Europe confronts an increasingly transnational far-right threat

Europe confronts an increasingly transnational far-right threat

Post By World extremism, Far right, France, Germany, Ireland, twitter

Movements that could once be tackled one government at a time are more and more able to connect with each other across borders – and Elon Musk’s Twitter has given them a gift.

Since the outbreak of the current war in Israel and Palestine, numerous European governments have warned of an uptick in two violent threats: Islamist extremism and antisemitism. Authorities in Germany, for instance, say that the threat of a jihadist attack is “higher than it has been for a long time”.

But in terms of what’s playing out on European streets and online, the threat of an organised, sometimes violent and increasingly transnational far right is becoming impossible to ignore.

Britain last month saw far-right counterprotesters attempt to disrupt a peaceful pro-Palestinian march in central London. Recent protests in Spain against an amnesty extended to Catalonian independence leaders attracted far-right elements.

And in France, the recent stabbing of a young boy in a southeastern village sparked days of protest, many of which featured out-and-out far right groups, including some from the notoriously extreme “Identitarian” movement.

The presence of extremists at the marches has been alarming enough that French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin is seeking to ban three specific far-right groups, some of whose members are on a government extremism watchlist.

Announcing the crackdown, he cited the example of Ireland, where a mob recently ran riot in the centre of Dublin after several children were stabbed outside a school in broad daylight. Warning that “there is a mobilisation on the ultra-right that wants to tip us into civil war,” he praised the authorities for helping avoid “an Irish-style scenario”.

That scenario extends beyond the violence in Dublin itself and includes a wider, long-brewing movement with international reach.

While some commentators attributed the violence in Ireland to anger among working-class people suffering in a housing crisis while immigrants and asylum seekers are provided with accommodation and welfare benefits, others dismissed that argument as an excuse for something far more sinister.

Close observers of the Irish far right insist that the roots of the violence run deep, warning that openly racist and fascist groups are galvanising their supporters using increasingly violent rhetoric directed squarely at asylum seekers and immigrants of all kinds, especially those who are not white.

The incident followed a pattern that has played out in many European countries, as ostensibly grassroots far-right movements latch onto assorted issues – transgender rights, immigration, the place of Muslims in society, or Covid control measures and vaccination – and put pressure on democratic political systems with increasingly angry rhetoric and organised, sometimes violent protests.

While they often rail against their national governments’ policies, these movements have an increasingly transnational character. And across Europe and beyond, these factions now have a newly hospitable environment in which to communicate: the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Planet Musk

Since he took over the platform last year, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has become increasingly erratic and politically extreme, routinely engaging positively with racist and antisemitic users. According to Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, the renaissance of Twitter/X as a haven for the far right is a major development.

“Every form of far-right extremist is using the platform now in ways that they only could before on unregulated sites like Telegram,” she told Euronews.

“Musk has allowed prominent neo-Nazis and other white supremacists back on the platform, including very extreme people like Andrew Anglin of Daily Stormer, and they are pushing their ideas out there. The site is also monetising extremist material.

“This is true internationally as well. Our recent report on Generation Identity accounts on Twitter, which were pulled and then reinstated, shows the transnational reach of the problem.

“Twitter is an essential part of the far-right online ecosystem now, for raising money, recruiting and propagandising. It may well be the largest hate site on the internet at this point.”

The events on the streets of Dublin, which saw a tram and a bus attacked and many businesses looted, were heavily amplified online by local influencers with large followings on Twitter/X and international figures in the far-right ecosystem in the US and the UK.

But also getting involved was Musk himself, who engaged with extreme users trying to call attention tweeted that Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar “Hates Irish people” and complained that “The current Irish government clearly cares more about praise from woke media than their own people”.

Into the mainstream

While its value has plummeted and advertisers are leaving, taking crucial revenue with them, the platform’s moderation policies have a huge impact on European countries.

Unlike Telegram or other encrypted messaging apps, Twitter/X’s open nature means images, footage, false and misleading claims and hate speech can far more easily leach into public conversation – including via pickup from populist politicians and parties trying to appeal to receptive audiences.

And while none of Ireland’s very small far-right political parties have any hope of entering government any time soon, other countries have already seen their established ones embrace and fuel the anger on the far right, bringing outlandish and extreme ideas into the centre of electoral politics.

As for the future, Beirich warns that there are frightening scenarios in the offing – and that in many European countries, things are already well advanced down a dark path.

“What was fringe not too long ago has now breached the cordon sanitaire, especially when talking about immigration and Muslims,” she told Euronews. “We’ve just seen this in the Netherlands as well. The biggest tragedy would be if the AfD makes huge gains in the upcoming German elections.

“At this point, there is little to distinguish say [French extremist politician Éric] Zemmour’s politics from the white supremacists in the Identitarian movement and many elements in Marine Le Pen’s party. I would argue the Finns Party, who are in coalition in Helsinki, are extremists that are already in power, meaning they have breached the mainstream. And Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is much the same.

“Unfortunately, the failure to take action against the far right online and off has now left us with extremism in the mainstream.”

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Ireland’s stalled plan to open safe injecting rooms for drug user

Post By World Designer Drugs, Drugs, Dublin, Europeans and drugs, Ireland

The country was reported as having the third-highest overdose death rate in Europe by the European Union’s drug agency in 2020, with 409 deaths that year, 70% of which involved opioids.

With the third-highest overdose death rate in Europe, Ireland is trying to change its approach to drugs.

But the country’s first Medically Supervised Injection Facility (MSIF), which experts say has the potential to save lives, remains unopened over a decade since it was first proposed.

On a blustery November’s day in Dublin, small groups of people linger near the entrance to Merchant’s Quay Ireland (MQI) as they wait for the Riverbank Centre to re-open for its afternoon services.

MQI is one of several homelessness and addiction charities in the inner city area and was selected by Ireland’s Health Service Executive in 2018 to trial an injection facility for 18 months.

With illicit drug use and associated harms rising across the country in recent years, the injection facility could be a revolutionary approach to problematic drug use in once-conservative Ireland.

The country was reported as having the third-highest overdose death rate in Europe by the European Union’s drug agency in 2020, with 409 deaths that year, 70% of which involved opioids. Yet, despite the numbers creeping up over a decade since the project was first proposed, the MSIF has still not been developed.

What happens in a safe injection room?

Inside a Medically Supervised Injection Facility, users can take illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroine under the supervision of medical staff.

It gives them access to clean needles and other supplies, with medical staff on hand, and also acts as a gateway for getting help to fight the addiction.

“You can’t help people recover if they’re not alive,” says Dr Jo-Hanna Ivers, a professor academic working on addiction issues at Dublin’s Trinity College.

Proponents of the MSIF argue that an injecting facility is there for the most vulnerable intravenous users who will use drugs whether they have a safe space to do so or not.

The MSIF, they say, will not only reduce deaths and other drug-related harm but will help to build critical relationships between MQI’s medically trained staff and users to support them in seeking treatment.

“You have to start with harm reduction,” says Dr Ivers.

On the margins of society

Newly appointed as the head of MQI after over thirty years working in the Irish prison service, Eddie Mullins says that seeing through the implementation of the MSIF is his “number one priority”.

“Unless there’s a major blockage from somewhere along the line, there’s no reason we will not open for the 1st of September 2024,” says Mullins. “That’s our objective, and I remain committed to that because I think we can do it,” he tells Euronews.

Mullins insists the government and health authorities are “very supportive” of the initiative.

“I have to give credit where credit is due. My experience over the last eight weeks has been nothing but positive,” Mullins says after meeting with Ireland Minister for National Drugs Strategy, Hildegarde Naughton, who offered her full support to his project.

“We used to say ‘there are no votes in prison’ and there are also very few votes among chronic drug users,” he says.

“The general commitment to people on the margins is probably less than in other sections of society. [The MSIF] is one of those initiatives that people are holding their breath on because it is very pioneering in many ways for a country like Ireland.”

In response to a request for comment on the delays, Minister Naughton’s office said that since December 2022, “the HSE and MQI have been developing plans to progress the establishment of the facility” and the establishment of the facility remains “a Ministerial priority”.

Political inertia

The delays to the facility’s opening have caused many to blame a lack of political will, despite parties across the board voicing their support.

“I feel hopeful [that the MSIF will open] but I’m not sure that it will happen in the lifetime of the current government,” says Gary Gannon, Social Democrats TD for Dublin Central, adding that he believes the government may shelf the project and leave it for the next administration to take up.

A general election is expected in the next 18 months.

Continued stigma

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, a Labour TD and former minister of the National Drugs Strategy who pushed through the 2015 bill for a safe injection facility, points out that stigma remains a significant obstacle to the MSIF, or any broader change to drug policy.

“I, as a politician, will get much further in my political career if I say things like ‘tough on drugs, zero tolerance, more guards [police]’,” says Ó Ríordáin. “That’s music to the ears of your average voter.”

Stigma against drug users is still widespread in Irish society, says Ó Ríordáin, leading to policies that continue to dehumanise those with an addiction.

“It’s been extremely disappointing for me that almost eight years after the government decided to legislate for it, it’s still not open,” he says. “And, as a result, we’ve lost lives.”

Local opposition

There’s ongoing opposition to the drugs safe injection facility from local businesses, residents and the local primary school which previously blocked its construction.

For MQI, Mullins says that addressing the concerns of locals remains the main obstacle. “Our [community] stakeholders and neighbours will never love the facility, but we will be able to co-exist and minimise the impact,” he says.

Locals are open about their fears of an injection facility on their doorstep. While business representatives declined to comment on the proposed September opening, locals did not hesitate to voice their opposition.

A manager at the Brazen Head, a pub particularly popular with tourists, said illicit drug use in the area is a major problem, with people using the pub’s entranceway to consume.

“I don’t have a clue how to fix [the drugs crisis] but it’s definitely not a good idea to open an injection facility right beside a school and in the middle of the tourist area,” he told Euronews.

The continued opposition is something politician Gary Gannon believes should not stand in the way of the MSIF’s opening.

“Hearing community voices is important but there’s also medical best practice that needs to be taken into consideration,” he says.

“People have had any number of years to learn. Now we need to get on with it.”

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Why Ireland’s leaders are willing to be tougher on Israel than most

Post By World Ireland, Irish politics, Israel, Leo Varadkar, Palestine, Sinn Fein

A long anti-colonial history and specific recent incidents mean Irish-Israeli relations are noticeably strained by European standards.

Like other European countries, Ireland is watching in horror as thousands of people are killed in Gaza, knowing that among them are likely to be some of its own citizens.

One particularly shocking case stands out: that of Emily Hand, an eight-year-old girl who was thought to have been killed by Hamas terrorists at a kibbutz during the massacre on 7 October.

Her father was initially informed of her likely death, but DNA tests have indicated her body was not among the remains recovered from the kibbutz.

She is now thought to be alive and held hostage in Gaza, providing the Irish government with an imperative to secure her release – if at all possible – requiring intense diplomatic work as fighting rages in Gaza.

But at home in Ireland, Hand’s case is part of a complicated political reality. While many European governments have hesitated to condemn Israel’s bombardment of Gaza – if they have criticised it at all – many Irish leaders have taken a noticeably tougher tone.

The Irish Taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar, has repeatedly condemned the Hamas massacre of 1,400 people in Israel, but has also said that Israel’s response in Gaza resembles “something more approaching revenge“.

At an international aid conference for Gaza hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Thursday, Varadkar said that failure to observe humanitarian law “can’t be inconsequential”.

Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins, meanwhile, has accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of nothing less than undermining international human rights norms.

“To announce in advance that you will break international law and to do so on an innocent population, it reduces all the code that was there from Second World War on protection of civilians and it reduces it to tatters,” Higgins said in mid-October as the air campaign in Gaza began to claim increasingly more civilian lives.

His remarks were criticised by the Israeli ambassador in Dublin, Dana Erlich, who accused him of being misinformed and suggested that Israel’s overall impression of Ireland was one of unconscious anti-Israeli bias.

Another Israeli diplomat in Dublin posted their criticism on X: “Ireland wondering who funded those tunnels of terror? A short investigation direction – 1. Find a mirror 2. Direct it to yourself 3. Voilà.” The post has since been clarified and disowned.

Higgins has also been critical of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, whom he said was “reckless” in her initial pro-Israeli response to the outbreak of war.

He continues to call for a humanitarian ceasefire, and for international independent verification of the death toll in Gaza – a number currently reported only by the Hamas-run health ministry.

So while many Western European governments remain in near-lockstep, why are Ireland’s leaders noticeably more ambivalent in their public statements about Israel’s actions?

Long memories

For one thing, the two countries have not had the warmest relationship over the last two decades. In 2010, it was revealed that agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had used counterfeited passports to travel undercover to Dubai, where they assassinated a Hamas leader.

Among their forged travel documents were Irish passports, including some using stolen genuine passport numbers.

The episode put a chill on Irish-Israeli relations, one that marks the relationship to this day. At the time, Irish ministers warned that Mossad’s actions may have put Irish travellers at risk. But six years after the incident, the then-Israeli ambassador to Ireland declined to guarantee that the same thing would not happen again.

On both sides of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, many Irish nationalists have identified with the Palestinian cause for decades, seeing in it a parallel with their own resistance to military violence from the British state.

This resonance is still felt today. Sinn Fein, the largest and oldest party that advocates for Irish reunification, is widely expected to lead the next government in Dublin, and its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has made her views on Israel abundantly clear.

In 2021, during a major outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence, she told parliament that Israel needed to be condemned as a “racist, apartheid regime”, and grounded her call for Palestinian statehood in the grand narrative of Irish history.

But as independent Irish Senator Tom Clonan, himself a former military officer, told Euronews, while Ireland’s experience of colonisation makes it something of an outlier in Western Europe, most of its politicians or population do not take a negative view of Israel’s existence.

“Irish people support Israel and believe in the legitimacy of the state of Israel,” he said.

“We have strong links in terms of trade, and there’s a large diaspora of Irish Israelis. Chaim Herzog, the president of Israel for most of the 1980s, was an Irish-Israeli who grew up in Dublin! What we’re critical of are the actions of the Netanyahu government.

“Hamas committed truly genocidal attacks on October 7th, breaking all the laws around armed conflict, which it continues to do in Gaza. But at the same time, the Israeli military has failed to provide safe passage to the elderly, the sick, pregnant women and so on, as they are required to under the Geneva Conventions. Forcibly expelling civilians from their homes, firing on hospitals and schools and civilian areas – all of that and more is prohibited.

“That’s what Varadkar was referring to: proportionality of response, which is an objective standard in the law of conflict. In fairness to the British, for instance, when the IRA was setting off bombs in the UK and murdering innocent civilians, including children, the UK government didn’t order air strikes on republican neighbourhoods in Belfast!”

Actions beyond the pale

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has condemned Hamas’ attack, but is also criticising Israel for “ignoring” calls for a ceasefire. And like party leaders to the left of Sinn Fein, she is also calling for the Israeli ambassador in Dublin to be expelled because of Israel’s actions since 7 October.

Varadkar has rejected that call, pointing out that not even the Russian ambassador has been expelled and warning that to eject Erlich would “disempower” Dublin as it tries to get 40-odd Irish citizens out of Gaza.

Varadkar’s partners in the coalition, centre-right party Fianna Fáil, meanwhile hosted Erlich at their annual party conference last weekend. Her appearance was met with outrage on the left, but party leader and current foreign secretary Micheál Martin defended the government’s decision not to expel her, pointing out that to do so would likely result in Ireland’s own ambassador being expelled from Israel just as they try to save Emily Hand and the other Irish citizens trapped in the crossfire.

All the while, Ireland’s voice in Europe remains a distinctive one. Clonan suggests that since Ireland has itself been through a difficult peace process at home, its leaders are perhaps particularly alert to double standards when it comes to the protection of civilians in conflict.

“I was very dismayed when Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Tel Aviv and gave absolutely unqualified support for Israel,” he says. “It must be remembered that when Russia targeted the electricity network in Ukraine, she said that hitting civilian targets there was a war crime.

“I would encourage her to reflect on that, and look at Israel’s actions through that prism as well.”

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Why there are hundreds of baby remains inside a septic tank in Ireland

Post By World child trafficking, Ireland, Protests in Ireland

Ten years after a dark discovery was made in the west of Ireland, Euronews takes a look at the grim legacy of the maternity homes that were still in operation until the end of the 20th century.

Many parents might tell you that having a child is one of life’s most fulfilling experiences. But for the thousands of single women who found themselves pregnant in 20th-century Ireland, the experience was deeply stigmatised and often shortlived.

Between 1922 and 1998, an estimated 90,000 unmarried, pregnant women were incarcerated in institutions called Mother and Baby Homes. Upon birth, the babies were handed over to the care of governing religious orders.

In 2012, Catherine Corless, a local historian from Tuam, County Galway, reported that she found death certificates for 796 babies and toddlers born in St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home between 1926-1961. However, the burial records were missing.

Her research gained international media attention and sparked fears that these children were buried in a defunct sewerage system on the grounds of the Bon Secours Home.

Soon after, the Irish government launched an inquiry and an independent Commission (MBHC) into the Mother and Baby Homes.

Almost a decade later, Ireland’s Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman, has finally appointed a former Red Cross envoy to oversee the exhumation of remains buried on the site.

So why were unmarried mothers ostracised in 20th-century Ireland and why has it taken so long for the site to be exhumed?

How did the Mother and Baby Homes come about?

“The Mother and Baby Home system and the migrant asylums which are connected to it were all actually inherited from the 19th Century” Lindsey Earner-Byrne, a Professor in Irish Gender History at University College Cork, told Euronews.

Ireland gained its independence from Britain in 1922 and the Catholic Church gained partial or in most cases, complete control of these institutions.

According to James Smith, a Professor of English and Irish studies at Boston College, in Massachusetts, the Catholic Church and the Irish Free State were the self-appointed guardians of the nation’s moral climate.

At the time 94 per cent of the population was practising Catholics, therefore, the clergy’s teachings on sexual immorality, and how women should behave in the eyes of the Church, were hugely influential.

There were huge ramifications for women who got pregnant outside of the wedding vow, even those who had pregnancies as a result of rape or incest. An unmarried pregnant daughter was thought to bring shame to an entire family, many left home or were sent away by their own parents.

While the Catholic Church maintained that these facilities provided a place of refuge for unmarried mothers, according to Earner-Byrne, these institutions admitted women “for a myriad of reasons”. Ultimately this system of female incarceration was “dedicated to controlling female behaviour in lots of ways, not just in relation to motherhood, but all sorts of women,” she said.

Most women were detained in the Mother and Baby Homes for six months to two years however in rare cases, detainees remained for extended periods. The MBHC found that a woman admitted to Bessbourgh House in Cork died in 1974 aged 81 while another woman died in the same facility in 1984, aged 80.

Those incarcerated were subjected to unpaid labour in the form of cleaning, laundry washing, clothes and jewellery making.

Did the Mother and Baby Home system make money?

Once adoption was made legal in Ireland in 1953 almost all children born in the Homes were put up for adoption. Others were transferred to industrial schools, some were later moved to Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.

The sisterhoods profited from the adoptions but they were also endorsed by the state and local councils as Earner-Byrne explains: “The local authority would pay a capitation for the religious orders to ‘take care of her’ (a referred or self-referred women). So, there was a transfer of funds, if you like, from the state to the church through a capitation system and the same sort of system applied for the industrial schools where the children were held”.

Some Homes even demanded ransoms of £100 [approximately €4000 in 2023], from wealthier family members who pleaded for their daughters to be released back into their care after giving birth.

The laundry, clothes-making and jewellery-making services provided by the inmates made the Home and Baby Home scheme a lucrative business: “There were lots of ways in which it was a huge untapped labour force that had no rights and was not paid for the labour. So it’s very, very hard to actually quantify the degree to which there was a financial benefit, but there was a huge financial benefit,” Earner-Byrne said.

The MBHC also found that children at the institutions were used as participants in unethical vaccine trials.

Why were children experimented on?

Some 43,000 children were involved in vaccine trials in Ireland during the last century. Glaxo Laboratories and the Wellcome Foundation, two companies that became part of the tenth largest pharmaceutical company in the world, GlaxoSmithKline, were involved in these trials between 1934 and 1973. The Commission confirmed that at least 1,135 participants came from Church-run institutions and more than 223 of these were from Mother and Baby Homes.

According to the MBHC, neither the mothers nor their children consented to the trials, in addition, many of the tests did not comply with regulatory standards and the necessary licenses were not in place.

“The independent researchers, as the individuals conducting the trials, were personally responsible for ensuring they were carried out with the licenses, permissions and consents required under Irish law and practice at the time,” a GSK spokesperson told Euronews.

Following the publication of the final Commission report, Minister O’Gorman promised that compensation would be provided to survivors and called on the Catholic Church and GSK to contribute but so far neither the Church nor the pharmaceutical company have contributed to the scheme.

However, an Irish investigative platform, Noteworthy, discovered that several governing religious organisations made payments totalling 27 million euro to the State from 2016–2022.

“While the findings of the Commission’s report are extremely upsetting, they do not question Wellcome or Glaxo’s responsibilities and duties in developing, manufacturing and supplying vaccines for the purposes described. For this reason, we do not propose further reparations in response to the issues raised,” the GSK spokesperson said.

Why has it taken so long for the Tuam site to be exhumed?

The MBHC was established on 17 February 2015. As part of the investigation, a number of excavations took place at the Tuam site between 2016 and 2017. The Commission discovered a large quantity of buried baby remains inside 20 chambers of a disused waste tank, carbon dating determined the bodies were buried while the Home was still in operation.

The former Taoiseach of Ireland, Enda Kenny, described the site as a “chamber of horrors”.

The Commission decided it would focus on 18 institutions around the country, however, several support groups called for all burial sites connected to former State and Church-run institutions to be examined.

In 2018, the Irish government announced it would facilitate a full excavation and exhumation of the site. After five interim reports, the Commission finally published its full report in 2021.

The report made international news and Catholic Church faced fresh accusations of child neglect.

Some members of the government praised the findings of the six-year investigation for shedding more light on gender discrimination and a deeply misogynistic culture in Ireland. But many campaigners and survivors slammed the final report claiming it did not reflect the true experiences of many survivors and rejected a number of accounts in the final report.

The Irish High Court also found the Commission proceeded illegally in denying the survivors the same opportunity given to religious and State institutions to comment on the Commission’s draft findings and subsequently breached the 2004 Commission of Investigation Act. Survivors also said the report lacked detail on forced incarceration, forced labour and forced adoptions.

In February 2023, the Minister of Children published a five-point update stating the draft legislation to excavate the site was now “fully-operational” but it lacked clear deadlines which was met with criticism by some survivors and families.

After a director was appointed to oversee the excavation at Tuam in May, Catherine Corless said, she was optimistic that the director, Daniel Mac Sweeney, would do a thorough job and bring closure. However, survivor representatives and family members have said they doubt any progress would be made this year.

The Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth which will oversee the operation, said the director’s first priority is to meet with relatives and survivors of the Tuam home.

Are there other mass graves?

There are several other burial sites around the country connected to former homes while the government and commission have called for the church to come forward with burial records they have struggled to gain access. The Church has stated that many records have been lost or never existed.

Legislation enabling someone in Ireland to register a stillbirth wasn’t enacted until 1996, but it still wasn’t mandatory.

“There were also challenges when it came to registering births in certain geographical areas so until the 50s and 60s there was a poor registration of births… It was very difficult to know what they (the church) were doing and the fact that there was that grey area in the registration of births that result in death very shortly afterwards meant it was possible not to record them,” Earner-Byrne said.

More than 900 children died in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork however the Commission was only able to establish the burial places of 64 children. For now, there are no plans to conduct excavations of the ground of Bessbourgh House, a decision which was met with outrage by survivors of the institution and campaigners.

However, the Planning and Development Act 2000 currently enables local authorities to protect potential burial sites from possible harmful development. In January 2023, Cork City Council refused planning to developers looking to build a €40 million apartment complex on the grounds of Bessborough House.

Redress for survivors

Following the report’s publication, the Bon Secours Order issued an apology in January 2021, acknowledging it did not live up to its Christianity at the Tuam home.

According to the Minister of Children in 2021, there were as many as 58,000 survivors, mothers and their children included still alive today. However, many of the survivors are in the later years of their lives and this figure is dwindling.

As part of redress efforts, survivors will receive financial payment and an enhanced medical card, however, former residents must first prove they spent six months or more in an institution, meaning 24,000 could be excluded from the scheme if the terms are not revised.

There are several organisations that provide support to survivors and their families. Katie Doyle is a Magdalene Laundry and industrial school survivor who serves as a survivor liaison at the London Irish Centre.

“Anyone who has survived any of these institutions, has a deep understanding of the lived experiences of others, no matter what institution they resided in,” she told Euronews.

“We unite, we resonate.”

The London Irish Centre’s survivor service includes a national response line to provide individuals with advice relating to the upcoming payment scheme. It also signposts service users to external agencies and provides a wide range of social and emotional support.

Katie added: “For the people who come to us, as soon as they know that both my colleague Séan and I have survivor backgrounds, they relax, they engage and more importantly, they trust.

“And that’s a huge asset to this service. We need that level of trust to enable impactful service outcomes.”

The Irish Government published the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme bill in October 2022, amendments to the bill were debated by the Seanad, the upper house of Parliament, and were referred back to the lower house (the Dáil) on 28 June 2023, where it is likely to be debated again.

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Paris joins celebration of Irish language’s renaissance as it marks 50 years in EU

Post By World Brexit, culture, European Union, Features, France, Ireland, music, Northern Ireland, Paris

The Irish Cultural Centre in Paris held a ‘Festival of Ideas’ event from June 15 to June 17 to join in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Ireland joining the European Union on January 1, 1973. The final day’s activities consisted of panel discussions and concerts celebrating all things Irish, from the Irish language to traditional music and cuisine.

Located in Paris’s 5th arrondissement (district), the Irish Cultural Centre (ICC) was inaugurated in 2002 on the site of a former Roman Catholic educational establishment for Irish students, with even a small chapel on the site. The names of the different dioceses throughout the island of Ireland can also still be seen when wandering through the open courtyard, which had rows of chairs set up in front of a stage for Sunday’s big events.

The courtyard of the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, France on June 17, 2023. © Mariamne Everett

From June 15 to June 17, the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris held its “inaugural” Festival of Ideas to celebrate Ireland’s relationship with the European Union (EU), “enable our public to engage with contemporary Ireland and to discover current preoccupations such as the renaissance of the Irish language” said Nora Hickey M’Sichili, the centre’s director.

Celebration of the Irish language

The Irish language featured heavily in many of the panel discussions.

The official language of Ireland along with English, the Irish language has undergone a long journey within the EU. When Ireland first joined the EU on January 1, 1973, Irish was listed as a treaty language. However, it eventually gained full official and working status on January 1, 2022, putting it on par with the EU’s 23 other official languages.

“Language is political and to be an Irish speaker is political,” said Irish language activist Aodán Mac Séafraidh, encapsulating the sentiment of many of the panellists discussing the politicisation of the Irish language on Sunday. Each speaker clearly had their own relationship with the Irish language and it “was interesting to hear all these varied ideas about the Irish language outside of an academic setting”, said Sean Ryan, a communications professor at ISCOM. This festival also “reflects this wider need of people to exchange ideas and be open to ones that differ from their own”, said Ryan.

Speaking at the Festival of Ideas event, (from left to right) Professor of Social and Political Philosophy Helder de Schutter, Irish language activist Aodán Mac Séafraidh and mediator William Howard at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, France on June 17, 2023. © Mariamne Everett

Mac Séafraidh is a member of the language and culture project Turas at the charity East Belfast Mission, located in a traditionally Protestant area of Belfast. Turas (which means journey or pilgrimage in both Irish and Scots Gaelic) is “an Irish language project which aims to connect people from Protestant communities to their own history with the Irish language”.

Increase in Irish spoken

For years, said Mac Séafraidh, the Irish language was associated with Irish republicanism, but it can now be used as “a vehicle for reconciliation” between the nationalist and unionist communities in Northern Ireland. Banned several times throughout the island of Ireland’s history, the UK introduced the Identity and Language Act on May 31, 2022, officially recognising the status of the Irish language for the first time in Northern Ireland.

In recent years, the Irish language has become more widely spoken across the island of Ireland. According to the latest census data from the Irish Central Statistics Office, the number of people who said that they could speak Irish increased by 6% between 2016 and 2022 to 1,873,997 (out of a population nearing 6 million). The latest census data from Northern Ireland shows that the number of people who said they could speak Irish rose from 10.65% in 2011 to 12.45% in 2021 (out of a population nearing 2 million), while the number of people who said they spoke it as their main language rose from 4,164 in 2011 to 6,000 in 2021.

The Irish language is not only experiencing “a renaissance” in Ireland, but also in France. In addition to holding events and concerts, the ICC offers Irish language courses from levels A1 to B2. During a concert by Irish singer Jack L on Sunday, William Howard, one of the event’s organisers, said that when he “started teaching Irish at the ICC in September 2021, it was quite easy for people to sign up to take classes. However, there are now waiting lists for all four classes. The students are mostly Irish and French, but we also get a small number from other nationalities”.

Members of An Gaeltacht-sur-Seine enjoy a picnic at lunchtime during the Festival of Ideas event at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, France on June 17, 2023. © Mariamne Everett

At lunchtime, in between bites of sausage and colcannon (mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage), Irish and French visitors alike had the opportunity to chat with members of An Gaeltacht-Sur-Seine, a group that meets once a month to speak Irish. The Festival of Ideas is “a nice occasion to meet new people and Irish people. It makes me proud to see French people wanting to learn about Irish culture”, said member Linda Moloney in French, respecting the group’s rule to only speak in Irish (and in French only when necessary) on Sunday.

Ireland and the EU

“I think it is a great idea to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ireland joining the European Union. Some people at the time were against joining the EU, they were even scared that Irish people would leave Ireland. But we’ve only had benefits from EU membership, from cultural to economic and being less dependent on the UK,” said An Gaeltacht-Sur-Seine member Philomena Begley. This sentiment was echoed in a panel discussion after lunch by Irish journalist and broadcaster Dearbhail McDonald, who said that “joining the EU lessened our dependence on the UK and also had economic and social benefits, especially for women and girls”. For instance, EU legislation led to the abolition of the Marriage Bar act, which had mandated that women resign from their jobs once they had gotten married, in 1973.

McDonald continues: “When we joined the European Union, we were a poor country that received over €40 billion in EU funds between 1973 and 2018.” Times have changed since then. Between 2018 and 2020, Ireland contributed €377 million in average net contributions. Despite being more prosperous now thanks to high-tech industry and global exports, the EU continues to greatly support Ireland. As recently as December 12, 2022, the European Commission approved a €1.2 billion scheme to support Irish companies affected by the war in Ukraine.

Priest Aidan Troy poses with attendees of the Festival of Ideas event at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, France on June 17, 2023. © Mariamne Everett

The repercussions from Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in particular have seen Ireland grapple with its historic policy of neutralit y now that it plays a bigger role in the EU, said McDonald. Soon after establishing itself as an independent republic in 1937, Ireland adopted a policy of neutrality when World War II began as a means of both countering the potential threat from Germany and resisting the historical imperial power of the UK. An Irish Times poll published on Saturday revealed that 61% of voters favoured the state’s current model of military neutrality, while only 26% said they would like to see it change. On the other hand, 55% of voters supported “significantly increasing Ireland’s military capacity” to defend airspace and territorial waters, while a majority of other voters said they were in favour of seeking help from other countries for the country’s defence needs. This poll came as the Irish government prepares to hold a series of public discussions about the future of Ireland’s neutrality and defence policy next week. McDonald finished the panel discussion by pondering Ireland’s future within the EU: “What does Ireland’s future in the EU look like, given that it values its neutrality but also wants to increase defence spending and show support for Ukraine [in its war against Russia]?”

Ireland also celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement this year on April 10. This political deal was signed by the British and Irish governments, and Northern Ireland’s major political parties on April 10, 1998. It is credited with bringing an end to most of the violence associated with The Troubles, a sectarian conflict that began in the late 1960s between the overwhelmingly Protestant unionists, or loyalists, who wanted the region to remain part of the UK, and the overwhelmingly Catholic nationalists, or republicans, who wished to see Northern Ireland become part of the Republic of Ireland. The final panel on Sunday was a discussion between McDonald and Aidan Troy, a priest who received death threats in June 2001 while he was stationed in Ardoyne, Belfast for accompanying Catholic parents and children along loyalist parts of Belfast every day for three months. He said that he had accompanied these parents and children on their way to school in the hopes of protecting them, as they were being harassed by some loyalists living in the area. This incident clearly demonstrated that “The Troubles didn’t end with a stroke of a pen”, said McDonald. Troy said that the biggest lesson he learnt from his time in Belfast was that “there’s only two things you can do when you’re confronted with violence, you can either demonise your enemy or you can talk to them”.

A celebration of Irish culture

The final events of the day featured musical performances by indie-folk singer and songwriter Inni-K as well as Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta, a duo from Connemara (a region of Co. Galway, in western Ireland). Both acts performed traditional Irish music using traditional Irish instruments, including the bodhrán (a frame drum), blended with Sean-nós singing, which is generally unaccompanied traditional Irish singing performed in the Irish language. In between songs, Seamus Uí Fhlatharta told the crowd that he loved “having the opportunity to play around with a genre [Sean-nós singing] that is generally quite rigid. This is what this festival is all about”!

Connemara duo Séamus and Caoimhe Uí Fhlatharta peform traditional music and song in their mother tongue of Irish at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, France on June 17, 2023. © Mariamne Everett

Even at the end of a day where events had been interrupted by heavy rain more than once, which necessitated a quick change of venue, the festival’s attendees seemed happy overall and overjoyed at having spent the day listening to different panels and musicians, immersing themselves in Irish culture and meeting members of the Irish community. “In my opinion, there hasn’t been so much excitement, creativity and joy in being Irish since the 1996 ‘L’imaginaire Irlandais’ [Irish Imagination] festival in France! The unbridled joy we’ve felt over the past 3 days has brought me back to my youth in Ireland,” said Patricia Killeen, one of the leaders of Le Cercle Littéraire Irlandais (The Irish Literary Circle) and a freelance writer. “I hope that the ICC will be there, with its rich cultural agenda, and lovely ambiance of welcome and inclusion, for our children, and their children’s children, for the French to explore” and remain “a cultural and community haven for Irish people living in Paris,” concluded Killeen.

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Why young adults in Italy and Ireland have to live with their parents

Post By World Cost Of Living, Housing, Inflation, Ireland, Italy

In the face of rising inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, Euronews investigates the reasons why young people are struggling to get on the property ladder or afford to pay rent.

Sophie is just one of 350,000 young adults in Ireland between the ages of 20-35 still living in her family home. Like many millennials in Ireland, the 28-year-old marketing executive from Galway is locked out of the housing market.

This problem is not unique to Ireland, according to Eurostat, approximately 67% of people (between 16-29) in Europe live at home with their parents or relatives, but for some, this is not a choice.

The Galway native told Euronews that rising inflation coupled with the cost-of-living crisis is largely to blame: “It’s so frustrating, I have a master’s degree, a good salary and like so many of my friends I’m saving to buy a house.

“But I had to move back in with mum and dad because I was struggling to save money, let alone pay rent, even now it is going to take me forever to save a deposit,” she said.

Affordability is a major issue, as Ciarán Lynch, a former member of the Irish Parliament explained: “House prices have never been so expensive and interest rates are increasingly rising for people coming into the housing market.

“They are almost as close to the figures from two years ago when interest rates were particularly set by the European Central Bank”.

The Mortgage Crux

Considering that house prices on average in Ireland are 94% above those of the EU, Sophie’s dilemma is not surprising.

In order to be eligible for a mortgage in Ireland, first-time buyers are limited to a loan of four times their gross annual income, a prospective mortgage is also capped at 90% of a property’s value.

However, house prices across the country have risen 537% since 1988 and are not in line with today’s earnings.

According to recruitment solutions giant Morgan McKinley, professionals in Ireland take home an average salary of €45,000. However, the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO) recently revealed that the average Irish house price is now a record-breaking €359,000.

So, for single-income, first-time buyers with a salary of €45,000, the maximum amount they can borrow is €180,000, which is slightly more than half of the average house price.

Ireland vs Italy

House prices and rents vary from one EU Member State to the next, in fact, in some EU countries, house prices have dropped in recent years. Italy, for example, experienced a boom until the financial crash in 2008 and then the cost of property steadily dropped. According to Eurostat, prices were cheaper in 2022 compared to 2010.

While rents have increased in Italy, the differences are marginal compared to Estonia, Lithuania, or Ireland where the average monthly rent stood at €1,733 in December 2022, that’s 126% higher than in 2011.

If the Italian house prices are more attractive to potential buyers, does this translate to higher levels of property ownership among young adults? On the contrary, a higher percentage of young adults live at home with their parents in Italy than in Ireland.

So, what are the drivers behind this trend in both countries?

Ireland’s lack of supply

While median gross salaries in Ireland are considerably higher than in Italy, available homes are also few and far between on the Emerald Isle.

“In 2010, we had 24,000 rental properties advertised on Daft (Ireland’s top property site) on any one day of that year, compare this to recent figures when we had just 700 properties available right across the country,” said Mark Rose, the managing director of Rose Properties.

“So now we have approximately 3% of what was available in 2010, we need thousands of rental properties to be loaded onto the market today, tomorrow or as soon as possible, they are urgently, urgently needed,” Rose added.

Limited properties are increasing demand and are placing a serious strain on rents and potential buyers, as the managing director of Dennehy Auctioneers in Cork told Euronews: “The rental market in Ireland is totally and utterly dysfunctional. We put a house up to rent two weeks ago at 12:55 pm and by 13:20 pm we had 90 emails (enquiries)”.

“We need thousands of apartments in cities to keep up with demand, however, Ireland is a victim of its own success, a lot of people want to come and live and work in this country and are attracted by the lifestyle, but our population is also growing and we can’t keep up,” Dennehy said.

The Central Statistics Office estimated that the population in Ireland increased by 88,800 between April 2021 and April 2022, the largest 12-month population increase since 2008. This is largely due to a 445% surge in migration and according to Dennehy, foreign direct investment is part of this trend: “Ninety per cent of the inquiries I am currently receiving for a new housing development in Carrigaline (a commuter town in Cork) are from non-nationals, and ninety per cent of those again are non-EU”.

“The professionals coming here have good jobs, they are well paid and they love this country”.

But former deputy Lynch who chaired the Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform in October 2012, said non-nationals with money to burn are also running into problems: “Foreign direct investment is a very, very significant part of the Irish economic model. And job creation has become a problem because it’s not that the jobs aren’t there, but the houses aren’t actually there for the employees when they get those jobs.”

The Italian job

“Property might be cheaper in Italy but the problem lies with the country’s stagnant labour market,” said Mimmo Parisi, a sociology professor from the University of Mississippi.

The senior advisor for European and data science development told Euronews: “Everyone is looking for that dream job in Italy and professionals don’t move around much, once they find a dream position they stay, often for life. As a consequence, there are fewer job openings and it’s difficult for young adults to enter the job market”.

High youth unemployment in Italy is a major factor. According to Italy’s national statistics institute, ISTAT, the unemployment rate (for youths aged 15-24) was 22.9% in January 2023, nearly eight points higher than the EU average of 15.1%, as a consequence young Italians are less financially independent.

“Add dubious work contracts, slow wage growth and low salaries to the mix and it is easy to see why young Italians are stuck at home despite falling house prices. It is also difficult for university graduates to secure relevant short-term work experience when the labour market works in favour of an ageing workforce,” explained Parisi.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Italy is the only European country where wages fell between 1990 and 2020, all the other Member States experienced a rise with Lithuania leading the charge with a 276.3% increase.

“Many students stay in university that bit longer when hunting for that dream job, which as we’ve learned is difficult to come by. This forces young adults to be more reliant on their parents until that happens,” Parisi said.

To add to the plight of youths, an Italian bank will not approve a mortgage without a permanent work contract otherwise known as ‘il contratto a tempo indeterminato’, which creates additional obstacles.

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Why can’t youths in Italy and Ireland afford to move out of home?

Post By World Cost Of Living, Housing, Ireland, Italy

In the second part of our three-part series, Euronews investigates how tourism is proving to be both a blessing and a curse for young people hoping to buy or rent property in Italy and Ireland.

Competing with tourists

Italy’s charming lakes, world-famous gastronomy, climate and heritage attract millions of tourists every year. Some 56 million tourists reportedly visited the Bel Paese in 2022; a figure close to pre-pandemic levels.

While tourism is one of the main drivers behind Europe’s third-largest economy, locals in some of Italy’s most popular cities like Milan, Rome, Venice and Naples are struggling to compete with the year-round flow of tourists for a limited supply of housing.

Airbnb, the online accommodation service that allows property owners to rent their homes or rooms to travellers, was introduced to the country in 2008. According to resident Fabio Scrivanti who works at the Venice Art Factory, it created a living nightmare for locals needing affordable accommodation solutions.

“Venetian landlords discovered that it was more profitable to list their property on Airbnb than rent to everyday people,” he told Euronews.

“It’s controversial because locals can’t afford to pay upwards of say €80 for a room per night — the price someone might pay for an overnight stay in a hotel — if they had to reckon with these prices, that would amount to €2,400 per month, that’s crazy, I certainly couldn’t afford that,” he said.

“I am 29, I have a master’s degree and work in the field I studied at university, I have lots of experience but even still, salaries are not high in Italy. People my age can’t afford rent, never mind a house of their own, lots of my friends are still living at home with their parents, it’s just easier.

“I got lucky with my shared apartment because my landlord gave me my room at a good price but this is rare, I know this isn’t the reality for many people” he explained.

Aside from Airbnb, astronomical rents in some of Italy’s major hubs are also making it more difficult for city residents to afford down payments on mortgages. According to Europe’s largest online rental platform, Housing Everywhere, Milan is one of the most expensive cities in Europe.

Lucia Pizzimenti (35) an environmental engineer, living and working in Milan, told Euronews: “I am living with my grandmother who has a spare room in her apartment because I don’t want to pay upwards of €800 for a small room here”.

Lucia has been searching for a property of her own for the last seven years but recently she had to broaden her search to commuter towns or nearby cities in order to find a flat within her budget.

As aspiring renters and homeowners in Italy continue to battle the influx of tourists post-pandemic and soaring accommodation costs, the lack of short-term accommodation solutions in Ireland is discouraging tourists from visiting the Emerald Isle.

The Irish Tourism Industry Confederation (ITIC) says the cost inflation on holiday accommodation is having a negative impact on the tourism sector and that one-third of tourism beds outside of the capital are under government housing contracts, serving as international protection accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers. In County Donegal alone more than 50 per cent of tourism beds are contracted by the Government.

The number of international visitors to Ireland during the first quarter of 2023 was 16 per cent below January-March 2019. As Irish tourism providers struggle to match Ireland’s pre-COVID tourism levels, many companies within the tourism sector fear ongoing price hikes will put Ireland’s long-term reputation at risk.

This affects activity and tour providers across the country who rely heavily on hotels, B&Bs, hostels and Airbnb to house visitors during their stays.

Nowhere to go

Europe’s migration crisis or the strain it places on the lack of available accommodation is now having an effect on refugees and locals alike.

According to the Irish Refugee Council, rapid increases in asylum seekers, specifically Ukrainian refugees, have highlighted the shortcomings of Ireland’s housing policy. So far, some 73,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled to Ireland since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and they all need a place to live.

The Irish Red Cross reported that the lack of readily available emergency accommodation solutions in Ireland for Ukrainian refugees had reached a crisis point in July 2022 despite the public’s best efforts. In March 2022, Irish Red Cross Secretary General Liam O’Dwyer confirmed that approximately 23,000 locations had been offered up by the public to be vetted to house Ukrainians.

While Irish residents were hailed for their generosity, this figure wasn’t enough. As a consequence, some Ukrainian refugees arriving in Ireland had little choice but to sleep on the floor of Dublin Airport, in hotel lobbies and temporary campsites.

The Irish government has promised to find solutions to the housing shortage and support local communities, newcomers and asylum seekers alike but the ITIC says that tourism and the revenue it generates also need to be factored into the equation.

The decade of lost development

According to Mark Rose, the Managing Director of Rose Properties, Ireland’s economic growth and recovery post the 2008 crash was largely thanks to foreign direct investment: “We have recovered well, there is lots of money and lots of jobs in Ireland but there no housing to support everyone that we are attracting in. So, even if we wanted to attract in builders to help relieve the crisis, as many countries do, there would be nowhere for them to live,” he said.

“We had little to no building in this country for nine or ten years because there was no money to build, architects, bricklayers, electricians, builders, they all moved overseas to Australia etc in search of work, and these professionals never returned”.

While Ireland is still one of the least densely-populated countries in Europe, the laws governing planning permission create a lot of red tape for potential builders, as Roy Dennehy, the Head of Dennehy Auctioneers explained: “We’re living in the lag period because in 2006 we had a population of maybe four and a half million, but we were building 90,000 units.

“That’s between apartments and houses per annum. The population is higher now and we are only building a fraction of what we were” he added.

The CSO found that some 30,000 residential units were built in Ireland last year, a third of the dwellings built across the Irish State in 2006.

Stay tuned for the final article in this three-part series in the coming week.

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Fintan O’Toole on his bestselling book and the transformation of Ireland

Post By World change, conservative, Equality, Fintan, Ireland, Irish, lgbt, Marriage, modern, O'Toole, ourselves, progressive, theocracy

It’s possible over the course of just one lifetime to see the world you’ve grown up in and all of its certainties stood on their head. That happened to the generation that grew up in the 1960s in Ireland in a social climate that’s now as lost as Atlantis.

In “We Don’t Know Ourselves, A Personal History Of Modern Ireland,” journalist Fintan O’Toole has taken a flinty-eyed and often funny look at the transformation of our nation from one time conservative theocracy to its first in the world vote for equal marriage.

Last week, he spoke to journalists in New York City about its unexpected bestseller success in America and the lessons it carries.

“We Don’t Know Ourselves” by Fintan O’Toole. (Liveright Publishers)

In his look at the changes that have marked our transformation from paranoid post-colonial theocracy to progressive European trailblazer, O’Toole has lived the changes he writes about.

Beginning his talk to a gathering of invited New York Irish journalists on April 24, O’Toole spoke the two words that haunted his childhood and the childhoods of many around him: Letterfrack and Daingean.

These were the names of the two most feared Industrial Schools in Ireland, the ones that “bad boys” were sent to for terrible crimes like stealing a loaf of bread.

Between the years 1940 to 1970, 147 children reportedly died in Letterfrack in Connemara while in the “care” of the Christian Brothers. There was evidence of acute physical and sexual abuse there going back to the 1930s.

In Daingean, a similar reign of terror prevailed, with flogging and other physical abuse creating an atmosphere of horror that has haunted many who passed through it for life.

“I wondered how did I know those two words?” he told the journalists. “I don’t remember anyone saying Letterfrack or Daingean to me very often but they were everywhere – and yet nowhere.

“When Mary Raftery – who is probably the greatest journalist of our times – did three documentary films about the industrial schools in 1999 called ‘States Of Fear,’ I remember everyone was shocked and appalled. Yet everyone knew.”

That weird cognitive dissonance, that ability to hold two conflicting pieces of information at once, to know and not know, was the origin of his best-selling book. And the study was not simply academic, it was part of his own family life, he says.

“My father had a broken skull and we have different stories about how he got it.

“It was only quite late on that I got the real story, which was that his stepfather had thrown him down the stairs. He was a brute and so the question was, why did his mother – my grandmother – stay with him?

“And the answer was she married him because it was the only way to keep the kids out of the industrial schools. And she knew it was worse, you know, that the worst thing was having your kids being taken into these institutions.

“That’s a very dark way of talking about this sort of doubleness, where lots of people were highly aware of the way that parts of Irish society worked. But we had this extraordinary capacity not to recognize it.”

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In the decade of his birth, the country was floundering. “There were only two countries in Europe that lost population in the 1950s,” O’Toole said. “One was East Germany and the other one was Ireland. The population was just leaving, young people were leaving in droves.

“And they were leaving to go back to the old colonial oppressor. They were choosing to live in England. All my father’s family, his siblings were in England, all my cousins were living in Birmingham and London.”

‘Island for lease, current owners leaving,’ ran a poignant cartoon that caught the eye of T.K. Whitaker, the gifted Irish economist and Secretary of the Department of Finance.

“He was in his late 30s from Rostrevor in the north,” said O’Toole. “He was an Irish speaker and devout Catholic, and he had come to live and work in the Republic because he believed in Irish nationalism, he wasn’t a rebel.

“But he realized that in order for things to stay the same, things would have to change. That really was the ironic T.K. Whitaker idea, that in order to keep Catholic nationalist Ireland, we’ve had to change how our society operated radically.”

Ireland would have to open up to foreign capital and it would have to attract private capital, Whitaker wrote.

“I think Whitaker thought, you could do it and it wouldn’t really change Catholicism, it wouldn’t really change the structure of governing and theology the way it was.

“And in fact, Catholicism still did pretty well in terms of its control of the society, right up to the end of the 20th century.

“And then it collapses with extraordinary intensity. I’m not talking about Catholicism as a faith, I’m talking about this peculiar fusion of Catholicism and nationalism as a governing ideology. But when it went it went with astonishing rapidity.”

Albania got state television before Ireland did, O’Toole notes. “The Irish government didn’t want to do television, but they had to because more and more people would be putting up huge ariels and getting the BBC. So London finally forced them into having a TV station to stop people being influenced by BBC.

“And of course, it was opened by the Archbishop of Dublin and it was headed by [Edward Roth] an Irish American, some good Catholic boy from Boston, who was the first director of programs and all he could do was buy programs from ABC and the entire back catalog of NBC and ABC.

“So we started watching American kids college programs and this huge American cultural influence started coming in.”

The great challenge before us in 2023 is how to deal with the unexpectedly promising path ahead that nothing in our past has prepared us for.

“There is always an urge to fill it with stupid slogans or populism,” O’Toole said. “But if instead you can live with uncertainty, and you’re not susceptible to every demographic who wants to tell you they know the future, and can control the future, we will be okay.

“I think, by and large, Ireland has gotten to a point where actually there is more comfort with that uncertainty.”

O’Toole concluded: “There was a big international survey a couple of years ago that asked people would you like your country to be the way it used to be? And the two countries who said no were China and Ireland.

“We may be very sentimental but we’re not nostalgic. That will save us from the kind of populism we have seen elsewhere.”

“We Don’t Know Ourselves, A Personal History Of Modern Ireland” is published by Liveright, $32.00.

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Why can’t youths in Italy and Ireland afford to move out of home?

Post By World Cost Of Living, Housing, Inflation, Ireland, Italy

In this three-part series, Euronews investigates the reasons why young people in Ireland and Italy are struggling to get on the property ladder or afford rent amid the cost-of-living crisis.

This problem is not unique to Ireland. According to Eurostat, approximately 67% of people aged 16-29 in Europe live at home with their parents or relatives. But for some, this is not a matter of choice.

Galway native Sophie told Euronews that rising inflation, coupled with the cost-of-living crisis, is largely to blame: “It’s so frustrating, I have a master’s degree, a good salary and like so many of my friends I’m saving to buy a house.

“But I had to move back in with Mum and Dad because I was struggling to save money, let alone pay rent. Even now it is going to take me forever to save a deposit,” she said.

Affordability is a major issue. Two years ago, for example, interest rates, particularly those set by the European Central Bank, were still at record lows.

“But now we are now seeing situations where quarter upon quarter the ECB is increasing its interests rates by at least half of a base point” Ciarán Lynch, a former member of the Irish Parliament, told Euronews.