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.

Brassicas

Originally published in the Kildare Nationalist newspaper. 

Brassicas – the cruciferous vegetables of the cabbage family – made a long and fruitful journey from the scraggly sea kale of their ancestors; today they provide us with some of our healthiest, easiest and most versatile crops, bred for their leaves (cabbage, kale, bok choi), roots (kohlrabi), flowers (broccoli, cauliflower) seeds (mustard) and buds (Brussels sprouts).

Such crops particularly suit Ireland, as they like lots of sun and water but not too much warmth – our summers, in other words. Moreover, many of them continue to produce throughout the year, as our kale does. Thus, in our garden cabbages comprise about a third of our crop, and we’ve been gathering them in and using or preserving them for the last month.

One of the easiest ways of making cabbage, of course, is in colcannon: all you need is a cabbage, an onion, and a potato. Boil some potatoes until soft in the middle, and while they’re boiling dice some onions and chop up a cabbage – I dice my onions about a centimetre on the side and my cabbage about three centimetre chunks, so that the onions will cook faster, but it’s up to you.

Once the potatoes are boiled and out of the water you take a pan, coat the bottom with a thin layer of oil, put on medium heat and throw in the onions. Cook about a minute and then throw in the cabbage, and cook for a few minutes or until the onions are golden-brown and the cabbages cooked through. In the few minutes that they will take to cook, mash the potatoes.

Next, chop up about 20 grams of parsley, wash and chop finely, and throw into the pan to cook for a moment. Finally, add the mash and mix it all together for a meal rich in vitamins, mostly vegetables but with some potato to hold it together.

One of the best brassicas this time of year, of course, are Brussels sprouts, which in our garden have been less vulnerable to pests than other cabbages -- perhaps because they are raised above mud-level. We are just harvesting the last of ours, but you can harvest them any time from autumn to spring, making them ideal for keeping your family in fresh vegetables during the winter months.

Many people boil the goodness out of Brussels sprouts, so one of the best ways to cook them is to cut the larger ones in half, boil some water, set them in for exactly three minutes, and then add to the rest of the meal separately.

If you want a new way to cook Brussels sprouts that allows the best flavour and avoids overcooking, try this recipe I used on my own. You will need:
300g Brussels sprouts
200g leeks
50g beetroot
One strip of bacon
Five cloves of garlic
10g butter
Chinese five-spice powder
Vegetable stock cube

Boil some water, cut the large Brussels sprouts in half, and put them in for three minutes – you want to flash-boil them, take the boiling water out and put in a bit of cold water to stop the cooking process. Then you take a strip of rashers (bacon), cut it into pieces about a centimetre across, and fry them in a pan.

While that is frying, chop the leeks into one-centimetre pieces (make sure to wash them well first!) and slice some mushrooms half a centimetre across. Take 20g of beetroot and cut into cubes half a centimetre across. Finally, mince some garlic or chop it very finely. When the rasher pieces are cooked just enough to be edible but not yet firm, put in the mushrooms, leeks and beetroot. Sautee these together for a few minutes, then add the minced garlic and sautee for another minute or so.

Dissolve a vegetable stock cube in about 20 ml of boiling water, and mix well. Add that to the mix with about 10 ml of lemon juice, so the mixture begins to sautee for a minute. Add a dash of five-spice powder; it’s available at most supermarkets, a mix of star anise, cloves, cinnamon, pepper and fennel seeds. Finally, add the Brussels sprouts and mix it all together. The result should be savoury, garlicky, tangy and just a bit spicy.

The cabbage you don’t use, of course, you should preserve through the winter, and the classic way of preserving cabbage, though, is by pickling it, either through the European method of sauerkraut, or through its spicier Asian version of kim chee.

To make sauerkraut, find a cylindrical container and a lid slightly smaller across than the container, to that it can slide down the interior with little air in-between – the cabbage has to be squashed down in salt water away from oxygen, but air still has to escape. Alternately, you could use a mayonnaise or other glass jar, stuff with sauerkraut to the rim and leave the lid on, securely but not tightly. Finely shred a cabbage and put a few handfuls of the shredded cabbage in the container, and pound it down with something heavy like a rolling pin.

Then sprinkle some salt onto the cabbage – about 50 g to the kilo – and repeat the process with another few handfuls until your container is full. Then fill the container with water until it just covers the top of the cabbage/salt mix. Put the lid on and place the container someplace warm to ferment. The cabbage should begin to ferment right away, and gradually fill with water that escapes from the cabbage. It will gradually turn from cabbage to sauerkraut over about a month, but you can dig in at any point, eat some and put the rest back. Just make sure to keep the cabbage away from oxygen.

Kim chee works in much the same way, but soaking the cabbage overnight in a salt brine – I use 50g of salt per kilo of cabbage – and the next morning draining it.

Then you rinse it and mix in a spicy paste, often with slivers of carrots or radishes, before pounding it into jars and leaving a lid on loosely.
My paste contained 10g ginger, 50g garlic, 20g hot pepper flakes, and 20g fish sauce for two kilos of cabbage.

With no electricity or technology, sauerkraut and kim chee allow you to have vitamin-rich vegetables all through the winter, straight from the pantry, until next year’s garden comes alive again.

Top photo: Red cabbage from our garden

Bottom photo: My kim chee.

Weather that reminds us to give thanks

As many times as I’ve seen the wind whistle across our land in the Bog of Allen, I’ve never before felt as nervous as I have today, as the giant trees around our property are bending alarmingly in the gale. Our cement house has actually groaned in the intense wind, which blew down a tree across our driveway recently and ripped our greenhouse door apart.

Our heat pump gave out and the house is cold, the road to our house has patches of water so wide it is almost impassable, and our chickens are barely able to step out of the coop without being blown down. We do have a shed-full of wood for the fire, along with a pile of turf from the bog -- but there’s been nothing but rain, and that soaks the turf and slows down the chopping. I’m supposed to be at work in Dublin right now, but our car broke down and the bus never showed up. Thankfully, our internet and phone works, so I could post this. Basically, though, it’s not my best morning.

Then again, I’m thankful we don’t live on the streets of Kilkenny yesterday, as the swelling river burst through the streets, smashing open the doors to pubs and businesses. I’m pleased that we have electricity, as thousands of people here in Ireland were left without it after recent storms. I’m thankful we did not have to abandon our homes over Christmas, or come home to a devastated neighbourhood. I’m thankful we were not on one of the flights that had to be cancelled, or on the roads that were completely impassable.

I have friends in the UK, where 2,000-year-old towns – founded by Romans – have seen their roads become canals. This has been the wettest December on record there, in a country where records tend to go back a ways – 341 millimetres of rain in one single day in Cumbria. More than 5,000 homes were flooded in Cumbria and Lancashire counties alone, and tens of thousands of homes lost electricity, and many local buildings looked like they had been bombed by the Blitz – including a 200-year-old pub whose interior was hollowed out by the rushing waters. Thankfully, local people are pitching in heroically to save as many homes and businesses as they can --- including many Syrian refugees, repaying the favour done to them when they were allowed to settle nearby.

I grew up where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, two of the largest rivers in the world, come together, and those rivers are wide and dangerous at the best of times. In 1993, though, I remember an unprecedented flood that eliminated entire towns and put large areas underwater. I interviewed former residents holding their mayoral elections in what were essentially refugee camps, to be mayor of a community rather than a physical town. I remember driving down a road until it stopped, seeing nothing but water all around and a church steeple poking out of the water in the distance.

It was called the 500-year-flood, as it was only supposed to happen that often. Then they saw a similar flood in 2008 and again this year. I have family who live along the rivers, patrolling the levees and preparing for the worst. I’m seeing images of homes ripped from their foundations, wild brown waters rushing through neighbourhoods, and towns along the river that survived previous floods fear they might have to abandon their homes for the last time.

A freak storm in the North Pole – which after all, only a thousand miles or so from us in Ireland – has pushed the temperature above freezing. The North Pole, which is supposed to remain below freezing all summer, is above freezing on New Year’s Eve.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how we are seeing more and more changes in the weather, but that it’s difficult to prove it’s connected to climate change. What we do know is that scientists predicted this sort of thing – unusual weather, going to extremes, at odd times of year – more and more often, and it’s happening all over the world.

When I see references to climate change on my social media feed, though, they tend to fall into the language of many activists and reporters --- the language of Hollywood catastrophes. Climate change becomes something imminent, perhaps happening The Day After Tomorrow. It becomes global, something that everyone pays attention to. It becomes total and dramatic, even exciting, as in a thousand disaster movies. Most of all, when this hypothetical thing hits, it will be undeniable. And this thing called “climate change,” we’re told, will “hit” – a word that implies something sudden and dramatic – very soon, so we have only a short time left to “stop it.” The clock is ticking. It’s all up to us now.

 I’m going to be harsh here: I suspect that we talk about climate change this way because we’re social primates with instincts primarily focused on our own status and not global abstract problems. Our better angels – our logical analysis of problems, our compassionate desire to help others – are forever warped by the gravitational pull of our primate drive to make ourselves look good within our social group.

Let's say you anticipate an imminent disaster, whether climate change or anything else. Of course you would feel a bond with other believers, and feel like an elite blessed with special knowledge. You would feel frustrated by the majority that don't seem to care about the disaster about to befall them. You have a reason for getting up in the morning, because we have become one of the heroes of the greatest story ever told. The urgency of the ticking clock allows us to ignore many smaller needs and considerations, perhaps including other people.

In short, it's tempting to become just like any number of other political groups these days -- angry, insular, and impotent. It's easy to be sucked into the trap of complaining about the "sheeple" that have been Brainwashed by the Mainstream Media -- something I hear from ecological friends, gun owners, conspiracy theorists and many other groups. It's seductive to simply read posts online or "like" them on social media, becoming the ecological equivalent of armchair generals or Monday-morning coaches. Finally, it's tempting to continue to anticipate the day everything will "hit," and people were forced to acknowledge you were right. 

But climate change isn’t a global tragedy happening someday; it’s a million small tragedies now, and more tomorrow. There is no turning it around at this point – only coping with what is to come. No clock is ticking, and there will never be a starting point, any more than the Industrial Revolution or the Decline of Rome had a starting point.

What we can do is anticipate the crises that are likely to occur in your local area in the next few decades, and prepare. You can help make sure the buses run on time, no matter the weather, and perhaps create your own unofficial bus / carpool service with a neighbour’s SUV or van. You can stock up supplies for the next emergency, and prepare for when your power goes out. You can make sure all your elderly neighbours are well, and keep visiting them. You can make sure that your office remains flexible with people who are stranded or unable to get to work, and that those people are not deprived of their livelihood.

You can set up child-minding arrangements in your neighbourhood, creating a “tree” of people who can watch children on short notice when the need arises. If you have access to land, you can cover it with fast-growing trees that will keep supplying your neighbours with firewood. You can gather with neighbours to help them rebuild, even if you don’t like them. You can let cousins or friends stay with you, and always have spare food and supplies ready and a plan to put into effect as soon as the need arises.

You can think of it as being a Londoner during the Blitz or a movie hero preparing the townspeople for a disaster, if that helps you. You need to actually help, though, and not expect to be thanked – and understand that, unlike most movie disasters, this one won’t build to a climax and be “all over,” but will crop up again frequently in our lifetimes. Your neighbours might not know about your service, but they don’t need to – they will be warm, dry and fed.

And we can realise how great things are right now. I just came in from chopping wood and wrote this by the fire. I have a day filled with small problems that need to be dealt with eventually, but for the moment, I’m in a warm and dry home with electricity and broadband, a pantry full of food and a family. We leave troubled days like these better people and feeling blessed.