Monthly Archives: September 2023

Trusting the State (4) – Irish ‘neutrality’

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The neutrality of the Irish state, that most of its people support, is a myth.  The Irish government has repeatedly stated that the state is militarily neutral but not politically.  Since its armed forces are tiny it might be said that its military neutrality doesn’t matter but its politics does.  It is also often said that its policy of neutrality is whatever its government decides it is.

Already the so-called policy of neutrality is variously referred to as ‘not clear’ and ‘flexible’, while the anti-communism of the cold war period was clear, and before that its neutrality in the Second World War was flexible in favour of the Allied powers.  Before that, the sympathies of Catholic Ireland with the nationalist and fascist forces of Franco was widespread.

At the minute the Government hides behind a ‘triple lock’ which mandates that more than twelve members of the armed forces can be sent overseas on operations only if the operation has been approved by the UN, the Government, and a resolution of Dáil Éireann.  It is now complaining about “the illegal and brutal full scale invasion of Ukraine by a permanent member of the UN Security Council”, and that because of the Russian and Chinese veto on the Council no sanction on Russia can be approved.  No such calls were made when the US or British engaged in recent “illegal and brutal” invasions, and the contrast with the approach of other countries such as India and South Africa at the recent G20 meeting is glaring.

The political practice of the Irish state has been to allow US troops to stop-over at Shannon airport on their way to its various wars and to have a deal with the British Royal Air Force to police its airspace. It has refused to assert its sovereignty by checking suspected US rendition flights and has always made clear its support for ‘the West’.  To think that a state so dependent on US investment and financial flows, plus its integration into the European Union, would be in any meaningful way neutral in the conflicts these various states are involved in is for the birds.

The claim to any sort of neutrality is not only bogus but also hypocritical and malevolent.  Hypocritical, because in the Irish State’s recent application to join the UN Security Council it made much of its non-membership of NATO while flying kites domestically in order to facilitate the first steps to joining it.  Leo Varadkar stated that trading on its former status as a colony had helped it gather support for Ukraine and oppose ‘Russian imperialism’.  The level of hypocrisy would be astonishing were it not so common; it claimed its privileged victim status in alliance with all the Western powers that are members of NATO, are former colonial powers, and currently comprise the biggest imperialist alliance in the world. All very ‘anti-imperialist’.

It is malevolent because it has combined lying with efforts to support the war in as strong a way as it can, without eliciting opposition from its own people.  So, it has ignored its own housing and homeless problem by welcoming one of the highest levels of Ukrainian refugees in order to demonstrate its political support.  Should anyone fall for the idea that this is the expression of some sort of (welcome) humanitarian concern, the previous and continuing policy on asylum seekers of direct provision should be noted, as should the second class status applied to refugees who aren’t Ukrainian.  Even with regard to Ukrainian refugees, Varadkar has made it clear on a number of occasions that while the door is open there’s nowhere to stay: the not so subtle message is ‘stay away’.

Implementation of the welcome has therefore stumbled from crisis measure to crisis measure with an eagerness the state did not previously display.  The self-image of ‘Cead Mile fáilte’ (“a hundred thousand welcomes”) does not withstand historical examination, including the referendum on the right of children born in Ireland to citizenship, which was targeted at excluding the children of non-EU nationals born in the Irish State.

The recent government sponsored ‘Consultative Forum on International Security Policy’, which was no more than an obvious attempt to advance the cause of NATO membership, majored on the threats to Irish security, while commentary has often focused on the vulnerability of undersea cabling off the Irish coast linking the US to Europe.  No one was so impolitic at this Forum to mention the threat to underwater infrastructure from the Americans, responsible for blowing up the new Nordstream gas pipeline to Germany.

The deceitful nature of the Forum was indirectly exposed by the Dame of the British Empire who was invited to oversee the proceedings.  She remarked that “I really don’t know any other country where they’ve done something like this, really tried to engage the entire population in an open conversation about a county’s role in the world, – national security is variably restricted to small groups of senior officials and decision makers.”

In fact, the Irish State is no different in this respect from other capitalist states, as the example of US military flights through Shannon airport demonstrates, and now the support given to Ukraine.  The Forum was not an exercise in conversing with the people of Ireland but an occasion to lecture them about the necessity to get on board with the rest of the West, led by the US, in its increasing polarisation of the world and aggression against its competitors – Russia and China.

The Irish government claimed that its support for Ukraine was only going to involve provision of ‘non-lethal’ training to its armed forces, which included training in clearing mines and equipping it with two de-mining vehicles. Its ministers repeatedly emphasised the humanitarian nature of the training being provided. This claim was already something of a joke, given that clearing minefields was a crucial element of the Ukrainian offensive in which its armed forces have been thrown into a headlong assault against long-prepared Russian defences, only to be slaughtered in their tens of thousands.  All for the sake of complying with the United States and the Zelensky regime, with the miserable result of the uncertain capture of small settlements that have been utterly destroyed in the process. Lives exchanged for a few kilometres of bloody ruins.

The revelation that the ‘non-lethal’ training also includes weapons training and military tactics has exposed the government as liars.  Even the correspondent from the rabidly pro-war ‘Irish Times’ was compelled to admit that this was ‘a significant departure from the Government’s public position that Ireland is providing only non-lethal support.  Weapons training was not included in public announcements by the Government of the Defence Forces participation in the EU training mission. It contrasts with a statement by Tánaiste and Minister for Defence Micheál Martin earlier this year that the training would be in “non-lethal” areas.’

There was no reference to weapons training in any Government statements in the Dáil during debates on Irish involvement, yet in July the Cabinet had authorised this extension of support.  Just like other capitalist states, in Ireland “national security is variably restricted to small groups of senior officials and decision makers.”  The policy of neutrality is indeed whatever the government decides it is.  

The Department of Defence stated that the training presented “no conflict” with Irish military neutrality and denied any attempt to mislead the public on the nature of the training. It also said the training previously announced, which did not include any mention of weapons training, “was always intended to be indicative rather than exhaustive”.  It was, it said, only a “modest step-up”.  

What this “modest step-up” demonstrates is that the Irish State, through its participation in the EU’s Military Assistance Mission Ukraine (Eumam), is participating in a proxy war against Russia. It therefore also appropriates its own share of responsibility for its horrific results.

Back to part 3

An exchange of views on ‘Public Sector’ vs ‘Private Sector’

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The comment below to a previous post is almost perfect in illustrating the illusions that exist on the role of the state and for which the series of posts were written.  It is therefore worthwhile bringing greater attention to it along with my response:

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I would have reservations about what you say about the State and capital relationship. Both sides of the equation seem to be too general, categories that are not specific to time and place. I find the categories of the public sector versus the private sector a little more specific. The key thing here is that there has occurred over the last thirty years a major transformation in the relation between the two sectors. In short hand, there really is no public sector to talk about in the way we once did. One should preface talk about the public sector with the phrase ‘so called public sector’. The public sector has been taken over by the private sector yet throws over this capture an appearance of being in the hands of and being managed in the interest of the public. 

When you use the public health service it is easy to believe that you are being served by what used to be known as the public sector, when in fact your are not, most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies. This is just one example of many. It is interesting to see how in Britain many of what you would once have thought of as classic public services are in fact in the hands of private companies like SERCO.

I read the policy documents of the World Economic Forum and everything is dressed up in the clothes of Public Private Partnerships, something designed to deceive. What we mostly end up with, are private companies extracting money from what used to be called the Public Purse. Even the Dole broadly defined is operated by private companies pretending they are public bodies.

In a nut shell it is important to keep up with changes that have only recently occurred, over the last 30 years, not to get stuck using doctrines about State and Capital that are so universal that they pass over the particularities that now prevail. 

RTE was once upon a time a part of the public sector, yet the funding came from both the licence fee and income raised from commercials. A model I have to admit I never liked, when I watch it I can’t stop moaning about the deluge of commercials, I have to sit through, more frequent than the those you get with British commercial television, four breaks for ads every hour. So the public broadcaster always had one foot in the commercial private sector. I wonder if State capitalism ever actually existed in the Republic of Ireland. When I travel from the North to the South I am struck by how more commercial the South seems to be, maybe this is too is deceptive.

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You write that the categories of State and Capital “are not specific to time and place” and that “the categories of the public sector versus the private sector [are] a little more specific”, and that the public sector gives “an appearance of and being managed in the interest of the public.” Of course, the opposite is the case.

“Public” and “private” in these contexts are empty abstractions designed precisely to obfuscate the real situation and to give appearances that essentially deceive.  So-called public sector organisations are presented as if they serve the public but experience illustrates otherwise, as the posts on RTE demonstrate.  The reformist left pretends that failures are due to the corruption of ‘public’ sector ownership by ‘private’ interests but the ‘public’ (however understood) does not own or control it; as we have seen from their sale and from the complete and utter lack of democracy and accountability in their operation.

Even ‘private ownership’ is no longer dominated by single ‘private’ capitalists but by collective pools of capital, including pension funds of workers, as well as pools of money of separate capitalist companies and ultra-rich individuals. Capital is being socialised but is still capital, so operates according to the laws set out by Marx, while the state is not the depository of the ’public’ or general interest but of the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.  Again as set out by Marx.

It is a body separate and above society, which, while it rests on society, has its own interests that are intimately tied to the capitalist system and to various fractions of the capitalist class or to individual capitalists.  Precisely in what way permits greater specification of their forms that are “specific to time and place”, which you see as the shortcoming of these categories.  The general abstractions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ go nowhere, while the Marxist categories of ‘state’ and ‘capital’ have engendered whole libraries of analysis and empirical studies.

As I wrote on Facebook about the controversy at RTÉ – ‘it wasn’t commercial interests that decided to pay one presenter over €500,000 per year. It wasn’t they who doctored the accounts to hide this. It wasn’t they who cut other RTÉ workers’ salaries and conditions, and it wasn’t these interests who wasted millions by, for example, buying thousands of euros worth of flip flops on ‘barter accounts’. So what is it with “public service broadcasting” that requires so much forgiveness and support?’

Illusions in the ‘public sector’ are deep.  Consider these facts:

During the Covid-19 lockdown everyone was invited to clap for the NHS in the North and in Britain when it had closed its doors to other services, with lasting effects we still suffer from, while it spent billions of pounds on useless equipment from the cronies of the Tory Party.  Everyone now complains that they struggle to get a GP appointment, and that the service is crumbling, while more and more are signing up for private healthcare if they can afford it.  If the ‘public’ sector really was there to serve the public none of this would be happening.  If it really belonged to ‘the public’ it could be stopped but it can’t in its present form of state ownership.

The NHS is a bureaucratic monster.  We recently learned of the neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby, who murdered at least seven infants and attempted to murder at least six others in her care between June 2015 and June 2016. The worst serial killers in British history have been ‘public sector’ employees paid to care for the public.  It would be possible to write these off as tragic anomalies were it not for the fact that such scandals are exposed on a regular basis and are certain to recur.  Only when workers and patients have the power to control and make accountable these services will this change, and this will only happen when these services are removed from bureaucratic state control.

You write that “most of the services are provided to the hospital you are using by many private companies” but this has always been the case. One of my first jobs was processing invoices from these companies in the NHS, from medical devices to food to pest control.  The use of agency staff, employed indirectly through private companies, has certainly increased, but this is because the terms and conditions are better in some ways so workers such as nurses would rather work for an agency.  In the last year millions of ‘public sector’ workers have gone on strike to get higher wages in defence of living standards ravaged by inflation, in the teeth of opposition by their state employers.  Many workers in the private sector have already achieved higher pay increases without even having to go on strike.

You are correct to say that many previous state services have been privatised and often this leads to attacks on workers’ terms and conditions as well as deterioration in services.  This often obscures the poor services previously provided under state ownership, as evidenced by telecoms in the South of Ireland.  Much of the left opposed the creation of a single water authority in the Irish State, forgetting the failure of the previous mode of state ownership.

While it is correct to oppose privatisation it is no alternative to champion ownership by the state.  The use of the term Public Private Partnerships, which you state is “something designed to deceive” is only true in one sense, for those with the illusion that state ownership is on behalf of the public.  The purpose of the capitalist state is to protect capitalist ownership of the means of production, which is a sort of partnership.  The use of the term Public Private Partnership is therefore not “something designed to deceive” but is actually a more accurate description of the relationship between State and Capital.

The alternative is workers’ ownership and not the belief that capitalist state ownership can be made democratic.  This, of course, does not prevent us furthering any democratic changes that are possible without illusion that they are adequate or any sort of solution.

Trusting the State (3) – giving us the ‘right’ to housing

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Queuing to look at one rental property in Dublin; pic Conor Finn, Sky News

Ireland suffered effective bankruptcy in 2007-08 through a property boom funded by a massive expansion of credit and crisis of overproduction, illustrated by employment in construction falling from 232,600 in in the last quarter of 2007 to 133,200 in the last quarter of 2017, a fall of 42.7%.  Yet the drop was even more precipitous than this: from 236,800 in 2007 to 83,400 in 2012, that is, by 65 per cent.  Almost one in every two workers who lost their jobs in the Irish state in the five years from 2007 to 2012 had previously been employed in construction.

The sector went from10.7 % of GDP in 2006 to 1.1% in 2011; going from the sixth largest share to the lowest in a group of around 50 countries during this period. The index of the value of residential construction fell from 751.7 In 2006 to 57.9 in 2012 while the index of non-residential construction fell from 115 to 73.59.  The growth in the stock of housing plummeted:

From an unsustainable boom to a collapse and again rapid growth, the boom-slump-boom Irish economy now has capacity constraints only partly made up by immigration, leading to a new housing crisis in which not enough houses are being built, house prices have become extortionate again, and not enough properties are available for rental.  To rub it in in, some of the partly finished houses from the boom were left to rot or demolished while the quality of much of what was built has become, or is becoming, uninhabitable because of poor materials or dangerous construction.  The banks that workers bailed out in the 2008 crisis are back in profit, having involved themselves in new rip-off scandals, and now criticised for pitiful savings rates while borrowing costs for its customers increase.  Despite their profits today their massive losses carried forward are set off against taxes, not a facility available to the working class.

The housing crisis dovetails with other aspects of the malfunctioning of Irish society including health and education.  More than 830,000 patients are on hospital waiting lists while staff vacancies are unfiled, including senior medical staff, while there are hundreds of teaching vacancies in schools.  Doctors, who in their career development will work for a year or two in Australia, aren’t coming back because they can’t afford houses in the areas they want to live.  Executives in US multinationals complain that housing is an issue for their recruitment of staff, thus raising the potential of lost foreign direct investment.

It is tempting to say that only Ireland could go from bankruptcy to growth of 26% in 2015 (and over 12% in 2022), and in some ways this is not just another example of the contradictions of capitalism in general but does speak to the particular character of the Irish variety.  Infamously, the Irish GDP figure is often ridiculed, and no longer accurately reflects real domestic economic activity; so although it has been boosted massively by US multinationals’ direct investment, it also reflects the massive impact of transfer of assets and production from elsewhere so that they can be taxed in the Irish State.  This has resulted in a massive growth in corporation tax receipts and its concentration in a few multinational companies, with around 60% of receipts come from only ten companies.

What the Celtic Tiger boom shows, and the vertiginous climb out of the following slump, is that even in good times capitalism is a problem and does not discard its contradictions.  The traditional Left alternative of spending more money by taxing the rich is not cutting to the root of the problems exposed, which arise from the contradiction of the development of productive forces coming up against the relations of production, which produce crises of overproduction and credit booms and slumps.

The unplanned and uneven development of these forces produces shiny new multinational offices beside small terraced houses that cost a fortune because not enough new housing has been built–in a city like Dublin that has witnessed an abundance of high cranes over its skyline for years.

The Government of the Irish State thus has a housing crisis and a surfeit of revenue.  Calls by opposition parties to solve the problem by spending more money and taxing the rich doesn’t recognise that this is not the problem.  The Irish state finds it both difficult and easy to spend money.  In the first three months of 2023 spending on housing was €80m behind budget, while spending on the new national children’s hospital has ballooned from a budget of €650m to an estimate of over €2bn, although nobody knows how much it will eventually actually cost or when it will be finished, being already years behind schedule.

The ability of capitalist states to waste money, which goes inevitably into the pockets of private capitalists, is not confined to Ireland, but the Irish state does seem to be good at it.  However, spending money to build houses requires workers to build them, land to build them on, and raw materials with which to build them.

Many workers and their skills have been lost following the Celtic Tiger collapse, as we have seen, and unemployment is low, falling from over 16% in 2012 to just over 4% now.  Land is privately owned and hoarded, and raw material costs have increased worldwide due to general inflation caused by monetary policies to protect the asset values of the world’s ruling class and the dislocation of supply caused by Covid lockdowns and sanctions arising from the war in Ukraine.  The Left, or some of it, thinks printing money is a solution, supported even stricter lockdowns, and supports western powers sanctions–so is in no position to parade its solutions.

In so far as it does, it calls upon the state to take direct action to build houses and acquire land.  The capacity constraints mentioned remain as does the record of failure of the Irish state.  The state itself is aware of this and the government in office has taken a host of initiatives to boost the housing market, mostly with the effect of increasing prices and relying on the private sector.  In turn, many private capitalists have suffered, as is the norm, from the workings of their own market.

Out of all this the governing parties decided that they wanted a Housing Commission to advise it on what it should do, including proposals for a constitutional referendum on housing, so that it to be some sort of right that people could refer to.   Not surprisingly, this has proven a problem.

It appears that there can be two approaches to putting such a right into the constitution.  First, it could be a statement of aspiration, which would involve more perspiration in writing it than any effective action arising out of it.  The second is the establishment of some legally enforceable obligation on the state, which the state fears will open it up to multiple legal challenges with all the horrific costs that this would entail.  Less money to spend on housing would result, they claim.

And here we come to the Karl Marx bit.  Famously, he said that ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.’  In other words, if there aren’t the resources to build more houses the establishment of some ‘right’ to one will make no difference.  As one right-wing commentator rightly said, a referendum ‘won’t lay a single brick.’

As Marx also said: 

‘Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only . . . one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. . . . To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’

So, to whom would a right to housing apply?  Everyone 18 and over, asylum seekers and refugees?  What sort of housing would a right entail – apartment, detached, terraced; where would it be sited and of what size?  And at what cost? Who would decide all this and what effective remedies would there be for non-compliance with any determined right?

It can be no surprise that Sinn Fein (paywall) fully supports a referendum, and no surprise what its reasons are.  Its housing spokesperson advances it because it ‘would restore trust in politics’ and would ‘put in place a basic floor of protection’, and ‘require the State, in its decisions and policies, to reasonably protect that right’; allowing ‘the courts to take the right into account where the State failed, manifestly to vindicate the right.’

However, just as a referendum will not lay a single brick, neither will any judge or judicial decision.  As if in recognition of this, the Sinn Fein author, Eoin Ó Broin, endorses the view that “its primary effect may actually be in the sphere of politics, administration and policy’, but doesn’t explain how the current forces prompting action we have noted above are less compelling now.  As for ‘restoring faith in politics’, the story of failure and ‘success’ set out above shows that faith in existing politics and the state is something to be overcome, not strengthened.

At the end of his piece the impotence of a constitutional right is acknowledged and then this acknowledgement denied–even on paper Sinn Fein can talk out of both sides of its mouth at the same time: ‘a constitutional right to housing will not, in and of itself, fix our broken housing system.  It would, however, place a firm legal obligation on the current and all future governments to realise that right through its laws, policies and budgets.’

The toothless nature of aspirations enshrined in the Irish constitution have been evidenced before: in its previous Articles 2 and 3, which stated that ‘The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.’ And that ‘Pending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the parliament and government established by this constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole territory, the laws enacted by the parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of Saorstát Éireann and the like extra-territorial effect.’  Far from advancing the claimed sacred goal of national reunification the articles became an alibi for not doing anything remotely effective, until eventually they were overturned for something else that isn’t working.

A more recent example illustrates the feebleness of expecting economic and social ‘rights’ to mean anything. A few weeks ago the Ombudsman for Children criticised the state for “profound violation of children’s rights”, so that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had “seriously failed in its duty to uphold the rights of children to the best possible healthcare”.  “The examples of rights being ignored are numerous” he said, in a criticism that covered 20 years.

In reply, the HSE said that it had ‘prioritised targeted improvements and investment over recent years.”  It couldn’t even be bothered to explain or exculpate itself from the many previous years of failure, never mind guarantee future satisfaction of children’s healthcare needs.  Trusting the state or the constitution to deliver social and economic rights, that cannot even be precisely defined, is to trust the state and constitution that protects and legitimises the social and economic system that ensures that they are both needed and cannot be delivered.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4