The Government have produced a short video as part of their public 'information' campaign in the run-up to the referendum on the Fiscal Treaty on 31 May. Whether or not the content of stabilitytreaty.ie and the video aforementioned is best described as 'information' or as 'lopsided propaganda for the Yes side funded by public monies in contravention of the the McKenna judgment' has been the subject of some debate. Sinn Féin and the Socialist Party are both currently seeking legal advice on the matter.

In the meantime, the CounterSpin Collective have produced their own version of the Government's 'information' video, which is embedded below, along with the original.

For someone who has worked in the university sector and has been the President of the National College of Ireland, Paul Mooney’s level of ignorance as to what lecturers and professors do and the purpose of the higher education is quite remarkable.  What is even more striking is that his opinion piece in the Irish Times (Inside Third Level) lacks the rigours of analysis that one would expect from an academic. Assertion, anecdote and the partial, cherry-picking of data does not constitute evidence-informed analysis.

Where is the data and its systematic analysis to underpin the conclusions drawn?  Where are the international comparisons that would set Ireland in the context of other higher education systems? Where is the standardisation against staff/student ratios and funding that should be a part of such comparisons? Where is the wider contextualisation and reference to the myriad of reports on the higher education sector over the past decade?

The Irish Times published an interesting article yesterday, ‘Inside third level'. Interesting in the sense of its approach: it can only have been written by jogging around the shelves of the corporate management potboilers at the airport, noting down random phrases, and adding education-related nouns as an afterthought. In what may be the first instance of a national newspaper publishing a Powerpoint presentation, Paul Mooney, former president of the small business college the National College of Ireland, takes us so far inside the entire ‘third level sector’ that he supersedes the need to mention any actual institutions, to reveal a truth so profound it no longer depends on facts, or stuff.

So I was going to ignore it, in the same way as most workers in Ireland, when confronted with the violent reduction of their labour and experience to the cut n’ paste truthoids of reform-whisperers, simply hope it will go away. But they don’t go away, you know. The article is currently the most read on the Irish Times online, and last night the paper’s education editor Seán Flynn was triumphantly tweeting that the article was ‘much discussed at higher level in Dept of Ed!’ Which – as opposed to such traditional aims as informed analysis and factual claims – was presumably the point all along. So the article requires a response, the only question being, what kind of response?

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Reading Paul Mooney’s “exposé” of third level education, I was engulfed in a wave of nostalgia (alongside the nausea). While lacking in the subtlety and ideological nuance of much of the discourse, Mooney’s PowerPoint discussion could have emerged straight out of John Howard’s “Culture Wars” that devastated Australian tertiary education during the first decade of this century. Indeed it was the precarious labour conditions generated within this false “war” between markets and the public good that demanded I leave my home country and travel to the other side of the world in order to find secure, reliable employment – a journey with deep resonance with Irish history. To find this discourse at work in Tuesday’s Irish Times was both strangely comforting in its familiarity and deeply chilling.

Begun under the previous Keating Labor administration, the neoliberal shift toward privatisation of education – a user-pays system based on competitive market principles – intensified and expanded under the Howard coalition government of the late 1990s. Howard’s genius, though, was to cast the neoliberal doctrine of “obvious” market superiority as the victory of good, earthy old-fashioned Oztrayun (white, Anglo-Celtic) common-sense values over a high-falutin’, pretentious, privileged, chattering class and all their fancy book learnin’. Academics, and educators more generally, were made obvious targets, not to be trusted for their sceptical, socially interested engagement with non-market ideas such as the public good that used to be education. The general mistrust of intellectual life in Australian culture was poked and prodded by the continual iteration and mediatisation of this discourse until it became a schism through which damaging University reforms could be easily driven. That the ones articulating and mediating this argument, and those who benefitted most from it, were an economic and political elite could not put the lie to what everyone “knew”: Universities and academics were a cultural elite, wasting taxpayers’ money and needed to be rationalised by market forces like everyone else.

Ireland’s government has not been shy about proclaiming its commitment to human rights. “We will require all public bodies to take due note of equality and human rights in carrying out their functions”, declared the Programme for Government published by Fine Gael and Labour last year. A few months later, in October, the government told the United Nations Human Rights Council that there was “no room for moral relativism or selectivity” in this regard, and that “respect for dignity and human rights” was “the incontestable baseline of decent politics everywhere”.

These are laudable words, but such annunciations have little meaning if they are not reflected in the design and implementation of social and economic policy. All too often, such affirmations belie policy programmes that take little account of the actual requirements of human rights law. Moreover, the context of an economic crisis makes it all the more important that proper protection be afforded to basic human rights, as it is precisely in such a situation that vulnerable groups are most exposed to violations. The question, then, is whether the Irish Government’s actions are in step with its rhetorical commitment to human rights. An analysis of the recovery measures deployed since the financial crisis took hold suggests they are not.

In October 1974, Ireland ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and in so doing took on an obligation to dedicate the “maximum of available resources” to protecting the economic and social rights of people living within its borders. International law states that these rights, which include the right to employment, housing, health, education and an adequate standard of living, must be realised progressively and without any unnecessary backsliding, or “retrogression”. Needless to say, the country’s protracted economic crisis has taken a heavy toll on these rights, with poverty levels rising fast, just as the queues at unemployment offices grow and thousands of families find themselves unable to make payments on unsustainable mortgages.

Following the Crash of 1929, an epic debate began between liberals who believed in capitalism’s automatic stabilisers and John Maynard Keynes who did not. Today, in Bailoutistan (Greece and the other fallen eurozone countries), this debate has taken an interesting, sad, twist.

Hayek vs Keynes

In the aftermath of the Crash of 1929, Keynes famously criticised the conventional wisdom of his time (the so-called Treasury View) which held that, given sufficient time, the economy would adjust to any recession by letting wages and interest rates fall until the entrepreneurs’ ‘animal spirits’ are stirred sufficiently to stimulate both the additional employment and investment necessary to end the recession. Keynes’s objection was that, following a massive financial crisis that manages to infect the ‘real’ economy, it is highly likely that the large diminution in output, investment and income will lead to a ‘bad’ equilibrium. To a situation where unemployment is sustainably high (and unresponsive to wage reductions that cause labour to become dirt cheap), investment is rarer than snow in the desert (even after interest rates have crashed to zero; the so-called liquidity trap) and, generally, to an economy stuck in a new underemployment equilibrium from which it will not escape even if prices are free to adjust to their heart’s content. Under those circumstances, thought Keynes, to target government budget deficits, by means of government spending cuts, is precisely wrong. His proposition was that, once an economy finds itself locked into an underemployment equilibrium, any attempt to try to “cut itself out of the slump” is tantamount to cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face. No, for Keynes the trick was to “grow out of the depression”.

At the time, the Treasury View (i.e. that automatic stabilisers would do the trick) seemed increasingly pie-in-the-sky and vulnerable to Keynes’s quip that “in the long run we are all dead”. It took an outsider’s intervention to articulate (a) the strongest critique of Keynes, and his advocacy of government intervention during a slump, and (b) the most powerful defence of the market’s superiority as a resource allocation mechanism which government meddling can only stunt and harm – with long term detrimental effects for all. That ‘outsider’ was none other than Friedrich von Hayek.

Possibly the best catchphrase in the world was recently taught to me by the 4-year-old son of a good friend, who upon seeing any of the grown-ups in the room talking amongst themselves would sidle up to one of them and with big anime doe eyes enquire, ‘What about meeeeeee?’ I know not whether this comes from an epilepsy-inducing cartoon, a tale of anthropomorphic trains or is the product of his own overachieving mind, but it lodged in my brain like a photo-op of a skipping Taoiseach gambolling across the street eager to have his head patted by any passing European technocrats.

While I do not like to give my parenting friends advice on child-rearing (or rather, they do not like to hear my marvellous suggestions, no matter how many times I tell them that children are the key to competing with China's prison labour factories), I do believe this lad has a bright future ahead of him in print media, possibly as the editor of The Irish Times, for in essence their recent Squeezed Middle series - that set out to ‘examine how Ireland's squeezed middle is coping with wage cuts, job losses and debt’ - amounted to nothing more than one long plaintive cry of ‘What about meeeeeee?’

Richard McAleavey took the paper to task, accusing it of:

‘trying to fashion a depoliticised readership, with a newfound sense of common identity, forged amid recession, which can be easily and productively targeted by potential advertisers‚ [that] instead of creating political engagement on the part of citizens, concerns are fostered and appetites are stimulated‚ [for] the function of the Irish Times, along with that of other Irish newspapers, is to present a political programme, the imposition of mass unemployment and the destruction of the welfare state, which is being conducted in the interests of the wealthiest groups in Irish society, as a moral imperative, divinely ordained.’

This special edition of CrisisJam marks the twentieth anniversary of the X Case. The case transformed political debate on abortion in Ireland and led to a growing liberalism around the issue, so that today, the majority of people are in favour of some form of abortion legislation. Yet, the anniversary also represents twenty years of political cowardice on the issue and the systematic denial of the reality of abortion in this country, North and South.

The contributors to this collection of essays are all women who campaign for abortion and are openly and proudly pro-choice. What all the essays share is a sense of outrage at the hypocrisy that surrounds the abortion debate in Ireland.

This week the United Left Alliance put forward legislation in Dáil to allow women to access life-saving abortions in Ireland. While this legislation will not help the thousands of women who are still forced to travel abroad for abortions, it is a vital step forward in struggle for abortion rights. It also offers an opportunity for a genuine discussion on abortion in Ireland. We hope that this CrisisJam special edition will contribute to that discussion.

Image top: mag3737.