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behalf is one that cannot be resolved within another piratical fiefdom of finance capital nestling in the shadow of fortress europe because these seeds of democratic renewal deserve a chance to ripen and blossom in riotous number not to be scattered on stony soil yes to popular sovereignty yes to crushing the tories yes to democratic accountability yes to the elementary humanity of a public health system yes is the right answer awaiting the right question another client state to the empire of capital isn t it posted in elections ireland nationalism politics 2 comments gah humbug how you re helping the gaa ruin your life september 22 2013 if you re of my persuasion and you re probably not unless you re the sort of reckless maverick who uses parentheses in an opening sentence croke park strikes the eye as a kind of optical illusion at once monstrously conspicuous a brusque interruption of a familiar landscape and curiously invisible by virtue of one s utter indifference to everything it represents for international readers croke park is the 80 000 seater dublin headquarters of the gaelic athletic association the body which governs gaelic games if you re unfamiliar with gaelic football it is essentially an archaic kicking and catching code akin to those played in elite english schools 150 years ago from which modern football quickly evolved its sister sport hurling resembles a hybrid of lacrosse and field hockey in which the ball is plucked and volleyed freely the common format of the gaelic games amateur players multiple scoring methods 70 minute matches is unrecognisable from those practised at the elite level of sport and they are better understood as elaborate athletic folk rituals along with other regionally popular spectacles such as bullfighting and morris dancing dublin dilettante it is beyond dispute that football and there will be no qualification of that term is the game indeed the primary cultural outlet of the global working class it conquered the world in parallel with the very processes which formed that class rippling outwards from the british isles along the earliest currents of globalised capitalism enthusiasm for the game was immediate and uniform throughout latin america and central europe except initially in germany where football was condemned as a malign foreign influence amid a vicious swelling of teutonic nationalism but survived and thrived nonetheless curiously however those countries which proved most resistant to the game were precisely those which appeared best placed to assimilate it by virtue of their cultural ties with britain even today football remains institutionally marginalised though wildly popular amongst much of the general public in australia canada ireland new zealand and the united states south africa is an atypical case where majority rule has seen football displace rugby union the sport jealously favoured under apartheid as an exemplar of disciplined white supremacy football had the misfortune to take the playing field at a time when all these societies were attempting to disentangle themselves from british influence with varying degrees of urgency but in order for the native elites of these countries to preserve their own political and economic power they needed a forge national identities which did not conflict with existing systems of ownership cultural and ethnic differentiations were a means of short circuiting the more radical currents of thought which emerged from anti colonial struggles in the english speaking world sport was a central battlefield in this cultural war even in those places where the trenches had to be carved from virgin land the supposedly ancient gaelic games and how weird is it that a sport should carry a racialising prefix were not actually codified until the 1880s like so many feats of national awakening this was hailed as an heroic revival rather than an outright contrivance from the very outset of ireland s independent existence the gaelic athletic association constituted the sporting wing of the corporatist irish state a state which sought to bring all cultural religious and social institutions under its control while allowing private capital to operate freely gaelic games were in effect the racial purity and brutal simplicity of de valera s gaelic ireland neatly encased in pigskin professional football is a primarily urban sport in which the club based structure tends to highlight local class tensions and divisions dublin s clubs have their roots in unambiguously working class communities such as inchicore phibsboro and ringsend gaelic games by cunning contrast are contested at the inter county level ireland s counties being more or less arbitrary parcels of land with no distinct socio economic identity it s hardly surprising that this meaningless and unthreatening county pride is relentlessly promoted by the irish media political class and the massive multinationals which back the gaa to the hilt if you re still not convinced that the gaa s supposed centrality to irish life is a political and marketing exercise attempt the following take a walk through any estate park or viable patch of grass in any major urban centre in ireland you will see gaggles of children breathlessly kicking heading and dribbling footballs just as if not god then some happy combination of human biology and human genius surely intended indeed it s significant that football involves the head and feet the organs of thought and dance whereas catching codes express the acquisitive desire to grasp and manhandle to fumble with the greasy ball by contrast the only evidence of gaelic games you will encounter will be taking place within caged off reservations festooned with civic and corporate sponsorship or under strict and peremptory adult supervision the gaelic catholic model of nationalism upon which the state was founded has largely fallen into disrepute in recent years it has been replaced by ireland inc a perverse concept which presents the favourable business climate as the bedrock of 21st century patriotism but this novel definition of ireland as a patchwork of taxation rates and share prices excludes the populace entirely and makes for a vague and tenuous claim on their allegiance and so the gaa must continue to be fostered the atrophied black heart at the centre of the irish state the eternal reminder that your ancestors were every bit as unworthy and servile as you are posted in culture history ireland league of ireland politics sport 17 comments their apocalypse and ours february 20 2012 the word bandy is bandied around all too often these days but one term that s been getting a thorough and undeniable bandying in recent months has been social cohesion like many standbys of liberal discourse it functions at a double remove from material reality as a kind of euphemism for a euphemism since a precise definition is elusive it can probably best be arrived at by a process of exclusion following is usage amongst the irish commentariat as a guide this phenomenon of social cohesion is never espoused as an end actively to be pursued rather it is only ever invoked in terms of its negation loss of social cohesion breakdown of social cohesion etc usually by reference to the salutary example of greece where such a breakdown is supposedly imminent this is highly instructive as we ll discover in due course in fact the loss of social cohesion is regarded not as an evil in itself but merely a potential existential threat to business as usual the bailing out of banks and the preservation of the euro at any and all costs a few things that aren t considered a threat to social cohesion again taking the pronouncements of the irish establishment as our guide mass emigration and the tacit and explicit encouragement of same by government ministers the subjugation of all existing democratic models to the primacy of the markets as a matter of both principle and practice the positing by the national media of the existence of a coping class assailed from below by the parasitical poor the cultivation of a climate of suspicion and resentment which encourages citizens to spy and inform on one another with impunity and to regard teachers nurses firefighters and other social service providers as thieves from the common purse if none of this sounds like the stuff of harmony and fraternity it s because once again social cohesion is not the object here the concern is merely that the host organism is beginning to run out of blood in greece the collaborationist papademos régime has abandoned even the perfunctory evasions of its irish counterparts in favour of hysterical threats and outright repression from the european media s racially aggravated depiction of events there we can deduce that the following are considered threats to social cohesion mass public expressions of social solidarity hostility to the national and supranational architects of austerity popular demands for democratic oversight of economic policy identification of former imperialist aggressors with contemporary forms of imperialist aggression the pursuit of common cause amongst diverse strata of society at one level this is simply a crude and transparent shell game designed to offer the evangelists of austerity some measure of plausible deniability in its peculiarly irish manifestation however it nourishes itself from the fetid swamp of petty resentment which lies beneath the foundations of the state liberals always believed that the curtain twitching bien pensance of post independence ireland had been transplanted wholesale from the pulpit to the parlour the easing of the church s stranglehold over public policy and it s sobering to think that only the revelation of widespread and irrefutable child rape made this possible has changed little in this regard however instead we ve witnessed an ascension of the divine consciousness from heaven to frankfurt the pitting of citizen against citizen the holy terror of becoming corrupted by the weakness of others has not been abated by the transition the economic forces which dictate the ravaging of society are protected at all costs with no sector of society not the unemployed not disabled children not the old exempted from service as human shields in a crude parallel to the scapegoating of single mothers for problems arising from poverty at every turn citizens are encouraged to see entitlement as privilege and privilege as entitlement the spectral hordes of fraudulent welfare claimants haunt middle ireland s dreams even as their taxes pay for useless multi million euro reports by the ideological architects and beneficiaries of the crisis michael o leary becomes a put upon underdog while the teacher coping with the fallout of a moribund society in a vermin infested building becomes a freeloading hedonist it is this total identification with the system not on its own merits but merely as the prevailing system which makes every act of resistance from the spark protests to the campaign against the household tax all the more admirable and all the more essential the political establishment the media and their masters in europe fear that deviation from their ideological consensus will lead to the breakdown of their system of governance our challenge is to prove them right posted in eu europe ireland morality politics leave a comment preoccupied on dame street october 27 2011 sometimes to a man with a hammer everything looks like a sickle after three years of asymmetric class warfare and suffocating ideological conformism it s wholly understandable that any stirring of organised but we ll come back to this resistance should be welcomed with enthusiasm on the left the potentially epoch defining occupy wall street protest represents a slow awakening of class consciousness within the belly of the beast the copycat movements triggered by ows throughout the technologically advanced world while nowise to be compared to the infectious popular heroism of the arab spring are not without significance its logic may be uniform but the dictatorship of capital reigns over a wide and varied kingdom and the occupation tactic is more suited to some quarters than others greece where a volatile coalition of organised labour political radicalism and popular resistance is forcing the ruling class towards endgame provides one salutary example there the sterile apolitical syntagma square occupation inspired by the democracia real movement actually sapped momentum from the struggle earlier this summer in chile however the mobilisation called for the global day of action on the 15th of october fanned the flames of a student revolt which has been raging for months in other settings the occupy movement like its stillborn real democracy now twin has taken on the aspect of an internet meme which made the species jump into the human population and found itself unable to replicate there occupy dame street doesn t quite fall into that category but its contradictions are deep and profound whereas occupy wall street wore its union endorsement with pride its irish offshoot proved ambivalent to organised labour and outright hostile to the organised left from day one there were a variety of reasons for this the political persuasions of the core group an understandable though at times hysterical aversion to working with the swp a reluctance to alienate potential converts gorged on a diet of anti union editorials these proscriptions are gradually being relaxed potentially estranging those who want nothing to do with the selfish job destroying pension hogging union bastards and found such views initially unchallenged by the occupiers it could be argued that the influential autonomist tendency have proven their point it was precisely their maladroit de facto leadership which erected these obstacles to begin with this past week occupy dame street weathered a downpour likely to be the equal of any the irish winter can muster it s still standing and i ve no doubt it will go on standing as long as the bodies and minds of the camp residents hold up and probably well beyond that the stamina resourcefulness and tenacity of the residents has been inspirational and nothing forestalls breaking point like a comrade at your shoulder but whereas the boisterous processions from parnell square to dame street have doubled in size week on week the number of bodies manning the camp itself has yet to see a corresponding increase not that such an increase could be accommodated in any case these natural limitations of the central bank site and its vulnerability to the encroaching winter are frequently cited criticisms of the movement this is unfair both issues were as unavoidable as they are insurmountable we shall simply have to add al fresco insurrection to the list of activities for which there is no suitable season in ireland alongside cricket and rock festivals the physical precariousness of the camp has however come to necessitate a sort of liberal s...