Beyond the Walls of North Belfast

Posted on May 7, 2012 by admin

Limestone Road, north Belfast, calls to mind novelist Robert McLiam Wilson’s description of his native city as a place in which ‘the stories are jumbled and jangled. The narratives meet’. During Belfast’s early twentieth century heyday, Limestone Road was an attractive, tree-lined thoroughfare populated by prosperous families, many of whom earned their living at the nearby Port. But decades of conflict and haphazard planning have taken a lugubrious toll on ‘the Limestone’: today the area is underdeveloped and, to the casual visitor, feels somewhat less than welcoming.

Loyalist Tiger’s Bay lies at one end of the road. Antrim Road, with its republican murals, is a short walk in the opposite direction. Like many of Belfast’s interface areas – the zones of contact between Catholic and Protestant communities – Limestone Road is pockmarked by vacant lots and boarded up houses. Weeds grow up around a shipping container abandoned just off the street. Nearby, sectarian graffiti is daubed on the shutters, rusted shut, of a long-closed corner shop.

Across the road something mundane, yet remarkable happens: a car turns into Newington Street. Until recently, this would have been impossible. In the late 1980s, following a spate of sectarian murders, a steel gate was erected across the entrance to this non-descript row of terrace houses. In February, the gate was opened for the first time since. Traffic can now access Newington Street from 7am to 4pm on weekdays, for a three-month trail period.

In a city where over two-thirds of the population live in segregated neighbourhoods – defined as streets that are 90 per cent Catholic or 90 per cent Protestant – the unbolting of a gate at an interface ranks as a sizable achievement. Indeed the Newington Street initiative marks the latest in a string of minor successes for advocates of greater integration across the manifold ‘peace lines’ that separate working class Catholics and Protestants – for the barricades are almost uniformly in working class neighbourhoods – across Belfast. A little further down the Limestone Road, an erstwhile shirt factory located between a Catholic and a Protestant primary school has successfully been converted into a shared housing association. The complex’s 22 flats are divided equally between both denominations.

The Alexandra Park ‘peace gate’, a couple of hundred yards from Newington Street, is arguably the biggest accomplishment so far. Since 1994, a 120 metre long, 3.5 metre high corrugated iron fence has effectively split this tidy Victorian park into Catholic and Protestant areas. The fence’s foundations were laid on September 1, 1994. The previous day the army council of the Provisional IRA had announced a ‘complete cessation of military operations’. In September, Justice Minister David Ford cut the ribbon on a new gate that links the two sides of the park for eight hours a day. After more than 17 years apart, children from both sides of the interface can share the park.

Alexandra Park is surprisingly busy when I take a stroll through it on a fresh, April morning. As I pass through the gates from the Catholic side, a dog walker approaching from the opposite direction nods in greeting. Despite having lived in the vicinity for a year in the mid-2000s this is my first time in the Protestant end of the park. In front of me a young couple, weighed down with shopping, amble towards the Tiger’s Bay exit. If their bags are to be believed, they have been to Tesco on Antrim Road: a short trip but, before the gate, out of bounds, practically and socially.

‘It’s been great since it opened,’ says Kate Clarke, a community worker with North Belfast Interface Network, an organisation that worked for three years with local residents before the gate was incorporated into the Alexandra Park fence. ‘There has not been a single complaint since September (when it opened). There’s a desire among people to open (the gate) for longer.’

Outsiders, particularly politicians, often wonder why Northern Ireland’s ‘peace walls’ exist at all, with the initial IRA ceasefire now almost twenty years old. In 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters in Belfast that the walls were a barrier to ‘the floodgates of private investment’. More recently David Cameron described the increase in barricades since 2006 as ‘disappointing’. Sitting in her cramped office in the nationalist Cliftonville Road, less a kilometre from Alexandra Park, Clarke is more circumspect. Taking down walls is, she says, a difficult process that requires time and open communication between communities, statutory bodies and service providers.

John Howcroft, a former loyalist political prisoner working with the North Belfast Community Development and Transition Group in neighbouring Tiger’s Bay agrees: ‘People see a gate opening but they don’t see all the work that goes before that underpins it. We spent a long time going into youth clubs and schools, speaking with local business and the police about safety.’

‘The walls, in many respects, define Belfast,’ says Dr Jonny Byrne, a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Ulster and a leading expert on peace walls. ‘The walls, like the murals, are part of our folklore. The question is how do we evolve the conditions in which they can disappear but we don’t lose part of our identity?’

Issues of identity and territory are seldom far away in north Belfast, a four square mile patchwork of sectarian enclaves and divided loyalties where kerbstones turn from red, white and blue to green in a matter of footsteps. The troubles had a disproportionate impact on north Belfast: just 5 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population live in the area, yet it accounted for a fifth of all those who lost their lives in the conflict. Even today, almost a decade and a half on from the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, sclerotic sectarian tensions remain. Anti-social behaviour and recreational rioting, especially during the summer marching season, is a recurring problem. And then there are the peace lines.

Around 90 per cent of the peace lines in Northern Ireland are in the capital. According to a study published earlier this year by the Belfast Interface Project, 99 walls, fences, gates and roads divide Belfast’s Protestants and Catholics. Forty-four are located in the north of the city, with a staggering 19 of these built since the Peace Process began in 1994. Attitudes towards the barriers began to shift in 2008, after a media storm accompanied the erection of a 25ft high perimeter fence around Hazelwood Integrated Primary School in North Belfast.

‘When I started my research in 2008 you couldn’t talk about peace walls. The fact we are seeing small gates open shows momentum is building, it shows change can happen,’ says Jonny Byrne. Chris O’Halloran, practice co-ordinator for Belfast Interface Project, agrees that there have been ‘positive movements’, although there is ‘a long way to go’. Earlier this year, the International Fund for Ireland, an independent organisation promoting reconciliation in Northern Ireland, announced a £2m fund aimed at bringing down the walls across Belfast.

The devolution of policing and justice powers to Stormont has been a major factor in the changing dynamic around the barriers. Prior to the 2010 Hillsborough agreement between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, responsibility for peace walls rested with the Northern Ireland Office, which took its cue from Westminster. Since the early 1970s NIO policy was geared towards minimising threats of violence by physically separating Protestant and Catholic communities.

The establishment of the devolved Department of Justice has seen old approaches fall out of favour. Under Justice Minister, and Alliance party leader, David Ford, an unofficial moratorium on building new barriers has been introduced. A realisation has emerged inside and outside Stormont that the interface dilemma must be solved within Northern Ireland. The era of high-powered conferences presided over by heads of state and bankrolled by international cash is over. With devolution bedded in, local politicians, and their electorates, are now responsible for addressing the legacy of a security policy that long favoured defensive architecture over dialogue.

Less contentious gates such as those at Newington Street and Alexandra Park have been opened, partly in the hope of building confidence for more radical future measures. Nevertheless, peace walls remain a feature of quotidian life for many interface communities in Belfast. The stereotypical image of the barrier – the imposing, 800-metre long multi-level barrier that has, in various forms, divided the Shankill and Falls at Cupar Way, West Belfast since 1969 – has become a tourist cliché, with black taxis and buses ferrying visitors to sign their names on the concrete. The reality is most are less dramatic, but arguably more insidious.

In any other city, the walk from Newington Street to the Institute of Conflict Research’s offices in nearby Duncairn Gardens, which runs parallel to Limestone Road, would be a five-minute jaunt. However, as I soon discover, during redevelopment of the Limestone Road area in the 1970s, cross streets were turned into cul-de-sacs, following a policy of defensible space. After losing my bearings in a maze of blocked off streets and dead-ends, I eventually give up, retrace my steps back on to the main road and continue on from there.

‘Sectarian geography has blighted a huge part of the city,’ says Neil Jarman when I eventually arrive, a quarter of an hour late, for our meeting at the Institute for Conflict Research, an independent research organisation sitting on the interface between the Catholic New Lodge and Protestant Limestone Road. Behind Jarman’s desk an ordnance survey map of Belfast is tacked onto the wall. Every peace line is marked in red pen. The areas north and west of the city centre are awash with colour, including a short strip of red beside the ICR’s location. Outside the window is a sheet metal fence, part of the Duncairn Gardens peace line.

Jarman, the ICR’s director, believes that peace wall removal needs to be conceived of as part of a long-term strategy for Belfast. ‘You shouldn’t just remove the walls for the sake of it. You need to think in terms of regeneration.’ Most interface areas desperately need development. Decades of disinvestment and technocratic planning have left a scarred, under-used landscape on both sides of the wall.

Kate Clarke from North Belfast Interface Network works primarily in New Lodge, the fourth most deprived ward in the whole country, according to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ‘Things in both communities are the same, we have the same problems,’ Clarke says. Increased use of alcohol, drugs and prescription medication is closely correlated with proximity to peace lines. Life expectancy is ten years lower at interface areas; rates of mental illness, depression and family breakdown are all higher in the shadow of the walls.

Over the peace line in loyalist Tiger’s Bay, unemployment runs at over 50 per cent. Few here have experienced any peace dividend. ‘An economic and political ring of steel has replaced the physical ring of steel (the security cordon that surrounded Belfast city centre during much of the Troubles). These communities haven’t had the socio-economic benefits even though we have peace,’ says John Howcroft. ‘There needs to be investment in the three rs: relationships, regeneration and reconciliation.’

Neil Jarman agrees that interfaces cannot be viewed in isolation. ‘They need to be part of a wider discussion that says “look we need to start thinking about the city with a more focused approach”. Interfaces are part of that but not the only part.’ Unfortunately, joined up government has seldom been Northern Ireland’s strongest suit, even if the situation is slowly beginning to improve under the devolved assembly at Stormont.

As Neil Jarman points out, peace walls were constructed, sometimes overnight, under anti-terrorism legislation — but no formal mechanism exists for taking them down. It’s a textbook illustration of how Northern Ireland’s fragmented institutional structure can have unintended, detrimental consequences at the interface. On Flax Street, a quiet street in north Belfast, residents on both sides of a metal peace gate have agreed that the gate, locked for the best part of 40 years, should be opened — if their fears that cars might use the street as a short cut are addressed. However, local roads authorities have so far refused to introduce traffic calming measure. Not enough vehicles currently use the blocked off street to justify speed bumps. The gate remains closed.

Practical problems are not the only obstacle to bringing down the walls. Variations on the phrase ‘taking down the barriers in people’s minds’ recur in almost every discussion about the interface. ‘Removing the wall is the easy bit. It’s getting to the stage that it can be taken is the real challenge,’ says Jonny Byrne. From service providers to community groups, there is a broad consensus that the support of local communities is integral, but should residents have sole responsibility for removing peace walls?

‘Government can’t impose things that communities can’t live with but at the same time within many interface communities most people are so used to what they have been living with for so long that it’s hard to see where the spark will come from (to take barriers down),’ says Chris O’Halloran. A recent study conducted by Forthspring, an inter-community group located between the Shankill and Falls roads in West Belfast, asked residents what changes would be required before the walls could come down. The results were surprisingly achievable: better street lighting, increased cross-community activity, improved employment opportunities.

‘It’s not rocket science but it needs politicians and community workers on both sides of the divide working together. People need to see their politicians behaving to each other in ways that are keeping with a situation in which the walls could eventually come down,’ says O’Halloran.

Former Community Relations Council chief executive, Duncan Morrow has been involved in cross-community work in Northern Ireland for over a quarter of a century. Having watched the ceasefires, the fitful attempts at devolution in the early years of the last decade and now the restoration of Stormont under Sinn Fein and DUP control, he believes that a frank discussion about the peace walls is long overdue. ‘It’s a fascinating issue because it brings to the core the question of what are we doing here, stabilising a conflict between fixed groups or opening up a new future that won’t be like the past. At the interface is where that discussion becomes really physical and really practical.’

Morrow acknowledges that interface violence has not gone away, as evinced by last June’s serious riots at Short Strand, a Catholic enclave in East Belfast.  But he believes the time has come for a shift in emphasis in discussions about the barriers: ‘We keep talking about residents’ fears but we need to talk about threats. What is the level of threat and if there is a real threat what is the strategy at a political level to make sure that the threat is alleviated.’

That residents in interface areas still face threats at all should force the Northern Irish government ‘to confront the fact that we haven’t tackled sectarianism yet’, says Morrow. Since the reinstatement of devolution in 2007, the Stormont Assembly has certainly been remarkably reticent on the issue of sectarianism. A Shared Future, essentially a government policy for a post-sectarian society based on reciprocity and reconciliation, was quietly shelved by the Sinn Fein-DUP administration. A replacement strategy, Cohesion, Sharing and Integration, is still in the draft phase.

Cross-community relations are still fragile in many areas. The annual Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey suggests attitudes towards the sectarian ‘other’ have deteriorated since 2007, particularly around interfaces.

Sectarian division costs Northern Ireland. According to Alastair Adair of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, duplication of services, particularly segregation in education and housing, costs about £1.5 billion per annum. Segregation is not confined to peace lines and working class communities: divided services, particularly schools, in rural areas are a significant drain on Stormont’s diminishing public purse.

Peace walls don’t just stop violence. They also prevent a community expanding and, by extension, another receding. Protestant and Catholic interface areas share many similarities, but in general there is a major difference between them: in Catholic areas, demand for housing is extremely high, with people living right up on top of the barrier; on the Protestant side of the barrier, the opposite is often the case. If every peace wall was removed tomorrow great swathes of traditionally unionist and loyalist areas of Belfast would turn green practically overnight.

‘Catholics see peace walls as a problem to their community developing. For Protestants peace walls protect their way of life, their bonfires, their flags,’ says Jonny Byrne. ‘The question is how do we create the conditions in which Protestants don’t see the removal of the wall as a threat to their existence as a community?’

How long this situation can continue is uncertain. Although demographic change has not been as swift as some expected Catholics are now in a majority in urban Belfast. And their numbers are growing steadily. ‘Housing is still the elephant in the room,’ says Kate Clarke. ‘There’s a huge waiting list in most nationalist areas.’ Duncan Morrow sees echoes of the late 1960s and the civil rights movement in contemporary Catholic housing demands housing. ‘Forty years on, we still haven’t solved equality in housing, which kicked the whole thing off in the first place.

‘If you said anywhere else that it was a matter of public policy to, for example, keep west London white it would be a complete political outrage. But that is what we do here and nobody bats an eyelid. When people move into empty houses in, say, the Village (a loyalist area in South Belfast that was the scene of a series of racist incidents over the last decade), be they Polish, Chinese or Catholic and the UVF, or whatever remains of it, stands outside their door and throws stuff at them and the community can’t or won’t stand up. What we end up with is a discussion about “They should have known better (than to move there)”. It’s unbelievable.’

The grim irony is that space is one thing Belfast des not want for. Since the 1950s the population of the city has dwindled from 470,000 to just 270,000. Shiny new city centre apartment complexes belie the reality that Belfast is a depopulating city with a crumbling inner-core.

Mark Hackett, an acclaimed architect and co-director of Forum for Alternative Belfast, a not-for-profit that campaigns for more equitable development in the city, says that Belfast’s population has declined by 35% in 35 years. The conflict was not the only cause: from the 1960s on, planners levelled whole sections of the city, encouraging residents, in particular Protestants, to migrate from the inner city to suburban new towns.

A succession of Robert Moses-esque roads projects, most notably the M1 motorway, effectively sealed off great swathes of the west, north and east of the city in concrete, turning neighbourhoods into sectarian ghettos and exacerbating the bifurcation of the city that lives on to this day. A recently released secret Stormont government report from 1971 suggests this segregation of Belfast by development was not entirely unintentional. Chaired by the then Ulster Unionist Minister of State John Taylor, the report into ‘future policy on areas of confrontation’ avers that opportunities to create ‘natural’ divisions existed throughout the city.

‘We would consider it essential to provide in the redevelopment of the city…for the maximum separation between the opposing areas,’ continues the report, which was submitted to Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner in April 1971.

Adducing the multi-million pound Titanic Quarter development in the east of the city, Hackett argues that ‘the division between rich and poor as the new division in Belfast’. He does, however, see reasons to be cheerful. The marked slowdown in the North’s, particularly in the housing market, has ‘allowed time to think about planning for the city’. Proposals to devolve planning, currently conducted at Northern Ireland level, to local representatives would help. ‘(Planning in Northern Ireland) was a bit like Eastern Europe – you had just one plan and you used it over and over. That needs to change,’ says Hackett.

Back at the interface, economics is quickly supplanting demographics as the defining issue. Cash for peace and reconciliation work, abundant in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, is running out fast. According Chris O’Halloran from Belfast Interface Project, 87% of funding for community relations work in Northern Ireland is non-governmental. The leading funders – the European Union, Atlantic Philanthropy and the International Fund for Ireland – are all currently in exit strategies. In five years time almost all will have ceased funding projects in the North. Meanwhile, swingeing cutbacks to the Stormont budget are hitting the community development sector hard.

‘A lot of those sources to build stability here are receding. There is a fear about where the resources will come from,’ says O’Halloran. At the peace line in north Belfast, Kate Clarke confides that North Belfast Interface Network faces an uncertain future. Last year the organisation, which employs five people and works across nine separate interfaces, cost £165,000 to run. For 2012, it has so far received just £62,000.

Multinational investment – the model of economic growth favoured by both Sinn Fein and DUP –– is unlikely to improve either conditions at the interface or the prospects of the walls eventually coming down. Stephen Nolan, co-director of Trademark, the anti-sectarian unit of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions based near the Cupar Way peace line in West Belfast, has been developing worker co-operatives at the interface. Last year, the Belfast Cleaning Co-operative was set-up by two women’s groups, one based on the Shankill, the other on the Falls Road. So far the new company has eight contracts and a staff of six workers. ‘I don’t think it is the answer but I do think it is an answer,’ Nolan says of worker co-operatives.

As Robert McLiam Wilson recognised, Belfast’s narratives tend to converge in unusual, unexpected ways. Back in the 1970s, West Belfast had a thriving co-operative sector. Since then government have focused on attracting outside industry to the area, with limited success. ‘I’m looking out at a waste land here,’ says Nolan, speaking on the phone from his office. ‘No-one is going to want to build a factory here in the next 10 years. Everyone here knows it but no one says it. It’s time we started investigating the alternatives.’

This article originally appeared as the cover feature of the Sunday Business Post‘s Agenda magazine, May 6, 2012.

Posted in Northern Ireland, Society and Culture, Sunday Business Post | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Local Currencies

Posted on May 7, 2012 by admin

My latest blog on the London Review of Books site, on local currencies, runny Spanish omelettes and ‘the Miracle of Worgl’:

Death to the Euro.’ The handmade sign was pinned to the wall of a community centre in San Luis, a gentrified neighbourhood just inside the boundaries of Seville’s old city. It was a balmy Friday evening, but inside a crowd of around a hundred people were listening to a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation on puma, a new local currency for San Luis launched last month. Puma is the third local currency to be introduced in the Andalusian capital this year. Pepa and jara already circulate in Macarena, a working-class district on the other side of Seville’s city walls.

After explaining how the new currency would work – euros can be exchanged one-for-one for puma notes, which are valid in designated San Luis shops – the speaker took questions from the floor: an elderly man with a straw hat wanted to know if his local café would acceptpuma; a young mother asked how she could sign up for the scheme on-line.

Repeated doses of EU-enforced austerity have hit Spain hard. Last week, the country officially slipped back into recession. The Spanish economy, the fifth largest in Europe, is expected to contract by 1.7 per cent in 2012.

In the slipstream of the Eurozone crisis, local currencies – perfectly legal, so long as income tax is paid – have proliferated across Spain. Thezoquito has circulated in parts of Galicia since 2007. Local currencies are proving popular in the UK, too: the Totnes pound has been around since 2007; the Brixton pound, with a natty picture of Ziggy Stardust on the tenner, emerged in 2009; the Bristol pound is about to launch.

Local currencies tend to circulate more rapidly than national (or transnational) currencies, as well as keeping money in the area, with the result that local economic activity increases. In 1932, the mayor of Wörgl in Austria replaced the faltering national currency with specially printed ‘Certified Compensation Bills’. Inspired by Silvio Gesell’s theory of ‘free-flowing money’, the Wörgl bills were designed to depreciate by 1 per cent of their value each month in order to promote rapid circulation and dissuade hoarding. Within weeks Wörgl had almost full employment. A new ski jump was built. Roads were repaired. Six neighbouring villages soon copied the ‘miracle of Wörgl’. In 1933, the Austrian Supreme Court upheld the Central Bank’s monopoly over the issuing of currency. Thirteen months after it began, Worgl’s experiment was over; within weeks joblessness in the town returned to around 30 per cent.

At the end of the evening in Seville, plates of runny omelette were passed around the room. An activist in his late twenties – a member of Spain’s M15, or indignados, movement – said the presentation was ‘fantastic’: ‘He wasn’t just talking about money, he was talking about trying to create a new society. We need another system. The currency is just a tool.’

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Seville Youth Bear Brunt of Economic Collapse

Posted on May 1, 2012 by admin

A middle-aged man with a Che Guevara beard and a black and white keffiyeh smiles down from an election poster attached to a lamppost in Gines, a middle class suburb on the outskirts of Seville. Below the photograph a single word instruction emblazoned in bright red ink: ‘Rebelate’. But there is little sign of rebellion on the neat, tidy streets of Gines, just a weary fatalism about the prospects for Seville, and for Spain.

The main road into Gines is pockmarked with empty office blocks and faded signs advertising housing developments that never materialised, victims of the Spanish construction bubble that popped four years ago. ‘Since the 80s, all the business here was building, but now that’s finished and politicians have done nothing to help the situation,’ says local resident.

Opinion polls suggest voters in today’s election to the regional Andalusian parliament are unlikely to heed the (largely former Communist) United Left’s calls to rebel. Indeed after more than 30 years of continuous power in the sunny southern region, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) are set to lose control of Andalusia to the conservative People’s Party (PP), previously a marginal concern in an area with a long history of left-wing activism and support.

‘I don’t think PP are any better than PSOE but after all these years Andalusia needs a change,’ says Solina, who has seen many of her friends immigrate to Germany, France and even Brazil and India in recent years. Defeat for PSOE in Spain’s most populous autonomous community would leave conservatives in control of every regional administration. This comes on the back of PP president Mariano Rajoy’s crushing victory over the ruling Socialist government in national elections in November.

Although a weary electorate endorsed Mr Rajoy’s manifesto of austerity and budget cuts last winter, jobs remain the most important issue for most Spanish voters. According to figures released by the Spanish Ministry for Employment last month, the country’s unemployment rate stands at 22.9 per cent, the highest in the euro zone. Among 18-25 age group, work is even scarcer: over 40 per cent are not in education and without work.

Of Spain’s regions, Andalusia has been hardest hit by the downturn. Historically an economically deprived area, official unemployment now stands at a vertiginous 31 per cent. Julio is typical of many in the picturesque regional capital, Seville. The 34-year-old studied music at university before gaining a scholarship to study at a famous conservatory in Colombia. On returning to Spain he completed another degree, in history and science of music.

‘When I was finished the only job I could get was in a supermarket, stacking shelves,’ says Julio, who now ekes out a living teaching music in Seville. ‘I have three degrees and a scholarship paid for by the state. I passed five civil service exams but I didn’t get a public job because there isn’t any anymore.’

Diego Beas, a Spanish policy analyst and journalist based in Washington, describes youth unemployment as ‘the biggest problem facing the next generation’. ‘Spain’s is a very structural unemployment that isn’t going to just go away with an upturn in the world economy.’

Mr Rajoy’s proposed labour reforms – which will make it easier for employers to hire and fire workers – are strongly opposed by trade unions. A nationwide general strike has been called for Thursday. Meanwhile, Mr Rajoy has asked the European Union for more flexibility on Spain’s deficit-cutting commitments: it is estimated that the deficit will be 5.8 per cent of total economic output in 2012, higher than the agreed target of 4.4 per cent. The Spanish economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2011.

In January, Mr Rajoy outlined €8.9bn in new budget cuts, as well as tax increases designed to raise €6.3bn. Such austerity proposals are unpopular with many young, unemployed Sevillians. ‘Politicians here try to look at the Irish model – but after four years of cuts we are worse than at the beginning. (The new measures) look like they will make things even worse,’ says Francisco Jurado Gilabert, a bright, articulate 29-year-old studying for a PhD in the University of Seville.

‘We are fighting with each other for internships earning €400 or €500 a month. It’s impossible to think of the future, of having your own house with a wife and children. It’s very difficult to think in a stable way about the future anymore.’

Gilabert is a leading member of Real Democracy Now (DYR), a public platform against corruption in politics and unemployment that played a pivotal role in a wave massive demonstrations and occupations across Spain on May 15. The 15M movement – named after the protests’ hashtag on Twitter – has garnered strong support among the young and unemployed, the vast majority of whom are deeply disillusioned with mainstream politics.

‘We are not happy with the political system in Spain,’ says Gilabert. ‘Voting every four years is like giving a free cheque for four years. The two big parties (PSOE and PP) are the same, it doesn’t matter who wins. Most people don’t vote or only vote because they feel they should. They don’t believe in politicians.’

Real Democracy Now is not running in the Andalusian elections, or any other for that matter. ‘We don’t want to run for election, that is the first step to joining the system. We don’t want to have any structure. We are a network only, without leaders, without public speakers,’ Gilabert says of a movement that became known around the world as ‘the Indignados’, inspiring Occupy protests from Nigeria to New York, via Dame Street and London.

Diego Beas says that the scale of the May 15 demonstrations, which saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets of cities and towns across Spain, was a ‘complete surprise’. ‘It created a sense in which young people could participate in the political process in a way that was completely unheard of before May 15,’ says Beas.

If Mr Rajoy’s government is unable quickly to provide jobs and opportunities for the next generation he could feel the wrath of this new, still inchoate political voice. ‘Unemployment needs to come down significantly within the next year. If it doesn’t start dropping, that could cause huge problems for the current government,’ Beas remarks.

This article originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post, 25 March.

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Solving Ireland’s Youth Unemployment Crisis

Posted on April 26, 2012 by admin

A recently published survey of students should make sobering reading for Ireland’s politicians. The poll, conducted by international research firm Trendence, asked 6,000 students in Irish universities if they intend to leave the country after graduation to secure a job in their chosen field. 27 per cent answered ‘yes’. In comparison, just 19 per cent of British students surveyed expect to emigrate for their first job.

That Irish students are willing to migrate for work is hardly a new phenomenon, but it does reflect a lack of job opportunities at home that is fast reaching chronic levels. According to the latest available data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, around one in three of under-25s in Ireland are out of education and without a job.

The situation in Ireland is, unfortunately, anything but unique. The unemployment rate among Spain’s under-25s rose to 50.5pc in January. The youth unemployment situation in Greece is just as bad. Across the rest of Europe’s so-called periphery the situation is scarcely better.

In his 2010 book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, sociologist Richard Sennett talks of a ‘spectre of uselessness’ that haunts workers, particularly in the west. ‘A defining image of the Great Depression in the 1930s,’ Sennett writes, ‘shows men clustered outside the gates of a shuttered factory, waiting for work, despite the evidence of there own eyes. The image still disturbs because the spectre of uselessness has not ended.’

To visit to any one of the lengthening dole queues across Ireland is to see this uselessness in action, or, more correctly, inaction. As I discovered recently on a visit to my local social welfare office in the Midlands, the lines of the unemployed in Ireland are packed with intelligent young people. Many have college educations. Some lost their jobs in the downturn, but more still have never had a job, they emerged from university into a country without work. All are waiting for their benefits or to apply for jobs that simply do not exist.

Official unemployment in Ireland has been hovering around 15 per cent for a couple of years now. Without emigration it would doubtless be higher – especially among young people.

It is a dereliction of duty among Ireland’s political classes to rely on London, Sydney and Toronto to solve the nation’s unemployment problem – just as it was for Michael Noonan, earlier this year, to describe the decision to leave the country as ‘a lifestyle’.

The European Union has, for once, been relatively quick to appreciate the scale of the unfolding crisis. The Commission, under the “Youth Opportunities Initiative”, is proposing to redirect €30 billion of uncommitted European Social Fund money to help develop the employability of young people across the region.

Following a European Council meeting in January, EU President Barroso wrote to the eight member states with youth unemployment levels significantly above the EU average: Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Lithuania, Italy, Portugal, Latvia and Ireland. In his letter President Barroso wrote that, ‘We need to make a special effort to boost growth and tackle the problem of youth unemployment.’ Barroso went on to say that Ireland should set up an action team to come up with a strategy for getting young people back to work.

Speaking in the Dail during a visit from Commission officials in February, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, as expected, praised the President’s initiative but stopped short of committing funds to new youth unemployment strategies. ‘We will, in the first instance, be looking at whether employment programmes might be re-focused to better effect,’ Kenny told the house.

In truth, it should not take a letter from the European President for Irish politicians to realise the breath of the problem. Last year, the National Youth Council of Ireland published a report entitled ‘Youth Unemployment in Ireland: A Forgotten Generation’. Its findings make for grim reading: 90 per cent of respondents said that being unemployed had negatively effected their sense of well-being; more than half said the quality of jobs information provided at social welfare offices was ‘unsatisfactory’ or ‘poor’; and seven in ten said they were likely to emigrate in the following twelve months.

When it comes to youth unemployment, identifying the problem is likely to prove much easier than solving it. This is, in part, an effect of what the Harvard economist Richard Freeman calls ‘the Great Doubling’: in the two decades after 1989 the world’s labour force grew from 1.5 billion to 3 billion people. As the amount of labour doubled, its value was reduced, and continues to be reduced. In the US real wages have not grown since the late 1970s, while in the UK (if not Ireland) wages have been stagnated for a number of years too.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) puts youth unemployment at 74.6 million people across the world. Before our eyes we are witnessing the emergence of what Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason calls ‘a new sociological type: the graduate with no future’.

Next month the ILO will host hundreds of young people for a forum in Geneva on youth unemployment. Answers to the problem won’t come easy. The historic level of debt in the global economy is not simply going to disappear – but there may be creative solutions that small countries such as Ireland could experiment with, including the introduction of shorter working weeks and increased job sharing.

Last month I gave a presentation on the subject of unemployment to a group of students at NUIM Maynooth. After spending an hour comparing and contrasting the situation facing young people in Europe and Africa, I asked the audience how confident they themselves felt about getting a job. Most were silent, but those that did speak said they expected never to use the degrees they would graduate in. If this does come to pass, we could be looking at the largest ‘lost generation’ in living memory.

This article originally appeared in the Irish Post, April 2012.

 
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Book Review: David Harvey – Rebel Cities

Posted on April 23, 2012 by admin

Last January 25, over 50,000 people occupied in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, in protest at the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Less than a week later, the number of protestors in the square and surrounding streets had swelled to more than one million. On February 11, Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt.

On May 15, thousands took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona to campaign against corruption, bank bailouts and a proposed law restricting internet access. As in Cairo, the demonstrators were mainly young, well-educated and under-employed. Within two days ‘indignados’ had appropriated over 30 public spaces cities and towns across Spain, in a wave of occupations that was to inspire similar movements everywhere from Wall Street and Oakland to Dame Street and Lagos.

‘There is something political in the city air struggling to be expressed’, David Harvey notes midway through this thoughtful, prescient collection of his recent essays and articles. Harvey, a British Marxist geographer based at the City University of New York, has spent a lifetime interrogating the nexus between capitalism and urbanism.

Rebel Cities sees Harvey bring the full force of his analytical mind to bear on the question of just what this inchoate ‘something’ might be, and why it is emerging most prominently in cities.

The slight collection is framed by Harvey’s twin interests in the urban: cities are pivotal sites for capital accumulation and investment, but yet are also, and increasingly so, the location of social and political struggles. This loose division of intellectual labour – between capital accumulation and class struggle – frames the book’s two halves. In the opening chapters (leaning heavily on his theoretical lodestars Karl Marx and French social theorist Henri Lefebrve) Harvey outlines why cities are so important for capitalism. The latter sections are devoted to identifying why cities often make the ideal incubators for ferment and, ultimately, rebellion against the status quo.

Harvey is a committed Marxist who was never seduced by New Labour and Anthony Giddens’ Third Way. From his 1973 work Social Justice and the City to 2010’s The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism, Harvey has consistently exhibited a flexibility and innovation of thought conspicuous by its absence among many of his contemporaries, inside and outside the academy.

Indeed he is one of the few writers on economics to emerge with his reputation enhanced by the global meltdown. Commenting on the proliferation of mortgage debt in the United States in his 2003 work The New Imperialism, Harvey wrote, ‘what happens if and when this property bubble bursts is a matter for serious concern’.

In Rebel Cities, Harvey’s central tenet is that cities are integral to capitalism: it is only by construction and ‘creative destruction’ in urban centres that surpluses can be profitably deployed. Urbanisation solves – or at least appears to solve – the problem of over-accumulation. Constructing, say, airports or apartment blocks delays a crisis of over-accumulation by putting immediate surpluses to use and shifting returns into the future, in the form of expected profits.

It doesn’t take a distinguished scholar to appreciate the dangers of this ploy. As more and more ‘fictitious capital’ is submerged into speculative activity, the threat of an even greater crisis of over-accumulation grows: ‘Speculatively, the asset markets constituted by housing and land have a Ponzi character without a Bernie Madoff at the top.’

When the emperor is revealed to be naked all along – as in Ireland after the 2008 credit crunch – house values plummet amid rampant over-supply and crisis ensues.

The deepest economic crisis for 80 years has created the material conditions for urban tumult on a scale unparalleled in living memory. Meanwhile, the organized left, from trade unions to political parties, has struggled to articulate a creative route out of this impasse for the growing legion of jobless graduates and the unemployed.

One reason for this, as Harvey recognizes, is that an insecure, low paid workforce that is disorganized and predominantly urban has largely usurped the traditional industrial ‘proletariat’. Think of the twenty-somethings with their laptops camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York. This new ‘precariat’ have little time for hierarchical politics, but are forming new alliances around issues as diverse as working conditions and the environment.

Written in terse, economical prose, Rebel Cities is a readable (and timely) introduction to the work of one of the world’s most influential social thinkers. While the chapters on urbanization and monopoly rent had this reviewer reaching for his dusty copies of Marx’s Capital, anyone who has ever wondered why cities look increasingly similar will find the discussions on the role of cultural producers in, often unwittingly, aiding the homogenization of urban space engrossing.

Harvey acknowledges that ‘what we academics so often forget is the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us.’ It is an omission that Rebel Cities goes a long way to addressing.

This book review originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

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Between the Lines

Posted on April 23, 2012 by admin

In 1971, a parliamentary Working Group criticised the speed with which walls, gates and fences were being put up to separate Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. The ‘peace lines’, constructed mainly by the British army, were creating an ‘atmosphere of abnormality’, the Peace Walls Working Group warned. But they did ‘not expect any insurmountable difficulty in bringing together well-meaning people from both sides’, and believed that before long, the barricades would come down; ‘normality’ would return.

Gates in a 'peace line', Lanark Way, West Belfast. © Laurence Cooley 2005

Dismantling the ‘peace lines’ wasn’t a requirement of the Good Friday Agreement. Between 2000 and 2007, seven new barriers were put up and 16 old ones rebuilt or extended. Their history long predates the Troubles, too. In the mid 19th century, the route of the Dublin-Belfast railway was planned deliberately to separate Catholic Pound Loney from Protestant Sandy Row. In 1935, after weeks of sporadic violence in Belfast’s Docklands, with Loyalist snipers firing into nearby Catholic areas, the military built a large fence across Nelson Street.

The corrugated iron fence that bisects Alexandra Park in North Belfast is 120 metres long and 3.5 metres high. Its foundations were laid on 1 September 1994, the day after the army council of the Provisional IRA had announced a ‘complete cessation of military operations’. Seven months ago, a ‘peace gate’ was opened in the fence. Between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., you can walk from the Loyalist Shore Road end of the park to Republican Antrim Road without having to take a half-hour detour. The North Belfast Interface Network, a community group that spent three years canvassing local residents before the gate was opened, reports no incidents of violence in the park since September.

For civic boosters, however, this modest achievement can’t begin to compete with the centenary of the Titanic’s maiden voyage (the ship was built in Belfast). Sixty million pounds of public money was plunged into Eric Kuhne’s shimmering Titanic Belfast ‘experience’, with millions more in PFIs for the Titanic Quarter redevelopment project. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s community sector is reeling from a succession of cuts. The North Belfast Interface Network, which employs five staff in a poky office near Solitude, the home of Cliftonville FC, is struggling to stay afloat. Last year it received £165,000 in funding. For 2012, it has so far secured only £62,000.

This piece originally appeared on the London Review of Books blog.

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Will Titanic Quarter Sink?

Posted on April 15, 2012 by admin

The Titanic Quarter in Belfast was meant to signal the rebirth of the city, but a downturn in the property market has raised fears about its viability, writes Peter Geoghegan.

The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, a century ago today, but in Belfast the ship’s memory is more alive now than it has ever been. On High Street, Titanic tour buses jostle for space. Around the corner, on Little Donegall Street, the newly minted Titanic Bar has replaced a dilapidated snooker hall. Titanic gimcrack, everything from t-shirts to chocolate, abounds in city centre gift shops.

The main attraction for maritime buffs and curious locals alike is Titanic Belfast, a £97 million ‘experience’ built in the shadow of the slipway on which the ship was launched into Belfast Lough on May 31 1911. Constructed by Todd Architects, working to a design by internationally renowned architect Eric Kuhne, the shimmering structure is a startling addition to the Belfast skyline.

The 125ft tall, glistening silver shell of Titanic Belfast consciously references the prows of four ocean-liners, the logo of White Star Line, the company which commissioned the ship, and, most surprisingly, the ice-berg on which the ill-fated vessel ran aground so fatefully.

Inside, original photographs, CGI animation, 3D imagery and a suspension ride through a mock-up of the Harland and Wolff shipyards tell the tale of the Titanic from its construction in then boomtown Belfast to its eventual demise. ‘Titanic Belfast is iconic not just in its design but in the story that it tells,’ Tim Husbands, CEO of Titanic Belfast Limited told the Sunday Business Post.

For decades after 1912, the Titanic was a source of shame for many in the shipyards and across Northern Ireland, seldom talked about and certainly never celebrated. ‘It was only when Dr (Robert) Ballard filmed the wreck in 1985 and then Mr Cameron made his movie (Titanic) that we had the confidence to do something like this,’ said Mr Husbands.

Titanic Belfast is the centre point of Titanic Quarter, a public-private development on a 184-acre site about a mile east of Belfast city centre. Formerly known as Queens Island, it was here that Belfast’s famous shipyards were located – Samson and Goliath, the iconic yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, still tower over the site.

Since 2005, Titanic Quarter Limited has been joint owned by Pat Doherty’s Harcourt Developments and financier Dermot Desmond, with land provided by site owners Belfast Harbour Commissioners. Ambitious plans for the Titanic Quality development have been stalled by the downturn in the Northern Irish housing market, but a number of apartment complexes have been built as well as a Premier Inn hotel, which opened in 2010. Belfast Metropolitan College, with over 17,000 students, and the Northern Ireland Public Records Office are based in Titanic Quarter too.

‘We think Titanic Quarter has the potential to pull people into Belfast to give them a reason to come to Belfast,’ said Michael Graham, Director of Corporate Real Estate, Titanic Quarter Limited.

Speaking from the renovated Edwardian director’s dining room of Harland and Wolff, which has become the headquarters of Titanic Quarter Limited, Graham outlined a dramatic vision for a sprawling site that remains largely brownfield. ‘It’ll take a little while but the overall cost of the project could be anything up to £8-£10 bn,’ he said.

A vast, scale model of the Titanic Quarter, featuring yet to be constructed waterfront hotels, business parks and residential buildings, dominates the ground floor of the company’s headquarters. For Graham, Titanic Quarter is a 100-year plan for the former shipyards, which were themselves built on land reclaimed from Belfast Lough in the 1830s.

Central to this vision of a new city on the banks of Belfast Lough is Eric Kuhne’s plans for a series of radial ‘villages’, comprised of apartment blocks interspersed with green spaces. ‘Ultimately we envisage around 30,000 people living here and around 25,000-30,000 working in the area,’ commented Michael Graham.

However, the Titanic Quarter development has struggled. Although most of the 600 or so apartments already built were sold off the plans, Northern Ireland’s housing market contraction means many properties currently lie empty. A string of retail premises on the site are completely empty, save for a single coffee shop.

The hope now is that Titanic Belfast will give the area a new impetus. Tim Husbands, CEO of Titanic Belfast, estimates that 600 jobs were created during the construction of the building and that the centre will provide 250 permanent jobs.

It is proving a popular attraction: Titanic Belfast has been sold out since it opened, with Mr Husbands estimating that 20,000 people visited in the first week alone. ‘Demand has been huge, we have had people coming from all over the world,’ he said.

Mr Husbands anticipates Titanic Belfast receiving 450,000 visitors this year. But doubts remain about the long-term viability of a centre with such a specific purpose and, at £13.50 for an adult, a high entry price.

A report published in December by the Northern Ireland Audit described the long-term future of Titanic Belfast as ‘doubtful’ and expressed concern that the 290,000 visitors needed every year to break even would not materalise. The report, which also drew attention to the exclusive development rights enjoyed by Titanic Quarter Limited in Titanic Quarter, concluded that: ‘Compared to other world class attractions, the Titanic Signature Building will be one of the most expensive relative to the number of visitors it expects to attract.’

Titanic Belfast was built with £60million of public funds. Mark Hackett, co-director of Forum for Alternative Belfast (FAB), is concerned that Titanic Quarter will become a ‘parallel city’, with Belfast’s less affluent residents effectively excluded. ‘More and more we’ve seen the division between rich and poor as the new division in Belfast,’ said Mr Hackett, one of the lead architects behind the newly MAC arts centre in the Cathedral Quarter.

Along with many conservation groups, Mr Hackett questioned the raising of the Titanic Quarter site in the early years of the millennium, which took place before development began. ‘We could have used the old buildings, fixed them, involved new objects to make an incredible post-industrial expo/conference centre/museum. But we didn’t do that,’ he said.

Glenn Patterson, one of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated novelists and an aficionado of Belfast history, is more circumspect about the new development: ‘As a building, Titanic Belfast is a very interesting addition to the cityscape. You can no more be against it than you can be against the weather. You can only take about it.’

Patterson’s latest novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, is set in Belfast in 1831, at a time when the act to create the Victoria Channel was going through parliament. The channel, designed to improve access for ships to Belfast Port, created Queens Island, which was a public park before becoming home to arguably the world’s most famous shipyards.

According to Patterson, the unintended effect of dredging the Victoria Chanel – the creation of the shipbuilding industry – deftly demonstrates that ‘you don’t know what the consequences of something are going to be’. It’s a maxim that could be applied to Titanic Quarter today.

‘We don’t what the effect of all this redevelopment is going to be. The interesting question is “what will the effect of all this be in 100 years time”?’

This article appeared in the Sunday Business Post, April 15.

 

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Olympic Spirit Comes to East London

Posted on March 25, 2012 by admin

‘Is that a rollercoaster, daddy?’ a young boy, his face pressed firm against the plate glass, points in the direction of a towering, twisting hulk of clay-red metal in the middle distance. ‘No son, it says here it’s a piece of art’, his father replies, reading off an inscription on a nearby viewing panel.

Designed by artist Anish Kapoor, the 115 metres high ArcelorMittal Orbit (so-named after the Indian steel magnates who contributed much of the £20million cost) isn’t just any old piece of art – it’s the largest public work ever commissioned in Britain and the centre point of London’s Olympic village. Unfortunately Kapoor’s effort still looks like a grandiose Coney Island Cyclone, albeit one with an Olympic motif and an observation deck that promises an unparalleled eye-full of the East End.

Until the Orbit opens later in the year, however, the best views of the 500-acre Stratford Olympic site are not to be found inside the heavily cordoned off village but from the London 2012 shop in the adjacent Stratford Centre. Housed in a branch of John Lewis — the games’ ‘Official Department Store Provider’ no less — the store is filled with all manner of gimcrack embossed with the famous five rings, but the viewing gallery at the rear is free to visit and the vista is genuinely spectacular.

‘Parts of the Olympic village are ugly but parts of it are beautiful too,’ says Simon Cole, a resident of nearby Hackney and my guide through the Olympic site and its environs. It is late afternoon — the official Olympic tours long finished for the day – by the time we rendezvous inside the vast, cream-coloured Stratford (think Dundrum on steroids). The Stratford was purposely built so that it’s nigh-on impossible to visit the Olympic site without walking through: it’s estimated that 70% of Olympic visitors will pass along the centre’s abrasively air-conditioned halls.

Wayfinding inside is a nightmare – our tour was delayed for fifteen minutes as my guide and I were waiting outside different branches of the same newsagent. Finally we meet, just in time to see the sun setting over the vast Olympic park from the John Lewis viewing gallery.

Framed in the background by Norman Foster’s iconic gherkin, the eye is drawn, almost inevitably, to the shimmering silver Aquatics Centre. Designed by the famed Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, this bold, undulating building was created to mimic ‘the fluid geometry of water in motion’ – it’s here that Irish swimmers such as Grainne Murphy will be hoping to excel this summer.

At the heart of the park is the circular Olympic stadium. Track and field events will take place inside stadium, which will have a capacity of 80,000 during the games. As Cole explains, the stadium has proved controversial – and not just because of the on-going legal battle between Leyton Orient, West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur football clubs over who will inherit it after the games. Dow Chemical is to sponsor the protective wrap that will encircling the 900-metre circumference during the games – the company is claimed to have links with the 1984 Bhopal disaster that killed more than 15,000 people in India.

‘Personally I think it’s a real shame,’ Cole says of Dow’s prospective involvement. Cole, a native of Sunderland who sports a Sex Pistols-inspired Hackney Tours t-shirt, is a keen student of the East End’s radical history – as we stare out across the Olympic site he points out a red-brick complex close to the stadium. This, he explains, is the erstwhile site of the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, where, in 1888, match girls rose up in a famous strike against the severe health complications that arose from working with white phosphorus.

Nowadays the old Bryant and May building is a gated community, an exclusive address home to popstars such as Katy B. Opponents accuse the Olympics’ backers of attempting to perform a similar transformation in Stratford – more than 3,000 flats, which will house Olympians in the summer, have already been sold after the games, at rates far in excess of what most people in traditionally down at heel Stratford can afford.

Stepping out onto Great Eastern Road, the thoroughfare separating the Stratford Centre and the Olympic park, feels disorientating in the same way that walking in LA does. All around are buildings so large and impersonal that the humble pedestrians is reduced to a pin prick, cars whiz by at furious speeds, a flashing LED sign advertises the Stratford Centre’s in-house casino, behind which peek out a pair of old-style high-rise flats. People are thin on the ground, save the ubiquitous security guards around the village and a few day trippers with tickets for an evening swimming meet in the Aquatics Centre.

English psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, a trenchant critic of the Olympics project, has called the games an excuse for the ‘privatisation of public space’, that have ruined ‘a wonderful wasteland’ which once existed in the marshes around the River Lea. Proponents – most notably London Mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron – argue that the games will boost the economy and national pride at a time when Britain is experiencing the most prolonged period of austerity in generations.

The reality, as ever, is somewhere in between. The costs of the games have spiralled to over £11 billion, almost £2 billion over budget, and the event’s legacy is uncertain – but there is no denying that, even in its unfinished state, the Olympic park possesses a thrilling, shock-of-the-new quality.

Standing at the View Tube, a series of nattily recommissioned shipping containers on the Greenway cycle path, the whole site opens up before my gaze. Past the National Stadium and Kapoor’s hula-hoop, beyond the Aquatics Centre and the waves of the temporary water polo auditorium, sits the spectacular fan-like velodrome. Nicknamed ‘The Pringle’ – and described by author Andrew O’Hagan as ‘like a cyclist’s helmet made of conker-brown wood’ – the velodrome is a triumph of art and functionality. Nearby a giant LED sculpture of the word RUN sits on the outside wall of the handball arena.

But the largest building of all is not a sporting arena or a grandiloquent lump of metal – it’s the media centre, a gigantic white hangar that will house over 20,000 journalists during the games. ‘You can fit two jumbo jets inside it,’ Cole assures me, with a look of mild disapproval.

Cole describes his own view of the Olympics as ‘typically postmodern’: ‘there will be benefits but there will also be losers,’ he says as we pass by a block of newly built condominiums. A group of youths with swimming club logos emblazoned on their tracksuits walk in the direction of the Aquatics centre. Across the road, an office sits empty, the majority of its windows broken.

The East End is still the poorest part of London but the area is changing fast. Near the Olympic park perimeter fences is the shiny new East London Porsche dealership. A few hundred yards further down the road we pass a ramshackled family-run car repair shop.

‘If it wasn’t for the Olympics, I wouldn’t really come to Stratford’, Cole says as we near the end of our tour. It’s a sentiment many Olympic tourists will probably share, but there’s an undeniable, if distinctly ambiguous, allure to a corner of East London that will come alive in July.

For more information on Hackney Tours visit http://www.hackneytours.com/

This piece originally appeared in the Irish Examiner, 24 March

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Access All Areas – LRB Blog

Posted on March 25, 2012 by admin

In January, Transport for London applied for anti-social behaviour orders to be issued against four unnamed young men. Under the terms of the ASBO, they are prohibited from speaking to one another for ten years, carrying equipment that may be used for exploring after dark or blogging about ‘urban exploration’. Their crime: in the early hours of Easter Monday last year, as ever-tightening security encircled London ahead of the royal wedding, the group entered Russell Square tube station, and walked along the deserted train tracks and closed tunnels to the abandoned station at Aldwych.

The four men are members of the London Consolidation Crew (LCC), the most active (and prominent) urban exploring team in the capital. Between 2008 and 2011, LCC climbed, clamoured or blagged their way into places including Heron Tower, Strata Tower, New Court, Eagle House, Temple Court, 100 Middlesex Street and the Shard.

People have been sneaking into places they are not supposed to since time immemorial, but urban exploration – with its emphasis on fresh sites, photographic evidence and blogging – is a more recent phenomenon. The late Jeff Chapman, better known as Ninjalicious, is widely credited with coining the term. In Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration (2005), he defined urban exploration as ‘“infiltrating” or entering into otherwise restricted or off bounds areas or spaces’, including sewers, drains, towers, churches, quarries, disused tunnels, towers, prisons, military sites, asylums, mines, theatres, factories and train stations.

The rest of this blog is available on the London Review of Books blog….

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Ireland’s tough road back

Posted on March 25, 2012 by admin

It doesn’t feel like a country in the grip of a lost decade, writes Peter Geoghegan, but beyond Dublin’s corporate office blocks and crowded city-centre bars lies another Ireland

Last weekend more than 50,000 people – many of them Scottish rugby fans – packed into the Aviva Stadium in Dublin to watch Ireland triumph over Scotland in the Six Nations. Erected on the site of the homely if rather anachronistic Lansdowne Road ground, the Aviva was built, in part, to show off brash, modern Celtic Tiger Ireland to the world.

Unfortunately, by the time then premier Brian Cowen opened the stadium in May 2010, the economy that bankrolled the Aviva was already on the rocks.

Today, the shining corporate offices of Google and Facebook in Dublin’s Docklands and the busy, bright young things in the Irish Financial Services Centre belie the reality that Ireland has yet to “the turn the corner”, to borrow a recurrent phrase of politicians in the lead-up to the banking crash that led the country to the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

“The 2008 banking crisis was not caused by an outbreak of moral failure or individual weakness,” Irish historian Conor McCabe writes in the concluding chapter of his book Sins of the Father. It was structural and political forces – not “pockets of immorality” – that led to a bust of global proportions.

Subtitled Tracing the decisions that shaped the Irish economy, McCabe’s is a compelling account of the economic failings that dogged Ireland since independence, from the fateful decision to peg the punt to sterling for more than 50 years (a parable worth revisiting for some Scottish Nationalists) to the state-sponsored boom in construction and financial services that underpinned the Celtic Tiger’s ruinous second decade.

As McCabe avers, the response of Ireland’s political classes to the banking crisis has proved as disastrous as the policies that created it. On 30 September, 2008, the Irish government elected to guarantee almost all the liabilities of the state’s six financial institutions. The effect of this decision – which led indirectly to the €85 billion IMF/EU bail-out in November 2010 – are still being felt across just about every sector of Irish life today.

The scale of Ireland’s recession is worth reiterating. In 2009, GNP contracted by 11.9 per cent. In the same year, Gross Domestic Product shrank by over 7 per cent. That year, unemployment climbed above 10 per cent for the first time since 1997.

The vital signs from Ireland’s economy are more positive than they were when the European troika rolled into Dublin 18 months ago to agree the bail-out. Indeed, walking around the capital, Ireland doesn’t feel much like a country in the grip of a lost decade. The on-going boom in IT, particularly in the corporate sector, has ensured that an affluent, young middle class remains. Exports have grown steadily in recent years (although a new report issued by Ulster Bank warns exports will weaken in 2012 and GDP will increase by a paltry 0.4 per cent).

But beyond the corporate office blocks and the crowded city-centre bars lies another Ireland, one that profited little from the boom years and now finds it’s bearing the brunt of the Irish age of austerity.

A cursory glance at Irish unemployment figures bears this out. From the halycon days of the Celtic Tiger and full employment, official statistics have joblessness running at over 13 per cent for more than two years. Among young people and recent graduates, the numbers are even worse: for those under 25, unemployment stands at well over 25 per cent.

Headline unemployment rates mask the return of another facet of Irish life supposedly banished by the Celtic Tiger: emigration. The Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin estimates that more than 1,000 people are leaving Ireland every week. A report released last year by the National Youth Council of Ireland suggested 70 per cent of young unemployed Irish people believed they would emigrate.

Even the signs of economic life in Ireland are not as positive as they appear at first viewing. The bulk of the growth in Irish exports is attributable to the presence of significant numbers of multinationals who use few if any Irish raw materials.

Attracting large foreign firms to Ireland with a generous tax regime and grants has been, and remains, a mainstay of Irish economic policy. However, the value added by these multinationals to Ireland’s indigenous economy is less clear-cut.

According to McCabe, in 2008, multinationals accounted for a whopping 88 per cent of all Ireland’s merchandise export sales. Yet these same companies provided just 7 per cent of total employment. Despite total sales of almost €110bn, they paid about €2.8bn in corporation tax.

Meanwhile, the detritus of Ireland’s laissez-faire housing policy, encouraged by massive tax breaks from central government during the boom years, is littered across the country’s fabled green fields. The problem is particularly extreme in rural areas in the Midlands: the total number of houses in sparsely populated counties Longford, Cavan, Roscommon and Leitrim increased by 50 per cent between 2002 and 2009. Many of these properties now lie vacant on unfinished estates. According to the 2011 census, 294,000 properties in the state – some 15 per cent of total housing stock – are habitable but vacant.

After three and a half years of austerity budgets, which have cost thousands of jobs, there are signs that the Irish population is growing restive. The €100 “household charge”, introduced in last December’s budget as an interim property tax, has proved unpopular, with very low rates of compliance. A more extensive property tax, due to be introduced in the coming months, could prove even more divisive.

All this is bad news for EU mandarins. Ireland is due to vote in a referendum in May or June on the European Fiscal Compact, designed to stabilise the eurozone by enforcing strict budgetary controls on EU nations. The latest opinon polls, published in the Sunday Business Post, suggest 44 per cent would vote in favour, but 29 per cent remain undecided and support for Sinn Fein, who oppose the treaty, has grown substantially.

Recent opinion polls put the republicans on 25 per cent, behind only Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael. Although coalition partners Fine Gael and Labour still enjoy strong backing – and Mr Kenny is personally very popular – support for opponents of austerity is growing.

Leinster House, where the parliament sits, will hope the EU treaty vote will offer an opportunity to renegotiate with the bail-out lenders. The EU-IMF loan was made at a punitive 5.8 per cent, an interest rate that is crippling growth in the economy. Currently, the Irish government is attempting to reschedule about €31bn of promissory notes for its failed banks.

“What we are looking for is a deal to pay them back over a longer period, possibly at a lesser rate of interest,” deputy finance minister Brian Hayes said yesterday. “I would ask people in fairness to be patient with us on this issue.”

Beyond the corridors of power, the new economic reality has produced some creative responses. Comedian Abie Philbin Bowman – who, fittingly, will be appearing at the Glasgow Comedy Festival this Saturday, St Patrick’s Day – is returning to a tried-and-tested financial model: barter.

“I’m planning a tour of Ireland this summer that runs entirely on barter,” Bowman says. “All my shows are free to the public, and afterwards people are asked to make a donation. If they can’t afford to give money, they can offer me a hot meal or somewhere to stay. In the past, one person offered me juggling lessons, another taught me how to fly-fish. It’s a very different experience and a really interesting way of seeing the country.”

The Aviva isn’t down as a date on the tour, yet.

This article originally appeared in the Scotsman, March 15

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