Brexit. The view from the South

I recently received an email from my Accountancy body expressing their concern about the Brexit process. That’s understandable. Anybody with an IQ above minus infinity knows that Brexit is the biggest political mistake since the Confederacy tried to leave the Union in 1860. That is a little unfair perhaps. I’m sure there are many people in the wastelands of Northern England who wanted nothing better than to give the establishment the middle finger. The sad truth is that they are cutting their nose off in the process.

My Accountancy body wanted to warn me that I may not be able to obtain an Auditing Certificate in the United Kingdom after 2020. I was devastated to hear this news. I qualified in Ireland in 1987 and have never found the need to obtain a British Auditing Certificate. But it was comforting to keep it in the locker if I ever wanted to semi retire to Sunderland and spend two days a week preparing accounts for people on zero-hour contracts within the gig economy.

The other thing this email made me realise is that Brexit’s tentacles can still find me, even down here in New Zealand. I also have a bank account in the UK and I’m watching the value of this drift away like snow in spring.

That being said, I have to admit that I’m a Brexit obsessive. I’ve always been interested in the mechanics and theatre of politics. I’ve attended election counts, poured over results in obscure constituencies and to take a recent example, spent far too much time reading about the congressional campaign in the 9^th district of Texas. Brexit ticks all the boxes for political nerds. Brain numbing complexity, outright lies being bellowed with gay abandon and the slow car crash of a country destroying itself on live TV.

I read everything I can on the subject in the Guardian and the Irish Times (while safe within my liberal echo chamber) and listen to Brexitcast and the regular reports on New Zealand radio where the presenters take turns to laugh at their former Mother country. Part of my fascination is that this is a process that will barely impact me but will affect all my friends and family in Ireland and the UK. So, I thought it was time that I wrote down my thoughts on the subject.

Brexit at its heart is about immigration and that gnawing feeling that somebody on the outside is responsible for all your ills. At a simple level, the free market fundamentalists in British politics (both Labour and Tory) introduced the free movement of eastern European labour to drive down wages and working standards. When the locals got angsty, the British political system conscripted their old private school buddies in the media to blame some shadowy cartel in Brussels for everything that was going wrong. It’s a lie on the level of Hitler convincing the German people that Jewish peasants in Poland were responsible for the humiliation of Treaty of Versailles.

The British establishment thought they were getting away with it. An endless supply of cheap labour producing goods and service that they could then sell into the European market at massive profits while simultaneously blaming the Europeans for the social ills this caused. The mistake they made was to pretend that they were democrats who cared about the feelings of the general public. They called a referendum they never thought they would lose and which was designed to be a safety valve to allow the lumpen proletariat to blow off some steam. They miscalculated and the rest is history. History that unfortunately the Irish and British people now have to live through.

Every country has concerns about immigration. Ireland, for example went from zero immigration to 10% of the country being foreign born within twenty years. Not everyone welcomed this. A former justice minister took away the right to citizenship of kids born in Ireland to foreign parents. A decision that made zero difference to immigration but will lead to many elite athletes and footballers declaring their allegiance to Nigeria rather than the country they were born in.

In the early days of immigration to Ireland My Mother used to say “I don’t mind the blacks but I don’t like those Bulgarians.” There wasn’t many Bulgarians in Ireland at the time but they were lots of Romanian gypsies. Which just goes to prove, that is you are going to be racist, you should at least be specific. Britain had the same issue. The Brexit campaign brought up immigration and the protection of borders constantly. For those who didn’t like immigrants, this brought to mind Islamic terrorists and Pakistani taxi firms involved in child abuse. The irony is that this immigration came from former British colonies and not from the EU. But the seed was sown.

I fear now that no deal is the most likely outcome and that Britain will crash out of the European Union on March 29^th next year. The reason I say this is that all other possibilities, including Teresa May’s deal and an extension of Article 50 require a majority vote or consensus among the other 27 countries in the EU. “No Deal” just has to plod along and hope everyone else keeps arguing with each other. This is becoming more likely every day.

There is an assumption that nobody wants a “No Deal” scenario but this isn’t true. The nutcases within the European Research group and their backers within the Russian troll industry would like nothing better than the chaos that will come with crashing out. Jacob Rees Moss and his cronies would love to build a new Jerusalem from the embers of modern Britain and the Russians would be happy too.

I hope I’m wrong. I have too many British and Irish friends to take any pleasure from the misery that a no deal will result in. But nobody wanted World War One to happen either. It just did but because nobody shouted stop.

What is the working week?

It’s 10.54am in Auckland on a Thursday morning. I’m sitting at home with a nice cup of coffee and the BBC playing on internet radio. I have a morbid fascination with Brexit. Part of me finds it hilarious to see perfidious Albion shoot itself in the foot and take a hacksaw to its own leg. But being Irish, I know that collateral damage is likely from this process too.

I’m at home on a Thursday morning because my company recently moved to a four-day week. You might have read about it, apparently it has achieved about 180 million hits on the Internet. The owner of our company has been on CNN, Chinese TV and the BBC to press the message that the five-day week is an arbitrary number.   

We still get paid the same as when we worked five days and work the same eight hours or so. The idea is simple. Like most people, I don’t get paid for simple attendance at work. I get paid for completing tasks. Nobody ever looked at these tasks to see if they fitted neatly into a forty-hour week. Throughout my 36 years of working in the Financial Services industry I’ve been given tasks and deadlines and told to get on with it. Quite often you can meet these deadlines comfortably and spend the rest of your time in the office talking to workmates about football, reading the paper on the toilet or in my case, writing the bones of a novel while pretending to work in a large American bank.

On occasion the pressure would mount when a project deadline was imminent and I’d work late at night or weekends. But the truth is that when this happened, it mattered not a jot that my contracted hours where 37.5 hours a week. When I was busy, I’d work 80 hours and when I wasn’t busy, well I’ll be honest and say that there were days when I did nothing productive.

Our four-day week recognises the reality of this. We will adapt to the time we’re in the office. Meet our deadlines by reducing water cooler chat and surfing the internet while pretending to work and still put in the extra hours when appropriate. The reality is that for most of us working in the Financial Services industry, we are not head down automatons. We’re effectively firemen. We react to issues like client complaints and looming deadlines like firemen react to a fire. We jump into our trucks and we get it sorted, regardless of how long it takes. And the rest of the time, we play cards and polish the equipment.

Our owner has realised this. When we sat at our desks for five days, we would work at about 50% productivity in weeks when we weren’t busy and at about 140% on the weeks when we were busy. Like the fire service, he knew that staff can only have the energy and enthusiasm to attack the 140% weeks if they were rested and not burned out. As most weeks are 50% weeks, he has figured that we might as well spend a day a week at home. It’s just a reflection of the real world. He knows we’ll be there for him when the 140% weeks kick in. In fact, we’re more likely to do that because we are rested and more bought into the company objectives.

I spent most of my career working for American banks. The expectation (although not the actuality) is that you worked at 110% productivity in normal weeks and lifted this to 140% in the busy ones. The Americans are still fixated on being present. They wanted you at your desk early in the morning and the later you stayed there at night the better. Most people gamed it of course. Leaving a jacket on the back of your chair was a common trick as was disappearing the minute your boss went home.

Of course, many people need to be busy. Their self-worth and ego are tied up in being fully committed to work. These are the people who don’t talk about football or last night’s TV at work, who eat lunch at their desk and make sure that their boss receives an email from them at 9pm. Most of them are well meaning but the truth is that they invent work to make them selves busy. Work expands to fill the time available. If they work 60-hour weeks then their work will expand to fill this.

I lived in Melbourne for seven years and one of my favourite sights was the monument to the 888 movement. This commemorates the introduction of the 8 hours work, 8 hours recreation and 8 hours rest in Melbourne in 1856. Workers fought hard for this right but even after they achieved this, they were still working six days a week. It took another fifty years before the forty-hour week became standard. Ironically, the Financial Service Industry generally sets out a lower expectation of hours in its contracts. In Melbourne, my contract called for me to work thirty-five hours, when in reality I was expected to be present for much longer than this.

The monument demonstrates that what we consider to be the standard working week has been changing over time. Stone Age man worked every waking hour. Christianity brought in the day of rest and for most of the next two thousand years that meant working six days a week. The Victorian working class nudged this down to half days on Saturdays so they could go and watch football in the afternoon.

Somewhere in the twentieth century, five-day weeks became the norm throughout the world. The expectation of output didn’t change from when we worked six days. It won’t change when the rest of the world follows our lead and moves to four-day weeks.

If nothing else, it gives me a chance to get back into blogging, and at least this time, I’m not doing it at my desk while pretending to work.

Notes from the Doctor's Room

“Do I get a sedative?” I asked sheepishly.

“A sedative? For what?” the doctor replied.

I looked at the large plastic gun he was holding. It was still enclosed in its wrapping with ‘Single use only’ stamped on the side.

“Well, you said you were going to stick that up my back passage and that seems a slightly uncomfortable option. So, I was hoping I might be knocked out.”

The doctor seemed confused; as though I was the first patient he’d ever met who thought a large object being rammed up his rectum was a cause for concern.

“Oh, Good Lord, sorry. I wasn’t clear. I won’t be shoving the gun up there. I’ll be using a telescope with a torch and an air tube to expand the colon. The gun is attached to this on the outside.”

His description made me think of a miner about to embark on a solo mission down a long and dangerous mind shaft.

It was another rainy day in Auckland and I was sitting in the office of the city’s top ‘General, Breast and Endocrine’ surgeon. Before you delve into google, I should point out that ‘endocrine’ has something to do with glands. I don’t have issues in that area and despite appearances; I am not in the possession of breasts. So, I can only assume that I was referred to this good doctor because of his expertise in ‘General’. I have had a few problems with haemorrhoids this year, including a lot of bleeding. So, my doctor suggested that I get them banded.

Mister Moss (I notice that you go from Mister to Doctor and then to Mister again in the medical profession) was doing his best to explain the procedure to me. Like most doctors, he wasn’t very good at communication and mumbled through the description. He managed to do all this without ever mentioning pain or even discomfort but noticeably did all this without ever making eye contact.

He picked up the plastic gun and pointed out the three green bands at the end of it.

“Right, we shoot these little fellows at the affected area and hope one of them sticks. Then it will seal the haemorrhoid and fall away after two weeks.”

“Why are there three?” I asked.

“In case I miss with the first two,” he replied. “It’s not an exact science.”

“Is this a game of darts? Or is it like that game where you throw horseshoes at a stake in the ground.”

Mister Moss let out an embarrassed laugh. “Don’t worry. I haven’t missed yet.”

“But what if you do?” I asked.

“Then you come back in a couple of weeks and we try again.”

I looked at the gun on the desk and decided I’d rather put up with the bleeding than come back again.

He then made his excuses and said he had to get some more equipment. He came back with a large machine on wheels with tubes and valves attached. He whistled a dainty tune as he checked that everything was working. He showed no indication that he was going to explain what the machine was for. So, I jumped in the deep end and asked.

“Oh, this has two purposes. It blows air into the colon to expand it and then when we see the little fella that’s causing the trouble, I attach the gun and it air blasts the bands onto the haemorrhoid.”

I looked at the machine and figured that it had the capacity to launch a hot air balloon. I wondered why he needed something that big for my little colon. But then I realised that it allowed him to do the job on his own. A hand pump would have needed a willing accomplice.

This realisation unsettled me. My doctor (who is a middle aged Sri Lankan woman) has had cause to examine my nether regions given my current condition. When she does this she brings in a chaperone, because it is health board policy to have an observer when you’re sticking your fingers up a patients bum. This is apparently for the patients benefit, although personally when I’m lying on a table with somebody searching around my back passage like a drunk pensioner trying to find her keys in the bottom of her handbag, the last thing I need is another person watching.

This policy doesn’t seem to apply to consultants. And so I found myself in a room with a man I’d never met before, who was standing over a large machine with a plastic gun in his hand and who was asking me to strip and face the wall with my knees tucked under my chin.

The less said about the actual procedure the better. I wouldn’t describe it as particularly painful but it was probably the most uncomfortable thing I’ve done since I presented myself to a doctor with a lump on my left testicle and she said she had to check that it wasn’t a sexually  transmitted disease first. It turned out to be testicular cancer in case you’re wondering. All I will say is that I was very relieved when I heard the third blast of air.

I was given a couple of minutes to reclaim my dignity behind the curtain while he scribbled notes on the other side. When I retook my seat beside his desk he asked me how I was feeling and explained that he didn’t want to tell me the full details of the procedure beforehand because if he did it would make most people walk out.

I said I was feeling ok, all things considered. He said I had good colour in my cheeks and then pointed at the wall, which was painted a sickly yellow colour and said that most people looked like that after the procedure.

He then offered me his hand. Before I shook it, I wondered where it had been. But in a list of indignities that day, a hand shake was well down the list.

The North-Western European Archipelago

Yesterday I was called a Pom. I’ve been called worst things in my time. Being called early in the morning is my least favourite. But being called a Pom is up there. It means the speaker thinks you are English, or worse still knows you are Irish but lumps you in with the English anyway. Because to him, you’re all the same anyway.

Now as I’ve said before, I have nothing against the English. I think every house should have one. Particularly as a Butler. The English make very good Butlers. I’m just proud to be Irish and want people to recognise me as such.

This happens much more often in New Zealand than it ever did in Australia. I’m not sure why this is. Kiwis have a closer connection to the Mother country I guess and the European settlers here came primarily from the islands of Britain and Ireland, so perhaps it’s understandable that they see us as homogeneous mass.

I have a certain amount of sympathy. For the vast majority of the world, the geographical and political names are the same. New Zealanders come from the islands of New Zealand. Australians from the island of Australia. But some British people come from the island of Ireland.

So, I thought I’d present my idiots guide to the peoples and places of the North Western European archipelago.

The first trick for young learners is to distinguish between the Politics and Geography. “The British Isles” is a geographical term that includes the islands of Britain, Ireland and surrounding islands.

The United Kingdom is a political term and represents a country that can issue passports, raise taxes and spend every waking hour arguing about whether it should leave or partly stay in the European Union.

Ireland is both an island and a country but the country doesn’t encompass the whole island. But more of that later.

So, it’s clear that both the Irish and the British have some responsibility for confusing the world. But we’re not the only culprits. Macedonia is a small Balkan country but also a province in Greece. 

Citizens of the United States like to call themselves Americans, when the Americas run from Canada down to the tip of Chile.

Let’s start with geography. Ireland is the island on the western side of the archipelago that looks like a teddy bear driving a vintage car. To its right is the larger island called Britain which looks a predatory old man crouching over a teddy bear. Collectively (and from a geographic standpoint) this is known as the “British Isles”. It’s not clear where this name came from, although we can be pretty certain it didn’t start in Ireland. Use of the word British in this context is contentious. When you want to come up with a collective name for two things, it’s pretty lazy if you just use the name of the bigger of the two. Iberia is a better name than the Spanish Peninsula and the Scandinavians and Nordics are able to come up with collective names that don’t call out individual countries.

Understandably then, to the ordinary Kiwi it is logical to assume that if you come from the British Isles, you must be British. But being British is about identity, ethnicity and citizenship. The first two are difficult to define, but the third is clear. You are a British citizen if you come from the island of Britain or Northern Ireland, which is the six counties in the north east of the island of Ireland. So, those of us who come from the rest of the island of Ireland are not British.

We are of course Irish. We have Irish passports. We are a Republic, independent since 1922 and a stand alone member of the United Nations and European. However, to the casual observer if you come from the Island of island of Ireland you are Irish, when the north east piece is actually British.

So, not everyone in Ireland is Irish and not everyone in the British Isles is British. To complicate matters, we Irish call our country Ireland, which is three quarters of the island known as Ireland.

The British add to the confusion by having sub countries. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are regions but they get to play as separate countries in Football and other sports that originated in Britain. We Irish are not without guilt here too however. We play games like Rugby based on the geographical island of Ireland and not the political entity of Ireland which as I say makes up about three quarters of the Island.

There are many fans of this set up who think it should be extended to other sports such as Football. In fairness, the people who support this tend to be the ones who are disappointed that Ireland ever became independent of Britain in the first place. Outside of the “British Isles” every other country that plays international rugby or football is a stand-alone country with its own government. That’s why they can fly their national flag and play their national anthem, whereas the Irish Rugby team has to make these up so that they can pretend they are something they clearly are not.

As you can see, it’s a mess of geography, history and politics, which is a toxic mix. Ireland and Britain have been interconnected, often against their will for centuries. We Irish have a dark history of colonisation and conquest and the British are to blame. So names bring baggage and are rarely neutral. I’ve given up trying to explain that I haven’t just come back from the UK or that I should like warm beer because I’m a Brit. Life is too short and there are bigger questions to answer. I hope to address these in future blogs, now that I’ve so clearly articulated this one.

I’m just back from the North-western European archipelago. I spent some time in Ireland and the United Kingdom without leaving the island of Ireland.

Farewell Dad

Last Monday I woke up to a notification from the Irish Times to tell me that Limerick had just won the All-Ireland hurling championship.  My immediate instinct was to ring my Dad to discuss the final, as I have done every year since I left home 31 years ago.

Then I remembered that he wouldn’t answer because he passed away a month ago. That’s happened a lot these past few weeks. A thought pops into my head and like a sledgehammer I remember that he’s no longer with us.

Hurling was a huge part of his life. He was a proud Wexford man and brought me up on tales of Nicky Rackard’s exploits in the 1950s.  That was the golden era of Wexford Hurling and Dad was lucky enough to be in his 20’s when they won three titles in six years. He moved north to Dundalk where hurling was as rare as a Pope Francis t-shirt on the Shankill Road. So, when a hurling team was set up in my primary school, I was made the team captain on the basis of my Dad’s heritage. It certainly wasn’t on the basis of my talent.

After living abroad for eight years, I moved back to Ireland in 1996 which happened to be the year that Wexford won the All-Ireland for the first time in twenty-eight years. We went to the early rounds as a family. Mam, Dad, me and my sister Mary. Dad would make his famous cheese and coleslaw sandwiches and pack a few cans of Harp into a cool bag. We would enjoy these out of the boot of the car before the game as he had done forty years previously.

As Wexford got closer to the final, tickets became harder to source. Dad started calling in favours. He had lived in Dundalk for thirty six years by then and had more contacts than a Hollywood Agent. He somehow managed to source four tickets for every game up to the Final. But in the week before that game, he announced that he was only able to get two tickets for the big game. Wexford probably had the biggest support in Ireland and their opponents that day were Limerick. They were going through their own drought then, a drought that wouldn’t be quenched until last Sunday and they had a huge support too.

We agreed that Dad and myself would go to the game and that Mam and Mary would enjoy the picnic with us beforehand and then retire to a local hostelry. I donned my new Wexford jersey and we made our way to the old Nally Stand and as we climbed up the steps I could see a glint in his eye as though the ghosts of the 1950s were tipping their caps to him.

It was a tense game. Wexford had a man sent off in the first half but they hung on tenaciously to win a title that is still being sung about in the pubs in Dad’s home county.  When the final whistle went, I was reminded of all the tales he told me of games in the fifties when the fences would be scaled at the end and the crowd would pile onto the pitch. And so I dragged him down the steps towards the pitch against the tide of Limerick fans coming the other way. He complained bitterly that he was too old for such childish caper. But something told me that this might be my only opportunity to stand on the hallowed soil of Croke Park and led him on.

We climbed the last obstacle and suddenly found ourselves among thousands of delirious fans.  We couldn’t hear the speeches because, as I learned that day, the speakers at sporting grounds point back into the stands and not towards the field. But we did see Martin Storey lift the cup and the memory of all those childhood stories washed over me as I stood beside Dad in the September sunshine. We made our way out of the ground and back to the pub where we had left Mam and Mary. Dad was like a giddy child as he told them about our on field adventures. It seemed to be the highlight of his day.

Later that evening as we watched a replay on TV, Dad leaned across and whispered that he had actually been offered four tickets for the final. But he wanted to enjoy the game with me. The others weren’t real hurling fans. My Mother had a tendency to ask questions at crucial times of the game such as “who does the guy in black play for?”  

Dad was always there for me. He taught me how to ride a bike, he taught me how to enjoy a beer and how not to be seduced by it. He even taught me how to attract girls. “Let the hare sit” was his enigmatic advice to an over eager sixteen year old. It took me a while to appreciate that advice. You don’t catch a hare by chasing it. You catch it by staying still and to trigger the hare’s curiosity.  Then the hare will come to you.

I feel now that I have nobody left to teach me anything. Nobody to pick me up when I fall off my bike. Nobody to talk to about hurling.

He died as he lived, making as little fuss and causing as little hassle to others as possible. He slipped out of the world on the 24^th July. The same date that my Mother passed away eight years previously. He would have liked the symmetry of that and the fact that his coffin was placed on top of hers and not beside it. She was normally the kingpin in their relationship and he would find it hilarious that he will now be on top for the rest of time.

They say that hurling is the sport played in heaven. I hope so, because they have just received its greatest fan. I’ll miss you Dad. You were my hero.