By Rory Fitzgerald   Mon, Jul 26, 2010

“I think there is a lot about Catholicism which is absolutely beautiful. I think the essence of Catholicism is beautiful.” So speaks Sinéad O’Connor, often imagined to be hostile to Catholicism. In fact, she holds a deep affection for the faith.

The stark, ethereal beauty of her voice first enchanted the world in the late 1980s. Yet she became a hate-figure for many Catholics in 1992 when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live television in the US. She was widely vilified at the time: her albums were ceremonially crushed by bulldozers, and she was booed off the stage in Madison Square Garden.

What at the time seemed like outrageous claims of a Church cover-up of child abuse have now been borne out as fact by a litany of reports from around the world. A contrite Facebook group, “apologise to Sinéad O’Connor” has even been set up by some who once dismissed her.

Sinéad has been a world-famous singer since her early 20s, but the 43 -year-old Dubliner has now become a prominent and increasingly respected voice on the child abuse issue. She has recently appeared on BBC’s Newsnight, CNN’s Larry King Live and last month wrote an article in The Washington Post, where she said that the Pope’s recent pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland was “an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country.” She has called on ordinary Irish Catholics to boycott Mass until the Vatican confesses to the cover-up of child abuse.

Sinéad O’Connor’s father was a barrister. That little-known fact seems somehow significant when you speak to her about the abuse crisis. She must have inherited some of his lawyerly genes: she has studied multiple reports on the issue in forensic detail, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of them:

“The fact is that there are five reports, done all over the world: Boston, Philadelphia, Ryan, Ferns and Murphy; and each of those reports independently of each other have come to the same conclusion: that there was a cover-up. And when you look at how exactly they went about covering up, each diocese behaved in exactly the same way. Now if it hadn’t been ordered by ‘central command,’ there would be differences in how each arch-diocese had handled things. “

Speaking to The Tablet from her home near Dublin, she breaks off occasionally to comfort her kids, to arrange their lifts to swimming practise; taking care of a million small things, like any busy mother-of-four. She remains very active as a musician, but says her primary occupation is not singer, songwriter or campaigner, but mother. In recent years she has seemed more comfortable in her own skin than ever before. After becoming suicidal in hear early thirties, she was belatedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The treatments worked, and she recovered her happiness and her creativity.

She sees great beauty in the Catholic faith, but says, “Unfortunately the people who are now running the business of Catholicism don’t seem to actually appreciate true Catholicism. The love and curiosity I have about religion, and the passionate love I have for the Holy Spirit, come from Catholicism. I am very interested in the idea of the Saints; everything about it; I mean, it’s beautiful.”

She says her two favourite Saints are Bernadette of Lourdes and Joan of Arc: “how you get to be a saint is you speak out against the church, they murder you, and then a century later they make you a saint.”

She knows Ireland’s Catholic institutions from the inside: as a troubled 15-year-old girl she was committed to the Grianán Training Centre for shoplifting and truancy. This was one of the now infamous Magdalene Laundries. She recalls:

“I wasn’t treated badly in there…[but] I grew up in a very abusive household, where I was abused very severely by my mother. So the whole idea of child abuse is something that I would identify strongly with.”

She says that the only really horrific thing that she experienced in the laundry was when, “a friend of mine had a baby; she was 17 or so. We all looked after her during the pregnancy, we were all really excited, and the baby was born, a beautiful boy. I always remember him, so white, with black, black hair, a really lovely baby. When she came back with the baby, she was thrilled. She had the cubicle next to mine, and she would poke her head over the top in the morning and would talk about all the plans she had for herself and her son. And then one morning we woke up to hear her screaming. What had happened was, without any warning, the nuns had come to take her baby. They literally tore the baby out of her arms. She was screaming and begging, all the rest of us were screaming and begging, I’ll never forget the screams of the woman. And they literally pulled the child out of her arms, and that was that. She never heard anything more about where the child went, what happened, nothing.”

Yet she also recalls that one of the nuns in the Grianán centre donated Sinéad O’Connor her first guitar. When she was growing up in the 1970s, she says, “Ireland was a very religious place; it was a theocracy in fact. I was a lucky person in that I never sponged up anything but the good of Catholicism.”

Speaking of the image of the Holy Spirit as a dove, she says “I was very struck by that as a small child… It used to disturb me when my father would bring me to Mass when I was small, as I used to see these priests … and how miserable they were. They weren’t taking any joy in the Mass or any joy in their belief in God. And then they would unlock the tabernacle and take out ‘the bird’, it would be dished out and then they would lock it back up again in the tabernacle. As a small kid, I used to actually feel that I couldn’t breathe, because they were locking up the Holy Spirit.”

She says, “I never had any bad experiences with the clergy… My feeling about ordinary priests and nuns is that they’re great. I’ve never met anything but loving priests and nuns. I’ve been communicating with quite a lot of them lately, and they themselves are very upset about how they have been brought in to disrepute by the behaviour of the hierarchy. The poor priests are afraid to walk down the road with a child. It’s appalling.”

In 1999, Sinéad O’Connor was ordained Mother Mary Bernadette by the Latin Tridentine Church, a breakaway Catholic church. She says, “It’s something I regret ever talking about ….To me [becoming a priest] was a Holy Spirit request, and that’s all I would say about it. I’d be far more wary about disobeying the Holy Spirit than I would be about disobeying the Vatican.” She feels that she is fulfilling her call to ministry through her music: her 2007 album “Theology” was inspired by the Psalms and other scripture.

She says, “To me, God and religion are two different things. What is the difference? Religion loves conditionally and God loves unconditionally… To me, the Holy Spirit, it’s supposed to be a bird, it’s supposed to be free to fly and land wherever it chooses, so who has the right to say, ‘well, it can’t land on you’?. To me, it seems that an awful lot of religions are actually holding God hostage. So, we are in a situation nowhere we actually need to rescue the Holy Spirit from religion.

I do think that, to an extent, if women had been more involved in the organisation, [the abuse scandal] might not have happened. Do you remember when John Paul II was close to death and he had just had a tracheotomy? I always remember seeing him on TV…in the window of St Peter’s one day doing his blessings, and he had this tube in his throat. Apparently he was having a problem with the tube and he started to fiddle with it. And instead of a person coming to help him, what actually happened is just unbelievable, and it says an awful lot about the organisation: a long stick was poked toward him and the stick poked the tube back in to place. Now if women had been there, a woman would have put her arm around him and said ‘are you all right?’

We are all human, I am a human being and if I see an old man suffering I feel bad about that. Cardinal Brady had a heart attack the other day and I feel sorry for him, even though I don’t like what he did... “

“Jesus to me was an anti-religious character. He came to say to people that God lives inside you. When he said the kingdom of God is at hand, it’s in your hands, it’s inside you, it’s all around you, [he was saying that] you don’t need religion to get God.

We are coming to a time in the early 21^st century when it is going to become very obvious to people that God and religion are two very different things.

It’s not that you get rid of religion, because we all like to have somewhere to go to light a candle, and we all like our rituals, but we need to understand that God and religion are two very separate things. I think that religion has been acting as if it is God.

She acknowledges that the New Atheists can be “quite rabid” but says: “I always actually get atheists to pray for me; because I figure God must prick up his ears and listen to them! God’s sick of listening to everybody else.”

She is fascinated by near death experiences, noting that many people return with a new impression of God: “most were aware of what they can only describe as a superior being, or an intellect. It wasn’t a man or a woman. It was an energy or an intellect that was pure love.”

As to whether she practises meditation, she says: “No, I don’t feel I need to. I feel I’m in constant communication…I don’t feel that God requires me to perform any particular rituals or to say prayers that were composed by anyone else. I don’t think God minds if I talk to God while I’m sitting on the toilet. I reckon old God has a special individual relationship with everyone.”

As to her views on the Eucharist, she says: “I’m not sure I believe the thing about it literally becoming the body or Christ, because it seems strange to me that Christ would require you to think of things in that kind of grotesque manner.” She agrees that she gets good feeling from the Eucharist, but says that it’s “not something I would feel I have to do. I get a great feeling when I see something happen in my life or the world that I think is a sign of God’s presence. For me, being pregnant or having children: that to me is the greatest time when you feel connected to God. It’s when your child is in your womb, and somehow you made it, and God is forming it.

The essence of Catholicism is beautiful, but I don’t think all the dogma and the rules and regulations represent Catholicism. I think the attitude to homosexuality is anti-Christian, and you could argue blasphemous, since God made gay people.

About 10 years ago I went to confession. Because I grew up in abusive circumstances, I had absolutely no self-esteem, so I spent about 10 minutes telling the priest what a terrible, awful person I was, and he stopped me in mid flow: ‘stop it!’ he said, ‘this is blasphemy: God has made you exactly the way you are and it’s a blasphemy for you to criticise yourself and to say that you are a bad person’… I thought that was a very powerful thing to say.”

“I think that unfortunately [the people running the Vatican] have made it so that when people hear the word “Catholic” now, they shudder…they think of sexual abuse.

What they’ve done in fact is driven people away from the idea of God, there are more people now who don’t think there is a God at all, who otherwise would have, because people have run [the Church] so badly. “

As to our time, a time of perpetual crisis and uncertainty, and whether she feels in her bones that goodness or is darkness is rising, she says:

“Well, it’s a bit like a boil being lanced. I think that there has been a lot of darkness going on behind the scenes, and its now all spilling out. The boil is being lanced, and after that the pus will leave, there will be a healing then, there may be a scar for some time. But over the years, that will fade away.

I think that what’s happening spiritually is that the Holy Spirit is doing some serious housekeeping. And that means throwing out a lot of stuff, and that’s painful for all of us; probably especially for those who are being revealed as criminals. But that is necessary work. So I think that it’s a healing thing and a great thing that is happening, even if it’s very painful.”

She would like to see “a regime change, so that we get to have a say in who becomes pope… and we want more transparency, like any other 21^st century organisation. The attitude shouldn’t be ‘we work for them;’ it should be ‘they work for us.’

If that doesn’t happen, then people are going to leave and go to other churches. What I would and love to see, is for Catholicism to survive this, and to redefine what it actually means to be Catholic…, so that the essence of what true Catholicism is can shine…..we are all talking to the same Spirit, we are all brothers and sisters.”

The Church, she says, “is not a 21^st century organisation. The rest of us are in the 21^st century, and they are in the 1500s. Perhaps they need some help to cross the bridge and come with us in to the 21^st century, but I don’t think you can help someone who won’t admit that they have a problem.

I would say to them: go back to Isaiah, which says, ‘though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be made as white as snow.’ But not until you tell the truth and you wish to be healed.”

By Rory Fitzgerald   Thu, Jul 08, 2010

In the face of threats that he would be turned in to calamari, Paul the Psychic Octupus bravely, and correctly, predicted Germany’s defeat by Spain yesterday. The German-based psychic octopus has now achieved a 100% accurate prediction rate for the World Cup 2010.

An unexpected epiphenomenon of the world cup, Paul has gained such popularity that German TV has now started to broadcast his predictions on-air, with two reporters sitting by his tank, offering live commentary from his home at Aquarium Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany.

Paul has become world renowned, but recently provoked hostility in some quarters: After his quarter-final prediction where he correctly predicted that Argentina would lose to Germany, some Argentineans threatened to kill Paul and put him in a paella.

The newspaper El Dia even offered a recipe for any Argentine patriots who managed to capture Paul: "All you need is four normal potatoes, olive oil for taste and a little pepper."

The Argentinan chef Nicolas Bedorrou suggested a harsher way to cook the octopus: "We will chase him and put him on some paper. We will then beat him in order to keep the meat tender and then put it in boiling water."

His keepers encourage Paul to make his predictions by putting mussels into two glass cubes, with each cube having one of the competing nations’ flags on the front. Whichever mussel Paul chooses first is taken as his prediction.

Paul showed special talents from his early life in Weymouth sea life park in England. According to the park’s entertainment director Daniel Fey: "There was something about the way he looked at our visitors when they came close to the tank. It was so unusual, so we tried to find out what his special talents were."

The first time Paul’s psychic abilities were tested was during the UEFA Euro 2008 soccer championship when he was proven correct in 80% of predictions made. Paul’s current keeper in Germany, Oliver Walenciak, says Paul is not bothered by the death threats sent by Argentinean supporters, some of whom now blame the octopus for their World Cup exit:
"There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive."

Paul’s antics have been reported to billions throughout the world, adding yet another light-hearted and quirky twist to the already great celebration of humanity that is the World Cup in South Africa.  The phrases "Paul the Octopus" and "Pulpo", the Spanish for octopus, are both currently in the top 10 global trends on Twitter.

Octopi are apparently highly intelligent animals and have been shown to have a good short and long-term memory. Some say their intelligence is similar to that of a dog. It has been calculated that if you placed accumulator bets on the basis of Paul’s predictions at the beginning of this World Cup, you would have now made a 131 times your money.

Yet don’t base your pension plan on betting on Paul’s predictions during the next World Cup, as Paul is unlikely to live until 2014 - octopuses only live an average of 3 to 5 years, and he was born back in 2008.  I can see already unprecedented grief for this octupus on his passing, as millions unite in silence and the Last Post is played - on a vuvuzela, of course.

Calamari will never taste the same again.

By Rory Fitzgerald   Fri, Mar 26, 2010

Ireland is mired deep in a dark night of the soul. In Catholic thought such a "dark night" can bring purification. Might it be the same for Ireland? 

The Irish Church has been central to the Irish people for sixteen centuries. Even as we stumble through a spectacular economic collapse; people now also speak of the imminent collapse of the Irish Church.

The Dublin Report on child abuse in the Church was published last November, just as the worst floods in recorded history submerged major Irish cities. The meteorological pathetic fallacy continued in to December and January as the nation froze solid in the coldest winter since 1947.

Patsy McGarry, the Religious Affairs Editor of The Irish Times puts matters like this:

"The Catholic Church in Ireland, as we have known it, is seriously damaged and probably beyond repair. It is sinking and sinking fast."

Even the most outspoken defenders of the Church now see the possibility of collapse. David Quinn has said: "Thermonuclear war has been declared on the church by its critics. If it's going to go down, it may as well go down with its flags flying at full mast."

The tenor of the debate in Ireland changed over the past few months: ambivalence to the Church has given way to open hostility. And, if you read the pages of the Irish Catholic press, it is clear that the Catholic laity and clergy are the most enraged of all. Many feel let down by the Church that they love, and to which they have dedicated their lives. Although, none can feel more betrayed than the victims of abuse.

People could accept that there were some bad eggs in the Church. They cannot forgive a cover up by senior clergy: and that is the core finding of the Dublin Report. The Irish people now feel betrayed by their banks, their government and their church: the Pope's letter was written to a nation in despair.

The Irish Bishops seem blinded in the headlamps as they stumble from disaster to catastrophe. Only the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has chimed with the people with his humble and open contrition.

It has been a long, dark winter here in Ireland. The Pope's letter arrived on the day of the spring equinox, when light and dark poise perfectly balanced, and seasons change. Ireland has always been paradise for six months of the year, and purgatory for the rest. The Pope's addendum to his letter was a special prayer for Ireland's recovery from this crisis. In it he prays for a "springtime of holiness". The papal letter is not all things to all men: Many have found good grounds to criticize it, yet it does, I feel, convey sincere sorrow and offers hope of renewal, however faint.

Even if day now grows to exceed night, the Irish Church remains at war with itself and its critics. Amid the fray, the words of an old soldier now resonate. Tom Kettle was a dedicated Irish Catholic, a lawyer and a poet. Just days before he was killed in the Somme in 1916, he wrote a poem to his baby daughter:

"Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for the flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor."

This crisis arose because many in power put the empire of the Church above that dream, that scripture, and our children.

The dream that was born in a herdsman's shed has sustained the Irish people for centuries through war, desolation and famine. Now, we can only hope that a bright spring will somehow follow this darkest of winters.

By Dara Lawlor   Thu, Jul 08, 2010

A Munster or Leinster win in this year’s Heineken Cup Final, would catapult Connacht into the competition for the first time.  Indeed a Connacht victory in the final of the Amlin Challenge Cup would do likewise.  Heineken Cup qualification could do a lot to help build Connacht’s brand and fill the Sportsground for each home game.  Unfortunately it’s hard to see them acquitting themselves respectably.  Unless there’s an Italian side in their group they’ll be throttled week in, week out.

Once rugby went professional the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) designated Connacht a “Development” team. Their current budget is 50 percent of that of the other provinces.  They rely on recruiting promising under-21 and youth internationals that are not snapped up by the other teams.  Every season they finish in the bottom spot of the Magners League and it’s hard to see this changing while they continue to operate under such a major constraint.  The IRFU tried to shut them down as a professional entity in 2003 to cut costs but were forced into an embarrassing u-turn after being faced down by a major public protest. 

The IRFU are once again  reviewing the operation in order “to provide a sustainable future for Connacht Rugby.”  As a result players and coaching staff can only have one year contract extensions beyond the 2009-2010 season.   Ominously this also applies to head coach designate, Eric Elwood, who succeeds Michael Bradley at the end of the season.   If they’re honest with themselves they’ll admit that they’ve mismanaged Connacht.  Would the New Zealand Rugby Union allow a team with “Development” status to source a third of its playing roster from abroad?  Unlikely!

A major consequence of Connacht’s meager funding has been the development of an unbalanced squad with six or seven very good professionals, a number of promising younger players, and the rest middle of the road journeymen.  This will continue until Connacht are allowed to seek alternative sources of funding that complements their existing allocation from the IRFU.  The prospect of receiving a decent salary at Connacht may entice players operating on the fringes of the other provincial squads to take their chances and go west, as well as helping Connacht keep any promising players that they’ve developed.  This would improve the balance of the squad and negate the need to sign mediocre players from overseas.

While this may be seen as impractical and unenforceable the always creative Australian Rugby Union (ARU) have put in place a system that allows their new Melbourne based Super 15 franchise ,The Rebels, do just that.    The ARU are part funding The Rebels and allowing them to make up the shortfall through private sector funding.  While such a set up is not without its problems, a rigorous oversight system would help to ensure that it is not open to abuse.

A Connacht side populated with young fringe players, unable to breakthrough at the other provinces, could be very competitive.    Fergus McFadden played for the Irish Wolfhounds against Scotland “A” on February 5th.  He doesn’t even make the bench for Leinster’s Heineken Cup matches.  With Gordon D’Arcy and Brian O’ Driscoll set to continue to monopolize the Leinster midfield until the next World Cup there’s a danger that McFadden will spend his most important developmental years in the wilderness of Leinster’s reserves instead of proving himself  at the coal face of regular competitive rugby.  Two seasons ago Sean Cronin looked at what was ahead of him in the pecking order at Munster and opted to sign for Connacht.  He has developed as a player and is now a genuine international option at hooker, having made his debut against Fiji in November and sitting on the bench during the Six Nations.   Q.E.D.

If fringe players cannot be enticed to leave their provinces to join Connacht another system may facilitate their development.   They could be farmed out on a one year loan to Connacht with both provinces sharing the wage bill.  If the IRFU are serious about developing depth in key positions they could install a mandatory loan system that secures at least one promising player, not making the match day 22, from each province.

Like Melbourne is AFL territory with a small rugby community, Connacht is prime GAA territory and its rugby community is also small, containing only 7 percent of the national player base. Connacht are not going to fill the Sportsground on a consistent and long term basis with support from the rugby community alone. They need to entice the wider sporting community to come along too.  They have a number of factors in their favour.  They are the only professional sports team worth talking about in Galway. Rugby is a winter sport while GAA is played in the summer, and rugby matches are family occasions where it’s safe to bring the kids along without exposing them to boorish behaviour in the stands.

Rugby is seen as elitist in every town in Ireland bar Limerick and many people don’t go to games or show up at clubs because of this.  How are Connacht going to build a relationship with a wider community?  What do these people look for when they go to a match? How can they design an experience at the sportsground that doesn’t intimidate them, meets their needs, and genuinely moves them?  Is there more to Connacht’s marketing strategy than updating the website and posting up the name of their next opponents on the billboard outside the Sportsground?

The people conducting the current IRFU of Connacht’s operations should examine the work done by sports marketeer extraordinaire, the late Peter Deakin, at both the Bradford Bulls and Saracens.  Deakin arrived at the Bradford Northern rugby league club in 1996 along with Australian coach Brian Smith.  It was the advent of Super League and Bradford Northern had been underperforming for years both on and off the field.  Deakin and Smith radically overhauled the club’s operations, re-established and improved links with the local community, and rebranded the club the Bradford Bulls.  Smith restructured the player roster, installed new systems, and changed the colour of the club jersey from black to white, using the rationale that it was easier for players to see each other in white.   Their efforts led to improved performance on the field, with the Bulls narrowly missing out on the inaugural Super League title in 1996, winning it in 1997, as well as significantly increasing average attendances to over 10,000 in 1996, and 15,000 in 1997.  Deakin went on to repeat the trick of dramatically increasing crowd attendance at the Saracens rugby union club.  

Brian Smith’s initial input was equally important.  Smith, a former school teacher, had built a reputation as an innovative coach who was unafraid of making tough decisions, at the famous St George Dragons rugby league club in Sydney.  Though he left the Bulls after a year, having received an offer to coach the Parramatta Eels, the foundations were in place for his assistant, Matt Elliot, to coach the Bulls to the Super League title in 1997.  There are many similarities between Smith and former New South Wales Waratahs, Leinster, Scotland, and Ulster Coach, Matt Williams.  Both are controversial “fixers” who seem to do their best work when tough decisions are needed on restructuring player rosters and installing new systems.  It’s unfortunate for both that someone else usually seems to capitalize on their hard work, but such is the way for “fixers” in every walk of life.  Though the IRFU have gone with an insider, the former Ireland out-half Eric Elwood, to take over as head coach, its hard not to feel that Williams, or someone with his skill set,  is required to challenge the status quo and do the kind of heavy lifting  needed at a club clearly at a crossroads.

By Isambard K. Brunel   Thu, Mar 25, 2010

Well it is magnificent.  I travelled back to my beloved Bristol today as soon as I had learned that they had completed the bridge in my absence.  The grace and elegance of the structure suspended across the Clifton gorge was certain to reinvigorate the heart after a deep slumber. 

But the magnificence of my design was minute by comparison to the structures and transport machinery I observed on my way there.  I travelled with the aid of a companion who took me in his private carriage.  The prodigious speed and level of control was disconcerting.  80mph in a carriage with no rails!  The braking capacity was formidable and enough to unsteady the nerve of a Victorian engineer.  When I asked the operator of the carriage to describe the motor within, he seemed dumbfounded.  I believe it to be still a reciprocating engine of some sort, but so quiet and without steam.  He mentioned cylinders and pistons but could not engage in any interesting discourse.  How the operator of such machinery should remain so ignorant of its workings I can only guess.

Still, one only had to observe the world within and out-with the carriage to be utterly convinced that mankind's progression of technology has been exponential.  Even the quality of the glass that permitted such observation .... How did they get it so flat? Such distractions.  Such scale and complexity!  All in a mere 150 years!  Magnificent.  And it was only when we started to ascend a structure leading straight out and over the Severn estuary itself did I realise that I really had entered a new era for mankind.  Not one bridge but two bridges across the Severn estuary to Bristol and I am somewhat immodest to point out that they use the same suspended configuration that I myself first used in Clifton!  Once we got to my own seemingly modest structure, I had to contain my amazement and appreciation of my own bridge for fear that my contemporary colleagues would take me for a simple-minded fool.

I have decided to retire to the city of Dublin for a period.  I always liked it there and I would like to catch up on that interesting atmospheric railway project Charles Vignoles completed there.  I requested carriage on the Dublin steam packet from Liverpool.  This has been replaced by a contraption called the "Sea Cat" sailing from Holyhead, from which I write this note.  Such speed across water and queer hull structure perplexes m mind.  Alas, it is a propeller-less craft, it seems, and I dare not speculate what machinery can be spouting such vast quantities of water rearward to propel the craft forward with such celerity. 

Perhaps that propeller invention did not have the legs I thought it might have had.  I had counted on a bit more time for the crossing of the Irish sea to collect my thoughts but I now find it takes a mere 2 hours.  This is now a frantic world, uncivilised even.  If truth be told, I am struggling to maintain control of my wits.  There is so much to learn.  Perhaps I will not cope?

I must confess a certain disquiet in my soul.  Was I right to assume that technological progress was the only true progress?  In this modern world, technology has unleashed an abundance of energy to the masses ....the largely ignorant masses as far as the technology around them is concerned, it seems to me.  Where does the energy come from?  Man now truly has mother nature clamped tightly in his vice.  In his ignorance, will he squeeze too tight?  But I vex myself.  I am sure that there is order.  I am sure that when I find some solitude and look into the matter, I can put my mind at ease.

I arrive at Kingston in 10 minutes.  It is called "Dun Laoghaire" now.  There has been some political changes that I must catch up upon.  There is so much to learn.  I cannot help but think that the scale of changes in the last 150 years is many times more significant in terms of human history than the preceding 150 years with which I am more familiar.  I just hope mankind has not bitten off more than he can chew.

Recently reanimated, Isambard K. Brunel now blogs for The Freeman's Journal.

By Ciarán Madden   Sat, Mar 06, 2010

 It's past 2am
 Again
 And heaven shines
 Its bright white light
 Again
 Into the darkened corners of my mind
 In intervals

 Like a great warm sentry
 Doing his rounds
 He laughs at me kindly
 When he sees me
 And pokes me in the ribs
 While telling me 'everything's just fine
 Don't worry'


 Like the stretching of the evenings
 The hour jumped forward
 Or the puff of a cloud
 Over the blue green valley
 Oh how lucky we feel
 Him and I
 And all whose hearts are open
 To breathe this air


 And watch these tides
 To have been born here
 To have been alive
 And how lucky we'll be
 To die here
 In the soft warm soil
 Of our mothers


 With our only fear
 'Does it all just end here
 Like this
 In the cool and dark
 Of nothingness
 No hell?'


 Yes, the heaven I see
 And feel
 Has no need to make ill
 Or judgement
 And though it loves
 It is no father
 Or mother
 It is no brother or sister
 Or cousin or friend


 But is both and all and everything
 It is the bringer of sex and seed
 The breaker of smiles and waves
 It is the lifter of spirits
 Beaten down
 The falling of water
 And whisper of leaves
 It is the song of the blackbird
 On the branch


 It is the sun
 The moon
 The rain and stars
 It is a mountain
 And a cold lake


 It is a hungry fox
 A rabbit and a squirrel
 It is a heron waiting on the river bank
 A seagull screeching, swooping down,
 It is the river itself
 And the sea
 It is a shrew
 And makes of itself a burrow
 And a hill


 It is all stone
 All cats
 And every mule
 It is the panting of a dog
 And a city


 It is what's lost for words
 When we get too excited
 By love or by the morning
 It's what passes between us
 When we forget ourselves
 And remember such creation


 It is the pump in our hearts
 That fills us forever
 With the colours that we dream
 In their spinning wheel
 Of forward moving venture


 It is a beginning,
 An end,
 A move toward invention
 And,
 When our fears
 Do finally come asunder,
 It's what sets us all free
At the dawning of the summer

By Dara Lawlor   Thu, Mar 25, 2010

A few weeks ago I listened to Ryan Tubridy interview guitarist Barry “Bat” Kinane about the impact of illegal downloading on his band,  the Wicklow-based Glyder.  Barry reckoned that 30,000 copies of their most recent album had been illegally downloaded and was doubtful that the band could survive under these circumstances.

“Unless the internet gets policed…bands like us won’t be able to exist, we won’t be able to put out the music…bands years ago were able to make a living out of this…I’ll have to give it up and do something else.”

Glyder play a style of classic rock reminiscent of Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher.  Throw in a dollop of Pink Floyd and Fish-era Marillion and you’re getting there.  Their music is available to purchase on iTunes, eMusic, their website, and also streams for free on their Myspace page.   This, along with steady touring and excellent reviews has seen them build up a solid following at home and abroad. According to their Facebook page “Glyder played their first headline tour in Spain in 2008 and headlined to 10,000 rock fans in India in October 2008.” They also opened for Metallica at Marlay Park at the beginning of August. Impressive!

They are one example of the thousands of niche bands worldwide that have become commercially viable with the move from the traditional music retailing model to the new disruptive digital one enabled by the emergence of the internet and broadband.  Chris Anderson describes the phenomenon in The Long Tail (2006).

“The new niche market is not replacing the traditional market of hits, just sharing the stage with it for the first time.  For a century we have winnowed out all but the best-sellers to make  the most efficient use of costly shelf space, screens, channels, and attention.  Now in a new era of networked consumers and digital everything, the economics of such distribution and changing  radically as the Internet absorbs each industry it touches, becoming store, theatre, and broadcaster at a fraction of the cost.

Think of these falling distribution costs as a dropping waterline or a receding tide.  As they fall, they reveal a new land that has been there all along, just underwater.  These niches are a great uncharted expanse of products that were previously uneconomic to offer.  Many of these kinds of products have always been there, just not visible or easy to find”[1]

Glyder aren’t the kind of band that shift enough units to command shelf space in the major retailers.  I wasn’t able to find a physical copy of any of their CDs in my local HMV or Tower Records.  According to Anderson traditional retailers are “not interested in the occasional sale, because in traditional retail a CD that sells only one unit a quarter consumes exactly the same half-inch of shelf space as a CD that sells 1,000 units a quarter.  There’s a value to that space – rent, overhead, staffing costs, etc. – that has to be paid back by a certain number of inventory turns per month.  In  other words, the onesies and twosies waste space.”

As we now know, what the internet gives with one hand, it takes with the other through illegal downloading.  Barry is right to be miffed at not receiving a penny in royalties for the 30,000 illegal downloads.  It’s not fair, the files are his property after all. But, as I outlined in another post, one illegal download is not the equivalent of a lost CD purchase under the old model.  The people who download Glyder’s music from illegal p2p sites can be categorised as follows.

1. Those who use p2p file sharing networks as a substitute for buying the album.  In other words they take the music.  If it was impossible to file-share, many in this category would not buy the music.  They are merely doing it because they can.  That said, there are those who would have bought the music.

2. Those who sample the content and then, if they like it, make a decision to buy the music, go to concerts etc.  Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor recently  made the point that in advance of the official release of a CD he’s looking forward to he will always go to an illegal p2p site for a sneak preview. I did likewise before buying the most recent Wilco album.

The fight against illegal downloading has been going on for almost a decade without a satisfactory end in sight for either side. Record companies have not prevented illegal downloading, nor have they come up with a suitable model to make sure their artists are paid.  In Remix Professor Lawrence Lessig calls for the decriminalisation of file sharing “either by authorising at least non-commercial file sharing with taxes to cover a reasonable royalty to the artists whose work is shared, or by authorising a simple blanket licensing procedure, whereby users could, for a low fee buy the right to freely file share.”[2] This is not a perfect solution, but a license fee could go a considerable way towards paying for Glyder’s studio time and touring costs, ensuring that they continue to do what they love.

In a recent interview Trent Reznor, similar to Barry, bemoaned the younger generation’s lack of appreciation for the creative sacrifice involved in making good music, and was wistful for the “physicality and aesthetic experience” of the vinyl era.  He accepted though that record companies had only themselves to blame for not realising the implications and possibilities of digital media “until the toothpaste was out of the tube.”  He feels that there is no way back and musicians need to face up to this and “make the best of it.”  Reznor has considerable resources that enable him to experiment with this new reality in a way that Glyder cannot.  He was able to offer his latest release The Slip for free on his website and still make millions out of the physical release.

So where do Glyder go from here?  It’s obvious they have a lot going for them musically, along with a growing fan base that many bands would kill for.  My gut tells me that harnessing this following in a manner similar to the Grateful Dead with their radical marketing approach would be a good place to start.  This style of brand building  defied conventional wisdom at the time, is still unmatched, and well worth studying.  Their unique relationship with their fans has endured and they still make millions even though they haven’t toured since the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995.

For Glyder to succeed they too need to defy conventional wisdom and recognise the new terrain for what it is. Lawrence  Lessig puts it better than anyone else when he says that  “our norms and expectations around the control of culture have been set by a century that was radically different from the century we’re in.  We need to reset these norms to this new century.”

By Rory Fitzgerald   Fri, Mar 26, 2010

Niall O'Dowd: "The voice of Irish America"

Thirty Years ago, Niall O'Dowd left Ireland. He arrived in America as an illegal immigrant, a construction worker. From humble beginnings, he went on to become a close confidante of the Clintons and an architect of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Bill Clinton has called him "the voice of Irish America for this generation." How did this ordinary Irish immigrant go from pushing wheelbarrows of cement, to pushing international politics at the White House?

Niall O'Dowd's new book, An Irish Voice, opens with a vivid description of St Patrick's Day 2009 at the White House:

"The first ever black president of the United States, Barack Obama, is holding court for the Irish in the house that kept Irish and blacks out for so long. Yet here we are: one group who came as slaves, and so many of the other in coffin ships. This is our night, to celebrate with this young African American man who has capsized the stars."

An Irish Voice is a warts-and-all memoir of an extraordinary immigrant story. He unflinchingly recounts the Irish immigrant experience of the 1980s: the loneliness, the laughter, the inner struggle between the free-love of San Francisco and a stern Catholic upbringing; sleeping in a cold bed with your buddy because you can't afford your own place. He tells of playing Gaelic football; getting in to fights on constructions sites, getting drunk and womanising: trying to get by as an outsider is a strange land. It's a story familiar to Irish emigrants the world over, yet rarely is it written about so candidly.

The book is fluid and dynamic, the story remarkable. You can detect the influence of American writers like Hemmingway and Whitman. O'Dowd shares a similarly pure and eloquent writing voice: deceptively simple, but an art in itself.

I met Niall O'Dowd at a Dublin hotel earlier this month. The hotel's porter smiles and says he knows him. O'Dowd has stellar political contacts, but he keeps his feet on the ground. He will happily chat to the hotel porter, just as he will speak to the Prime Minister of Ireland at his book launch later that same evening.

He hasn't forgotten his roots, nor has he lost his Irish accent. He says, "when I arrived in America, what I loved was that the country was just so big: If I didn't make it in Chicago, I could just go to Boston or San Francisco; or maybe in the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, I'd find out what I should be doing!"

Catching the Greyhound bus from Chicago to San Francisco, he missed the telegram saying his father had died. He felt far from home, but stayed in San Francisco. His burning ambition to become a journalist provided the impulse to set up the The Irishman; a newspaper for the many Irish fleeing the economic disarray of 1980s Ireland. Some Berkley feminists would have preferred if he had called it the "the Irishperson". Yet the paper thrived. After a number of years on the west coast, he went to try his luck in New York City in the late 1980s.

In New York he set up the Irish Voice newspaper and Irish America magazine. He got involved in politics, and founded the "Irish-Americans for Clinton" campaign in 1991. After Clinton's election as President, he asked O'Dowd to lead the American delegation to Northern Ireland in 1993.

All over the world, students of politics and international relations study the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Here's a former construction worker turned journalist, living off his wits, who just scribbled out the idea on beer mats and napkins in New York and Dublin bars in the early 90s: "one of the things I became convinced of was that for peace to happen in Ireland, there had to be an American connection. That had never happened before.

The world, he says, thought of the "terrorist community" in Northern Ireland as "a group people in a corner of Belfast who had just gone totally insane; but when you went and talked to them, you found that they were looking for a way out.

"They wanted America as an outside player. They needed an outside-the-box scenario, because every group within the box had been acting and reacting to each other for thirty years and nothing was changing.

"Drop the President of the United States in the middle of that and suddenly everything changes. You create a whole different nucleus around which everything begins to revolve."

He describes Bill Clinton's understanding of Irish politics as "astonishing", calling him "an informed politician, but also a jazz musician who knew how to riff at the right time, and when to make a change at the right time. In all the years I knew him I never saw him make a misstep as he walked through the minefield of Northern Irish politics...

"In 1995 Clinton made a speech in Dublin: 750,000 people turned out that day to cheer an American president. That's the same number who turned up to protest George W. Bush."

He laments how the Lewinsky scandal has overshadowed Bill Clinton's legacy, and praises the Clinton Foundation's work. He feels that the lessons learned in Northern Ireland can be applied elsewhere:

"In my last conversation with Hillary [Clinton], she was talking about how she wanted me and others to go and talk to Muslims in America, and other groups who have troubles in their homelands; and explain how the expatriate community can come in and help. They can help remove some of the mistrust of America; say [for example] in Pakistan, with the Pakistani-American community going there and selling the message."

Like many of his generation, he had much of his faith beaten out of him by the Christian Brothers, but he feels something spiritual in Ireland itself: "There is something there, something immutable and timeless about Ireland, something very old. You feel it and you touch it."

"Ireland is the touchstone" for the Irish Diaspora, he says, "Scratch the surface and you find an amazing history, beyond time."

Of the many ordeals undergone by the global Irish tribe, one of the more recent was 9/11. His book, "Fire in the Morning" explores this story. He recalls interviewing Irish American survivors of 9/11:

"I got a strange feeling talking to them. It was almost like it was visited on them because they could take it. Somewhere deep in the Irish identity there's that belief that trauma and misfortune will befall you, but you have to respond. They were the strongest, bravest people, the widows of the fire-fighters. I just ended up in awe of them, because of how they dealt with it. They hadn't collapsed, they weren't falling apart. They were raising their families; they were putting one foot in front of the other. It's that wonderful Irish spirit. Part of it is their religious faith, which is great; but part of it is [the idea that]:

'This is what we do as a race. We hang in. We fight, We're tough. This isn't going to knock us back.'

"Look what we did [in America]: we were the cops, we were the fire-fighters, we were the people who protected the public. Ron Clifford from Cork was in the WTC that day, and his sister was in one of the planes that hit. He describes these guys running past him: he knew they were going in to their deaths."

Yet O'Dowd is saddened at how 9/11 brought a culture of fear to America. He thought that the election of Obama would change things, but he's "disappointed how all those millions of foot soldiers who helped get him elected have just run to the hills."

Obama, he says, has "done a magnificent job" in terms of how America is viewed abroad. Coming to Ireland now and taking about Obama instead of Bush; it's like two different worlds."

He says: "the two most significant events in American [political] history were the election of JFK and the election of Barack Obama."

Of Ted Kennedy he says: "one of my saddest memories of Teddy was walking through the Kennedy library with him. There are these two guys (JFK and Bobby) in huge portraits up on the wall: frozen in history, good looking, young; millions worshipped them. And then there's Teddy: He's big, he's fat, he's out of control, but in some ways he did more than those two on the wall. It must have been an incredible burden to live in the shadow of his brothers."

Niall O'Dowd feels passionately that the Irish-American and African-American experiences should be understood as parallel: "Only the African Americans came in worse shape than us. We came in coffin ships, they came in slave ships."

He recalls his own grandmother recounting her father's memories of the Irish Famine of 1847 and says: "The night that Barack Obama was elected, I was in Harlem talking to a woman whose grandfather was a slave.

We're not so far away from the past."

And yet how things change: His great-grandfather was illiterate; his father became a teacher; and O'Dowd is now adjunct Professor of Journalism in Columbia University. He lives with his family on New York's Upper East Side and runs Irish Voice newspaper, Irish America magazine and IrishCentral.com

His new book, An Irish Voice, offers a behind the scenes look at the Northern Ireland Peace Process; it also touches on the most personal issues, from his battles with depression and drink to love and family. Most of all, it offers a portrait of modern Irish America and proves that America remains a land of opportunity, even for the humblest immigrant.

If you want to understand Irish America in the 21^st century, you must read this book.

You can purchase a copy of An Irish Voice here.

By   Thu, Mar 25, 2010

By Rory Fitzgerald   Thu, Mar 25, 2010

A version of this article originally appeared in The Jewish Chronicle on 19 March 2010.

By Dara Lawlor   Thu, Mar 25, 2010

The 1970s film Three Days of the Condor offers Finance Minister Brian Lenihan lessons as he bets the farm on NAMA.

I’ve always loved the final scene where Joe Turner, the CIA agent on the run played by Robert Redford, tells shady CIA boss J.Higgins (Cliff Robertson) that he has spilled the beans on a proposed U.S. led invasion of the Middle East to The New York Times.

"JOE TURNER: Well, go on home, Higgins. Go on. They’ve got it.

J. HIGGINS: What?

TURNER: You know where we are. Just look around. That’s where they ship from. They’ve got all of it.

[Higgins sees that as they've walked they have reached the front of the New York Times printing plant.]

HIGGINS: What? What did you do?

TURNER: I told them a story. You play games. I told them a story.

HIGGINS: Oh, you…you poor dumb son of a bitch. You’ve done more damage than you know.

TURNER: I hope so.

HIGGINS: You’re about to be a very lonely man. It didn’t have to end this way.

TURNER: Of course it did.

HIGGINS: Hey, Turner. How do you know they’ll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?

TURNER: They’ll print it.

HIGGINS: How do you know?"

The film closes on a freeze frame of Turner’s anxious and paranoid face as Higgins asks “How do you know?”

The Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, in his approach to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), would do well to heed the lesson of this scene: It is impossible to predict the future.

Lenihan is telling us to trust him regarding the valuation of the development loans that are to be transferred from our damaged banks to NAMA.  A reecnt article in The Irish Times signed by a group of 46 economists, asks the government to reconsider NAMA.  It questions the minister’s proposed valuation approach which it describes as “taking the market price as a basis and then adjusting upwards to ‘fair economic value’. This concept works on the assumption that in the short term, property and development prices will rise.”

Well Brian… How do you know?

By Rory Fitzgerald   Thu, Mar 04, 2010

They cannot operate a mobile phone, or use a clutch, but elderly ladies are the wisest people on Earth. You see, they will have led lives for others, and are full to the brim with unfeigned kindness. They have lived so much for their children, and put up for so long with their cantankerous husbands, that they know no other way of being: only patience, love and kindness; never anger or pride.

Parallel parking may be a mystery to them, but they know the mysteries of the heart. They have seen people live and die, many times watched the seasons come and go, and have seen whole civilizations pass and fade. They know that the truth and beauty of life lies in small things: a flower, a newborn baby, a cat.

They are not deceived by the promises of the world: that money makes you happy, not for them the loud and empty glorying in youth, fame or sexuality. Happiness comes in the quiet ticking of a clock, a peaceful cup of tea and a biscuit, the finches flitting in the garden, the buds unfurling anew for spring.

And in their quiet and humble way, they all seem to know the divine, the Great Mind that infuses All. They hear him in birdsong and in the early morning quiet. He hears them too; when their hearts stir for an injured creature, or when they whisper prayers as their grandchildren sit exams. Unlike young seekers, they need not seek, for they are knowers. They do not need to spend years in an Indian ashram to see love in all. They see it always, and are the very heart of compassion.

Old men are great too, but not as wise somehow. I'm not sure why, but this is so. Everyone knows it; don't try to deny it. The difference is perhaps this: old men will spend hours tinkering with a lawnmower in the shed, or sawing pieces of wood to repair a chair. Whereas old women repair minds and hearts. With a smile, they distill the mysteries at the heart of being. Old men sweep leaves from pathways, old women sweep away pain. They live lives of love for their families and friends. They are givers to their last breath.

"But what about crotchety old cows?" you ask. A fair point, and one well made. But an exception does not unmake a rule. Irredeemably bitter and mean old ladies are rare things, inverse desert blooms. An occasional flower does not undo a desert. An island does not make an ocean any less of an ocean. But I take your point.

Except then for crotchety old cows, the proposition holds: old women are the wisest and best of all mankind.

Dedicated to old women everywhere, but especially the young at heart and, not-quite-yet-old, Anne, Margherita and Joan.