Bedsit, with three clowns, and a rottweiler

When I started this book, George Floyd was alive.  His name was known only to his loved ones, friends and community.  Now his daughter is without her Daddy, and we know his name.   Imagine a mountain of corpses, George's body is flung somewhere near the top of this pile.  I say near the top since bodies have been added since his murder.  Hochschild's points to the nameless dead, beneath poor George's black body.   Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost needs to be widely read. While it deals with the particular horrors of King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, it makes clear that the butchery characteristic of King Leopold’s reign were features of all European colonies. I first moved from Ireland to England in 1995.  Quickly making English friends, one of the striking observations was how these otherwise well informed and articulate individuals knew next to nothing about Ireland, it’s history and how that history informed it’s current p...

Elif Shafak’s Bastard of Istanbul is a gentle book.  It does not harry us with rushed ideas.  It dips us gently into quiet realisations. The life of a family, principally three sisters and their mother.  It shows a city,   Istanbul, littered with sublime and beautiful things. Fragile things, surrounded by shite and detritus.  The glass teacups, Zalahi has a grá for.  These things always break, being too delicate for this world.  Yet Zalahi doesn’t break, she grows out of the shite of this world to emerge bloody but unbowed.   The Bastard is claustrophobic, the closeness of others bears down upon each of the characters.  This is juxtaposed by the literal and figurative distance between characters.  The physical proximity of the sisters is contrasted with the chasm of unspoken truths between them.  ‘People stuck to one another to disguise their loneliness, pretending to be far more intimate than they actually were.‘.  Gaps b...

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  Shoshana Zuboff I pored over this book, stayed with the words. Read and reread them. Drank deeply from their wisdom.  It was not an easy read, but ultimately it gave far more than it took. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a seminal text for our age.  Zuboff's account of surveillance capitalism is elegant, poised and persuasive. Yet for all her brilliance, Shonanna’s central thesis suffers a number of fundamental flaws.   Where the Age is at it’s strongest is in the articulation of surveillance capitalism.  Consider this, ‘Who owns your face?’, ‘Who owns your behaviour?’  What you do, where you go, who you know, all this has value and extracting value from these data is the business model of the surveillance capitalist.  But this is only the description, where Zuboff’s account takes a darker turn, is in the control. Once Surveillance Capitalists have provided a d...

In 2008, I was 31 years old, recently married, and we had just welcomed our first baby boy into the world. That year, the bankruptcy of Ireland shook the nation, resulting in devastating consequences that we continue to live with. People lost their homes, their dignity, and their hopes for the future. Some took their lives, and many fled the country. Reflecting on Ship of Fools, a searing history of that period, is a difficult experience that cannot be separated from the events it describes. Revisiting this book in 2020, I am disheartened to see that little has changed in Irish society over the past twelve years. While O'Toole's subsequent book, Enough is Enough, offered a path to reform, to my mind no substantive change has been achieved. What we have learned is that the so-called "great and the good" are neither great nor good. O'Toole accurately depicts a peculiar characteristic of the Irish people, where we know that our politicians are corrupt but still vote ...

Ireland has a home crisis, construed as a homelessness crisis.  O'Brion shows us what we already know, we inhabitants of this damp rock are pissing our last away in the teeth of squalor and growing out of damp dereliction.  Those who fail to cling on become The Homeless. The reason? Money can rest and gain value in The Land.   In a delightful affectation, O'Brion's book is presented in Musical Movements, with the introduction being an Overture and the text divided into Three Movements. O'Brion tells the tale of the radical idealism that founded the nascent state, of how the democratic programme of Dáil Éireann 1919 committed that the interests of private property must be subordinate to the public right and welfare.  It's a story of how solutions are bountiful, solutions created by and placed in our own communities. Yet at each step the lusty embrace between the monied interests and the political class colluded to subvert the public right and welfare.  Ther...

In her poignant account, Rebecca Skloot sheds light on how the biopharma industry has trampled on bodily autonomy, building their empires on the backs of individuals without their consent. Skloot's book tells the stories of unsung heroes in medical science and exposes the atrocities committed against marginalised communities. Skloot sensitively records the tragic loss of Henrietta Lacks, whose fundamental right to bodily integrity was ignored by society. It is a story of incomprehensible oppression and ignorance, where doctors watched patients die, solely to study the disease prognosis. This was evident in the Tuskegee experiments on untreated syphilis, which took place in the United States between 1932 and 1972. The biopharma industry made incalculable sums of money by taking Henrietta's cells without her knowledge or consent. The ongoing ethical and legal battle raises the question of how to balance scientific advancement with individual freedom. Sadly, commercial interests...