Stretching the spring

We had a guest staying with us who was a massive help on the property, and her industrious hard work, plus, the fine weather of spring, has allowed us to re-do much of our garden. We now have a potato bed, have torn down much of our wooden garden, and will be putting it back in brick. We took the berry bushes and transplanted them to the back edge of our land, where we planted them in a newly built raised bed. We'll be creating a thorny hedge along the cow fence, creating our own barbed-wire hedgerow to keep out our neighbours' cows in case they get adventurous.

Our guest also planted some of the willow shoots we pollarded some weeks ago, and they will fill a gap in our hedgerow. I will put cardboard between the shoots to keep the weeds down, and lay down the now-rotted boards that made up our garden beds; as they compost down, they will feed the young trees, and we will be able to lay them down, year after year, into a hedgerow, a solid living wall of wood.

We used to have shower doors made of plexi-glass, or transparent plastic, until one of them came off the hinges. We could spend a lot of money to put it back, or we can just use a shower curtain and use the two-metre-long, one-metre wide transparent slab to make a cold-frame.

Cold-frames are ideal for people who lack the space or extra money for a greenhouse or poly-tunnel, but they allow you to do the same thing: to let you grow plants in a space that will let in sunlight but trap heat. Even when the temperature outside dips below freezing they keep out frost, and allow the gardener to more easily control water, pests and wind-blown seeds.

A cold-frame is just a box with glass or transparent plastic on top, ideally with a top slanted toward the south, and a bit taller than your waist so you don’t have to stoop to get into it. Fill the box with earth and plant seeds inside, and over the slanted top secure a sheet of glass or whatever you have. You could install the window frame with hinges at the top for maximum convenience, but just taking off the glass gently will do.

To keep seedlings going during the winter, you can insulate the back and sides with anything from straw bales to foam. You can also do what the Victorians did and pile in manure under the bed, which generates a lot of heat when it decomposes. Put soil on top for the seedlings, and you give the baby plants warmth from above and below.

Around this time of year, most of us are only just beginning to put in our plants outside – and we still have the occasional frost. Plants are at their most valuable when they are seedlings, and can perish quickly with a drop in temperature, a deluge of rain or a nibble from a passing critter. Seedlings are also expensive to buy; you can grow annual plants from seeds, but that means that you lose up to a month of growing time.

Cold-frames solve this problem, allowing you to start your seeds early under conditions that you control, while it is still cold and miserable outside. The additional month of growing time means that you can get a richer harvest than you ever thought you could in this country.

After the seedlings are out, moreover, cold-frames remain useful for growing warmer-weather plants – Victorians grew tropical crops in Britain this way. During the winter months, it allows your crops to continue growing without threat of frost.

If you want to start small, though, you can create cloches, transparent coverings for one or a few plants each. Victorians, again, mass-produced glass bells to cover plants to create a microclimate inside. You can do the same thing, however, with soda bottles.

To make a cloche, cut the bottom off an old two-litre bottle and place it around a seedling in the garden. Once the bottom is off, the plastic becomes very flimsy, so you might want to bury the edges several centimetres deep to keep it stable. Alternately, you can place a ring or solid structure inside if you have one, something that will keep the bottle in place but allow the seedling to grow. Or you can place it around a flowerpot whose diameter is smaller than that of the bottle.

Cloches, like greenhouses, allow you to regulate the amount of water a plant receives – here that means not getting waterlogged in the rainy winter. You might want to keep the caps of your soda bottles in a drawer, so you can put them back on at night if it gets too cold.

A step up from a cloche is a row cover, something to put over an entire bed. We clamped flexible plastic piping over our raised beds to make hoops, draped clear plastic over them and secured the plastic to the wood below the hoops with staples. Alternately, instead of plastic, you could put horticultural fleece over another raised bed– we did both this year, and it worked so well that our corn salad survived the darkest part of winter.

Photo: Grapes growing in Ireland, thanks to greenhouses and cold-frames. 

Ireland's Quiet Revolution

Originally published in the American Conservative. 

Once every four years my social media feed goes bananas; hundreds of colleagues in my native USA promise that the upcoming election will the most important moment in history, the last chance to fulfill our promise as leaders of the planet or save ourselves from sliding into totalitarian darkness. This time around I know people who have supported Trump, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Carson, Clinton, Sanders, and Stein, with every fan base seeing themselves as hobbits standing up to Sauron. Too few of my friends on the left or right pay much attention to the other 195 countries of the world, or the fact that some of their elections and voter frustrations parallel the USA in instructive ways.

Here in Ireland, for example, we saw the same 2008 crash and Potemkin recovery, similar anti-government protests and civil disobedience. And in last month’s election, just as in the American primaries, many voters abandoned the mainstream choices and flocked to political independents promising radical change—and no one knows quite what will happen next.

The two countries’ upsets filtered through different voting systems: In the U.S., independents Trump and Sanders had to declare themselves a nominal Republican and Democrat, as the system effectively shuts out third parties. Ireland, though, is parliamentary; voters select their representatives in the Dail (the parliament, pronounced something like “Doyle”). The majority party—or coalition of parties—then create the ruling administration.

The U.S. is unlikely to chuck the Constitution for a parliamentary system any time soon, but Ireland has a few other innovations that my countrymen should consider. We vote for up to several people to represent one district, usually from more than one party. Voting districts are not gerrymandered into bizarre shapes, so seats are not pre-determined. We rank our choices first to last, and if candidates don’t reach a certain quota on the first round, voters’ subsequent choices are factored in—like being able to choose Rand Paul over Sanders, Sanders over Trump, and Trump over Clinton. Such rules allow voters here to fire their public servants more easily than in my native country, where one group gains extraordinary federal power by some slim margin, and voters have only one choice more than in authoritarian states like North Korea.

The two main parties, Fianna Fail (rhymes with fall, not fail) and Fine Gael (actually does rhyme with fail) parallel American Democrats and Republicans in some ways; in theory, they were ideological opposites descended from the bitter rivalry of the Irish Civil War. In practice both were centrist, pro-business parties sustained mostly by old family loyalties, reliably getting a large chunk of the votes and taking turns holding power.

On our most recent election night in February, though, the mainstream parties were shocked to receive their worst results ever, 25 and 30 percent each, while almost half the votes went to third parties and independents—the nationalist Sinn Fein, an alphabet soup of small activist parties, and an army of locally-supported wild cards. Now the government hangs in limbo, as representatives of many parties must duct-tape a coalition together.

The U.S. and Ireland also entered the 21st century with very different pasts that shape voter expectations. Americans today grew up in a superpower, surrounded by the massive infrastructure of suburban wealth; Ireland remained an agrarian and traditional society until the last few decades, and only then, during an economic boom in the 1990s, was modernized at bewildering speed.

Millions of Irish built homes with the new wealth, commuter towns increased several hundred percent in size, and the construction was financed by an escalating debt bubble. When the banks collapsed in 2008, the Fianna Fail government made the fatal decision to guarantee all bank debt with public funds. Those promises came back to haunt them in 2010, when the country went effectively bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Ireland has chafed under its debt burden ever since, and many of my neighbors feel that they left the boom worse than they entered.

After this economic crisis, in 2011, the once-dominant Fianna Fail lost 60 percent of their support—the greatest fall of any party in Irish history. A Fine Gael-led coalition took power, but support for third parties and independents began to rise. The new government’s honeymoon quickly wore off; the terms of the bailout limited their power to make changes, and a series of new taxes and fees angered an already struggling populace. (Water charges introduced in late 2014, for example, spurred massive public protests that are still going 18 months later, and almost half of all households have simply refused to pay them.)

When the time came for a new election this year, Fine Gael’s slogan, “Let’s Keep the Recovery Going,” garnered only horse laughter from people who weren’t feeling the recovery. In the end, Ireland’s recent history of bubble, bust, and bailout effectively destroyed generations-old political loyalties, leading one wag to comment that Angela Merkel had finally ended Ireland’s civil war.

In the U.S., populist groundswells for Trump and Sanders might be strong enough to tear the two parties apart without actually leading their candidates to victory. In the same way, Ireland’s surge of independents crippled the two main parties, but are not strong enough to take power themselves; even if they could all work together, they would be just shy of a majority.

That leaves every politico and pundit in the country frantically shuffling numbers around to see what kind of government is possible, and whatever agreement party leaders reach in the coming weeks will result in the strangest in the Republic’s history. The possibilities include:

1. The two mainstream parties go into coalition with each other. Picture Republicans Rubio and Kasich forming a government with Hillary Clinton to stop Trump and Sanders, and you see how much pride would have to be swallowed.
   
2. A minority Fine Gael government cobbled together with many, many independents, who are meeting with Fine Gael leaders one by one and presenting lists of individual demands in exchange for co-operation.
   
3. Everyone gives up and a new election is called, and all the candidates re-open their campaign offices.

In theory, if the next election results tip even further away from the main parties, the next government could be run by the largest third party—in this case the socialist Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army during the terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s. That’s not as frightening as it sounds: they abandoned violence two decades ago, and have been increasingly accepted as a legitimate party. But it would be unprecedented, with unknown effects on Ireland’s relations with Britain and Europe. 

For now the country feels strangely like the U.S. did in November of 2000—but with a few important differences. People here don’t demand global dominance or an endless boom, just jobs and basic infrastructure. Since the system allows for many parties to participate, voters know they can blow off frustrations without destroying the established order. 

Most importantly, voters here lack the sense of imminent apocalypse that haunts Americans. Some Irish are celebrating after the election, some are chastened, some are making deals—but no one is panicking. Whatever happens, they’ll get through this.

Published by history magazine

The very nice people at Medieval Histories have reprinted my piece on bog butter -- check it out here, and the rest of their magazine.

Photo: The bog after a rain.

Ireland's 100th anniversary

A century ago this Easter, 1,200 Irish soldiers tried to take the city of Dublin by force; 500 would be killed, and 3,500 Dubliners taken prisoner by the British. The uprising that marked the beginning of the War for Independence.

Today Ireland saw its largest-ever parade to honour the 1916 Uprising.

Also, Happy Easter!

Published in American Conservative

They have just published my piece on the Irish election, so check it out.

Election in Ireland

Friends of mine around the world are talking about little but the US election this year, even though it’s several months away. There actually are 194 other countries in the world, though, and most of them have elections too – many of which are quite instructive, both in the way they parallel the US election and in ways they are very different.

Last Friday was Election Day here in Ireland – my first vote as a citizen -- and this election campaign, like that of the USA’s, is without precedent in recent memory. It’s a bit different here because we have a parliamentary system, vote for more than one person to represent our district, and have first and second choices that factor in when votes are tallied -- a system that allows for multiple parties that must work together in coalition. It has many advantages over the USA’s system, in which people choose between the least awful of two often-similar candidates, and one gains enormous power by some slim margin.

In our case, the two biggest parties are Fianna Fail (rhymes with fall, not fail) and Fine Gael (actually does rhyme with fail), and they each tend to get about 40 per cent of the vote, forming a majority coalition with one of the minor parties.

Still, the mood among the populace is similar – people are struggling and unhappy with the mainstream candidates. Fianna Fail governed during the crash of 2008, and most people think they did a terrible job – Ireland effectively went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the IMF and EU. The last election voters slammed Fianna Fail hard, and a coalition of Fine Gael and the Labour party took power. But they, too, have lost credibility with voters, trying to boost the government’s income with a series of extremely unpopular taxes.

Thus, just as in my native USA, dark-horse candidates are doing very well. Over there it means Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, independents running under the nominal banner of the major parties; here it means third parties and independents.

Sinn Fein has been the biggest beneficiary of this, the left-wing nationalist party is now garnering about half as many votes as the major parties – not able to control a government yet, but getting there. They have a lot of baggage, though – they were the political arm of the IRA during the terrorism of the 1970s and 80s, and remain the only party operating in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. They went legitimate a long time ago – it’s been almost two decades since the Good Friday accords effectively ended the “Troubles,” and former terrorist like Martin McGuinness even had dinner with Queen Elizabeth recently. Younger voters see them as the legitimate political party they are, but older voters have not forgotten Sinn Fein’s past, and the mainstream parties have refused to work with them.

Independents and minor parties like the Anti-Austerity Alliance or the Social Democrats – won more candidates than any party at all, meaning that a plurality of people now elected are local candidates promising to undo the recent actions of the major parties.

As I write this – with 34 of the 40 election counts complete and 146 of the Dail’s 158 seats filled -- the two “major” parties are major no longer, not only closely matched but both severely diminished in numbers. Ordinarily garnering 35 to 50 per cent of the vote, this time they won about 25 per cent each, with Sinn Fein taking 13 per cent, and independents and minor parties making up most of the rest.

Now comes the tricky part: all these candidates have to form a coalition government, and whatever agreement they managed to hammer out, it will be the strangest government in this country’s history. There are a few possibilities:

1.) the two main parties, rivals as long as the nation has existed and descended from the two sides of Ireland’s civil war, will be forced to go into coalition with each other; if you are American, picture all the mainstream Republicans forming a government with Hillary Clinton to stop Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

2.) Sinn Fein and all the minor parties will be forced to form a sweeping left-wing coalition; it’s possible, but seems quite fragile;

3.) One of the two major parties will have to join forces with Sinn Fein, which they have vowed never to do;

4.) There will be a hung parliament, and we’ll have another election soon.

I’ll have more to say on this later, but for the moment one thing is clear: here as in many countries, voters are overthrowing the political establishment in favour of radical change. What kind of change they get remains to be seen.  

 Photo: Streetcorner in Dublin.

Invasion of technology

Most readers of this blog know that I regularly read, and comment in, John Michael Greer's admirable blog The Archdruid Report. I almost never mention other web sites on this blog, but I thought some of the recent discussions there were worth mentioning, and I doubt he would mind if I reproduced my comments.

A few months ago JMG posted a fascinating essay, "The Shadows in the Cave," about our culture's obsession with everyone owning the latest technologies. It's almost taboo, he pointed out, for people not to have a television, mobile phone, microwave and many other gadgets, even though humans survived before these things were invented and many people get on quite well without them.

JMG also pointed out something I've often harped on here: that most people these days get all their experience of the world from screens and loudspeakers, which paints a certain picture of the outside world for them. Most people I know -- left or right, American or European, religious or not -- are different only in the brand of information provider they use, and all accept the information given to them as though it were real experience.

That led in turn to a productive debate in the comments, in which I said:

JMG,

I’ve been reading the last series of posts with great interest, and find they match my own experience. Rather than simply add my experiences to the long list here, I’d like to bring up a few related points.

Firstly, it’s not just that more people are increasingly adopting technology in their private lives – it’s that technology has invaded public spaces until it’s almost impossible to escape their influence. For example, I find it increasingly difficult to ride the bus, eat at a restaurant, work in an office, or relax in a coffee shop, without loud music blaring over loudspeakers, interfering with normal reading or conversation.

In our office there is a daily battle to get the pop music turned down, and the idea offends many people – “What would we listen to?” they ask. I invested in my own headphones to listen to something else, but this also makes conversation more difficult, and it takes away my right to silence.

The same is true of television screens. Just in the time we’ve lived in Ireland, it seems, more and more pubs have abandoned the conversation or sing-a-longs for which they were traditionally known; many have purchased wide-screen televisions, and more patrons just sit there staring at it. More and more restaurants too have a television on the wall, playing television while people are trying to eat. I have even seen offices that set up televisions on every wall – showing company propaganda rather than actual programming, but programming all the same.

Secondly, I notice that many people – especially in my native USA – regard adopting the latest technology not just as a fashion, but as a patriotic or religious duty. I hear many people talk about “supporting the economy” – meaning the money economy, a coalition of international corporations, beholden to no one -- as though they are tithing in church. I can’t tell you how often I hear people stare at their glowing rectangles and make announcements about how “the economy” is doing, as though they have sworn loyalty to it rather than to their family or community, and as though they have some control over it.

Finally – while I largely agree with you and everyone here about the dangers of technology, and have argued as much in my own life – I would argue that just using technology sparingly makes a big difference.

For example, I know many people who only watch one television programme, and gather at friends’ homes to watch it 12 times a year or however often it is on, and live the rest of their lives largely media-free. They find their television gatherings a powerful experience, partly because they are seeing it with others, but partly because they are not surrounded by such things all the time. For my part, I watch old black-and-white films with my daughter, and have written about their value in envisioning a low-tech future.

When our ancestors saw plays or operas, or my grandparents saw cinema in the 1930s, I suspect they felt a power and catharsis that few of us will ever know, precisely because what they experienced was so different from their daily life. Just as loudspeakers playing the same songs over and over prevent me from ever enjoying those songs again, so does constant exposure to television or media rob us of the ability to savour them.

Thank you for your posts,

Brian Kaller

 

Bonds of community

I take every chance I get to chat with people at the bus stop, at the shops in my village, and on the bus to work in Dublin; people don’t socialise as much these days, and our lives are the worse for it.

We become moral animals when we care about others as we do ourselves, and in most eras that wasn’t a problem. Whether in Stone Age tribes or bucolic villages, we lived in the constant presence of people like ourselves, with whom we shared a lifetime of memories and on whom we depend. You might have had conflicts with your neighbour, but after sharing three sacraments, a football championship, the rights to the nearby pasture and two great-grandmothers, you learn to get along. Relationships like this civilise us, and thousands of such threadlike connections, layer upon layer, cushion the weight of the world.

Today, though, we spend much of our lives alone even in a crowd, often insulated by headphones and absorbed in a screen of some kind, whether a lap-top, television or phone. In this protective bubble we find it easy to treat the icons on Facebook like the icons on a video game, or the cars on the road like moving images on a screen. We can fill online comment boxes or the space between our cars with language we would never use over a cup of tea, because we can now live in a world free of identity and consequences. As individuals we default to being self-absorbed, and now we have technology that allows us to stay that way.

People had drifted apart long before the digital revolution, though; 16 years ago sociologist Robert Putnam, in his seminal book Bowling Alone, compared survey data from across the decades, exploring how often people ate together, joined clubs, talked to neighbours and so on. Putnam looked at the USA, but his conclusions apply here as well, and they were dramatic and sweeping: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished.

Read that again: Most traditional forms of human interaction have declined, and some have almost vanished. 

“Human interaction” covers quite a bit of ground, of course, and Putnam goes through hundreds of pages of examples – any of which might seem tiny in isolation, but fit like mosaic pieces to portray a crisis. Over two decades, for example, the number of times people entertained friends at home had fallen by half. “Time diary” studies show that people spent a third less time socializing in 1995 than in 1965. Instances of family members vacationing together, going to church together, or “just sitting and talking,” as one poll put it, have all declined. Gradually and silently, hundreds of millions of neighbours became strangers.

Putnam’s 2000 work spawned a decade of journal papers and studies looking at various kinds of “social capital” and hot academic debates over its definition. Most of us, though, know it when we see it, and when we have it we live longer, feel better, are stronger, healthier, and have more meaningful lives when we are part of a close family or a loyal group of friends.

It’s more than your best mates, however – our lives are made up of thousands of tiny gestures like this every day, and ninety-nine out of a hundred fly right by us. We don’t think much about the pedestrian who shifts to one side to let us pass, the clerk who smiles at us, or the kids who walk around our property instead of through, but we coast on a sea of such courtesies, and where such moments disappear – say, in a violent inner-city neighbourhood – we immediately feel their absence.

 “Members of a community that follows the principle of generalized reciprocity – raking your leaves before they blow onto your neighbours' yard, lending a dime to a stranger for a parking meter, buying a round of drinks the week you earn overtime, keeping an eye on a friend's house, taking turns bringing snacks to Sunday school … find that their self-interest is served,” Putnam wrote.

That’s why I like to chat with people I meet; I’m putting pennies in a bank of social trust, from which we can all withdraw someday. When we do that we help regrow an older and real social network, the one that you don’t leave when you die.