Billy King shares his monthly thoughts
You couldn’t make it up, explosive munitions at Lidl
https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/54351562097/in/dateposted/ and an iPhone dictation bug that replaced ‘Trump’ with ‘Racist’ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/26/apple-to-fix-iphone-dictation-bug-trump?CMP=share_btn_url ……..manys a true word that was spoken in jest tech.
Fierce and farce in Dublin
OK, one was fierce but not a farce, the other was a fierce farce. My visits to Doubling tend to be either social or movement related so it was great to have a cultural visit recently. The first part of the visit was to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square to see Brian Maguire’s “La grande illusion” exhibition there. The second was to see the stage production of Dr Strangelove. Both would get excellent marks from me.
We didn’t have enough time at the Hugh Lane because we hadn’t banked on spending three-quarters of an hour watching a video interview with Brian Maguire. It is at the entrance to his exhibition but once we started watching then we couldn’t pull ourselves away. Intelligent, humane, personable, concerned with justice, these are just a few of the terms that come to mind in describing the gentle but strong man in question from watching the interview. His work in prisons, at home and around the world, is remarkable.
In the video he quotes Lara Marlowe as saying he worked like a journalist and you can see that clearly in the video and his work (he can do much work to access photos of scenes of death or violence). But he gives more than that, he gives imagination, depth and humanity – where appropriate – to his subjects. The coverage in this exhibition includes Mexico and the devastation on lives by the drugs trade there, Syria, and migrants to the USA who did not make it. Regarding the first, one work looked like a stone or rock from a distance only on examination to reveal a severed head; shocking but a humane treatment of the topic. And regarding Syria his treatment of a damaged and abandoned street in Aleppo evokes the life which it once had and its emptiness now, it is an image that has stayed with me – I think you might have the same experience with any of his images. War and human rights are integral subjects to this work.
Brian Maguire’s exhibition at the Hugh Lane has had its run extended to 18th May (2025) and I certainly recommend it – but leave time for that video interview.
Doing Dr Strangelove as a stage production might seem a strange choice but it actually worked very well in the Iannucci/Foley/Coogan presentation of Stanley Kubrick’s original, and the stagecraft was good. Steve Coogan was to play 4 roles when we were attending at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre – this compares to 3 roles played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film – and obviously doing it on stage requires nifty timing and a bit of ingenuity (which mainly but not always worked in my opinion). Not performing due to laryngitis meant Coogan’s understudy, Ben Deery, had that challenge and managed it very well when I attended.
It is of course a sign of the times that Dr Strangelove is – tragically – as relevant today as when it was filmed in terms of actual and possible mass annihilation. The violent crazies and smooth talkers are running the shows and any interventions by people with a titter of wit may be ineffective. If we even consider nuclear accidents and near misses of various kinds we can shiver in fear. Add in further human error and possible malice and we are on the edge of the precipice or indeed various precipices.
One of the stand out lines in the play is where the US President advises the Soviet ambassador and a belligerent senior air force officer that there should be no fighting as “This is the War Room”! Sadly the world is still going in the direction of gross violence and pulling back from this requires the imaginative goodwill which many of our leaders lack. So we have to provide some sanity in these troubled times.
It’s a Doge’s life
I do believe there is such a thing as ‘evil’, but as it is such an absolute term it is one I rarely use to describe people or situations. I am usually moderate enough in how I express myself [Really? – Ed] however when I saw Elon Musk gloating on television news about the apocalyptic cuts to the USAid budget, and his proud claim to have put it through the shredder, I really felt I was looking at the face of evil, undiluted evil.
The USA spends far more money on its military – and 800 military bases around the world – than any other country, by far; the budget for this is over $900 billion, say $1 trillion. You could attack USAid spending in some places for its political bias – Ukraine and Israel are the largest recipients – but the fact is it does make a difference to some of the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick. $40 billion is not a huge amount for a large, rich country like the USA to share though the total spent on aid by the USA is $72 billion (possibly 8% of the military budget). https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/20/how-will-trump-and-musk-freeze-on-usaid-affect-millions-around-world?CMP=share_btn_url The Trump/Musk justification for the attack was also false; three of the four projects named as wasting money by USAid were funded as cultural projects by the State Department, not USAid.
For the richest man in the world to be part of destroying help to the very poorest and sickest in the world is obscene and vengeful evil, full stop. Two thirds of soup kitchens in Khartoum, Sudan, closed as a result. Many essential health programmes in the poorest countries in the world have been decimated. And for a ‘Labour’ prime minister in the UK to subsequently cut their aid budget, already miserly as a percentage of GDP, to up military spending feels like another betrayal on the world stage. But then with Trump in the White House everyone seems to be getting in on dangerous and unjust behaviour.
Down North
What are you to make of the sadistic that while 81% of nationalist/republican voters in the North believe extreme weather events are at least partly caused by climate change, only 29% of unionist voters believe that. So 4 out of 5 nationalists/republicans are aware of the connection while more than 2 in 3 unionist voters have their heads in the shifting sand. Is this explicable by the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican ‘community’ being generally centre or left of centre and Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist politics tending to be centre or right of centre? You might expect some difference due to that but the void is staggering. I couldn’t look at the details more because the story was behind a paywall in the ‘Tele’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/environment/just-29-of-unionist-voters-believe-climate-change-is-partly-responsible-for-extreme-weather-poll-reveals/a1145304503.html
Meanwhile it does seem the gap is closing between those who support staying in the UK and those who want a united Ireland. In an Irish Times/ARINS survey the figures were 48% to 34% respectively, and there were some changes in the non-headline figures https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/02/07/support-for-irish-unification-grows-but-unity-vote-would-be-soundly-defeated-in-north-poll-shows/ However a Lucid Talk/Belfast Telegraph poll showed figures of 48% and 41%, much closer, which begs questions about their repective methodologies. While the latter poll has consistently shown a high proportion opting for a united Ireland, both show the gap narrowing.
The conclusion is that there should be all sorts of explorations on what a united Ireland might look like and how it would initially fund, and economically develop, the poorer North, as well as guarantees on human rights and other issues. However there is a reasonable case that unionists can or could make for continuing in the UK and one start to doing that took place recently in Coleraine with a ‘Safeguarding the Union’ meeting. While demographics show the Catholic population increasingly outpacing the number of Protestants, certainly from middle age downwards, it can’t be assumed that the current direction of travel will automatically continue. What would happen if, as the Coleraine meeting heard, there was a big economic shock to the Republic? What indeed.
It is all to be played for. The hope is that the players won’t engage in fouls and that the respective supporters will temper their behaviour. Unlikely? Maybe, but not if there are processes which encourage intelligent and analytical thinking at all levels and in a variety of ways.
Global injustice: It’s rich
I didn’t read the Oxfam report concerned but Stephen McCloskey of the Centre for Global Education in Belfast did a very useful precis in the February issue of their e-Bulletin which I quote here in full:
“Oxfam have published their annual analysis of global economic inequality which this year is titled Takers not Makers: The Unjust Poverty and Unearned Wealth of Colonialism. This annual report has become an indispensible tool for understanding the key economic forces driving poverty between and within the global North and South. The report’s main headline is that billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than 2023 with 204 new billionaires created. Such is the global flow of wealth to the super-rich that Oxfam estimates that there will be five trillionaires within a decade. Conversely, the number of people living below the World Bank poverty line of $6.85 is 3.6 billion people, the same total as 1990, which means poverty indicators are going in the wrong direction because of wealth accumulation by the one percent. In explaining the concentration of billionaire wealth, Oxfam’s report cites two main factors: first, the rise of a new oligarchy that generates wealth through inheritance, cronyism (such as tax avoidance) and monopoly power (for example, Amazon controls 70% of online purchases in the UK); and second, both historic and ongoing colonialism of the global South through global institutions, financial markets and multinational corporations. The report sets out the kind of systemic changes needed to address global inequities and they really should be seized by development educators as a platform for economic literacy, advocacy and activism. The depth of the problems described in the report demand nothing less.” The report is at https://www.oxfam.org/en/takers-not-makers-unjust-poverty-and-unearned-wealth-colonialism and the Centre for Global Education is at https://www.centreforglobaleducation.com/
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That’s me as we come up towards St Patrick’s Day, that national occasion when anyone or everyone can shiver in the open because wintry weather is still around. It’s a shame(rock) that the weather can be so poor…..the day marks the death date of St Patrick himself but whether 17th March is accurate or not I don’t know, perhaps it could be ‘discovered’ that it was really sometime in the period May to August that the man himself died….. Until we meet again next month, Billy.