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.

News from the Beach

There are times when you find yourself lying on a beach with a good book and a cooling breeze drifting in from the sea that you can think that you are a million miles from the real world with its hustle and bustle and suffocating consumerism. The truth is that it is hiding on the other side of the sand dunes.

I was about to settle into a midday snooze when a text message summoned me to the other side of town with an urgent request to procure ice creams for three thirsty kids. I ambled slowly towards the car and with a very satisfying yawn set off for the shops.

I should point out that I find myself this year in Pauanui on the Coromandel Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand. It is a beautiful spot, favoured by Auckland dentists and Waikato farmers who grew rich when the Chinese discovered milk. The houses go for millions and the vehicle of choice is anything capable of towing a large boat. It’s fair to say that you don’t get any riff raff and there is no edgy side of town where you can buy drugs or move into a squat.

It does have a small supermarket which is quiet and well run for 51 weeks of the year. At New Year, however, when the hordes decamp from the city to the beach, it takes on the appearance of Macys on 5^th Avenue on the morning of Black Friday.

I had clearly missed the memo that said that the world was about to end and that we should urgently stock up on bottled water and paraffin. I knew where the ice cream fridge was but it still took me twenty minutes to navigate the kids staring goggle eyed in the chocolate isle as though Christmas had never happened and old ladies with isle blocking trollies that contained a loaf of bread and a packet of pain killers.

After a Marco Polo-esque trek I made it to the ice cream fridge which miraculously had not been cleaned out by the hungry ants who were grabbing everything else as though their money was about to become worthless at midnight.

I found myself at the end of one of the queues for the tills and being a lazy sort and a believer that these things even themselves out in the end, I decided to join and spurn the opportunity to find a shorter or faster line.

How wrong I was.

Small supermarkets in New Zealand are like Spars or Centres in Ireland. They don’t just sell the staples of bread and milk, they act as an off-licence, dispenser of lottery tickets and probably undertaker and shipping agent as well.

The first thing I noticed was that I had joined the queue that also contained the lottery machine. Like most countries, New Zealand runs its national lottery on a Saturday night. This being Monday, there was a long line of mainly elderly patrons anxious to see if they had become millionaires, or multi-millionaires in most cases as most of them were rich already. The checkout girl was gamely trying to cater for these geriatric requests while scanning the purchases of other customers. She did this by feeding the tickets into a machine that read the numbers and issued a short yelp if a prize was forthcoming. The tickets of course had spent the new year crumbled in the bottom of shorts pockets and had to be carefully unwrapped before loading into the machine in a process that reminded me of those Iranians who put together the hastily shredded messages they found in the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

I stood watching this as the ice creams slowly melted in my hand but was comforted by the knowledge that I was now three places from the front. Alas, the person at the front wanted to buy a ticket for the following week’s lottery, no doubt figuring that getting in early is the key to success. This involved charging up two space age terminals that were clearly beyond the technical abilities of the girl on the till. She gamely pressed all the available buttons with no success. She rang a bell which was obviously designed to summon assistance and we stood there silently fuming while we awaited the manager. She turned up after an age and pressed one button on the machine and a ticket was duly issued.

It was then that I noticed that the guy in front of me was clearly the most popular person in Pauanui. Every 30 seconds or so he would be greeted with fulsome New Year wishes and a request if he would mind awfully if his friend could add a small item of shopping to his basket in order for the friend to avoid joining the back of the queue. He didn’t mind, but I did. He had gone from a simple bread and milk purchaser to having an overflowing basket.

It would be some time before he got to the front, because lordy me, the lady who had finally made it to the scanning phase had just realised that she had picked up full fat milk instead of skimmed. She set off on a mission to fight her way through the milling crowds while we twitched and tutted. The ice cream was now running slowly down my clenched hands.

 At last I’m at the front and thinking that I can at least save the chocolate coating on the melting desert. But it seems that the checkout girl, while being clueless in the operation of lottery machinery is the go to expert for everything else. One of the other check out girls pushed in front of me to ask if she could accept an Australian drivers licence as proof of age for the purchase of alcohol. The licence she held indicted that it’s owner was in her mid-forties, but you can never be too safe I suppose.

The kids at least enjoyed the ice creams, even if they did have the consistency of yogurt by the time they consumed them. Next year I’m going to buy a lottery ticket and if I win I’ll spend the money employing a little man who can do my shopping for me.  

Where did the left go?

Is it wrong to say you agree with Donald Trump or Nigel Farage? I instinctively hate both of them but have found that occasionally I find myself guiltily nodding in agreement with them. It’s usually on the bits where they appeal to the common man, of which I am a proud member. I know they are bullshitters and don’t mean any of it but I’m not smug enough to believe that I’m immune to their carrier cries to populism.

2016 has been a strange year for politics. Everything I’ve long thought has been challenged and as the year closes, I thought it would be opportune to look into the dark recesses of my heart and try to figure out what I actually believe in.

My political awakening happened when I was ten. I spent that long hot summer in England, staying at my aunt’s house. She was a landlady who owned several rundown Victorian tenement blocks in the city centre that mainly housed Irish labourers. One Tuesday morning she brought me into town to buy me my first watch. Needless to say, I set out that morning with a gay heart. The sun blazed brightly in the sky, the sweet shops contained exotic delights that weren’t available in my Irish home town and I was gripping the hand of my kindly aunt who was about to endow me with a present.

An hour later, I was a bitter and confused child who had learned that the world was a cruel and unfair place where the poor were kept in their place.

My aunt had stopped off on the way to the shops to collect some late rents from her unfortunate tenants. This involved entering some of the hovels she passed off as attractive residential properties.  I can still remember the smell. It was a pungent mixture of sweat and urine with an overtone of mould. My aunt was targeting the tenants who worked the night shift. There were two to three beds in each room and many of the beds were double booked. The stained grey sheets would still be warm when the night worker arrived home and the day shift labourer had left for the day.

She woke a number of these men and whispered threats of eviction while searching the pockets of the trousers which were draped across the only chair in the room.

It had a profound effect on me and I guess in hindsight was my first realisation that the world is split between those with capital and those in desperate need of a roof over their head.

When I was twelve, I wrote my first essay in secondary school. We were allowed to choose our own topic and I decided to write about the middle east crisis and the nasty treatment that Israel was imposing on its Palestinian neighbours. My English teacher didn’t appreciate the sentiment and that was the first challenge I received from the great unwashed, otherwise known as the right wing.

Later on in secondary school, I wrote a couple of pieces for the school magazine on the subject of American Imperialism in Central America and the differences between Socialism and Communism. My new English teacher was more benign but still left a patronising comment on my work “He has no heart who is not a Socialist at twenty and no head who is still one at thirty”.

I remember voting for the Labour Party not long after my thirtieth birthday and thinking “Fuck You”, although that language might have just proven him right and that I had no head.

I then spent a year of my late teens in what turned out to be a Trotskyist party with secret links to the what was then the Soviet Union.

I went on of course to become an Accountant and have spent most of my time working for dollar chasing, corrupt American Banks who would impoverish an entire continent while sipping cocktails in a posh New York restaurant. But I just saw it as a job and tried to do no evil. I was even once part of a shadowy group called “Accountants for a Labour Victory” which campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Neil Kinnock in the UK.

As the years have passed by, I’ve tended to vote for left wing parties wherever I’ve lived and engaged a lot of friends in pointless debates on the merits of internationalism or the corrupting influence of parish pump politics.

But the events of the past year have shaken my core beliefs. My heart wept when I saw the plight of Syrian refugees and I instinctively felt like I was privileged to live comfortably in the West while many in the world need safe refuge because of the actions of the West. But the Brexit vote and the election of Trump made me realise that immigration is a double-edged sword. While it gives refuge to those who need it, it is also used by greedy Capitalists to drive down wages and trample over the few rights that the working class still have.

I have struggled with this paradox and it seems I’m not alone. The left is adrift and rudderless in almost every developed country as it struggles to come up with a saleable message in this post global meltdown world. And of course, Trump and Farage charged straight into the vacuum that this created like riders on the four horses of the apocalypse. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more despairing. For most of my life, I’ve lived under right wing governments wrapped in an arrogant comfort blanket on the left. Secure in the knowledge that we had the code to the secret to human happiness if only the foolish electorate would come to their senses.

And now we have lost that code. The old politics of trade unionism, community solidarity and the drive for equality are lost in a fog of globalisation, jihad and austerity. We live in strange and troubling times, but it’s also Christmas and hope comes with a January flower.

Down and Out on Queen Street

The blue and white Police tape was stretched between two lampposts on Queen Street, causing the early morning commuters to step into the road as they passed. Most of them slowed to sneak a peek behind the heavy green tarpaulin erected there where Policemen in full body white overalls were busily marking out bloodspots and placing samples carefully into plastic bags and test tubes.

Billy’s body had been removed four hours earlier. It had lain there under a woollen blanket since it was discovered by a staff member from Dunkin Donuts who was locking up for the night when he made a ghastly discovery in the shop’s doorway.

Dunkin Donuts was closed for the day out of respect and the inability of customers to get past the forensics team to their front door. The McDonald’s next door, being McDonalds, was open, having used free hamburgers as a tool to negotiate that the Police tape got moved two metres to the right and that their door was unimpeded.

Fifteen police officers and three paramedics worked on Billy’s body from the time it was discovered to the time they wrapped up and removed the tape and tarpaulin. Donuts were back on the menu when the evening commuters were walking back down Queen Street.

So Billy got far more attention from the public service after he died than he had ever received when he was alive. Billy was homeless. Originally from Samoa, he had come to New Zealand to work in a meat packing plant in South Auckland that closed when its owners realised that they could do the same thing for half the cost elsewhere. Inability to pay rent had pushed him onto the streets and then a growing addiction to methamphetamines had driven him further into the dark underbelly of Auckland’s homeless sub culture.

Queen Street is the financial centre of Auckland and also hosts shops selling Hermes’s handbags for $8,000 and Swiss watches that cost so much that you would need a Swiss bank account to fund them. In the daytime it heaves with pedestrians walking six abreast along its broad footpath. Office workers mingle with students, tourists and shoppers and the colours and faces of the whole world can be found there.

But at night, when the shoppers and office workers have gone home, a different group descends upon the street, clutching tattered old sleeping bags and dog eared blankets. They all seem to have their own allotted doorway where they try to find shelter from the rain and wind that charges up Queen Street like a cavalry battalion on its way to war.

Homelessness is a global phenomenon of course, but I have never seen it in the quantity or state of destitution as you witness in Auckland.

It jars of course against the traditional view of New Zealand. This country likes to describe the place as “Godzone” in the same way as Australian’s describe their homeland as “The Lucky Country” and Ireland thinks of itself as “a little piece of heaven that fell out of the sky.” None of these are entirely accurate of course, unless a lucky country describes finding yourself in a vast land full of bounteous mineral deposits and squandering the resulting benefits. Godzone and a little piece of heaven suggest that God actually exists and is careless about his real estate and doesn’t mind having his name shared with a laser tag venue.

The advertising associated with Godzone focusses on mountains and rivers, comely maidens doing tribal dances and the All Blacks. It never includes a photo of Queen Street at 1am. It’s the country most Kiwis would prefer not to think about. The dark world that comes out at night when they are tucked in bed dreaming of sheep.

By the following morning, the street was back to normal. Stressed office workers grabbed overpriced coffee on their way to team meetings. Tourists huddled around a map on every corner. And bleary eyed Chinese gamblers stumbled into the daylight from the windowless casino at Skycity as they made their way to the Hermes shop to spend their winnings.

Amongst them you could find Billy’s friends, emerging from doorways and dark alleys with their worldly belongings on their back. Many of them had left flowers at the spot where Billy fell and some of them were gathered to swap rumours about his demise and tell tales of happier times. The Police were around and asking questions. But they weren’t really interested in answers. The case had already been filed under “Another homeless guy gets high and falls and bangs his head.”

I live near a large park that has a toilet block and a shower. Battered old camper vans and dented cars turn up each night and families sleep there. There are many more people in New Zealand who live in garages or garden sheds, pushed out of normal housing by unemployment or the high costs of rents and unavailability of social housing. But in many ways, they are lucky ones, clinging to at least a remnant of warmth and shelter. Billy and his friends are at the bottom of this social ladder and Auckland is a cold and wet city in winter and doorways don’t come with mattresses.

I don’t have all the answers of course and I’m not arrogant enough to roll up in a new country and tell them how to run their affairs. Many people will be sleeping on the streets of Dublin tonight for example and many people will be in on the streets of Auckland handing out sandwiches and hot soup. I won’t be and therefore I’m part of the problem. But it can’t be beyond the talents of the Irish or New Zealand governments to solve a problem that affects 1% of the population.

Billy sparked a little flurry of interest by falling and banging his head on a busy street. It’s just a shame that I and everyone else here didn’t show enough interest in him when he was alive.