The re-enchantment of Ireland.

The  2^nd ICIS conference is planned for  8-9 November 2013, Bewley’s Hotel, Ballsbridge, Dublin.

 Inquiries to contuirt2013@gmail.com;  The proceedings of ICIS 1 have been approved for  publication and will be out in book form in October  2013; in the meantime CSP has published “Ireland: a colony once again”

Summary call

 

Last year, the inaugural conference of the International Congress of
Irish studies took place at UC Berkeley -
http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/ihouse.html?event_ID=55681.
The proceedings of the first ICIS conference are in press with CSP,
due to appear this month, and the conference chair has a strong record
of getting proceedings published in four such volumes to date.

With last year's seminar, academically sponsored by and hosted at the
number 1 public university in the world, we aimed to open up a
refreshing range of perspectives. Speakers such as Ishmael Reed
(McArthur fellowship recipient), Harry McGee (Political Correspondent)
and Stephen Watt (Theatre ) addressed the event amid a high
calibre of academic papers. We will now  host a
comparable event in Ireland on: Friday Nov 8th and Sat. Nov 9th 2013
in the Donnybrook Room , Bewley's Hotel, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4

In addition to the themes suggested below,
here will also be a focussed workshop on the following motion and
consequent points for discussion as part of the conference:

"The moral and political impetus of the first Irish republic
has spent itself or has been spent.
If this is so, what form might a new political dispensation take to

optimize the welfare of the Irish people? How would this be reflected
in a renewed republic's constitution?

If it is not so, what reforms to current structures will best serve
the people as a priority and how should they be pursued?”

The discussion is framed with the assumption of crisis, as in a time
which calls for decisive intervention to resolve complex difficulties.
While the notion of a new republic circulates, discussions to date
have yet to attain either theoretic rigor or practical impetus. Surely
in political discussion, the concrete is what's called for?

Participants are encouraged to bring up any themes they wish in
politics, law, technology, and the arts.

By way of example:
- problematics of defining Ireland and the Irish, as in the 1998 GFA
agreement where “Irish means born in Ireland” was overwhelmingly
repudiated by subsequent referendum.

• the elision of the national territory
• The failure of the legal system, with court schedules jammed, legal costs skyhigh, and law thus being used as an instrument to buttress privilege versus a promoter of justice

• the failure of the criminal justice system
• - the endemics of corruption
• The failure to implement even basic corporate law to the point that the privilegeds like U2 tended to use dissolved companies with impunity to deal with day-to-day business, while keeping their solvent companies away from the action
  - the interwoven mismanagement of private and public finances
  - the corporatist structure of the society, with no effective bodies
  for the protection of workers
  – the absence of security for [private sector] labour/industrial
  action since 1990
  - the abrogation and denial of property rights in Ireland (privacy of
  data; artists' IP and copyright)
  - the dynamics of (explicit and insidious) power at play throughout
  the above vis a vis civic identity and culture
• The destruction of civil society by increasing transaction costs through devices like IMRO, or by more direct means

For additional themes, and details about our organization, please see below

Please send inquiries and abstracts to eireann@yahoo.com

The deadline for abstracts is Oct 5 2013; however, discussants are encouraged for the workshop on the second republic, which will consist of a focused set of presentations and a moderated discussion

Additional themes; the re-enchantment of Ireland.

As exemplified by the first, highly successful event at UC Berkeley in July, 2012, ICIS conferences address a wide swathe of issues relating both to the island of Ireland and the Irish diaspora. In particular, we focus on topics which are not discussed publicly in Ireland or elsewhere due to the Irish state's stranglehold on discourse, with the message emerging loud and clear from the orgy of litigation against academics from 1999-2012 and exhortations from the Irish Prime Minister for his ideological opponents to “commit suicide” that the state will not countenance any deviation from its received narratives on the part of academics on its payroll. The media run by the Irish establishment is no better, with the result that online fora like “politics.ie” and “boards.ie” get a million views a month. Consequently, there is a huge backlog of topics that should have been discussed in appropriate academic fora but were not so discussed; the apparently programmatic nature of the ICIS conference calls is in fact simply an attempt to clear this backlog rather than any attempt to bias discourse.

While we continue to refuse direct funding from the Irish state, in order to facilitate free discussion, participants are welcome to apply for grants and we will provide letters of support. So far, these applications have met with 100% success, both in the USA and Ireland, with Culture Ireland indeed providing resources for an artist to visit from Germany. 

Similarly, our 2012 panels featured episodes from the darker annals of Irish history: the events that led the word “Connemara' to be a synonym for lazy and feckless in parts of the  American Midwest; the vicious and ruinously expensive attempt to destroy academic tenure and freedom in Ireland; the hunger strike to death of Terence McSwiney. In this vein, we are open to panel suggestions; the  one we have prepared ourselves is

“Just Once or with Improbable Frequency; can the surprising rise of left-field Irish musical theater to international success be maintained?”

Invited speakers will include Lynne Parker (Rough Magic which brought “Improbable Frequency to off-Broadway), Prof Stephen  Watt (Indiana), Arthur Riordan (Rough Magic) and Enda Walsh (Director “Once”). No formal invites have yet been issued

The theme of the first meeting was ”Ireland in crisis”; in this, the second, we examine what has arguably been a disenchantment of Ireland, the pace of which has quickened since 2000, and how to reverse it. Participants are free – indeed encouraged – to disagree whether such a recolonization has taken place; moreover, the following sub- themes are suggestions rather than directions:

1.      Re-enchantment through the Performing Arts;

In summer, 2012, a war of words broke out following an “ex cathedra” announcement from the Irish times that theater groups in Ireland through their refusal to tackle themes of socio-political change were, in effect, wasting taxpayer money. The response from the highly respected Lynne Parker of “Rough Magic” was furious; the miracle was, she argued, that any of the independent groups were still on their feet at all. Underlying all this, surely, is a dynamic whereby the Irish Times and other such organs of the Irish establishment exert a stranglehold on the perception of Irish artists. Debate is to be conducted on the terms of this artificially-created elite or not at all, as the already minuscule Arts grants are likely to be cut off in the name of “social relevance”. How should artists respond?

·         By refusing to interact with state institutions and other organs of the Irish establishment?

·         How can those in the traditional arts defend themselves against the Irish state's infantilization of what they do, a move consistent with the attempt to turn the Gaeltachtai (Irish=speaking areas)into reservations?

·         In that vein, why has the current government not moved against the attested criminal attempt - attested in US federal court after the Irish criminal justice system visibly failed - to privatize all of Irish traditional music and steal the rest of the music copyrights through IMRO with distribution of the effects of the crime to be implemented through Enterprise Ireland stands at trade fairs – for example Midem in 1998? The result has been a clear paucity of new Irish popular music groups on the international scene after the huge success in the 1990's;

·         Can Irish choreography ever recover from the expectations of its nature due to Riverdance?

·         Why are U2 repeatedly allowed to use the Dublin courts and neophyte judges to punish their ex-employees, both in civil and criminal process, while they remain inviolate after their dissolved distribution company Record services Ltd stole from hundreds of Irish artists and in so doing cost the Irish economy a fortune in destroyed businesses and dealt Irish culture a hammer-blow?

·         In the plethora of movies released about the “troubles” why is “Patriot Games” the only one to examine even tangentially the most intellectually and politically significant group involved -the Marxist Irish National liberation Army? While what Sean Bean depicts indeed is a caricature of the desperadoes who flocked to the military wing of Seamus Costello's Irish Republican socialist Party, it is now increasingly clear that the IRSP/INLA set the agenda for Gerry Adam' dual political and electoral strategy. In fact, the refusal of the British to terminate the Provisional IRA - as even hunger strikers members like McKearney now make clear they could have - increasingly looks like it was motivated by fear that Costello's heirs would fill the vacuum. Can we expect a new biopic of Costello to follow up the Carraher 1986 opus in the plethora of movies being made in Ireland over the next decade or, 35 years after his death, is the man who burnt the British embassy in Dublin in 1972 as part of their eviction notice still too disturbing?

·         By the timeworn path of emigration of the most talented? This is now substantially more difficult in that it is attested that a senior consular officer at the US Embassy in Dublin has taken it on himself to second-guess recommendations from US Immigration, often obtained after a very costly outlay both of time and money by the artist involved, that artists of outstanding ability should be allowed work in the USA. While this had been reported to the Irish Democrats prior to Obama’s re-election, they took no action, and only the very public rejection of Tim Pat Coogan for a visa led to a sequence of events culminating in the  resignation of the ambassador and the re-assignment to /Mexico of the consular officer in question, a Mr Bradley Wilde.  Indeed, there is evidence that Wilde  is NOT a standard  state dept  employee, and his actions resulted in Irish passports being “lost”, sometimes within the embassy itself, leading on at least one occasion (ironically hoe on the heels of the Benghazi incident) for a demand for their return by the Irish dept of foreign affairs, who yet did not make a public statement on this critical matter; Papers are invited that discuss whether the contempt of the US administration for Ireland, exemplified by Geithner’s  2010 intervention to make sure that the debt was too crippling ever to be paid back, extends to considering Irish visa applicants mainly as sources for passports to be passed on to the Israelis for another Dubai operation

2. The re-enchantment of the land of Ireland

In 1608 the first colonial reification of a colonial “property” in Anglo-Saxon Law was achieved through what became known as the Irish “Tanistry” case. Immediately, a land that was experienced largely through the “dindsenchas”, narratives about place, had to wait 300 years for a genius of the caliber of Joyce to res-establish this mode of experience in “Ulysses”. Moreover, two minutes with pen and paper will confirm that the cartography of the “dindsenchas”, like that of Joyce is unerringly accurate when it chooses to be; its location of the center of Ireland is more correct on the north-south axis than the reified ordinance survey.

It can perhaps be argued that the over-interpretation of the Tanistry case to facilitate the Munster and Ulster plantations was illegal, and in any case vitiated by the 1704 Queen Anne decision that removed land claims from colonial courts all over the nascent Empire. This issue is still the elephant in the room of indigenous affairs in the former Anglo-Saxon colonies, and we believe that there is a chance to discuss it here.

It could also perhaps be argued that Anglo-Saxon common law was falsely established as the law of the land on foot of the 17^th century Tanistry case, an argument for which the current chief justice Denham has reportedly publicly expressed sympathy. ,Judge Denham also has expressed a willingness to countenance Brehon/Irish law in her courtroom.

Finally, part of the narrative of Irish independence was the contemporary sense of self-sufficiency; Arthur Griffith correctly argued that the carrying capacity of the island was well above even its current population. However, recent activity by both the Atlantic and North Atlantic oscillation has shortened the growing season by 2-3 months, and fodder is now being imported from far more densely populated countries. Is this the final nail in the coffin for independence?

We welcome papers, inter alia, from artists who wish to discuss the disenchantment of the land and how to reverse it through appropriate gestures of reclamation of self-sovereignty

3. Queer, Irish, Catholic

Given that the first  ICIS conferences was n in California's “Bay Area”, we believe it worthwhile to re-examine one of the most troubling sequences in Irish-American history through the prism supplied by the work of Randy Shilts. In his book , “The mayor of Castro street”, which supplied the template for the hit movie “Milk”, this very respected gay activist documents what was effectively the ethnic cleansing of the Irish from the Castro neighborhood (perhaps the only such in American history), all the while demonizing the Irish as bigoted and backward.

However, in Shilt's later “And the band played on”, many of the heroes of the book are Irish starting with the pope's personal physician, one Dr Kevin Cahill, the first person to publicize the fact that AIDS was actually an epidemic. What does this tell us about this fragile nexus of identities of gay, Catholic, Irish and Irish-American at a time when Ireland's deputy prime minister describes gay marriage as the number one human rights issue of the moment?

4.      Intellectual Freedom; content and carrier

Given that ICIS runs academic conferences, so far in elite universities, we will continue to debate this issue sub specie academic freedom until the Irish state accepts certain universally-agreed principles of academic freedom. Recently, the CO of Ireland's Higher education Authority, (the other) John Hennessy, declared that academic freedom was something that should be earned by academics through the public's respect for what they say. Is it now clear that the Irish state does not want real universities?

The spate of university court cases from 1999-2010, perhaps in a lull, ended in an inconclusive situation about tenure. One is reminded of the analogy whereby the USA was willing to allow Japan keep its emperor only after they had dropped two atomic bombs on its people. Will the state achieve what is clearly its goal; the land grant universities simply doing training for corporations, with superstar academics being flown in for short stays, “students” preferably paying the extra fees gouged from non-residents of the country) engaged in projects for these corporations, and everyone else on short-term or no contracts?If the Irish state gets away with this, will universities in  America and elsewhere copy it?

It is clear that an elite continues to  benefit from the absence of real debate, exemplified also by a caste of broadcasters on RTE who have $million salaries to lose. Yet in 2009 Claire Duignan, head of radio at that same station, disgracefully, prevented an RTE radio show from appearing on NPR at no cost to RTE after a trial run showed that there was an audience of many millions in the USA for Irish content.  Is there any need for RTE? Could the license fee money be better spent of supporting Lyric, TG$ and RnaG as before, while also creating an internet carrier with unbiased search algorithms and dispensing with the plethora of pop and “current affairs” programs?

Similarly, the Irish Times, having interviewed the students whose basic rights were violated at DCU in 2003, and chose instead to join the attack on academic freedom and tenure, to the point of having to issue an apology in 2010 to the acaemics who stood up against DCU management, and fought DCU all the way to the supreme court – a case again misreported by the Times.  What we’ve had instead in terms of activism from the Times is an attempt to bias the implementation in law of a referendum result that was being charitably dealt with.  Does the fact that the same journalist  - Kitty Holland – was involved in both cases indicates that Ireland’s Gosnell case will be as unreported as the one in the USA?

5.      Balancing the books

It is fair to say that Ireland is being held hostage by international finance, which seems to have found a way to restore confidence in its dubious products by creating a debtor of last resort, one whose survival as a nation-state is related to payment of unsecured bonds. Moreover, the current Irish government seems willing to risk even the peace in rural Ireland by cutting policing as it prepares itself for the 7^th deflationary budget in a row.

This trend exists simultaneously with the most generous social welfare payments and a burgeoning bureaucracy. Indeed, it is arguable that the permanent government, the civil service, simply change their front-men with each election and continue their often criminal incursions into civil society apace, regardless of what went on in the election.

It is fair to say that many of these functionaries, instead of seeing themselves as administering sectors of the state to facilitate Irish people of energy and goodwill, instead see themselves as victors in a “Darwinian”  struggle over those individuals for that sector of Irish society. The latitude of behaviour they allow themselves is terrifying and has ruined the lives of millions; while exemplified by the banks, the process whereby IMRO was granted a monopoly and destroyed the native Irish music industry involved corruption of a senior civil servant, documented by Anthony  McCann;  Enterprise Ireland continued the job of destruction by attested bootlegging of the up-and-coming Irish artists of the 1990’s at international trade fairs, a practice that successive government ministers, including the present one, has failed to prosecute, even after criminal complaints and a successful US Federal court action made known to him; SFI has become a bottomless pit; the universities are almost wholly unregulated.

Moreover, the gargantuan, overpaid and corrupt bureaucracy seems to be the worst of both worlds; overstaffed, but with decisions made centrally, often by a single unqualified and criminal individual put there in the Ahern era to do his bidding, as a  recent Irish times op-ed speculates. How far can costs be cut while retaining decent salaries for public servants who actually work for the betterment of the country? Can we cut the looming E300 billion + pension bill, stay solvent, and negotiate with the ECB as equals as we reclaim our country? Can anyone who is benefiting from the numerous scams which have so degraded Ireland – from rent subsidy to inflated banking sector wages – truly assist in the recovery? In what sense should we talk of a new national movement a la the Fenians  rather than mere politics?

Papers are invited that discuss the purposes of this nation-state (eg a civic versus ethnic nationalism?), the ethical use of law and administration for this end, the proper scope of the state vis a vis civil society in a reimagined  Ireland,  and how to cost it.

Seán Ó Nualláin Ph.D.