He must have caught sight of me screwing up my nose at the thought of tea in a particular house, for he told of taking tea and sandwiches with an old countrywoman.

‘She cooked on an open fire; not even a range. The old kettle hung above the flames. She would have been sat with a cat, or maybe even a chicken in her hands. She offered me tea one day and picked up the teapot from the ashes at the edge of the hearth. Then she picked up the tea caddy and, never washing the hands, took out fingerfuls of tea, sniffed them,  and put them in the pot. She then put the teapot back down on the hearth and got hold of the kettle. She poured the water into the pot while still standing; half of it missed the pot and sent clouds of ash flying in the air’.

‘Anyway, the tea was left to brew and she got a couple of old cups and put a drop of milk in them both; then she poured the tea into both cups. She put a spoon of sugar into one of them, gave it a stir and then tasted the spoon. It was not good enough, so she put another spoon of sugar in. She tasted it again and must have thought the cup of tea was all right, for she then handed it to me to drink’.

‘Then there was the bread. She had this old apron that might have been blue at one time, but with the cats and the chickens and the years of dirt, you wouldn’t be sure and it could have stood up by itself. Anyway, we had to have something to eat with the tea, so she takes a loaf of bread and puts it under her arm and saws off big slices with a knife. She takes one of these slices and hands it to me. There was a big sooty thumb print in the middle of it.’

‘She would have been in her early-90s at that time. She lived until the age of 98. I would never have been rude and refused anything’.

Mental arithmetic suggested that the woman might have reached adulthood before the death of Queen Victoria; the story was a first hand account of a figure that might have appeared in a storybook. More than that though, it spoke of an old Ireland where hospitality was a duty and where acceptance of that hospitality, however humble it might have been, was a recognition of the dignity of the person.

The story, and the many more he tells, should be recorded, not as oral history, but as a reminder of the ways of kindness and respect that are so easily lost.

‘So they say’, she said, ‘but I think there is still some winter to come. It’s cold out there this morning’.

‘But it’s not about the weather, is it? It’s about the light – the darkest season of the year is over’. The lady gave me the sort of  look she might have given to a strange eccentric. To try to have explained what I meant would probably have only added to the sense that she had been confronted by someone very odd.

Met Eireann, the Irish weather service, would agree with the lady about there still being winter weather to come. Their definition of the seasons uses calendar months: winter is December to February; spring, from March to May; summer, June to August; and autumn, September to November.

Using the definition of the seasons we were taught at our primary school, there is not just a month, but a full seven weeks of winter remaining.  We were taught the astronomical seasons, which fell into four neat quarters – winter ran from the solstice until the spring equinox; spring from the equinox until the summer solstice; summer from the solstice until the vernal equinox; and autumn from the equinox until the winter solstice.

So, if Met Eireann have spring starting on 1st March and astronomers have it starting a further three weeks later, how does the Celtic calendar have spring beginning today?

It’s about the light. The shortest day is usually 21st/22nd December. The quarter beginning on 1st November and ending on 31st January has the shortest day at its middle. It is the darkest quarter; it is winter. The quarter beginning on 1st May and ending on 31st July, with the longest day around 21st/22nd June, is the lightest quarter; it is summer.  The Celtic festivals of Imbolc on 1st February, Bealtaine on 1st May, Lughnasa on 1st August, and Samhain on 1st November, may mark seasons of weather, but they are much more seasons of light and darkness.

The lady lived in the city, in that land of permalight where the lengthening and the shortening of the days sometimes passes without notice. Move deep into rural Ireland, and it becomes clear how today is the beginning of spring. The difference light  makes can only be appreciated when it is not there.

There was an attractiveness in soft accents and soft landscapes  during years in the North. The strident denunciation of all things ‘Irish’ by voices certain of their righteousness was something that pained. An unhappy man would write angry letters to the ‘Belfast Telegraph’ signing himself as ‘Non-Celt’ and then giving his address as an unmistakeably Irish placename.  A mural inspired by tales of Cú Chulainn bore the inscription ‘Irish Out’. If people wished to reject any suggestion that they had an Irish identity – despite all the evidence to the contrary, including even the name of their country, then that was their choice; it became annoying when they sought to impose those views on others.

Always, there was Seamus Heaney to describe an Ireland very different from that inhabited by Free Presbyterian preachers, an Ireland where life was something to be affirmed, where even the things of daily life could be occasions of delight, moments when words became almost tactile. It seemed extraordinary at times that Heaney inhabited the same land, so different were his perspectives.

Each of Heaney’s collections of poems would be bought from bookstores in Belfast, in latter years from Waterstone’s because in Waterstone’s there was a feeling of stepping out of a world of accordion bands and garishly uniformed youths into a world where softness might be a possibility.

Heaney described the area in which we lived in the lines of ‘The Peninsula’, it seemed to be transformed in his description. From being a place of fundamentalist mission halls and hardline politics, it acquired a sense of being somewhere different. Looking seaward, it was easier to imagine the words assuming reality, than looking at the drab villages that dotted the coast.

Philip King described the storm that had battered West Kerry in the past week and in a silent prayer I wished that they might be well past, for tomorrow we sail from Rosslare to Pembroke.

Heaney would have provided a perfect accompaniment to King’s weather report.  The seventh of his Glanmore sonnets:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.

It is good to live in a land of softness.

Harry McGee’s report in the Irish Times suggests the one to come will be worse than the one past. The economic programme, to which Ireland has been subjected in order that it may pay for the speculative losses of a small elite, is to worsen.  Further tax rises, spending cuts and attacks on the vulnerable are part of the IMF programme for Ireland, and if anyone thinks this bodes well, the experience of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s is a salutary tale.

Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society, wrote:

Africa’s economies were handed over to World Bank and IMF economists. “Structural adjustment” introduced a dose of tough economic medicine that would restore the patient to health. Governments were forced to let the “free market” decide the value of their currencies, cut public spending and sell off their assets.

As a theoretical economic solution it might have looked right, but on the ground in Africa it pushed up prices, impoverishing all but a few, and destroying Africa’s professional classes by reducing the value of their salaries. Those in power who had mismanaged things so badly, now sold run-down state assets to themselves at knock-down prices.

Reading Harry McGee’s summary of the Troika’s plans for Ireland in 2012, there are echoes of the policies that left Africa poorer and a small number of people hugely richer.

Structural adjustment programmes attacked the middle classes in Africa,directly reducing their salaries.  The IMF is intent that a similar path be pursued in Ireland.  Given that the poor have no money upon which to pay tax, and that the rich have schemes to avoid it, the broadening of the tax base will directly affect middle earners.   The IMF believe a reduction of tax credits and lowering of thresholds are necessary:

However, while the Government has promised no changes to income tax rates, bands or credits, IMF staff concluded that broadening the tax bases ‘will likely need to encompass tax bands and credits’.

A further placing of the burden of the cost of the greed and incompetence of the small group of insiders upon the shoulders of working people is to accompanied by the privatisation of state assets:

The disposal of State assets has led to ongoing disagreement between the troika and Government and will play a major part in this month’s discussions. The Government has committed to divesting only €2 billion in State assets while the IMF has suggested €5 billion. The Government may agree to a higher figure this month, but only if a portion of the proceeds are used for jobs stimulus rather than debt reduction.

Of course, in the midst of a deep recession, assets will be sold for values far below those of normal times, and who will buy them? Who is there left with money? The powerful who made money during the boom and foreign investors.  Assets built up with taxpayers’ money over decades are to be given to the powerful to pay the debts incurred by the powerful.

A happy new year.

On August 26th 1981, I first set foot on Irish soil. It was 7.30 in the morning and we had travelled all night.

I bought a Daily Telegraph from a paper seller standing at the entrance to the Carlisle Pier and we walked the three hundred yards to Dun Laoghaire station. In retrospect, going to the station was a daft thing to do, we could have walked the distance to the seasonal youth hostel in half the time we stood waiting for the train.

The youth hostel was in a primary school closed for the summer. The metal bunks were in the classrooms. We knocked on the door of the warden’s office; she appeared in her night dress, unaccustomed to arrivals at 8.00 in the morning.

We were allocated bunks and went to rest, but, of course, the place was a hive of activity by that time. I attempted to read the newspaper, but there was the urge to be out and about.

There was another lengthy wait at the station for a train into the city; the suburban rail service in those days was provided by elderly locomotives pulling carriages which were empty except for rows of plastic seats down each side. There were few enough jobs for people to be going to, anyway.

We rolled northwards into the city centre and got off at Pearse station where we were told that we could buy fifteen day passes for train and bus travel throughout the country. The request seemed an unfamiliar one and we were sent to an office at one end of the platform. The man behind the glass glared at us suspiciously.

We explained what we wanted, twice. He obviously doubted our ability to pay. ‘Those passes are very expensive’.

We explained that we knew how much they were, we had read the tourist board information. ’They are £52 – each. Can you afford that?’ We took unfamiliar banknotes from our wallets and, almost with an air of disgust, he stamped the passes.

Exhaustion crept up as the day progressed and we caught a train back to Dun Laoghaire. A fine afternoon with bright sunshine and the gentlest of breezes. Walking to the West Pier and finding a deserted spot on the seaward side, we stretched out in the sun. The granite flagstones were warm and the sunlight covered like a cosy blanket.

The warmth of that August afternoon was in a country draped with black flags as hunger strikers died in the North; in a country where income per capita was about 60% of the European Community average; in a country where hundreds of thousands were trying to emigrate; yet, whatever the political context of the state, the country we were to meet was one where we encountered deep personal happiness, whether in the streets of Dublin or in tiny corners of Kerry and Cork.

The stories from the 1940s of people being happy in unhappy times make sense when recalling those days in 1981.

Posthumous pursuit of people is not so strange. On a road near Ardglass in Co Down, there was a single storey cottage. Unused for some time, it had become a store for a local farmer. Even the door was made of corrugated iron. Tom, a friend was passing one day when he spotted two men in suits standing outside the cottage. He stopped and asked them their business.

“We are from the TV licence office”, they said.“Does Mr Carson live here?”

“He lived here last time I saw him”, said Tom.

“Buck eejits”, he told me, “the man has been dead for years. But I told them no lie. He was alive and well and living there the last time I saw him”.

As a new year approaches in which the government plans to introduce household charges and septic tank inspection, John O’Keeffe’s unpaid taxes and Mr Carson’s missing television licence come to mind.

Adam Smith, a father figure of economics, set down in his ‘Wealth of Nations’, what he described as ‘canons of taxation, principles of any effective taxation system.  The canon of economy states,

‘Every tax is to be so contrived as both to take out and keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state’.

In other words, the cost of implementing a tax should be a small element of what it yields, yet the planned charges on owner occupied houses and on septic tanks present a massive administrative challenge.

Who knows which houses are owner occupied and which are rented? If registration is voluntary, who is going to drive the roads of rural Ireland to discern which properties might not have been registered?  In towns and villages and parishes across Ireland, addresses at best refer to a street or a townland, only local knowledge will tell who lives in which house – who is going to gather such knowledge?

And what of the septic tanks? Have politicians any idea where such an inspection regime might even begin? Any idea of the logistical challenge of its implementation? The cost is likely to far exceed any yield.

Perhaps a contemporary John O’Keeffe will write a comic play of unknown householders and disappearing sewers.

Whatever has happened, there is still in Ireland a deep attachment to the spiritual, to values other than balance sheets and the bottom line; to a society determined by considerations other than the market.

Neo-liberalism, with its measurement of everything in terms of cash and utility has been rejected.  The notion that everything must have obvious financial or practical merit finds little sympathy in a community battered by the fundamental naivete of a political philosophy that failed to appreciate that you cannot build a community on human greed.

There is a cynicism towards the politicians across the divide who bought into the philosophy that something could only have worth if it could be bought or sold; that it only mattered if it could be counted or measured.  Happiness consisted in accumulation. The collapse of the international financial markets compelled people to think about happiness that comes from sources other than a large bank balance.

Bizarrely, it was reality television, that broadcasting format where human emotion and experience becomes a saleable commodity, that pointed to something deep within human nature.  The millions who watch it, do so because there is a fascination with ordinary human beings; the subjects are not rich or famous or powerful, they are interesting for their own sake.

The obsession with material possessions, with its concerns about the price of one’s house and the year of one’s car and the label of one’s clothes, so alienated us from ourselves that from an unlikely quarter has came a reminder that people in themselves are of unmeasurable worth.

A century ago, WB Yeats expressed a sense that people needed more than just the material, that, if people were to soar like eagles, beauty in all its forms was important, that life was more than money.  Writing in December 1912:

TO A WEALTHY MAN WHO PROMISED A SECOND SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DUBLIN MUNICIPAL GALLERY IF IT WERE PROVED THE PEOPLE WANTED PICTURES

You gave but will not give again
Until enough of Paudeen’s pence
By Biddy’s halfpennies have lain
To be “some sort of evidence,”
Before you’ll put your guineas down,
That things it were a pride to give
Are what the blind and ignorant town
Imagines best to make it thrive.
What cared Duke Ercole, that bid
His mummers to the market place,
What th’ onion-sellers thought or did
So that his Plautus set the pace
For the Italian comedies?
And Guidobaldo, when he made
That grammar school of courtesies
Where wit and beauty learned their trade
Upon Urbino’s windy hill,
Had sent no runners to and fro
That he might learn the shepherds’ will.
And when they drove out Cosimo,
Indifferent how the rancour ran,
He gave the hours they had set free
To Michelozzo’s latest plan
For the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.

Your open hand but shows our loss,
For he knew better how to live.
Let Paudeens play at pitch and toss,
Look up in the sun’s eye and give
What the exultant heart calls good
That some new day may breed the best
Because you gave, not what they would
But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest!

Yeats, hardly orthodox in his religious views, would have delighted in the thought of Irish people turning against the idolatry of the Celtic Tiger years.  Yeats, who transformed the prosaic reality of Dublin in 1916 into a poetic heroism, might have found a strange beauty in those who believe there is something more.

A mystifying question through history classes at school and college days was why the Irish people were so tolerant.  Centuries of English domination prompted the odd revolt, but not until 1918 was there a national mood that said, ‘Enough is enough’.  It would be difficult to imagine that the English would have been so long-suffering had they been subject to such foreign occupation with its frequent misrule.

G.K. Chesterton discerned a trend amongst English working-people to become restive and uneasy when unhappy at the course of events.  His poem The Secret People captures a sense of the inscrutability of an ordinary people who, if pushed too far, would speak in no uncertain terms of what they thought.  The poem opens:

“Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget;
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet”.

Twice in the Twentieth Century those people went to the polling stations to elect governments that would bring radical changes in society.  In 1945, the war hero Churchill was ejected by working people because there was no desire to return to the 1930s.  In 1979, working people turned on the Labour Party because they wanted a lifting of the burden of taxation and bureaucracy.  Attlee and Thatcher became the two revolutionary figures in modern English history.

There seems no prospect of radical change in Ireland.

An Old Testament prophet would be thundering denunciations of a society where the chairman of a bank could loan himself €87 million and conceal it from the auditors, while women are dying for want of proper medical services.  A biblical response to the collapse of the economy, the failure of the health service, the lengthening of the dole queues, the cuts in education, the repossession of houses, the disintegration of family life, the burden of taxation on working people, and the culture of corruption and cronyism, would demand a John the Baptist-like figure striding across our television screens with calls for repentance.

There is no response.  There is just quiet resignation and getting on with things.  There is a sense that voting would make little difference for there is little more confidence in the opposition party than there is in the government.

Yet in the land of Pearse and Connolly and Larkin, there must surely be people like those Chesterton met in England.  There must surely be people who believe in a righteous and just society.  Perhaps it is just that they have not spoken, and, when they do speak, no-one knows what they might say.

Three years later, and the year closes with a government that has continued where its predecessor left off in making working people pay for the private debts of speculators, and there seem no Secret People in Ireland.

The programme narrated the tale of the development of a Ponzi scheme, a scam whereby early entrants receive large dividends from the investments of later entrants; the scheme working just so long as the base of the pyramid can be made wider and wider, that more and more people can be drawn into parting with their money.

The story had been revived in a newspaper back in 2006, six months before Bertie Ahern resoundingly triumphed in the general election; a time when the economy was still booming, but when there were serious being asked (and dismissed by Ahern). Rory Egan wrote in the Sunday Independent 

Once upon a time, back in 1954, a man named Paul Singer decided to make his fortune in Ireland after his business collapsed in the UK. He approached a reputable family auction house run by the Shanahan family and persuaded them to join him in a new venture: buying and selling stamp collections.

On the face of it, Singer’s plan was sound. His idea was to buy up a number of eclectic stamp collections, sort the various stamps into countries or ‘First Day of Issue’ albums and sell these specialist collections at a profit. He appealed to the ‘Money in Grandma’s Attic’ in all of us by telling the Irish public that there was an insatiable appetite for the old Irish Free State stamps. But the smoke and mirrors really began when he encouraged the general public to invest as little as £10 in one of his syndicates, which he practically guaranteed would make huge returns.

One must remember that in those days the only way to make a fortune was to inherit or win the Sweepstakes. All of a sudden syndicates were buying stamp collections and selling them months later for profits of 20 or 30 per cent. It was possible to double your money inside a few years. People invested their life savings and for a while it seemed to be too good to be true. And it was. The truth was that most stamps sold at Shanahan’s were bought by other syndicates run by Singer.

On May 9, 1959, a mysterious robbery occurred in Shanahan’s, with over £300,000 worth of stamps stolen. All of a sudden, all the syndicates tried to cash out. Singer was arrested on fraud charges, but he was eventually freed on a technicality and promptly left the country.

Thousands of investors lost money, but the country learnt a lesson and we would never again allow ourselves invest in something that was so hyped up and inflated to unrealistic values. No, we’re much smarter now – we put our money in property.

Reverting from English to Irish towards the end of the programme, McWilliams spoke of the Singer scam as a triumph of hope over experience.  Much of economic history history is a triumph of hope over experience. George Bernard Shaw, a founding figure of the LSE is said to have once commented, “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history”.

Few people will admit that Rory Egan’s 2006 column was correct, that many of the property investors of the 2000s were as naive as those who invested in the sale of postage stamps at Shanahans’ auctions in the 1950s .  We don’t want to accept that we built our hopes on pyramid selling, on a Ponzi scheme.  We believed tricksters who took what was before our eyes and told us it was different – that an Irish Free State postage stamp was hugely valuable; that the bit of pavement outside a block of flats was, in fact, a plaza where the sun always shone; that a flat overlooking a dual carriageway represented elegant living; that prices would rise and rise, and that if they did not, there would be a ‘soft landing’.

If a Paul Singer came along today, there would still be people who would part with their money.

Striving to understand the nuances of the game and still not having grasped each of the subtle differences in signals, watching a match tends to be a reflective process, an effort to understand what is being planned in each phase of play and to discern why the whistle has been blown at unexpected moments.

Realizing the complexity of the rules and the marginal nature of some infringements, there is a sense of impatience with those who do not bother yet roar abuse at an unfortunate referee.  Sitting at the RDS in Dublin one afternoon, it became clear that the man behind thought himself as having an instant grasp of the game.  One of the Leinster players missed a catch, knocking the ball forwards and the referee blew the whistle for a scrum to the opposition, as the rules stipulate and as any schoolboy player would know.  The man rose to his feet and roared that the referee had no idea what he was doing. It was a cringeworthy moment; those around the man had clearly become increasingly embarrassed at the man’s voluble commentary on the game and his intemperate outbursts at the officials.

Attempting to learn the rules of rugby is a leisure activity, something optional and without consequence.  It is of no matter if I never learn the difference between the signal for a prop in the scrum pulling an opponent and that for a prop pulling an opponent down.

There are game rules that are of significantly greater importance, where the failure to understand those rules can have a negative impact on the lives of millions of people.

As the schoolboy rugby player would tell you that knocking the ball forward means a scrum for the opposition, so the schoolboy in an economics class will tell you that a government that takes a huge amount of tax, while at the same time severely reducing expenditure, will  have a strongly deflationary impact upon the economy.  Furthermore, the piling up of taxes and accumulation of spending cuts further exacerbates the problem as uncertainty about the future causes people to spend less and save more, so reducing demand, increasing unemployment and making a bad situation worse.

This is economics much less complex than the rules of rugby, yet our government persists in the belief that we can pay the private gambling debts of the banks and still grow our way out of our problems.  They seem to have as much understanding of the game they are watching as the loudmouth at the RDS.