Taking Over the Asylum

Following on from an earlier post, if the people of Monaghan need proof of their great town's ability to provide new and innovative political solutions to grave injustices, they need only look back to 1919, when Monaghan Lunatic Asylum established the first Soviet in Ireland.

Admittedly, Soviets would not be my chosen challenge to a stagnant and ineffective establishment, and the fact that this radical venture was launched in the local lunatic asylum does sound like the beginning of a bad joke. But the incident does, if nothing else, highlight how Irish people were once unafraid to challenge the political orthodoxy, and truly ask whether those in power deserved to be there. The Daily Mail, from April 2010, has more details

"THE first soviet in Ireland was indeed set up at Monaghan Lunatic Asylum in February 1919 by staff protesting against their long hours - an incredible 93 hours per week - and a wage rise that had been promised by management but hadn't materialised.

Staff in the asylum were organised by Peadar O'Donnell Peadar O'Donnell (Irish: Peadar Ó Domhnaill; 22 February 1893 – 13 May 1986) was an Irish Republican socialist, Marxist activist and writer.
..... Click the link for more information., who was a leading organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.

O'Donnell, who came from Dungloe, Co. Donegal, had a varied and colourful career - a trade union activist who later became sympathetic to the IRA, and ultimately became renowned writer.

The workers organised their soviet on the Russian model and ran up the red flag over the hospital. The workers, incidentally, were enthusiastically supported by the inmates of the asylum. Despite the hospital being surrounded by policemen and soldiers, the strikers refused to give in. After some days, management caved in to their demands, but they refused to give the same pay rise to women workers, so the soviet continued until the women won the same improvements in their wages and conditions.

Although the Monaghan soviet closed down, it was only the first such protest across the country. During 1918 and 1919, a wave of strikes hit the country. Some of these strikes turned into soviets, where workers attempted to emulate the style and organisation of the Russian revolution."

Along with the more famous Limerick Soviet, and the fervent developments occuring across the Irish political spectrum at the time, from militant Republicanism, through cultural Nationalism to armed Unionism, the second decade of the 20th century clearly witnessed vast tracks of the population thinking about the issues of the day, and becoming involved in activism to bring about the Ireland that they envisioned. The question is, what happened?

I have blogged before on the numerous attempts to launch a new force in Irish politics, and how these efforts meet with little encouragement from the general populace. Indeed, even mainstream Irish politics is something of a minority sport. The sad, simple truth is that the Irish have stopped caring about politics - they complain, they give out, but they do nothing to effect change. You get the impression that if our struggle for independence was happening today, the Empire wouldn't need to rely on the Black and Tans - so long as the Premiership and Big Brother were on 24/7, the Irish would stay good and compliant.

Tribaltastic

I may be a Dub (not an honest-to-God, true blue Northsider, Joe Duffy, kind of a Dub; yet a Dub nonetheless), but I love Monaghan. I can't place my finger on why, exactly, I like this county so much; in large part I expect it is the unique way it keeps a cultural foot firmly North and South of the border all at once. On top of that, the centre of Monaghan town is quite well preserved; efforts have been made to boost the town's cultural stock through the County Museum and the various theatres and drama groups, plus there's the archaeological society. In short, Monaghan does a pretty good job of balancing the best of the rural with the best of the urban.

But my enthusiasm for the Big M isn't shared by the native Monaghanites - wherever I go, whenever people hear my accent, the first question is always "Why in the name of God would you move to Monaghan?" When I express my admiration for the town, and for the county generally, they stare at me in disbelief, before reciting the litany of all that is wrong with the area: the lack of a full hospital, the factories shutting down, no motorway to Dublin, insufficient businesses in the town, and so on.

Such disgruntlement could be easily dismissed as simply the disillusionment that has spread throughout the country since the Celtic Tiger bit the dust, but what is truly revealing is not the negative attitude which pervades the town, but rather the factor which Monaghan people blame for their travails.

The supposed cause of their woes is usually revealed when they contrast Monaghan with nearby Cavan. "You see Cavan," they tell me "That's a great town. They've got great politicians over there; they get them all sorts of things. Sure why else do they still have a hospital?"

Now, I never have the heart to point out that the county of Monaghan actually has 4 of the 5 TDs (members of parliament) in the constituency of Cavan-Monaghan, and that 2 of the 4 Monaghan TDs are in the governing Fianna Fail party. More worrying though, is the attitude that has developed (all over Ireland, not just in Monaghan) that a politician's only job is to get things for their locality, even if this is to the detriment of the nation as a whole. In many countries politics might be ultimately local, but in Ireland politics is only, and ever, local.

The sad irony is, of course, that this fixation on the tribalisms of who gets what at county level (counties are, after all, by and large based on the old borders of tribal kingdoms) actually ensures that all of us get substandard and ineffective services. Monaghan, and the whole country, would arguably be better served by having no "local TDs" but rather by having national governments that, in a bold revolutionary move, actually governed the country.

Besides, if any Monaghan people are reading this, just remember that Monaghan has Dinkin's bakery. And by God, I've not tasted the like of their ginger wheaten bread anywhere else on earth: compared to that sort of a luxury, motorways are overrated!

My Daily Commute - A Journey Through History!

Image taken from Strange Maps

Those of us condemned to the drudgery of commuting to and from work every day usually have very little to contemplate as we zone out for the journey to the office. Until recently my commute was like any other, unremarkable and dull. That was until I moved to Monaghan...

Now, to most eyes, my commute may still seem humdrum. True, it's a pleasant 30 minute drive through rolling drumlins and pastoral countryside, via the towns of Monaghan, Smithborough, Clones and finaly Belturbet. But what I find interesting about this drive (in a remarkably nerdy kind of way), is that I cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic 4 times, and for a short half-kilometre section of the road I am in a virtual enclave of the Republic within Northern Ireland, which has no direct contact with the rest of the state, but rather can only be accessed by road via the North. Effectively, this means that this semi-enclave cannot easily be reached by An Garda Siochana (the Irish police force), nor can it be patrolled by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. While it is not exactly lawless, this pocket of territory has been used for a number of nefarious activities over the years, and it is still apparently the place to go locally if you like cockfights or other bloodsports (who doesn't?. I mean, c'mon, nothing says a classy evening to me like bloodsports!)

Similarly, each morning you can see the "donuts" burned in rubber onto the road by young men with too much horsepower and not enough brains, who zip along this border route in the dead of night, safe in the knowledge that for police in the South, without road access to the enclave, speed traps here would be a logistical nightmare, while on the Northern side of the border, police checkpoints run the risk of attracting violence from dissident Republicans.

What strikes me most, though, are the signs scattered along this route as to how artificial the border is, not just from a Republican viewpoint, but also how the division of our island has resulted in communities that once contained both Protestants and Catholics, Unionists and Nationalist, being divided, with one section of the community artificially removed, or withering away over time. In truth, this phenomena has seemed to be far more common among the Protestant community on both sides of the border; in the South, communities which had been in the locality for nearly 400 years have slowly disappeared since 1922, marrying into Catholic families or choosing to emigrate; while on the Northern side of the border the change has been more rapid, as the inter-religious violence that coloured the Troubles has led some Unionists to pull back from areas bordering the Republic, retreating further North to where greater numbers of their co-religionists live.

One of the most poignant signs of this change is a Church of Ireland (Anglican) church located in the enclave in of the Republic, but which I would guess would have been built over the course of the late 19th Century to serve the community in the area. It stands alone, a long way from the nearest village (which is now in Northern Ireland), and only once have I seen any activity at the church, a funeral. Judging by the mourners, the deceased that day was obviously of an older generation, and I noticed that every car parked outside this church, which was remember South of the border, had Northern plates. I couldn't but wonder had the deceased grown up in the area, either before or shortly after partition, when there still would have been a sizable Protestant community. Now, were they being returned to the church where they worshipped as a child, mourned by friends and family who had also felt that it was necessary to leave this place all those years ago? Was this area a place where they could not live, but could only return to in death?

In Belturbet, too, the town where I work, there is signs of a once thriving community now gone; an Orange Hall that is now only empty and unused, restored by the Irish state with a view to being turned into a museum. The local pub has a picture of the main street taken in 1910, in which one can clearly see, hanging from a house, the sign "UVF Meets Here" (the UVF being a Protestant paramilitary organisation opposed to Irish independence.) And while, as an Irish Catholic, I obviously find the basic premise of Protestant supremacy, on which the Orange Order and the UVF are based, difficult to stomach, these little hints of people now gone still make me wonder could partition and its aftermath not have been better handled. What position would the island be in now, if the Southern state at least had done more to calm the concerns of its Protestant population? Would we closer to unity or still divided? And, as a Southerner, am I just naive in my thinking?

If you would like to learn more about the enclave and are, like me, a bit of a nerd, see the great discussion at Strange Maps.