He is everywhere in our cities, anywhere we see shipwrecked people adrift and wandering
Fintan O'Toole 21/7/26
Now that it has returned as a $375 million cinematic blockbuster, it is worth remembering that The Odyssey is the story of a rich man who is forced to behave like a poor man. The great epic works by winnowing its hero down until he is the lowest of the low.
Odysseus starts out on his journey home from the Trojan wars as the admiral of a small fleet. Then he is captain of an isolated ship. Then a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage. Then a homeless stranger. And near the end, before he resumes his place as king of Ithaca, he disguises himself as a dirty old beggar.
In the Iliad, the Homeric epic that precedes the Odyssey, Odysseus is already cunning, ingenious, sneaky, crafty. Achilles contemptuously describes him as a man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart”. But there’s a big difference between having your wits about you and living on your wits. In the first condition you use your brains to exert your will. In the second you use them to survive. That’s what poor people have to do.
Odysseus is famously called in the Greek polytropos. Emily Wilson’s recent translation renders this as “complicated” which is rather flat and unspecific – which of us isn’t complicated? Scholars tell us that polytropos has an apt double meaning, carrying notions both of personal evasiveness and of a meandering journey which of course is what the story goes on to narrate.
I much prefer the opening of Robert Fagles’s translation: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course”.
I like this perhaps because it brings to mind a Dublin word that seems to have gone out of use: a twister. If it rings any bells now it is probably as the American term for a tornado. But a twister in Dublin was a chancer, a con man, an artful dodger.
Odysseus the twister is all of these. Like poor people throughout the history of humanity, he does what he must do in order to endure. He lies and cheats, ducks and dives, charms and seduces. He sings for his supper, telling enthralling stories to strangers who feed him.
He is supremely shifty: a king who can appear as a miserable slave. In the backstory recalled in The Odyssey, Odysseus infiltrated Troy as a spy: “Scarring his own body with mortifying strokes,/ throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave,/ he slipped into the enemy’s city, roamed its streets – / all disguised, a totally different man, a beggar, / ... and no one knew him at all”.
He becomes a literal nobody – one of those people we step over on the street. To be a nobody is to be beneath our notice. Part of what makes Odysseus so good at survival is that, for all his privilege as a king, he knows this: even in the small, intimate cities of his world there are invisible people – and invisibility is the superpower of the weak.
This nobody is who he becomes again as the poem reaches its climax. Because his court is infested with suitors who will kill him, he has to slip back into his own home as a repulsive old vagrant.
Odysseus is the refugee, the migrant, the foreigner, the evacuee, the stateless, the undocumented, the outsider, the alien. He is also the tramp, the beggar, the slave, the street dweller, the drifter, the transient
The goddess Athena transforms him: “She shrivelled the supple skin on his lithe limbs,/ stripped the russet curls from his head, covered his body/ top to toe with the wrinkled hide of an old man/ and dimmed the fire in his eyes, so shining once./ She turned his shirt and cloak into squalid rags, /ripped and filthy, smeared with grime and soot.”
Squalid, filthy, smeared – we are invited by these terms to feel about Odysseus the worst thing we can feel for any human being: disgust. If we met him on the way to Ithaca we would literally turn up our noses at him.
But one of the most extraordinary things about this poem is that it gives a slave a name and a voice. The person who first shelters Odysseus when he gets back to his island is the swineherd Eumaeus. He is a vividly realised character with many lines of dialogue and a meaningful part in the unfolding of the story. He surely smells of pig and muck but he speaks to us across the millenniums as a decent and dignified human being.
His decency is rooted in a set of values that is the beating pulse of the whole epic: the moral obligation to accept and protect the stranger. As he informs Odysseus (who he takes to be a miserable tramp): “It’s wrong, my friend, to send any stranger packing –/ even one who arrives in worse shape than you.”
This is the duty imposed on civilised humans by the supreme god Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xeinios, protector of strangers. “Zeus of the Strangers,” says Odysseus to the one-eyed Cyclops, “guards all guests and suppliants.” This quality, xenia, is the precise opposite of xenophobia.
Odysseus is the archetypal stranger, thrown again and again on the mercy of those who don’t know him. Eumaeus imagines that if he is still alive Odysseus must now be a man who “starving for food, I wager, wanders the earth,/ a beggar adrift in strangers’ cities, foreign-speaking lands”.
Odysseus is the refugee, the migrant, the foreigner, the evacuee, the stateless, the undocumented, the outsider, the alien. He is also the tramp, the beggar, the slave, the street dweller, the drifter, the transient. He is an everyman who is also often a nobody, the man who has fabulous stories to tell but who is at key moments in his own story not worth seeing or listening to.
He’s all around us, of course – not just in the giant posters advertising Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster but down at street level in the corner of our eyes where we see shipwrecked people adrift and wandering, dreaming of the place that is the ultimate goal of all journeys: home.
I thought about making some predictions for 2025.
And then I had a look at a detailed report drawn up in 2008 by the US
National Intelligence Council on what it thought the world would look
like in 2025. It drew on “numerous think tanks, consulting firms,
academic institutions, and literally hundreds of experts inside and
outside governments here in the United States and overseas”.
But it doesn’t mention the possibility of a banking meltdown or Brexit or a Russian invasion of Ukraine or the mass slaughter of Palestinians by Israel.
It suggests that “Russia has the potential to be richer, more powerful,
and more self-assured in 2025 if it invests in human capital, expands
and diversifies its economy, and integrates with global markets.” It
imagines that “resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute could
engender some stability as the [Middle East] region deals with a
strengthening Iran and global transition away from oil and gas”.
Needless
to say, Russia has not become more self-assured and it has reversed its
integration into the global economy. The Israeli-Palestinian “dispute”
has become an ever-deepening bloodbath and Iran is not “strengthening”
but rapidly declining.
The American
futurists were confident that “new energy technologies probably will not
be commercially viable and widespread by 2025″. Pessimism about the
potential of solar and wind power to replace carbon fuels was part of
the conservative orthodoxy in 2008. It was happily misplaced.
Here are 10 confident predictions about 2025 made at various points over the last decade by serious experts, all of them wrong:
1. The EU will have broken up by 2025.
“The European Union might survive in some sense, but European economic,
political and military relations will be governed primarily by
bilateral or limited multilateral relationships that will be small in
scope and not binding. Some states might maintain a residual membership
in a highly modified European Union, but this will not define Europe.”
(Stratfor Strategic Forecasting, 2015)
2. We will all be living in a world of augmented and virtual reality.
“The screen as we know it – on your phone, your computer and your TV –
will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass,
but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are
wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of
industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education,
travel, entertainment and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.”
(CERN, May 2015)
3. We will all be ashamed of our carbon footprints.
“In 2025, carbon footprints will be viewed as socially unacceptable,
much like drink-driving is today.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020)
Alas massive personal carbon footprints – private planes, vast houses,
hyper-conspicuous consumption – are still all the rage.
4. Critical thinking about technology will have made great advances.
“By 2025 I expect our lives to change dramatically … We will start to
be more critical about new things but also learn how to turn this
critical thinking into decisions. In short, we humans will stop
regressing in regard to applying critical thinking and move on to make
better decisions about our uses of digital technologies.” (Marvin
Borisch, technologist and author, 2021) Not much sign of this in our age
of rampant disinformation.
5. Carbon capture will solve the climate crisis.
“A scale-up of negative emission technologies, such as carbon dioxide
removal, will remove climate-relevant amounts of CO2 from the air [by
2025].” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Carbon capture technologies
remain staggeringly expensive, unproven at scale and have yet to show
that they can have a decisive impact on the reversal of climate change.
6. Technological innovations will deliver quick, cheap healthcare to everyone by 2025.
“Engineering biology will deliver simple, low-cost diagnostic tests to
individuals in every corner of the globe. As a result, morbidity,
mortality and costs will decrease in acute conditions, such as
infectious diseases, because only the most severe cases will need
additional care.” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) Billions of people
barely have access to basic healthcare and even in the rich countries
(like ours) access to diagnosis and treatment is grossly inequitable.
7. There will be a referendum on a united Ireland.
“Let’s have an All-Ireland Forum on Unity to plan for all aspects of
reunification, including a referendum by 2025.” (Mary Lou McDonald,
January 2020). A Border poll is extremely unlikely to happen before
2030, and will be most probably much later.
8. Homelessness in Ireland will be on the way to being “eradicated”.
So claims the Government’s Housing For All strategy, published in
September 2021. In fact, there were nearly 5,000 households who had been
homeless for more than six months in 2024 and there will almost
certainly be many more in 2025.
9. Artificial intelligence will have made us all rich.
“Improvements in AI will finally put access to wealth creation within
reach of the masses…” (World Economic Forum, June 2020) The current
evidence, summarised by the World Development Forum, is that AI will
“widen income disparities within countries, benefiting highly skilled
workers, displacing lower-skilled jobs in repetitive tasks, and
concentrating wealth among those who control the technology.”
10. “Trump is finished. The future of the Republican Party belongs to Ron de Santis.”
This is a headline from the Telegraph in November 2022. Or “Donald
Trump is finished as a serious contender for high office.” (New York
Times columnist Bret Stephens, November 2022). How’s that working out
for y’all?
There’s a reason
astrologers, soothsayers and prophets are still thriving – they are no
worse at prediction than most rational experts. When it comes to the
future, only three things are certain. The first is that human beings
have an innate need to attempt to reduce the unknown to rational
predictability. The second is that we are usually wrong – or, if we do
get it right, it is at least as likely to be the result of fortune as of
brilliance. And the third is that all we can really do is to keep
trying to make the new years better than the old ones.
The
Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for
RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of
Tipp-Ex
Sometimes, if I was having a bad day at The Irish Times, I would look out of the window of the offices on Tara Street and gaze for a while at the ugliest building in Ireland. Hawkins House, a grey 12-storey pile that embodied the vandalism inflicted on Dublin in
the 1960s, has since gone to its grave unmourned. But it was for me a
kind of memento mori. If I was tempted by the lure of self-pity, I would
remember the many evenings I had spent cleaning the toilets in Hawkins
House. I would tell myself again that, whatever the occasional
frustrations of journalism, it sure beats working.
As
it happened, our family’s main connection to the world of newspapers
was through my mother’s job as an office cleaner at the Irish Press,
just down by the Liffey at Burgh Quay. She would get up at 5am and cycle
in there to empty the overflowing ashtrays and hoover the floors and, I
presume, clean the toilets. She would usually be gone before the
reporters arrived for the early shift. Though she did sometimes have to
wake the great sports writer Con Houlihan
when he slept under his desk after a hard night. She had made the
mistake on her first morning in the job of calling the security man to
say that a tramp had broken in, but Con – a gentle, shy, dishevelled
bear of a man – perfectly understood the reasons for her confusion and
was not in the least offended.
As well as contributing to our daily bread, the Irish Press, Fianna Fáil’s semi-official journal, was our daily newspaper. My grandfather, who lived with us, was a de Valera
man, so it was the Press and its sister papers, the Evening Press and
the Sunday Press, that informed us of the happenings of the world. They
were read from cover to cover with an intense interest that did not
waver between the death notices, the hurling reports and the epic events
of global history. In memory, I seem to have moved seamlessly from the
children’s page in the Evening Press to David Marcus’s New Irish Writing page on Saturdays, which is where I first read contemporary Irish poetry and short stories.
It was natural, I suppose, for my mother to hope that I might get a job
on the Press. No one in my family had gone to university – my parents
did not even go to secondary school – so the world of the white-collar
professions was very distant. But the newspaper was familiar territory,
and it seemed like an obvious possibility for a son who was patently
useless at almost everything.
I edited a newspaper at school. I wrote
reports for the Irish Union of School Students. (My first publication
was a survey we did on the use of corporal punishment.) I got a small
prize for an essay submitted for a Council of Europe competition. At University College Dublin
I edited the student newspaper imaginatively titled Student. I was
obviously on some kind of trajectory, but I had no idea how all of this
could become a career or a way of life.
My
only real thought was that I would somehow make a living from writing,
and, as I didn’t write fiction, this must have meant some kind of
journalism. My mother mentioned my proclivities to Vincent Jennings, who
edited the Sunday Press, and he offered to see me. He was very nice,
and, as my mother and I sat across from him in what I remember as a
rather dingy office, he asked me some questions about what I wrote. I
babbled something. He looked at my mother sadly and said, “I’m afraid
it’s too late. He’ll be too old by the time he leaves UCD.” I should, he
said, have gone instead to the College of Commerce in Rathmines to
learn shorthand and typing.
It was obvious that he thought I had
already acquired too many notions to ever be any use on a newspaper. I
remember he used the word “wordsmith”, which I had never heard before,
to suggest what he thought I thought I was. I could tell he did not mean
it as a compliment. He stood up and shook my hand and wished me luck in
the future.
He was quite right too. I
never learned shorthand, and I still practise the hunt-and-peck method
of typing. Back then I wrote everything out in an appalling scrawl
before transferring it, slowly and laboriously, to the page on the huge
old second-hand typewriter my parents had bought me for my 18th
birthday. My best friend was the little bottle of a white liquid called
Tipp-Ex that you brushed on to the page to blot out your mistakes. I was
the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex.
And the truth was that, although my poor
mother was very disappointed that I was not good enough for the Press, I
would have been much more worried if the editor had told me that, as
soon as I got my BA from UCD, there was a job waiting for me as a
reporter for de Valera’s papers. Beneath my diffidence and shyness I was
an arrogant young pup. I had no clear idea of what a life in journalism
could look like for me, but I had a pretty clear idea that it wasn’t
that.
The problem really was the journalism that me and my friends were now reading. It was mostly American – Joan Didion’s The White Album, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic. But it was also Irish: Nell McCafferty and Maeve Binchy,
for example, were writing journalism in The Irish Times that was
something other than news reporting, that had the voice and the
sensibility and the individuality of good fiction. Vincent Browne had established Magill magazine and Gene Kerrigan
was writing riveting long-form pieces that fused scrupulously detailed
reportage (usually of stories the newspapers did not cover) with the wit
and rhythm of hard-boiled detective novels – Philip Marlowe on the mean
streets of Dublin.
Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly
I
was far from such levels of accomplishment, but I was lucky in that I
did have a calling card: drama criticism. I had been going to plays
since I was 13 or 14, and I liked to write about them, initially just as
a way to define my tastes for myself. It was an endeavour where
reporting (this is what I saw) could meet opinion (this is what I felt
about it). I felt at home on that crossroads because I could never
really write anything that did not have a point of view. Words always
arrived from an emotional hinterland of deep feelings about life,
especially Irish life in all its absurdities and hypocrisies.
I
was fortunate, too, that there was a place where these impulses could
be pursued in print. John S Doyle and David McKenna were turning In
Dublin from a basic listings bulletin into a current-affairs and
cultural magazine. I wormed my way in as drama critic and also wrote
longer features about social changes, not least the great surge in
religious reaction in the 1980s. The money was terrible, but it was a
great place to be. The stable of critics – myself, Aidan Dunne, Michael Dervan, Michael Dwyer – would eventually migrate en masse to The Irish Times. The regular writers included Mary Raftery, arguably the most consequential Irish journalist of her generation, and Colm Tóibín.
It was a better school in which to learn the ropes than the College of
Commerce – at least for the kind of vessel I was interested in sailing.
Theatre criticism also toughened me up.
It was actually harder than writing about politics. Artistic Dublin is a
small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about,
sometimes harshly. Some of them – Hugh Leonard,
for example – had much more widely read newspaper columns of their own
from which to launch furious counterattacks. In the late 1990s I spent
three years as drama critic of the Daily News in New York, where the
stakes on Broadway were ostensibly higher. But the job was infinitely
softer than it was in Dublin, where WB Yeats’s
“great hatred, little room” retained its salience and you had to learn
to live with the fact that some people despised you. That is an
essential part of the education of any serious journalist.
For
a few years, at least, it was possible to make a kind of living as a
journalist in Dublin without writing for the newspapers at all. Magill
and In Dublin were thriving – as indeed were Hibernia and Hot Press.
Nobody was making a fortune, but Ireland did have a genuinely
independent and alternative media. Browne in particular was full of
missionary zeal and vibrant mischief, and he was willing to give space
to anyone who seemed interesting to him, regardless of age. When he
relaunched the Sunday Tribune he gave me my first permanent job. At 25 I
was simultaneously arts editor, literary editor, feature writer and
drama critic. It was as exciting as it was insane.
The excitement was not just professional.
It was also generated by the strange state of Ireland. On the one hand,
it was stultifying – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had more than 80 per cent of the vote between them, and the Catholic Church
still had a lock on all legislation concerning sexuality, education and
healthcare. On the other, things were patently falling apart under the
pressure of the Troubles, an imploding economy and mass emigration and
unemployment. It was not a great place to live, but it was – with its
endless ambiguities and contradictions, the gaping distance between
official rhetorics and daily realities – a great place to write about.
By
1988, when I was 30 and had a spouse, a child and a mortgage, I was
ready to become semi-official myself. I had written a pamphlet called
The Southern Question for Dermot Bolger’s Raven Arts Press, a most disobliging piece of work about Charles Haughey
and the hollowness of faux patriotism that had been read with a certain
relish by Dick Walsh, The Irish Times’ redoubtable political editor. He
recommended that I be brought in as a columnist, critic and feature
writer, and Conor Brady, the paper’s editor, took a chance on me.
There’s
also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s
intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens
This
too was lucky. It meant that I have enjoyed the enormous privilege of
never having to work for a media mogul, an egomaniacal tycoon or a
political propagandist. Over 36 years I have never had a column spiked
or seriously altered for any reason other than the rulings of libel
lawyers. A lot of things I’ve written have undoubtedly seemed
wrong-headed to editors, but the right to be wrong-headed is part of the
paper’s unwritten constitution. Exasperation has never led to threats
of expulsion.
This security has also
meant that when I’ve written for publications outside Ireland I’ve had
the luxury of not working for those I despise. It has been very easy for
me to have principles. Bertolt Brecht’s
dictum – “food first, then morality” – is the brutal truth. But I
haven’t had to choose between feeding my family and writing what I
believe.
There’s also something about Ireland
that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours,
acquaintances, fellow citizens. Until the mobile phone killed the habit,
it was not unusual for me to find myself sitting on a bus behind
someone reading one of my columns and commenting on what rubbish it was
to the companion beside them. Or, occasionally, meeting people for whom
something I had written meant a great deal because it gave voice to
feelings they had long held but had not felt free to express.
That
intimacy mattered because Ireland was shifting, not just on the large
scale of economics and identities and national narratives but in the
nature of the conversations we were having with ourselves. What could be
seen and said and acknowledged and recognised was changing. Reality
itself – the specific gravity of our lived and local truths – was being
redefined. It was possible to imagine as a journalist that you were
taking part in that conversation, even if it was only by making people
so cross at you that they had to articulate for themselves what they
were so cross about.
I often wonder
whether anyone will again have such freedom, such privilege. Newspapers
are under such pressure now, in terms both of money and of the nonstop
demand for immediacy, of time, that their capacity to indulge arrogant
wordsmiths is increasingly limited. But there will always be those of us
for whom journalism beats working.
What
will remain after Israel’s fury is spent? Collective punishment is not
justice. Scorched earth is not security. Desolation is not peace
In his
history of a Roman invasion of northern Britain, Tacitus gives the
Caledonian chieftain Calgacus a famous speech. Of the Romans, he says
“They make a desert and call it ‘peace’.”
This
is not meant to be an instruction manual. But Israel seems to be
treating it as one. It will, after many thousands more civilians have
died, eventually declare peace in a blood-soaked wasteland of rubble and
dust.
There
is, however, an obvious difference. The Romans, when they invaded the
Highlands, were very far from home. They did not need to live beside a
devastated Scotland. They could take it or leave it.
Israel can take Gaza. But itcannot leave it.
It
has no exit strategy – not just in the immediate political and military
sense, but in the plain, banal facts of geography. The terrible
atrocities inflicted by Hamas on Israelis on October 7th dramatised a
simple and inescapable truth: proximity. The Supernova festival, where
young people were dancing through the night to trance music, was going
on just five kilometres from the Gaza border fence.
It’s
about a four-minute drive. WB Yeats’s grim phrase about Ireland during
the Troubles – “Great hatred, little room” – recurs for a reason. There
is no breathing space here. The toxic dust from a pulverised Gaza floats
on Israel’s air too.
We
know that dire intimacy all too well from our own very recent history.
We know the terror of a tribalised topography, where a bend in the road
is a sudden plunge into peril. We too, on our island, still have those
tautologous structures: peace walls.
We
know too well how familiarity can breed contempt, how physical
closeness to the tribal enemy has to be negated by psychological
distance. So near and yet so far: the more obvious the need to share a
space, the more powerful the urge to erect supposedly impenetrable
barriers. The daily evidence of common humanity feeds a desire to
dehumanise.
In
his Nobel Peace Prize lecture of 1994, the then Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin – soon to be murdered by a far-right Jewish extremist
whose political heirs now serve in Binyamin Netanyahu’s government –
evoked the haunted silence that follows a decision to launch an attack.
Rabin knew what he was talking about: he commanded Israel’s armed forces
in the Six Day War of 1967.
Rabin
recalled “the hush when the hands of the clock seem to be spinning
forward, when time is running out and in another hour, another minute,
the inferno will erupt. In that moment of great tension just before the
finger pulls the trigger, just before the fuse begins to burn; in the
terrible quiet of that moment, there’s still time to wonder, alone: is
it really imperative to act? Is there no other choice? No other way?”
The
answer to those questions depends on what you mean by peace. Rabin, who
was very good at the business of killing, knew what it did not mean. He
understood that body counts are not victories and that there is no real
security in mere superiority of arms.
“We
invest,” Rabin said, “huge sums in planes, and tanks, in armored
plating and concrete fortifications. Yet despite it all, we fail to
protect the lives of our citizens and soldiers. Military cemeteries in
every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of
national leaders to sanctify human life. There is only one radical means
of sanctifying human lives. Not armoured plating, or tanks, or planes,
or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”
This
is not hippy-dippy peacenik piety. It is tough realism. Rabin’s
prediction that bomber planes and tanks and fortifications would “fail
to protect the lives of our citizens” was horrifically vindicated on
October 7th. It is Rabin’s murderers, and their political progeny on
Israel’s far right, who are the fantasists.
If
you create a moral and literal wasteland on your doorstep, you can call
it whatever you like – even peace. But it’s really just a vast,
open-air radioactive dump that will continue to emit deadly particles of
rage and hatred.
You
cannot sanctify the lives of your own citizens by dehumanising those
they are fated to live beside and among. You cannot overcome your own
traumas by traumatising a whole population. You cannot immerse another
generation of children in butchery and expect the future to be secure.
The
hands of the clock have been spinning forward and there seems to be no
one in power asking the questions about what comes after vengeance. How
much revenge is enough? What remains after the fury is spent? Who is
going to rule the wasteland?
Much
as some of Netanyahu’s allies would like to do it, ethnic cleansing is
not possible. Israel cannot drive the Palestinian populations into the
Sinai or across the Jordan. Trying to do so would set the world ablaze
and the world, however pitiful its current failings, cannot abide that
conflagration.
If
the Palestinians cannot be made to disappear, close proximity remains
Israel’s destiny. It has to decide what kind of neighbours it wants. It
has to decide what peace looks like.
At
the moment, there seems to be no clue. There is, apparently, some
make-believe world in which, after Gaza is levelled, somebody else sails
in to take charge of the ruins, pay for reconstruction and make the
shattered survivors behave themselves meekly and humbly. And meanwhile,
five kilometres away, all-night dance festivals can resume in perfect
safety.
It’s
not going to happen. The abyss that Israel has to live beside will just
get deeper and deeper. Israel’s own democracy, already on the edge,
will, as the costs of war rise, become ever more tenuous. The “self” in
“self-defence” will become more fractured and uncertain. The capacity to
make a real peace will be further eroded.
Razing
a city is not realism. Collective punishment is not justice. Scorched
earth is not security. Desolation is not peace. Bloodshed is not
irrigation. Human deserts, unlike physical ones, cannot be made to
blossom.
"Depend upon it, sir,” said Samuel Johnson,
“when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates
his mind wonderfully”. We do indeed have to depend upon the Cop26 summit
proving Johnson right, and that the threat of extinction will
concentrate the collective mind.
There
are, at least, some precedents. One of them is, ironically, the origin
of the great fear that has now been displaced by climate change: nuclear
war.
Over Christmas in 1938, two physicists, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch,
had a startling insight. They realised that if you bombarded a uranium
nucleus with a neutron, it could split into two, releasing a great
amount of energy.
It
very quickly dawned on scientists that this could become a chain
reaction, producing more and more energy. That process could, in theory,
be harnessed to make a bomb of unprecedented destructiveness.
In
the spring of 1940, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, having, like Meitner,
fled from the Nazis, arrived in Birmingham. There they figured out
something even more alarming – a lump of uranium-235 the size of a golf
ball would be enough to make such a bomb.
An
even darker thought followed – if they had worked this out, then surely
the brilliant colleagues they had left behind in Germany must have done
the same. Hitler might well be working on an atomic bomb.
This
was, as Jewish people already knew, an existential threat. If Hitler
had the bomb and his enemies did not, he would certainly use it. “As a
weapon,” Frisch and Peierls warned Winston Churchill,
“the super-bomb would be practically irresistible”. They argued the
imperative of developing an atomic bomb as a “counter-threat”.
Extraordinary
What
happened next was an extraordinary concentration of the mind.
Churchill, who himself had already foreseen the possibility that the
splitting of the atom could lead to a new and fearful kind of weaponry,
alerted US president Franklin D Roosevelt.
Out of this dread came a staggering
achievement. The Manhattan Project really got under way in September
1942. The first atomic bomb was exploded less than three years later, in
July 1945.
The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki make it hard to celebrate this achievement. But it was, in itself, stunning.
Creating
the atomic bomb was actually much more difficult than the scientists
had imagined. It required an unprecedented concentration of industrial
might, scientific brilliance, governmental commitment and vast public
resources.
The reason all of this came together was
existential dread: terror of the Nazis and what they would do if they
got the bomb first. The prospect of being hanged in a fortnight made
what was scarcely possible an achievable reality.
The great irony, of course, is
that this remarkable accomplishment in fact added to the common store of
dread. Nuclear weapons, initially a guarantor against extinction,
became themselves the bearers of the threat that humanity might
obliterate itself.
I
sometimes wonder whether one of the deep-lying reasons for the failure
of governments and societies to acknowledge the peril of climate change
was a kind of dread fatigue.
Everyone
who lived through the cold war also lived with a burden of anxiety: the
knowledge that an apocalyptic conflagration would trigger the nuclear
winter in which most life on Earth would perish. It was a constant
background noise that, at moments of crisis, came to the fore and became
overwhelming.
It
was perhaps unfortunate that the first report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change was published in 1990, just after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. One burden of terror was being lifted, but here was
another coming along right on cue to take its place.
Existential anxiety
Perhaps
it was natural to think: give us a break. Perhaps humankind needed a
holiday from existential anxiety. But the effusion of greenhouse gases
did not take a vacation – it just kept going.
Maybe
there has also been a paradoxical hangover from the cold war – the
worst did not happen. The hard rain did not fall. The eve of destruction
was not followed by the dark night of annihilation.
Maybe
the period between 1989 and the Paris Agreement of 2015 can be seen as
humanity’s long exhale, a sigh of relief that the great danger had
apparently passed and we were safe now.
There
was a deep desire not to know this was the ultimate false sense of
security. It was a pleasant illusion to imagine that, since we got away
with the game of chance that was mutually assured destruction, we would
get away with every other form of dicing with death.
Indulgence
in that illusion has led us to the present crisis. The question that
now faces the world is a stark one: can humans concentrate their
collective minds without an external enemy?
The great fusions of politics,
technology, industry and science – like the Manhattan Project and the
Apollo moonshot – have been driven by warlike competition.
Without
the fear of the Nazis, the atom bomb would not have been developed at
such dizzying speed. Without the space race between the Americans and
the Soviets, there would have been no man on the moon.
A
pessimist might say that this is precisely the problem with climate
change. There is no Them, only an Us. We are our own worst enemy, and we
have to be our own bogeyman. We have to scare ourselves into action.
It is war that has typically speeded up
history by galvanisng the idea of a threat that must be countered,
whatever the cost. It is competition for dominance that has spurred
governments to undertake the seemingly impossible.
But
now we face a threat that cannot be countered by competition between
nations. It can be met only by co-operation on a truly global
scale. Survival demands that we be afraid, not of each other, but for
each other, and for all the others not yet born.
What
we know, however, is that the concentration of the mind produces
amazing results. If political systems really want to, they can harness
science, technology, government, economics and industry to the same
wagon. And then things can move with extraordinary rapidity.
Can that willpower be generated without war?
More than a century ago, George Bernard Shaw,
in Man and Superman, had the Devil suggest that “in the arts of life,
man invents nothing, but in the arts of death, he outdoes nature
herself”. But we can no longer outdo, or outrun, nature.
If
half the money, ingenuity and energy that has been devoted to the arts
of death is channelled into the rapid decarbonisation of the global
economy, it will be achieved.
The
gallows we have built for ourselves does not have to be ascended. We
have the power, seldom granted to those who have committed capital
crimes against nature, to grant ourselves a reprieve.
A study last summer found that one in 10 parents of primary
schoolchildren in Ireland lacked an appropriate digital device for home
schooling. Photograph: iStock
One of the things I least like
about Ireland is that it is hard to do a simple thing like giving some
money to charity without having very complicated feelings. Voluntary
efforts are a wonderful part of Irish society. But, far too often, they
are not a supplement to a properly functioning system of social decency,
but a substitute for it.
Last
week, I made a small donation to the Trinity Access Programme’s
nationwide effort to get laptops to second-level students whose families
can’t afford to buy them. Rather than making me feel good as a person,
it made me feel a bit sick as a citizen.
This
is not in any way a criticism of the campaign. It’s a great initiative
being run by terrific people. But what on earth is going on here? How
warped does a system of values have to be when the right to a basic
education is dependent on charity?
If
a government takes the decision to close schools and move classes
online, it takes on an absolute duty to ensure that every student is
able to access digital learning.
In
a lockdown, a laptop or tablet is as essential as a copybook and pencil
used to be. If you don’t have one because you can’t afford it, you are
being subjected to systematic discrimination.
Even
the Tory government in Britain understands this. It committed itself to
buying a million laptops or tablets for disadvantaged pupils. As of
January 24th, it had delivered 876,013 of them. There has been criticism
that this is not enough, but at least there is tangible recognition of
the state’s obligation.
Last
April, during the first lockdown of schools, the Government created a
fund of €10 million to allow schools to buy IT equipment – €7 million
for second level, €3 million for primary schools.
It’s a pittance. It represented a deliberate decision to leave thousands
of children and young people without the means to access education
online.
Poorest communities
In
October, The Irish Times interviewed the principal of Moyross National
School in one of the poorest communities in Ireland. He spoke of
fundraising for technology: “We purchased 60 digital devices, and it
nowhere near met the demand. We would need a further 60-80 at a
minimum.” So more than half of his pupils most at need did not have
proper access to digital learning.
In
August, by contrast, Simon Harris announced a fund of €168 million to
allow third-level institutions to buy digital equipment. The Government
went out and bought 16,700 laptops directly from Dell for distribution
to third-level students.
Spot
the difference. Universities are important. Their students are counted
as an economic asset. It matters that none of them is left without
access to classes.
Meanwhile,
a study last summer found that one in 10 parents of primary
schoolchildren in Ireland lacked an appropriate digital device for home
schooling.
The
Trinity programme mounted a huge effort during the first lockdown to
raise €300,000 and supply 1,000 reconditioned laptops or tablets to
disadvantaged school students in the Dublin area. It is now trying to
replicate that effort on a national scale and to supply 5,000 devices.
Even
without a discount for bulk purchase, the Government could buy 5,000
new laptops today for well under €2 million. We know it could deliver
four times that number because it already did that for college students.
Compare
this with the Government’s commitment of resources to the Stay and
Spend scheme introduced last October to stimulate the hospitality
sector. It proved to be useless – only €300,000 was actually claimed in
tax relief under the scheme before pubs, restaurants and hotels had to
shut again.
But the Government set aside €250 million for it. A fraction of that would solve the immediate problem.
Stamp of exclusion
This
could and should be done right now, today. Children and young people
who are already coping with disadvantage do not have time to waste.
Every day that goes by with a kid struggling to write an essay on a
phone and giving up in tears of frustration is a day on which this State
is putting a stamp of exclusion on that kid’s forehead.
So
where the hell is Norma Foley? What is Roderic O’Gorman, supposedly the
voice of children and young people at Cabinet, actually doing for those
experiencing this acute educational crisis? If Simon Harris can get
laptops to college students, why can’t they do the same for the pupils
to whom they have a moral and political responsibility?
As
well as being disgraceful in itself, the unwillingness to ensure that
every pupil has the basic tools needed to keep up with the rest of the
class points to a larger problem. It suggests a lack of thought in
Government about the social consequences of the pandemic.
Coronavirus
may not discriminate but our social system most certainly does. It is
our collective handling of it that is determining the shape of the
society that will emerge.
As
things stand, we are deciding by default to handicap even further those
who already face the highest obstacles. That is surely not what most
citizens want to see on the far side of this trial.
First minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon attends the opening of The
European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre located in Aberdeen Bay on
September 7th, 2018 off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland. Photograph:
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
Imagine a person who can only lose
weight, not by going on a diet, but by accidentally running out of
food. It is a grim fact that Ireland’s only really effective way of
responding to climate change has been to go into recession. We succeed
by failing.
Since
2005 the most significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were
caused by the implosion of the economy between 2008 to 2012. This
“success” will be repeated in 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis,
whose main benign effect is a likely reduction in Irish carbon emissions
of around 12 per cent this year.
If
the recession it causes is deep enough, we may even, as Samuel Beckett
has it, fail better. It is an Irish twist on the idea of collateral
damage: collateral benefit. Bomb the economy and we get some green
shoots of climate action.
We have a very clear example right next door of the viability of rapid change. If Scotland can do it, so can Ireland
As a
strategy, this surely has its limits. But of course, it is not a
strategy at all. It is accident, not action. The decent environmental
consequences, when we’ve had them, have been not merely unintended but
unwanted. They result, not from getting our act together, but from
things falling apart. Once we get up and running and again, we go back
to pumping out the gases.
What
does it say about leadership on climate change when disasters have been
much more effective in allowing us to meet our international
obligations than any official plans?
If
Ireland is to get anywhere close to fulfilling the stated aim of being a
leader on climate change, it must start with a radically transformed
sense of national purpose.
The
best way to grasp what this means is simply to look to the country that
is probably closest to Ireland in size, geography and culture:
Scotland. The Scottish government is less powerful than ours – it does
not enjoy full sovereignty. Yet its performance on climate change is
light years ahead of Ireland’s.
Scotland
deliberately made things hard for itself. The UK government set a
target of a 32 per cent reduction by 2020 on the level of greenhouse gas
emissions in 1990. In the Climate Change Act unanimously adopted by the
Scottish Parliament in 2009, the target is 42 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.
How has it fared?
Radical change
Scotland
will not reach its 42 per cent reduction target in 2020. It met it in
2015, five years early. It is now at 47 per cent. It went from getting
10 per cent of its electricity consumption from renewable sources 15
years ago to 60 per cent now. It is on track to get near its 100 per
cent target in the early 2020s.
And
Scotland’s neighbour to the west? More like its evil twin. Ireland set
less ambitious targets and failed abysmally to meet them.
Ireland’s
target was a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020,
relative to 2005 levels. Before the coronavirus crisis, the
Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions projections indicated that,
by 2020, a reduction of between five and six per cent will have been
achieved.
Scotland’s leaders deliberately chose a target high enough to excite their citizens
Without
radical and rapid change, cumulative Irish emissions of greenhouse gases
are also on course to exceed the 2030 target of 376 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide equivalent, by between 52 and 67 million tonnes.
In
Scotland, emissions from transport increased by 0.4 per cent from 1990
to 2017. Over the same period in Ireland, emissions from transport rose
by 133 per cent. Scotland already gets twice the proportion of its
electricity (60 per cent) from renewables as Ireland does (30 per cent).
Scotland
is on course to plant 10,000 new hectares of forestry every year. The
rate of afforestation in Ireland in 2017 actually fell to 5,000
hectares, with provisional figures for 2018 falling even further to
4,000 hectares. At these rates, Ireland will not attain the national
policy goal of covering 18 per cent of land with forest any time in the
21st century, let alone within the lifetime of any current climate
action plan.
At
one level, this shameful contrast is actually good news. It makes a
nonsense of the claims that radical reductions in Ireland’s emissions
are extremely hard to achieve or wildly impractical. We have a very
clear example right next door of the viability of rapid change. If
Scotland can do it, so can Ireland.
But
we have to start with the obvious question: why are the Scottish and
Irish records so starkly different? The answer has nothing to do with
resources and everything to do with leadership. One country has been
well led on climate change, the other – to put it very charitably – has
not.
Looking
at the Scottish experience, five things stand out in defining the way
this good leadership expressed itself. These are the things an incoming
Irish government should copy and paste.
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon meets Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
at Government Buildings in Dublin in October 2017. Photograph: Artur
Widak/NurPhoto/Getty
1. Pride
First,
Scotland took pride in setting itself a big challenge. People are
motivated by thrilling new possibilities, not by grudging concessions.
While Ireland set the bar low and failed abjectly to clear it,
Scotland’s leaders deliberately chose a target high enough to excite
their citizens.
As
Andrew Kerr, executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon
Innovation, told the Citizens’ Assembly in Dublin in 2017: “Political
vision and leadership in putting forward a challenging target, and
corralling the resources and narrative around delivering that target,
was as important for setting the framework for tackling climate change
as robust evidence that it was achievable.”
The
dominant tone on climate change from Irish governments has been
negative – this is bad stuff we are being forced to do because we had to
sign all these international agreements.
Even
now, action on the single most important question facing humanity is
framed negatively. It is not climate change that “threatens rural
Ireland”, for example – it is the action needed to prevent it. The Scots
decided to tell themselves a different story: we can do this. Ireland’s
story has never got beyond: do we really have to do this?
Ironically,
one of the reasons for this may be that Scotland has been debating
national independence. The idea of a big collective project, a practical
expression of national willpower, fed into – and was in turn fed by – a
desire on the part of Scots to prove to themselves that they could
achieve big things together.
Ireland,
with a century of independence behind it, seems to have lost that
collective desire. If we are to get serious about climate change we will
have to find it again.
2. Monitoring
Second,
having set these ambitious targets, the Scots had rigorous independent
monitoring and analysis of how they were doing. Measuring how things
were progressing became, in Kerr’s words, “a normal part of
parliamentary debate and engagement, involving extensive consideration
each year”.
Scotland
was a pioneer in developing rigorous systems of monitoring and
evaluation, with annual reporting to parliament and a major assessment
of progress by a fully independent body every two years.
Ireland,
by contrast, did not even pass a Climate Change Act until 2015 – six
years after the Scottish Parliament did so. The EPA monitors emissions
and there is now a very capable Climate Change Advisory Council.
But
“advisory” is the key word. Irish governments are very good at ignoring
advice they don’t want to hear. There is no effective mechanism for
holding government departments or public bodies accountable for meeting
specific targets in specific time frames.
Scotland has had very strong civil society engagement on climate change
As the
Oireachtas climate change committee recommended last year, the “advisory
council” needs to be replaced by a powerful “action council”, which
will, among other things, produce five-year carbon budgets. It must have
its own statutory multi-annual funding to ensure its independence.
But
these changes need to be part of a much bigger transformation of the
official mindset. Behind those appalling increases in emissions from
transport, for example, is an inability to link the way we plan urban
development to climate change.
If
you make housing unaffordable in the big cities, you force people to
commute long distances. If you don’t invest sufficiently in public
transport, commuting is done in cars that emit greenhouse gases. Ireland
has ended up with one vehicle for every two people (including children)
and we now drive nearly 50 billion km a year.
3. No trade-off
Third,
the Scots refused to frame the whole question as a trade-off between
the environment and the economy. Perhaps because Scotland was already a
major oil producer, it was primed to think of the development of
renewable energy as a huge economic opportunity.
Scotland
sought successfully to attract investment into these new energy
sources. Doing the right thing could also be credibly presented as a
strategy for economic growth.
In
Ireland, by contrast, the issues are largely framed in terms of
reductions in activity – cutting the excessively large national beef
herd, for example. Good leadership should articulate the benefits of
replacing expensively imported oil and gas, creating new jobs and
developing new technologies.
4. Ownership
The
fourth thing the Scots have been good at is fostering a sense of
community ownership. This is not just a matter of encouraging and
supporting local communities in developing their own energy projects. It
is also about literal ownership.
The
Scottish government set a target for 500 megawatts of locally owned
energy generation facilities by 2020. It has already exceeded this and
reset the target to 1,000 megawatts. Profits from these projects return
to the communities who can then decide how best to invest the money.
Unsurprisingly, planning objections to wind farms are much rarer in
Scotland than in Ireland.
5. Engagement
Fifth,
Scotland has had very strong civil society engagement on climate
change. It has not been an issue only for environmental activists.
Churches, trade unions, scientists and business leaders pushed for the
more ambitious targets to be adopted and met.
Business groups like the Scottish Whisky Association
have pushed hard on the benefits of Scotland being seen globally as a
clean, green place. Builders switched to constructing timber-framed
houses, which are both more environmentally friendly and a good fit with
large-scale forestry planting.
Absence of leadership
We
don’t have to look very far, therefore, to see what good leadership
looks like. Generate a sense of national purpose. Set up rigorous
monitoring of, and accountability for, very specific targets. Embrace
the economic opportunities. Give communities ownership. Keep civil
society and businesses engaged.
But
none of this is going to happen in Ireland if adapting to climate
change is approached through the usual miasma of grudge and grievance.
Or if we fail to understand that the economy cannot be restarted after
the coronavirus crisis – it must be reimagined. Or if meeting our
international obligations is framed as a concession by the “mainstream”
to the Green Party rather than a collective challenge for government,
society and the economy.
The
absence of leadership emerged in the recent Sign of the Times 2020
study as the biggest factor in public disheartenment about Irish
responses to climate change. Part of the problem, though, seemed to be
that people were looking for saintly figures like David Attenborough to lead them. There won’t be any in the next Irish government.
But
leadership doesn’t need to be saintly. It needs to be challenging,
rigorous, accountable and decisive. If people can’t manage to meet those
standards, they shouldn’t be in government at all. If they can, this is
the time to show it.
