Neighbours of Azharuddin Ismail, who acted in “Slumdog Millionaire”, gather to watch the 81st Academy Awards presentation on television outside their homes in Mumbai February 23. Photo: Arko Datta/REUTERS
99% of non-consultant hospital doctors (NCHDs) voted in favour of industrial action yesterday. Interestingly, nothing was left off the table, including an all out strike.
I remember being involved in a doctor’s strike in Zimbabwe. It’s never a good thing when people who work in hospitals are unhappy. Patient care can only suffer. In a Zimbabwean context, a doctors’ or nurses’ strike meant that some people, who under different circumstances would have survived their illness, died.
So why did we go on strike? We were dealing with a system that refused to respond to any but the most extreme actions. It was the only way to ensure that health personnel were earning just enough to be able to live above the poverty datum line. The fact that the country’s social fabric had been completely ripped apart made it much easier to take that kind of action. And we always saw it as action taken against the government as opposed to patients. I guess when times are desperate, people generally try to use whatever power they have to ensure that they have the best chances of getting by. But having said all of that, even though we were convinced we weren’t in the wrong, I think we all felt guilty about the consequences of our actions.
Here in Ireland, The NCHDs are being unfairly targeted by the HSE (Health Service Executive). They are significantly weaker than the nurses, who have powerful unions backing them, and they have less leverage and options than consultants. Despite the fact that NCHDs do most of the doctoring in hospitals, it has been proposed that they take what amounts to a 49% pay cut. Can you imagine a 49% pay cut being proposed for consultants or nurses? It just wouldn’t happen … unless similar cuts were imposed across the board.
That said, the environment in Ireland is different to that in Zimbabwe. For starters, in many ways, the strike vote is primarily a show of power. The Irish Medical Organisation is in talks with the HSE and the industrial action vote will bolster the union’s position.
The politics and the socio-economic situation are also very different. Public opinion counts for a lot more here than it does in Zimbabwe. There is also more social cohesion. I can’t see doctors walking out en masse. This dispute will probably be decided by public opinion and after all the posturing is done (on both sides), some form of compromise will be reached.
To echo the sentiments expressed in Monday’s editorial in this newspaper, the real issue here is that people need to feel that the burden of the recession is being shared justly. At some stage, severe cuts are probably going to have to be made, and the standard of living in Ireland will have to drop.
I wonder if any mainstream political party will be able to endure the political fall-out from saying that and making cuts across the board. The cynic in me thinks that most political parties the world over are much more likely to try to spare those with the power to keep them in power, or precipitate their demise.
There is an interesting story on the BBC’s website. A year after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologised to Aborigines for ‘past injustices’, not much seems to have changed. In fact, some incredibly paternalistic practices introduced by former Prime Minister John Howard have been extended. Howard, in response to alarming statistics on child sexual abuse, banned the sale and consumption of alcohol in indigenous communities. Similar bans were extended to the sale of pornography. The idea was that a sober male population that wasn’t sexually charged on pornographic material would be less given to sexual assault. That’s probably a fair assumption.
Like most people, I don’t think there are many things worse than the sexual abuse of children. It needs to be tackled aggressively. I also have no sympathy for people who break the law following substance. But I don’t like the idea of treating a people group like children. Incredibly, it seems as though the Rudd government is being accused of pursuing a line of thought that isn’t too far removed from the one which led to the abduction of Aboriginal children so that they could be raised ‘properly’.
A friend and former colleague worked for years as a doctor in Alice Springs, a town in Australia’s Northern Territory. He was shocked by the degree of alcohol abuse he witnessed there, particularly within the Aboriginal community. We spent hours debating the degree to which the past, low expectations, and the other social factors contributed to that state of affairs.
I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert on Australia. But coming from a continent that has suffered under the burden of low expectations, I can empathise with people who are angry about being subject to a different set of laws to the rest of the population.
Last’s night Questions and Answers was, as it usually is, really interesting. Unsurprisingly, the focus was on the banking and financial crises that have rocked Ireland. A lot of what was said was to be expected. The only real shock, when the banks were being discussed, was that there weren’t effigies of the bank executives on set for people to hurl rotten tomatoes at and then set on fire.
Fintan O’Toole was brilliant and asked Martin Cullen, Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism some difficult, but important questions. One of them had to do with tax exiles. In response to it, Cullen basically said that the country had to do whatever it took to keep multinational corporations happy and invested in Ireland.
Maybe this jarred me because I come from a place whose leader’s favourite word is ‘sovereignty’. While I don’t think that Robert Mugabe should serve as a model for good practice, I find the idea of bending backwards for foreign groups worrying.
An example that comes to mind is Malawi. This small sub-Saharan African country depends on foreign donors to fund large portions of its annual budget. The trouble with that is it is beholden to these groups in many ways. I don’t like the idea of the IMF or even Oxfam dictating how Malawi is to be run as opposed to the citizen of Malawi. That’s not to say that either organisation does that, but it’s easy to see how that situation could arise.
In the same way, I’m not sure how I feel about Dell, Microsoft, or anyone else determining any government’s tax structure. One of the definitions of power put forward by New York University’s Professor Steven Lukes is the ability to influence someone into doing something they may not otherwise have done. This can even take the form of acting in a certain way without needing to be told to do so by the person or group that has power over you. If that is the case, how much power do multinational corporations have over the Irish government? How much do they have over governments in general?
After Martin Cullen gave his response, one which most people I’m sure will accept as accurate, I started thinking about the idea of sovereignty. Is Mugabe, by constantly referring to a state’s right to its sovereignty, trying to hide behind a concept that no longer exist? If it doesn’t really exist for a country like Ireland, how can it possibly exist for places like Malawi and Zimbabwe?
“…modern politics is business politics… This is true both of foreign and domestic policy. Legislation, police surveillance, the administration of justice, the military and diplomatic service, all are chiefly concerned with business relations, pecuniary interests, and they have little more than incidental bearing on other human interests.”
Thorstein Veblen, American institutional economist, 1965.
Congratulations to fellow Irish Times blogger, Fiona, who won the Best Arts and Culture award. Not only is her Pursued by a Bear a fantastic blog, Fiona was terrific company at the event!
This was my first time at the Irish Blog Awards. I now understand why the venue was sold out so quickly. Not only is the whole thing a lot of fun, it’s also a great opportunity to meet people who you might interact with regularly online. So, for example, Maman Poulet’s Suzy Byrne is now a real person in my mind, not just a series of really interesting thoughts. Similarly, you get to meet amazing people like Gavin and Anthony - I haven’t had too many discussions on politics that were as interesting as the one I had with them.
Thanks to Damien and everyone else who put the event together. Thanks also to Teamwork Project Manager, who sponsored my category. And congratulations to Tommy, who rightly won the Best Newcomer award.
Boys pan for gold on a riverside at Iga Barriere, 25 km from Bunia, in the resource-rich Ituri region of eastern Congo February 16. Photo: Finbarr O’Reilly/REUTERS
A homeless man on Patrick Street in Cork city. Photograph: Daragh Mac Sweeney/Provision
A section of the 4,000 crowd attending the the Civil, Public and Services Union (CPSU) demonstration against the pension levy which took place outside Leinster House yesterday. Photograph: Eric Luke
Civil, Public and Services Union (CPSU) members, voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action. It is more likely than not that more groups of workers are going to demonstrate their displeasure in similar ways. In Ireland and beyond, questions are starting to be asked about the distribution of wealth.
On a morning news talk show, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke about the potential for ‘class conflict’. He brought up the fact that in the recent past, a small group of people have acquired extraordinary wealth. In his words, there was a ‘transfer of wealth’ which was to the benefit of a few. He then noted that in the foreseeable future, a good deal of people are in danger of losing their jobs, homes, and the little they have. The result, he postulates, is that those who find themselves on the short end of the stick could respond violently.
Brezinski also brings up the fact that at a time of banking crisis in the United States a hundred years ago, the ‘bailout’ was provided by the rich. The rich have the capacity to help fix the economy and should be doing so is the conclusion that he comes to.
Dr Brezinski was talking about what is happening in America, but things aren’t that different here. That then begs the question, do those with disproportionate wealth have a moral obligation to contribute disproportionately to an economic recovery? Likewise, is Ireland in any danger of ‘class conflict’?
One of the silver linings of this recession is the fact that it provides a good opportunity to ask fundamental questions. In this case, there is an opportunity to look at what, as a society, we believe about the distribution of wealth. In Scandanavia once upon a time, it was virtually impossible to be wealthy because of the thinking there, and the tax laws that it produced. Today, Ireland gets to work out what the country feels about who should get what, and there is an opportunity to translate that belief into legislation. Ideally, that would happen without there being physical conflict.
Maybe I’ve just grown cynical, but I doubt that there will be any such rethink. I don’t think there is any danger of class conflict in the Western world. I don’t think that people are as angry about he fact that some people have so much more than others. Instead, there is much more individual anger at not being among those at the top of the wealth food chain.
The real danger for conflict is within the ranks of the poor. As people try to scramble up the narrowing rungs of the socio-economic ladder, I predict that there will be more people stepping on those below them than trying to pull down those above. Why? In the words of a friend, greed is universal. It doesn’t just apply to the wealthy.
I was pleasantly surprised when this blog was nominated for this year’s Irish Blog Awards. I’m thrilled to bits that Outside In has been shortlisted for the Best Newcomer award. The group is a little intimidating. The other finalists are Lottie, Lee, Joe and Tommy (Tommy, respect man. I wish I was doing something as impressive as running Trust Tommy when I was 14).
I’m also really happy, though not very surprised, for Fiona, Conor and Jim.
The awards are being held in Cork this weekend. Having lived in Cork for a while, it’ll be good to walk down St Patrick Street again.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged the Irish government to remember the world’s poor in light of the cut in the overseas aid budget. Interestingly, when the same issue came up on RTE’s Questions & Answers last night, I thought the general consensus was that savings had to be made somewhere and most felt overseas aid was a good place to start.
An article in The Economist (months ago, I think) revealed that most African governments had stopped placing pledged financial support from rich countries at the heart of their budgets. This is because there is an established trend of promised development assistance being scrapped, or significantly reduced, during periods of slower economic activity in the donor countries. Ireland will not be the only country reducing its commitments to the developing world this year.
The real lesson, as far as I can see, is that the developing world needs to come up with its own solutions, expecting no more that occasional help from the rest of the world. This recession looks to be a time of readjustment. Hopefully, one of the things that will be adjusted away is the notion that the salvation of the poor world is going to come in the form of Live Aid - like concerts, or even government backed groups like IrishAid.
The harsh fact is that in tough times, most countries look primarily after their own. Who knows, as the developing world is reminded of that fact in the coming months, we might see, emerging from there, innovative strategies to stay afloat and then swim. Or not. Either way, as tough as things may get here as more become jobless, in other parts of the world, mere survival is going to become harder.
The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives.
- Karl Polanyi (1944)
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez salutes during a news conference. Reuters/Tomas Bravo
This is already turning out to be a very interesting week. It’s only Monday, and already, two very significant things have happened in the political world. Hugo Chavez got permission to stay in power for as long as his people will have him. At about the same time, another controversial but equally charismatic leader, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, managed to get Nelson Mandela to campaign for him.
There are many things I admire about Hugo Chavez. He is an impressive leader. He has done a lot of good for his country’s poor and indigenous populations. And who, having watched Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, can be unsympathetic towards him? Chavez has never really had a fair hearing in much of the West’s media. That said, I think the referendum that he has just won was ill conceived. The result, I fear, may haunt Venezuela in the coming years.
Respect for a people’s right to self determination means accepting their decisions. In that respect, I think it is wrong to accuse Chavez of totalitarianism. He has a democratic mandate now to stay in power for as long as he can win elections. Whether some of us like it or not, we have to accept the decision taken by Venezuela’s majority. That does not mean, however, that we have to pretend we think what has happened is a good thing.
As trite as this may sound, power does corrupt, and absolute power… Chavez may not have absolute power, but the potential for unlimited terms can only have a corrupting effect. And then there is the megalomaniac syndrome that revolutionaries and freedom fighters are given to. Having overthrown the previous order, these people begin to think that the revolution will unravel if they are no longer at the centre of things. This too has a corrupting effect. It is a pity that Chavez does not have confidence in the people around him to continue the social program he has begun. In thinking that only he can guarantee Venezuela’s success, he has demonstrated the degree to which power has already corrupted him. In taking this course, he has almost guaranteed that he will fulfill the expectations of his fiercest critics.
As for Jacob Zuma, I’m sure that he will be praying that Mandela, a virtual, modern day deity, has the power to cleanse past sin and make all things new. I can’t wait to see if his prayers are answered. Could people really be that fickle?
The poll also shows that a substantial majority of voters would now like to see a change of Government with 62 per cent favouring a change and 28 per cent opposed to it.
David Adams had an interesting article in the paper yesterday titled ‘Truth’ falls by wayside in this post-rationalist world.
I don’t agree with all of his points, but I think there’s a lot to his claims. In a nutshell, Adams says that Ireland has substituted Catholicism, and with it, objective ‘truth’, with a more subjective, anything-goes religion.
Without going into a sociological or philosophical discussion on the nature of religion, it doesn’t take a great stretch to think of modern day Ireland as holding to a state religion. Like Adams, I think the lack of absolutes is a definite component of that religion. But I don’t think that is its central tenet. That honor belongs to materialism and ‘conspicuous consumption’. How many other parts of the world, for example, display the year a car was manufactured on its number plate?
But it’s not just Ireland. The world over, there is a trend towards what David Adams calls ‘post-rationalism’. Personally, I think it’s because we all watch way too much television. I’m serious. Whether or not culture replicates society, or society is informed by culture, the two reinforce each other. I think we all watch so many commercials telling us that we need ‘stuff’ to make life better, and we watch so many shows that reinforce that idea that we have been sold on that materialism.
At the end of the day, the idea that everyone subscribes to a religion, whether or not they think of their views as ‘religious’, is an interesting one.
I REMEMBER Zimbabwe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Around that time, foreign soap operas were introduced on to the local television station. At first, people were gripped. Shows like Australia’s Neighbours , and, from the United States, Santa Barbara , managed to captivate us.
Inevitably though, these got tiresome. A person can only wait for so many weeks for a door knob to be turned or for the truth about a pregnancy to finally come out. One by one, all but the most die-hard fans fell away by the wayside and the soap craze died.
This is going to be very interesting. For the sake of the estimated 9 million people living in Zimbabwe, and the 3-4million that are thought to be living in neighbouring countries or further afield, we can only pray that Morgan Tsvangirai’s gamble pays off. Hopefully, this arrangement will actually turn out to be a short term one that facilitates the writing and implementation of a new constitution.
The Zimbabwean diaspora lights up whenever there is a sign that things ‘back home’ might be turning around. Even though there is little evidence that a turn-around is on the horizon, it’s buzzing again. Yesterday, a friend sent me a policy paper on potential strategies for the country’s economic recovery. While it made for interesting reading, it had one major flaw: it didn’t actually address the real problems.
Way too many of the debates on the economy feel the same. I understand the need for strategies to get beyond the pain of the here and now. I understand the need to sort out the banking crisis. But even after the long-term future of the banks is guaranteed, isn’t there still an unanswered question about the core economy? What does Ireland do or make that is going to fuel its growth in the long run?
At the moment, it sounds to me as if what is hoped for is increased consumer consumption. At this juncture, I have to admit that I’m not an economist, but surely consumer consumption can’t possibly be the cure-all, or even a serious answer. Wasn’t a significant part of what created this mess in the first place unrealistic consumption? Surely the moment we start to promote consumption for consumption’s sake something is seriously wrong? How does the world, on one hand, call for greater responsibility when it comes to the planet’s finite resources, and on the other, propose that the path to prosperity is found in buying and consuming. It’s as though some economist somewhere decided that people are like caterpillars. If we all feed on industry’s excrement long and fast enough, we’ll be transformed into self-actualized butterflies.
I’ve asked this question over and over again, in all sorts of ways, but not many people must think it’s worth answering. Rather than running around in crisis management mode and trying to keep a set of wobbly plates spinning, isn’t it time to start rethinking the entire economic system? Just a thought.
Ready to wear: from left, Hilwati Yamin, Somaia Elsayed, Intan Syafiqah and Samah Mohamed Ali in UCD. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh.
I have a friend who is a committed feminist. Come to think of it, quite a few of my friends are feminists. What marks this one out is what seems to me to be her very strong belief in universal norms. We often disagree between the role of culture in interpreting what freedom, equality, and justice mean. I like to think of myself a weak cultural relativist - someone who believes that there are many things that are true across the board, but even for most of these, culture shapes how they are articulated and expressed.
For example, I believe that what equal rights and dignity between men and women looks like could, and probably should differ between different cultural groups. That’s not to say I condone violations of those rights made in the name of culture, rather, I think it is possible and best to assert those rights from within that cultural context. My friend, on the other hand, tends to be much more of a universalist - for her, generally, right is right and wrong is wrong, regardless of cultural differences.
As I read Roisin Ingle’s article over the weekend, Hijab chic on the catwalk, I thought of my friend. I don’t know what her thoughts are on the hijab, but I have come across a lot of people who have problems with it because they feel that the headscarf is symbolic of the oppression of women in some cultures. It is very interesting that something like the hijab has come to be so symbolic. It has come to represent ‘otherness’ and all that implies on the one hand, as well as becoming a symbol of identity on the other.
About six months ago, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic wrote about the manner in which non-issues related to immigration were being debated in place of substantive matters. In that article, he quoted the Hungarian historian István Bibó, who, speaking on society said,
It will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for the real one that it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter.
Putting on an hijab fashion show was an incredibly clever, creative, non-abrasive and I’m sure a fun way for the ladies involved to assert and affirm a part of their religious and cultural identity. So much so, I really hope more groups come up with such imaginative ways of revealing more of themselves to everyone else.
If that happens, hopefully the appetite for confronting the challenges of globilisation and those of living in a multicultural society at a level deeper than the symbolic will increase.
First- and second-year international seminarians play in the snow before attending Mass at the Novitiate of Legionaries of Christ in Leopardstown on Monday, 2 February. Photograph: Naoise Culhane/Maxpix
This blog has made it onto the longlist of the ‘Best Newcomer’ category of this year’s Irish Blog Awards.
To everyone who follows, occasionally reads or regularly comments on this forum, thank you. Thanks also to the people who nominated it. And even though this is beginning to sound like one of those award speeches that feel like meaningless rituals, thanks also to the sponsor of that award category, Teamwork Project Manager.
You sometimes hear horrific stories about people spending dreadful hours in A&E. But there is nothing like having it happen to you to get you to realize that there really is an urgent need for health reform.
At around midnight, a friend developed severe abdominal pain and his wife called an ambulance. She later phoned me and I decided to tag along. Hours later, the two of us had to leave him in the A&E department. He had been looked over once and had been given some pain medication which hadn’t done him much good. We still had no idea whether or not he would be admitted or even the working diagnosis. But because there were children at home alone, and a hospital is supposed to be a safe place for the ill, we left him. I’m yet to hear what eventually happened.
The whole thing got me thinking. I started comparing the A&E services in that Irish regional hospital to those in Zimbabwe three years ago. In fairness, the Irish hospital won the contest pretty easily, but the fact that I had to think about it, considering that the competition was a hospital in a failing state, is telling. And although I normally reserve my strongest criticism for managers and politicians, I think there is enough blame for everyone to have a share.
We can argue over who is responsible for the fact that a visit to A&E is often much worse than it needs to be, but that may miss the point. The big question for me is this: are the people who work at the various levels of health delivery conscious of the experience of patients as they go about their day-to-day jobs? If the patient experience is not their primary concern (and I’m talking about everyone - consultants, government officials, nurses, hospital security, etc…), shouldn’t that be where ‘reform’ starts?
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s ruling class know how to push all the wrong buttons!Ahmadinejad especially seems to enjoy sticking it to the West whenever he gets a chance.
The routine that accompanied the launch was almost amusing - one side with the implausible claim that it was an entirely peaceful event, and the other with a thinly veiled threat to militarily crush what is being framed as the greatest military threat of our time.
The whole thing is ridiculous. And because this spat seems like it shouldn’t turn into anything more than a spat, I have a very bad feeling that things will escalate. As a presidential candidate Obama once said that America took countries like Cuba and Iran too seriously and that a sense of perspective was needed. I wonder if President Obama will take Senator Obama’s advice.
Yesterday, Taoiseach Brian Cowen announced major public spending cuts. Harry McGee spells it all out clearly. What intersts me most is the fact that the bulk of proposal is in the form of a pension payment that civil servants will have to make. A civil servant earning €45k a year, for example, will see a weekly reduction in their salary of about €62.
It is important to bear in mind that this pay cut isn’t really a pay cut. It’s more like being forced to increase the payments into your pension. That said, for those who are already struggling financially, the loss of a further €62 every week could hurt badly.
This entire episode has been revealing. The truth is that a decrease in the overall standard of living has been inevitable for some time now. What should not have been so surprising is the fact that there has been a tendency to suggest that someone else should bear the brunt of that change. Fingers have been pointed at civil servants and the wealthy. I’m all for a progressive system of taxation. I’m even in favour of the rich doing even more than normal in times of economic difficulty. But I don’t like the idea of scapegoating people, the rich included. If there is a national challenge, shouldn’t everyone, rich, middle-class and poor contribute in some way to making things right?
I think the government has done a reasonable job given the circumstances. The one area where I think they, and the entire political elite, have dropped the ball has to do with tackling things head on. I’m still waiting to hear a politician on either side of the political divide address the country’s economic difficulties without trying to gain political milage out of it. Even now, it seems like political considerations are dictating economic policy.
By the way, I thought consensus at the moment was that increasing public spending and maintaining spending power trumps budget deficits? If that’s the case, how wise is decreasing the spending power of civil servants?
I spent most of yesterday off-line, actively avoiding all sources of news. The reason? A friend had recorded Super Bowl XLIII - Sunday’s final match in the American Football’s NFL. The game was on really late here because of time differences so we decided to watch it the following evening.
Why is a Zimbabwean in Ireland watching the Super Bowl? I have a surprising large number of American friends. Galway is a very multicultural city! One of my friends is from Arizona so the game was especially important to him and his wife.
It turned out to be a brilliant game. It was decided with about 30 seconds to go, but was really exciting throughout. That said, viewers outside the United States lost out on one of the highlights - the ads. The average cost of running an advert during the game was about $3 million! In fact, despite a weakening global economy, approximately $459 billion was spent on advertising in 2008. It has been predicted that in 2009, that figure will fall slightly to $458 billion.
So, having paid millions of dollars for the time slot, what sort of adverts did American viewers see during the game? Of the ones that I have tracked down on YouTube, here are my top 3:
In third place:
In second place:
And without a doubt, of the ones I’ve seen, my favorite:
What can I say, I’m a huge fan of both Bob Dylan and Will.I.am. The big question is this: am I more likely to but a Pepsi (the other two don’t apply in Ireland)? After all the money they must have spent to make and distribute that commercial, I wonder what sort of increase in sales would constitute a success?
