The Quakers Again

A happy family, we’re told, eats together.  The dinner table is the fulcrum of the family where life is talked out under the benign eye of the loving matriarch. Dad provides some jokes.  It’s not really how I remember meal times growing up. We did eat together, it was important to the family and it was often a laugh, but meals didn’t really take the form of a pleasant middle-class dinner party.  Instead dinner started with a frantic scramble for food, followed by a grim silence as the days takings were consumed.  The atmosphere was more Gulag than Come Dine with Me, talk and laughter followed after dinner was eaten, which in the case of me and my brothers never took more than ninety seconds.  My father approved of this gluttony and insists to this day that it’s a genetic imprint of the Famine.  Irish people, he reckons, were so traumatized by the 1845-49 famine that they consume food in a desperately functional manner.  It’s an interesting hypothesis; although I think in our case eating habits may have been more influenced by our father’s prodigious, Wellesian voracity than some folk memory.  I wouldn’t dismiss the argument altogether though; a person has a right to suppose that the Famine is the single defining event in Irish History.  As with most of our story, it becomes subsumed by the bitterness in our relations with the British, and the Liberal government of the time demonstrated a spectacular disregard for the Irish peasantry.  The second episode of my Quaker documentary, Waterford’s Friends, features a choice quote from Sir Charles Trevelyan to the effect that the Irish deserved what they got.  To be fair, and to fudge the matter as I usually like to, the previous Conservative government of Robert Peel did take what action it could to relieve the situation.  Peel may have been attracted to the Free Market but he was enough of an old school Tory paternalist to believe that when poor people are starving the government may have some responsibility to help.  John Russell’s Whigs in an act of blinkered idealism – which ought not to be lost on us today – wanted the market to decide who lived and who died.  Also to be fair, many of the starving peasants were hunted from their holdings not by absentee landlords but good catholic Irish nationalist farmers from whom they sub-let and from whom they got little in the way of compassion.  However, politics and recrimination aside, the desperate fact of the famine, an event so terrible it could, according to my Dad, genetically program the behavior of subsequent generations of Irish people in their eating habits is what fascinates me.  Our main cemetery in Waterford, Saint Otterans, is located where it is because that is where the refugees from the land died in their hundreds.  The country boreens festooned with the dead and the dying.  The desperate journeys to America where success awaited some, penury the others.  The Waterford Quakers were one of the first (although as they are quick to point out, not the only) groups to organize relief.  Their religion had little time for economic theory, economic practice was more their line; nor were they too interested in questioning the motives of God.  God may have had His reasons, but their job was simple, to help.  What I love about that help was that it often took the form of loans, those they helped paid them back, and the money was reinvested somewhere else.  The Quakers were not interesting in feeling good about themselves, they wanted to get things done.  There was no religious caveat to the help; Quakers don’t seek converts, reasoning that a person must find their own way to God, without nudges.  It seems to me that the Quaker belief in God is so profound that they are much more comfortable in allowing that God discretion in His own decisions, a refreshing contrast to the zealots around the world today who are determined to do God’s will themselves in case, I don’t know, He forgets.  I’m not into conversion myself, I suppose an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Catholic is much the same as an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Quaker, or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Muslim or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Mormon.  But I’ve developed a profound respect for the Quakers of Waterford, as much for their practicality as anything else.  The second episode of Waterford’s Friends is broadcast tomorrow at 11am.

Peacefully Radical

There may or may not be lessons to be taken from history.  First and foremost, I like the stories and the weirder the better.  One of my favourites is the Siege of Munster (German Munster, not our Munster) during the early stages of the Reformation.  Growing up in a country with such Catholic baggage and where Protestantism had been the religion of the ruling establishment, I think we tend not to fully understand the excitement of the reformation, its iconoclasm, its radicalism, its individualism.  In an age where belief in God was deeply held and unquestioned and where that God could only be communicated with through a monolithic church, Martin Luther’s idea that your own personal faith in God alone will decide your destiny must have been thrilling for those (usually artisans and shop-keepers) willing to embrace it.  The new protestant theologians found that no one had exclusive ownership of the bible and its meanings. In this teaching we have the beginnings of individual liberty, freedom of expression and, paradoxically, secularism and atheism.  Quite how thrilling this could be was revealed in the religious-political mania that took hold in Munster in 1534. A group of radical Anabaptists took control of the city and declared a second Jerusalem.  They were generally artisans, bakers and tailors and the like.  They instituted adult baptism sparking a powerful revivalist movement amongst the population (in a time of high infant mortality though, early baptisms were a big selling point for the Catholic Church).  The expelled Bishop began to besiege the city and Anabaptist leader Jan Matthys, believing himself to be a second Gideon, led thirty men to attack the Bishop’s army. It didn’t go well.  Tailor John Bockelson took over the rebel city and things got really interesting.  He introduced communal living – which meant confiscation of all goods for his own use – and polygamy, promptly taking sixteen wives for himself.  Execution and torture became commonplace and a proto-secret police was developed. He anticipated 1970's British stand-up comedy by publically beheading one of his wives. The city was retaken and Bockelson was subjected to a pretty gruesome execution himself.  Not surprisingly Munster gave radical Protestantism a bad name and as a consequence pacifism became a cornerstone of many protestant groups thereafter.  An intense devotion to the bible and rejection of any interlocutor priesthood between the individual and God was politically unacceptable in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and successor groups to the Anabaptists, like the Mennonites, the Amish or the Dunkers could only insulate themselves from the full rigours of religious persecution by insisting on a quiet, peaceful existence.  This Friday WLR FM will broadcast the first of my two-part documentary on the Waterford Quakers, a religious group whose famous pacifism came from a similar political expediency.  The Quakers emerged from a revolutionary period in English history.  The political could not be separated from the religious during the English Civil War which ended with the execution of a King – an extraordinary event in 17^th Century Europe.  Lest the chopping off of the King’s Head might encourage too much revolution, the Cromwellian government was keen to keep a lid on groups like the Levellers, and the Quakers were regarded with suspicion, hence their attachment to peace.  However unlike other pacifist religious groups, the Quakers believed in a full engagement with the economic life of their environment.  This practical aspect of the religion sets it apart from protestant fundamentalism.  Clearly the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is an anathema to Quakers, but so too is some of the theology of protestant groups, particularly the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination.  Pre-destination basically dictates that God has already chosen those who will ascend to heaven before the creation of the world, before you or anyone else was born.  The doctrine removes all notions of individual responsibility and morality and is profoundly stupid.  The Quakers believed that we are put on this earth to make use of the talents God gave us, an individual relationship with God and bible is important, but it’s only a starting point.  The Quakers in Waterford were very useful; they started Jacob’s biscuits, Waterford Crystal, the Portlaw Cotton Mill, and the Neptune Shipyard.  They traded throughout the Atlantic seaboard and were responsible for a third of the trade in Waterford with no more than 2% of the population. They also saved the Irish language in Waterford through their intervention in Ring during the Famine.  In fact, you can be an athiest and still approve of Quakerism which may explain why athiest pin-up Christopher Hitchens sends his children to a Quaker school. Their contribution to Waterford is remarkable; I hope the programme does it justice.  Lessons from history?  Well, when the Malcomson family got fed up paying exorbitant fees to export their cotton from Portlaw, they decided to build their own ships in Waterford.  There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Templars Hall

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on yesterday’s report on WLR from Templar’s Hall in Waterford.  Of course it was nice to have so much positive feedback, and those who expressed reservations about the piece have given me food for thought in the coming days. I have to admit, the confrontations with drunken revelers were kinda fun (and what you heard was pretty much what happened, I don’t believe in stitching people up in the editing room), but the thought of anyone trying to bring up their family in this environment was profoundly upsetting.  I went to Templar’s Hall on Monday night to see just how bad the anti-social behaviour engaged in by some of the students in rented houses there is. Context is everything.  This is a demographic mis-match. If there were no families living in Templars Hall I suppose the behaviour would fall under youthful joie de vivre and they’d left to their own devices. Although students who go to college primarily to study (they do exist) might still have cause to complain.  However the fact is that families do live in Templar’s Hall.  Many moved out as it became apparent just quite how many houses had been sold to landlords intent on renting to students.  Often those moving out sold to landlords thereby intensifying the problem.  With the property market in Ireland now moribund, those left behind no longer have the option to sell out.  Besides, their children are going to local schools, many of them work locally so why should they?  The main problem I witnessed on Monday wasn’t so much individual behaviour (although some of that was pretty bad) but it was the scale of the problem.  One or two parties in a residential estate are hardly anything to worry about, but loud 4/4 beats coming from every third or fourth house two or three nights a week?  There’s nothing worth commenting on in a group of boisterous twenty year olds walking the street, but when these groups traipse up and down an estate or 50, 20 or even 10 yard intervals all night, filling the air with incoherent laughter and clinking bags, it’s not surprising a family might feel trapped. In that case there is no cruel intention but the effect remains upsetting.  A bottle might be broken on any street, but every corner, every green space, every nook and cranny of an estate where a child might be expected to play out their childhood? Then there’s the simple fact that these are young people, not perhaps best adept at keeping their properties clean, an inadequacy that will extend to the garden, and then the street. Having scant regard for the properties they live in, this lack of respect is, I think, extended to the estate as a whole, and to the people trying to make a life there.  Because the rationale of the partying renters in Templar’s Hall tends to put the blame back on the families living there – “What do they expect?” “Students are going to party, they shouldn’t have moved here”.  Even if this reasoning were sound - which it isn’t - it doesn’t actually absolve them of responsibility for their behaviour. I know he never went to trial, but if he did, I don’t even think Fred West would have argued in court that his victims had it coming “I am Fred West after all”.  It seems to me perfectly true that families and students are not ideal neighbours, but that’s not the fault of the residents, and it doesn’t absolve people from their responsibilities to one another.  There may also be a seperate issue with young men.  While girls were prepared to at least attempt to explain themselves to me, the response of the drunken young men I came across was either “no comment” (a statement which many seemed to believe carried legally binding powers) or “fuck off” (which again was a request I had no legal obligation to comply with).  Drinking in their own groups, the men were loud and raucous, but I couldn’t help thinking that these young men, brought up in the internet age, walked into this estate sober and without the social skills to engage with their neighbours in a way that might create some understanding and report.  This is a highly contentious and subjective statement, but here goes: I think there are many young men whose social skills operate on two settings: morbid shyness and drunken exuberance. Add to that the inevitable herd mentality and primacy of the peer group, and there is a sense in which these men don’t perhaps believe that society exists.  Mrs. Thatcher is often misquoted on this issue of  society. She wasn’t advocating naked individualism (which isn’t to say that’s not what her policies created) but her argument was that “society” came down to the good will, or not, of individuals. There are perhaps too many individuals surrendering their innate decency to a headless, rudderless herd intent on having a “good time” at all costs.

Bad News

A few months ago we were covering a story on WLR about the takeover of US pharmaceutical firm Genzyme by French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi.  Exciting eh? The thing is of course, Genzyme is a major employer in Waterford and one of the few in the last three years that didn't appear to have a question mark hanging over it, but takeovers make people nervous.  And so they should, takeovers are one of the times when the naked ruthlessness of capitalism is exposed, on show for all to see. Sanofi appeared to be smiling at Genzyme through shark's teeth.  Besides, as the good people in Talk Talk management proved this week, profitability and a good workforce is no reason not to close a factory. In order to make sense of the Genzyme takeover – which was safely outside the power of my mind - I got in contact with Meg Tyrell, a Bloomberg correspondent who knew the sector inside out and was very helpful.  She seemed to think everything would be okay in the short and medium term, as for the long term, well, capitalism doesn’t really do the long term.  I told her afterwards how glad I was not to have relay any more bad news to people in Waterford, “I hear you on that” came the response from the American accent on the other end of the line. It’s truly horrible to have to report on job losses, not as bad as having to endure the lost job itself, but it is depressing and working as I do for a business that depends on local spending power, it’s not hard to see personal consequences down the line.  Last week’s news that Talk Talk was closing its Waterford operation with the loss of 575 jobs left me and many like me nauseated with worry as to how this will affect my city and family; meeting the workers affected left me angry and upset with how ordinary, decent working people in Waterford were being treated by the principles of international capitalism.  Of course, as I say that I have to acknowledge that the jobs wouldn’t have existed in the first place without international capitalism – you get no answers off me folks.  None of the emotions I’ve just described have any place in the reporting of this story, one can only hope that feeling upset, angry, scared might bring you closer to the factual truth of how the workers are feeling, but I don’t advise going all Peter Finch.  Over the weekend we also marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  That was a bad news day.  The attacks started just before two in the afternoon Irish time.  I was reading the news that day but was still pretty new to the job.  I knew a plane had hit the tower when I went to read the news at two o’clock, but I no had real idea what was going on, or the size of the aircraft.  As I was getting towards the end of the bulletin, I was told a second plane had crashed into the other tower, confirming not only was it not an accident, but a coordinated attack.  While I was reading the news on WLR at three o’clock, still not fully understanding what the hell was going on, I was given a message on air that the first tower had collapsed.  At the time I wasn’t used to broadcasting off the cuff, I clearly remember my throat contracting and mouth drying up but most particularly a dizziness as my brain started to issue emotional responses, as if on reflex, while I was live on air.  With the collapse of the tower I knew that thousands of people had just been murdered and that something terrible was going on.  The most frightening thing was not knowing where this was going to end. What happened was bad enough, but at the time, as the news got worse and worse and events built up with a brutal speed, we wondered what was next. It seemed so many people were involved in the attack and intent on so much destruction that I remember thinking a nuclear explosion had to be next. For a half an hour, as the towers were collapsing, I wondered whether this was the end of the world.  It was hard to deliver news that day. New York being the world’s greatest city, its destruction felt a bit like the end of the world. The fact that so many of those emergency personnel had Irish surnames made the whole thing a lot personal to us.  But that wasn’t my worst bad news day.   That was the day when Waterford’s end of the world came.  When receivers pulled the plug on Waterford Crystal in January 2009, the national press spoke about hundreds of job losses, quite right too.  In Waterford though, the closure, and the brutal way it was handled, and most of all the desperate defiance of the workforce, went beyond figures and lost incomes.  It was a spiritual and existential crisis for every single individual in the city.  Each person had to come to terms with the trauma caused when a Dublin accountant decided one cold winter morning to end my city’s sense of itself.  It wasn’t easy to report that one in a detached manner.  I find maintaining impartiality in politics easy, enjoyable even, but when the sit-in started at Waterford Crystal it was the only time I remember wanting to shout, get angry, man the barricades.  I didn’t, and no doubt I would have had little useful to say, but being a reporter was never harder than that day.  And yet, life goes on.  New York is still New York, and Waterford will still be Waterford.  I think a man (or woman) picking themselves up from the ground with a bloody nose, and dusting themselves off while making a black, black joke has always been our self-image.  We’ll pick ourselves up; I just wish we didn’t have to do it so often.

Sympathy for the Devil

Somewhere in Tripoli tonight a man is facing an almighty reckoning.  The ghosts of 42 years of repression have come to hunt Colonel Gaddafi out his bunker, proving yet again how fragile a hold on power the most brutal dictators have.  Hard but brittle, the façade crumbles when enough people expose it for what it is, a façade.  As Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones put it “Ain't talking big what makes a man big, s'long as he makes folks believe it?” Talking big – if by big we mean Mad - is what Gaddafi was good at; I’m not so sure about thinking big. The hunted dictator holed up in a castle of sand powerlessly waiting for the tide to come in is a compelling subject for the dramatist, from Shakespeare to O’Neill, but I don’t think the Colonel is all that interested in reflection. Not that he isn’t smart in his way, but while I haven’t read The Green Book, I imagine it’s a piece of self-serving incoherent Mein Kampfism. The question he now faces is how to go out, as a Hitler or a Mussolini? Detached from reality in Romantic self-pity, Hitler had no interest in life after the Reich and committed the suicide he should have carried when he lived in the obscurity from which he should never have emerged.  Mussolini on the other hand was different, however much he enjoyed being Il Duce, he was also a man, and an Italian man at that.  The dictatorship hadn’t worked out but if he could just make it to South America, there would always be skirts to chase.  It didn’t work out; he was nabbed just outside Milan and strung up with piano wire. Colonel Gaddafi was behind some of the worst atrocities of the last thirty years, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in Ireland by paying for the IRA to become Europe’s number one terrorist organisation and his rule in Libya was a particularly noxious blend of corruption, personality cult and indoctrination.  But the people were also kept on their toes by a taste for the surreal that would rival Vic and Bob.  That’s one of the problems with tonight’s events.  Hitler remains entirely odious, but it’s now possible to joke about Mussolini, and Gaddafi? Who hasn’t had a laugh about Gaddafi? Whether it was farting at interviews, making clearly illogical pronouncements (Libya is the only democracy on the whole planet) and, let’s face it, baiting America in the eighties, for most of us Gaddafi was an entertaining nutter.  If everything goes according to plan, democracy will emerge and a Libyan Enda Kenny will take the helm, and there may be moments when we miss Gaddafi on the world stage, just for entertainment value (Hugo Chavez just isn’t quite mad enough for me). So will his end be the final act of a lifelong nutter? Instead of a Hitler or Mussolini, will he choose the MacBeth route of fatalistic defiance “Why should I play the Roman, and die on mine own sword? While I see lives the gashes do better on them.” The rebels have clearly won, but a word of advice, if any of them hear the words “Say Hello to my Little Friend!” in the Bab Al-Aziziyah compound, duck.

The Editing Process

The blogs are going to be a bit thinner on the ground for the next while, as I have to set aside time for my forthcoming radio documentary on the Waterford Quakers.  Forthcoming sounds a bit grand actually, Harry Potter sequels are “forthcoming”, mine is more a “documentary what I made”.  The interviews were recorded between February and May and I’m now in the midst of the editing process, which is without doubt my favourite part.  My least favourite part, for the record, is completing the red tape necessary to secure the funding. I’d like to describe it as a Kafkaesque experience but it’s no way near as pleasant as that. Anyway, the editing process seems to hold the key to meaning and narrative drive in prepared broadcasting, and even more so in film.  It always makes me think of the position of the Director in film culture.  It’s taken for granted that the director has authorial ownership of a movie, but where would a director be without his or her editor? Or cinematographer? Or composer, set designer, art director, scriptwriter or even actors? What does a director do anyway? Are they chancers? Editing is one of the most basic – and therefore important - tricks in the trade. While you might need a full orchestra for the score to work or expensive lighting and locations for your tasteful cinematography to cover up the fact the film is no good, every movie needs editing and it’s still the most effective tool in the box, as Georges Méliès understood at the inception of the art form.  Most editing is of course tastefully done, but it lends itself quite easily to the brutal didacticism of low budgets and left-wing politics, hence the revolutionary montage techniques of Soviet cinema in the twenties: one shot of striking workers being attacked intercut with a bull being slaughtered –  Workers!?, Bulls!? GET IT? I don’t want to be dismissive though; it was revolutionary at time, highly influential and remains powerful.  Weird juxtapositions are huge fun in editing, so much fun in fact that you have to be careful not to wreck your story on the rocks of hyperbole while pursuing the siren-like cleverness of an arresting edit.  You should be careful of metaphors too. Fun edits are one of the less celebrated elements that’s made Citizen Kane such a film nerd’s favourite, I’m not quite sure why Orson Welles wanted to cut to a scary Cockatoo, but I’m glad he did.  Welles loved the solitary process of editing, his portable moviola a constant companion in his exile years.  As if to prove the point, his last film F for Fake was largely made up of bought second-hand footage he edited into a masterpiece.  I love Orson Welles. Of course F for Fake was a mock documentary which means it was a fiction film and he could do what he wanted.  I make factual programmes which means there’s an ethical element to the editing process: I can’t interview someone in good faith and then edit that interview with the sound of a bull going to the toilet (although, note to self, that would be brilliant).  The edits have to be a fair representation of what was said to you, but cut together in such a way as to tell a half interesting story.  That's how you have to make documentary.  Unless you don't.  Unless you’re doing a Michael Moore style polemic where your own subjectivity and point of view is made obvious to the viewer.  I don’t think I want to do a Michael Moore about the Quakers though. I leave you with a final irony; this blog isn’t very well edited.

During the course this blog being written, journalism as we know it has gone into a possibly terminal collapse. I did think I should write something about it but I can’t really think of anything original to say.  There is just one question that’s been bothering me: which Australian became big in Britain first, Rupert Murdoch or Paul Hogan? And can the Northern Hemisphere hand back Rupert Murdoch in exchange for Paul Hogan and the fella with the crooked mouth?

Pride of Place

There are few political creeds more enduring, powerful and ugly than nationalism.  That an accident of birth should instill someone with such misplaced pride and inform the political decision making process is plainly irrational. Yet despite being thoroughly discredited in two world wars, nationalism retains a powerful hold on modern political debate, eschewing universal principles in favour of chauvinism and creating unities amongst groups who really ought not to have that much in common.  In 2002, Gerhard Schroeder - Germany’s own “Tony Blair” - having failed to make much reformist headway in four years as Chancellor, fought the Federal Elections on anti-Iraq war, kind-of anti-American ticket and won himself another three years of ineffective rule.  George Bush wore a stars and stripes collar pin while cutting taxes for a relatively small section of the wealthiest Americans and got himself re-elected with the support of most of the poorest states in the union.  In Ireland we had nationalism real bad.  So pleased were we with winning independence from the British that we spent most of the first forty years or so of self-rule ignoring the socio-economic progress that was being made elsewhere in western Europe, so pleased with being a republic our political leaders had no difficulty allowing a foreign monarchy vet social legislation as long as it wasn’t the British.  Even when I was a kid, Charles Haughey was flogging nationalism every chance he could get to gain advantage over the liberal Garret Fitzgerald.  Historians continue to debate the relative merits of his premiership, but there’s no doubt that one of his main political planks was that he kind-of didn’t like the British , a policy which did exactly nothing for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed in the country who lived an impoverished lifestyle that his corruption had insulated him against.  He didn’t like the British and sometimes wore a fisherman’s hat; therefore he was a man of the people.  Nationalism says we are all of one tribe, we are all the same and in its ugliest form insists we all should think and act the same with any breaking of the ranks suspect at best, treasonous at worst. It’s simply not rational to invest pride, honour and meaning in the place you happen to be born in.  But then, if reason defines us humans, so too does our sometimes endearing, sometimes terrifying ability to abjure it.  Georges Clemenceau said a patriot loves his country, while a nationalist hates everyone else’s (to be fair Clemenceau spent most of his career hating the Germans). I think political nationalism with its flags, marches, drums and demagogues is often predicated on hating another place, but love of locality is much more of a simple fondness for home, less heralded but ultimately more keenly felt.  Loving your home town comes down to the mundane and banal everyday of life; the way people speak, the way people work, the way people insult.  It doesn’t depend on being the biggest or most beautiful place, just that it should have something unique only you truly recognize.  That uniqueness is usually formed by a combination of shared history and humour, and, from time to time, shared pain.  So when this everyday place you live in pulls off something extraordinary, when it does a good job, the most satisfying aspect is the opportunity to feel proud of something you take for granted a little bit too much.  To indulge in some of that more strident nationalistic pride in the place you love in a much quieter way every other day.  Waterford put on a great party last weekend, the oldest city in Ireland looked youthful, happy and optimistic, and all our visitors agreed - to which I always think “and they haven’t even seen the county yet!” It’s not important for me believe that Waterford is the greatest place on earth: you know, I’ve heard New York is pretty cool.  It just has to be the most Waterford place on earth but the weekend showed us just how great that can be.  I leave with the words of the great Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.  As the gladiators, resplendent in their homo-erotic shortened togas, and even more homo-erotic Brooklyn accents, debate where the best wine in the world comes from, Kirk interrupts and tells them that they’re all wrong: “the best wine in the world is from home, wherever home is!” The group then break into hearty laughing and back slapping, which is what Waterford should now do.