind kids. The course I design is a smash success, and every day is as memorable as a prizefight. To expect this kind of work your whole life would be absurd.

I am a qualified academic. What is an academic, you ask? Not what it used to be. The ever-widening gap between the number of PhDs and the number of jobs in the humanities has turned academia from a professional career with a long lead time into something that resembles an extremely expensive version of moving from your one-horse town in Iowa to Hollywood in order to “make it”. You are somewhat more likely to become a successful musician than a tenure-track professor, and you can get a very nice guitar for a fraction of the price of tuition. I dream of a steady gig at a local college, perhaps of being one of a handful to open up a new History department. But while plenty of new History is being made, there are no new History departments. This is a tragedy of course, but ours is a time of tragedies, and this would not make the top thousand. The places where the over-educated left wing used to comfortably hide in the twentieth century have virtually withered away. It has become increasingly difficult to find a niche where you can live a decent life in sympathy with the dispossessed. There is little practical use for sympathy anymore, and it feels as if one must choose between abandoning the dispossessed or accepting your place as one of them.

For the last three years I have worked as a middle school history teacher. Middle school, a division which does not exist in Ireland, is perhaps the least glamorous of all the educational positions. Those who teach younger kids often have a beatific charm, like Ms. Honey from Matilda. High school teachers have fragile gravitas, and the sense that they are preparing young adults for the excitement of university. Middle school teachers, in my experience, are friendly, forgiving, slightly rumpled, and possessed of a gentle, empathetic realism about humanity, born of dealing with the very worst ages of life.

La Maestra Rural, The Rural Teacher (1923), Diego Rivera (1886–1957), Museo Vivo del Muralismo, Secretaría de Educación Pública, CDMX

Teaching as a profession occupies a (say it with me) strange class position, especially in the U.S. Teachers in some states and some schools can earn salaries above 100k, at the midpoint of a solid career. In others, teaching is an effectively proletarianized occupation, requiring a level of self-sacrifice on par with care work or emergency medicine. Teachers’ unions tend toward the most radical among the shrinking base of organized labour. Several of the leaders of the 1916 Rising were teachers, even. In a classical division of society they tend to get lumped in with doctors and lawyers, but without their glamour, or predilection for reactionary politics. Teachers in fiction are put-upon working stiffs, inspirational mavericks, or, in an earlier and more condescending mould, disappointed ladies who have been left on the shelf. My own teachers in secondary school were a strange and very human mix: working class intellectuals, broken-down Christian Brothers, the first ones to attend university from rural farming families, die-hard Irish Republicans, artists whose careers had stalled. Those who can’t do, teach goes the old George Bernard Shaw insult. I have found it to be quite the opposite: teaching requires a set of skills and patiences never even attempted by many supposed “doers”. Teachers were over-represented among 19th and 20th century nationalists; they tended to be people to build a nation for good and ill. Sometimes this meant the preservation and transmission of history and language, sometimes the expansion of literacy to the masses, sometimes the inculcation of questionable patriotic fervour. I will not deny that I am proud of my accidental profession, even though I teach at the more comfortable, relatively well-remunerated end of the spectrum.

If my resistance to embarking upon a career has always been rooted in the faint sense that most work is essentially fake, the last several years have been ones of the world catching up to this idea. We are repeatedly bombarded with the notion that the advent of Large Language Model tools and what is tendentiously called artificial intelligence will rapidly and irrevocably make large swathes of the white collar workforce obsolete, their day-to-day labour replaced by a machine that will email itself with the indefatigability and usefulness of the bewitched brooms of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Ironically, all this talk of people’s disposability has made me soften on the value of what are scornfully referred to as “email jobs”.

It probably goes without saying that I loathe AI “writing” tools with every bit of myself, and I totally refuse to use them in either my professional or personal life. If I am to be replaced, I will not go willingly, and neither should you. My instinct is to tell you to go down like John Henry and his hammer or General Ludd smashing the stocking machine. To blacken their name. To kick up a fuss if forced to engage. To complain, defame, refuse. This is reasonable advice, but it concedes too much ground already. The steam hammer that replaced the mythical Henry was at least capable of doing the actual work effectively. As of right now, LLM tools produce endless streams of sloppy bullshit, useful mostly as a pretext for disciplining organized (or disorganized) labour power rather than an actual replacement for meaningful work. We must continue to insist on the value of humanity and human action, in the face of overwhelming propaganda to the contrary. We must believe that humanity can and will continue to revere learning, art, and the thumbprints in the clay that tell you that a person was here, once.

During periods of precarious or non-existent employment, people will often ask which jobs you are applying for, or sometimes more directly, what you want. What I want is probably what you want: to not be broke, to do something with meaning, even small meaning, to reclaim some dignity without becoming so far removed that I forget that such indignity exists. Our current ruling class, head-sick on their own power and impunity, are striving every day to destroy that meaning and dignity. I write and I teach until I am exhausted. Meaning is generated, however distantly. Dignity is present, however variably. As a citizen of the empire of the global north I am part of so many systems of horror, but there are still some that I can refuse.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the late scholar of what it means to be poor, was an exemplar of this. She was keenly aware of the advantages of her own position, but did not indulge in some useless, self-serving guilt. Nor did she lose faith, and collapse into a late, nihilistic compromise with capital that ignored any complicity. Instead, she tried, repeatedly, to find some way to live a life in alliance with those denied dignity. A life of trying does not seem so bad. A life of teaching others to try sounds yet better. What else, after all, am I qualified to do?

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An Fear Marbh (Inis Tuaisceart), Co. Kerry, (Jack Sheehan, January 2025)

In late December 2016, I posted a video on Facebook (Facebook!) of a live performance of “Heavenly Father” by Bon Iver at Sydney Opera House with the caption that I hoped it would be a better year. It hasn’t been, but I continue to hope.

My reading habits, built up over a lifetime, were temporarily shattered by the final years of the PhD, when reading for pleasure virtually stopped in favour of downloading JSTOR articles and despairing. Since then I have been far less of an intentional reader, moving instead like a mouse from cheese to cheese, nibbling at whatever is in front of me. If you give me a book I am extremely likely to read it that week. I am extremely unlikely to read it at any other time. Nonetheless this year some intentionality began to creep back into my reading list.

My year began with exactly that, two Christmas presents, from my sister and my mother, Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (2020), and Katya Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 (2023). I enjoyed the Laing book far more, but remember almost nothing of it now. Hoyer’s book was written with a few supremely irritating stylistic tics, but had enough in it to be worth persevering. Apparently the German historians loathed it, presumably because it didn’t conform to the usual presentation of East Germany as a uniformly grey place.

The first two weeks of February were given over entirely to the 867 magnificent pages of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988). I had used sections of McPherson in the past, fairly instrumentally, but as I was designing a research project for my 7th grade students, I figured I should read it cover to cover. There are few better single volume histories of anything in the English language. McPherson’s main asset is positioning: he has that great historian’s talent of seeming to be in the exact place where the war is brewing, breaking out, escalating, turning, turning back, in the balance or in its dying moments. He incorporates palatable amounts of military, social, political, economic and environmental history, without ever taking you fully away from the enormous and vivid cast of characters who fought it. All those bickering, backbiting, hysterical, sometimes drunk, sometimes insane, occasionally heroic men and women who fought the unassailable slave power to the finish. This is a book to put fire back in you after a defeat.

Typically I follow up a long book with a short one, but I was so full of the holy spirit after McPherson that I went straight into Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), a book I started in 2012, getting a hundred pages in, before misplacing the tome. With Shadow Ticket (later), I have now read exactly half the books Pynchon has published, and Mason & Dixon is comfortably the best, besides being one of the best books ever written. I promise I’ll be more diffident for the rest of the year, but reading this book felt like finding a new window in your home hidden behind a painting. Pynchon has spent his career tracing the terrible structures of power that possess our world today, and this, being the earliest, is the starkest, the saddest, and the funniest. It’s a diagnostic of world imperialism that is also a story about two men who are deeply, hopelessly in love. Contains many conspiratorial Jesuits.

I stayed in the colonial Americas in March, with Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires (Tu sueño imperios han sido, 2022, trans. Natasha Wimmer, 2024). I admired rather than enjoyed this one; a bloody, chilly, mystical drug dream taking place over a few days in 1519 as the Spanish and Aztec Empires came into sudden, violent contact. It has one of the most genuinely revolting opening scenes in literature, and made me feel like I understand Mexico about 2% better.

April brought Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, ging, gegangen, 2015, trans. Susan Bernofsky, 2017) into my life, via dear friend and brilliant journalist Sarah Goodman. I know Kairos has gotten a lot of love this year, deservedly so, but her earlier novel is worth returning to. It’s a story of an older East German man arresting his own slide into irrelevance and ennui through the building of slow, practical solidarity with people seeking asylum. The book starts gentle, wistful, melancholy and gradually builds to a kind of righteous, joyous fury that I often find lacking in defenses of migration and asylum. This is not a fairy tale, but there is some small hope of better in terrible times. I have nothing smart to say about my other April book, Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss (2023), other than it was relentlessly gross and two tons of fun.

Early summer brought a series of minor disappointments. First, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001, trans. Anthea Bell), a canonical book of the literary world just before my own. I read and adored The Rings of Saturn a decade ago, but found Austerlitz too cold, too austere, too weighted by the expectation of genius I had placed upon it. I may simply be the wrong audience.

Next, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (2024), which came highly recommended, and let me down quickly. It’s an ambitious piece of work with a great setup, but the prose smothers under a very English whimsy, and few of the broad jokes are funny enough to justify their inclusion in what is a generally serious book. On the subject of recommendations, maybe no writer has ever come with more than Flannery O’Connor. On my eventual reading this summer, Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965) was hugely overrated and her worldview deeply repellent. I have a similar distaste for Didion; I don’t tend to like writers who find humanity contemptible. Ultimately, I found Everything that Rises smug, a cardinal sin.

Tony Tulathimutte’s collection Rejection (2024) was decidedly not for me, but ambitious and path-breaking in meaningful, admirable ways. The strongest story is “Pics”, an obsession narrative which contains some disquieting images that still bubble up in my brain occasionally. The book’s final and longest section fizzled, and ended in a frustrating, self-defense crouch. Jess Bergman’s thoughts on the book are far more coherent than my own.

I read two political memoirs in quick succession in July, Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag (2023), and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message (2024). Coates’ book is the more successful of the two; more vulnerable, more honest about his own failings and less resigned and disengaged from the moment.

I was lucky enough to read advance galleys of a few exceptional books that my wife Rachel Sargent acquired as an editor at Ecco. Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World (July 2025) is a collection of lightly linked short stories set in and around Hawaii, and is so moving, funny and convincing that I’m still astonished it’s a debut. I read all of Claire Oshetsky’s comic noir Evil Genius (Feb 2026) on a single flight, and by the end of it my eyes were poking out like a Looney Tunes character. It is so fucking funny, and dark as jet. I felt immensely privileged to read Kinsella’s Freida Slattery as Herself (May 2026) before the general public. It’s an absorbing, hilarious, sometimes brutal decade-long saga, with one of the most convincing depictions of Dublin I’ve ever read. The big social novel is coming back, and by my hazy oracle abilities this one is going to be huge.

I finally finished Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series with Jack (2020). I love everything she writes, despite (because of?) the odd Congregationalist Christianity that floods her work. My review from August reads, in its entirety: “Thank God for love, or we wouldn’t have anything in this old world.” That’ll do!

I started a new teaching job in September, and as the insane two months of the start of term went on I read whatever was handy. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000), (earthy, charming, wistful), John Ganz’ When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024), (Irritatingly good), James Woods’ How Fiction Works (2008), (slight), Mary Oliver’s Upstream (2016), (disappointing), and Cora Lewis’ Information Age (2025), (unassuming, has lingered in the mind).

Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident (2023) was a very pleasant surprise, as was Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (2025). Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket (2025) was underwhelming, but the man is 88 years old, and I’m just happy he had one more in him. Osita Nwanevu’s The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (2025) was tight, lucid, measured, and would make an excellent gift for a liberal you were trying to push leftward.

I’ve spent much of the last three years teaching Medieval history, and stumbled on Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098 – 1179) Selected Writings (2001, trans. Mark Atherton) in our neighborhood free sharing box. Von Bingen was a twelfth century abbess and mystic, and this is a surprisingly accessible collection from across her career, including some letters written by and to her, and a hagiographic mini biography from shortly after her death. One of the most useful things you can do for yourself as a writer is to periodically seek out texts from very different time periods and epistemologies. Months later, I’m still buzzing off of Hildegard and her world. I felt so vindicated by Rosalía’s new album Lux, which shared my fascination with the woman.

I finished the year with two Irish books, Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter (2020) and Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits (2024). I’ve been a little disenchanted with Irish literature in the last few years, which receives almost universal praise abroad and insufficient sustained criticism. These two books, read together, have me back on side. Both are novels about aftermaths, about performances of self, and about unsparing, occasionally stomach lurching violence. The Wild Laughter is also the single best novel about the Irish economic crash that I have read to date.

Christmas is for comfort, so I’m speeding through old Terry Pratchett novels like Going Postal (2004) and Monstrous Regiment (2003), which are my equivalent of eating your grandparent’s home cooking.

I didn’t publish much this year: a few essays, a few opinion pieces. 2025 felt spiritually and intellectually exhausting, simultaneously full of horror and empty of inspiration. The avenues to publishing fiction, especially, felt more obscure and tangled than ever. Practically speaking, I also spent a huge proportion of my time teaching history to wonderful but tiring cohorts of middle schoolers, leaving little enough time for the kind of deep reading and contemplation that makes for decent writing. I know in my heart that 2026 is unlikely to be any better of a year politically, but there are nonetheless things to be excited for. We have to imagine that the seeds we drop now will flower at some point when the weather improves. I should probably avoid plant metaphors; I’ve never been much of a gardener.

Here’s to a better 2026.

(Jack Sheehan, 2025)

- Théodore Chassériau, Banquo’s Ghost, 1854

Goodbye to Old Gav

Jim Gavin was not going to be president. Fianna Fáil’s nominee for the 2025 Irish presidential election entered the race as an also-ran. Most polls taken before he dropped out had him a distant third of three, on around 15% of the vote. Even prior to his premature departure, he had been foundering, rudderless, unable to answer simple questions, and clearly out of his depth. So why on earth was he there in the first place? The three candidates initially nominated – Gavin, Fine Gael’s Heather Humphreys and the united left candidate Catherine Connolly, all have historical precedents in presidential elections past. Understanding them requires going back to some of those odd, and oddly consequential races.

What the Irish president is and does is a matter of some ongoing debate. The resident of Áras an Uachtaráin is the head of state, an office established in 1937 to replace the loathed and ludicrous Governor General position, a bitter remainder of the incomplete separation from Britain. The president holds mostly symbolic power, with a few official constitutional functions that crop up every once in a while.

The office is taken seriously by the people of Ireland, despite the lack of executive power. People are not voting for their material interests here, except in the most obscure sense. Instead, every seven years the nation is asked what story it wishes to tell about itself. This is not to say that material forces play no part – quite the contrary – but merely that they are more deep rooted, less directly transactional, and more ideologically shaped than a typical Dáil race. Narratives play a much larger role than they ordinarily would. These narratives do not always comport with social or political reality, and frequently a majority of the Irish people vote for an ideology they would not support if it had any chance of actually changing things. Nonetheless, these votes are not entirely symbolic; certain things can be learned from the results.

Tides of History

There have been nine presidents since 1937. The socially conservative, big-tent Fianna Fáil party won every contested election until 1990. From the 1930s through the 2000s they were the natural party of government, and possessed of a legendary voter mobilization machine. They were also often smart about picking consensus figures; respectable old politicians and those more upright than the rest of the party. The strength of their core vote, and the story that Fianna Fáil told, was enough to win for decades, even if barely at times.

Fine Gael have never won a single race. The closest they ever came was with Tom O’Higgins, a liberal in a hidebound conservative party who ran a fairly energetic campaign in 1966, coming within a few thousand votes of dethroning an octogenarian, nearly blind Eamon De Valera. Attempting gamely to replicate the glamour of JFK and Camelot, O’Higgins correctly identified that the ground had shifted under the conservative republican consensus, but was still a few years too early to claim the spoils.

Labour have a strangely good record for such an enduring basket case of a party. If Catherine Connolly prevails, she will be the third Labour-endorsed candidate to become president. Their successful picks have come from the ideological fringes of the party, or, in the case of Connolly, a reluctant endorsement of someone who left the fold almost two decades ago. Connolly’s nomination was initially backed by People Before Profit, the Social Democrats and other independent left and small parties, before Labour (somewhat reluctantly), the Greens and finally Sinn Féin wisely decided to support her. Successfully picking a winner tends to give parties a little fillip in the polls; backing a loser can be catastrophic.

Every presidential election is a wonderful opportunity for some candidates to profoundly embarrass themselves, and for at least one party to spectacularly misjudge the mood of the electorate. Despite Fianna Fáil’s catastrophic collapse and their own commanding presence in government, Gay Mitchell in 2011 delivered Fine Gael’s worst ever performance, with a scarcely believable 6.4% of the vote. Despite his working class upbringing, Mitchell was parodically stiff, humourless, and patrician; the George H.W. Bush of Inchicore. A long-time TD and MEP, he had an eeyore-like countenance and a brittle, combative style that did not endear him to the general public. At one point he suggested Ireland might rejoin the British Commonwealth. When told he was virtually without support outside of Dublin, he donned some approximation of a country squire’s outfit and posed next to a tractor.

Liadh Ní Riada’s decision to challenge Michael D. Higgins for reelection in 2018 made a certain amount of sense if you squinted. Sinn Féin were attempting to build on their strong 2016 general election performance and boost the profile of one of their rising stars. Instead, she was swallowed up in that year’s clown car of also-rans, netting even fewer votes than Mitchell had seven years before.

She was not the funniest or most humiliated candidate that year, however. That prize goes to Dragon’s Den star Gavin Duffy. Duffy is what passes for a successful businessman in Ireland, that is to say someone who attends many dinners, vaguely consults on a variety of nebulous subjects like leadership and change, and carries an air of faint but persistent malfeasance, like the smell of mildew in a shower curtain. His campaign (2.2%) came to an end during a radio interview, during which, when pressed, he could not precisely recall the number of people he had hit with his car in a long career of hitting people with cars.

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Given their lack of executive power, there is frequently a disconnect between the rhetoric of the president and the actions of the government in power. Unlike the strange ritual of Britain’s yearly King’s or Queen’s speech, the Irish government does not directly put words into the mouth of the head of state. They are nonetheless expected to avoid direct confrontation, though near misses occur fairly frequently these days. An early harbinger of the current era was a 1976 controversy that prematurely ended the tenure of President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh. Ó Dálaigh was something of a maverick: an urbane, activist Supreme Court justice with a particular zeal for preventing government overreach in matters of individual judicial rights. He was elevated to the presidency without a contest on the sudden death of Erskine Childers. He had the misfortune to be president at the same time as the blighted Cosgrave administration, then flailing in response to the ongoing crisis in the north and introducing some of the most draconian public order law in Irish history. When Ó Dálaigh took legitimate issue with the emergency legislation Cosgrave’s government was attempting to pass, referring it to the Supreme Court, he was called a “thundering disgrace” by Minister for Defence Paddy Donegan, the most reactionary of Cosgrave’s band. Donegan, a man who was once convicted of firing a shotgun over a halting site in an attempt to intimidate Traveller people out of their homes, should have been forced to resign. Cosgrave circled the wagons, however, making Ó Dálaigh’s resignation inevitable. He was replaced by Patrick Hillary, a man whose Brezhnevian pair of terms was distinguished only by his laudable refusal to allow the office to become yet another instrument of his increasingly grubby and corrupt political party.

Ó Dálaigh, like Tom O’Higgins, was ahead of his time. Mary Robinson in her 1990 campaign explicitly argued that the role of the president should become more expansive, and won a mandate to make it so. She was a frequent headache for the government of the day, and was on one occasion constitutionally prevented from leaving the country by a Fianna Fáil administration worried that she would draw attention to the state’s many failings in front of world media. Robinson broke from the Irish political establishment in openly meeting with Republicans like Gerry Adams, as well as Unionists. In this she prefigured her successor’s stated dedication to “building bridges” in Irish society, even with people who were persona non grata in establishment political circles.

The Oracle at Delphi Adventure Centre

Presidential elections are frequently early heralds of the next decade, such that the occupant of the Aras often fits better the longer they are in the job. Mary Robinson won fewer first preference votes than Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan, but was helped by her opponent’s disastrous campaign, including a major corruption scandal and a legendary comment from Padraig Flynn about her “new hairdo” and “new-found interest in the family”. Lenihan was ultimately undone by his role as a Fianna Fáil enforcer, something which would echo twenty years later in the campaign of Seán Gallagher.

Robinson was running at the end of a deeply reactionary decade, which had seen legislative and even constitutional losses to a resurgent and vicious right. Her victory was an indication that Ireland’s conservative majority was now a rapidly dying plurality, and the country was building a socially liberal population block that would eventually claim every major party. By the end of her tenure, homosexuality, divorce, and contraception had been decriminalised. Abortion would have to wait another two decades.

Mary McAleese in ‘97 was another candidate who caught the moment about as well as any Irish politician ever has. A lawyer and academic, McAleese was a northern Catholic who as a child had been forced out of her home by loyalist pogroms. McAleese was a deeply committed Christian who nonetheless broke decisively with the Catholic hierarchy over their handling of the abuse scandals, and her personal commitment to religious plurality. Her mantra of “building bridges” was often understood simply as being about reaching out to northern unionists, but McAleese’s ecumenism was wider than that. More controversial among the Irish establishment was McAleese’s commitment to extending the hand to northern republican politicians, including those involved in paramilitary activities. The bridges went both directions. With hindsight, the early 90s commitment to treating Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin as untouchables that required a cordon sanitaire seems utterly ludicrous, and both Robinson and McAleese were vindicated in ignoring their critics.

During the grim years of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition (2011–16), the Labour Party as junior governing partner were responsible for executing some of the most brutal austerity in Irish history. They did so with initial reluctance, genuine or feigned, before settling into the usual posture of decayed European social democratic parties: a haughty, paternalistic self-satisfaction. When passing a savage 30% cut in unemployment relief for young people, a Labour TD claimed that they were doing it to incentivise access to work and training, saving the youth from the scourge of “watching a flat screen TV seven days a week.” Michael D. Higgins had spent his life in the Labour party, and in the early days of his presidency it was common to see him rightly and eloquently advocating on behalf of the very people they were immiserating. In the 2016 general election, Labour were obliterated. Higgins’ popularity continued to climb to giddy heights. His reelection in 2018 was comfortable, proving only the relative softness of Sinn Féin’s core support and a murky, rising reactionary current that drove Peter Casey to over 20% of the vote.

Throw Away Your Television

Michael D. Higgins’ victory in 2011 came during an exceptionally bleak period in Irish life. The country had surrendered sovereignty to the EC/ECB/IMF troika the previous year, and Fianna Fáil had been so thoroughly discredited that they didn’t even field a candidate. And yet, they still almost won. The Celtic Tiger was dead, the country was mired in depression, and the old order was washing away. The narrative was there for the taking. As such, the field of candidates was large. The campaign was full of scandals, and extraordinary, consequential, even questionable interventions from the media. During this crisis the already permeable walls between journalist, politician and activist broke down. The enormous malfeasance of Irish and international banks took some investigation, and journalists at home and abroad were developing an inflated sense of their own world-historical importance. The previous year, journalist George Lee spent a disastrous nine months as an elected Fine Gael TD. Fianna Fáil tried unsuccessfully to recruit broadcaster Gay Byrne as their candidate. Journalist Niall O’Dowd was seriously floated as an option by more than one party. In a live TV debate, presenter Miriam O’Callaghan, never a paragon of impartiality, asked Sinn Féin candidate Martin McGuinness the question, “How do you square, Martin McGuinness, with your God the fact that you were involved in the murder of so many people?”

The race came down to Higgins and Séan Gallagher, yet another businessman, yet another Dragon’s Den judge. They charted very different courses out of the depths. Higgins, a sociologist by trade, spent his career on the left wing of the not very left Labour party, and had cultivated an internationalist and third worldist sensibility, forging links with Latin American socialists and offering stark criticism of the United States, Israel, and NATO. His other great love was for the arts. The story he told was one of a new, more socially conscious Ireland, moving away from the crass and often criminal materialism of the Celtic Tiger years, and towards something more humane and meaningful.

Gallagher was, like so many 21st century politicians, a reality TV personality. His life was a textbook example of the essential fictionality of many business careers. A few years of spottily successful business-owning, supported by generous grants and loans from governmental bodies, becomes a narrative of bootstraps and entrepreneurial derring-do. This reputation established, and burnished by prizes and places on magazine lists, it is then leveraged into positions on boards, lucrative media opportunities, and consulting work, which requires nothing more than a suit, tie, and copy of PowerPoint. Gallagher offered an image of Ireland’s future that almost put him in office: bombastic, cheery optimism, and a sense that we could all get back on our feet if we just displayed a little more of that can-do Irish spirit that had lifted us out of the bog. Ireland would bounce back by being the best little country in the world at doing business.

Gallagher was polling at 40% going into the final debate, ten points clear of Higgins with only a few days until the election. Under RTÉ studio lights he was confronted with the unmistakable odour of his past. Gallagher had admitted to being of the “Fianna Fáil gene pool” but professed to leaving the party before all the worst chaos descended. In front of an audience of almost a million people, his campaign unravelled, as Martin McGuinness and presenter Pat Kenny tore into him about his suspicious business dealings, and deep connections to the Fianna Fáil machine. In a sensationally lurid moment, McGuinness accused Gallagher of acting as a facilitator and courier for the sort of brown envelopes and backhanders culture that had defined the party since at least the 1980s. Banquo’s ghost appeared in the form of a Dundalk fuel smuggler. Gallagher later successfully sued RTÉ for their perceived unfairness, but the damage was done. A radio interview the next day made things considerably worse. Like Lenihan, he was now known countrywide as a Fianna Fáil “bagman”. Regardless of any possible illegality, it was clear that Gallagher represented the old order in everything but name. He came a distant second on election day, and an even more distant fourth seven years later. The window of opportunity for blithe, amnesiac business boosterism in the Áras had closed. Blithe, amnesiac business boosterism would stay where it belonged: in the Dáil and the Department of An Taoiseach.

The Ghosts at the Feast

On the right and in the centre, the 2025 election is notable more for its absences than its presences. On the extreme, rapist and far-right ethnonationalist Conor McGregor failed to get a nomination, running a fairly inept operation that mostly consisted of wearing ill-fitting suits and making garbled, xenophobic twitter videos. Peter Casey, a right wing – say it with me – former Dragon’s Den presenter, who won 23% of the vote in 2018, also fell short of the support needed to get on the ballot. Most prominently, and ominously, Maria Steen, best known for her involvement with the Iona Institute, a Catholic anti-choice organization, made a late, and near-successful tilt at getting nominated, falling short by just two sponsors. Steen’s candidacy would have likely absorbed and amplified the energy on the right. We will never know how many votes a social conservative would have netted in this election, and how her presence would have changed the tone of the debate, thank Christ. A right wing candidate, however, will almost certainly be competitive in 2032.

There are two candidates from establishment parties who could have won this election who are not on the debate stage: Mairead McGuinness and Micheál Martin. McGuinness, initially the front-runner and only Fine Gael candidate, was forced to withdraw for health reasons. A centre-right religious conservative and EU power broker, she was probably closer than any other Irish politician to real executive power, and I do not mean that as a compliment. Her appeal to the Irish people would have been about competence, which is a word that the media and political class use for how well one adheres to the whims of the European Commission and international capital at any given moment.

Micheál Martin, on the other hand, could have won on the back of his enduring popularity among broad swathes of the country, even if not within his own party. Rumours of his entry to the race swirled early this year, before he ruled himself out during the summer. Calling him the most high profile Fianna Fail member is a severe understatement. He has, over the last decade and a half, essentially monopolised the party, and he has been allowed to as long as his personal popularity still comfortably outstripped that of the brand itself. Fianna Fáil still carries the taint of incompetence and corruption to those of age during the recession, but Martin escapes it. This is highly ironic, considering that he himself is the last holdover of the Ahern/Cowen governments. Nonetheless, he has spent years as Ireland’s most popular party leader. His party colleagues, on the other hand, have never been seen, and little is known about them. It is theorized that there are other political personalities in Fianna Fáil, but there is no way of knowing this for sure.

Ultimately, Martin was unwilling to relinquish real power for a comfy seat in the Áras, but given his role in pushing the nomination of Jim Gavin, he might find himself without either. A poll released this week found that the Gavin affair dealt the party, and Martin a serious blow. His personal favourability rating fell by eleven points, with the combined Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael vote at or near its lowest level ever. Rumours of heaves against Martin are like rainshowers: they come, and they go. There is always discontent within the party, but until a credible candidate emerges, the near-fifteen year reign of Martin will continue.

Both McGuinness and Martin would have been, essentially, EU candidates. The message of their presidencies would have been something like, Ireland needs to grow up, and move closer to its western allies. Get real about defence spending, the triple lock mechanism, participation in EU military exercises, even membership of NATO. Facilitators of a giant “national conversation” about neutrality with one predetermined result: handing over billions to armaments companies. Jim Gavin, handpicked by Martin, expressed a single policy preference, which was “reform” of the triple lock. Humphreys, if elected, may attempt something similar, but lacks the harder edges of either Martin or McGuinness. The best that could be said of her is that she does not have the cold fish anti-charisma of some of Fine Gael’s previous candidates, but it would be hard to point to anything approaching a vision of moral leadership.

So why Jim Gavin? Gavin himself may now be asking that question. The former Irish Air Corps pilot and successful Dublin GAA manager was parachuted in from nowhere, without a sniff of a previous political career. He made a series of minor gaffes, performed one step above appallingly in a televised debate, and generally exhibited the charisma of someone working at the Car Tax office. There was an essential pointlessness to the Gavin campaign. All presidential campaigns run on platitudes, given the limitations of the office, but Gavin’s were particularly platitudinous, and not delivered with the customary panache. He heralded nothing, neither a break from the past nor continuity. The scandal that finally brought him down was petty, but revelatory. He had held on to money accidentally paid to him by a former tenant. The amount in question was a few thousand, like the amount in the envelope that Gallagher was accused of handing over. The stink of malfeasance, of small-time double-dealing was unmistakable, because Irish people have decades of experience with it, both personally and politically. Most people have had a landlord like Gavin.

“Smear the bejaysus out of her”

The race is in its dying days. From seven candidates in 2011, and six in 2018, we now have only two. Heather Humphreys is spending the final stretch making inane videos of herself drinking coffee and being sued for defamation. Catherine Connolly, on the other hand, has been the subject of relentless attacks from media and political figures, but weathered them surprisingly easily. Former Fine Gael minister and failed bookie Ivan Yates said the quiet part loud when he advised the party to “smear the bejaysus out of her”. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have evidently taken him at his word, accelerating their smears in the closing hours. Fine Gael produced an American-style attack ad which has even their own backbenchers shifting uncomfortably in their seats. This pattern of increasing mania as the day draws near is familiar to anyone who has watched Irish elections, but usually directed at Sinn Féin.

Like Robinson and McAleese before her, the insinuation is that Connolly is too radical, too close to republicanism, too sceptical of the bellicose militarism of power brokers in Europe and the U.S. That she will in some way embarrass us in front of the Germans, or the Americans. In this I believe they have misjudged the sympathies of a majority of Irish voters, who like an independent, critical voice, and do not, by and large, yearn desperately for ever closer military and political integration with our gallant allies in the “West”. Social media is alive with indignation about the apparent closing of ranks in the media against Connolly.

The presidency has been occupied by a person of the left or centre left for, remarkably, my entire life. Thirty five years of leaders with drive and purpose. Robinson’s of a reinvigorated Irish feminism, and a commitment to human rights abroad. McAleese’s of reconciliation between divided communities on the island. Michael D. Higgins has provided a steady, intelligent, humane voice on the moral and political questions of the last fourteen years. It’s possible to draw a coherent line from Robinson and McAleese through Higgins to Connolly, just as the comparisons between the venal grubbiness of Lenihan, Gallagher, and Gavin are unavoidable. Humphreys is just the latest in a string of subpar Fine Gael candidates.

Should Connolly triumph on October 24th, as the polls currently predict, it would be an impressive victory for an Irish left that has managed to display coherence and unity unthinkable even a few years ago. If they can hold this kind of message discipline in a general election, the possibility of Ireland’s first government without Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael feels, at last, possible. Connolly has managed to position herself effectively as both the heir to Higgins and someone who can go beyond his legacy. She has spent a lifetime as a principled, independent-minded voice on the left, with ironclad commitments to the rights of the most vulnerable, and a refusal to accept the polite fictions of the political centre and right. If Ireland is to take a more critical and clear-eyed look at its place in the world, Connolly is by far the best placed to facilitate it.

The world is in a wretched place, and sorely in need of humane leadership. Liberal institutions have been seriously discredited by their silence or active complicity in the Gaza genocide. This moment feels uncertain, unmoored, full of possibility and risk. We’ve been fortunate in our heads of state over the last three decades, with some genuinely close calls. Ireland deserves better than reality TV stars or Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil castoffs. The country does not need seven years of a pliant president, a mouthpiece for the government of the day who will do little but attend ribbon cuttings and sign on the dotted line. Europe needs politicians who will engage with the EU not as an altar to genuflect to, but a real power structure to be engaged both critically and constructively. The world needs humanitarians, negotiators, people who will stand up for peace when every person in the room is demanding war. Catherine Connolly is the only candidate not speaking in meaningless bromides, the only one offering a real vision, the only real choice.

Gaza, August 2025 (Alessio Mamo/The Guardian)

Move him into the sun–

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unseen.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

– Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918), Futility, May 1918

It has never been worse than this. The last time I wrote here of Palestine, in February 2024, the invasion of Rafah – Joe Biden’s supposed red line – had just begun. Since then the IDF has obliterated Rafah, along with most of the rest of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians officially, hundreds of thousands in all likelihood, have been killed, by Israeli bombs, bullets, and starvation. The long-threatened famine is here. Hundreds have already died of starvation. More than a thousand people queuing for food have been gunned down in two months. The West Bank, without even the pretext of a Hamas presence, is under a state of dual siege. The IDF executes urban destruction, killings and kidnappings, while a juiced up army of settlers spread terror among the Palestinian population, vandalizing, looting, burning, and murdering, knowing the police, army and courts are on their side. All the while Israeli politicians and media figures have ceased to hide their intentions whatsoever. Seemingly every day brings another quote, each one gobsmacking in its genocidal intent, from a politician quoting Hitler as a model for what should be done, to the Finance Minister’s repeated demands for ethnic cleansing and settlement of Gaza.

Horror of this scale has the effect of deadening words, making stories of the most unimaginable violence land with a dull thud. We are used to it, even as new levels of depravity are found weekly. I have seen every one of the most obscene images of violence of my life in the last two years. As teenagers we would see images like this very occasionally, either intentionally or accidentally. Moments of surreal and genuine violence, usually culled from video nasties like Faces of Death, old VHS transfers of 35mm film further pixelated into short animated GIFs. Now, new high-fidelity snuff films are created daily, and we see them in our Instagram feeds next to pictures of holidays and ads for Volvos. Ash and fire and endless grey dusty death. Not that it’s anywhere near the most important thing to think about, but this daily bombardment of images of death is having a devastating psychological effect on everyone who experiences it.

All of this has been said before, by better writers than me. And yet it’s worth saying it again. The deliberate policy of the Israeli government is to flood the world with so many crimes that it becomes almost impossible to hold on to any one for any length of time. As Nemick says in the first series of Andor, it’s easier to hide behind forty atrocities than one single incident. I might have been embarrassed once to quote a Star Wars character, now I find I don’t much care where I get my encouragement from.1 Why be embarrassed about anything else, when the whole world is party to an obscenity that shames us all?

The last two years have been clarifying, and not only in unpleasant ways. I feel an immense sense of kinship when I see some visible act of solidarity for Palestine, no matter how minor. At a check up this month, my doctor wore a keffiyeh pin, and I had a glimpse of what it might have been like to be an abolitionist in the early 19th Century, seeing someone else wearing a badge that said, “Am I not a man and a brother?” The left is notoriously fond of factionalism and infighting and yet I feel absolutely no desire to rehash old battles now. What do I care if someone is a social democrat or a communist, an anarchist or a left liberal, if they are willing to stand with me on this, the moral crisis of our lifetimes? Friends I haven’t spoken to in years share the same horror, reach out for a quick word. I feel as if we are part of something greater than ourselves. Perhaps something too little too late, but that is not yet decided.

Many of the old certainties that I felt in earlier years have faded away. As a lifelong agnostic, I find more kinship among people of faith who oppose this war than fellow non-believers who stay silent. There is even some solace to be found in religious texts, even if I can’t quite get myself to believe them. Not a man ordinarily given to quoting the bible, I found myself struck by a colleague’s deeply moving presentation on a verse from, of all things, the Old Testament. This document, so often a justification for violence, also contains words of reconciliation, of fortitude and healing. I will take my encouragement where I can get it.

“...and people will call you Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets to Live in.”

– Isaiah 58:12

I have seen some laughable commentary from the more tedious sections of the British political system wondering indignantly how Palestine became such an important issue, lamenting people’s relative lack of fervour for more quotidian domestic problems. They are missing the point spectacularly. This attempted destruction of the Palestinian people is the great moral issue of the early 21st century precisely because it is being done in our names. It is a demand to kneel in the face of brutal, arbitrary power, lest it be turned against you next. If it is not refused, if it is not defeated, if it is not at least battled to a standstill, I do not wish to contemplate what comes after.

This crisis has shown us which world leaders are truly beneath contempt - most of them. Which ones – Biden, Trump, Starmer, Merz, Macron et all – will not only consent to this genocide but brutally discipline their populations for having the gall to question it. And question it they are. The mass mobilizations for Palestine have been among the largest in history. They have also, so far, been ineffective in exerting power. That is no slight whatsoever on the activists, among whose ranks I’d count myself, for whatever minor amount I’ve done. It is merely an acknowledgment of the immense democratic chasm in the world of 2025: little that we do or say seems to have any effect on the actions of our governments or the international organizations to which they are a part. It’s also to acknowledge the incredible social, economic and physical violence meted out against those opposing this slaughter. In country after country the full repressive apparatus has been deployed to ruin the lives of anyone who dares to speak out.

Almost 20 years ago the Irish political scientist Peter Mair coined the phrase “ruling the void” to describe the creation in the west of a democracy stripped of its demos, the removal of democratic control over vital economic and political functions, alongside the encouragement of mass indifference among the general population while power continues to be exercised in their name. Western nations are no longer merely ruling the void, but ruling a moral abyss: using the withered consent of the populations of Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia to facilitate Israel’s genocide.

The justifications for the slaughter which started out so white hot after October 7th have cooled now. As they have moved further and further from the original pretext they have also become more and more incoherent. The hostages are used only as the bluntest tool. They can only be invoked against anyone seeking a ceasefire, never analysed or examined. Even their families must be eliminated from the popular discourse if they threaten the needs of the Israeli government. The many thousands of Palestinians (including children) held hostage in Israeli internment camps are, of course, not a consideration whatsoever. Listen to Israelis politicians, ambassadors, online influencers or their supporters online and you’ll hear the same phrases repeated ad nauseam. Hamas must surrender, Israel does not commit war crimes, Hamas steals aid, the UN refuses to distribute aid, the IDF only fires warning shots at civilians, the people you see wasting away were sick or disabled anyway. Those videos are fake. Israel has the right to exist. Do you condemn Hamas? Why aren’t you out marching against Hamas? This criticism, that criticism, all criticism of Israel is anti-semitism.

If there seems to be no consistency to any of this, that’s because there isn’t. The goal is not to convince you, those days are long gone. The goal is to muddy the waters and make you switch off. Failing that, to batter you into submission, to convince you that Israel’s power and control is so great that it cannot be faced, and must only be endured or endorsed.

And yet, and yet, and yet, I cannot give up the feeling, the hope, that gradually, things are changing. The hollowing out of democracy in the west is profound, but it is surely not yet at the point where leaders are simply immune to the wishes of their constituents. Across Europe’s largest countries, fewer than a fifth of people hold a favourable opinion of Israel. The comments section of the New York Times, once the natural home of blithe, unexamined liberal Zionism, now abounds with people calling for a total suspension of military aid and diplomatic cover.

It’s easy to feel powerless and alone, bombarded by so much indifference and sick glee from those who do not care, or who approve. But it's worth remembering that most people, when presented with images of immense and deliberately inflicted human suffering, have a human response. They are against it. They are revolted by it. They want it to stop. The question is not opinion but salience. How can we transform the issue from being one in which people passively feel opposition to one where people are activated, and motivated to exercise their vote, their boycott, their feet to do something about it? How can we mobilize people in sufficient numbers, and effective ways, as to be impossible to ignore? How can we make it clear to our political class that this is non-negotiable, and that those who facilitate it will be held accountable, in the ballot booth and perhaps the court room too. How can we bring pressure on Israel that is not only moral, but backed by real political and economic force?

Because the notion that we are powerless, that there is nothing that we can do, is an admission of pessimism that the powerful in Israel would love to encourage. If there is nothing that can be done to stop them, then there is no limit to what Israel can do. But there are limits, and there are tools at our disposal. Israel is not immune to pressure. They are, of course, sustained by military aid and sales from the U.S. and Europe, but they also have an economy that is deeply integrated into that of the world. This is not some autarkist hermit kingdom, it is a modern state reliant on foreign investment and trade, and whose non-Palestinian citizens are accustomed not only to a high standard of living, but the freedom to travel worldwide, frequently visa-free. As a pseudo-European state on the periphery of the continent, Israel is deeply connected to many European organizations, from education to entertainment. There are pressure points everywhere if governments can be forced to use them. It will require creativity, flexibility, and a great deal of humility.

أَيَحْسَبُ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ أَلَّن نَّجْمَعَ عِظَامَهُۥ ٣

بَلَىٰ قَـٰدِرِينَ عَلَىٰٓ أَن نُّسَوِّىَ بَنَانَهُۥ ٤

“Do people think we cannot reassemble their bones? Yes indeed! We are most capable of restoring even their very fingertips!”

Qu’ran (75:3-4)

It is time for the international movement for Palestine to go on the offensive. This slaughter must end, this occupation must end. And until it does, we need economic sanctions on the state of Israel, not merely the occupied territories. Arms sales, even of so-called “defensive” weapons, must be cancelled in both directions. This point is even being argued by some in the (admittedly small) Israeli left. As in South Africa in the 1980s, the goal must be to bring some critical mass of Israelis to the table through moral, economic and political force. Some will experience that genuine psychic break with Zionism that many white South Africans did with their country’s system of oppression. Some will move cynically, making the calculation that accommodation with the Palestinian population is preferable to being a permanent international pariah. Both groups will be necessary.

Those responsible for or participating in war crimes must be investigated and charged, including those Western consultants and mercenaries who have enabled the bread massacres in the guise of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”. Driven by intense organizing from the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Global Legal Action Network, Belgium recently detained and interrogated two IDF soldiers accused of war crimes, the first such case in Europe. Ireland is inching closer to banning trade with the occupied territories, and the cross-party Oireachtas committee is pushing back against government attempts to water it down. Slovenia became the first European country to declare a total arms embargo on Israel. In itself this will have little impact, but it is a crack in the dam. It may be that Israel has finally overextended itself. There are signs of frustration with Israel among some EU states which have up to this point cosigned their actions. The French, the Dutch, even the Germans appear to be running out of patience, or fearing electoral backlash. Either way, the lonely corner of Europe that dared to question Israeli policy – Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Slovenia, Norway – looks likely to acquire a few new members. Outside of Europe, the newly formed Hague Group of nations aims to put some institutional heft behind the global movement.

Slowly, haltingly, we move forward. It is, needless to say, maddening to watch powerful people who endorsed this for two years suddenly have a road-to-Damascus moment. Many of these, especially the most senior politicians and media figures, are entirely cynical, an attempt to avoid holding the bag when the absolute worst details come out. Some are partially genuine, experiencing a gradual erosion of long-held Zionism that simply cannot withstand the mounting horror. You are under no obligations to enthusiastically welcome the powerful into a coalition, but we may have to grit our teeth and be patient with ordinary people as they look for a way to assuage their conscience. In late July, centrist independent U.S. Senator Angus King released a startlingly angry statement. Notwithstanding the usual throat clearing, he concluded by saying, “For these reasons, I am through supporting the actions of the current Israeli government and will advocate—and vote—for an end to any United States support whatsoever until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.” The statement is interesting both in that it comes from someone not on the left, but also appears to skip several expected steps in the ladder of escalation. The promise is not to sanction a handful of settlers, symbolically recognize a Palestinian state, or even to merely restrict arms sales, but to vote for an end to any United States support whatsoever if there is no change. Sometimes when people break, they break hard. Those who have long felt secure in the bipartisan underwriting of Israel’s many crimes may yet feel the ground move under their feet.

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The movement builds strength, but the killing continues. So where to look for strength in the meantime? Of all places, the American Civil War is where I have been taking some hope, looking for the ways in which seemingly unassailable systems can be fought. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., wounded three times as a Union soldier, recalled that his generation was one whose “hearts were touched with fire”. The brutality of the American Civil War is well established – a war fought with modern weapons and initially pre-modern tactics. The slaughter at Antietam, Shiloh, and Gettysburg was a taste of what the 20th Century would bring. Unlike the First World War, which started for no good reason and was fought for even less, the American Civil War was understood by the most clear eyed Unionists and Confederates to be, from the outset, something titanic and consequential. Even for those in the North who didn’t care a damn for the four million held in brutal bondage, or those who wanted a soft, conciliatory approach, the war began to take on new and moral meaning.

On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

– Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977), For the Union Dead, 1960

Lincoln is the clearest example of this transformation. Before the war he had been a radical Whig, then a moderate Republican, with relatively humane but unmistakably blinkered and racist mid-19th century liberal views. He was, above all, a believer in the essential goodness and necessity of the United States, a belief that lent him the steel to stand up to the South when they dared him. The experience of secession, of war, of industrial slaughter and gallant sacrifice, of Black soldiery and humanity all reforged Lincoln into a stronger alloy. By war’s end he was not only convinced of the moral rightness of Black suffrage and civil rights, but of their essential necessity and urgency. As Karl Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864, “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”

Holmes and his generation had “seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor”. Their duty was simply to “bear the report to those who come after us.” For a time the American Civil War made hard-bitten soldiers of soft-handed Northern lawyers and merchants, moral giants of former slavery apologists, and heroes of people thought good enough only for the scrapheap. Ulysses S. Grant was a reluctant soldier, a failed businessman, and a bad farmer. He was drummed out of the army for his drinking, and only recalled because the supposed best and brightest military minds had deserted to the Confederacy. His failures did not paralyze him: they freed him. Freed him from ego, from fear, from the inability or unwillingness to act that characterized the early Union generals. I know many activists feel burnt out and broken now, ground down by defeat, despair and repression, by the real consequences they have experienced and the sheer obscenity of the crimes being committed. But in this struggle we may too be remade as something better than we are now.

A ghost that haunts the contemporary left is the feeling that we are, in some fundamental way, unworthy of the legacy of our ancestors. Those women and men who died to end slavery, to win basic rights, to win the vote, to dethrone monarchs and destroy the ancien régime, to fight Czarism and fascism and Nazism and imperialism and apartheid, they were in some way our moral betters. They were braver, they were smarter, they could endure more and keep faith longer. They were not afraid to fail, to lose, to suffer and to perish for these ideals. They believed in something better to be built, we only fear that worse is yet to come. But these people were merely people, just as we are. They did not start out their lives brave, or strong, or fearless. They were transformed by their struggles. They found bravery in each other, they found strength in their work. Their fear was never banished, only mastered.

Radicals around the world rejoiced at Lincoln and his Grand Army of the Republic, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Slaves, serfs, peasants, and wage workers mostly understood that what was being struck was a hammer blow on their behalf. The liberation of the Palestinian people would not be the end of something, but the beginning.

How do things change? First slowly, then all at once. Weeks and decades, decades and weeks. We outside of Palestine do not have the luxury of despair. We must keep the faith even when hope seems faint. We must remember that all empires fall eventually. No oppression lasts forever. If we were to do nothing useful for the rest of our days save to hasten the arrival of a free and democratic Palestine, with equal rights for all, ours would be lives worth living.

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death – of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841 – 1935), 1884.

– Grant Wood (1891 - 1942), “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”, 1931

This is a piece I wrote almost three years ago, for the first issue of an architecture magazine. As far as I know, the magazine never launched, though I stress they did pay me promptly! With the current discourse around the so-called “Abundance Agenda”, the material is surprisingly relevant. It might shock you to learn that the housing crisis in Ireland or elsewhere has not in fact been solved. The text is as it was written in October 2022, but I’ve included some bolded links to where some threads developed.

NIMBY – standing for Not in My Back Yard – is a term that has been in common use for decades, at least in the United States. It conjures images of the classic suburban homeowner, furious at construction in their neighborhood, at noise, at dust, at light-blocking and view-destroying, at new housing, at public housing, at a new light rail line, at wastewater treatment plants, at wind turbines and solar panels and absolutely everything else. The phrase YIMBY – Yes in My Back Yard – is somewhat newer, and one you may not have encountered. By their own account, YIMBYs are a constituency self-consciously organised against NIMBYism, and in favour of development. What development exactly? Precisely the sort that NIMBYs are against. So anything from waste incinerators to public housing, with little distinction made between any project.

YIMBYs may object, and say that I am being unfair, it’s more complicated than that. And indeed, it is. But unfortunately, so are the politics of urban development, and the other side’s position. No one self identifies as a NIMBY, but you will find many proud YIMBY labels in the twitter bios of intelligent young men (it is usually men). Across social media, particularly YouTube and Twitter, the last few years have seen a new flowering of interest in urbanism, often by amateurs and outsiders responding to the hostile urban environments in which they are forced to live. They arise, too, from a very real sense that they have had no part in shaping these environments. These videos are charming, maddening, often informative. Online urbanists (often correctly) identify heroes (trains! Mixed use development!) and villains (stroads! Single family zoning!). They have a pleasantly nerdy affect: that of the concerned young man who wants walkable streets, vibrant downtowns and less dependence on the car. For the most part, they are acting in good faith, and many of their critiques are trenchant. They are not politically homogeneous but lean, on the whole, left. In recent years they also lean YIMBY. (Since the time of writing, this loose tendency has solidified somewhat into the “Abundance Agenda”. The People’s Policy Project has a good analysis of them here. “Well-funded” is an understatement!)

In an American context, this is understandable. In such a suburbanised country, the power of wealthy homeowners to block new housing is indeed vast, and there is a long and ugly history of public transit being blocked by those who don’t want poor people to have easy access to their neighborhoods. But the NIMBY/YIMBY divide is now creeping into Irish discourse. The Business Post in 2018 attacked politicians from across the political spectrum for what it called NIMBYism in opposing development in their neighborhoods ranging from fairly modest apartment blocks on the site of an old pub, to controversial plans to build on parkland, to the euphemistically named “student housing”; units that skirt minimum livability regulations and garner premium returns from eye-wateringly high rents. The Irish Times wrote an explainer in 2019 offering to help you “know your NIMBY from your YIMBY”. Leo Varadkar was accused of “pandering to NIMBYs” by a Green Party councilor for opposing a section of a cycling greenway. In 2021 Taoiseach Michael Martin lamented the culture of NIMBYism in Ireland. In Ireland, as in the US, the YIMBY side is presented typically as non-ideological; a sort of common sense approach that any right thinking person, of the right, centre or left, should agree with.

Both NIMBYs and YIMBYs in their basest form are unusual class coalitions. A tall proposed market rate local housing development might be opposed by both wealthy locals concerned about the impact on their views and traffic, and at the same time by working class people who would quite reasonably like to see the same (limited) space used for public housing. The net result if successful is that the project is not built. The wealthy get their way, the rest of us, probably not. YIMBYism by the same token is an alliance of genuine, well meaning advocates for more housing and transit alongside an extremely powerful class of real estate developers and speculators. Should they get their way, the wealthy get their way. And the public housing that was promised? Sorry, that’s in phase two, delayed indefinitely. (One of the projects in my head at the time this was written was the enormous Hudson Yards development in New York City. The first phase was finished. Two guesses as to whether the public housing that was promised got built.)

These battle lines favour only the wealthiest: they have been drawn as a series of skirmishes between two forms of capital and enlisted the rest of us as soldiers. There is a real risk to defining your ideological identity as merely the opposite of what you hate. Self-identification as a YIMBY blunts one's ability to engage critically with the forces ruthlessly shaping cities for personal profit. In the US, unencumbered by limits on political spending, YIMBY organisations also appear suspiciously well-funded, often by the very capital forces that stand to benefit from the policies they espouse. Few self-identify as a NIMBY, but opposing YIMBYs nonetheless can nonetheless put oneself in a defensive crouch and blind to the genuine power of conservative forces that, by weight of property ownership and political importance, can create exclusive urban zones that delay or prevent vital public housing and transport projects. (I’m never not thinking of the cafe in Ranelagh that helped derail the Luas metro upgrade.)

It is possible to detect some similar DNA in both blanket objection to development and enthusiastic development boosterism. Both are driven by a kind of pessimism. Development is seen by both as a powerful, almost unknowable force. One that cannot be influenced or reasoned with, but only opposed or accepted. Your choices are a luxury apartment block or an empty lot. In truth few people actually object to all construction, fewer still celebrate all. But most people also have little faith that any sort of democratic input will be respected. They acknowledge, quite reasonably, that the forces driving urban development are international capital and state incentives. Libraries, schools, parks, and other load bearing elements of the social fabric are not built at anywhere near the frequency or urgency by which they are desired. The state itself has retreated from building homes and seems only able to give tax breaks to developers, enter into eye-wateringly expensive public-private partnerships, or simply beg for scraps from the table. Costs overrun, promises of amenities go unfulfilled and all that lovely vegetation in the initial render never materializes. The private sector has repeatedly failed to deliver fair rents, sufficient or livable housing in the decades since the state turned over the task. (Residential rents in Ireland in early 2025 grew at their fastest rate in two decades. The average rent in Ireland in late 2022 was €1733 per month, now it is €2053, an increase of 18.5%)

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We must be wary, too, of taking a framework from the United States and trying to apply it without modification here in Ireland. One can identify with the desire for more transit or housing without forgetting that the systems of planning, zoning, local government and political participation are vastly different in the suburbs of Californian cities from those in Ballyogan. It’s worth remembering that the last era of building unrestricted by “red tape”, “NIMBYism” or excessive government regulation – the 1990s and 00s – produced grotesque urban sprawl and tens of thousands of homes that, only a few years later, are literally crumbling. Ireland was constructing tens of thousands more housing units in the mid-00s than today, but prices were just as high. Abolition of restrictions on international capital owning and developing property in Ireland has mostly resulted in a proliferation of hotels, idiotic experiments in “co-living” and high-end housing, much of which remains vacant; an asset and not a home. The ill-fated Fine Gael Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy fiddled with planning regulation repeatedly in ways that both delayed construction and encouraged low-quality development. (His successor, Fianna Fáil’s Darragh O’Brien, did some more messing around. In July 2025, new Housing Minister James Browne has once again remade the planning rules for apartment buildings on the fly. I expect a new utopia is only months away as a result.)

What we are left with are cities that are not only too expensive for most to live, but also ugly, perverse, opaque spaces. Large sections of our urban spaces seem to follow no logic but that of the market. It is that same market logic that, against all historical precedent, the YIMBY turns to as a panacea to make housing truly affordable. But with housing entirely the preserve of the private sector, there is simply no incentive to reduce rents or sell houses at a below-market rate. Why would these individual capital actors voluntarily reduce their own profit when they are in complete control of the supply?

The left in Ireland is occasionally guilty of a pessimism around urban politics. A common genre of social media post is a picture of a beautiful and highly desirable piece of public housing, usually from Northern Europe or Austria. It is almost absurdly tasteful, livable, warm and inviting, and available widely at a reasonable rate. There is something almost pornographic about this kind of post, and in a strange way it seems to foreclose the possibility of such things existing at home.

The problem with self-identifying as either YIMBY or NIMBY is that it really is more complicated than it appears. There is a difference between public housing and high-end build to rent housing. There is a difference between a new rail line and a waste incinerator. These labels flatten genuine political conflicts into simple slogans. YIMBYism is an insufficient means of dealing with the housing crisis because it fails to acknowledge the real power structures behind the current international housing crisis. But opposition to development is also insufficient. If we organise around these poles we will unwittingly support the worst impulses of one or other branch of capital. We must demand real systems of democratic participation in urban development; the ability to shape our environment, rather than merely preserve it, or allow it to be remade without us. Beware the easy answers of the Irish YIMBY as they come to your town.

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Eoin Hayes' story is a strange one. It likely would have got little notice if he hadn't won a seat in the recent Irish General Election; his was probably the most unlikely victory in an election that was mostly a case of as-you-were. Barely a week after taking office he was engulfed in controversy, when the media drew increased attention to his work for military technology company Palantir, perhaps the Silicon Valley corporation most deeply embedded in both the US and Israeli war machines. The issue was sharpened by the fact that Hayes held hundreds of thousands of Euro worth of shares. There was an immediate and enormous outcry, given the centrality of Palestinian solidarity to the current Irish left, and political system generally. People felt betrayed, particularly given the fact that he replaced Sinn Féin TD Chris Andrews who, whatever his other faults, is a steadfast supporter of Palestine.

Hayes' stated position on the ongoing genocide in Gaza is decent, laudable even. The Social Democrats have taken early and strong positions against the Israeli government's actions, and there is little suggestion that Hayes is some sort of closet supporter of the slaughter. Nonetheless, the party moved quickly to suspend Hayes, pending an investigation. Many have called for his outright resignation, though that seems unlikely. Some in the centre and on the right have pushed back against his suspension, arguing that Hayes was hard done by, just someone who had a job at a tech company and happened to make some money from it.

If there is any sympathy to be had for Hayes it lies in the fact that ending up in a morally compromised job is not difficult if one grows up with money and education in Ireland. Ireland is a highly educated, English-speaking country with deep connections to centres of power in the US and UK, and a preponderance for industries with variable morality: financial services, tech, management consultancy, pharmaceuticals. This is not to say that everyone who works for all these industries is a bad person, but merely that it's easier to end up doing something immoral than if you grow up in an economy dependent on, say, the manufacture of pencils. Companies recruit from a young age in elite Irish schools and universities, targeting especially – though not exclusively – STEM students. The pull can feel irresistible.

I know little about Hayes’ life, but it's not hard to imagine how this kind of thing happens. You display a creative mind or early skill in programming, combined with a natural affability and a willingness to get along with a wide range of people. You have no difficulty finding an internship during college, probably even a paid one, with a large well-known tech firm. You are willing to work hard, and impress your bosses, who introduce you to a dizzying rolodex of important people. Tech overlords would have us believe that the industry is hard scientific, data-driven, but in reality it runs almost entirely on confidence, bullshit, and personality, areas in which Irish people excel. On graduation you spend some time in the US – San Francisco, New York or D.C. almost certainly – working for another, lesser known, but well-capitalized firm. After a few years you are offered the real job, the one you’ve been driving towards, the one you will regret. This will be for some really, truly rotten corporation, or perhaps a military directly. Your work will contribute to their mission which, if laid out plainly on paper, would seem almost comically evil. But it will not feel like that while you work there. It’s likely you will be doing something that feels in equal parts anodyne and exciting, working with a team of bright, pleasant young people who are broadly socially liberal and mostly kind, on a personal level. You will be treated well by HR, and compensated beyond what you thought was possible only a few years previously. If you had been given that salary at 18 your eyes would have popped out of your head. Then again, if you had been asked to do it at 18, you might have said no, citing your principles. But slowly, slowly, you were brought into the fold.

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Much of the controversy has centred around Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Thiel has spent the last number of years spending large sums of money furthering right-wing libertarian causes. But his personal political contributions pale in comparison to Palantir’s actual day-to-day work. The company is deeply involved in providing data mining and target identification systems for the Israeli military. To speak plainly, this is not merely a case of a company that makes money from economic activity in the occupied territories, or refuses to stop sponsoring, say, the Israeli football team. Palantir makes and sells tools that help the Israeli military decide which Palestinians to kill. It is impossible to imagine a corporation more closely connected to the mass death in Gaza.

Hayes worked for the company for two years, amassing thousands of shares alongside his presumably ample salary. The value of those shares was realised at about €200,000. Hayes also lied about when they were sold, first saying that it was before his entry into politics, before admitting that the sale was only completed in July 2024, almost a year into this wretched “war”. There is no other conclusion to reach than that he has blood on his hands.

- Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 1812

Given this career trajectory, it seems a little odd that he ended up a member of the Social Democrats, first elected to the council and then the Dáil. But this is not the first time the party has had candidate issues. Our own recently benighted Fianna Fáil Health Minister Stephen Donnelly was one of the party's founders. Years after its founding the party remains somewhat ideologically incoherent, and dependent on an overwhelmingly middle class support base. Having a middle class party of social democracy is of course better than having a middle class party of reaction; there are a lot of middle class people in Ireland and it would be unambiguously better if they voted for a progressive option. But this class position among their voters is matched by that of its elected officials. Hence why a candidate would have a work history more in line with the party's foes than its supporters.

Class traitors exist. Fidel was a lawyer, Che Guevara a doctor. But it takes a strong personality to swim against the tide that carries you, if you let it, to a life that is comfortable, prosperous, and compromised. We are all morally compromised, to some degree, in our consumption habits, in what we do and what we fail to do. The apparatus of oppression outside our borders that undergirds our lives within them is a stain on our character. But there are levels, and there are limits. The sociologist Clifford Geertz once observed that true cleanliness is impossible, but all the same, surgeons do not operate in sewers. In some ways those most vulnerable to the path that Hayes took are not the truly wealthy. They have the insulation of inherited capital to fall back on; their sordid moral compromises are often several generations back. The strivers are the easiest to get on board, being both convinced of the merits of hard work, and terrified of the possibility of social descent. Above all lingers the figure of the Irish house, that thing unattainable to so many. That thing that could be achieved so easily with a few years work in Dubai or for a merchant of death and immiseration.

This is a stunningly bleak moment, socially and politically. We live in a time of reaction, of backlash to the small amounts of power that the previously powerless have been able to accumulate. There is much glee on the right and centre over the fact that so many liberatory projects of the last few years - BLM, MeToo, Bernie, Corbyn, etc. - have been soundly defeated. The powerful have been shown to be virtually above consequences, be they legal, political or otherwise. The controversy over Hayes was, in a sense, almost heartening. A critical mass of people understood that while he had committed no crime in a legal sense, what he had profited from was deeply morally troubling; a sin, if it doesn’t sound too Catholic. Hayes is likely amiable enough, and he may even be possessed of real convictions and a determination to make the world a better place. But like everyone else, he has moral weight. As a citizen of the global north he chose to participate in a machine that destroys lives in order to make his own substantially more comfortable. That must have consequences.

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For the last print edition of the Baffler, I wrote a long piece considering the possibilities of Irish unification. Looking over Sinn Féin’s rise and stall, I said:

The party displayed impeccable timing in the 1990s and also benefited from remarkable luck, coming to the negotiating table with the British and Irish governments while they had maximum leverage and before the war on terror would make any paramilitary force lose influence in Washington. In the first years of this decade, however, that luck has run out. Sinn Féin’s polling began to decay last year, and that decline has accelerated in the last twelve months, driven by the rising salience of immigration as a political issue and the emergence of an active, violent far-right as a live force in Irish politics. Rather than double down on the issues on which they hold a commanding lead, namely housing and health, Sinn Féin have instead engaged in amateurish overtures toward the right, attempting to define themselves as “serious” on immigration in the manner of center-left parties across Europe. This appears to have led to a further softening of their support on the left, while winning them few votes from the immigration-fixated center and right. The same ideological flexibility that once allowed them to grow rapidly now looks like cynical opportunism and political incoherence. An older generation of Republican activists are dying or retiring, and with them, some of Sinn Féin’s commitment to being a real social force, rather than merely another electioneering political party.

Their performance in June’s local and European elections in the Republic was disappointing: they polled in the low teens, below the two main, center-right government parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. With a general election due no later than March 2025, and likely happening in November of this year, Ireland is, as it stands, looking at a reelection of the current government, possibly supported by new right-wing party Independent Ireland and various clientelist and xenophobic independents. While none of the current government parties are explicitly against a united Ireland, there is precisely zero chance that this coalition would push for unification in anything like the medium term.

Well, the election happened, as predicted, and the outcome was pretty much exactly that. Sinn Féin did a little better than expected, but were still miles off being able to govern in any realistic scenario. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been comfortably reelected, needing only a handful of independents, who they will no doubt get for a sack of magic beans and the right to dump more nitrates in the groundwater. As all the seats are filled and we’re in that strange interregnum before a government is formed, I thought I might offer some lightly focussed thoughts on the state of Irish politics after this latest anticlimactic election.

I have been wrong about a great many things, but I never bought the inevitability of a Sinn Féin government. It is a boring aphorism that I repeat too much, but no political outcome is inevitable. Sinn Féin’s breakthrough in the last election was genuinely astounding, shattering a hundred years of political duopoly and forcing the two civil war parties into coalition for the first time. Sinn Féin then soared to new polling heights, touching the upper thirties in vote share. In April of last year – last year! – B&A polled them at 37%, one percentage point more than FF/FG combined, a result that would have netted them over 70 seats, and left them in spitting distance from a majority.

Were these numbers real? Who knows, because by the time this vote rolled around they were lucky to scrape the 19% they did. So why did I never quite believe it? Well, for one thing, Fine Gael also polled in the high 30s in the last election cycle. An electorate that oscillates across the political spectrum like that is not ideologically committed, and cannot be relied upon to deliver votes at the time you need it. Sinn Féin’s numbers always felt a little overinflated, not reflective of how recently they were a small party, or how shallow their roots were in certain parts of the country.

The most remarkable thing about this election is that it wasn’t worse for Sinn Féin. Beset by inscrutable scandals, internally and externally incoherent, they spent the last year losing votes from left, right, and centre. They fought a decent national campaign, though as ever their ground game remains frustratingly patchy for a major party. Given the low turnout, some Sinn Féin strategists will be happy that their core vote is now in the upper teens. They returned a healthy number of seats on a reduced vote, reflective of the increased size of the Dáil, but also a smarter selection policy and, I suspect, a greater transfer friendliness than they historically experienced. Ultimately, there are 39 Sinn Féin TDs in the next Dáil, and they are the main opposition. Old heads in the party will surely be saying that it could be worse, and reminding the younger types of a time when it was just Gerry and four other lads.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been engaging in mutual back patting, Fianna Fáil with considerably more reason. For all the supposed new energy of their dilettante Taoiseach, and the elevated poll numbers it brought, Fine Gael’s vote declined yet again, albeit marginally. This was their worst vote share since 1948, though you wouldn’t know it to look at their smug faces. They ran too many candidates and a fairly anemic campaign most defined by Simon Harris’ inability to appear even vaguely human when confronted with a member of the public. Had the Dáil size remained static they would likely have lost net seats, and are sitting in third place yet again. After almost fourteen years in power they are listless, shorn of their big personalities and liable to be rolled by their more powerful coalition partner. Still they managed to replace their ranks with AI generated backbenchers, so that’s something.

Speaking of same, you’ve got to hand it to Micheal Martin, the man knows how to spin shit into gold. Eighteen months ago I tried to gauge the position of the party:

Fianna Fáil has recovered from its lowest point in 2011, but this has mostly been achieved by clawing back some older voters from Fine Gael. It is true to say that the Fianna Fáil brand remains toxic to younger voters, but for most under 30, it’s truer to say that it is increasingly irrelevant. It remains the most generationally polarised party in the country, with candidates occasionally garnering margin-of-error numbers among young voters. It would be a struggle for many people to name a single, notable, unique Fianna Fáil policy. To return to the question of who Fianna Fáil is for, the answer appears to be a steadily dwindling, increasingly regionalised demographic.

Taking the exit poll data with a grain of salt – considering its larger than usual error – FF remain a party of older people, with a hefty 27% of over 65s, and 22% of 50-64s. They remain unsurprisingly unpopular among my own cohort of millennials, for whom they will ever be the party that, as the saying goes, fucked the country. But they’ve made a modest recovery among Gen Z, too young to appreciate the splendour of Brian Cowen’s brief tenure. Their vote has remained remarkably static since the last election (down 0.3pp, from 484,000 to 481,000). These are not wholly the same voters, of course, in five years people move, die, change parties, become old enough to vote etc. But they have managed to replace supporters at approximately the same rate as they have lost them, assisted by the higher voting propensity of older voters. Much rests on the personal popularity of Martin himself, widely perceived as a capable, humane Taoiseach; a decent man, as he has been described perhaps one million times, notwithstanding his actual positions in governments which have overseen immense human misery.

Fianna Fáil are becoming a party that you vote for when you can’t think of anything else to do. They landed on an absurd 48 seats, though Mary Fitzpatrick was shafted, for what must be the tenth time. Their seat-getting is bolstered by the remnants of their legendary turnout machine, as well as a breakdown of the old civil war divide that now sees them add a hefty chunk of Fine Gael second and third preferences to their harvest. They still have an ideological problem, of course, but electoral success can paper over those cracks for a while longer. The real fun will begin when Martin steps aside, or is pushed. I’ve long bored everyone around me with my prediction that Martin will run for, and win, one of the next two presidential elections. As ironic as this sounds about a Fianna Fáiler who has been around since Haughey, there is simply no other obvious figure who can attract as broad based support for a role that largely hinges on being seen as stately and dignified. Absent Martin, however, Fianna Fáil are, to put it kindly, thinly stocked with personality and ability. Who is Peter “Chap” Cleere? We may never know. An ideological war will likely not break out among the contenders, that will have to wait until one of them leads the party into a truly catastrophic election result. We await the day.

It was a very strange election for PBP/S, in which they lost seats, gained a seat, had near misses, increased their overall vote share, and ultimately ended up down 2, from 5 to 3. It didn't feel like a disaster but it didn't feel great either, particularly combined with the loss of left independents like Thomas Pringle and Joan Collins. They feel simultaneously like they’ve really deepened their roots in certain constituencies and at the same time completely failed to make any headway in most of the country. I would love to know what their strategy is for the next Dáil because I couldn't even begin to guess. Nice to see Seamus Healy get back in down in Tipp, a bright spot in a dark local political landscape.

The modestly impressive vote for the Social Democrats appears to be in large part leakage from Sinn Fein and the Greens. A considerable number of voters are angry about Sinn Féin’s posturing on immigration and general drift, as well as the Greens’ time in government, and the Social Democrats are relatively unblemished so far. Their position of party to vote for if you want a Sinn Féin government but don’t want to vote for Sinn Féin is a smart one. That’s quite a few people in this country. They have been genuinely fortunate that FG/FF are so close to the numbers they need, because they will hardly be tempted by a spin on the party-killing carousel that is coalition government.

I have nothing to say about or to the Greens except, if you go to dinner with a cannibal, you can’t be surprised if they eat you. At least the trains are sort of cheap now. As for the question of who votes for Labour, I’ve been trying to answer that my entire life and have never come up with an answer except “me in 2011”. They appear to have run a smart, targeted campaign that netted big seat numbers on a modest vote, and if Alan Kelly doesn’t get to go into government soon, blood is going to start pumping out of his ears.

Which leaves us with the right. There are essentially four categories here, the anti-choice loopers in Aontú, the curdled clientelist right Independent Ireland, other right and far right independents, and the fascist microparties. My boundaries on right independents are somewhat arbitrary, but adding up all these categories, the right and far right have 10 TDs, and about 10.5% of the vote. There was no explosive far right breakthrough in terms of seats, but this does represent a solidification of the reactionary forces in the Irish system. Aontu by rights should have had more seats, given their vote, but for now there's plenty of more transfer friendly parties out there. Their candidates are also, to not put too fine a point on it, absolute freaks. Independent Ireland gained a seat, and remain a strange outfit. Technically part of Fianna Fail (and Emmanuel Macron’s) centrist grouping at European level, their TDs have more or less openly fraternized with the far right, and their clientelist appeal now has the explicit admixture of faux-community anti-migrant politics. This goes for the unaffiliated right independents, too, all four of whom are explicitly anti-migrant. There are others - like Kevin “Boxer” Moran - who I could have included but chose not to, as their commitment to anti-immigrant politics seems more opportunistic than sincere. As always, the permanent coterie of clientelist independents serve as a useful buffer zone for the government. They don’t even have to support FF/FG, as those parties know they will never support a government of the left.

I saw some talk that the far right had been defeated, or even vanquished, in this election, but I don't see it. They appear stuck in the same stasis as everyone else. The potential is still very much there for a wider and more serious breakout. 235,000 odd people voted for the right and far right in this election, which if united could return as many as 20 seats. The explicitly fascist parties didn't return any seats, but they weren't a million miles off. A right vote in the country is not new, exactly, but it used to be mostly contained within the two major parties, especially their youth wings. The Progressive Democrats had an extremely right wing streak on immigration, and managed to make their mark through the removal of birthright citizenship in 2004. Since their demise there have been several attempts to create a vehicle for the right, from the Atlanticist astroturfing of Libertas to the Fine Gael breakaway Renua Ireland. Many personalities have remained constant through each cycle. To be frank, each was doomed by just how incredibly weird and creepy the leadership presented. This is what makes the relatively sober-seeming Peader Tobín such a dangerous prospect as leader. The settling point for a modestly successful Irish right appears to be an ECR-like party akin to the Polish PiS, deeply socially conservative and anti-immigrant with bland economic centrist offerings, and a foot in both fascist street politics and “respectable” electoralism. There is plenty of money to go around on the right, between mysterious funding sources and the more banal state financing that both Aontú and II will be entitled to, having crossed the 2% vote threshold. They have a media outlet in the form of Gript, and remain well placed to grow beyond the benighted little pool from which they spawned.

In the end this election was notable for what didn’t happen, rather than what did. No Sinn Féin government. No bounce for Simon Harris. No Fianna Fáil implosion. No huge breakthrough for the far right. No defiance of gravity for the Green Party. Many of the political currents that influenced the last few years feel as if they spent themselves before election day. The water charges and Repeal movements built a new Irish left politics, but the high point of the former was ten years ago, the latter six. The Climate Justice protests that brought the Green party to its best result ever feel like distant history. Covid welded together a psychotic conspiratorial reaction, but the last lockdown restrictions ended two years ago. Even the noxious anti-migrant agitations declined somewhat in the wake of last year's riots. Despite the fact that housing is unmistakably the biggest issue in Irish society, a sustainable, effective social movement around it has remained frustratingly unachievable. If you could sum up the election in one word it would be: exhaustion.

With the lowest turnout since the 1920s, the electorate was disproportionately old and, I suspect, affluent. A short, uninspiring campaign, with two incredibly familiar party leaders and one incredibly unimpressive one. A lot of people simply sat this one out, and it's hard to blame them. The left parties didn’t offer anything like a united front. The establishment parties showed resilience, but not strength, and would surely be vulnerable to either a major economic shock or a new charismatic leadership on the left. As to the latter, the wait goes on.

In September 1939, as German tanks rolled into Poland, W.H. Auden wrote a poem, much quoted since. His description of the thirties as a “low, dishonest decade” has been ringing in my ears as this grim year ends.

            It’s been twenty years since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a violation of international law so gross that it seemed to warp and distort everything that came after. That war showed the impotence of international institutions, most especially the United Nations. The decades since have not been kind to them either, unable to stop flagrant violations of international law on every continent. The promises of globalisation have also proven utterly hollow. Instead of a gradual withering away of national hatreds and the construction of a global village, the 21^st century has seen a dramatic escalation of right wing ethnic nationalism, and consequent territorial irridentism. One by one frozen conflicts have thawed, and in the absence of meaningful consequences, military states have reasserted their dominance over disputed territories, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Kashmir, to the Donbass, to the West Bank. Fragile democracies in the Sahel, discredited by their closeness to former imperial masters, have collapsed in the face of a wave of military coups. In countries across the world discrimination against internal minorities has become open pogrom. Already untenable situations have degraded further.

            And in the supposedly civilised west, virtually every country has seen a massive strengthening of right wing and far-right nationalist parties, capitalizing on years of austerity and national gloom to win seats, join coalitions and even lead governments. In response, the liberal centre and even elements of the centre-left have stepped up anti-immigration efforts. Men and women in sensible suits make deals with Libyan militias to cage the migrants they don’t want turning up on their shores. The Mediterranean is now a graveyard, not only of tens of thousands of human beings but of the pretensions to human rights that the European Union trumpeted since its inception. This year, in particular, has felt as if the bill for every violation of international law, every compromised settlement of the 1990s has come due. Gone are gestures from powerful states at reconciliation, and in their place a simple acknowledgment that might makes right. The bleeding edge of all of this, of course, is Gaza. What is still being done there by the IDF, cheered on by a radicalized Israeli public and carefully protected by liberals in the west, shames us all, and makes a mockery of any pretensions to international law or order.

            The 2010s began with a little more hope. As Vincent Bevins covers in his excellent new book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, the last fifteen years saw an unprecedented wave of mass action, both in scale and spread, following the economic collapse of the late ‘00s. Governments gave in to demands, others teetered and fell, still others cracked down hard and yet at the decade’s close, little positive seemed to have come of it. Those irresistible human energies ebbed and flowed and finally disappeared. Sometimes the dictatorship returned with a new leader, sometimes the country collapsed into civil war, sometimes reactionary forces seized the moment to claim power for themselves. And this new right, once they took power, were gleeful revolutionaries, laying waste not only to their political enemies on the left but the basic institutions of the state. A striking characteristic of right wing regimes across the world in the last ten years has been their determination to undo tentative attempts at reconciliation, from Trump’s dismantling of the Iran nuclear deal to Colombian president Iván Duque’s attempts to destroy the peace process in that country. Liberals themselves seem to have succumbed to gloomy fatalism, offering little resistance to these vandals, and sometimes joining them. The radical left, as such, is put in the strange position of playing the role that liberals once saw themselves in: as institutionalists, compromisers, peacemakers. A left that dreamed of liberation now desperately calls for ceasefire. All this on a planet that, it needs not be said, gets warmer and more volatile by the day.

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            Where then to find a source of hope? The answer lies not in the statistical trickery of Stephen Pinker et al, who suggest that despite all evidence in front of your face, now is the most peaceful and prosperous time of all. Rather, the good liberal should look inside themselves for courage. The courage to abandon their shop-worn Cold War enmities about the radical left and recognise them as the only real allies they still have. To take a small leap of faith, rediscover the spirit of the Popular Front, and stand proudly against this nihilistic machine that the 21^st century has built.

            In Chile, the original laboratory of neoliberalism, popular mobilisation was so profound that it catapulted a former student radical into the presidency. Gabriel Boric took office in 2022 to great rejoicing on the left and a premature declaration of victory, as if a stake had finally been put through the heart of Pinochet. Boric then ran headlong into the entrenched institutions of the reactionary right, who still controlled the legislature and other poles of power in the country. The progressive new constitution he championed was rejected by the electorate. Another one drafted by the right was also defeated. Many voters, it seems, have yet to make up their minds. The Chilean centre, like liberals around the world, face a choice. Perhaps the same choice that liberals have faced for over a hundred years. Whether to side with a left who go a little far for their tastes, or a right who will go further than your worst nightmares can imagine. A hundred years ago it was socialism or barbarism. Now it is barbarism or something, anything else.

This will not be a particularly well written essay. At the best of times I’m not the most aesthetically-minded writer. I’m not an exceptional prose stylist and I don’t write very beautiful sentences. This is not the best of times. 

What is there left to say? This week I saw a photo of the body of a child, dismembered by explosions, hanging from a wall. I saw this photo ten times or more throughout the day, while at my job teaching history to kids. We spent a week on the Boston Massacre, an incident from two and a half centuries ago where five people were killed. Someone stood trial there, at least. In the time it took us to pick through these old bones for clues, thousands of people, many their age or younger, were murdered by an army funded in some small part through the taxes levied on my own wages. Men in powdered wigs speak through time to complain of the intolerable situation in Massachusetts. How could anyone stand it? 

Since October, thirty thousands Palestinians - at least - have died, been killed, murdered, assassinated, blown to pieces, had buildings collapsed on top of them, been shot by remote drones and now starved. Yes, the gnawing whispers tell you, starved to death in the abyss that is Gaza. And who dies of starvation? The young, the old, the sick, the weak. Newborns and toddlers. The world for a few days expected a pause, a humanitarian pause as the parlance goes, but no such luck. This shattering horror we have witnessed these months now looks for all the world like a prelude. The IDF masses for an attack on Rafah, the so-called “safe zone” that they crowded a million and a half people into. Settler extremists blockade the trickle of aid coming into Gaza, chanting death death death. Bulldozers work inside and outside the strip, clearing land for buffer zones, for walls, for camps, for pens to hold humans. The Israeli hostages inside Gaza are used by the governments of Israel and the US as something like symbols. Just a gong to bang whenever anyone questions the latest atrocity. 

I have written about it, once, for an op-ed in the paper. The subject was limited to the effect that such slaughter will have on Joe Biden’s electoral prospects. Do I have anything else interesting to say on the topic? Does anyone? I’ve written notes, journal pages, even poetry. All of it is terrible, inadequate to the situation. Such awful times blunt the edge of your mind, make it almost impossible to articulate anything except a blank horror, a demand that it stop. 

So why am I writing now? No reason other than that horror. The horror that follows you from waking to sleep and waking again. The horror you carry around in your pocket and read on the couch, see on the train in and out of the city. Images so obscenely violent they feel as if they should be illegal to disseminate, and at the same time should be broadcast on every screen in Times Square. I have posted virtually nothing on social media that isn’t related to the slaughter in months. Not out of any moral high-mindedness, but because nothing else online feels in any way real. Real life is not without joy. I live a life of relative comfort, relative ease. In the real world you can forget, however briefly. 

This essay is as predicted: not very good. Barely an essay at all. I have said nothing, can say nothing, except no, no, no. Nothing except, this is murder, this is ethnic cleansing, this is genocide. No moral person can accept this. No moral world would allow this. We must bring it to an end. We must have a ceasefire. The only way to keep your sanity is to keep saying it. Keep saying it as long as you are allowed and in as many ways you can. Every march, legal challenge, every denunciation and petition, every diplomat expelled and symbolic vote, every boycott feels simultaneously urgent and inadequate. Like one of these things has to make a difference, and we search desperately for the one that will be enough. 

Because what we are witnessing feels like a defining moment of our young, awful century. At no time since the nineteen-forties has human life felt so cheap, so disposable. The tools and techniques of dehumanisation, occupation, torture and murder that states of the 20th century trialed, traded around and modified, have been perfected. Our leaders, our media, my own terrible mayor and worse president, are in the business of stalling us for long enough to let this all happen. For the people of Gaza to be systematically reduced, through aerial bombing, summary execution, arbitrary arrest and most of all, expulsion from their homes. Because if we can be convinced to let this happen then it will be the blueprint for every state that wants to liquidate a troublesome population. Ghettoize, make life unlivable, and when the inevitable backlash comes, use it as a pretext for total destruction. 

Some will cheer this development. Every fanatical nationalist in every fanatical nation will rejoice to be able to finally fix those awkward dotted lines on the map, remove that difficult ten or twenty percent of the population to somewhere else. Last year saw over a hundred thousand Armenians were ethnically cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh by the army of Azerbaijan. The fragile, disputed statelet, an anomaly of the collapse of the USSR, ended not in a negotiated settlement, not with compromise or reconciliation, but with men in tanks driving a civilian population over the border. Right wing regimes learn from each other. They share techniques, justifications, means of obfuscation, and weapons, of course. The Azeri conquest was accomplished in no small part with arms provided by, who else, the Israeli state. It seems likely there will be many such moments in the next few years, each one making us feel more and more powerless. We, without tanks or armies or the power of sanctions. With nothing more than the ability to march, to strike, to protest, to write. 

Writing is always embarrassing. Why in all the world should anyone listen to what you have to say, or what I have to say? There is always a nagging voice that says you are not the right person, this is not the right time. That you don’t know enough, that this situation is complicated, that you should shut up and listen instead. That people are tired of hearing it. That it’s the same old story. That you’ve become boring, or preachy, or humourless, or didactic, or shrill, or a thousand other things. All mass murderers rely on this to wear down those who would speak out against them. On the growing sense of hopelessness and despair that gradually becomes embarrassment at having said anything in the first place.

Frequently this voice telling you to shut up isn’t inside your head, it’s online and on the TV, from political, media and other figures in support of this Israeli state campaign of destruction. The tone varies from day to day, as does the emphasis, from apoplectic to conciliatory, from intellectual to crude. History is deployed cynically and instrumentally, to end discussion rather than to start it. Authority is invoked, outrage is drummed up, tears are shed not in opposition, but in defence of killing. There are threats both explicit and implicit. To your career, your voice, your seriousness. If you want to be taken seriously, they say, if you don’t want to lose your job, you must keep your opinions within the narrow confines that we tell you to. Perhaps you can advocate for more aid to enter Gaza, but not for IDF troops to leave. Perhaps you can argue for a pause in fighting, but not for a ceasefire. Perhaps you can make a case for an ephemeral, defenceless Palestinian statelet, but never, never full and equal rights. You go against these rules, they say, at your own considerable risk. 

But – and this is so freeing to realise – none of it matters. None. The whole scope of your writing career, your artistic career, your journalistic integrity, every aesthetic concern you have ever had matters infinitely less than the life of one single human being. The most embarrassing person giving 1% of their effort to the cause of stopping this killing is better than the coolest person you know doing nothing. The approval of your peers or bylines in a magazine mean nothing at all compared to the brute suffering that it is our responsibility to end.

If we can slow this terrible thing, then we can stop it. Don’t lose hope. Leave behind your embarrassment. Forget your ego. Save your own sanity by continuing to say no. Keep your shoulder to the wheel, even if you doubt that it will ever move. You have to keep believing that it might make a difference.

I started shooting film – taking photos on 35mm – in the summer of 2012, a couple of months after Kodak declared bankruptcy. I was living in New York City, unemployed, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I had started to feel that without a focus, the days were slipping away from me, forming no permanent residue of memories. The question arises in these pivotal moments in your life: what if you have no epiphany? What if nothing happens to you? What if you go on a journey and return exactly the same as you were? Well, you can always take pictures, and then at least you’ll have something to point to.

A basic digital point-and-shoot cost a few hundred dollars, which I didn’t have. A cheap plastic film camera cost exactly $48.50 (about three and a half packs of Newport cigarettes), including a roll of Lomography Lomo 400.1 My friend, exasperated on seeing the bright blue Holga, sighed, “please tell me you didn’t buy a camera in Urban Outfitters.” I had.

(New York, 2012)

The Holga was a Chinese-made bargain basement camera, originally for larger 120 film. By the times I bought one, the 135 model was a fashionable accessory for cool kids in Berlin and Brooklyn.2 I used it, inexpertly at first, to document my walks around the city. Interesting graffiti, the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise, the distant speck of the Statue of Liberty in the blurry 47mm lens.3 Yes, all these things were clichés, but they weren’t clichés to me then.

(The downtown Manhattan skyline, 2012. One World Trade Centre, unfinished, is visible in the right of the picture)

But wait, that’s not true. I started shooting film years earlier, in 2004, on an Olympus Trip 35 owned by my aunt. I took pictures of a bog in Wexford, and a few gaelic football matches at my secondary school, where other kids made fun of me for using a camera from the eighties. They probably didn’t even make fun of me that much, but my pride didn’t allow me to continue, and so the camera went back, dreams forgotten.

Actually, even that isn’t true. When I was nine, my cousin bought me a disposable, probably a Kodak Funsaver. I shot the 24 or 36 exposures and then, lacking information on what to do next, dismantled it with a screwdriver from a Christmas cracker. What can I say, I wanted to know how it worked. I gave myself several medium-sized electric shocks from the exposed flash capacitor and tossed it fearfully into a corner, where it lay for months, mysterious, ominous, a source of pain and no photos.

Back to New York. Film was cheap, development hard to come by. It was the era where serious photographers were offloading their analogue equipment for a tenth of what it cost, clearing out their freezers of old emulsions, chucking apparently worthless accessories in favour of a new, digital workflow. The clunky, expensive and inferior DSLRs of the early ‘00s were gone, and cameras like the Canon 5D Mark II and Nikon D90 were hegemonic.4 People always wanted to know why you were bothering with this old stuff. I once bought a dozen disposables from a man on the internet for less than a fiver, which I handed out to my baffled and often non-receptive friends, many of whom had perfectly acceptable cameras on their phones.

(Dublin, 2017)

Back home I discovered that my dad had a still working Pentax Super ME, a severely underrated early-eighties, Japanese-made SLR with a bright, enormous viewfinder and neat, tactile dials. I walked my way through the basics of photography again, the exposure triangle, the sunny 16 rule, every mistake a joy, every successful picture a miracle. I was laughed at again, but in a friendlier way this time, with an edge of slight longing when I let people focus and fire, showed them the plastic negative sleeves they remembered from early holidays to the Algarve. I found a photo lab that still did processing, not begrudgingly but enthusiastically. I’ve still never found a lab anywhere in the world the equal of John Gunn’s on Wexford Street, and probably never will.

So why film over digital? There is no answer to give to that question that doesn’t sound ludicrous, pretentious or questionable. As with the audio debate, it’s impossible to avoid getting into subjective arguments about the “feel” of analogue. Like most new technologies, digital did not take over because it was better, it took over because it was cheaper, more efficient. It took over in part because it could and would destroy jobs and thus concentrate profit upwards. Digital is endlessly scalable and transmittable. At the consumer end, it requires little infrastructure or skilled labour. Quietly, almost invisibly, the position of lab technician basically ceased to exist. Slowly even positions around photography – photojournalists, travel photographers – began to erode as ever greater numbers of people began taking pictures.

(Porto, 2018)

But the aesthetic argument can’t be avoided, so I’ll lay my cards on the table. Digital photography may be technically more precise, but analogue remains more human. It is in the failures and the flaws where film excels. Like the difference between the warm fuzz of scratched records and the screech of mp3 distortion, digital noise is alienating, analogue noise is lovely. Zoom in close on a digital picture and all you will find are individual pixels. There is a reason that the last twenty years have seen dozens of efforts, from camera and app makers, to replicate the warm grain of emulsion. Digital photography is ugly in so many ways, and only beautiful in a few. Digital amateurism is anonymous, ubiquitous, the mounting slush on every device. Analogue amateurism is charming at the very least. Think of how your eye slides over thousands of digital images, of concerts and food and sun holidays, to settle on a faded, flash-lit snap of someone’s parents, grinning, permed and moustached, in the 1980s. On the rare occasions now that someone bothers to shoot a feature film on 35mm (Asteroid City, Liquorice Pizza), the reviews inevitably note how rich and gorgeous it looks, so different to the weightless, antiseptic digital pictures we have all been fed since the turn of the century.

(Hue, 2019)

The price of film has climbed vertiginously since the mid-2010s, when you could buy a roll of cheap Agfa 200 for €1.50, and develop it for €8. Blame supply chains, blame the price of materials, blame price gouging. It doesn’t really matter, this is a hobbyists world, and we’ll keep buying that garbage. Unlike vinyl LPs, making film is complicated, expensive, and reliant on machines for which there is no longer much of a mass market. Film manufacturing at any reasonable scale rests in the hands of a small number of corporations. With the honourable exception of Ilford, these companies appear to care very little about their creations. Fujifilm, in particular, have an almost vandalistic attitude towards their beloved colour film lines, discontinuing them at will, without notice or explanation. Is it profitable? It doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t fit in with a business plan that lies outside of any democratic control. If they want film dead, they will kill it. Film photography is a fatalistic pursuit, where you stock up your freezer and wait patiently for a company to vanish the tools with which for decades you have built your art, never to be seen again.

(Madrid, 2013)

Photos are adhesive, memories build up like sediment around them, with all their attendant distortions and evasions. One photo, taken at the right moment, can provide the structure for your recollections of a day, a whole month, a whole year, an entire person. The times in the last ten years where I have lacked the money or the will to shoot are also the times that I remember the most indistinctly. I have no grip on particular seasons or some years without the hard anchor of a sloppily taken group shot, a landscape marred by smoke, a quiet moment on a city street. They are mine to keep.

(London, 2017)

And it looks better! It looks better. We are now past the era where it was customary to label a vast quantity of cultural outputs, clothes and affectations as “hipster”. Film photography sat comfortably in this world, alongside artisanal axes and drip coffee and fussy facial hair, and we all laughed, but in the clear light of morning I’m afraid they were right. It looks better! Notice how affection for film has been seamlessly transmitted to Gen Z, even as they discarded the rest. Some of them do not even remember the original era of film, but something speaks across that divide. They spent 150 years perfecting the chemistry of film, you can’t expect them to get digital right in less than 30.

As emulsions are discontinued, the hardware supporting film photography continues to age. Few new film cameras are made in 2023, and those are either prohibitively expensive (think Leica) or essentially plastic toys. Pentax whisper of a new midrange SLR but in the mean time we take care of our cameras and try to fix the parts that stop. The foggy mirrors and cracked seals, the grinding focus wheels and shorting eighties electronics. Five years ago, my wife took an Olympus OM-2 out of storage in her native Arizona. It had lain in the bone dry climate, ageless for decades. A few months on the road in Ireland and Asia made it cough and splutter to a halt. The batteries on another camera were mercury, and the technician told us that not only was he unable to replace them, he couldn’t even let us leave the shop with the ones we had.

I am not a professional photographer, in the sense that I don’t do it for a living. I certainly take it seriously, more seriously than almost anything I do. But I have an uncomplicated love for it that I don’t for the things that I rely on for income: writing, research, etc. Give me enough film and money to develop it and I will happily make images forever. The same thing that puts me off digital also repels me from professionalisation: the need to streamline a workflow. The need to spend hours in Photoshop and Lightroom, messing with curves and tones and generally becoming more of a manufacturer of pictures than an artist. I have shot exactly one wedding in my life and it was equal parts wonderful and stressful.

The mounting costs have limited the amount of film I can shoot in the last few years. I’ll probably get a digital camera at some point, for less important occasions, for convenience, out of curiosity. But then, I’ve been saying that for years. I’ve watched systems come and go, seen millions of digital images and rarely been grabbed enough to consider buying in.

Everyone becomes a collection of sentimental clichés at some point, so here are mine: there is still nothing in digital photography to compare to the excitement of getting developed images back. The thirty-six or thirty seven moments you grabbed, some blurry, some poorly composed, some incoherent, some you didn’t even remember. And a few that help you stay connected to the life you’ve led, that help you remember.

(Dublin, 2021, Photo taken by the incredible Ivana Patarčić)

Reading – Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2012)

Watching – Video updates on the California High Speed Rail project

Jerry Springer began life in Chicago, but by the time we went, it was being filmed in Stamford, Connecticut, alongside The Steve Wilkos Show and Maury. If you’ve ever watched someone be declared to be/not to be the father, it’s a good chance it was there. We journeyed up there on Metro North, a rail service that traveled slower than a sleeper train in northern Vietnam I once took. Stamford was joyless, in the manner of mid-sized American cities, and we were hungover. I don’t remember the original impetus for going, other than we vaguely thought it would be funny. It was not.

In the nineties, Jerry Springer was, if you’ll pardon the cliche, a genuine cultural phenomenon. He didn’t create the trash talk show, but he perfected it. I’m the youngest of four siblings, and as such often find my cultural reference points a few years behind people my age. You don’t get to decide what’s on the TV, and you better believe you’re sitting in the middle seat until some time in middle age. I don’t really remember many of the storylines on the show – I believe there was a man married to his horse at one point – but the feel of it is so specific and powerful. To call it in bad taste would be beside the point, and also correct, but more than that it was a sense that genuinely anything could happen. There’s a reason that clips from these shows, some of them thirty years old, constantly get churned back up into the culture. The specific blend of reality and fiction at play created moments that can still shock and amuse, even as the clothes, the hair, the very energy of the room become more and more obscure.

If you’ve never been in the audience for a live taping, you’ve never experienced one of the worst forms of human interaction: the warm-up. A steroidal-looking hype man appeared to explain the call and response nature of the show. When they wanted applause, they would ask for it, when they wanted boos, well, it would be pretty clear. Jerry was next, looking far older than late sixties. He delivered, in a flat, quiet monotone, jokes about Bill Clinton and the Macarena, touchstones from an era in which the show had been relevant. The jokes were old enough to be unsettling, as if a friend was telling a story so obtuse and incoherent that you suspected they were having a manic episode. They film several episodes of chat shows in one day, so the host is constantly changing shoes and shirts to provide the illusion of time passing. As a live audience member this feels like a strange ritual of deliberately inserting continuity errors.

The stories themselves were too depressing and quotidian to recount at length. Infidelity, addiction, incarceration, without the bizarre or taboo-breaking interest that provided a reasonable cover in the nineties. There was no sense of mischief or shockingly outré politics, no ambition to disabuse polite society of its pretensions, only a steady stream of human misery and a crowd of people with little else to do on a weekday morning but be there to witness it.

Including us, of course. The queasy feeling didn’t leave me for weeks. I clung to the fact that when the hype man instructed us to chant abuse at the guests, we declined, becoming only mute witnesses. Afterwards we sat in a Subway sandwich shop with a few other audience members, and to distract myself from the mounting horror I successfully convinced one guy that it was a treat getting to order goats cheese on my sandwich, given that goats had been outlawed in Ireland after the disastrous goat flu epidemic of 2003.

The nineties of Jerry Springer in some ways felt more distant in 2012 than they do now, in the way that clothes of ten years ago feel more dated than those of thirty. I consider it a minor personal failing of mine that I can never entirely shake the need to be in a “cool” place from my head. This is not to say that I spend my life hanging out at Brooklyn warehouse raves or art gallery openings (they wouldn’t have me even if I wanted to), but only that I have an acute and unsettling sense for when I’m somewhere that time has passed by. Somewhere that used to be sought after, but is now actively avoided. They inspire in me a powerful wave of despair, exponentially worse the more recently they were desired. Being in an abandoned mining town in the American west: exciting, spooky, melancholy. Being in Brambles cafe in Stillorgan: existentially devastating. The best way I have to describe this feeling is as if you are stuck in school on a Friday evening in the summer, pacing the strangely empty hallways and vacant classrooms, looking out the window where a perfect warm day is ending, and you know in the pit of your stomach that somewhere, everything is happening, and you will miss it.

Share The Rising of the Moon

Being at Jerry Springer in 2012 felt like seeing the last of the Borscht Belt comedians. Like the closing down sale for a department store. The final meeting of some decayed worker’s party in 1991. Every move lies heavy with the weight of all that has come before. Jerry Springer ran for almost five thousand episodes. While I wouldn’t repeat the experience, in general its a privilege to be there at the end of something. All is laid bare in the final years. Even Jerry Springer had a late style.

I’m not old, but I don’t get ID’d any more. And many of the things and places that I felt then were the centre of the world, now no longer exist. Memories and history accumulate like dust and grime, and we work daily to make sure they don’t become too much.

Rest in Peace Jerry, you had it, and you lost it.

But New York cares

-       Interpol, NYC

It was a strange time to be in New York. It always is. As a very dumb twenty-one-year-old I got a J1 work visa to come for a summer to the United States. Most people I knew then went to Boston or San Diego. I went to New York with a few others and slept on a bedroom floor in Morningside Heights, then after a month moved out to Bushwick by myself. While there I walked for hundreds of hours up and down the avenues and streets of Manhattan, ambled around Brooklyn and paid brief fleeting visits to Queens and Staten Island. I did not at any point gain, or really seek, employment. I burned through what savings I possessed and then borrowed some, frittering it away on fourteen-dollar packets of cigarettes and six packs of Brooklyn Lager and one enjoyable but fiscally irresponsible trip to Six Flags Massachusetts.

- 2012

New York is a rare city, you can grow up on the other side of an ocean and still have some cultural idea, some opinion of it. When I was seventeen my mother let me skip school on the day Grand Theft Auto 4 was released. You play an immigrant of vague European origin in a lightly fictionalised New York City. It was made by Scottish people. I played it from dawn to whenever I passed out, driving the imaginary streets and living an imaginary life. At fourteen I stood in a dull supermarket in South Dublin and listened on my Creative Zen Nomad to Interpol’s Antics and never imagined that the city it was made in also had dull supermarkets, and wet, gloomy Sundays and edgy, grey boredom.

New York, you're perfect

Oh, please don't change a thing

Your mild billionaire mayor's

Now convinced he's a king

LCD Soundsystem, New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down

It was ten years after 9/11, when the city that the rest of the country had hated suddenly became an emblem, willing or unwilling, of America. You couldn’t move for the lamentations of the nostalgic. New York was safe, too safe, and boring now under the technocratic regency of Mike Bloomberg. Then a few months after I was there, Hurricane Sandy flooded the streets, knocked out the subway and totally reshaped the city's relationship to its environment.

- 2012

New York is older

Shedding its skin again

It dies every ten years

And then it begins again.

- The National, Born to Beg

This was not the New York of Robert Mapplethorpe and Joni Mitchell, not the one on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, not the one of CBGBs (closed in 2006) or even the one depicted in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, the oral history of the last time New York was officially cool. That era, of the Strokes and all their imitators, ends in the book's reckoning, some time in 2011. Mars Bar, the lower East Side spot with the worst toilets in the city, closed around then, too. I would have lamented it, but of course I had never heard of the place. The old New York is dying, the new one struggles to be born etc etc. Every city has cycles of death and rebirth, but New York’s are different, because you have to read essays about them.

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New York is a city in which everything imaginable is happening and you are not invited to any of it.

-       A friend

- 2012

As a J1er you are a fleeting fixture, not permanent or prominent enough to be loathed. My experience was fairly solitary, and it felt as if I only ever met the oddest Americans imaginable. I walked the streets feeling sorry for myself and listening to James Vincent McMorrow’s Early in the Morning on hard rotation, to the extent that my memories are soldered to the songs. I’m listening to it right now. There is a YouTube video called A Year In New York from 2011 set to one of the tracks on the album that held a grip on me when I lived there. It was a minor viral hit, for whatever that meant back then, and it’s still a lovely bit of work. What it evokes more than anything is that sense of the secret, unknowable lives being lived by everyone else around you.

It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.

- Maeve Brennan

I thought of, and discarded, several schemes to get a job, to make some money, to do something, anything at all. I was going to be a personal assistant to someone powerful. I was going to dye my hair pink and get a job in American Apparel (closed in 2017). I was going to get a story published in the New Yorker. I bought a camera in Urban Outfitters, and I swore I was going to have my photos displayed in a gallery. I was morbidly fascinated with the world of Brooklyn “alt lit”, the literary movement that spawned a few heavy hitters, far more forgotten names, a lot of bad autofiction, several self-written Wikipedia pages and more than one creep. Most of it is painful to reread, dated even when it was written, but it has left a mark on more writers than would admit it, myself included. If you imitate something at a young age, it’s hard to scrub it totally from your mind. Part of being truly young is the inability to tease apart the genuine culture of a place from its commodified cousin. All things meld into one visible but unattainable world. And now it’s possible to visit both the apartments from Friends and Sex and the City.

- 2012

I am back. The last visa was issued on my 21st birthday, this one a few weeks before my 30th. I can clear up only one thing so far. New York has not lost its grit. Rats and roaches remain, their efforts redoubled. The water comes in two types: leaded and unleaded. Two hurricane remnants hit the city in a month, and someone on twitter reassures us, don't worry, rats can swim for three days without rest. The city is recovering from yet another collapse, covid waves that hit earlier, harder and again, and again. The people here do not have the brash confidence of much of the rest of the US, they have seen the freezer trucks outside the morgues. They are spooked, and weary. The pandemic has closed yet another chapter of the city, and this is an interregnum. I get my booster shot at the Natural History Museum and am instructed to wait 15 minutes under the giant whale. The hold music plays softly as we wait for the future to arrive.

It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer

tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come.

They stand packed and waiting very near,

a mob of people with blank faces.

-       Tomas Transtromer, The Couple (Trans. Robert Bly)

Last summer I got married in a small ceremony in Central Park in New York City. We stood next to a waterfall, and confused, charmed joggers craned their necks as they went by. It was messy, and perfect, and as we walked out of the forest the first serious drops of rain started to fall. That night between ten and eleven pm, more rain fell than in any other hour in New York’s history. A hundred- and fifty-year record broken. It was broken again eleven days later, as the remains of Hurricane Ida swept over the city. Our phones buzzed with mandatory alerts, bypassing the silencing. I didn’t know New York got tornadoes, I said. It didn’t, until now.

In books, radiators hum and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running.

-       Johanna Kaplan, Other People’s Lives

I live with my wife in a very nice little apartment which, in true New York landlord fashion, was turned over so quickly and inexpertly that you could smell the paint and the bathroom door doesn’t close without enormous effort. The hot water and the elevator work most of the time. It does not receive any direct sunlight. Like everything in the city, it’s expensive enough to make you feel like the edge is never far away. I am no longer a dumbass 21-year-old with no job and yet, in the vagaries of a PhD untethered to a desk, a library or a schedule, I still have to put my days together one by one, without instructions. In the evenings my television asks me which Tony the Tiger/ESPN crossover commercial would you like to watch? Robert Putnam wrote that “Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia”. But what does he know, the big dork! Popular entertainments this year include watching videos of insane people talking about the epidemic of kidnapping that is not happening, and having groceries delivered in 15 minutes that you do not need and could easily go get yourself.

The practice of living well in a big, lonely city is a practice, among others, of resisting easy reaction. Your home is nice, but don’t make it your castle or you might start thinking everyone outside is a barbarian. After a brief spell of wondering if the most expensive and militarised police force in the world is a good idea, the plain people of the U.S., riled up by specious bullshit in the respectable press about a crime wave, are back to calling for the sort of law and order interventions that made the world’s largest prison population. The new mayor takes his first three months of pay in Bitcoin, cuts the health, education and sanitation budget, and believes that the smell of weed is one of the most pressing problems facing the city.

- 2021

New York is a city of levels, social and physical, in which it is incredibly difficult to rise.

-       A Friend

Getting to the top of the Empire State costs seventy-five dollars, and the building is falling apart anyway. The problem with having a golden age is that people have to live fifty or a hundred years afterwards, when all that shiny infrastructure is becoming geriatric at the same time. The subway floods, the pavements crack, the rubbish bags pile up on corners. The real money is elsewhere, in places you wouldn’t even have heard about. My academic work is about The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, another group of lads who came to New York, younger than I am now, and made a great success of it. Reading about their lives can make you nostalgic, not only for the wild village of the fifties and sixties, but your own life in a city where you were socially embedded, where your networks were wide and deep. I still walk the streets sometimes, though I don’t do the trail from 122nd to 42nd that used to be my trademark. They are the same streets that Maeve Brennan lost herself on. The same ones where Jackson C. Frank ended up. There are sensitive souls who don’t survive the journey. Most nights I sleep just fine, but sometimes I linger in the dark, listening to the sounds of the pipes gurgle, the scratching of the rats in the bins outside, the occasional siren or, once, the pop pop of the airbags going off in a car accident.

Try another city, baby

Another town

Wherever I have gone

Wherever I've been and gone

Wherever I have gone

The blues come following down

-       Jackson C. Frank, Blues Run the Game

What was I looking for in 2012? A job would have been a good start. But more than that, I was in search of some sort of New York that no longer existed. The Tompkins Square Park Riot was three years before I was born. Even Occupy Wall Street had been smashed off the streets the year before and was spoken about with vague embarrassment, if at all. I was here for the tenth anniversary, and history has been much kinder to it than I would have suspected. A raft of retrospectives agreed that the modern American left, for good or ill, would not exist in the form it does today without it. Occupy was the last gasp of the anti-globalisation movement of the 90s, invested with the memory of the Battle in Seattle and the best and worst of turn of the century Anarchism. But it was also a bridging point between two incarnations of the left. The former  was non-hierarchical (in theory), diffuse, non-electoral and hippyish, at least in aesthetics. The latter is (was?) electorally minded, institution building, nostalgic and a bit more put together, at least in aesthetics. The city has had anarchists before, as Wall Street will remember, and failed left wing presidential campaigns too. Pete Seeger played at rallies for Henry Wallace in 1948, The Strokes played New York City Cops at about the last Bernie rally that you could really believe you were going to win. They both lost of course, but I bet they were a hell of a good time.

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

-       Maeve Brennan

- 2012

That was over then, and the two flowerings of socialist electoral organising, the twin Bernie campaigns, are over now. They happened while I was away, as did the massive outpouring of Black Lives Matter protests last summer. But the incense lingers in the air. The energy may dissipate but the physical remnants remain. Peeling stickers on junction boxes, half remembered murals and signs in shop windows yellowing under the sun. The busker at 42nd street station plays a cover of Last Nite. There are resonances everywhere, murmurs and jingles and tunes playing just below a level you could hear. If we could see into the future, perhaps we wouldn’t spend so long on the past. If we could talk every day maybe we would be able to imagine it. It is easy, from the right or left, to look at some decaying thing and imagine when it was grand, but some things are not things getting better or things getting worse. They are merely the passage of time. What you are looking for is not here anymore, but surely something is.

One black Wednesday evening in December at zero degrees I run in Central Park. It is forty one years to the day since John Lennon, another foreigner, was shot dead outside the Dakota building, on 72nd and Central Park West. So I add a few kilometers and run to the memorial, thinking that there will be some meaning to be found there. Thinking, too, that I am the only one with this on my mind. As I round the corner I see people, crowds of people, and the glow of tealights and votive candles arranged around the mosaic. A candle in winter has great beauty to it. Rippling out from the musicians in the centre, the crowd is singing In My Life. Like choirs and protests, the union takes the weak reeds of their voices, of my voice, and makes them ring into the night.

A train has rolled in. Car after car stands here,

But no doors are opening, no one’s getting off or on.

Are there any doors at all? Inside, it’s teeming

With closed-in people milling back and forth.

They’re staring out through the unyielding windows.

And outside, a man walks along the train with a maul.

He’s hitting the wheels, a faint ringing. Except right

            here!

Here the sound swells unbelievably: a lightningstroke,

A cathedral bell tolling, a round-the-world sound

That lifts the whole train and the region’s wet strokes.

Everything’s singing! You’ll remember this. Travel on!

-       Tomas Transtromer, The Station (Trans. Patty Crane)

Extras/Would Recommend

Reading: “When Was Wales?” - Gwyn A. Williams, 1985

Writing: “Earthquake Day” - Forthcoming short story in The Pig’s Back

Watching: “Barry” - I don’t normally approve of TV but it’s very good

In 2010 Ireland was a beached whale. An enormous property bubble had become an even bigger crash. Most of the major banks had been nationalised in a panic, absorbing tens of billions of dodgy debt into the Irish exchequer. Irish people like to note with a bleak and furious humour that it was the most debt incurred per capita of any nation in Europe. In March of that year Sean FitzPatrick, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, was arrested for fraud. His case would later collapse amid accusations of mismanagement on the part of the police. A zombie government, of centre-right Fianna Fail and the Green Party, was grimly marching into electoral catastrophe. I was working in a car park.

I had ignominiously crashed out of a Computer Science degree and before going back to college I was trying to earn my fees by working as a glorified traffic cone for a major hospital. It rained a lot. I wasn’t allowed to listen to music. The angrier drivers used to call me a jobsworth, which I had to look up. I was once found during a morning shift fast asleep, curled up on a bench, by my boss’ boss. I was nineteen. It was a delicate time.

The mind does strange things when given eight hours a day without any stimulation except the ever-present threat of a low speed traffic collision. I recited every American president in order, every European capital alphabetically. I carried out baroque text message exchanges with anyone who would respond. And in the heart of some endless Tuesday, my mind wandered to a plan.

It began with the discovery that all TDs (Teachtai Deala, members of the lower house of the Irish Parliament) had their government email addresses available online. The public mood towards elected officials at the time was fairly apocalyptic; a general election the year after saw a historic number of TDs kicked to the kerb. I considered all kinds of messages, from the sincere to the obscene. But what would be the point? The country was in free fall. The IMF was circling. Soon the Troika would be in town, and effective sovereign politics would all but cease for at least a few years. I couldn’t get anything from them, could I?

(Taoiseach Brian Cowen is accused of being “either drunk or hungover” during a morning interview in the last days of his government)

On June 6th 2010, I wrote a simple email to all 166 sitting TDs and a few Senators too:

Dear [x]

My name is Peter Prendergast. I will be starting a teaching placement at [SCHOOL REDACTED] this autumn. I will be teaching a special extra-curricular class on politics for first years as a supplement to the CSPE [Civic, Social and Political Education] curriculum. A major part of this class is the formation of a 'Mock Oireachtas', including a mock Dáil and Seanad. As part of this project, we would like to request a signed photo from each of the TDs and Senators included. Preferably an 8 X 10 glossy, but really any photo will do. It would really mean a lot to the children if you would participate in this project as they are all enthusiastic to learn more about the politics of this country. If you would like to participate, please send all photos to:

Peter Prendergast
[ADDRESS REDACTED]

Thank you very much in advance for your help, it really is much appreciated.

Yours faithfully,
Peter James Prendergast.

Peter Prendergast was a reused character from a short-lived blog of mine: an all-caps, unpunctuated middle-aged man screaming at everything from RTÉ to the government to RTÉ again. Some stickers advertising it that I put up as part of what passed for a viral marketing campaign can still be seen in a few toilets around town. But here, Peter wasn’t a television-interrupting crank shouting where’s my NAMA?!, he was a gentle teacher, an eager educator. It would really mean a lot to the children.

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The next morning, photos arrived from the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) and the leader of the opposition, neatly signed at the bottom. I took a moment to enjoy the idea of Brian Cowen, house crumbling to sand around him, taking the time to scrawl his signature on a glossy photo like he was walking the red carpet, mobbed by dozens of teenage fans. I figured I might get one or two more, from enterprising young TDs in the constituency of the school, or the old pros at clientelist politics.

The next day the postman arrived at the door holding a stack of envelopes thirty deep. “Who’s Peter J. Prendergast?” he asked, as I mumbled something indistinct. There were campaign leaflets, glossy photos with sharpie signatures, offers of school tours to the Dáil and ministerial visits to the (unfortunately real) school in which Peter was doing his placement. The man who would go on to be our beloved current president wrote to ask, would a printed out A4 colour photo be ok? A Green backbencher made legendary by screaming FUCK YOU across the floor of parliament offered dozens of business cards, one for every student. An independent TD found to have been involved in a scandal deemed by a tribunal of inquiry to be "profoundly corrupt to a degree that was nothing short of breathtaking" said “Very interesting project, keep me updated”. Some sent a photocopy of whatever they had lying around. Others seemed to take the matter more seriously. Too seriously, perhaps. Occasionally what came in the door looked to be the product of an impromptu photo shoot, the vibes of which ran the gamut from “child in father’s suit” to “speed boat salesman” to “forgotten mid-20th Century dictator” Maybe it was a nice moment of respite in between being told the repo men were asking for our pension fund and the art in the National Gallery.

After about eighty responses I was getting a little anxious. This was meant to be a quick joke, and it was, if anything, gaining momentum. I had picked a school that a frankly suspicious amount of TDs claimed to have attended as children. Then a bombshell: a letter came from the principal of the school itself, saying he had received numerous phone calls from politicians wanting to speak to this Peter J. Prendergast. Who, he asked, are you? And why are you impersonating a teacher at this school?

I panicked, stopped all communication, and buried the photos in a drawer as they came in. I gently asked a law student I knew if you could be done for fraud if you hadn’t asked for any money. I pictured myself as a Cold War submarine captain: running deep and silent. Years later, the letter itself was revealed to be a hoax, a double bluff from a cousin I had stupidly told about the whole plan.

Ireland has been held up in recent years as a beacon of liberal tolerance and centrist restraint. Our last (and probably next) Taoiseach, the Thatcherite scandal machine Leo Varadkar, got weeks of gushing headlines in the international press for being the first gay head of government. To outsiders, it’s hard to describe how depressingly limited the horizons of our system have always been. Two right wing parties trading power for a hundred sullen years, consuming whatever leftish coalition partner wass required to get them over the majority line. In place of a genuinely egalitarian social vision, a patchwork of social programmes, grudgingly given, inadequately funded in good times, slashed and gutted in recessions. The only real commitment has been to patronage politics: jobs, favours, money and planning decisions flowing from those in office to the ones who put them there. We boast about how local our national politicians are. How easily you could see the leader of the government in the Ginger Man pub of a Thursday evening. But they are and have only ever been good for a dodgy favour, or a signed photo.

I did little else with the rest of my summer. My barely paid debts and endless gruelling days had left me chastised, and moderately depressed. But I understood something about patronage that had been hidden to me: it’s not just about money. Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have operated for most of their history as clientelist parties, as jobs and favours machines. Clientelism works best in a society with weak, underdeveloped public systems, poor social welfare, a small middle class, a lack of good jobs and chronic unemployment. It promises some benefit in exchange for your vote, but not in a formalised sense. There is merely an understanding between the voter and the party that largesse will be distributed to populations, locations and people that are supportive of that party. But it depends on an illusion. There aren’t enough resources to pay off every voter, but there is enough visible direction of favours, funds, and jobs to suggest that you might be in with a chance. And half the reason to do it is for the sheer joy of feeling as if you’re part of the game. To know that you are someone that matters, even if what you receive is nothing more than a piece of photo paper with a childish scrawl.

It has been ten years since I sent out my fishing expedition. Those two dominant right parties have shrunk to the point where they cannot even form a government together without the help, once again, of the just-happy-to-be-there Green party. In opposition now are a large and broadly left-wing contingent of TDs, anchored by Sinn Féin. Whatever else about Irish politics that remains uninspiring, empty, and transactional, we have left that era behind. I’ll keep these photos as a record of a time that feels farther distant than it really is: a time when a dig out, a whip around and a signed photo were about all you could ask for.

Extras/Would Recommend

Writing: “Ireland We Hardly Knew Ye” - My review of Fintan O’Toole’s new history of Ireland at the Baffler

Reading: “Homesickness” - Colin Barrett - 2022

Listening: “Delusions of Grandeur” - Thumper - 2022

Marianne : Forgive me, I'd hate to be in your place.

Héloïse : We're in the same place. Exactly the same place. Come here. Come. Step closer. Look. If you look at me, who do I look at?

This week I watched three versions of Greek myth. The first was Hadestown, a musical that took the long way around to smash success. In 2006 it was a minor stage production, then a 2010 concept album before moving from the margins to massive audiences on Broadway. If you’re unfamiliar, Hadestown is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the lovers who went to the underworld and back, and then back to the underworld again. The setting is vaguely Steinbeckian, definitely Southern, with a jazzy orchestra and class conflict without anyone using the “S” word. Hades (Patrick Page, very good) is an industrialist, king of some kind of mining or foundry company town where the workers’ very souls are dissolved by drudgery. Eurydice is an unfortunate drifter, doomed to wander from town to town until Orpheus charms her, and then accidentally gets her killed. Or gets her to sign her life away. Or something. The two settings, ancient and modern, never quite gel beyond a sort of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did that” way. There are constructive, and obstructive ambiguities littered throughout the play. For every moment where your brain neatly fills in the gap there is another where you spend a few minutes uselessly trying to figure out the logistics of the whole thing. The set design is gorgeous and the costumes are beautiful, but neither convey much meaning beyond the obvious.

The production I saw suffered from what you might call the Dear Evan Hansen Problem. Orpheus, ostensibly a naive youth, is played by a man called Reeve Carney, who is thirty eight years old. The main instruments used to bridge that credibility gap are an unsettling haircut and an infuriating tic: In trying to give the impression that his character is inexperienced, Carney does a nervous, strangled, fake-bad singing for basically the entire musical. It cannot be overstated how distracting it is to see a man about to enter early middle age, with twenty plus years of singing experience, pretend to be a little kid with big dreams.

Some of the issues with Hadestown are not necessarily their fault. It’s probably considered bad form to edit Greek myths for modern sensibilities, so they are stuck with the downer ending that is poor Eurydice getting sent back to the underworld. Hades promises that they will both be free to leave as long as Orpheus goes first, and in a display of faith, doesn’t look back to see if she’s following. At the last minute, he does.

“That’s horrible,” says Sophie in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, on hearing the same story. “Poor woman, why did he turn? He was told not to but did, for no reason.” She sits with Héloïse, the noble daughter shortly to be wed to an anonymous nobleman far away, and Marianne, the woman sent to paint her, in the flickering firelight as they debate the reasons for Orpheus’ mistake. Watching Hadestown’s ending, I admit I had the same reaction. “Perhaps he makes a choice,” Marianne suggests, “He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” Héloïse adds another few lines and wonders, “Perhaps she was the one who said, ‘turn around’” The scene is on an island in Brittany at the close of the eighteenth century. The three are living in a brief moment of joy and freedom between oceans of repressed time. Marianne and Héloïse are in love, and for a few days the Countessa is away. There is room in this film to explore the story properly. There is layer and meaning far beyond most films. Every shot is full of textural detail, literal and metaphorical. Cold ocean and sharp stone, the folds of fine silk and the rough cloth of a habit, oil paints, charcoals, soft red pencil and deep red wine. Both Hadestown and Portrait of a Lady on Fire comment on class, but the former is both overblown and curiously bloodless; the clashing demands of musical bombast and an aversion to overtly political content. In one of my favourite scenes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the three have settled into a comfortable equality that feels natural and transgressive at the same time. Sophie, the maid, attends to her needlework, fixing in art the flowers on the counter whose loveliness will not last one more week. Marianne pours them all wine as Héloïse, the highest born, chops vegetables for their dinner. Hadestown is sung through, whereas Portrait has no formal score, only a handful of moments of wildly startling music. Music is spoken of, but not heard until the women circle a bonfire, the boundaries between the world of the spoken and unspoken blur and dissolve, and the song bursts out, an overwhelming ecstasy of freedom.
It is unfair, perhaps, to compare the two. One is a massive spectacle for Broadway audiences, the other a film with a self consciously refined audience. And despite its flaws, Hadestown evokes some genuine feeling in its better moments. It’s just hard to escape the feeling that Broadway musicals in the end sound and feel roughly the same. Like prestige television or Hollywood films, there is a laundering process that dyes everything with the same ink. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is something that looks like nothing else, feels like nothing else.

Courtesy of the YouTube recommendation algorithm, I have been watching a channel called Early American, the product of a group of historical reenactors who, it seems, try to live life as if James Monroe were still president. There are painstaking food preparations (A Working Class Supper in 1820s America), clothing demonstrations (Dressing in 1790 vs. 1830) and even courting rituals (Guide to Wooing a Woman in 1820). What there is mostly however, is bad acting. An uncomfortably clad man comes into the authentic cabin and places his musket on the table. His wife stiffly greets him, “Hello my dear husband. Have you brought anything for the dinner?”

“No, wife, none of my traps sprung today.”

“That is ok, I will make some barley stew.”

It often takes on the appearance of bad reality television, floating in the nether realm between bad scripting and bad improv. The overall effect is deeply uncanny. It fails because the reenactors imagine their early 19th century counterparts to be fundamentally different to them. They are the product of earnest research, animated by the tropes of movies, television, the Oregon Trail computer game and the shadows of previous historical reenactors. The interest is ostensibly in showing how far from modern life these people were. The work! The hardship! The stiff manners and stiffer clothes.

Why do we imagine the people of the past to be so different to us? One of the great joys of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that it never indulges the viewer's hunger for period excess. The detail is exact, but restrained. The leads wear the same things for basically the whole film. The presumably sumptuous fixings of the house are mostly covered in dust sheets. The people in these rooms, in these clothes, are just people like you or I. They sit by the fire and make conversation, make jokes, make love. They fight with, and show incredible tenderness to, people they’ve known for only days. Their lives inside are full, whatever their exterior trappings. The items are beautiful, but they are unimportant. When the camera lingers, it is not on their finery, but on their faces, and the elements that are eternal: fire and ocean. Watching the film is like finding the one painting in the museum that speaks to you. The gaze of a model from hundreds of years ago that stares back and reminds you that there was once flesh and blood behind the layers of oil.

- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Penitent Magdalene, 1650-1655, National Gallery of Ireland

In the Early American videos there are very occasional glimpses of life. One video sees three women go to a shop to buy some flour, passing as they do a sign that advertises an app called something like Hungr. The simulation breaks down as they walk the aisles of a modern supermarket, and they laugh slightly, at the absurdity. Then the door closes and they begin mugging for the camera once more. The moment of breach is the most of closest truth, and it passes quickly.

The last thing I watched was Disney’s Hercules. I last saw it when it came out and I was about eight years old. They did not have the same qualms about rewriting Greek myth, and this was probably for the best. There are some crossovers that I can live without seeing. I remembered the aesthetic and mood of the film perfectly and not one single plot point correctly. That’s looking back for you.

Extras/Would Recommend

Reading: Detransition, Baby (2021) - Torrey Peters

Listening: The Foggy Dew (1965) - The Wolfe Tones

Watching: The Rickshaw Man/The Life of Matsu the Untamed (1943) - Hiroshi Inagaki

The visual upgrades that the grotty 16mm film gets work wonderfully, most of the time. Yes, they do Motion Smoothe Ringo, which is unfortunate, but what they mostly do is help the medium get out of the way. They make it all a bit more present, a bit more ordinary. And then you have four very likable lads in a room together having tea and toast and doing funny voices. I had mixed to negative feelings about Jackson’s last project, the Great War (4K edition) doc They Shall Not Grow Old. What’s different here is that the subject matter is a little less serious, and so there’s no need to get too exercised, you can just enjoy the clear sound and picture.

For such well trodden ground, there are many surprises. John for all his faults is genuinely funny throughout, and softer to his bandmates than might be expected. Paul is a genius, but a dictator too. You could count George’s smiles on two hands, just about. One of Ringo’s chief contributions is to announce in the middle of a serious discussion that he has farted. Billy Preston deserves to be included in the pantheon of fifth Beatles. And as someone who reflexively defended Yoko for many years, well, the less said about her presence the better.

Moody though he may have been, it’s hard not to feel sorry for George, younger, less confident and above all, one against two. Even as McCartney and Lennon were drifting apart, they were still Lennon/McCartney: a unit of one that churned out some of the most accomplished music of the 20th century. Paul nags him, John kindly condescends, and his exit feels inevitable. He simply had the misfortune to be a genius in a band that was already at capacity.

There is great pathos to be found in the long lingering faces of the surrounding cast. The genial manager Mal, the suave George Martin, the Orson Welles lookalike and everyone else. The terrible knowledge we have of what happens next feels written on their faces. They watch as the project of the last ten years comes to an exhausted close. And we wonder if, with a little break, a little rest, a little less pressure or a little more understanding, it could all have been avoided. Was there another Beatles album to be made? Or five? Or were we always destined to get what we got: some solo music that occasionally glinted but never shone.

Then the rooftop scene comes and people start milling about in the street below, mostlly pleasantly surprised by this burst of surprising sunlight in a grey English January. Above the solid, drab grey wool of the average businessman, the Beatles look like they’ve come from the future. The only people to object, besides the cops (hilariously both called PC Ray) are the most Tory looking fuckers you’ve ever seen in your life. The Beatles, they say, are simply disrupting the Local Business of the street. A respectable geezer straight out of central casting on the other hand says that he likes very much their hair, their style, and he certainly wouldn’t mind his daughter marrying one of them. There are, even among the faithful, a sucession of repressed smiles, as if to express too much joy might land you in some Victorian prison.

What will stick with me is the most banal point of all: that John and Paul were made for each other. Their talents lay in large part inside the other, and when that connection was sundered they never could quite do it again. Many years ago when working a terrible job checking cars in a hospital car park I downloaded the entire Beatles discography and would listen to it, start to finish, on repeat, for weeks at a time. Of course I cried at that last performance of Two of Us. Theirs was the ability to transform the ordinary into the exciting, the cloud into the sun, the grey into the light.

You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead

Two of us wearing raincoats, standing solo
In the sun
You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere
On our way back home

We're on our way home
We're on our way home
We're going home

And I still like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.

Extras/Would Recommend

Reading: Battleborn - Claire Vaye Watkins, 2012

Listening: The Beatles, obviously

Well happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all. We all got our sweaters cleaned in celebration. Once a year, whether they need it or not.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem released In Person at Carnegie Hall in November 1963, a live recording from March of that year. The record was a selective edit of one of their annual St. Patrick’s Day gigs, with a few stray tracks from a previous concert at the same venue. In the original release, it is just under thirty seven minutes long. And it is perfect. 

The Clancys and Makem were half-accidental, half-manufactured. The album features the family trio of Paddy, Tom and Liam Clancy, with Tommy Makem the vital uniting element. The Clancys were migrants from Tipperary to New York City, and began life there as fairly successful off-Broadway actors. Diane Hamilton, heiress to the Guggenheim fortune, played a major role in introducing the brothers to Makem, and moving Liam Clancy and Makem from Ireland to New York.1 

The album opens with Johnson’s Motor Car, a 1921 tune by Willie Gillespie commemorating an IRA escapade of the same year in which a group in Donegal hijacked the car of a unionist doctor to transport arms during the War of Independence. A version of the song had been recorded a few years earlier by a Scottish group called The Emmettones, but it was the Clancys and Makem who popularized the song again. In 1969, the band’s money and contacts helped to found the National Association for Irish Justice (NAIJ), a left-wing Irish Republican support group in New York headed by Brian Heron, the grandson of James Connolly. One of their first actions was to brand a bus as “Johnston’s Motor Car”, and use it to follow around and picket a British train called the “Flying Scotsman”, which was transporting British goods across the United States on an odd PR exercise.

Irish Republican politics hover in the background of much of the group’s music. There are the classic rebel ballads, The Rising of the Moon, Brennan on the Moor or Roddy McCorley, but there are also many stray stage comments, mainly from Makem, half-joking grumblings about England or cryptic asides about the realities of life in Armagh in the middle of the century. And there are songs like Johnson’s Motor Car, creations of the War of Independence, Civil War and after. 

One of the most militant, I think, of the Irish rebel songs, was a song called the Soldiers of the Legion of the Rearguard. Y'know this song was actually banned by the Irish government. Maybe they didn’t like it as a song, I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like the music. But the theme of the song was very much to the point. You see, the vanguard was Pádraig Pearse and the sixteen men who fought in Dublin in 1916. The men who came after them in the troubled times - they called them the civil war - were a militant crowd, and their determination actually did get us our freedom or partial freedom. The soldiers of the legion of the rearguard.

- Paddy Clancy, Live at Carnegie Hall 1962

Legion of the Rearguard, the song in question, is most definitely an anti-treaty anthem. It was written, funnily enough, by a guy called Jack O’Sheehan (no relation, as far as I know) who was once imprisoned by the British government for “seditious singing”, which I think we can all agree is a great charge on which to be brought before the court. The song is still popular at Fianna Fáil Ard Fheiseanna today. 

The major artistic achievement of the Clancy Brothers and was to take existing folk music material, from memory, songbook or elsewhere, and reforge it into something new again: a faster, heavier, livelier sound. Makem had probably the deepest roots in the old stuff, his mother Sarah was a legendary ballad singer and the family practically musical royalty. It’s no coincidence that the Clancys started out on stage, as their stage presence is what transforms the material into something that could achieve worldwide fame. The Clancys and Makem didn’t invent pub music as we know it, but they helped to develop the vernacular by which the most popular version of it is performed today. Out were the solemn, slow studio versions and in were raucous semi-live recordings. They did it, crucially, outside the country, subject to the influences and commercial pressures of the United States. They were successful first abroad, but the cachet of American cool meant that their re-entry to Ireland was explosive. The year after this LP was released, nearly one third of all records sold in Ireland were Tommy Makem and the Clancys. 

Part of the joy of In Person at Carnegie Hall is how distinct all the personalities are. The tough patriarch Paddy, the genial Tom, the spiky, funny Tommy Makem and Liam, the youngest and cleverest of the brothers. The watcher, the observer, the man with perfect timing. According to Bob Dylan, the greatest ballad singer he ever heard. In immodest moments I feel very close to Liam, the youngest of nine, struggling from under the shadows of his older siblings. It is a great regret that I never saw him, or any of them, perform. Doing research on this period feels at times like stepping into an empty room that was just now full of people. The smells, the traces, the feelings are still there. But the people needed to make sense of them are gone.

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- Liam Clancy

The discography of the group became increasingly confusing after the mid-sixties, partially because the group split and reunited so many times, but also because their music was lucrative enough to be constantly re-released in dubious box sets and collections with titles like Ireland’s Favourite Drinking Songs! As a result there are dozens of versions of each song out there. In Person at Carnegie Hall contains the definitive version of many. Liam Clancy delivers probably the most well-known version of The Patriot Game of any artist, though as previously noted, the song’s author Dominic Behan hated it for removing the verse critical of De Valera. 

In Person at Carnegie Hall is a distilled spirit, less than 40 minutes long. A full version of the concert exists, and was released on an anniversary reissue a few years back. It has its own charms, and is worth a listen, but it loses something too. The record as first sold has the tightness of careful editing that allows for endless listens. It becomes the sort of album that you can listen to twice in a row without wearing out its welcome. It was produced by recording legend Harold Leventhal, a leftist who was blacklisted and denied a passport during the McCarthy years. In his time he worked with everyone from the Weavers and Odetta to Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Alan Arkin. Leventhal is one of those figures who my own research is built on, someone whose career stretched on through the twentieth century and whose vision united so many disparate artists and ideologies. It was he who organised tribute concerts for down on their luck (and short on funds) legends like Phil Ochs and Woodie Guthrie. 

- Leventhal and Bob Dylan, (Woodie Guthrie Centre)

The centrepiece of the album is the second to last song, called on the original pressing simply Children’s Medley. This is not one song, but fifteen, some only a few seconds long, punctuated by little vignettes, memories, jokes and laughter. If you’ve never encountered it, I would seriously recommend taking a few minutes to listen before you go on. 

Last summer, when we went home to Ireland, we threw a party for our little nieces and nephews – the children of the family. And they sang their children’s songs and played their children’s games, and we fell in love with our own childhood songs all over again. We’re going to sing some of them for you now.

The children’s rhymes and songs have an uncanny feeling of recognition to them. Even if you have never heard one before, you suspect they live somewhere in your memory, as if someone sang them to you in the cradle or you heard a snatch of one in a dream. they range from the comic to the melancholy. A friend my age from Drumcondra remembered the one about the Illy-Alley-Oh, another from Clare has told many times of the Wren Boys doing the rounds on St. Stephen’s Day. The fragments travel back in time and around the island. Ask your parents or grandparents and they might remember one or two, or all of them. But are they remembering hearing them as children, or are they remembering this record? 

Of course there is artifice here, inevitably, but there is alchemy too. All acts of remembering have some artifice in them. We do not really recall the past, we recreate it again, imperfectly, incompletely. We copy a copy, and the edges smudge, the words warp and change. In rendering real children’s songs on one of the most successful albums of the day they were taking something and freezing it, fixing it in amber, for good and bad. It was a recreation of the past that lives now in their future. The Clancys and Makem all died youngish. Not as young men, but younger than they should have. 74, 74, 76, 66, 75.2 Not so old. The kind of age when you’ve lived hard, and had both great fortune and misfortune. There are many other recordings of their songs, and even many versions of the Children’s Medley. On a 1962 recording they sound slightly hesitant, as if they were just learning their lines. On later versions there is a weariness underneath the showmanship, the memories worn thin and fine from overuse. Here every cue is perfectly hit, every laugh feels genuine and the boys egg each other on with whistles and shouts and kind exclamations. There was a moment between the naive and the jaded, between rehearsal and exhaustion. There were splits ahead, bitter feuds and bad blood too. There was sickness, and sadness, and late reconciliation. But there was one night on St. Patrick’s Day 1963 where they were perfect, and it lives on, under needle and vinyl, frozen and flawless.

Extras/Would Recommend

1. Reading: “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” - Shirley Jackson, 1962

2. Listening: “I’m On My Way” - Barbara Dane, 1962

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Jean: Do you ever think of the future at all?

Llewyn: The future? You mean like flying cars? Hotels on the moon? Tang?

The weekend before last I watched Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis for the fourth or maybe fifth time. The first time I saw it I felt it was a bit of a missed opportunity, too glum, too cold, too downbeat to be fully enjoyed. The gorgeous T Bone Burnett arrangements were lost in the grim, Joblike odyssey of the world’s most disagreeable folk singer, played by the never-more-handsome Oscar Isaac. But I went back for another go, and this time I vibed a lot better with it, the black humour, John Goodman’s nasty jazzman and an indeterminate number of cats. After the latest viewing I think it might be my favourite film of all time. 

Inside Llewyn Davis ran into a little controversy when it first opened, because the Coens made the mistake of showing their work, citing Dave Van Ronk's classic Greenwich Village memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street as a particular influence. Many made the obvious jump and imagined this was a thinly veiled biopic.1 Thus they cried foul: Llewyn Davis is a miserable sad sack, a spiky, disagreeable outsider. As Carey Mulligan’s Jean roars at him,  “you’re a reverse King Midas: everything you touch turns to shit.” Dave Van Ronk was everyone’s pal: a friend, a mentor, the rock on which Dylan built his church. Besides, he was about nine feet tall, a shaggy, friendly bear who exuded goodwill to all men. The Coens were quick to deny the links. Van Ronk was just one of many inspirations for the title character, who had slices of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and countless others. But as always, they weren’t telling the whole truth. 

Doubles, doppelgangers and stand-ins abound in their world. Walking crew cut Troy Nelson is a dead ringer for Tom Paxton, a man so square that when he arrived in the Village people thought he was an undercover cop. They even share a posting at Fort Dix, New Jersey.2 Bud Grossman, played by the granite-faced F. Murray Abraham, is a guardian of the Gate of Horn only a few shades removed from Albert Grossman, the real manager and owner. There are even a few knock-off Clancy Brothers, presumably bought cheap because of their suspiciously American-sounding singing voices. The more unflattering the portrayal, the more cryptic the association. The real Moses Asch wasn’t the sly nonsense merchant Mel Novikoff depicted, and Jim and Jean could be any number of pairings. 

The year is 1961, and the season is winter. The film has that bone deep cold of damp apartments,saturated socks and blazers worn as winter coats. One of the sources of Llewyn’s misery seems to be that he has no realistic prospect of ever being warm again. He travels from unfortunate accident to bad decision, from New York to Chicago and back again. Tide goes out, tide comes in. He alienates the people who love him, and they take him back anyway. He promises not to play the Gaslight for the four hundredth time, and he plays the Gaslight for the four hundredth time. He gets beaten up by an angry husband, though not the one you might expect. But whenever the film stills and he takes out his guitar, the music takes the breath from your throat. If the old folks are treated a little carelessly, the songs are held in gloves of velvet. There is no one like the Coens for sitting with a song until it finishes. As Llewyn plays us through the tragic life of poor Queen Jane, you’re sure, so sure that it was all worth it. This will be his break. And even if it isn’t, wasn’t it worth it anyway?

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I don't see a lot of money here.

Another major criticism levelled at the film is its distinctly apolitical shrug. This isn’t strictly fair either. The year is key. Our collective cultural memory of the folk revival abounds with images of lefties on guitars and dulcimers, inveighing against the war and the bomb and those misguided sons of Mississippi. But this is 1961. The old left has grown old, and the new one isn’t born yet. The older folkies had been badly battered by McCarthy and the constraints of the Cold War. Pete Seeger and the Weavers were beggared by the blacklist. Alan Lomax spent much of the ‘50s in self-imposed exile. Phil Ochs, the most overly and consistently political of the sixties folk singers, wouldn’t come to the Village for another year. The first real anti-Vietnam War anthem, Ochs’ Vietnam Talkin’ Blues, appeared in ‘64. 

The real omission is the civil rights movement, and the many songs and singers that accompanied it. A very fair criticism of the film is the almost complete lack of black characters, a persistent issue in the Coen Brothers canon. There is no Odetta or Paul Robeson stand-in, nor a Harry Belafonte one. ‘61 was the year of the Freedom Rides, and the fusion of left wing folk music with the traditional music of African Americans into effective and powerful works of artistic protest. But there is no Guy Carawan here. Such vibrant solidarity doesn’t fit within the desaturated frame of Inside Llewyn Davis. Perhaps they knew this, and elected to leave it out entirely rather than make a half-gesture. 

What little politics appear are gnomic; delivered from the side of the mouth. In Please Mr. Kennedy, what might have been a protest song against the Vietnam War becomes an absurd plea from a reluctant astronaut being sent to space against his will. After being told by an unsympathetic union rep that he can’t ship out with the Merchant Navy again, Llewyn asks, “Why? Cause I’m a Communist?” to which the rep quickly mumbles, “Shachtmanite?” Shactmanites were the followers of Max Schactman, a real life figure more ornery than Llewyn himself. Shachtmanism was a peculiar ideological dead end, a personality cult that helped to keep the American left peripheral and divided for much of the 50s and 60s. Radical politics in Coen Brothers pictures are usually played for laughs, think of the genial communists of Hail Caesar! Part of you wishes the Coens would do a film about the mid-century left, just to get it out of their system. 

These criticisms aside, what makes this such a special film in my eyes? At heart, I’m a folk music guy. It’s something many of us have to come to terms with at some point in life. I can’t resist the songs, but there is something else. After a few viewings you start to notice the pattern. It begins where it ends, with Llleywn getting punched in the face and left in a rain slick alley. He plays, he scratches a living, he sleeps on someone’s couch, and tomorrow he does it again. The song is the same, but played a little different every night. The whole film is a folk song, as played by Joel and Ethan Coen. And this is where the criticisms all miss the mark. This is the story of Dave Van Ronk, sure, but played as a sad song. Van Ronk never got famous, but it didn’t matter, he had a pretty good time just getting along. Inside Llewyn Davis asks, what if you never got famous, and felt really bad the whole time? The Streets of Laredo isn’t The Unfortunate Rake, but if you’re not paying attention they sound the same. 

Folk music is about eternal recurrence, a theme the Coens aren’t exactly new to. The story of the sixties, like the songs themselves, don’t belong to anyone. They can be picked up and used whatever way you like. Which leads neatly to the final stroke of the film. Llewyn plays to modest applause and a few dollars shared from the basket, and he exits stage left to meet his fate. A new kid takes the stage and plays the film out. The song is Farewell and the singer is Bob Dylan, name and all. The man with the made up name and a thousand phoney backstories is the only real character who appears.3 The choice of song is clever, as it was one of Dylan’s first controversies. It was built on the bones of The Leaving of Liverpool, just as With God On Our Side took more than a little from Dominic Behan’s The Patriot Game.4

Dylan was, at best, light fingered with others work, something which caused no end of trouble in his early career. This would not have been as much of a problem had he stayed at the level of modest local fame of those around him. But Dylan’s star was such that it distorted the old mechanics of folk music. If you take a song and rewrite it a little and it becomes a hit, everyone who played it before you becomes a retroactive plagiarist in the eyes of the public. The Coens fiddle with the lyrics and play a new version of the story, but Inside Llewyn Davis was at best a minor hit. By virtue of its minor key, its difficult appeal, it escapes the charge of overwriting history. 

What did I steal? Did I steal the word the, the word a, the word so? Everybody has to get their words from somewhere. Woody didn’t write 10 original melodies, but nobody ever called him a thief

- Bob Dylan on accusations of plagiarism5

Dylan becomes so large in the film, as in real life, that his authenticity is ratified simply by presence and magnitude. This isn’t about talent, though Dylan has more than enough. Timing is everything, and Llewyn has the misfortune of arriving a little too early. Flexibility is what matters, and Llewyn is just a little too reverential, too prickly, too rigid. He moves in cycles, in recurrences and circuits. But Dylan is the external actor that breaks the loop, the orthogonal force that takes, and absorbs, and remakes and reshapes reality around him. For the Coens, there is nothing to be done but to sit in the alleyway, and wait for the future to arrive.

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Extras/Would Reccomend

1. Reading: “Long Live the Post Horn!” - Vigdis Hjorth, 2014 (English traslation 2020)

2. Listening: “I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!” - CMAT, 2020

3. Watching: “Avatar: The Last Airbender” - Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, Aaron Ehasz, 2005 - 2008

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The Mountain Goats released Songs For Pierre Chuvin on April 10 of last year. The world had been in lockdown for perhaps a month. Tour cancelled and needing to pay the small collection of professionals that depend on the band for their livelihood, John Darnielle produced a ten track tape in quickfire order. These songs are hard, sharp diamonds, most two or three minutes long and recorded straight to an ailing Panasonic boombox, the first record of this type since 2002’s All Hail West Texas. A band that had been growing more musically complex for three decades was sent back in time. The pandemic reassembled our lives, took some of our privileges, and made redundant some of our learning. Gates clatter shut, boundaries appear where there were none. Darnielle found something to say about the unfolding crisis in the stories of the book he was reading, French historian Pierre Chuvin’s 1990 A Chronicle of the Last Pagans.

There was something providential about the release. A few videos went up of songs in progress, but the whole process took only weeks. Darnielle worked with an inspired fury that you would imagine comes less frequently after you turn 40 and stop doing uppers. The Mountain Goats’ music has always been religious, in an old testament sort of way. Over thirty years the small benign cult of TMG followers has gradually expanded, and fans tend to become superfans. You start off listening to This Year and before you know it you’re embroiled in intricate arguments over the sacred texts, the meaning of the obscure codices.

(From Series “Reusable Photos From a City Under Lockdown” April 2020, Jack Sheehan)

Comes a time, comes a plague, comes a divine bolt of inspiration. The suddenness of its appearance, the unfiltered sediment of the medium coming through your headphones, it all make it feel as if Darnielle was just passing on a message from somewhere else. There seems no other time that something like this could have appeared that wouldn't feel artificial, arbitrary. Darnielle has spent three decades getting better at his instruments, adding more band members, becoming more collaborator than auteur. His fascination with the complexities of music and love of constant learning has made the work ever more polished and intricate. John Wurster, Peter Hughes and Matt Douglas are talented artists in their own right, and latter day Mountain Goats has tended to foreground their work. From one man hammering an acoustic guitar and redlining his primitive recording device to a whole album without guitars, a mock-opera about Goths called, as you’d imagine, Goths.

Since the first time he stepped into a recording studio there have been fans who would really love him to step out, thank you very much. Not me, I came to the music far, far too late to be a purist. I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to Hot Garden Stomp all the way through, but I don’t want to live in a world where Pale Green Things doesn’t exist. You can’t go home again, you can’t pretend to be an angry young man who will not wait to learn his instruments before getting out the things in his heart and his head. And there are few things worse to listen to the results of an unsuccessful attempt. Bruce Springsteen, going through the fallow early 90s, no longer a desperate vagabond and denied even the subject matter of a failing romance, sang It’s a sad funny ending when you find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor man’s shirt. The same year he wrote a song about having too many channels on your TV.

The Panasonic RX FT-500 has a mythic place in Mountain Goats lore, the rolling hum as much an instrument on tapes up until All Hail West Texas as anything else was. It stopped working in the early 2000s, but Darnielle discovered you could get it to play nice if you stood it on its end. You can always repurpose an old idol if you play around with it a little. All your fine fine columns/Poking up through the pond scum/We will have uses for these things/When we come. The subject of these new songs is ostensibly the last days of the pagans of Europe. It’s the fifth century AD, the old religion is dying, a new one advances across the land like a cloud of locusts, casting aside what it can’t devour and repurpose. John Darnielle is a good Christian man, but his sympathies lie with the pagans. If not quite ripped from the headlines, the album feels like the product of cabin fever dreams, a restless night after endless days of consuming too much rolling news and too many stories of heresies and heretics and high priests reaching the end of the line.

Darnielle seems to be reckoning with living in a time of defeat. The two great liberatory electoral projects of the English-speaking world in the last five years have both been put to the sword. A defeat means a reckoning within any movement. Some fraying will happen, a splintering perhaps, as people lose faith, disagree about the path forward, even repudiate their beliefs. To plan for your future is to believe that you have one. A plan for a shared future is an acknowledgement of shared purpose and shared solidarity. This loss came at the worst time imaginable: in the face of a disease that makes in person mourning near-impossible and even discussion restricted to the savage and alienating rhythms of the online world.

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Songs for Pierre Chuvin is full of hard, bitter solace. Rough blankets to keep the warmth in for a long winter. The bracing drink is laced with a dash of nostalgia to make it go down easier, to banish the despair. Just enough sentiment, just enough indulgence. The echoes of the old stuff, the first few bars of each song that make us feel, just for a second, that the glory days are still here. There are treasures to be found for the die-hard, innumerable treasures. A sequel to a beloved rarity, the fourteenth song on an album released in 1994. Dozens of intertextual references to his own songs, Bon Iver songs, Pavement songs, whatever songs might be rolling back and forth across your addled brain as you try to make it from morning to night and morning again.

It’s as if he went back in time and gave the wisdom of age to a furious young man. But this is Darnielle after decades of experience. Every song hits, every line kills. It’s hard to imagine a passage like this without the layered irony of a musician who found Jesus, and wrote a whole album with bible references as song titles:

Notch some wins, take some losses

Be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses

They will stab you in the back

You gotta turn the other cheek

You gotta learn to love Jesus

So to speak

The tape taken together is a love letter to things that seem defeated, sympathy for the soon to be extinct. One summer/Then all of this is gone/One more summer/Then no more swan. but more than that. It is a plea to keep faith, to hold on to those around you and the ideals you were once so sure of that are taking a beating in this storm. Protect yourself/Vouch for every member of the team/This is just a momentary ripple in the stream. In our defeat we are denied even the comfort of others, of a raised drink in a crowded pub and a hoarse rendition of an old song. Alone, the doubts creep in. Everybody knows these days can’t last. Everybody knows there’s nothing left in the tank. But it seems like it’s been Late Capitalism for a very long time now. How long ‘til the snake devours its tail?/Longer than we think.

No easy outs, no simple answers, no taking away the pain. But a few songs to stiffen the spine. A broadcast from the mountains to let you know that help will come eventually. 

Political music, at its best, is less didactic than harmonizing. It does not ask you to dissolve your doubts or to show no fear, only that you still both for a few minutes. It subsumes the rancour and disagreement into a familiar song, full of short affirmations of faith. We shall overcome some day. As he died to make men holy let us live to make men free. It reminds the listener, better yet, the chorus, that we are here for a reason. That it is not about the atomised individual, but the whole world.

The ending is an old mantra, an affirmation of the Mountain Goats line that belongs to tens of thousands of sick and struggling people. Go to the YouTube video for 2004’s This Year and read the comments. It is thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people’s “song”. I got a diagnosis last month. I’m gonna be listening to this next year. People with cancer, with depression, with heartbreak and pain. Anyone else listening to this on New Years Eve? We made it. Latter day Mountain Goats songs resolve often into a simple list of affirmations, or perhaps instructions. Lie in wait/By the gleaming city gate/Try not to lose sight of the mission. Take note of what will be gone in the blink of an eye. Say your prayers to whomever you call out to in the night. And that line that has stuck for fifteen years now comes back to play us out.

Make it through this year
If it kills us outright

Extras/Would Recommend

1. Reading: “The Lottery and Other Stories” - Shirley Jackson - 1949

2. Listening: “For Those I Love” - For Those I Love - 2020/2021

3. Watching: “Secret Honour” - Dir. Robert Altman - 1984