Tag Archives: Fintan O’Toole

The Irish President election

Posted on by
Reply

Irish Times columnist, Fintan O’Toole, described the election of Catherine Connolly as President of Ireland as winning “a hollow crown.”  “Connolly” he said “cannot be unaware that she was also soundly trounced by the real winner: indifference.”  He makes this call based on the low turnout and unprecedented number of spoiled ballots.  Let’s look at his case.

While Paul Murphy of People before Profit boasts that the turnout increased, and it did from 43.87% in 2018 to 45.83% this year, it is also true that the 2018 turnout was the worst on record.  Bragging about the turnout this year is not particularly convincing.

The number of spoiled votes was extraordinary: spoiled papers were 12.9% of the poll, and when you take account of the Fianna Fail candidate’s vote, who had withdrawn from the race but remained on the ballot, you can add a further 6.3%.  Approaching one fifth of the poll effectively spoiled their vote while over 54% didn’t vote at all.

So, a majority didn’t vote, and while Presidential elections have traditionally had a lower turnout than general elections, it is also true that it has declined in recent elections.  Some of this year’s decline will have resulted from dissatisfaction with the choice of candidates and will have come from the less motivated cohort of those who spoiled their vote.  In this respect we are not talking about indifference but opposition to the process.

Nevertheless, taking all this into account, it remains the case that Connolly got a huge majority: over 55% of the poll and over twice the Fine Gael candidate.  The result was a stinging rebuke to the Government parties, and while the vacant character of their campaigns may reflect the largely vacant powers of the post of President, Connolly put up a rhetorical challenge that these parties spectacularly failed to address.

She championed Palestinian rights, supported Irish neutrality (such as it is) and criticised growing militarism in the West, including that of the European Union.  The government parties couldn’t or wouldn’t defend their purely verbal support for the Palestinian people alongside their lack of action, or their effective complicity through this inaction in the genocidal crimes of the Zionist state.  They couldn’t defend their policy of destroying the already threadbare claims to neutrality and wouldn’t defend their increasing collaboration with Western imperialist militarisation.

Their poor candidates were faithful reflections of the poverty of their political record, and they lost because they reflected too clearly their failure to address the myriad problems that they have created despite economic success. This includes the housing crisis to which their main political response is now to blame immigration upon which the economic success at least partly depends.

O’Toole’s “hollow crown” is not therefore because the “real winner” was “indifference”; the real problem was not that Connolly’s win was insubstantial, but because, for all his regular gripes about the governing class, he doesn’t like the Connolly alternative on offer.  In particular, he doesn’t want to call into question the liberal credentials of the West and its war drive against Russia.  He wants fundamental change, but not the only fundamental change that could bring it about.

Where the “hollow crown” comment has some correlate in reality is his observation that ‘the left’, of which Connolly’s campaign was comprised, has “as yet no clear alternative programme for government; and a very wide and disparate constituency of the disillusioned, the disgruntled and the disengaged.”

The campaign and voters for Connolly clearly have illusions in the importance of their victory but they were not so “disillusioned” that they submitted to inactivity and abstention.  Their being “disgruntled” is just the author seeking an alliterative pirouette for his column when words like anger, outrage, sanguinity and hopefulness would be more apposite.  So “disengaged” were they that they campaigned and voted and had the temerity to win.

What is correct is that this left is “disparate” and has “no clear alternative programme for government.”  The completely “insipid, inarticulate, ineffectual” Fine Gael campaign (Pat Leahy) that sought “to make a harmless niceness all over Ireland” (O’Toole) might have made Connolly coherent and substantial by comparison, at least for the post of President, but it was not, and not intended to be, a coherent and substantial political programme. Nor is it a mandate to especially do anything since the post of President is not empowered to do anything. It is mainly a ceremonial part of the political establishment, an establishment the left is meant to oppose. If it is argued that this aspect is unimportant this raises more questions about the importance of the exercise that will not be asked or answered.

As I have elsewhere laid out, Sinn Fein and the Green party have been tested in governmental office repeatedly. You can call them ‘left’ if you want, but only to render the term pretty meaningless. They are not socialist, and neither are the Social Democrats or Labour Party.  That People before Profit wants this ‘movement’ to continue under one political platform is the very definition of opportunism – the pursuit of immediate gain at the expense of principle.  The campaign only shows that elections breed more electoralism, especially the successful ones.

The coalition of forces behind the Connolly campaign is not currently a coherent one although it might cohere around the leadership of Sinn Fein. If ‘the left’ is more genuinely identified as limited to People before Profit and Solidarity then this left is creating a trap for itself by putting forward a joint political movement and platform with these forces.  If it succeeds it too can surrender any genuine claim to be left, or again the word ‘left’ will be rendered meaningless, if it isn’t rendered as betrayal.

A year of Covid-19 (4) – a tragedy to be forgiven?

Posted on by
Reply

It’s almost as if someone has been reading these posts on the course of Covid-19 in Ireland.  Fintan O’Toole’s latest column (paywall) in ‘The Irish Times’ also notes some of the mistakes made in its early management and, while he treats the Irish approach as one of ad-libbing and improvisation, he lends a sympathetic ear to the early performance.  To what extent is this justified?

Well, let’s start with the scope afforded by this forgiveness: “when it’s all trial and error, no one should be tried for making an error – even when, as in the case of nursing homes and residential institutions – the flaws were fatal.”  But consider if we change the tense of the sentence – ‘even when . . . the flaws are fatal’.

‘Error’ he goes on to say ‘is moreover built into the structure of science . . . but science isn’t a set of certainties . . . to follow science is to follow evidence and with a new disease the evidence has been constantly evolving.’

Well, yes and no.  The important link between the worst effects of the virus and a person’s underlying conditions has been more and more understood.  On the other hand, as I noted at the end of the previous post – ‘one aspect . . . has appeared stubbornly consistent, the median age of those dying was reported in mid-January to be 82.’  Most recently, of over 1,500 deaths in care homes 369 were in January alone, a five-fold increase from December to January.

The Health Service Executive (HSE) noted on 21 January that the 27th of the month would be the anniversary of the first meeting of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), the crisis management team for the pandemic.  It was noted in April that no mention of nursing homes had been made in its first 11 meetings, with the HSE claiming that the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) that attended the meetings were supposed to represent the interests of older people.

While boasting of the support given to care homes the HSE officials were at this time unable to provide up-to-date figures of deaths within them or a breakdown between state and private providers.  Neither did they answer as to whether any of the deaths could have been avoided.

Around the same time that NPHET was being set up a number of important academic papers were just being published on the effects of the new disease (here and here), including evidence of the effect of the pandemic in China.  The notable paper from Imperial College in London included further disclosure of the much greater threat to older people posed by the virus.  While the infection fatality rate was 0.002% for children aged 0 – 9, the rate for those 80+ was 9.3%, 4,650 times higher.  While these absolute figures were too high the relative differences remained.

Clearly avoiding infection was many multiples more important for older people than for the very young. Even between the age groups 40 – 49 and 60 – 69 the relative fatality rate was nearly 15 times higher for the latter group.  So protecting the older age groups was vital, which involved isolating them from potential infection.  How could these most vulnerable people be effectively separated?

Fortunately, many of these people were already relatively isolated in social care facilities, while identification of those in the community would be relatively straightforward.  Unfortunately, this relative isolation was not a protection.

While the health regulator was supposed to represent the interests of older people the HSE was there to protect the health of the whole population.  It became apparent however that the facilities they managed, controlled and regulated had become prime sites of infection, all while the NPHET engaged in interminable debate about opening or closing shops, hospitality, schools and workplaces etc.

When it wasn’t about the various levels of lockdown that were never applied at the levels specified, it was about testing and tracing, which didn’t identify where the virus was coming from and was later no longer advised for close contacts of confirmed cases.  So, what had been the point of it?

At the beginning of this year ‘senior sources’ were reporting the exhaustion of their approach, admitting that there was “not much else that can be done”, which didn’t stop the debate of vanishing returns continuing.  Today it revolves around rules for entry from outside the state, which is almost a moot point given the levels of domestic infection.  More honestly, it is being reported that ‘Ministers and senior officials’ view it as ‘more about politics than public health.’

Yet the places where around half of the deaths have occurred – residential homes and hospitals – are spared the outrage they properly deserve.  On 26 January it was reported that the level of infections among staff and patients in health care settings had never been higher.  And three days later the Chief Medical Officer was explaining that there was an “exceptionally elevated” infection rate among those aged over 85; that 55 recent deaths were associated with hospitals and 140 with nursing homes; and that we could “expect a large number of additional deaths in the coming weeks.”  Not much had changed over the year despite the ‘trial and error’ of ‘following the science.’

The state has incurred increased debt of around €20 billion in 2020 through various lockdowns but it is still unable to target resources effectively at the greatest problem: the daily death toll for Tuesday was the highest of the pandemic and the median age is still 80+.

It cannot be that a targeted prevention strategy would cost too much or that resources could not be prioritised – €2 billion would go a long way towards protecting older people never mind €20bn.  If even half the current death toll had been avoided and it was now around 1,750 who had died, would this justify the lockdown of society along with its enormous cost?  Would it not have been possible to identify those with the underlying conditions that make them vulnerable apart from advanced years, accounting for well over 90% of deaths? And would it then not have been possible to recognise the difference between those dying with Covid-19 and those from Covid-19?

But why would new problems be adequately addressed by the Irish health system when forever problems have not? When it turns out that the new problems are really the old ones?  As was pointed out by one TD early on, the Health Regulator – supposed to represent the interests of older people – had already reported that in care homes the compliance rates for risk assessment and infection control had fallen from 27 per cent to 23 per cent between 2017 and 2018.

Repeated problems identified have never been adequately addressed, with the HIQA complaining in November that nursing home residents were picking up the infection in hospitals and then being returned to their homes, while care home staff were being lost to contact tracing teams and agency staff were not being included in testing.

As Prof Sam McConkey, an infectious disease specialist with the Royal College of Surgeons, put it “nursing homes have been chronically under-staffed for several years.  They are going to have to start cherishing their staff as the most important thing they have.”  If staff were paid adequately they wouldn’t have to take second jobs, which might for example go some way to addressing the problem that staff weren’t turning up for testing and some were showing up for work while showing symptoms.

Some care homes were simply too small with too few resources. In some residential facilities for people with disabilities derogations were given to staff to continue working though they were identified as having possible close contact with infection.  They had not been tested and it was not clear when they would.

Yet, repeatedly bizarre statements have been issued by those in charge, including that NPHET was proposing setting up an infection-control team – in mid-December!  As if infection control was not a standard and routine hospital requirement. Or that there were difficulties in approving employment of nurses for care homes from India, Philippines and other countries outside Europe, reported in January, when many problems were the result of shortages of staff.

All this was occurring at the same time as repeated statements were made by the NPHET, which we noted in the previous post, that “there was simply no way of protecting nursing homes or any other institutional setting if we don’t control the spread of this infection in the community.” Then saying that vulnerable groups in care settings were a priority although also saying that it was “not realistic to think we could keep it out of homes.”

Unfortunately, seeking to prevent community infection through a generalised lockdown makes all talk of prioritisation a nonsense.  A general lockdown is precisely not to prioritise, and the actions and non-actions of the state are convincing evidence of this lack of ordering of risk.  To talk then, as O’Toole does, of inevitable mistakes is itself to fall into the error of identifying policy as simply mistakes.   Even in the case of vaccination, the representative body of private nursing homes has complained that just 10 per cent of the initial 77,000 vaccinations administered by mid-January were within nursing homes.

The identification, right from the start, that Covid-19 represented a specific threat should have been met with targeted and focused measures to protect those most vulnerable.  The ramshackle and incoherent attempt to lock everybody up, that cannot be sustained, has diverted attention away from this task.

That diversion continues with a false debate over a ‘Zero-Covid’ strategy, which is simply a variant of the current approach.  Like the existing approach, it targets what measures are required to support closing society instead of what measures are needed to keep it open.  It again ignores experience of just who is threatened and how specific measures might be implemented to protect them.

Both the current approach and its extension into a ‘Zero-Covid’ one can’t tell us how long we would have to be locked up for and how we could be sure that whatever metric of success is decided upon could be achieved on a sustainable basis.  What ‘Zero-Covid’ would gain in reducing deaths associated with Covid-19 would be more than offset by the costs of an intensified and indefinite lockdown, which if the advocates of it had been followed, would have been in place since March. Both ultimately can only be sold to an increasingly weary population by promising something that they can’t deliver: the development of the pandemic has had more to do with the weather than lockdown measures, and the end-point of immunity through vaccination may be illusory if new variants are impervious to the vaccines just developed.

In this case, and it may be the situation anyway, living with Covid-19 will be required and immunity through infection become the outcome, if not the objective.  In any case and in the meantime, the policy should be directed to protection of the most vulnerable.  In relation to the assessment of O’Toole, the prerequisites for forgiveness do not exist.

Back to part 3

Is learning from Brexit possible?

Posted on by
1

Last week the ‘Financial Times‘ revealed that the Tory Government is working with big business on plans to tear up those workers’ rights enshrined in EU law.  This would include ending the 48-hour limit on the working week; changing rules on work breaks and ending the inclusion of overtime pay in holiday entitlements.  This is the list reported but there are undoubtedly others.

That this was one purpose of Brexit and its likely effect was both predictable and predicted, it comes as a surprise to no one.  Yet large swathes of the Left in Ireland and Britain supported it, although much less vocally in Ireland because it is so unpopular.  In any case their support for it has assisted putting in place these projected attacks and is indefensible and inexcusable.

An analysis of why they took such a position would have to look at such things as an originally opportunist position becoming hard-wired into their politics; their nationalist perspective arising from the view that the nation state will introduce socialism and come to embody it; general simple-minded opposition to the EU on the shallow grounds that it is a creature of capitalism, and the strong tendency to have a more concrete idea of what you are against than what you are for.  There’s also a large dose of ignorance and stupidity involved.

The significant role of stupidity first hit me when I read that left supporters of Brexit were complaining that the negotiations on the British side were being conducted by the Tories.  Further examples became clear when they, like the rest of the Brexit movement, demanded a harder Brexit as the only one worthy of the name, and for the same reason – there was no point otherwise.

Now that even a blind man can see what the future invites, what are the chances that this left will reconsider its support for Brexit and the political approach that led to it?  What might this involve?

Well, much of this left also supports Scottish nationalism, which perhaps should be no surprise since this too involves an obviously nationalist project that harbours illusions in a separate capitalist state.

In the weekend’s ‘Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole has a long article on Scottish nationalism that is quite good.  It notes that in 1979 the referendum on devolution and creation of a new Scottish parliament couldn’t even get 40 per cent of the Scottish electorate to support it.  Now opinion polls show majority support for independence.  O’Toole looks for reasons for the change.

The first is the decline of the Empire that Scots played such a prominent and profitable role in creating, before it shrunk to the extent that many middle class Scots saw potential for better career opportunities in a separate state.  Some on the Left present this opportunist turn as some sort of anti-imperialism.  That some Irish accept this is where another heavy dose of stupidity comes in, although again, a common nationalist outlook is a more adequate political explanation.

The second reason is the growth of the idea that Scotland is more progressive than England (Wales hardly ever gets a mention), an idea O’Toole correctly describes as a ‘myth’.  This is traced to the idea that Thatcher and her policies came to be seen as an imposition on the country from outside rather than as a class-based assault on the whole British working class.

This isn’t really an explanation, more an outcome – why did Thatcherism come to be seen as a rallying cry for Scottish nationalism and not British working class struggle?  The venom of nationalism is now so prevalent in the bloodstream that even when English and Welsh workers try to move to the left, through the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, the Scottish left prefers its own nationalism and opposes it.

O’Toole notes the mass opposition of 70,000 Celtic and Dundee United fans during Thatcher’s attendance at the Scottish cup final in 1988.  Many Celtic fans, traditionally a base of support for the Labour Party, are now ardent nationalists.  Again, their existing (partial) identity with Irish nationalism assisted the switch, although with just as little justification.

O’Toole notes that the Scottish National Party tacked to the left in order to garner support from those opposed to Thatcherism, but Scottish nationalism is not a complement to Celtic supporters’ residual Irish identity but a dilution of it, if not a rival.  Recent criticism by the SNP government of the actions of Celtic Football club and praise for Rangers may mainly be a piece of opportunist tacking to a part of the electorate it hasn’t had success with, but it is also politically consistent with any idea of Scottish nationalism.

What O’Toole doesn’t cover is the employment of constitutional solutions by the Labour Party to cover up for its hostility to a militant class opposition to Thatcherism.  Ultimately this played into the hands of the more aggressive nationalists, but then the Scottish Labour Party was even more venal and rotten than the rest of the party.

The third reason advanced by O’Toole is that Scottish nationalism is very much bolstered by the rise of English nationalism.  How else, for example, can you account for the popularity of the SNP Government’s handling of Covid-19 as opposed to widespread criticism of the Tories?  Objectively, the differences are much less than the similarities and both have a very poor record in terms of deaths, making the same mistake of seeding care homes with infected discharges from hospitals.

The Tories have repeatedly used the rise of Scottish nationalism to attack the Labour Party, which plays very well for the SNP. It can hardly be a surprise that nationalist division encourages divisive nationalism.  Yet this too seems to have escaped much of the British left, which supports Scottish nationalism but deplores English nationalism, except for the most degenerate Stalinist section that is now buying into it.

Why do they not get that the former has helped the latter?  Why do those who did oppose Brexit not see the parallels with Scottish nationalism, both movements championing the magical powers of ‘national sovereignty’?  Did they really miss the absence of a Scottish component of the Corbyn movement, the potential base of which had already been partially vaccinated against left politics by nationalism?  Do they really think that the left of the nationalist movement in Scotland was the equivalent of the Corbyn movement in the rest of Britain; ignoring the project of the supporters of Corbyn being to move the Labour Party to the left while the most distinguishing mark of the left supporters of Scottish nationalism is the militancy of their nationalism?  Do they also have to actually witness its full reactionary effects before they discover that nationalism really is not the friend of the working class?

An analysis of why these socialist have taken such a position would have to look at such things as an originally opportunist (but successful looking and therefore trendy) position becoming hard-wired into their politics; their lapse into a statist conception of socialism and mistaken assumption that national separation is the default democratic position of socialists; general simple-minded opposition to the UK on the shallow grounds that it is a creature of capitalism, and the strong tendency to have a more concrete idea of what you are for when it doesn’t actually entail any element of socialism.  Not to mention that dose of simple stupidity.

If the Left that supported Brexit had any idea what mistake it had made in supporting leaving the EU it would be revising its support for nationalism of the Scottish variety.  It would even wonder whether any newly gained national sovereignty for Scotland might unleash demands for workers sacrifice for the newly won ‘independent’ Scotland in the same way the Tories seek to make Britain competitive against the EU.

Of course, it can be argued that Scotland voted against Brexit and a separated Scotland will seek to join the EU; although this is not an argument open to supporters of Brexit.  But even in this case, the point is not that the EU is something in itself that socialists should support, rather it is to be accepted as an exemplar of the progressive development of capitalism, which to the extent that it is progress is also progress towards socialism, as it increases the international socialisation of the forces and relations of production.

The point is that this internationalisation of capitalism, that by this fact brings forward the grounds for socialism, only does so because it strengthens the potential unity of the working class across nations.  It is exactly this unity that Scottish nationalism opposes and destroys.

We have seen this above; through its arising upon the bones of the defeated British working class movement under Thatcherism, and its opposition to workers seeking to mobilise to the left under Corbyn: its opposition to spreading this movement and assistance to those also opposed to it in the rest of Britain.

There is very little indication that the Brexit supporting left has learnt any lessons.  Although it may be viewed as early days, it is a sign you aren’t stupid when you can see the policeman’s truncheon falling and you decide not to put your head in the way, rather than wait until it cracks your skull, whereupon you declare the need to defend yourself against police brutality.