Booming Back

All Tomorrow's Harvest

2013-06-09T17:11:00.000+01:00

I was finally going to get off my backside and write a proper post today, but then the sun was shining and this happened.

Sorry.

3.1 iron-clad reasons to fund Rabble

2013-05-07T19:46:00.001+01:00

Those nice folks at Rabble have uploaded my piece from Issue 5 on Hollywood blockbusters and the glorification of the individual at the expense of the collective (it's punchier than it sounds), just in time for the release of Iron Man 3 (which, *spoilers*, deals pretty much entirely with the negative impact on our man Tony of suddenly finding himself part of a team of folks that are every bit his equal in Avengers. Sadly for Tony there is no "I" in "Avengers", so he just has to compensate by slapping a giant shiny red and gold one at the front of "Iron Man". There may also have been some bad guys and a few explosions, but I wasn't really paying too much attention there towards the end).

This serves as an opportune moment to remind you all about Rabble's ongoing Fund:IT campaign to let the magazine continue for another year as a reader-supported venture. The campaign is now just over half-way through, with nineteen days to go, and has raised over €5,000 of its €9,000 goal, from 122 backers. The problem with Fund:IT, like its bigger cousin Kick-Starter on the other side of the Atlantic, is that unless a campaign meets its full target, the project walks away with nothing. So while hitting the €5K mark is a very good milestone indeed, unless it brings in another €4K of pledges in the next nineteen days the Anne Robinson Bot will turn around with great glee and proclaim, "Rabble Magazine, you leave with nothing. You are the weakest link, goodbye", and none of us want to see that, now do we?

Rabble is a truly unique magazine in Ireland, nobody is covering the stores that they are, with the style of journalism that they are, and they can't continue without your help. I think you should all rush off immediately and give them what you can, but then again I am biased, I write for them. Luckily, a number of other far more interesting and credible folks than me have taken a few moments to let you all know why you should support Rabble.

First up is Donal Fallon, part of the group behind the altogether rather excellent history blog, Come Here to Me, that we are pretty big fans of here at Booming Back:

Next up is Tonie Walshe of The Irish Queer Archive, a living and growing collection of documents chronicling the recent history of the LGBTQ community in Ireland and housed in the National Library of Ireland since 2008:

Finally there are these words from Terry Fagan of The North Inner City Folklore Project, who has been preserving the forgotten history of the communities at the heart of Dublin for more years than any of us care to remember:

Now there you go, three great reasons to support Rabble, and one very poor one from your humble resident Ire-merchant and Bile-monger here at Booming Back.

Off you go now and give them your money, sure you'd only go and waste it on crisps and alcohol anyway.

Shouting here does not fix anything

2013-05-04T23:54:00.001+01:00

I was thumbing through a recent dead-tree copy of The Guardian and came across an ad on the back page of one of the sections. The ad simply read, "Everyone needs a volume control. When you shout every day and make everything a catastrophe, no one will hear you when you need to say something really important".

Now of course this is exactly the sort of manipulative trite statement that is designed to make you pause and say to yourself, "you know, I know that's a manipulative trite statement, but they have a point...", but, well, it made me pause and say to myself, "you know...".

I am, by nature, a very cynical and grumpy person. I am less a 'glass-half-empty' person and more a 'damn-those-capitalist-bastards-stole-my-glass-and-are-now-making-me-pay-for-the-privilege-of-watching-them-drink-champagne-from-it' type of guy, and having easy access to a platform from which to vent is akin to a junkie finding a Golden Ticket in his gear that gives him exclusive access to the magical CIA-funded Afghan factory where all his dreams are lovingly caressed from the fruits of shimmering ruby fields. Moderation is not something I am very good at when it comes to voicing my opinion.

Whether it is bank bailouts and bond-payments or human feces on my doorstep, I am quick to condemn and colourful in my approach, and all things get treated with an equal amount of outrage. Or at least it did, until quite recently.

Just over a year ago I wrote an article for Politico asking where all the anger was, why no one was taking to the streets. This May Day not only did I fail to take to the streets, I didn't leave the office until late in to the evening. While in the past I felt quite capable of balancing a reasonably hectic work-life with a passion for social activism, I have found that a spike in my Twitter usage has also corresponded with a sharp decline in my real-world protestations.

In a nutshell, I have fallen in to the trap of Passivism, what passes for activism in the online world.

I stumble home from the office drained and jaded, and although the fires of injustice still blaze inside me, the immediate gratification of switching on Vincent Browne and knocking out a few venomous Bon Mots at the expense of whatever conservative/religious right-wing hate-monger has been lined up for our evening's entertainment satiates the anger and ire in my belly. I go to bed with a sense of righteousness, that I have made a difference in the world by imparting my oh-so-insightful truths to the hundreds of like-minded individuals that follow me on Twitter, each of whom also sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that their own soundbites shared across the internets have surely contributed to righting the scales of social justice, like a thousand bee-stings laying low the mightiest oliphaunt.

But in the morning, we all rise and the beast is still there, trampling us all under foot and blissfully unaware that any of us even took aim the previous night.

That is the"power" of social media, to let us all feel like we have taken a stand without ever once actually challenging the forces of our oppression. Fintan O'Toole called emigration the release valve of Irish societal pressure; in the 21st Century that valve takes a new form, and though the politicians shake their fists and gnash their teeth at Social Media, crying, "won't somebody please think of the children?", they will never lay a finger on it for, like emigration and the pub, it keeps the angry kids off the streets while making a tidy taxable profit in the process.

Everyone shouts online. The internets are written in CAPS LOCK and when everyone shouts, nobody has to listen. Nobody can listen.

I went to see Noam Chomsky a few weeks ago. I, like most other Lefties of my age, grew up reading his diatribes on everything from the media to South America, and all of America's misdeeds in between. He was hosted by Front Line Defenders, a human rights organization whose patron is Denis O'Brien, and was interviewed by Brian Dobson. For an hour or more he railed against imperialism and hegemony, and the audience clapped and cheered, and all of us good little Lefties slept soundly that night secure in the knowledge that our presence there had made the world a better place.

But as we all listened closely to what Chomsky was saying, it suddenly dawned on me that what we should have been doing was listening to what he was not saying. He has a mesmerising way of pointing out all the ills of the world, so enticing that you completely fail to notice that not once does he offer any suggestions for how to make things better. For all we think that he challenges the establishment, all he really does is highlight the ills of the world, and in doing so he gives us permission to believe that simply by being aware of the wrongs we are helping to make things right.

Chomsky writes in CAPS LOCK. Chomsky is the internets.

We get our Two Minutes Hate, our system is cleansed and we return to our fluffy mochaccinos, happy and content with ourselves and all the good that we have done, simply by hearing his words. In the morning we awake, and the world has changed not one iota for all the awareness we now proudly puff up our chests with.

Just as Chomsky now sits two degrees of Kevin Bacon from Denis O'Brien, his outrage on the night neutered by this connection to the physical embodiment of Irish neo-liberal ultra-capitalism, so too are any protestations shouted out across the Tweet Machine or rallies organised through the Facebooks. For every online activist action there is an equal and profitable capitalist reaction, ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching, all the way to the Cayman Islands via Amsterdam and the IFSC.

At last week's 1913 Unfinished Business public meeting, a speaker quipped that "Austerity is working, it's working for the people it's designed to help. It's a forced transfer of wealth from poor to the rich". In the same vein then let me say then that Social Media is a powerful tool when it comes to activism and protest, but who wields that tool is not the activist, but the invisible hand of capital that sits behind the network, profiting from every communication while stymieing action in the Real World, the only activity that can actually lead to change.

I'm not going to stop using Social Networks, by now they are too ingrained in to almost every aspect of my life. But just as Caesar had the slave travel behind him in the chariot, whispering, "hominem te memento - remember you are but a man", so too will I stick a post-it note to my screen saying, "Social Networks are not The Real World. Shouting here does not fix anything".

Shouting here does not fix anything.

1913. You know, for kids.

2013-04-25T16:38:00.000+01:00

I got a nice note in the electronic door this week from the good folks over at 1913 Unfinished Business letting me know about a rather interesting event coming up very soon.

1913 Unfinished Business started off as a radio show on NearFM hosted by some familiar faces from DCTV's The Live Register. The series focuses on the anniversary of the 1913 Lockout, and what relevance it has to us today - really the whole "Unfinished Business" title should give you all a clue about where they're going with this. If you haven't had a chance to hear the show live, you can catch up on the first two episodes which are available as podcasts on the NearFM website.

Building on the themes of the show, the producers have decided to take its message to the streets, and by "the streets" I mean "the comfortable surroundings of Wynn's Hotel", because obviously "the streets" are, like, sooooo October 2012. The aim of this event is to provide a platform for young folks abandoned by a Government who would rather see them swept under the carpet and away to Australia than to have them stick around as a constant reminder that their policies have mortgaged the lives of our future generations to pay the gambling debts of the Developer-Banking Complex, a platform that will let them stand up and say, "I'm not going. I'm going to stay here, to take a stand and make a difference".

Now given that today's announcement of the rather meh Electric Picnic line-up generated more online chatter in an hour than a month's worth of Croke Park II negotiations, I might be forgiven for being slightly cynical about the eagerness of the Young Peoples of Ireland(TM) to stand up and say "No Más!", but the 1913 Unfinished folks are determined to assist them with a platform when they do.

Here's what they had to say about the event themselves:

"1913 Unfinished Business is an activist group working to reinvigorate class politics in Dublin using the centenary of the Lockout as an inspiration.

‘We’re Not Leaving’ is a public meeting of young people to fight forced emigration.

Emigration during the recession has reached famine level, with 200 people leaving the country every day. This social disaster is a direct result of the conditions facing young people in the Irish economy: youth unemployment, precarious work, unpaid internships, higher education fee hikes and grant cuts. How can young workers, students and the unemployed work in solidarity across our different struggles to tackle the challenges that unify us? How can we stay and fight?

The public meeting will build towards a youth bloc on the May Day march in Dublin."

Aha, marching on May Day! So apparently 'the streets" are cool again after all, like bow-ties and fezzes. Who would have guessed?

Anyway, the meeting is on Monday 29th April in Wynn's Hotel on Lower Abbey Street at 7:15pm, and if you are lucky enough to still get asked for ID in the off-licence and have even the slightest concern for your future and are outraged by the unjust decisions made by an uncaring government that will affect not only you, but your children and their children (and if not, why not?), then get your backside down there, even if only to Tweet cynically from the back that you were Not Leaving before it was cool to be Not Leaving.

There's even a page on the Facebooks for it.

This is a great initiative, and anything that gives young folks an opportunity to engage with substantive issues outside of the traditional and altogether rather stale and moribund party political system can only be a good thing.

I'd go along myself but I'd be afraid that they would see the red light flashing in my palm and send the Sandmen after me.

We've come too far to give up who we are

2013-04-20T21:25:00.000+01:00

The sun came out today and I snuck out of my own personal Room 101, but only for a moment.
Grand Canal, Dublin, April 20th, 2013

It being such a lovely day today, possibly the first really nice day of the year, I hopped on my bike and went out for a proper cycle. According to my cycling app (yes, I use an app to measure my cycling. Why would this be surprising to any of you? Do you even know me?) I haven't been out for a proper cycle since the end of October.

That's six months ago.

Yikes.

I would like to think that of course I have been out for many long cycles since October, but probably haven't remembered to record them. Sadly, I think the truth is that I have been sheltering indoors away from the sheer misery that is an Irish winter for so long that I have forgotten what the outside world actually looks like. The Irish weather is the single greatest reason why we are a) all potato-shaped and b) the streets remain disappointingly protest-free.

My little jaunt today took me 1 hour 50 minutes to complete a twenty mile route, which wasn't too bad for someone who (allegedly) hasn't been out on a bike for six months.

Now, in truth, the weather and a general unwillingness to engage with the cold and the rain, and the cold rain, and the rainy cold have only partially been to blame. Just as a thunderstorm occurs when a hot front meets a cold front and they don't get along particularly well, so too has my inaction been birthed as the unstoppable force of work hits the immovable object of ill health. My life has been entrapped in a perfect storm of inertia, buffeting me from all side simultaneously and preventing me from doing anything more creative than posting the occasional snide remark on Twitter (and even then there have been tumbleweeds rolling across my timeline, tumbleweeds that somehow get more retweets than my deeply insightful and pithy remarks on the inability of our current legislators to understand the Internets).

So today, as I sit in the eye of this Perfect Storm of Inertia, I thought I would post a short note to those of you loyal enough to keep checking in here when day after day I offer you nothing new in return. Normal service will resume shortly, there are still many ills in the world that I would much rather rant about than attempt to get off my backside and actually fix, your patience will be rewarded.

Until then, posts might continue to be few and far between here on Booming Back. I have neither the time nor energy to vent my wrath and ire on these pages in anything that resembles a regular schedule of cynicism and bile. Instead I have been taking out my frustrations on my neighbours by playing Daft Punk on near continuous loop, and at quite a high volume. I believe I can just about hear them moan "We're up all night to get lucky" as they rock back and forth slowly, clutching their sides and praying for Great Zombie Jebus to Rapture them up out of the endless purgatory they have found themselves in.

We're up all night to get lucky...

Notes The photo above is of an old piece of street art on a traffic bollard beside the Grand Canal that I passed today. The full quote the text is taken from comes from Part 3, Chapter 2 of 1984, as Winston experiences "enhanced interrogation techniques" in Room 101. In a lull before the real pain begins, O'Brien turns to him and says:

"Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

Cheery.

At last! The opportunity you've been waiting for to support Rabble!

2013-04-08T18:28:00.000+01:00

If you live in Dublin (or Cork, Limerick, Galway, Belfast and beyond) you'll probably already know about Rabble. It's a rather nice freesheet/website/force-of-nature that attempts to be an independent voice from the streets. It covers everything from activism to art, music, sport and an awful lot else in between with a punchy voice that's pretty much unique in Ireland. Over the last year it produced five issues, all entirely from the hard work of a dedicated crew of volunteers, and now it has launched a Fund:IT campaign to try and secure its future for the next four issues and beyond.

Some time around Issue 4 they reached out to me to throw together a few grumpy words on the Euro Referendum, and almost certainly on the strength alone of my adherence to deadlines (because they already had a wealth of much better writers) they asked me back again for Issue 5. Somehow, despite my unique approach to punctuation and spelling, I ended up lending a hand when time came to put together the last issue, and saw first hand the amount of work that it takes.

Each issue is the end result of countless hours of volunteered perspiration from scores of writers, illustrators, designers and editors somehow wrangled, marshaled and carom-shotted together by an editorial collective that literally put their lives on hold when print deadlines are fast approaching. Thus far printing costs have been largely covered by donations and fundraising events, but relying on these allows for no sense of security, the thankless task of raising the funds for each issue begins the moment the last has gone to press.

In 2013 Rabble wants to build a truly reader-supported magazine, and to do that they have launched a Fund:It campaign, looking to raise enough to cover the cost of the next four print runs in advance. Here's what they had to say about it:

"rabble is a non-profit newspaper from the city’s underground. It’s collectively and independently run by volunteers. Since its inception, rabble has created a space for the passionate telling of truth, muckraking journalism and well aimed pot-shots at illegitimate authority.

Those involved know each other from alternative media and street mobilisations, from raves, gigs and the football terraces, or by just living in the village that is Dublin.

We range from people living and raising their families in the city, to community and political activists, to artists, messers and mischief-makers.

We weren’t sure if a publication like this would work, if the city would want us, if anyone would care. But the response since has been immense. Dublin didn’t just get rabble, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Belfast and far beyond did too. You’ve told us what you like and what you want: more culture, more investigative pieces and more razor-sharp satire.

Each of our issues have been bigger and bolder. We increased our page count and leapt up to 10,000 copies for issue five. That’s a direct response to public demand. We also work online to pump out news and views that consistently challenge the orthodoxies of austerity.

We want to continue offering an alternative look at Ireland after the boom and help contribute to the popular imagination of what’s possible. Too many naively celebrate the creative side of the recession and utter non-committal grumbles about how we got here. rabble has no qualms about what side of the fence we sit on.

As some shower once said, "there’s a lot done, more to do". Now, we need you to support us and ensure the survival of the project as a print entity into the future. Running a magazine through fundraising gigs and constant hustle has its charm - but it is not a sustainable model. We reckon Ireland can sustain a reader funded free newspaper. One that uses crowdfunding to redefine the limits of what radical publishing looks like. We want to continue offering a vital space for original illustration, photography, journalism, politics and culture.

rabble works best in hard copy, it lends credibility and value to our work in a culture of online rapid fire disposability. Equally, our organic distribution network allows the project to be constantly discovered by people outside our own online echo chambers.

With this campaign, we are asking our supporters to chip in and cover our next four print runs. That’s a full year of rabble. Help us remain a truly independent voice in these times of crisis.

Once the stresses of our printers bill are out of the way, it’ll allow us to concentrate on developing rabble. This means recruiting more volunteers, upping the stakes of the paper and our journalism, experimenting with video, organising real world events and a whole lot more.

Yes, of course - we’ll still have the odd ruckus of a gig - but this time just for the lulz."

So head on over to their Fund:It page and give whatever you can, there's lots of nifty rewards if you do so, though sadly they rejected my offer of "Unkie Dave will come and #Occupy your front garden for five months and loudly complain to the media about the subject of your choice".

Their loss (and yours).

Ain't no pride on Dame Street

2013-03-17T21:29:00.000Z

Crowds so sparse you could occupy the plaza with a tent village and still have room to spare
Dame St, Dublin, March 17th, 2013

Patrick's Day is always an odd one. Like Halloween and the Oirish Theme Pub, it is something allegedly Irish in origin that seems to have been adopted abroad, perverted beyond all recognition then, for reasons unfathomable, imported back in to Ireland and assimilated in to our national psyche. Like a virus altering our DNA, this theatre of the absurd becomes accepted as cultural reality.

Curiosity (and a vantage point elevated, heated and dry) brought me in to town today to witness my second parade on Dame Street in as many years.

Curiosity, it would seem, is the midwife of extreme cynicism.

The Dublin parade, for those of us old enough to remember Millennium milk bottles, used to consist of a few freezing American marching bands and a million ATA Security floats with thread-bare and royalty-free knock-offs of Disney cartoon characters waving at the shivering crowds. Then, for a brief moment it was handed over to Macnas and coolness ensued, with night-time parades on Paddy's Eve and a weekend of festivities and fireworks. Foot and Mouth came and banished the parade to the summer and we all said, "Hey, why couldn't we do this every year?" and the marketeers at Diageo scratched their beards and said, 'hmmn, a drunken day of debauchery later in the year? Very interesting, very interesting indeed". Then the Celtic Tiger arrived and with the regeneration of the docklands the fireworks were all cancelled for fear of blowing out the windows of all those never-to-be-occupied cathedrals to greed, Macnas were sent packing back to Galway and everything headed south again rapidly.

A parade so devoid of meaning it even summoned its own Fail Whale
Dame St, Dublin, March 17th, 2013

If you go down the country, every town has its own parade, organised by and for the local community. The parades celebrate each town's heritage while often casting a caustic eye over recent local and national events with the community's concerns expressed through the medium of satirical floats. Bailouts, bankers and horsemeat were all on the agenda today beyond the Pale, but here in our nation's capital the sanitised Parade is run not for the locals nor the onlooking tourists whose money we already have, it is run instead for those who are yet to come. It exists as bait for next year's desperate attempt to fleece money from a new crop of unsuspecting foreigners, lured in by the Temple Bar myth of Ireland as Tír na Ceol agus Craic. Anything that could spoil this stage-managed photo-shoot for the Bord Fáilte website is banished, by excessive force if necessary.

Last year it was #occupydamestreet, evicted from their home just days before the parade so no cameras would see signs of public dissent. This year it was a proposed Trade Union float celebrating the centenary of the 1913 Lockout, branded inappropriate by the Parade and banned, judging it "not in keeping" with this year's Gabriel Byrne-pleasing theme of "The Gathering". We had Steampunk submarines, rockets and bathtubs, a cage-dancing monkey and Arctic explorers with their very own fail whale, but apparently no room for Big Jim Larkin in this Frankenstein's Monster of a parade.

Because he didn't fit in with the theme.

Sure, ye don't want to be scaring away next year's Americans with tales of Socialist triumphs, now do ye?

I think this was celebrating Emigration, the only export that's on the way up
Dame St, Dublin, March 17th, 2013

As the American marching bands trooped past, their big brass sounds called to mind Treme, the HBO show that tells the life of post-Katrina New Orleans, and in particular the trombone-wielding Antoine Batiste. Perpetually down on his luck and trying to rebuild his life after the floodwaters wiped away all that he had, he hustles from gig to gig, trying to pay his bills without sacrificing his dignity. When money runs tight, he ends up playing mass-market standards to drunken frat boys and bead-waving tourists in Mardi Gras-themed bars in New Orleans' plastic-Disney-hellhole, Rue du Bourbon, or Bourbon Street. As he tells a friend of his fall from grace, the reply comes, "There's still pride on Bourbon Street". Stay true to yourself, true to your culture and even if your audience are barbarians you can still feel good about what you do.

Paddy's Day has always been our day of national shame, where we pimp ourselves out to the wider world and drink ourselves senseless to forget what we have done. Each year our clothes get a bit more worn, our make-up visibly cheaper, and it's getting harder and harder to mask the emptiness in our hollow eyes. With our Tiger wallets bulging we could laugh uncomfortably and call it "Kitsch", but with our children's futures sold to pay the Troika none of us are smiling now. Save the drunken teens whose antics will no doubt be tomorrow's Red Top fodder, we all stayed away today. Even our Government fled, with nineteen of our finest Ministers hiding away from New York to New Zealand, India, Singapore, Dubai and the Philippines. Everywhere, it seems, except Dame Street.

The meeja say the weather "dampened our enthusiasm", but the truth is we can no longer look each other in the eye as we whore ourselves away. We just want it to be over as quickly as possible so we can try and wash the bitter taste away in the bottom of a pint glass, and forget we ever had pride in ourselves.

Drink all we like, the shame won't go.

There ain't no pride on Dame Street.

Update: 18/03/13
Doing a trawl for some pics of the old ATA floats, I found a Flickr set by catb that includes a few Dame Street pics of the 1988 Dublin Millenium Paddy's Day Parade. The parade pics start here. Floral constructions were pretty big in the 80s.

Two Years On

2013-03-11T16:45:00.000Z

Unkie Dave caught in the act of "rescuing" an UpStart poster
Wexford St, Dublin, March 4th, 2011

You might have missed it, but last week the Government held a very public display of celebratory DoubleSpeak. To mark the occasion of the two year anniversary of their rise to power, they held a press event complete with its own hashtag to tell the nation why, despite everyone's actual day-to-day experiences, we are better off now than we were two years ago.

When delivering a presentation, there is normally a simple format to follow to get one's message across, you tell the audience what you will say, then you tell your audience what you are saying, then you finish by telling them what you have just said. Repetition is comprehension. Sadly, unlike whispering "Candyman" five times in a mirror, endlessly telling the nation with the maddening regularity of a brimful of Asha on a broken 45 that we have "turned a corner" will not magically make a recovery appear.

Beyond the hurricane of hyperbolic spin emanating from Kildare Street, the simple facts are undeniable. We are all poorer than we were two years ago, our taxes are higher and the services we receive for them are worse. Unemployment levels are unforgivable, and the only reason they aren't even higher is because of emigration, what Fintan O'Toole has referred to as the release valve of Irish societal pressure and what our children will greedily call "The Gathering: 2063". The burden of public debt placed upon the shoulders of these future generations is of an order of magnitude so great that the citizenry simply can't imagine it, and so focus their own wrath and ire on pocket-book protests like the Household Tax and Septic Tank charges.

Yet even these token protests against injustice miraculously go unreported, for while there are never enough reporters for the State meeja to cover civic unrest outside the Dail itself, there are licence-fees to spare, it seems, enough to fly half of Montrose to Rome at the drop of a hat to report breathlessly and non-stop on the convoluted machinations of an old man trying desperately to escape indictment for crimes against humanity. Conviction? Nein danke, we'll just move him to another parish.

"We must all share the burden" comes the Kildare Street refrain, except, quelle surprise, for the mansion-owners and millionaires, the politicians and their donors who bankrupted our nation with their gambling addictions fuelled by a desperate need to ape their Cheltenham and Ascot-going blue-blooded UK counterparts whose respect and acceptance they've craved every moment of every day since their grandparents found Independence inconveniently thrust upon them, and now answer every phone call with the words, "It's pronounced 'Bouquet'!".

"We're all in this together" is Hiberno-English for "sod the poor, we can always make more of them if we need to".

"There is no alternative" is its companion phrase, and for once (sadly) the Kildare Street Massive are right. Labour seem ignorant of the meaning of either "social" or "democrat", and believe "socialists" are those dodgy despots who squander precious oil resources on the proletariat instead of building gleaming phalluses of glass in the desert. The Real Left™ has collapsed under the weight of its own Leninist vanguard shenanigans and infighting both painfully predictable and Pythonesque, a move that actually manages to make the Shinners look like a plausible alternative ("aye, sure, we did all the murder an' bombin' an' all, but look, we're on Twitter now an' we have a teddy bear. Isn't he so cute? Sure, how could ye all stay mad at a teddy bear?"). Of course the Irish public aren't quite ready to test drive the all new Kia Provo, and you couldn't actually put the fate of the country in the hands of a few Independents (sure how can you trust folks without a Cumman behind them?), so who can the citizenry turn to to fix all the problems caused by fourteen years of Fianna Fail mismanagement?

According to the last few opinion polls, that would be Fianna Fail.

The sound you hear between my uncontrollable sobs is the contents of my stomach, slowly embracing the floor in a Jackson Pollock entitled Anniversary 2, 2013.

Perhaps I missed the point of the press conference, perhaps I wasn't listening too closely. Perhaps the whole event was an incredibly open and honest exercise in Government transparency. "No lies," they were saying, "No spin. No half-truths or exaggerations. The simple fact is that we are better off than we were two years ago, and we have the data to prove it... but by "we", of course, we mean "us", the Taoiseach, Táinaste, thirteen Cabinet Ministers and fifteen Ministers of State, with our salaries and pensions, perks and privileges. Simply speaking the truth, we've never had it so good".

Two years on and the only corner we've turned is off Tragedy Avenue and straight down Farce Boulevard.

Aaaarr, like.

2013-03-07T20:07:00.001Z

The Beacon, 50 meters high and 50 meters circumference, navigation aid of a bygone age and symbol of Baltimore.
(Funnily enough almost exactly two years previously I was at another Beacon, but that's a post for another day)
Baltimore, Cork, March 2nd, 2013

This week I have mostly been... in Cork.

Cork is a bit like Facebook in that far too many people there add unnecessary Likes (It's true, like. They really do, like), but I love the place and try to get down there at least once a year, mostly for the food. I travelled down last week on business, and decided to stay for a few days. The last few weeks have been somewhat hectic to say the least, and my health hasn't been the best, so getting away from everything in the wilds of West Cork was just the healing salve I needed.

We packed up our bags after the not-so-briefest of repasts at Cafe Paradiso, in itself reason enough to visit Cork, and headed south to Baltimore. No, not the "way-down-in-the-hole, in-deed, Omar-comin" Baltimore, but the other, slightly less crime-ridden harbour town that explodes with tourists each summer but on a typically cold and blustery March day is near-deserted and altogether rather nice. Many a cliff-top walk was taken and fresh air consumed like bunga-bunga at a Berlusconi banquet.

Sherkin Island and Cape Clear as seen from Baltimore
Baltimore, Cork, March 3rd, 2013

Apart from being in close proximity to a sunken U-Boat, Baltimore's other main claim to fame (at least in my mind, there may be others) is that in 1631 the entire village was raided by Barbary pirates and the inhabitants carted off as slaves. Yes, that's right, 17th Century North-African pirates sacked West Cork and enslaved an entire village. You can read more about this episode in Des Ekin's entertaining The Stolen Village, a book that accompanied me across Europe some years ago.

Of course I only remembered this book on the last day of our stay there when noticing that one of the pubs was called The Algiers Inn. Revelation came less like a lightbulb above my head and more like an eco long-life bulb gradually flickering to life, slowly and painfully and not fast enough to prevent you from stubbing your toe badly on the side of the bed as you came in.

Despite the constant overcast sky, it was still jaw-droppingly jigsaw puzzle-box beautiful
Baltimore, Cork, March 2nd, 2013

Anyway, I can highly recommend both the book and the town, but I suspect the book is less aggravating during High Season.

I realise that this is not the most polemic of posts, but you can be happy in the knowledge that the carefully crafted zen-like state of bliss lovingly nurtured in Baltimore has almost entirely vanished now, and normal service here at Booming Book will shortly be resumed.

Emancipate Yourself

2013-02-17T19:33:00.001Z

Emancipate Yourself by Maser.
The Bernard Shaw, Portobello, Dublin, February 17th, 2013

Taking further advantage of the unexpectedly not-awful weather this weekend, I found myself in Portobello outside the Bernard Shaw, and noticed that the vacant lot to the side of the pub was, for once, accessible, so I did what any right-minded person out for a wander with their camera would do and navigated my way through the broken bottles, needles, human poo and other urban flotsam to take a few photos of the Emancipate Yourself piece by Dublin street artist Maser, from an angle normally impossible to get.

Emancipate Yourself was originally one of the strongest pieces from the Roadworks part of Dublin Contemporary back in 2011, and (minus the flashing neon homage to the iconic Why Go Bald? sign) it finally found a post-exhibition home at the Bernard Shaw late last year.

The piece originally was displayed on two opposing walls, the stylised head of Daniel O'Connell gazing serenely at you as you passed by, sandwiched between the date of the Catholic Relief Act, the final chapter of his campaign for Catholic Emancipation. It is interesting that in less than two hundred years the Church has gone from being the most potent symbol of our national identity to a morally bankrupt darkness that stains and shames us all with its continued existence.

Emancipate yourself indeed.

Emancipate Yourself by Maser.
Dublin Contemporary, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, October 27th, 2011

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

2013-02-17T18:53:00.002Z

Unkie Dave in his own private Dromosphere
Electric Picnic, Stradbally Co Laois, September 1st, 2012

It never ceases to amaze me what a little bit of blue skies, and a good aul' bike ride can do to restore a sense of well-being to one's life.

I've often speculated that peace in the Middle East could be achieved simply by bringing the entire population of the region to Ireland from October to January, for once they got back home they would all have both a shared pain to commiserate with each other over, and a new appreciation for just how amazing their lives could be together now they are no longer trapped in the monochromatic nightmare of an Irish winter.

This weekend it would appear that maybe, just maybe, our long national winter is starting to think about giving us all a break and handing over the remote control to spring, and as the skies cleared and a mysterious blue colour appeared above our collective heads, yesterday saw the first proper cycle of the year for me, a medium-sized jaunt of about 25km in total (my usual route being just shy of 40km).

Cycling, for me, is not a hobby or a past-time. I do not have an expensive bike, nor would I ever humiliate my family and friends by ever being seen in public in lurid day-glo Lycra. At its worst cycling is simply a journey from A to B, but at its best it is an exercise in splendid isolation that allows me to shut out the wider world and collapse in upon my own thoughts. It is a meditation only occasionally punctured by homicidal taxi-drivers or buses intent on harvesting my organs for resale to Larry Goodman. There is a regular rhythm to the movement of the bike that acts as a metronome for my mind, a tick-tick-tick that enables a process of thought that rarely happens in a world of intrusive emails and Tweets and the near constant cacophonic interruptions of urban life, the coughs and colicky belches the city makes to remind us all that it is still there. Always still there.

The Parisian urbanist and cultural theorist Paul Virilio uses the phrase "dromosphere" (from the Greek word "dromos", meaning both 'race/running' and 'race-track') to explain the state one exists in when moving at speed. It is both a physical space and an awareness, for just as our perception of real objects is blurred as they seem to zip past us when we move rapidly, so to does our understanding of things change as we move at speed, or as the speed at which we consume information is increased.

At a basic level the speed with which we are constantly bombarded with digital information, from Tweets and emails to 24/7 news feeds on both the web and television, means that not only do we have little time to process and understand this constant deluge, but we are also bludgeoned into accepting freshness and immediacy over substance. We become addicts to the steady torrent of information that crashes down upon us, demanding the latest hit as the rush of the just-old starts to fade.

While we are constantly told that we live in an "information age", what does it actually mean to be surrounded by unprecedented levels of information?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan writes of "food deserts", large areas, often urban, where as a result of the omnipresent chain convenience stores it is often impossible to buy fresh produce, the only food available is preprepared and highly-processed, high fat and higher sugar . These deserts are the leading cause of obesity in the US, it is not simply a matter of over-eating that has changed the face of America, it is the result of eating the wrong foods because no other food is available. The ongoing horse-meat crisis in Europe is a parallel symptom of these deserts of Capitalism, as every corner is cut to maximise profit and those on the lowest incomes forced to subsist on food barely suitable for human consumption out of both economic necessity and because no other options are presented.

I have come to believe that while we may indeed live in an Information Age, increasingly we find ourselves trapped in Knowledge Deserts. We are surrounded by digital convenience stores plying their wares 24/7, but every Tweet, every feed, every webcast and liveblog provides little more than a steady diet of preprepared and highly-processed information, digital high fat and higher sugar. We consumer and consume, and consume until our minds are bursting and bloated with morbid information obesity, yet we gain nothing of the Knowledge that we actually need to live. The speed of consumption prevents understanding and critical reflection, it prevents the development of Knowledge. We eat and eat, yet our intellect atrophies from malnutrition of the mind.

There is an irony here that to escape our societal dromosphere, I construct my own personal one as I race along on my bike. By restricting my awareness of the wider world around me, by blurring the outside until it becomes unreal, I am able to focus on a environment of my own construction. These brief hours spent in my own private dromosphere provide a healing salve that I didn't realise was so necessary until weather and lethargy interposed themselves upon my daily routine.

I may not be able to get out every day, but a few times a week would do wonders for my overall well-being. Not enough to chase away the grumpiness, but maybe just enough to help it be a little more focused and coherent.

Now ZoiDworks is the popular one

2013-02-09T14:51:00.001Z

While we were taking a break here at Booming Back, our friends over at netlabel Invisible Agent were releasing Selected ZoiDworks 05-12, from ZoiD, the electronica alias of Dublin musician Daniel Jacobson and the latest addition to their genre-warping series of album releases. I had a chance to listen to a pre-release version of the album when the good folks at Invisible Agent asked me to write up the album notes.

The album is an eclectic and at times combatative fusion of jazz and electronica, that despite my natural aversion to the more esoteric "Hmmm. Nice. Smooth" chin-strokey elements of live jazz, I found myself really rather enjoying.

Here's what I had to say about it (remember to read this in the deep, deep bass of a movie trailer voice-over):

While the title alone is a clear nod to the groundbreaking AFX/Aphex Twin releases of Richard D. James, and those looking for squelchy breaks and glitchy beats with the occasional old school acid overtone will not be disappointed, Selected ZoiDworks 05-12 is so much more than a frenetic exercise in ambient electronica.

Jacobson is a classically trained jazz musician, and from the opening bars of Aerosoul to the asynchronous beats of Particle Dither you are transported to the smoke-filled club of an improvising trio, though the free jazz notes they play were midwifed by a 303. Acid Leaves (with Bruce Morley) builds up to an acid rise and then subverts the expected break with a segue into a classical guitar riff that would not sound out of place on The Deer Hunter soundtrack, a theme continued on the soft yet driven Obelisk.

The ambient East Morning Pier, the darker Bluesqueek and pulsing Cember, and the 8-bit exercise in glitchy thumps Munch would reject any attempt to classify them as jazz, but even here its tempo, breaks and styling continue as a noticeable undercurrent, though one evolved almost beyond recognition.

The jazz/electronica path is one that is not well worn, perhaps because the cut-and-paste rhythmic regularity of a 4/4 laptop beat rarely plays well with the improvised fast-and-loose clashes of an off-tempo noodler. Where Brad Mehldau has drawn on Radiohead for his fusions, Jacobson has created something new and original, organically splicing the two with his own compositions, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes with a jarring dissonance, but always stronger than the sum of their separate traditions.

A difficult task, but done with apparent ease.

The album is available now on Bandcamp, Amazon, iTunes and a host of other places, more details about which can be found here, and you can listen to it below via the magic of Soundcloud.

Which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free

2013-02-09T14:16:00.000Z

I have a secret to tell, from my electrical well (technically an 18th century stone lighthouse in Wicklow)
Wicklow Lighthouse (The Upper Light), Wicklow Head, January 16th, 2013

It hasn't escaped my attention that these pages have been somewhat bare of late. While there have been the usual excuses of work and other external commitments, and a sneaky trip to Berlin for a few days, the fact of the matter is that I have been suffering from an aggrandised form of writer's block, one that seems to have infected my entire life.

For the last four weeks or so I have been unable to settle into anything. My sleep patterns have been so randomised that the only "pattern" one could see in them is a persistence-of-vision illusion drawn from a Rorschach-test flip-book. I have been unable to concentrate on anything longer than a few minutes, making reading an impossible chore punctuated (and punctured) by the inevitable diversionary tactic of the instant-on gratification of a Twitter stream. The high winds and appalling rain have kept me off of my bicycle to the stage where I now fear my calves would explode in shock at the first turn of the peddles, and my general health can best be described as "sub-optimal", wherein "optimal" refers to a state that doesn't require substantial medication just to function.

I described this listlessness to The Very Understanding Girlfriend as an experience beyond ennui, for I am not paralysed by boredom, and more akin to a Life Block, wherein I just can't seem to focus on anything long enough to relax in to and enjoy it. "Hmmn", she said, after pausing but a millisecond to think, "Has there been anything in your life in the last four weeks or so that may be weighing on your mind? Anything numerically or chronologically related? Any major events in your life that might have put you out of sorts? Anything? Anything at all?"

She is, as usual, completely right.

So the room must listen to me, filibuster vigilantly (I do that a lot on this blog. An awful lot)
Wicklow Lighthouses (The Upper Light and the Front Light), Wicklow Head, January 16th, 2013

I had been, on the whole, rather pleased with the way in which I dealt with the onset of the Big Four-Oh. In the preceding weeks I was a veritable ocean of calm and contentment, rationalising that as I has experienced a good deal of freak-out in the run-up to lesser birthdays, I had long since exorcised all the senescentic angst from my system and was thus able to deal with the onset of middle-age with a Zen-like acceptance, my mind and emotional well-being transformed into a well-raked garden of concentric gravel circles.

For the day itself we retired to the Wicklow Lighthouse, a nearly 100 foot high 18th Century stone tower that stands on the easterly-most point of Ireland. The same storm that blanketed the UK brought gale force winds, torrential downpours and flooding to Wicklow, but all alone in our tower behind meter-thick walls of stone, the storm broke around us almost unnoticed. A better metaphor for my acceptance of age could not be found.

Of course the moment you left the safety of the tower, all hell broke loose. Opening the car door, for example, resulted in the entire contents of the vehicle being sucked out in an inverted maelstrom and scattered across the twisting gorse and bracken like the world's saddest confetti explosion. The Sisyphean yet Clouseau-esque scramble to catch everything before it was carried off to Oz was an exercise of futility in the extreme, its pointlessness matched only by the levels of schadenfreude it must surely have elicited in any distant observer.

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch (actually the moon in a vaguely Tolkeinesque scene)
Wicklow Lighthouses (the Front Light and the Upper Light), Wicklow Head, January 15th, 2013

Now that the day itself has long passed, and we have left the safety and security of the thick comforting walls, it now seems that the inner calm and peace I so smugly congratulated myself on in the run up to the Big Four-Oh has been sucked out in an inverted maelstrom and scattered all around me, tantalisingly just out of reach. Like Teamsters flexing their muscles with an all-out strike just to remind everyone why they get paid their brown-paper bag kickbacks, my body and mind have had a chat and decided that they were, after all, going to have a major freak-out, and were rather miffed that I didn't consult with them about it all in the run up to the day itself.

Rather than viewing this as a unilateral point-of-no-return redline move on their part, I must believe that this is simply a warning shot, an opening salvo to bring me to the negotiating table ready to strike a fair bargain. I am thus prepared to concede that in future years, I may permit myself to experience a minor freak-out before significant chronological milestones, if it prevents an all-out tools-down stoppage like the one I currently seem to be experiencing. I am a reasonable man, and I am always willing to negotiate.

To make a little Croke-Park in my Soul (if you will).

Hopefully this realisation will get things back on track here at Booming Back, and elsewhere in my life.

Links
More photos of the lighthouse can be found here.

Then two come along at once

2013-01-22T19:34:00.001Z

In a time where so many dead tree magazines are ceasing publication and transitioning exclusively to online editions, it is remarkable to see not one, but two journals going the other way.

Shortly before Christmas, Dublin historical blog Come Here to Me released an eponymously-titled hard-back collection of posts by Sam McGrath, Donal Fallon and Ciarán Murray from their blog, expanded, updated and accompanied by new material, copies of which are now harder to find than Kerry County Councillor who is willing to say drink driving is a bad thing. Allegedly it is still available in Books Upstairs and Chapters, though I say allegedly because I bought the very last copy in The Gutter Bookshop back on December 17th, and I find it hard to believe that they lasted any longer elsewhere.

A second printing is on its way, and judging by the reaction my grandfather had to it (wherein he proceeded to read out a new bit of trivia from it every five minutes for the rest of Christmas night after I gave it to him), it should make anyone with even a passing interest in the city we laughingly call home a most welcome gift. Just make sure to keep a copy for yourself.

This evening I returned home to find the postman had delivered the second of our reverse medianauts. Irish Left Review is an online political magazine, with contributions from the broad left that tend more towards the academic than the polemic. After a good few years now of a purely digital existence, they have taken the bold plunge into the Really Real World of actual print journals, and released the first of what will hopefully be a long run of dead tree editions that look equally at home on your coffee table as on an empty beer keg in your local anarchist vegan squat. This first issue focuses on the Irish Financial sector and how it clasps the grasping tendrils of global capitalism tight to its chest, with pieces by Conor McCabe, Mark Malone, Donagh Brennan and William Wall and an interview with tax expert Richard Murphy, all woven together with poetry and prose by Dave Lordan, Sarah Clancy and Sean Bonny.

You can buy the journal online, but for an authentic 1990's experience just like your parents used to enjoy, you should take a wander in to Connolly Books and hand over a fist full of coppers and then read it on the bus home while trying to make sure the cute girl across from you can see the title. She'll think you are ever so mysterious and well-read. Honestly.

Well done to everyone at ILR and Come Here to Me, more of this sort of thing please!

Age cannot wither, nor custom stale

2013-01-20T15:08:00.002Z

This week I have mostly been... turning 40.

*sigh*

For many months now I have been languishing around in the wrong end of my thirties, and while you may think that this has depressed me somewhat, in fact I have been altogether rather neutral about the matter.

This is not due to any deep excitement over the prospect of entering my fifth decade, rather it is a legacy effect of all the major freak-outs that I experienced in the past when turning twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty and possibly thirty-four. Maybe also thirty-eight.

By the time this week and the Big Four-Oh rolled around, there was simply no chronological angst left in my system, and I was forced to enter a Zen-like state of calm and acceptance.

Worryingly, on Friday as I read John Waters' latest piece in the Irish Times, wherein he referenced both Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (one of my favourite pop-sci/tech reads of the last few years) to bemoan the negative effects on the human mind of the transitory online world, and Umberto Eco to promote the value of the book over the internets (an argument not unfamiliar to me), I found myself nodding along in agreement as opposed to my usual feelings of uncontrollable and violently explosive nausea.

And that's when the cold sweats set in.

Is this how it happens? Not with a gradual and almost imperceptible decline in to social conservatism but with a sudden Logan's Run red light exploding in your head, you go to bed one night singing The Internationale and wake up the next morning at a Vigil4Life rally with a headscarf around your head, a priest on your arm and a very professional looking placard in your hand funded by shadowy US organisations who run a good sideline in populating the comments sections of Irish media websites with inflammatory hate speech.

If so my RSS subscriber numbers will experience a pretty drastic tumble in the coming weeks.

On the other hand my new bestest friends will no doubt be able to convince the meeja that I have 30,000 subscribers, instead of 4 pensioners and a morally bankrupt bishop on day release.

But hopefully it will not come to this.

So let us assume that like a broken clock even Waters is right twice a day, and that this longitudinal milestone will see none of my militant fury weakened nor my poorly spelled polemics blunted or diminished.

To paraphrase Enobarbus in Anthony and Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither me, nor custom stale, my infinite variety (of wrath, bile and ire)".

Huzzah!

A response to a response

2013-01-10T10:53:00.001Z

Wahoo! Somebody in The Irish Times reads me!

Hugh Linehan has an interesting and very welcome editorial in the Irish Times online today condemning the recent hysteria emanating from John Waters, David Adams and others over the subject of Social Media. Linehan is one of the few in The Irish Times who understands the online business (he has to, its his job), and sometimes I picture him wandering around the halls of Tara Street banging his head off random walls in frustration.

In his piece he takes a moment to respond to certain recent suggestions that the Irish Times by publishing such pieces is either engaged in a war against the Internet, or is merely fishing for pageviews (it isn't, he says). In the comments thread someone linked to my republished piece on Politico.ie, and Linehan responded that (and here I am attempting to paraphrase for fear of being charged for linking to and/or quoting from the IT, as apparently text extracts are still billable) the actual monetary reward for any given post is minuscule, and that while my article has impressed some folks because of my attempt at maths, all of my conclusions and most of my figures were wrong.

Which means some of my figures were right! Also, "some folks" have been impressed! Winning!

In all seriousness though, of course my numbers are erroneous, the post was a satirical thought exercise that compared the value of John Waters to a horse's penis, all based on a hefty number of shaky assumptions. Although I used the IT online rate card, often large discounts are given for multiple buys. If the IT uses an ad agency to sell inventory then the agency are taking a cut. Ads are not shown on every page, like those with murders, disasters etc as that would be inappropriate and the advertisers don't want to be associated with tragedy, and of course it assumes all ad inventory is sold, which frequently it isn't judging by the number of in-house ads for other Irish Times services that appear on the site. There's also some hefty assumptions about the readership of any individual article, perhaps every single person who read the John Waters piece were so incensed that they shared or commented, so the total number of impressions was barely 500! On the other hand although I based my numbers on 2009 audience stats of 26,125,949 monthly impressions that are still listed on their main online rate card webpage, I see 2010 stats are listed now on a separate page with 36.2 million monthly page impressions, an impressive jump in a year but the data is still two years old.

But none of that was ever the point (as pointed out by lostexpectation in Linehan's comments thread). The thrust was to highlight that sensationalism sells, whether in the Press or online, and that the Irish Times wouldn't have John Waters on their books if he didn't sell papers. While there may indeed be a strict separation between the editorial side of the website and the revenue side, at a senior level within the paper when folks are deciding who to hire at the back of their mind there has to be a business motivation, who's writing will sell the most papers?

The spate of recent hysterical pieces on the subject of social media have been alarming, both in the depth of their ignorance and the breadth of their scare-mongering, and if the motivation to publish these hasn't been financial, then what has it been?

With elements within the Government taking a very harsh line towards Social Media of late, and public concerns being expressed over any possible attempt by the Government to restrict or regulate online communication, even if there is no commercial and/or editorial motivation at work here does the Irish Times really want to be seen as reenforcing the Government's current ill-informed attack policy in this way?

Update (or 'A Response to a Response to a Response') 17/01/13
Over at Politico.ie, Eadaoin O'Sullivan took Hugh Linehan up on his offer to discuss the broader aspects of the implications and effects of online advertising for newspaper websites, and the resulting interview is really quite interesting. While I don't agree with all of Hugh's assertions, I am impressed with the level of his responses. You really should read the whole interview here.

We have always been at war with the Internets

2013-01-09T18:12:00.000Z

Live & Love by Maser. A sentiment that I think we all can agree with.
Kevin Street, Dublin, January 6th, 2013

That last post was altogether too fact based, if you ask me. I think it's time to turn on RANTS LOCK and get back to shouty mode here at Booming Back. Tonight's topic, further thoughts on the current crusade against Social Media being waged by the Irish establishment.

Harry Browne said a very interesting thing the other night. Browne, an academic, sometime-journalist and author says a fair amount of interesting things, but on this night he cut through the hysteria and ill-informed hyperbole that surrounded him like a hot metaphor through something that normally isn't so tractable.

The occasion was RTE's much vaunted entry into the recent scaremongering of social meeja by the conservative stalwarts of our political establishment and their chums in the dead tree branch of the Fourth Estate, a foray to be spearheaded by Ireland's answer to Pat Kenny, Mr Pat Kenny. "Are the media too hard on politicians?", he asked on Frontline, his razor sharp insight getting to the crux of what has been on the mind of every right-thinking citizen, asking the one question we have all been too afraid to ask.

It was here that Harry Browne paused, reflected on all the wrong decisions that he took over the course of his life that resulted in him sitting on a stage in Montrose having to answer a question so inane that even the hot-tubbed brain trust on Tallafornia would feel insulted by it, and then replied, "When the media agrees with all the Government's polices, all they have left is to criticise individuals".

Or words to that effect, I took notes via Twitter and the 140 character limit means that on occasion things get lost in digital translation.

That is surely the crux of the matter here, that the print, radio and television media in this country by and large agrees with all of the Government's current policies. During the last administration they served as cheer-leaders for the Celtic Tiger Boom (Brendan O'Connor and his chorus at the Irish Independent should never be allowed to forget their Bertie worship and consistent lionisation of the "ballsy" property developers, even as the pyrite-infested foundations of this debt-built castle of dreams were crumbling around us all), and two years on they continue to recite the blood-stained cultish mantra, 'there is no alternative, there is no alternative, there is no alternative", as if trying to summon dread Cthulhu from deepest R'lyeh with their monotonous dirge.

What little dissent they show is focused on the individual, in the form of a carefully crafted outrage designed to deflect and diffuse public anger, like cattle walked through a curving Temple Grandin chute to calm them down before they hit the slaughterhouse. Headlines decry the alleged "Stroke Politics" of Minister Reilly over the suspicious placement of primary health centres, but no link is ever made between Bond Payments and savage cuts to the woefully inadequate Health Service. When the Government denies that the invisible hand of the parish pump could ever be behind national resource allocation, the Fourth Estate tugs its forelock and goes, "ah sure grand now, we were just checking", and returns back to photoshopping photos of bikini-clad IE-list celebrities, or whatever it is Wikipedia defines 'Journalism' as today.

The symptoms can be agonised over, but the causes may never be referred to. Manufactured outrage is created, and diffused. The public gets their Two Minute Hate but ultimately no damage has been inflicted, and somewhere a nice big cheque lands in the bank account of Ms Terry Prone.

With the media walking hand-in-hand with the Government like a pair of young lovers on the first day of a Parisian Spring, the only form of actual public dissent emanates from the Bieber/One Direction clogged wasteland of Social Media. Never ones to waste valuable shoe-leather on marching or protesting or actual Real World engagement with the issues, the Irish public have, nonetheless, taken to Social Media like barflies to a drunken pub-stool conversation wherein all the ills of the world are identified in sarcasm-laced detail and easily dismissed with the wave of a black-and-white porter wand.

"My Goodness, My Governance!", as the Toucan of Beery Truth might say.

The Government, however, has come to rather enjoy the lack of critical reflection upon its activities, and of late seems quite upset about the unflattering discourse taking place online. "Won't somebody please think of the children?" they cry, and while there have indeed been a number of tragic cases recently that have involved online bullying, sadly the Government seems to be engaged in a cynical effort to manipulate the understandable resulting public sympathy to their own ends. They manage to simultaneously conflate genuine bullying by and towards minors with any form of anger expressed towards the Government, while incredulously managing to stand apart from their own physical agression towards their critics.

Bullying's bad, m'kay, except it would seem when it happens in the Dáil to Ming Flanagan live on TV and the bullies are all wearing Louis Copeland.

The answer of course is to hold an inquiry, bring it all before a Dáil Committee. Our elected representatives don't need to investigate the circumstances of the bank guarantee, the links between politicians, developers and bankers, NAMA, IBRC, the Health Service or even the death of Savita Halappanavar. The number one issue that needs their attention are the trolls on Politics.ie, and their answer no doubt will be a policy even the Chinese could only dream of.

And all the while the hunchbacked media trapped in the eyries of Notre Dame de la Tara Street ring out for their unrequited governmental love, their wails carried high over the din of the crowds below, "The trolls, Esmerelda, the trolls!"

Incivility online is a problem, one I've written about before, but legislation will never change this. It is caused not by technology or anonymity but rather by a media-sculpted culture that believes placing socially awkward people on a public stage for the sole purpose of degrading and humiliating them by destroying their self-worth in front of a television audience of fifteen million is the pinnacle of Saturday evening family entertainment. Life is full of nasty people, but the media encourages and commercialises this nastiness in a Fordist assembly-line of bile.

Social Media is built on the premise that it is self-regulating, that users will reject inappropriate behaviour and shun those who promote it. But Social Media users do not exist in an isolated online bubble, their attitudes and social mores are built upon a historical assemblage of learned behaviours, from their earliest parental role models through to adolescent peers and on to the all-encompassing envelope of Old Media that surrounds their adult life, all of which are networked together in a complex tapestry of positive and negative reinforcements. When any single one of these groups takes a deep dive into the toxic plunge pool of public puerility, the other elements are pulled kicking and screaming into the accompanying sinkhole of incivility. If our online communities fail to reject inappropriate behaviour it is because they have been conditioned in the Real World to accept, if not revel in, such behaviour.

Whether through the ritual humiliation of hapless "contestants" on reality TV or the school-boy thuggery of our elected representatives broadcast live from the Dáil or on One Of Those Programmes, the Tristan and Isolde of our media and political elite pollute and debase society at large. Boorish behaviour online is the harvest that they themselves have sown, for if offline society views humiliation and aggression as entertainment how can they ever be expected to moderate such behaviour online?

Incivility online is not caused by the single lout who blasts out a solitary tweet, rather it comes from the chorus of bystanders who have been programmed to find such behaviour acceptable and either echo and amplify it, or through inaction stand silent and let it pass unchecked.

That is where we find ourselves at the dawn of the new year. The only voice that the people use to articulate their dissent is under existential and potential legislative threat from both the Government and their tame press. The more the press wring their hands and debate the matter, the more money they make and the less room there is to pay lip-service to the other issues of the day, like our catastrophic economic collapse and the failed policies that continue to perpetuate our misery, and the more anger is generated and expressed online by a frustrated citizenry.

And so the cycle begins again, an eternally looping ouroboros that St Patrick somehow failed to drive out, dragging us all down with every debilitating bite of its own tail, our wrath and anger micromanaged and monetized by the very machine we rage against, and all the while the change we crave will never come, for all we do is talk.

All we do is talk.

The true value of John Waters

2013-01-05T15:27:00.001Z

Stop me if you've heard this one, "What's black and white and red all over?".

If you answered, "the Irish newspaper industry, who are only scarleh after yet another humiliating fiasco in which they displayed an appalling ignorance and lack of understanding over the basic concepts of the Internet", then well done, gold star for you.

Unless you have been living under a broadband-free rock this last week, you can't help but have seen a flurry of online chatter concerning a declaration from the NNI, the Irish newspaper industry's lobby group, that Irish newspapers should be paid at least €300 each and every time an external website linked to some of their content. This was not a matter of having content republished without permission, this was simply for linking back to an article on the website of an Irish newspaper. The matter was first raised by a group of solicitors representing the charity Women's Aid, who had been targeted back in May 2012 by the NNI with a demand for payment from the charity for linking to two stories about itself that appeared in the online edition of a newspaper.

Yup, that's right. A newspaper published two articles about Women's Aid, then their lobby group tried to charge the group for referring back to them.

The solicitors for Women's Aid publicly raised the issue again in December, and then a few days later publish an editorial piece, "2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web" on their website that went viral, reaching BoingBoing, reddit and elsewhere. Everywhere it would seem, except on the websites of Irish newspapers.

After a pretty intensive week of online chatter the Irish Times was finally forced to issue a statement. Well, not exactly issue a statement, more announce that they would issue a statement, then have one of their reporters interview another member of staff about the statement, without ever actually publishing a statement. Let's call it a "Not-Meant". In this "Not-Meant" they said that they had no intention of charging individuals linking to their sites for personal reasons, but that companies and commercial services doing so were a different matter. In other words they continue to support the line of the NNI that they hold the copyright on all external links to their content but that at the moment they choose not to pursue individuals who link.

Tim Berners-Lee must be so proud of them right now.

Sadly you're going to have to find it yourself on their website as we here at Booming Back don't want to run the risk of angering the Grey Lady of Tara Street by sending traffic her way. However as of writing, the "Not-Meant" has been shared 52 times on Facebook and 157 times on Twitter via the "Share This" widget that the Irish Times embeds in each and every online article it publishes, daring every reader to provide the newspaper with free advertising. In fact, you know what, the content on the Irish Times is just so damn marvellous, people should have to pay for the privilege of advertising it.

Oh, wait a minute. Right. The NNI. Got you.

All of this curfuffle might not have been so damaging had the Irish broadsheets not recently published a series of inflammatory articles from socially conservative writers attacking social media. On 4th January in the Irish Times John Waters wrote, in his usual humble style, that social media was "venomous and toxic" and out of control, but couldn't understand why when he made death threats against Jack Dorsey, that Twitter didn't take it too well and asked him nicely to stop. It followed in the wake of an article in the Irish Independent by David Quinn, another deeply conservative anti-choice campaigner who clothed himself in the martyr's sack-cloth and ashes to bemoan his perceived abuse at the hands of the online lefties. It is clear that for the Right in Ireland, the myth of the liberal media is being replaced by the bogeyman of liberal social media, and the newspaper industry is happy to give them a platform to peddle their wares.

In fact all the broadsheets gave ample column inches to opinion pieces and "hard news" stories on the evils of social media in the aftermath of the tragic death of Minister Shane McEntee, for the narrative of an uncurated media accessible by all as being a cesspit of bullying and depravity suits the moribund industry seeking to staunch its hemorrhaging readership, and yet in all of this little has been said about the newspapers' own role in the increasingly polarised and vitriolic tone taken in Irish public discourse.

Let us not forget that a newspaper is not a public service, it is a business. It exists to make money for its owners and shareholders, and how it does that is not necessarily by providing the best coverage or most informative journalism. In 1898 William Randolph Hearst and Jospeh Pulitzer (whose name now graces the US award for excellence in journalism), started a war between America and Spain to sell their newspapers. Now The Irish Times and Independent seem to have declared war on the Internet for the exact same reason.

When I'm not writing poorly-spelled and misanthropic polemics, I work in the Internets. Specifically I help folks figure out how to make money from the Internets, and the number one way folks make money from websites is through online advertising. So bear with me now while I give you a crash course in Online Ads 101 (it'll be worth it, I swear).

At a basic level there are two types of online ads, the first type is normally text-based, the type you see when you do a search on Google. With these the advertiser is charged every time someone clicks on that ad. The second type is much bigger, normally more visual and maybe even animated. You'll find these Display Ads across the top of most websites, or along the side, and they work pretty much like an outdoor billboard. Here the key is not how many times someone clicks on the ad, but simply how many people see them. The advertiser is charged for every 1000 times the ad appears on a webpage.

The Irish Times runs a mix of Display and click-through ads on its website, but let's focus on Display for a moment. The front page of the Irishtimes.com provides a snapshot of all current articles, and has three major Display Ad placements, one at the top and two on the right-hand side. The large banner on the top has a CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions, M being the Roman numeral for 1,000) of €12 (as of Jan 2013, it was €10 last year), or €14 for the full masthead. The two Mid Page Units (MPU) normally on the right hand column also have a minimum CPM of €12. This means that for every 1,000 people who read the front page of the Irish Times (or every 1,000 times the page is loaded), the newspaper makes €36.

Of course the front page is just a snapshot of articles, so to maximise revenue opportunities to read any article in full you need to click through to a dedicated post page. Here the Irish Times prints a single article, with links to other relevant content on its site. On each individual article page they are currently running one banner ad at the top of the page and one MPU on the right, with a third text-based click-through Google ad unit (that means that Google is providing the text-ads in this space, and takes a cut of any money those ads earn). Ignoring the Google ad unit (which in all likelihood doesn't bring in a huge amount of money), that still means that each article brings in €24 per 1,000 readers, or €0.024 per reader. Assuming every person who comes to the Irish Times front page clicks through on at least one article, that means five ads have been loaded, and the newspaper has made €0.06. A far cry from the €2.30 cover price of the print edition.

In fact, to make the same money as the print edition they need a single online reader to see 191 ads a day.

Assuming a reader goes back every time to the front page after finishing an article to see what article they'll read next, that still means they'll need to read over 38 articles to see enough ads to equate to the print edition cover price.

However unlike a print edition of a newspaper, online readers are unlikely to sit down and do the equivalent of reading it from cover to cover, they are going to pick and choose those articles that match their specific interests. Once they've read through three or four articles, they'll head away and go somewhere else. For 2009, somewhat bizarrely the year the Irish Times still bases its audience numbers and advertising rates on, it claimed a monthly audience of 2,314,196 readers per month, and total monthly page impressions of 26,125,949. This would mean that each reader accounted for only 11 page views per month.

While linking to other recent and historical articles are one way for a newspaper to expose a reader to more ads, a more successful way is to try and get them to come back to the same article multiple times. Now this might seem counter-intuitive, for once you've read something why would you reread it? The answer is, of course, Social Media, in the form of a comments section. Yup, the very thing the newspapers have bemoaned is the one thing that they need to survive.

In May of 2012 The Irish Times finally embraced the Web 2.0 and added a comments field to many of its online articles, realising that people (the author included) love hearing the sound of their own voice. If a person comments on a post, they're more likely to come back and look at that article again to see what other people have said. Each time a reader returns and reloads the page the ads refresh, slowly creeping up to that magical 1,000 impressions when the advertiser is charged. the more people who comment the more ads are seen. The more inflammatory the article, the more likely people are to comment, and the more inflammatory the comments the more likely others are to add their own comments. The more reactionary the article and comment thread, the more likely it is that people will share it elsewhere via Facebook and Twitter, all adding more fuel to the fire.

This is why so few websites aggressively moderate their comments threads, it is in their financial interest to have as incendiary a thread as possible, all the better if the original article is relatively innocuous as that allows the website to say, "hey, don't blame us for lowering the tone, it's those damn internet users and their trollish behaviour", while the impressions build up and they laugh all the way to the bank.

The Journal.ie figured this out pretty quickly and it has been its business model ever since, and while Old Media was slow to enter into the Troll-baiting game, they're now making up for lost time. They've suddenly discovered that nothing is more likely to stir up online readers than attacking their online readers.

Either through a deliberate editorial policy, or an accidental happenchance of fate, the Irish newspaper industry has realised there's easy money to be made and has declared war on its own online readership. John Waters' venomous piece has been shared 385 times between Facebook and Twitter, and generated a staggering 343 comments. In comparison The Irish Times' own 'Not-Meant" managed 56, while Noel Whelan's call today for "new ideas" in Irish politics gathered but a paltry 10 (Michael McDowell and his dreams of a PDs Nua should take note).

There's a general rule of thumb, the 90:9:1 ratio, that suggests that 1% of folks in an online community create content, 9% contribute to it and the other 90% merely consume it, and with regards to online articles this can be used to guestimate that roughly 1% of folks who read an article will comment on it, and 9% will share it. All very unscientific really. The Guardian recently published a few stats about who leaves comments on their site, with 600,000 being posted each month, and 2,600 readers posting over 40 comments each, and analysis done on these figures bears out (very roughly) the 90:9:1 rule, so if we went by the comments numbers rather than the total shares it is not that unreasonable to suggest that with 343 comments Waters' article was read, reread or reloaded 34,300 times in roughly twenty-four hours.

Which would have made the Irish Times a whopping €823.20.

If each of his posts generated the same response online and he wrote once a week, that would bring around €43K directly in online ad revenue just from his particular brand of odious conservatism each year. However this of course does not include the knock-on effect of people coming to the site to read and react to his poisonous prose, and then calming themselves down with a nice bit of Noel Whelan to lull them back into a soporific state.

Ca-Ching go the online cash registers.

Waters and his counterparts in the Irish Independent are thus anchor tenants that grab all the footfall for their website with their special brand of incendiary hatred, the Anchors of Evil if you will.

The 26,125,949 total monthly page impressions that the Irish Times claims, taking their 2013 ad rates and assuming only 2 ads per page, would generate at least €627K in online ad revenue per month, or €7.5 Million per year. However the real figure should be higher given that at least 3 ad units appear on the front page, and they charge up to €14 for larger ad units. Total page impressions should also be significantly higher as the numbers used were for 2009, and reader comments were only introduced in May of last year.

But with dwindling print sales, €7.5 Million just won't cut it, and their online business is going to come under increasing pressure to perform. While charging for links may no longer be a runner, a few more incendiary pieces by Waters, Quinn and their ilk will be guaranteed to bring in a nice chunk of change. Online revenue can be measured with a granularity that print media could only dream of. Websites can tell exactly which posts bring in the readers, how many times they return, and where they go afterwards. Direct and ancillary revenue can be easily calculated for each and every article posted online. The money folks on Tara Street can clearly say, "get Waters to attack another group and we'll bring in exactly X", and the paper knows it needs the money to survive.

This is the direction the Irish newspaper industry is going, a race to the bottom that it is organising, yet still manages to stand above and condemn.

To finish let me offer by way of comparison between Old and New Media, the satirical website Broadsheet.ie, which saw 29.1 million pageviews last year. Their top article concerned a member of An Garda Síochána being romanced by an overly amorous horse (somewhat NSFW), shared over 13,000 times between Twitter and Facebook. Using the 90:9:1 rule for shares, if Broadsheet monetized as well as the Irish Times, that post alone would have netted them €3,467 in ad revenue.

So there we have it. John Waters, worth at least €823.20 per post to the Irish Times, but not as much as a horse's penis.

Shiny.

2013-01-04T20:48:00.001Z

Will St Leger channels his inner Morrissey
Temple Lane South, Dublin, January 4th 2013

And just like that it was 2013.

Depending on who you listen to on the internets, what we have now witnessed is either a) the abject failure of the Mayans to accurately predict the apocalyptic end of the world, or b) the dawn of their completely accurately prophesied new era of harmony and understanding with sympathy and trust abounding.

In either event (and hedging our bets like the chocolate-filled fence-sitting burghers of Switzerland), we here at Booming Back have celebrated the birth of a new year by launching a radical overhaul of our website. Gone is the clutter and Web 2.0 widgets that competed for your attention like a thousand screeching seagulls, swept away in a tropical storm of efficient lines and white minimalism.

Bowing to the inevitable pressure of the world of social meeja, we have introduced sharing buttons with each post. This should make it easier for you all to distribute whatever morsels of misanthropic bile and villainy you find here that strike your fancy.

As always should you feel the need to rejoin, reject or respond to whatever poorly constructed and haphazardly-spelled Straw Man I have indolently placed before you and then set aflame with reckless abandon, you may do so in the conveniently located comments field below each post.

We here at Booming Back know you have a choice when selecting your source of daily wrath and ire, and we'd like to thank you for choosing to fly with us.

Happy New Year!

2012-12-31T21:20:00.001Z

Fireworks over St Stephen's Green, ringing out the old, heralding the new.
Stephen's Green, Dublin, 31st December 2012

Ah, here now, we couldn't finish up the year on such a downer, now could we?

Thanks to the magic of the internets we heard about a fireworks display in Stephen's Green tonight, about ninety minutes before it was due to happen. We left our house five minutes before it started and arrived at the Green as the first bangy-bangies were being set off. Just as well really, as the whole thing was over in ten minutes.

Fireworks over St Stephen's Green, ringing out the old, heralding the new.
Stephen's Green, Dublin, 31st December 2012

But what a ten minutes!

See, sometimes city centre living in Dublin isn't so bad after all.

Happy New Year everyone, I hope wherever you are tonight you are having a blast!

Fireworks over St Stephen's Green, ringing out the old, heralding the new.
Stephen's Green, Dublin, 31st December 2012

Dreamed a dream... Dirty old town.

2012-12-31T16:03:00.001Z

We are all clowns now, by Canvaz. The image that sums up 2012 for me really.
Camden Street, Dublin, 26th February, 2012

Last night I dreamt about my house. It wasn't a particularly interesting or exciting dream, no zombie apocalypses, no flying through the air, not even a brief but awkward moment of public nudiness at a most inopportune time. The phone rang, I answered it while looking out the window into the street outside. The call was from a telemarketer, I mumbled to them as I stared at a blizzard through the window, snowy dust devils whirling up and down the laneway, all so very chocolate-boxy and Christmassy. The content of the dream is not the issue here (for most dreams are barely of interest to the dreamer, let alone to the rest of the uninvolved world), the salient note here is that I dreamt of my house, something so remarkably rare that I feel compelled to write about it.

I grew up for the most part in my grandparents' house, between the ages of 11 and 18, and to this day some twenty years since last I lived there it appears in my dreams. I sit at the kitchen table, almost always at night, the warm glow of the hanging bulb reflected off freshly painted yellow walls, the curtainless window an onyx pool of midnight mystery, a cicada-chorus of ticking clocks measuring out an arrhythmic heartbeat. Every cup and cobweb fixed forever in my subconscious mind, but my own home remains a formless shadow. I know in my dreams that the walls are not my own, put cannot picture where it is exactly that I live.

For six years I have been living here now, longer than in any other space save the house of my Grandparents, and yet still I feel little sense of connection to it. This was never meant to be home, it was simply meant to be a "home for now", a way-station on our journey into the future. I was too busy working sixty-hour weeks to go to any of the parties the Government are always on about, and then apparently one day they ended. For some reason still not exactly clear to me my house was suddenly worth nothing, a book-lined prison from which I would never escape, and the Government started taking all my money to give it their chums so they could throw new parties (though even less people were invited this time).

And while the politicians tightened our belts to buy more cream for their morbidly obese feline friends, bemoaning the loss of their paper empires in an orgy of Type-II cryabetes, everything around here started to fall apart. The shops closed down, the rubbish piled up on the streets, the vomit of the Celtic Tiger cubs replaced by the excrement of the needled-dead. The takeaways became headshops, the headshops turned to Shake Shacks, the Shake Shacks passed through Cash-for-Gold and arrived at the sex-shops with pinked-out windows and Fifty Shades of Grey toys just in time for Christmas. "Great news", says the Government, "at least some folks are still partying".

My house should be an oasis in all of this, a moment of warmth and calm in an unrelenting sea of grey. We work hard with our neighbours to make a better life for ourselves here, to maintain a community. But the drunken cubs come back and smash our windows with their pre-club vodka bottles while they piss all over our street, and the children of the needle steal all they can to pay for their next trip into thankful oblivion. "Great news", says the Government, "at least some folks are still partying".

I want to love my home. I want to love my city, but often the best that I can manage is an acknowledgement that I exist here, as grey as the sky above and the concrete brutalism around me, fifty shades, just in time for Christmas.

So on this last day of 2012 it is important for me to remember that my year was, by any measure, a rather good one. I fought the good fight with pen and shoe leather. I marched and wrote, I rallied and occupied. I brought a film out and toured far and wide with it. After a year lost to hospitals and operations, I went back to work, started a new business and hired people. There were happy times with family at home and abroad. There were celebrations with friends as they welcomed new life into the world, and as we close out 2012 it would appear that the worst of my illness may actually be over. There is food on my table and a roof over my head, two things that for many of my fellow citizens tonight remain sadly elusive.

While my conscious mind rages at all those things beyond my control, it would seem that for now at least my subconscious mind has acknowledged the good in my life and found a moment of peace. This is the importance of last night's dream. The sheer mundanity of it. On the last night of 2012 as I slept my subconscious mind said one thing to me, that I am home.

I hope that tonight no matter what troubles you are facing in life, you can find a moment to pause and reflect on the good things, however difficult that may seem.

To those no longer with us, your absence is an ache in our hearts. We will miss you forever.

To Dara, Sé, Fiach, Tadhg, Pearl, Samuel, Ayla, Chale and Silas, and all those who joined us in 2012, welcome to the world, already it is a better place just by you being in it.

Happy New Year to all of you, thanks for stopping by in 2012 and I hope to see you all again in 2013!

Notes
The image is above is of a paste-up on the former Irish Nationwide Building Society branch on Camden Street, by Dublin-based street artist Canvaz. Part of a series of five images that appeared around the city entitled "We Are All Clowns Now", each image represents one of the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief, specifically denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The clown is based on a friend of the artist who was forced to emigrate at the start of the year. More photos of the series can be found here.

Oompa-Loompa, do-ba-dee-doo

2012-12-30T22:35:00.000Z

Wonky Tan, by ADW
Mary's Abbey, Dublin, 29th December, 2012

Well, after yesterday's altogether somber and heavy post, I thought it might be nice to brighten things up here at Booming Back with something, as they say, completely different.

And so, may I proudly present to you Wonky Tan, the latest mural-based social commentary from Dublin's own ADW.

Ah Dublin, too orangey even for crows.

You are not alone

2012-12-29T23:45:00.000Z

Street Art by Morgan and Solus, for First Fortnight 2013
Temple Lane, Dublin, 29th December, 2012

Two weeks ago in a small town in Western Connecticut, a young man gathered up his mother's collection of guns and extinguished the lives of twenty-seven people, twenty of whom were children under the age of eight. Within a matter of hours the conservative lobby groups had decided that the cause of this tragedy was not the ready availability of hand-held weapons of mass destruction, but the fact that this young man suffered from a mental health illness. The conservative media embraced and reinforced this message, and quite quickly the narrative on certain channels became that the world was full of dangerous people with mental health illnesses, and only by arming teachers would your children be safe.

In October of this year, a young woman died in a Galway hospital after being denied a termination. Although the foetus had no chance of survival, Savita Halappanavar was forced to continue to carry it and consequently developed septicemia, resulting in her tragic and painful death from multiple organ failure. Subsequent pressure to introduce legislation in the wake of her heartbreaking death has been met with strong opposition from within an already conservative Government, with ministers threatening to break ranks and reject any attempts to enact legislation that is perceived as softening the stance on abortion.

Thirty years ago in the wake of the X-Case, the Supreme Court of Ireland ruled that an abortion was lawful if a pregnant woman's life was at risk, including the risk of suicide. In two subsequent Referenda the people of Ireland rejected Government attempts to remove the risk of suicide as grounds for a termination. Although both the Supreme Court and the people of Ireland clearly expressed their will, successive Governments refused to legislate on this issue. While the risk of suicide was not an issue with Savita, it is now being used as rallying cry by conservative politicians and media commentators in an attempt to block legislation.

The truly repugnant narrative being crafted here is that pregnant women will fabricate mental health issues in an attempt to gain abortions-on-demand. The insidious broader message is that mental health issues are not as serious as physical ones. The fact that the citizenry and Supreme Court have clearly expressed their will on this issue on three separate occasions means nothing to the forces of social conservatism within our legislature, and their beliefs are clear - mental health is an irrelevancy and of little importance in comparison to the diktats of Catholic dogma.

Street Art by Solus, for First Fortnight 2012
Drury Street, Dublin, 18th January, 2012

Eight days ago, a Government Minister sadly took his own life. While the Irish media is traditionally reluctant to report such tragedies as suicides, preferring to describe these deaths as "unexpected" or "sudden", within twenty-four hours the suicide of Minister Shane McEntee was being openly referred to. While the tragic death of such a prominent figure could have provided an opportunity for a period of dignified public reflection on the scourge of suicide in Ireland, instead the Government quickly decided that the conversation should instead be on the evils of Social Media. Suggestions were made that unspecified anonymous online comments directed at the Minister were instrumental in this tragedy, and as with their US counterparts conservative commentators within the Irish media were happy to play along.

The Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications under Fine Gael chairperson Tom Hayes TD will now examine the issue of Social Media in Ireland, and apparently explore the introduction of legislation to restrict anonymous Internet usage. Such legislation was enacted this week in China in the wake of a series of high profile corruption scandals uncovered by citizen journalists and disseminated widely online, and now all users must provide their ISPs with proof of their real names and addresses in a move widely seen as a crack down on dissent. While no doubt this is a comparison the Government will be keen to avoid, they may still contend that legislation is needed to prevent online bullying. However Hayes himself said quite plainly that "the media is in a different era now. It's very challenging and we want to control it".

While the Government has spent these last few days engaged in a very public hand-wringing, it emerged today that over the last year it has in fact gutted its own ring-fenced fund for suicide prevention programmes and other mental health initiatives. Although €35 Million had been provided in last year's budget to allow for 414 new staff to be recruited to bring our antiquated Mental Health system up to an adequate level, a significant portion of this allocation was diverted to cover shortfalls in other areas, and as a result only 17 out of the 414 proposed new staff were actually hired. Seventeen.

On Friday the Government paid the holders of unsecured Bank Of Ireland bonds just over €37 Million.

With the Government so quick to divert attention away from the real issues surrounding mental health in Ireland, perhaps it was simply easier to attack an online bogeyman than to explain why it had decimated an already critically under-resourced infrastructure.

Street Art by ADW, for First Fortnight 2013
Mary's Abbey, Dublin, 29th December, 2012

In the space of two months, three very public tragedies have shone a spotlight on issues of mental health, but the way in which politicians, the conservative media and special interest groups have treated the issue has been appalling. Those with mental health issues have been attacked, trivialised or coldly manipulated all for cynical political purposes. In the US the forces of social conservatism have demonised mental illness to preserve their fanatical gun fetish while here in Ireland they dismiss it as an irrelevancy in the face of their religious beliefs or capitalise on it to silence dissent, and all the while the issue of mental health itself gets more and more stigmatised, and the ability to openly discuss it in a rational manner disappears under the weight of so much hysterical baggage.

In 2011 alone over 500 people took their own lives in Ireland. Between 2008 and 2011 the total number is over 2,000. For young men aged 15-24 we have the fourth highest rate of suicide in the EU. Every year the annual report by the National Office of Suicide Prevention makes for very somber reading, and yet sadly both Taoisigh and respected journalists have thought it acceptable in recent years to make light of the subject.

Mental Health in 21st Century Ireland is still a taboo subject, something that only happens to other people, something to be ashamed of. Our leaders ignore or exploit it. Our media sensationalise it. Our children hide it, and succumb to it. Yet, still, nobody talks about it.

This is the conversation we need to be having. We need to be discussing this openly, publicly, rationally and in a supportive manner.

We need to talk, and then we need to act.

Street Art by Maser, for First Fortnight 2012
Grantham Street, Dublin, 13th January, 2012

Notes
In the first two weeks of January, the First Fortnight Festival will be taking place in Dublin. Launched in 2009 the Festival aims to create an open public space where issues of mental health can be explored and discussed through the medium of creative arts. All the photographs used in this post are of street art created specifically for the 2012 and 2013 Festivals.

More photographs can be found here.

Last Exit to Beacon

2012-12-28T14:33:00.002Z

On Dec 27th 2011 I went to hospital. Yesterday I went to the beach. The hospital was warmer, but the view wasn't as nice.
Howth, Dublin, 27th December, 2012

While the rest of you were all busy celebrating the mythical birth of a fig-tree hating community organiser to an unwed teenage mother after an unplanned pregnancy forced upon her by an absentee angry sky-father (who no doubt will be getting a knock on the door any day now from the lads in Operation Yewtree to help them with their enquiries, "Right now Mr YHWH, if indeed that is your real name, would you mind accompanying us to the station. We have a few questions we'd like to ask you about allegations of inappropriate contact with Judean minors in the first century BCE.""Hey man, it was a different time, right, none of us ever asked for ID, right, let me just call my publicist Max first. What? He's been what? Oh, bugger"), some of us were counting down the days to an altogether more personal anniversary, one which sadly seems to have gone unrecognised by our local purveyor of fine cards, gifts and stationery for all occasions (now the proud owner of a sarcastically uttered, "citation needed").

Today, my friends, marks the one year anniversary of my last exit from hospital. While I cannot claim to have been illness-free for the last year, I can, however, proudly boast that no incident in the last twelve months has been severe enough to force me to check in to possibly the only accommodation in Dublin to not only retain its value, but to actually increase its rent in 2012.

Over the holiday festivities, I was chatting to an old friend who mention that her own father had recently experienced the same illness as me, only he had been hospitalised for two months more than me and had been in the worst pain levels for a good bit longer than I was. He's now back on his feet and in the gym on a regular basis - and he's in his seventies! This told me two things, firstly one should never underestimate the power of the human body and mind to overcome any and all trauma and secondly, if a person more than thirty years older than me can have more to cope with than me and bounce back from it, then I really have no right to be shuffling around feeling sorry for myself.

Not that I do, mind you, but it's a good thing to remember if ever I do start to slip down that road. It's a nice milestone to hit at the end of a long year that has seen some joy mixed with an awful lot of sorrow and loss.

The tyranny of the remembering self

2012-12-17T10:56:00.002Z

Time.

Time now ladies and gentlemen. Time now please.

Time is a funny thing, a slippery concept that causes folks more learned than I to pause and stumble when examined in any great detail, yet it is something that has been on my mind of late, quite literally as it happens.

A conversation I had a week or so ago has stayed with me, providing a lens through which most of the last few days have been viewed. I met with a gentleman in a business setting, a scientific advisor to a financial group, in his late sixties and a telecoms engineer by trade. In his spare time, he explained, he is working on a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Our hour-long meeting turned to two hours, and then to three, and at the end we suddenly found ourself talking about the human perception of time.

"Every moment is now," he said, or words to that effect, for by that stage my note taking had been abandoned along with any pretence of our business discussion. "The future has yet to happen and the past exists only as memory. All there is is "Now", and memories. But what are memories? Memories are just stored data, sitting in your brain. Data is data, the memory of what occurred sixty seconds ago takes up the same space as what happend thirty years ago, so the two are essentially the same. Any sense of relativity between them, that one exists further away than the other, is artificial. They all occupy the same place. Some memories are harder to retrieve, because the pathways to those memories are rarely used. What we consider to be Time, is little more than a question of data access."

From 2001 to 2003 I worked in a small town called Shelton, in the US state of Connecticut. Every morning I would travel from my home in New Haven, about 15 miles to the east, a journey mirrored by many of my colleagues who would start their journey each morning roughly fifteen miles to the north-west, in Newtown.

On Friday evening I sat in my office working late, as news of the massacre started to filter through. At first I saw simply that a school was in lockdown, and then the scale of the tragedy started to become clear. My first thoughts were for those of my former workmates with young children, a small enough group for we were a young company. But then I realised that these were memories, frozen moments of time. Nearly ten years had passed since I last saw these people and any children they had were now teenagers. In fact those in the office who at the time seemed little more than teenagers themselves in all likelihood now have children of their own. Six and seven year old children.

Saturday evening I read through the names of the victims.

It didn't take long, but longer than it ever should.

No names were familiar, but that means little. People marry, people divorce, people remarry. Names change as new lives begin. The only names that must forever remain the same are those for whom life has ended. I lost touch with people as soon as I moved away, such is the way of things. Now they only exist as memories, as data accessed only in a time of tragedy.

There is a passage in Thinking Fast and Slow that came to mind as I reflected on this, wherein Daniel Kahneman divides our self-awareness into two distinct parts, the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self:

"The experiencing self is the one that answers the question: "Does it hurt now?" The remembering self is the one that answers the question: "How was it, on the whole?" Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self... ...The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximise the qualities of future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self." - Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p381

For Kahneman we are the product of our memories. Who we are, what we are, is our memory, tempered by a transitory 'fight or flight' reflex. Thus rather than being a creature of the eternal Now, we are in fact permanent travellers from the Past, trapped in the Now.

Ten years seems a long time, but ten years is really nothing more than a group of memories all ready to be accessed when needed. At any moment all that you are is the sum of all memories accessed. This weekend I was a man, standing 15 miles away from a school in Newtown, grieving for the lost children of my neighbours.

"Now isn't the time to talk about guns", the politicians say.

"Now is the only time to talk about guns", I say, for Now is all there is.

Every moment, every memory, every death is Now, and always will be.

Now is always the Time.