Supporters Direct are a not-for-profit organisation who promote the benefits of sustainability, community ownership and supporter involvement in the running of sporting organisations, mainly football clubs. Andrew Donlan met up with Kevin Rye of Supporters Direct to find out how their various Irish interests are coming along.

As of this week, the three League of Ireland clubs/supporters groups Kevin Rye advises – Cork City (FORAS), Galway United (GUST) and Bohemians (GST) – are differing in fortunes.

FORAS are readying themselves for their first season in the top flight having won the First Division. Bohemians have a massive seven figure debt hanging over their head and are now preparing for life in the Premier Division with one of the lowest playing budgets of the 12 participant clubs, while in Galway the GUST look down and out.

Having run Galway United on behalf of the board of directors last season, GUST withdrew their support and announced plans to set up a new club playing out of Terryland Park, the current home of Galway United. Their plans though now look in tatters, as it’s believed the FAI has rejected their licence application to play in next season’s first division.

Report Card

Cork City

When I put it to him that Cork City’s grandstand finish, swiping the first division trophy from under the noses of Shelbourne was a major success story, he agrees that it gave everyone “a nice lift.” However, he stressed, “That sort of story never fully justifies what we do; we must never say that (success) just because someone gets promotion. It doesn’t justify everything we do because we are not purely about results.”

He is passionate and assertive on that point, although the football fan in him – the one that stands on the terraces at Kingsmeadow watching AFC Wimbledon – eventually comes out. “The way it happened for Cork, the last kick of the last game, that’s why we love the game so much.”

Bohemians

When Bohemians come up for discussion – the reason he is visiting Dublin (while simultaneously advising his office on the developing crisis at Darlington FC) – he reveals.

“The situation was so terrible; I don’t need to explain how bad it was at Bohemians and how bad it still is in fact. But there was a desire from that group of fans (GST) and from individual members of the club and most definitely there were directors of the club at the time, who were trying their best to keep the thing afloat.”

What of the future of Bohemians?

“The aim is, I think there are other things that we need to do there, I think there’s a different legal model that we need to look at, that’s more akin to the Cork City model, which is more akin to what we have in England and Scotland, like an IPS (similar to a co-operative society). It would mean it’s a not for profit model that’s a bit more protective and it’s a bit more difficult to do things than with what they have at the moment, which is a company limited by guarantee. We believe it would provide greater protection.”

He also spoke about the courage shown by the often maligned Bohemians fans, or notorious boo-boys as one broad sheet newspaper once referred to them as. “When I went to Bohemians for the first time back in November, I got the sense of what a football club was. It was those people who were gathered there who cared, not only those people, but that was the very essence of the club.” And if worse comes to worst, he isn’t too down beat either. “It’s about giving it a damn good go and if you can’t do it with what you’ve got at the moment, you recreate it. Like what we did back home with Wimbledon. That’s really why Bohemians still exists as a club; the fans have the force of will.”

Galway

The situation in Galway is more precarious. The GUST are currently believed to be locked in talks with Galway’s two other League of Ireland clubs, Mervue United and Salthill Devon. The talks centre around a possible merger, with the FAI acting as intermediaries. But as a Kevin outlines, the GUST were in fact the model pupils in Ireland. “For that club to have continued over last season was a remarkable feat. They did things in the right way, they behaved in the right way, the way they acted towards their local community was absolutely spot on and they pulled people together behind them. This has shown in everything they’ve done over the last couple of months in pursuit of a licence, they embody the sort of spirit of what we do.”

Not mincing his words, he reveals, “Even under at times the most severe of attack from people who know who they are, who were in positions of authority at the football club, who arguably have brought it to the brink – will have no doubt they brought it to the brink in their decision making – under serve attack at times from those people, they still managed to do things the right way. To have dignity about the way they did things and sometimes had to argue their case very strongly and stick up for their football club, if they get their wish and if they compete next season they’ll be a model football club, I have no doubt. What they have done there is something that’s very important for the future of football in that area, whatever the football club happens to be called.” Talks regarding the future of the GUST in the League of Ireland are still on-going.

An extended piece on the work Supporters Direct do across Europe will feature in the next issue of LookLeft – out in mid February.

For more information on the Gypsies Supporters trust, visit their website

Just over a year ago one of the weirdest chapters in recent Irish life drew to a close. Following protests, pickets, criticism and moral outrage, legislation was eventually introduced in the Dáil criminalising the so-called ‘legal highs’ sold in the infamous head Shops. One year on and the question is how successful has it been in tackling drug use? Barry Healy reports.

Fr Peter McVerry, founder of the Peter McVerry Trust, has been providing services to young homeless people in Dublin for over 25 years. In his experience the closer of the shops has “driven it underground. There is still a huge demand for these substances” which are now bought from dealers. A new trend has emerged with users gravitating toward these substances “instead of crack cocaine or in addition to crack cocaine”.

Fr McVerry is adamant the shops were open too long and should have been shut straightaway. “Head shop stuff was dynamite. It made people psychotic and the damage was far worse [than previously illegal drugs]. People were committing crimes they wouldn’t normally commit”.

The problem seems set to get worse as services battle against cuts and drug use and addiction gets pushed down the list of national priorities. Finding a solution seems a long way off.

Treatment on demand is top of Fr McVerry list, “help should be available within days at least. There are currently waiting lists of at least a month” adding “very little can be done to stop the supply of drugs but the demand can be tackled”. He is supportive of drug abuse being dealt with as a health issue rather than a criminal justice one. In this country “Alcohol causes much more damage” yet it is dealt with as a health problem, “we need to adopt the same approach with drug addiction”.

As Honorary President of Europe Against Drugs (EURAD), Grainne Kenny was a key campaigner against the head shops. Speaking to LookLeft she was keen to emphasise the successes of the closers. “100 head shops were operating at the beginning of last summer and now there are only ten”, these are confined to selling pipes, seeds and other paraphernalia.
She stresses how the “nuisance on the streets has stopped. Queues outside shops at night are gone, the same with kids queuing after school” adding “not everyone will go to dealers so in that sense it has cut out one avenue [of access]”. She also feels “not as many people are taking them [head shop substances] as it is not as socially acceptable now”.

She agrees with Fr McVerry’s assumption that the head shops should have been closed straightaway as “there is now an appetite for these substances”. She is adamant it’s a good thing the former ‘legal highs’ are now harder to get but that there is a need for educational programs to be introduced.

This issue looks set to run and run, here and elsewhere. Recently the ‘Global Commission on Drug Policy’, a group of prominent former world leaders, has said the war on drugs has failed, ‘with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world’. The report urged ‘experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs (especially cannabis) to undermine the power of organised crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens’.

In the UK the ‘Release’ campaign has been launched. It includes film director Mike Leigh, former drugs Minster Bob Ainsworth and three former chief constables in calling for the decriminalisation of possession of drugs. They believe present policy and legislation isn’t working.

Tackling the drug issue will take more than the closer of shops and enacting stiffer laws. There is no easy answer. Fresh thinking and debate is needed if we can ever hope find ways of dealing with it. It isn’t going away and it looks certain to get worse.

Article published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.7

The creation of the National Assets Management Agency in 2009 was an exercise in power. It was done in the face of vocal opposition, and its role in merging bank debt with sovereign debt played no small part in the arrival of the ECB/IMF in November 2010 and the decimation of Fianna Fáil as a political force in Ireland. The new government’s maintenance of NAMA underlines the assertion that the present economic crisis has revealed a deeper truth, that Ireland harbours more powerful forces than Fianna Fáil. These economic and social forces have greatly undermined the real economy in Ireland, and have at present, through the bank guarantee and NAMA, a drowning man’s grip on the future direction of this country.

On 18 February 2009 the National Treasury Management Agency appointed the economist Dr. Peter Bacon as a special advisor reporting directly to the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan. Bacon was given a three-month contract and according to the Irish Times he was hired in order to ‘‘enhance the agency’s team during the recapitalisation process.’’ His remit was to ‘‘access the possibility of creating a “bad bank” or risk insurance scheme to take so-called toxic debts off the banks balance sheets in a bid to “free up new lending.’’

The government wanted a solution which was unique to Ireland, one that would involve moving impaired property loans, as well as the properties used to secure those loans, into a new property company, which would be capitalised and would seek to attract investment on the back of its ‘assets’. It was in order to explore the practicalities of this idea – a toxic property company rather than a bad bank – that the minister hired Dr. Bacon. On 8 April 2009 a press conference took place in Dublin where the result of these efforts, Nama, was presented to the people, Brian Lenihan told the assembled press that the creation of NAMA would ensure that ‘‘optimal value for money is obtained for the taxpayer’’. It would purchase property portfolios from the banks at a discount, and these portfolios would consist of both good and bad loans. The minister reckoned that ‘‘among the loans to be transferred are about €60 billion of land and property loans. The remaining €20 to €30 billion of loans is secured on investment properties – office blocks, shops and hotels – which have been provided as security for the speculative loans drawn by developers.’’

The purpose of NAMA was to inject liquidity into the Irish banking system, to get the economy moving again. It did nothing of the sort. The proposal – to buy loans at a discounted price as a means of recapitalising the banks – carried an inherent contradiction. The larger the discount on the loans, the greater the need to recapitalise the banks. Every cent it saved on the loans was simply one more cent to inject into the banks via State (rather than NAMA) recapitalisation.

This was pointed out in a letter to the Irish Times on 17 April 2009 which was signed by twenty economists. ‘‘Rather than create fully healthy banks capable of functioning without help from the State’’ they wrote, ‘‘the process may continue to leave us with zombie banks that still require the state-sponsored life-support machine that is the liability guarantee.’’ This, of course, is what took place.

Towards the end of the letter, the economists touched upon what they probably believed to be the real reason behind NAMA, but were too cautious to explicitly state out loud. ‘‘The Government’s plans seem likely to keep in place the current management at our biggest banks’’, they said. ‘‘It would be difficult to avoid claims of crony capitalism and golden circles were billions of State monies to be placed into the banks with minimal changes in their governance structure.’’

The Fianna Fáil/Green coalition had hoped that the cost of buying Irish bank developers loans could be placed ‘‘off-books’ and so not counted as part of the national debt. The rating agencies thought otherwise and told the Department of Finance that it treats “off-balance-sheet arrangements [such as NAMA] as direct obligations of the government.’’ As a result, NAMA severely affected Ireland’s credit rating in the months leading up to the momentous events in November 2010.

In July 2011 it was revealed that the loan book of €65 billion which had been bought by NAMA was the result of the failed speculative purchases of just 180 individuals. The agency’s top three ‘clients’ have debts totaling €8.3 billion. Just over one-third of the loans bought by NAMA relate to land – that is, empty green fields which were bought on the expectation of development, but to which nothing had been done. Another 36% of the loans are associated loans – that is, loans backed by commercial investment properties. The remaining 28% are development loans. The figures show that the equation of ghost estates with NAMA is grossly misleading. If you are looking at an empty field on the outskirts of Dublin, Cork or Galway, chances are you’re looking at a failed NAMA investment.

Overall, NAMA has saddled the Irish taxpayer with a loan book which equates to nearly 50% of the country’s GDP. It is an impossible burden to bear. The original suppliers of the debt – the banks – know this, and that is why it has been dumped onto the shoulders of the State.

Irish private bank debt has to be decoupled from sovereign debt if there is to be any chance of growth in the economy. It is a dead weight, and a strong factor in the decision of the international rating agencies to downgrade Ireland’s credit rating. They watched for two years while the Irish government took billions out of the real economy and used that money as an IOU for the betting slips of property speculators.

The fact NAMA continues to exist is testimony to the power of those it is designed to protect. And whoever that is, one thing is certain: it is not us.

Article published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.8

There have been many attempts to explain why the Irish banking crisis developed the way it did, and the argument that it was due to a breakdown in moral standards is quite a popular one. The Irish Times has talked of a “frightening lack of morality” within Anglo Irish Bank, the most indebted of the Irish institutions, and how the actions of its chairman “cast a shadow over the ethical culture of the bank he ran for most of the past 33 years.” The newspaper’s senior business correspondent, Arthur Beesley, said that the directors of Irish Life and Permanent inhabit an “ethical cocoon in which the sense of right and wrong is at odds with standards in the outside world”, while the economist Brian Lucey talked of the immorality of the government’s actions in pouring money into Anglo Irish Bank in a desperate attempt to keep it going as a business concern.

Yet, the banking crisis in Ireland was not caused by pockets of immorality in an otherwise reasonably well functioning system. The ruthless pursuit of profit is not personal; that is the way business works. And what is condemned as immoral in times of crisis, is often praised as savvy and pragmatic in times of prosperity. Similarly, there is nothing particularly unique about the ethical cocoons of Irish bankers, their frightening lack of morality, or lack of restraint and sense of propriety. This was a worldwide financial crisis, after all, not a regional or a Celtic one. In other words, it was not the implosion of speculative debt, but the ability to transfer that debt wholesale onto the shoulders of the State, which marked out Irish bankers as a step above their worldwide contemporaries.

The decision by the Irish government on the 30th September 2008 to guarantee almost all the liabilities of six Irish financial institutions was not an economic decision but an exercise in power. “The deeper truth exposed by the present crisis” wrote the journalist and politician Shane Ross, “is that Ireland harbors more powerful forces than Fianna Fáil.” And while this is true, it is not enough to point out that banks and property developers are indeed powerful in Ireland, but to explore why that is the case. What is it about the Irish economy that financial and property speculation is a core activity and not, say, fisheries or gas? Why are builders and insurance salesmen fêted as entrepreneurs, while indigenous exporters outside of agriculture and tourism struggle to find support? How did this situation arise, and how deep are the roots?

Put as concisely as possible, the type of business activities which dominated the Irish economy in the twentieth century – cattle exports to Britain; financial investment in London; the development of green-field sites; and the construction of factories and office buildings to facilitate foreign industrial and commercial investment; the birth of the suburbs and subsequent housing booms predicated on an expanding urban workforce – saw the development of an indigenous moneyed class based around cattle, construction and banking. These sectional interests were able to control successive government policy, much to the detriment of the rest of the economy. In 2008 the construction and banking sectors of that class closed ranks in order to protect themselves from oblivion, resulting in the bank guarantee and the creation of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA).

At the time of its independence, the Irish Free State was a fully integrated part of the UK economy. Its role within that economy was primarily agricultural, more specifically, the provision of livestock for the finishing farms and slaughterhouses of England. This relationship, not surprisingly, benefitted livestock breeders and traders, who had come to prominence in the post-famine era, with land cleared and secured for grazing rather than tillage.

This became a source of conflict within Irish rural society, between small farmers and graziers. Upon independence, however, it was the graziers who were in the ascent and Irish economic policy developed with their interests very much at heart.

The end of formal political links with Westminster meant that the Free State was now an independent country without an independent economy. In order to secure its future, it needed to expand its industrial base and develop new markets. For this it needed credit, something that a central bank based around a national currency could provide. The Irish banking system, however, was entirely focused towards the London financial markets, and resistant to the development of a national currency focused on the economic demands of the state. The need to expand agricultural and industrial output, in order to provide an economic base for sustainable communities, was pushed to one side. The result was increased emigration, with the Free State providing not only cattle and finance to the UK, but also a steady stream of labour.

The lack of industrial growth also meant that there wasn’t a sufficiently strong economic base to provide the standard of living demanded by the aspirational Irish urban middle class, who turned to the state for grants and tax relief in order to fund the type of home ownership and petit-bourgeois lifestyle they read about in the newspapers, and watched on cinema screens.

The emergence of Fianna Fáil as a political force in 1927, followed by its rise to power in 1932, saw a change in aspects of economic policy, with greater use of tariffs to encourage industrial growth. These initiatives were soon hampered by self-inflicted blows. The party kept the parity link with sterling. It also decided to focus on the expansion of produc- tion for the home market only. The structural deficiencies within Irish agriculture, including the continued use of the Shorthorn cow for both dairy and beef production and the serious lack of a food processing industry, remained untouched, as did any attempt to expand exports to anywhere except Britain.

The demands placed on the Irish economy in order to maintain parity included periodic deflations, which were timed in line with the dynamics of the British, not Irish, economy, and an obsessive concern with inflation at home. By the end of the 1940s the Irish economy was more dependent on Britain than it had been at the time of independence, while an overweight Irish pound stood drenched in sterling and out of breath, with hands on knees, desperately trying to take a few more steps towards expansion before it collapsed from exhaustion.

In 1952 the Irish government commissioned a report from the American consultancy firm, Ibec Technical Services Corporation. Its authors simply could not understand why the state persisted in exporting livestock to Britain, given the potential for industrial growth which the slaughter and processing of animal produce would provide. Similarly, the practice by Irish banks of investing in British securities with the full support of the central bank and Irish government seemed bizarre, given the fundamental need for credit and investment in Ireland. Its calls for an expansionary policy, with a fully-funded central bank using deposits to underwrite the Irish pound and provide credit, as well as an agricultural policy which would see the creation of a viable and profitable food processing industry on Irish shores, were dismissed in favour of the pursuit of foreign investment. Such a move allowed the Irish state to appease the banking sector and its cheerleaders in the Department of Finance. It allowed credit and foreign investment to enter the Irish economy without a revaluation of the Irish pound – something that was needed in order for indigenous businesses to attain the level of credit needed for sustainable growth. The state was on a path to industrial expansion, but one which was centred on tax breaks and financial incentives to multinational companies, and not ecessarily the development of local industry and Irish-sourced exports The expansion in financial investment, construction, and land sales, gave rise to a particular type of Irish capitalist entrepreneur. There was money to be made by providing services to foreign investors. Construction, banking, insurance, property, road haulage, and legal services – these were the areas of commercial activity that gained a commanding presence in the Irish economy, all of which benefited from the influx of American, German, British and Dutch companies.

At the same time, there was also money to be made by speculating on the boon to the economy which foreign investment brought. In the 1960s and 1970s the state started to provide these entrepreneurs with a similar range of grants and tax incentives as those offered to multinationals. In the case of office blocks in the 1960s, the state not only funded the speculation, it acted as tenant as well. The PAYE system, first introduced in the late 1950s, became a cash faucet for the government. The revenue generated through the direct taxation of ordinary workers was fed directly to speculators and foreign investors via the litany of tax havens which propped up these new industries.

Such was the lack of concern about developing indigenous growth that the country’s natural resources were sold off wholesale without a second thought. In Ireland, the handshake did not secure the deal, the handshake was the deal. The type of local business interests which expanded on the back of foreign finance were all about making the deal happen. Construction, finance, land and law: this was the four-leaf clover, the new lucky charm for the modern Ireland of Lemass.

By the 1970s the trick of foreign investment, and speculation on same, was running out of steam. Growth in the Irish economy relied more and more on construction, both commercial and residential. The notion that exports needed to be linked to the wider economy was given lip-service but little else.

The growth in building societies and the entry of banks into the private mortgage market took place alongside moves to strangle public housing as a viable option for working people and the increased use of tax incentives to bolster owner-occupancy as the only real option open to families. Housing was increasingly portrayed as a cure for all social ills, a bulwark against inflation, a nest-egg for retirement, a fool-proof pension plan for the honest worker. It was also a multi-billion pound industry, where standards and security played a very minor role.

The 1974 Kenny Report into the price of building land was shelved precisely because it threatened to upset the speculation machine. It threatened the livelihoods of the various politicians, bankers, builders and land-owners who profiteered from the rezoning game.

By 1981 only 8% of all materials used by foreign companies in Ireland were sourced from Ireland. This was in spite of repeated calls by foreign companies for the development of secondary industries to act as feeders for production.

The Irish entrepreneur as middleman was firmly, and fatally, entrenched in the way the economy functioned. Construction and services can only work as an aid to growth – in Ireland they had become growth itself. In the late 1980s, the widening of Ireland’s tax relief schemes to include financial services helped to turn the state into a glorified offshore bank. Incredibly it became a tax haven for Irish financial and commercial businesses. Ireland had become its own tax haven.

The decision by the Irish government in 2008 to guarantee almost the entire deposits and liabilities of the Irish banking system was everything people saw it as at the time; a bailout of well-connected bankers, speculators and builders – the dominant strands of Irish economic and political life. We need to understand why things happened the way they did, and to recognise that the old ways of doing business are not going to help us. It falls on us to make different choices if we want different results.

Article published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.7

The morning after a night out, despite the driving rain, strong winds and hangover I was nursing, I found myself up early and heading off to find Suir Bridge in Kilmainham. The purpose of my expedition was to photograph a piece of street artist ADW’s work. After finding the piece, I was saddened, but not surprised, to find half of it had been painted over by Dublin City Council.

Nevertheless, the journey was worthwhile and I continued on my way into town taking photos of stencils, paste ups, stickers, murals and tags.

This was not an unusual morning for me. I’ve been photographing street art for about four years. Since I was very young, graffiti and street art have always caught my eye. When travelling, the art on the streets always leaves a more lasting impression of that city on me than the more obvious tourist attractions. London’s diverse styles and vast array of techniques mirrors the heterogeneity of the city while Krakow’s propensity for anti-fascist stencils highlights a deeper sociopolitical problem. In Palestine, Israel’s illegal wall has been transformed into the world’s largest canvas by artists such as Swoon, Ron English, Banksy and Blu, as well as ordinary people determined to express themselves.

For this article I interviewed two very different contributors to Dublin’s street art scene: ADW the street artist responsible for well known pieces such as the Cowen/ Lenihan Blues Brothers and the Bertie Celtic Tiger, and TEXT a young graffiti artist who creates colourful murals around the city and worked on the ‘They Are Us’ project with Maser. I wanted to provide a cross-section of the motivations behind much of the illegal art that brightens up our city, and which forms a part of a rich scene that is yet in its infancy.
For me, it is the street art and graffiti I see around Dublin and its suburbs that make the monotony of daily life bearable. They immediately reveal a subculture, bravery and sense of purpose beyond the organised structures of our society.

Many of these pieces are created under pressure and with fear of arrest, and often only last a few days or even hours before being removed by authorities, or altered by other artists. This interplay between the artist and the city fascinates me as does the artists’ acceptance of the transient nature and public ownership of their art.

That Dublin has seen, in the last decade, a rapid increase in privatised space being sold off for advertising, with a resulting disappearance of public space, while during the same period there has been an increase in non-commissioned street art and graffiti is itself an interesting piece of non-verbal social commentary. That’s enough of my armchair analysis; let’s see what the artists think.

What made you want to start painting?

TEXT: What inspired me was a piece painted on three stories at the top of an apartment block in Dublin’s inner city. It really astounded me that the artist got up there. From the ground up the piece was a perfect three colour fade with nice white in lines and a border. It was perfect. Whenever I walked into town with my parents I used to look up for ages staring at it until one day I looked up and it was gone. The Council had buffed the surface clean, so I took it upon myself to learn how to paint graffiti and do what that artist had done. I’ve been painting ever since.

Would you consider your work to be socially conscious?

ADW: Primarily I create for me, I get a kick out of creating my own artwork whatever the motivation for the piece may be. I approach my work with a degree of honesty and believe that people can relate to this, especially in these strange and uncertain times.

Do you feel that street art has a positive effect on communities where it exists?

ADW: Good street art has a very positive effect within our society. I think people are getting pretty bored with the grey, cold walls that surround us and that most people enjoy and appreciate a splash of colour in their lives.

TEXT: I do feel that art has a positive effect on people and certain communities, but I also feel that with everything positive there comes some negatives. Legal spaces are often in “disadvantaged areas” because the council or the government feel that it would make an area better if there was a new culture or skill brought in. That’s all well and good but what the councils and government don’t realise is that within “disadvantaged areas” there are often serious problems with authority figures, so when someone comes into one of these areas and tries to show the locals how to learn this new skill there is always going to be some disagreement too.

Do you think that the amount of privatised space given up for advertising in the city has influenced people’s desire to create street art?

ADW: It would be nice to see more legal sites for artists so there could be more of a balance between the two. It would also be nice to see the huge sums of money invested into advertising being invested in the talented artists our country has to offer.

TEXT: I think it has influenced/motivated people to do more to build upon a very small culture.

How do you feel about your work being removed or tampered with?

ADW: Honestly, it is pretty disheartening to see your piece painted over or buffed off after all the hard work, but that’s just the nature of the game. It would be nice to see some of my work last longer than 24 hours though.

TEXT: I feel the way every other artist does about their work, it’s individual to themselves but also when you put your work into the public eye it’s no longer yours; people may change it or remove it, but at the end of the day, it’s the public’s to do with as they wish.

This article was published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.6

ETA declared in January its six months-old official ceasefire to be “general, permanent …and verifiable by the international community.” A consultation process among those who support independence for the Basque areas controlled by the Spanish and French states had been taking place throughout 2010, cumulating in a leading political element rejecting violence in favour of political organisation, debate and civil disobedience.

However, the Spanish government has maintained its policy of repression and complaints of torture by political detainees continue.
The Spanish hard Right media and their principle political party – Partido Popular – call for no negotiation with terrorists, claiming Basque radicals only wish to talk because they are weak and they should be crushed.

The social democratic media and many in the ruling Partido Socialista Obrero Español (POSE), say that previous ceasefires have been broken and the leading pro-independence political movement, Abertzale Left, has to do more to convince them that they are in earnest.
The Abertzale Left itself is a heterogeneous movement. Ranging from Marxist to anarchist it comprises the daily newspaper Gara, the trade union LAB, youth organisations, a political prisoners’ support group and a number of other cultural and political groups. However the movement’s leadership have made clear the new ETA truce is unilateral and the result of a wide consultation that conclusively resulted in a decision to reject violence and to rely on democratic political processes.

Some commentators have pointed out that the line of “ETA only wants to talk because it is weak now, so why bother” is a dangerous one, as the message given is that ETA needs to become strong in order to be considered worth talking to.

Despite the cold response from the Spanish establishment to their political initiative Abertzale Left has began to gather allies. When parties of the Basque separatist radical Left have been allowed to take part in the Spanish electoral process, they have won the votes of up to 25% of the southern (within the Spanish state) Basque electorate – 10% at their lowest point. But since 2003, the year the Spanish state closed down the pro-self determination Basque language newspaper, Egunkaria, and banned the pan-Basque organisation of town mayors and councillors Udalbitza, they have also banned every political party or electoral platform representing the Abertzale Left (with the exception of a Spanish state-wide Iniciativa Independista alliance that contested the 2009 European elections) and arrested its activists.

However Abertzale Left has declared its intention to stand in upcoming local government elections with a new pro independence political party Sortu launched in January. In its constitution Sortu rejected violence “including that of ETA” and undertook to expel from the party any member who advocated it. Parties cannot be registered in the Spanish state unless their constitutions comply with the Political Parties Law and it is clear that the new party wanted to ensure that the State had no excuse to refuse its registration.
Many Basque political and social organisations and all Basque trade unions welcomed Sortu’s formation, while the District Attorney of the Basque Regional Court stated that its constitution was a significant departure from previous political formulations of the Abertzale Left.

But on the basis of a file presented to it by the Guardia Civil, a paramilitary police force, the Spanish state’s Supreme Court stated Sortu was merely a reformation of an earlier pro-independence political party Batasuna and on 24th March declined its registration on a split vote of nine to seven judges. The decision has been appealed to the Constitutional Court but with a late April deadline for registration for the local government elections, even a favourable decision may come too late for the party’s participation.

The banning of Abertzale Left aligned political parties is part of wider state repression including closures of newspapers, radio stations, web-tv and websites, the banning of youth organisations, the arrest, torture and imprisonment of political activists.

Spanish liberal opinion, for the most part, ignores the evidence of this repression in the Basque Country. But some cracks in that unanimity may be appearing. Recently two duty solicitors employed by the state in Madrid to “supervise” the detentions of Basque political activists, broke ranks and refused to endorse “confessions”, commenting on the mental state of the detainees and on the “unusual hours” at which the “confessions” had been obtained (e.g. 4 a.m.). In April 2010, the National Court in Madrid found that the journalists and management of Egunkaria, accused of assisting a terrorist organisation, had no case to answer and that the newspaper should not have been closed. While in January 20 members of Udalbitza, on trial on similar charges, were similarly found not guilty. Its aims might be separatist and people might not like that but that did not did not make its activities illegal, the judges commented. The dissenting verdict of seven judges of the Spanish Supreme Court on the registration of Sortu is another example of cracks in the Spanish consensus, with growing opposition also voiced within the ruling PSOE to the Political Parties Law.

But for Basques to gain a real measure of independence would mean the French and Spanish states being prepared to lose a substantial part of their territory. Such an event would also encourage other sepratitist movements. There is no evidence that either state is seriously prepared to contemplate the prospect. So why then does the Abertzale Left seem to believe that the political process can bring them what they want?

The published conclusions of Abertzale Left’s internal debate show a decision to fight the Spanish state on what they consider to be its weakest front – the political one. They reason that through their leadership of Basque struggles since the creation of the two autonomous regions of the southern Basque Country in 1978, these structures have been exposed as unable to satisfy aspirations for self-determination and the development of an egalitarian society. It is time, they say, to take the next step forward, to mobilise the widest possible social and political forces to present a front for selfdetermination of such amplitude that it cannot be denied. At the same time in France they are campaigning to build a viable administrative, cultural, economic and political unit of the three Basque provinces there, which are currently part of a wider French administrative depárment. It is noticeable how often the Abertzale Left refer to the Irish Peace Process and Sinn Féin has been working quite closely with them.

But there are also doubts within Abertzale Left about the comparison. In private conservation some Abertzale Left activists say: “We are not like the Irish movement – we have a very broad movement right across our nation.” They say that they be concentrating on building the broadest unity at different levels and using campaigns of civil disobedience. Evidently they expect to achieve a result which Sinn Féin has been unable to do.

But there is disquiet among a minority. Sortu renouncing violenceis one thing, but specifically mentioning ETA while making no mention of the violence of the Spanish state is quite another. And the promise to expel anyone who advocates armed struggle has left a bad taste in the mouths of many.

But the consultation process was very wide and there is no sign of a forthcoming split but a future one in the movement cannot be ruled out, including perhaps a “dissident” ETA – especially if the Spanish state does not permit the Abertzale Left to enter the electoral process. On the other hand, many believe that the repressive apparatus of the Spanish state and its reactionary political forces need ETA in order to justify their existence and their repression of Basque legitimate demands for self-determination.

Euskal Herria (“The Land Where the People Speak Basque”) consists of seven provinces, three in Iparralde (“the Northern Country”) within the French state and four in Hegoalde (“the Southern Country”) within the Spanish state.
Part of Euskal Herria was granted autonomy by the Spanish Republican Government in 1936 and many Basques fought for the Republic during the civil war. This conflict saw the bombing by the German Luftwaffe of Gernika (Guernica), the ancient gathering place of the Basque chiefs. During Franco’s rule of a quasi-fascist Spanish state the Basques faced political and cultural repression.
The main Basque political party, Partido Nacionalista Vasco went underground. A section of the party’s youth wing was strongly influenced by the 1960s student uprising and anti-colonial struggles. These Leftist activists endured severe state repression and in 1959 broke away to form ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatuna – Basque Country and Freedom), with a view to “direct action” and also to separate from the Catholic and largely conservative PNV.
Among ETA’s early targets was Franco’s heir Spanish Prime Minister Carrero Blanco killed by a car bomb in 1973. However in later years some of ETA’s actions have met with disapproval within the Abertzale Left and the group’s activities began to be seen as a liability in the struggle for independence. State violence has also been a major obstacle to political dialogue. During the 1980s Basque militants were assassinated by the state-sponsored G.A.L. (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación). A journalistic investigation into these activities resulted in jail sentences for – among others — the PSOE Minister of the Interior and senior Guardia Civil officers.

This article was published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.6

Reports on student protests, Occupy Dame Street, turf wars in Kildare, AFA action against Nick Griffin, defending health services, the community fight against drugs, Occupy Wall Street, the sex industry, doctors in El Salvador, Ship to Gaza, turmoil in Egypt, the Greek Communist Party , Belfast’s Fresh Claim Café, WP Northern Ireland conference.

Interviews with PUP leader Billy Hutchinson, America Radical Fred Magdoff, Rapper Captain Moonlight

Main Feature; Ireland’ addiction to low corporation tax and Corporate Imperialism

Features; Occupy – where to now, Revolution in Cork City FC, Friedrich Engels on Ireland, Irish Graphic Novels, book reviews, the Jemmy Hope Column and Around the Left (news from progressive organisations)

Views; WP President Mick Finnegan on Budget 2012, Socialist Party MEP Paul Murphy on the need for an EU referendum

The western media have a clear, simple narrative of the events that have swept the Arab world. Oppressed people suddenly demanded access to westernstyle democracy, and have succeeded in sweeping away several corrupt dictators.
This movement has been led by young people using new forms of social media like twitter and facebook to outwit regimes stuck in the past. Only in Libya, where Gadaffi clings to power militarily, has a brutal dictator succeeded
in holding back the tide of history.
This is a powerful story. It also hides more about what is happening in the Arab world than it reveals. For two centuries, the most basic revolutionary demand of all has been for bread. Bread was at its highest price in living memory the day the Bastille fell, and Lenin built a revolution around the slogan, “Peace, Bread, Land”. Protests in the Arab world began with the demand for cheap food. As Fidel Castro has warned for some time, the consequences of global warming and the use of massive amounts of crops for biofuels in the US and Europe have included substantially higher food prices for the poorer regions of the globe. We have seen the political consequences in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. In other words, poverty, inequality and class struggle have been at the centre of the protests, with trade unions and left-wing parties and activists playing prominent roles. Barely a peep about all this in the western media.
The role of imperialism has also been obscured in the dominant narrative. The Egyptian dictator Mubarak and his like depended upon the support of imperialism, and served to keep the region, and its oil, safe for capitalism. Hence Washington’s initially lukewarm response to the protests. Only when the people were on the verge of sweeping away the regimes by their own efforts did the US, UK and others remember their support for democracy. While bombing Gadaffi, the imperialist powers ignored government troops backed by Saudi forces massacring anti-government protestors in Bahrain. The difference of course being that Bahrain’s despotic monarchy and the Saudi tyrant have been long-term allies of the US.
The Egyptian army has also made clear it intends to maintain its grip on power in its attacks on and torture of protestors since Mubarak fell. Again, NATO remains silent. Imperialism is seeking simply to replace its front-men while giving the illusion of change.
In 1848, a wave of revolutions swept Europe. Within a year, the reactionary monarchs used their armies to effect counter-revolutions almost everywhere. There is a real danger that the Arab revolutions face a similar fate.

Article published in LookLeft Vol.2 No.6

Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1905- 70) is someone many people have heard of, but usually only one aspect of him. People might speak of him as a leading writer in Irish, as a long-standing republican, as an Irish language activist, or as a socialist.
He was all of these things, of course, and this gives an idea of the range of his activities. But all too often, those who discuss Ó Cadhain come away knowing only bits of him instead of understanding the totality of his work.
His interest in republicanism was sparked by reading An Phoblacht at teacher training college. Back in Connemara, he joined the IRA and rose through the ranks until the bishop of Galway sacked him from his teaching job in 1936. Moving to Dublin, he was elected to the army council, but resigned from it in protest at the bombing campaign in England: “he considered political freedom without economic freedom useless”, he told them. Nevertheless, he was interned for most of the second world war with other republicans. They were fatally weakened by the rise of Fianna Fáil, but an attempt by Ó Cadhain to sketch out a new political course for the movement was met only with accusations of betrayal. He had no involvement with them after his release, and often spoke bitterly of republicanism, although throughout the 1950s he stood against Catholic church dominance in the southern state. He later returned to an uncompromising republican faith. “Is poblachtach mé féin”, he affirmed. “Níor ghéill mé ariamh do na Státaí atá sa tír seo agus tá súil agam nach ngéillfe.”1
From the start Ó Cadhain’s writing was characterised by a powerful use of Irish steeped in both the spoken tradition of Connemara and the classical literature. A far from romantic view of Gaeltacht life emerges from his stories, with a stark portrayal of the hardships of small farming. While his fic- tion rarely dealt explicitly with politics, his political attitudes are often evident in it.
His classic novel Cré na Cille touches none too subtlely on contemporary controversies, and bursts the bubbles of class pretension among its characters. The hopelessness of existence on a few miserable acres is mirrored in his stories of alienated office workers trapped in the confines of a dehumanising system. The suffocating constraints placed upon women are a constant theme in his writing. Ó Cadhain succeeded better than anyone in producing modern literature which integrated international philosophical influences in an unashamedly native idiom.
Ó Cadhain’s activism to defend the Irish language started with a bang in the 1930s when he led Muintir na Gaeltachta, a neglected case of social agitation on the part of republicans. Their demand that ranchers’ land in Meath be given to landless families from Connemara met with success in the establishment of the Ráth Cairn Gaeltacht.
Members of the group went to prison as part of a campaign of illegal fish-ins to demand public control of waters owned by local landlords. The language question was fundamentally a social one, Ó Cadhain insisted: “Ní tárrtháilfear an Ghaeilge gan an Ghaeltacht a thárrtháil, agus ní tárrtháilfear an Ghaeltacht gan an talamh.”2
In the 1960s, far from settling down to the academic moderation befitting his job as a lecturer in Trinity College, Ó Cadhain embarked on a bitter struggle to defend the language. He saw the Gaeltacht in clear class terms, with a respectable English-speaking middle class strangling the working people’s language: “Caithfear an mheánaicme seo threascairt, an nathair nimhe seo”.3 He called for a ban on sales of property in the Gaeltacht where this would jeopardise the position of Irish.
He was a leading light in Misneach, which fought tooth and nail for the language. He organised a midnight picket on Taoiseach Seán Lemass’s home, which succeeded in winning the release of Connemara fishermen jailed for refusing to pay rates. A government white paper on Irish was scuppered when Ó Cadhain got hold of a copy and leaked its meaningless banalities.
He took on the increasingly influential enemies of the language, refusing to be bound by any Queensberry rules. But he also excoriated the feeble respectability of the mainstream language movement, calling for revolutionary methods: “Níor smaoinigh muid fós ariamh in Éirinn gur gá réabhlóid ó bhun go barr leis an nGaeilge a thabhairt ar ais.”4
This was all part of a marked shift leftward in Ó Cadhain’s final decade. He had taken no part in the left-wing movements among republicans in the 1930s, but was enthusiastic about the republican embrace of social campaigning in the 1960s.
He proclaimed open sympathy with Marxism, and saw Irish more and more as one aspect of a broader revolutionary struggle. His involvement with the Gaeltacht civil rights movement crystallised this perspective, and he told Irish speakers that they had to embrace socialism:
An charaíocht a bhainfeas Éire d’Fhianna Fáil agus dá leithéidí, is féidir leis an gcaraíocht sin, ach muide dhá thapú anois, an Ghaeilge a thabhairt ar ais freisin do mhuintir na hÉireann…. Seo í Athghabháil na hÉireann, an Réabhlóid, réabhlóid intinne agus réabhlóid anama, réabhlóid i gcúrsaí maoine, seilbhe agus mai- reachtála… Sé dualgas lucht na Gaeilge a bheith ina sóisialaigh.5
Ó Cadhain saw the north explode in 1969, and welcomed mass nationalist resistance to British rule, hoping for military resistance too. He demanded that “capitalism must go as well as the Border”, rejecting the idea that the struggle could be restricted to civil rights or independence alone. The Ireland he envisaged would be “aontaithe, saor, gaelach, Éire na nOibrithe”.6
The marginalisation of the Irish language has resulted in a criminal neglect of Ó Cadhain’s work. He succeeded in bringing together a range of activities which are often viewed as separate or even antagonistic, and showed in his political activity that they naturally belonged together in an extensive fight to rebuild Irish society on radically new foundations. Now, as the need for such a transformation becomes ever more acute, is a good time for us to listen to what he has to say.

1 “I am a republican myself. I never gave in to the States that exist in this country and I hope I never will.”
2 “Irish won’t be saved without the Gaeltacht being saved, and the Gaeltacht won’t be saved without the land.”
3 “This middle class has to be vanquished, this poisonous serpent”
4 “We have never thought yet in Ireland that a revolution from the ground up is needed to revive Irish.”
5 “The combat that will wrench Ireland out of the hands of Fianna Fáil and its likes can give Irish back to the Irish people, if we grasp the opportunity now…. This is the Reconquest of Ireland, the Revolution, a revolution of the mind and a revolution of the soul, a revolution in matters of wealth, ownership and living… It is the duty of Irish speakers to be socialists.”
6 “united, free, gaelic, a Workers’ Ireland”

In this issue of LookLeft -

Can trade unions lead a fight back? Paul Dillon examines the strategic choices which face the trade union movement North and South —-

Health
LookLeft looks at how class defines health outcomes——

NAMA: So why was it created?
Nama plays no constructive economic role so why was it created asks Conor McCabe—–

The importance of politics
Historian Brian Hanley takes a look at the life
of socialist-republican George Gilmore—–

The Kids want Pyro
Donal Fallon and Kevin Brannigan take alook at Ultra culture—–

ESB – ‘It’s Your energy…for now”
Slaves and Slavery
– William Wall looks at the economics underpinning the Magdalene Laundries—–

Tom Redmond on Left Unity—-

Reports from Bodenstown and Peter Daly commemorations—–

Tomás MacGiolla – An enduring legacy

Fighting austerity in the Banana Republic of Italy

An Uncertain Future – the Arab Spring

A toxic Triangle- Gavan Titley examines the media’s role in the growth of Islamophobia.

Saving the Euro and the cowardice of Social Democracy – Influential Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis,

Interview with the authors of White Riot and history of Punk

Plus

Three pages News from working class communities and the left

Five pages of Reviews

The Jemmy Hope Column