Growing food on ghost estates

Urban agriculture is thriving in rundown Detroit as communities take over derelict sites to grow food. But with our thousands of ghost estates and other leftovers from the property boom, could Ireland plough a similar path? Lenny Antonelli reports.

Organic Matters magazine, December 2010

When Detroit native Mark Covington lost his job as an environmental engineer and moved back to his old neighbourhood, he decided to get to work improving the rundown area. He cleaned up an empty lot and planted fruit and vegetables, allowing locals to harvest the food for free.

Covington wanted to buy a nearby derelict building and turn it into a community centre too, but he couldn’t get a grant or loan. Then journalist Paul Harris profiled Covington’s project in the Guardian, and an anonymous donor appeared with the cash. Covington’s Georgia Street neighbourhood has been transformed: disadvantaged locals can now harvest free food, kids watch movies at an outdoor cinema and the community holds regular street parties.

Detroit’s decline is infamous. Once an industrial giant, in the 1960s the city was the fourth largest in the US and home to two million people. Its population is now just 900,000, and one third of the city — an area of land the size of San Francisco — is derelict.

But grassroots community projects are revitalising the city, and urban farming projects like Covington’s are thriving. Last year alone over 900 food plots were created, and plans are afoot to establish the world’s largest urban farm in the city.

Here in Ireland, the Department of Environment revealed last month that we have 2,800 ghost estates. Over 75,000 occupied homes now sit within unfinished estates, and a further 58,000 sites have planning permission for houses that remain unbuilt. Meanwhile, Nama (the National Asset Management Agency) is taking over property loans worth tens of billions of euro.

Nobody seems to have started growing food on ghost estates or Nama property yet. But plenty of groups have proposed it, including the South Dublin Allotments Association, which suggested the idea in a submission to Nama.

“We did a submission on the idea of using the land on an interim basis as allotments on smaller sites, and where there are larger sites we figured they could be used for… commercial growers, for people who are market gardeners,” says the SDAA’s Michael Fox.

The group submitted a comprehensive list of reasons why growing food on Nama property makes sense, from preventing dereliction to encouraging food independence, developing growing skills at a time of unemployment and creating small businesses that could sell produce at farmers’ markets. The idea makes sense for Fox — “all it takes is a little bit of collaboration and cohesive planning,” he says — but Nama didn’t bite.

But the SDAA aren’t the only ones pushing the idea.  An Taisce suggested it in their submission to Nama, while Dublin City Council’s latest draft development plan states that derelict sites in the city should be used for “community gardens, allotments, local markets and pocket parks.”

In 2005 Kaethe Burt-O’Dea set up a community garden on a derelict plot in Stoneybatter, in Dublin’s north city.  The garden has thrived, and so has the community around it — locals now hold street parties twice a year, and Burt-O’Dea is spearheading a campaign to turn a stretch of abandoned railway line nearby — long taken over by wildlife — into a public green space. Students from Dublin Institute of Technology have undertaken research for the rail line project as part of the Community Links programme at the college.

Burt-O’Dea and volunteers cleaned-up the line and surveyed its biodiversity earlier this year. She brims with enthusiasm about the possibilities for a space she calls a “secret garden” — not only its potential for growing food and sheltering wildlife, but also as a walking and cycling route that encourages healthy, green transport. “The way we build our environment has so much to do with the health of the population,” she says, adding:  “I really see it as an education space, in the same way that in a community garden you learn without being told.” The site is eventually earmarked for a Luas line, but Burt-O’Dea says her vision of a green urban corridor can co-exist with the tram.

She might not be growing food on ghost estates, but Burt-O’Dea is certainly breathing new life into derelict spaces.  Those thinking of making ghost estates productive might find another template in Dublin’s art scene. As the economy collapsed and businesses closed over the past three years, many buildings in Dublin became vacant — or just never found occupants in the first place— and rents dropped, allowing artists to start studios and galleries cheaply. Spaces that would otherwise be dormant became hubs for artists to work, exhibit and run events.

Now the current programme for government promises to provide free space for community groups and visual artists to display their work too, hinting that Nama properties could be used for this.  The Department of Education is examining whether some Nama sites are suitable for school building, and the HSE and other government departments are believed to be interested too.

Professor Rob Kitchin of the geography department at at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth has suggested some Nama properties could be used for schools, forestry or parks, while in September a letter in the Irish Times argued the state should hold on to Nama properties in the medium term and lease them out for socially useful activities. Others have floated the idea of using vacant housing in good condition for low cost rent-to-buy schemes, to provide shelter for the homeless, or even for squatting.

Ghost estates and Nama properties could be used for a raft of exciting ideas — growing food is just one of many. A Nama committee is examining what to do with the properties, and while bigger ideas like turning failed hotels into hospitals or prisons are unlikely to materialise, there are much simpler ways to use the property for public good.

Projects like Burt-O’Dea’s offer an inspiring example. She stresses that it’s often small grassroots projects like that really transform a town. “If you energise an area, then it becomes attractive,” she says. One small community garden can be a catalyst for dozens of other projects that revitalise derelict spaces — and now it’s surely only a matter of time before the idea spreads to land leftover from the property boom. “Getting people to think differently about a city gradually,” Burt-O’Dea says. “That’s how real change happens.”

The Christmas drink diaries

Note: this is my version. As you'll see the Irish Times's edit made me a sound a bit more repentant at the end than I actually was. 

Published in The Irish Times, January 2011

I spent the holidays at home in Galway as usual. My only drink on Christmas Eve was a glass of white wine, which I used to wash down some crabmeat, brown bread and chocolate cheesecake (though not in the same mouthful) at a friend's house. I planned to soberly spend Christmas Day geeking out over my new David Attenborough DVDs, but my mother had other ideas. "Why don't we watch The Notebook?" she insisted, with my 15 year old sister backing her up. I reckoned my naggin of whiskey and four small bottles of Grolsch would be enough to make the film tolerable. It wasn't nearly. I had pretty much the same St Stephen's Day experience I suspect most people do: pretend to have fun while spending most of the night queuing for the bar or fighting to hold on to an area of dancefloor the size of your foot. Total drinks consumed? Three small bottles of Grolsch and two big bottles of Erdinger before going out, and four pints of Galway Hooker pale ale in the pub.

I spent the evening of the 27th in a bar relaxing over two pints of Galway Hooker and a Hoegaarden while watching the love of my life, Arsenal Football Club, thump Chelsea 3-1. The following evening I stopped by a friend's house with a rucksack full of booze, but only drank one Erdinger and three Grolsch while failing miserably at Buzz Junior, a Playstation game designed for kids aged three and up.

I embraced sobriety on the 29th (or rather I couldn't find anyone willing to go to the pub with me) but made up for it the next night, which started with two pints of Galway Hooker and a pint of Pilsner Urquell at half five, followed by four whiskey and cokes with some friends in their hotel room. Then back to the pub for four pints of Galway Hooker, after which going to a friend's house at 3am for two gin and tonics seemed like a perfectly logical idea.

New year's eve started at a friend's house with three whiskey and cokes and a Grolsch. At 11pm I left for a party outside the city. Most people there seem convinced that getting into the sauna was the best way to start the new the new year — after my seventh whiskey and coke it seemed an absurd suggestion, but after my eighth it made perfect sense.

And that was that. Though my mother has just suggested I join her to watch Poseidon — the remake — tonight (I'm writing this on New Year's Day) so I might still need a last nightcap or two. I'm feeling fairly exhausted, and aware that I drank far too much over the holidays. But gross overconsumption at Christmas gives us the motivation to spend at least the first two weeks of the new year being healthy, before lazily and inevitably regressing into bad habits again. And that's better than not trying at all, right?

Teaching the teachers

The Department of Education has announced plans to revamp teacher training in line with some of the best education systems in the world. But will it make a difference? Lenny Antonelli reports

Village magazine, January 2011

Training for most secondary school teachers is inadequate, the Department of Education has admitted. This surprising statement is found in a new plan that proposes a major revamp of teacher training in Ireland. The Better Literacy and Numeracy for Children and Young People plan says that the typical nine-month graduate teaching course "cannot adequately prepare the great majority of post-primary teachers for developing the skills required to teach or progress their students' literacy and numeracy skills." "There's not enough time to do anything well in nine months," Dr Jim Gleeson of the Department of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Limerick told Village. "There's an increasing realisation that in a lot of European countries the teacher education experience is longer."

The plan proposes a shake-up of training for aspiring primary and secondary teachers. College courses for both will be extended by one year, and students will spend more time engaging in teaching practice in the classrooms of "high quality" teachers. Newly qualified teachers will get further support from mentors, while further training will be mandatory for teachers during their careers. More emphasis will be placed on literacy and numeracy in schools, and on standardised testing.

The document is only at draft stage, and the Teaching Council— which promotes and regulates teaching in Ireland — will soon make more thorough recommendations on teacher training. But the plan appears to be based on strong international evidence that great teaching is at the heart of the world's best education systems. Despite having a major impact on students teaching quality is rarely debated in Ireland.

In 2007, consultants McKinsey published How The World's Best-Performing School Systems Come Out On Top, a detailed look at what traits the world's best education systems — as judged by the OECD — have in common. The underlying factor? It’s largely down to selecting the best graduates to teach and giving them the best training possible.

In top performing countries such as Finland and South Korea entry to teacher training is highly selective, making the profession attractive to the best graduates. To be accepted students typically have to show excellent literacy and numeracy, strong communication skills, a willingness to learn and desire to teach.

Top education systems see improving teaching as the only way to boost student outcomes, according to McKinsey. Teachers are coached in the classroom and expected to learn from each other. Schools cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, and principals devote their time to supporting both teachers and pupils rather than administrating. Schools set high standards for every child, evaluate student performance and intervene when standards aren’t met.

The UK charity Teach First has been applying many of these lessons since 2002. The charity aims to fight educational disadvantage by recruiting top graduates, training them as teachers and placing them in some of the UK’s most challenging schools. Its teachers improve struggling departments according to UK inspectors Ofsted, and over 80% of Teach First teachers are rated either 'outstanding' or 'good'.

Victoria Richley is in the second year of the Teach First programme. She graduated from the University of Newcastle with a degree in English in 2007 and then went to Spain to study Spanish. "I had the intention when I was coming back to the UK that I was going to study law. However when I was away I started to realise I didn't want to work in the corporate world," she said.

Like all Teach First participants, she began with six weeks of intensive training before starting to teach. "Teaching is a profession that's based on reflection and learning from what you do in the classroom," she said. Teach First participants continue to attend seminars and workshops once in the classroom, and are offered extensive evaluation and coaching from tutors.

Competition for places on Teach First is intense, and the workload is huge. "When Teach First recruit people they're looking for things like humility, empathy, and motivation, as well as academic ability," she said. Students finish the first year of the programme with a graduate certificate in education and can then work towards a master's degree.

In Finland, most teachers spend at least five years training and possess a master's degree. Less than 10% of those who apply to be teachers are successful, and along with medicine teaching is the most sought-after profession. In Scotland every teacher is guaranteed a year’s work after graduating, with a lighter timetable to allow for induction and mentoring.

Back at home the Department of Education appears to be copying and pasting from the best international examples — its plan emphasises the importance of selecting the best graduates, providing them with extensive theoretical and practical training and then mentoring new teachers. It says initial training should produce “reflective” teachers, and that schools should cultivate a culture of constant improvement.

But major roadblocks lie ahead. Better teacher training will require more money, but the state's four-year austerity plan envisages a cut in teacher numbers, higher fees for third level students, a charge for PLC students, and cuts to programmes for travellers, adult literacy, community education and more.

"Given the paucity of resources at the moment it's remarkable that initial teacher education is now coming on to the agenda," Dr Jim Gleeson said. "For years and years when there were plenty of resources it was the forgotten part of the whole system a lot of the time."

He said that the proposed induction programme for teachers — which will see new teachers get a more experienced mentor — is still “skeletal”, and pointed to the danger that there will be little connection between initial teacher education and induction. “No matter how good any initial teacher education programme is, unless it’s built on and developed as the graduate goes through his or her professional career, it’s limited,” he said.

The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation welcomed the the one-year increase to the bachelor of education programme for primary teachers, but general secretary Sheila Nunan stressed that it's "impossible to implement the curriculum as planned in overcrowded, under-resourced classes in sub-standard schools." The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland said the plans will have little value to students struggling to keep up in big classes.

But evidence is mixed on how class size effects pupils. In 1998, Eric Hanushek of Stanford University examined 277 different studies on the effects of reducing class size, and found that in almost three quarters of cases it made no difference. A positive effect was found in just 15% of studies, and Hanushek concluded that teacher quality is far more important than class size.

But others say class size is crucial, claiming it leads to better relationships between teachers and students, less need for discipline, and that smaller classes prevent students from slipping through the cracks.

"If you're into more pupil centred teaching and learning, then large classes are a constraint," Gleeson said. "Whereas if you're going to teach in the traditional didactic way— the stand at the board and use the textbook way — I'm not sure class size is a major issue for many students, but for disadvantaged students it certainly is a huge problem."

Though most indicators were positive, the Department of Education's chief inspector reported last month that primary teachers were inadequately prepared for almost one quarter of maths and English lessons observed. Research last year showed that most second class pupils were taught by teachers who described themselves as “not very” or only “somewhat” confident teaching maths to weaker students. Meanwhile, the OECD was set to publish its latest research on the performance of 15 year olds in maths, science and literacy as Village went to print.

"Teacher training needs a shake up in this country, it needs a major overhaul,” recently qualified secondary school teacher Marie Lavin told Village.

Lavin reckons few of her fellow 2009 graduates from NUI Galway found teaching jobs in Ireland. "A lot went to England right after they graduated. Some stuck it out until after Christmas and then they went. I applied for umpteen jobs this summer. I didn't get a reply, never mind an interview."

Presuming the planned reforms go ahead, they will have little impact if few changes are made in existing classrooms and if new teachers are expertly trained but left unemployed.

A group chaired by the Department of Education’s general secretary is overseeing the implementation of its new literacy and numeracy plan. The department is currently accepting public submissions on the document.

Dr Jim Gleeson is a member of the Teaching Council but was speaking in a personal capacity

Being more civic

Giving young people a basic understanding of politics and democracy is surely as important as any other activity in school — but civic education has a tumultuous history in Ireland, and is rarely taken seriously. Lenny Antonelli reports

Village magazine, September 2010

(Note: this is my edit of the article, not Village's)

Young people in Ireland are more politically aware than those in at least 30 other countries, according to new international research. The International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) surveyed 140,000 students across 38 countries, and found that more Irish students intend to vote in future than the international average too.

But its initial findings have been largely ignored. The OECD’s conclusion in January that the mediocre standard of maths and science among Irish pupils stunts our economy generated headlines, but there’s been little focus on how the quality of our civic education effects the nation’s political and social health.

The ICCS findings provide a cautious thumbs up, but we’re still far from boasting an education system that ensures every student is politically engaged. “It's encouraging but it shouldn't be a cause for any complacency,” says Gerry Jeffers of the education department at NUI Maynooth.

There may even be quite subtle reasons for Ireland’s high placing, such our good literacy rate or similarities between topics in the survey and the Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE) curriculum, explains Jude Cosgrove of the Educational Research Centre (ERC), which ran the ICCS survey in Ireland. The full ICCS report will be released in late September, and in November the ERC will publish a detailed national report [Update: now released, see erc.ie].

Promoting “active participation” may be one of CSPE’s main goals, but the ICCS survey — given to 3,400 second year students in Ireland — found students here have fairly average levels of involvement in civic activities outside school.

Sixty per cent of CSPE’s marks go towards a student’s report on their action project — some activity that involves civic engagement — but ‘soft’ projects are common. Teacher and campaigner Mark Conroy says many teachers invite the same guest speaker in year after year to discuss an uncontroversial issue, with students only given menial tasks such as finding the speaker’s phone number or welcoming him to the school. “It's meaningless. The students are certainly no better off in terms of civic attitudes at the end of it. If they did a project that had a component of proper community action, they'd learn something.”

“Civic and political education is a very pedestrian affair in Irish education,” he says. “It, to all intents and purposes, is an information source, rather than a call to arms. It does not have as its purpose the function of creating genuinely politically-conscious individuals.” No qualification in politics or sociology is needed to teach CSPE, and Conroy believes this hinders the subject. “The first thing I think that is needed is teachers who are genuinely fired up by the issues that should be raised in a CSPE class. All too often it is seen as a subject that fills up the gaps in a teacher's timetable.”

But important progress has still been made. Ireland is one of just 19 countries in the ICCS study that has a dedicated civics subject, while Gerry Jeffers says the fact 60% of CSPE’s marks are awarded for civic action — no matter how modest —  is a big step forward. And while some schools let the subject rot, it thrives in others where principals and teachers take it seriously. But Jeffers says the subject needs more than 40 minutes a week to flourish.

One CSPE student I spoke — my 15 year old sister — said she has no absolutely no interest in politics, but that CSPE nonetheless taught her the basics about voting and government. But she also said the subject is considered easy, and that many of the exam questions just require common sense.

Internationally there’s strong evidence that good civic education leads to greater participation and political awareness, but the subject has a turbulent history in Ireland. The Church of Ireland sought its introduction at the birth of Irish state but the Catholic Church objected, fearing it would encroach on religious education. In 1967 civics was introduced as an unexamined subject. The syllabus focused on the “accumulation of facts about public organisations”, and the importance of patriotism, morality and obeying the law. Civics and religion were often taught as one subject.

By the early 1970s the subject was dying. The Curriculumand Examinations Board (CEB)developed a new social and political studies syllabus in the 1980s, but it faced opposition — during the 1987 election the group Family Solidarity claimed the CEB was subversive and anti-Catholic. Fine Gael lost the election and the subject lay dormant until education minister Mary O'Rourke introduced a CSPE pilot project in 1993. In 1997, it became a Junior Cert subject.

Six years later Garret Fitzgerald criticised the lack of political education at senior cycle, arguing that, “when students are reaching the stage at which they would begin to have questions to ask and would want to probe and challenge, their interest is damped down by removing them from contact with political, social and civic issues”. The government proposed the introduction of a senior cycle civics subject in 2006, and the NCCA published a draft syllabus last year.

It’s an impressive document, emphasising human rights and democratic learning. And students will take it seriously — it’s designed as a full-time subject and the draft syllabus is rich in political philosophy, referring to Marx and Locke, to Plato and Hobbes.

But it’s future is uncertain. In response to a query I submitted asking when the subject would be introduced, the Department of Education said that no date had been set, and that its introduction would “ be considered in the context of the overall priorities and resources available in the system” when the syllabus is finalised.

And what about primary schools? There, civics is principally taught through Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE), and primary school teacher and Labour Party councillor Dermot Looney says the political elements focus mainly on the roles of different government positions and institutions. But he says that "it's not so important to learn about institutions of democracy but about democracy itself.” SPHE is typically taught for just half an hour per week as a standalone subject, and Looney believes it should get more time — at the expense of religious education, he suggests, which is allotted two and a half hours weekly.

Civic education is about more than just teaching the subject though. It’s about the entire school — after all, how can students be expected to become active democrats if they’re taught under an authoritarian school system?

“There are some who are happy to have education run in an authoritarian way,” Michael D Higgins said in 1992. “Theirs is a most unusual view: to be content to have education function as an autocratic, undemocratic institutional structure within a formal democracy.”

The ICCS study is less kind to Ireland on this front —  just 38% of students say they have taken part in decision-making at school. Student councils are a lot more common than a decade ago, but NUIM’s Gerry Jeffers stresses they’re just one example of student participation. “Student councils can contribute a lot but they have to be supported by a whole lot of other things,” he says. “How the school is run, how the teachers relate to the students — how much students rights are genuinely respected is the big issue.”

He says transition year offers vital lessons for making schools more democratic — the more relaxed atmosphere and reduced exam pressure means teachers have more time to listen to students. “Classes become much more democratic, more participative,” he says.

Mark Conroy believes that for civic education to flourish we must look outside schools, to cultivating a wider culture of dissent in society. “Our state was founded because of dissent and genuine political engagement, but since then each government has been a very conservative one, and none have encouraged dissent and civic engagement, or at least not in any meaningful way,” he says.

He says the media has “major responsibilities” in fostering dissent. It’s two sides of the same coin:  while the media must help create such a culture, students also need a curriculum that teaches them how to critically analyse endless messages from the media, politicians and special interests.

They need a curriculum that gets them asking questions. “The whole notion of power isn’t on the curriculum,” Jude Cosgrove says of CSPE. “I’m thinking the concept would be — why do some people have more power than others? How is power mediated, how is it perpetuated? Are there any working examples of power struggles that have resulted in new power structures? If you look at the curriculum a lot of it is sort of fact-based, kids maybe aren't maybe being taught to question… Why are some people in society less well off than others? Is that just? How could that be improved?”

Ireland bailout: Young Irish flee 'Celtic Tiger' for a better life

CS Monitor, 21 November 2010 Young Irish, in particular, hope that the economic cycle makes just one more click – and that emigration isn't their only option. But amid news of the Ireland bailout, some aren't waiting around.

By Jason Walsh, with additional reporting by Lenny Antonelli

Dublin, Ireland

While top European officials and Ireland’s beleaguered politicians work out the details of an Ireland bailout package meant to save the country from collapse, the Irish Main Street is reeling, desperate for some sense of stability and a glimmer of hope that some semblance of the roaring “Celtic Tiger” will return.

The boom years that began here in the mid-1990s and made Ireland the envy of Europe for its rapid growth and virtual full employment are over. Today, unemployment, personal debt, and a lack of optimism dominate the country. The Irish have come to terms with accepting a life preserver in the form of European Union and International Monetary Fund aid, which may reach $120 billion. Still, many are bracing themselves for a wave of austerity cuts that have already swept Europe.

public services, including the unemployment benefits and, according to some sources, retirement pensions that many are now relying on.

Young Irish adults in particular are expressing deep concerns about their futures. Andrew Murphy, a recent university graduate, has taken an internship at the European Commission in Brussels and doubts he will find permanent work at home.

“I’d like to come back to Dublin; I’d like to get a job in Ireland. I like living there. I still think it’s a good country. It’s kind of a strange feeling having left Ireland and knowing that even if I wanted to go back perhaps I couldn’t, perhaps I couldn’t find a job,” he says.

Ruth McNally, another recent graduate, is living on unemployment benefits. “My friends thought they definitely weren’t going to get jobs, but I was more positive and I thought, ‘We’ll be fine, we’ll get something.’ But then there didn’t seem to be anything. I couldn’t find anything.”

Ms. McNally says her friends are all “pretty much” in the same position. “Two of my friends are going to teach English in Korea.”

Despair and humiliation

Indeed, there is a sense of despair that has taken hold here and a feeling of humiliation among many as Ireland seeks help from the rest of Europe.

“There is a very real sense of shame at the failures of government and the business class,” says novelist Gerry Feehily, a native of County Donegal who now lives and works in Paris. During good times, Ireland, for the first time in its history, was a destination for migrants seeking to make their fortune. Now, Ireland is again supplying labor to the rest of the world.

According to government statistics, unemployment is now above 13 percent and 27,700 people left the country in the first four months of this year, more than anytime since 1989. An estimated 5,000 Irish people leave every month, an increase of 81 percent on figures from 2009.

Things are so tough that even labor unions are telling members about prospects abroad. “As a result of the downturn we’re finding that a lot of members are finding it hard to get work and many are considering immigrating to the United States, Canada, and Australia,” says Sean Heading, spokesman for TEEU, a union for engineers and technicians.

‘Ghost estates’

The most striking aspect of the bust is the collapse of the housing market. Not only are houses not being sold, the Irish landscape is now littered with so-called “ghost estates,” housing complexes that are sparsely inhabited and often unfinished.

Architect Dominic Stevens says government policy fueled a boom in house building that could never be kept going. “As late as 2008 the average new house price was €375,000; €120,000 of that went straight into the government’s pockets in taxes and levies,” he says.

“These were being built for reasons that had nothing to do with making homes for people. In [rural County] Leitrim you had estates that were populated entirely by people working on building other estates,” he said.

An estimated 280,000 homes are unoccupied in the country, 23,000 of which are new homes that have never been lived in.

For homeowners who bought before the real estate bubble burst, foreclosure is a growing concern. In early November, the government reported that 1 in 10 Irish mortgage holders is failing to keep up with payments.

Michael Culloty, a spokesperson for the Money Advice and Budgeting Service, an Irish charity that provides independent advice to people with financial problems, says that people are seeking advice but that widespread foreclosures have not yet begun.

“We’re currently experiencing an increase in the volume of people we see,” he says. “People are getting into difficulty with consumer debt in particular.”

Mr. Culloty says the banks have not yet begun to force people out of their homes in large numbers: “Most people are hanging in there.”

Not all commentators paint the same picture. Economist Morgan Kelly wrote that mass home repossessions were on the horizon. “If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait until the mortgage defaults hit home,” he wrote in the Irish Times.

Why should the devil have all the best music?

In August, myself, Eoin Bannon and Una McMahon went to the Mad Christian music festival in Wicklow to attempt our best Louis Theroux impression for Totally Dublin. Here are the 2,500-ish words, and some of the photos, that resulted. Words: Eoin Bannon and Lenny Antonelli Photos: Una McMahon

“I saw myself in the mirror and I looked a bit like Satan, to be honest.”  Joe O’Donnell is describing the moment 28 years ago when he found God. “I was drinking in a pub in Coolock – Campion’s it was – and I went into the toilet and looked in the mirror. A twelve by twelve inch mirror. I got a fright from what I saw. Looked old. My face looked rough and my eyes were red.”

The 65-year-old alcoholic describes a drinker’s typical moment of clarity, but for O’Donnell it coincided with an intervention from God. “Around that same time, my wife was ready to leave me. She’d had enough of my drinking. But a voice told her – not a voice she could hear but something in her head – that she should have the strength to stay with me.”

“Within a few days of that I had that experience in the pub, and the next two days I went to mass and didn’t drink.”

The Donnycarney native has been to mass virtually every morning since. He now sings with the Revival Gospel Choir – a multi-denominational group that performs at religious services in Arklow, Co Wicklow, where Joe lives.

The choir is performing at Mad – Make a Difference – a Christian rock and music festival held in the rolling wooded countryside not far from Wicklow town. Now in its third year, the festival was the brainchild of the late agricultural entrepreneur Tim Phillips, once the driving force behind poultry firm Ballyfree Farms.

Tim’s father David left the UK for Wicklow in the early 1950s after selling his patent for the ziplock, a technology still used for sealing plastic. Tim was a keen aviator who hosted air rallies in Wicklow and even raced his own plane. In 1979 he and Goal's John O'Shea persuaded Air Lingus to lend them a fully-crewed plane to drop aid into Cambodia after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge.

The Mad website says that in the summer of 2006, Tim "repeatedly had a vision of a huge Christian music festival" on the family land, and aimed at young people. His vision "suddenly burst into life" in the spring of 2008 at a meeting in the family home, and the first Mad was held ten weeks later.

Tim died this year at the age of 71 – his daughter Scarlett Tice now runs the festival. She says her father always dreamed big: "Maybe next year we'll have Bono come and kick us off on a Saturday. You might laugh but my father never took no for an answer. Who knows?"

From a distance Mad resembles any small Irish music festival. The focus of the site is a large big top — It’s never more than half-full, but that leaves room for punters to relax or pray on mats around the edge. The big top is a slick operation, with carefully-chosen graphics on jumbo screens either side of the stage accompanying each song. There’s even room in the budget for a jib, recording footage from impressive angles as it swoops over the stage and crowd.

As well as the big top there’s a children's play area, a second tent for smaller acts, and various stalls — there's the online "music-driven" radio station Spirit FM (coming to the airwaves soon), a "Prayer Pod" where festival-goers can pray with volunteers, a book stall, a table selling God-themed school stationary, various food stalls – including Eddie Rockets – and a tent selling band merchandise.

And the bands are centre of attention. LZ7 are the headline act – their slick mix of pop, dance, and hip-hop thrills the God-loving teenyboppers. The Manchester group’s songs exhort the crowd to love Jesus, hate racism, and transform their lives for the good. Their dance-pop re-working of the first holy communion staple This Little Light gets the crowd jumping, but it’s their I Gotta Feeling / Bonkers mash-up  that really raises the roof. They skip the Black Eyed Peas’ lines telling a girl to “just take it off”,  but the juxtaposition in the mind of the band’s Christian message with Fergie wiggling her ass is unavoidable.

Other acts are in the folk-rock vein we expect of contemporary Christian music. The Rend Collective Experiment, from Bangor in Co Down, sound and look like many acts that grace the 2FM/Hot Press stage at Oxegen, and they’re popular with the young crowd. London “praise band” Worship Central’s exalting-but-bland lyrics roll on the screens as they play, encouraging the crowd to sing along as they bow heads and raise hands towards their God. Electric Picnic regulars the Dublin Gospel Choir add their hymns to the mix too.

MODERN Christian music was partially born in the hippy counterculture of the late 1960s. As the era of free love came to an end, the Jesus Movement blossomed as some hippies swapped the fuzzy spirituality of the peace movement for full devotion to Jesus Christ.

One of the most influential of these “Jesus freaks” was Lonnie Frisbee, who found God on acid and converted to Christianity in San Francisco. Frisbee teamed up with a pastor named Chuck Smith, and the two started a youth ministry at Smith’s Calvary Chapel converting hippies and street musicians and putting music at the heart of their ministry, which turned out to be hugely influential in the genre.

By then the Californian garage-rock band The Crusaders had released Make a Joyful Noise With Drums and Guitars — perhaps Christian rock’s first major album — and Larry Norman had released his first record. Hailed as the father of Christian rock, Norman challenged more conservative believers who saw rock music as anti-Christian. His struggle was neatly summarised in his song Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

For many the genre means bland soft-rock and cheesy lyrics – and on the evidence from Mad, the stereotype rings true. But its themes have spilled into the mainstream. A few people we meet at Mad claim U2 for the genre. In 1981, just before the release of October, the band headlined the Greenbelt festival of “arts, faith and justice” in England.

In the noughties Christian music continued to grow internationally. In 2004, Nielsen SoundScan reported that Christian and gospel music sales had exceeded those for classical, latin, and jazz. But in Ireland the scene is still small.

"It's a nice little community of bands and worship leaders and musicians," Steve Evans, guitarist with Worship Central, says of the UK and Ireland scene. With his long hair, beard and chilled demeanour, he could have stepped straight out of the Jesus Movement.

Steve plays with non-Christian bands too, and while that might mean toning down overtly Christian lyrics, he sees it as a chance to influence."You get to kind of shine in a dark place," he says.

He says he's comfortable with the drink and drugs of a typical club — but he’s not convincing. "As long as you're secure in who you believe in and how you feel about those things it's kind of like...it is awkward” – he laughs – “but it's doable."

Steve describes performing to a Christian audience as “leading worship”, a phrase we hear throughout the day. "Worship is expressing oneself throughout whatever creative means you may have," he says. "Even performing, I would see it as worship because that's where it comes form in my heart."

THE DIVERSITY of people at Mad is striking:  there’s trendy twenty-somethings who could have been dropped in straight from Electric Picnic, teenyboppers dashing to catch their favourite bands, and lots of kids running around who probably think they’ve been taken to a strange funfair with no rides. But there’s more than just young people here: there’s African men in immaculate suits, waistcoats and polished shoes — and their wives with elaborate hairdos, in bright purple and green dresses. Then there’s middle aged men walking about leisurely in panama hats, guys with mohawks covered in tattoos, and quite a few punters who resemble American tourists. And then there’s the bikers.

With his thick beard, stocky frame and leather waistcoat, Mickey Walker wouldn't look out of place at a Hell's Angels rally — until you read the insignia on his back: 'Riding for the son — Christian Motorcyclists Association. The badge on his chest just says, 'Hard Core Jesus Freak'.

The CMA preaches the word to the biker community in 18 countries. "Our bikes allow us into the biker community and the biker community respect us and they invite us in," says fellow CMA member Pat Brown. But he qualifies this: "Some of them do, some of them don't."

Pat and Mickey both ride Harleys. "Bikers have kind of a rough edge," Mickey says.  "Part of the community is definitely their fist-in-the-face type of thing. They call themselves the one percenters. So just because of the mutual interest in bikes they'll often let their guard down a little bit."

The group hand out 'Biker Bibles' and literature at rallies. They hand us one of their pamphlets — titled The Grand Finale, it's the story of a biker who tries a wheelie to impress a crowd only to realise he's forgotten to remove his front disc lock. It continues: "What goes up must come down and he went from a wheelie, to a steppie, to a swan dive to a headstand, to a broken neck to a lifeless corpse in a matter of seconds." It warns most people die suddenly and with no chance to say goodbye to loved ones, or to prepare for "what comes next".  "If you want him to be there for you on that day, you need to make things right with him today," it concludes.

Mickey's had a few of his own brushes with death on his bike. "You remember yourself flying through the air and landing on your head on the other side of a car," he says. "I'm living testimony that biking is in the blood. You lay the ground and the ambulance is coming, and for about five minutes you're thinking, 'Oh, I gotta give this up'. And then as soon as you realise you're gonna live, you start worrying about the bike."

THE CROWD at Mad might be diverse, but the festival openly targeted at youth. Scarlett Tice says her father's aim was to provide hope — and even just something to do — to young people. "Go down to Arklow or Wicklow or Greystones on a Saturday night — there's nowhere, there's nothing [for young people]," she says. "And now more than ever in this recession, even if you go to university you're not going to get a job. It's just empty, it's hollow.”

When she talks about offering teenagers something to do, she's probably thinking differently to the average 17-year-old. "I've got three teenage children. I wouldn't pack them off to Oxegen for a few days — goodness knows what might happen to them," she says. "Fortunately they don't want to go."

She says faith plays a big role in the lives of her kids, and that while they're not angels, their faith means they have little reason to take drugs, get drunk or sleep around.

"If kids all grew up with some moral values, I mean this place would be better wouldn't it? It has to be,” she says. “We’ve just got chaos out there. We’ve got so many broken homes, so many broken families, so many broken everything. I think that going back to the basics and having core Christian values will absolutely impact our country, no question.”

BUT WHAT do the kids think? We meet Emily Stewart 17, and Owen O'Neill, 16, chatting on bales of hay near the big top. It's their third year at Mad — they're enjoying it but say something's missing this year, though they can't pinpoint it.

They say being Christian during adolescence is tough. "At my age it's when everyone is starting to get into the whole drinking scene, and it's difficult to try and seriously stop yourself," Emily says. But being Christian makes her stronger in those situations too, she adds.

What about sex? Have the chastity rings of evangelical teens in the US made their way to Irish shores? Mercifully, no."I personally don't think I'm gonna have sex until I'm married," she says. “I don't need a ring to prove it."

Owen says most of his friends don't know about his faith. "Not a lot of people see me as a Christian, they just think of me as Owen," he says. But he's worried his friendships could hold back his Christianity. "They kind of see you as something different if they see you Christian and holy."

Emily says one of her best friends is gay — she hasn't made up her mind whether homosexuality is a sin, or whether it's nature or nurture, but says she's "totally fine with it”. “If they're Christian and they love God and they're true to that and they're gay, what's so wrong with that?"

If Totally Dublin came to Mad expecting to find a deliriously happy and fanatic type of Christianity, most young people here seem the opposite: intelligent, thoughtful and fairly open-minded. Alex Delap, 24, embodies this – a fresh-faced aspiring filmmaker, he’s working in the cafe tent, making coffee and serving brownies. Money raised at the stall goes to a charity that offers support to young people in Ibiza — which includes "running a van to go around the town, taking people [home] who are OD'd on ket or whatever,” he says. A big dance music fan, he’s been over to volunteer.

Throughout our chat he emphasises that Christians shouldn't act as moral judges, and shouldn't aggressively evangelize — he says preaching to others would feel as unnatural to him as talking about his faith with a magazine, which he admits to being a little uncomfortable with.

He reckons churches must revive the sense of community he feels Ireland has lost — regardless of whether those they serve are Christian. "I think that's where God is played out, in people looking out for each other and caring for each other."

He also finds the idea of an insular Christian sub-culture "nasty". "To me being a Christian just means I want to be like Jesus. I loved his way of life, I love a generous way of living,” he says.

To an extent Alex and his cohorts proved us wrong: Totally Dublin went to Mad with its prejudices about Christian music, and while these were largely confirmed by the big top performances, there wasn’t much of the happy-clappy, insular, judgmental sub-culture we expected.

Perhaps sensing our preconceptions, Scarlett – the organiser of this whole jamboree – moves to dispel any myths as we chat. “We’re not weird!” she laughs. “We’re not a cult! We’re not weird!”

Dot com boom

Throughout the day and deep into the night, they welcome gamers and gamblers, immigrants calling home and people with nowhere else to go. Lenny Antonelli spent a week wandering Dublin’s internet cafés Written for The Dubliner, February 2010

Download a PDF of this article, as it appeared in The Dubliner, here: Dot Com Boom

It’s after midnight in an internet café in Dublin city centre. The room is half full; chatting staff ignore the ‘Please Keep Quiet’ signs on the walls. In the corner, a 30-something woman spins an online roulette wheel over and over. Others play games and check Facebook. Some browse sex chat sites. A pounding noise upstairs in the private members’ room shakes the ceiling. “What’s your fucking problem? You stupid baldy c***,” a man’s voice shouts repeatedly. “You stupid baldy c***!”

Staff run up, then back down again to call the Gardai. It seems a man had been pretending to work there, ordering a woman asleep at her keyboard to wake up. Regular customers confronted him and a brawl ensued; one of those trying to help ended up with cuts on his face and torn clothing. The guards eventually found the offender, who had headed off down the street, but no charges were pressed. After a while everything is calm again, and the staff shrug off the incident. Not long later, the man sticks his head back in the front door. “Anyone seen my phone?” he asks calmly.

The action was real tonight, but mostly it’s pretend. At night adult gamers arrive in the cafés, usually to play World of Warcraft (WoW to its devotees), a multiplayer fantasy game that – by all accounts I’ve heard – is highly addictive. It has 11 million players worldwide.

Marco, 38, spends “50 or 60 hours a week” playing WoW here. A former corporal in the Dutch army, he played rugby at the highest level in Holland before a sky-diving accident forced him to quit. He landed a job with an airline in Dublin and took advantage of generous staff discounts – he could fly first class for free.

“Eight o’clock in the morning – open the champagne please!” he laughs. “I saw the whole world for free. You name it and I’ve probably been there.” Venezuela? “Yup.” Hawaii? “Yup.” Fiji? “Yup.” Ethiopia? “No, I didn’t do Africa.” He was made redundant in 2005 when the airline moved its operations to Poland.

Marco says it’s the social side of WoW that appeals to him – talking to other players, usually via a headpiece, is a big part of the game. Another man tells me he’s had “great conversations with players from Israel and Palestine. You meet people from all over the world and talk about religion and politics. The level of intelligence is very high.”

Despite the steady stream of gamers flowing through their doors at all hours, Dublin’s internet cafés are by no means recession-proof. “We’ve probably been hit harder than a lot of places,” says Dennis from Kimmage, who manages a café in Temple Bar. He took the job when a broken leg and quadruple bypass forced him to swap his 24-hour car-recovery service for less demanding work. Up to two years ago, most of his custom came from immigrants contacting home, but many have since left Ireland.

Revenue is half what it was in 2007. Dennis isn’t complaining though. “It’s fun, every day is different.” He has his share of stories: old men coming in to call sex chat lines, a student whose porn habits led to a string of complaints, and a female customer who Gardaí suspected of child trafficking. His favourite, though, is of the priest whose porn-watching prompted a shocked crowd to form at the shop window. “There were 20 or 25 people,” he says. “When I pointed it out to the priest, he was sweating – he got up and left quickly.”

THE wall behind Leo, a slight young man from south-east China who works in a northside internet café, is plastered with CCTV photos of thieving customers. One of them managed to strike four times, snatching purses and wallets from customers' pockets. Another stole €110 from Leo’s own jacket. The gardaí once had to kick the bathroom door down when a man locked himself in, shot up and then fell asleep.

Leo says that business is down drastically; his boss is struggling to pay the bills. But despite this – and the odd bit of trouble – he says the job is generally hassle- free. He’s glad he made the move from China to study business and computers four years ago: “It’s very different here,” he says. “Life in Ireland is easy.” Ali is equally happy he made the move. This slender, tracksuited 21-year-old spends a few hours each day in a Liffey Street internet café chatting to his parents and friends in Pakistan on Skype. He’s not working at the moment and can’t afford his own computer. Still, life in Ireland is “very good,” he says – “but very cold.”

Dubliner Brian, too, spends up to six hours a day chatting in internet cafés. He returned to Ireland from Canada after five years in September, but his girlfriend and other friends are still across the water. “I loved [Canada] but I was deported. My visa expired and my passport expired.”

How does he find Dublin now? “It’s changed quite a lot. It’s a lot faster, more dangerous. There’s more drink and drugs in the city. One or two of the internet cafés around are [open] 24 hours a day and a lot of people just use them as sleeping houses. The lights are turned down and people just sleep on the floor and in the phone booths.”

Of course many customers come in for simple reasons – to check emails, browse Facebook, chat. And the internet cafés of Dublin are more than a little varied – some are dank and dingy with rickety computers that crawl along; others have big cushy chairs, wide booths and widescreen monitors. But Brian was right – some do double as sleeping dens. At 7am in another city-centre internet café, two men sit in front of computers, sound asleep. Behind them, a young woman is asleep on a desk with no computer. At the back of the room a man is stretched out on the floor asleep, his head tucked under a desk.

In another internet café nearby, men sleep uncomfortably on sparse plastic seats. The lucky ones stretch out across two, buried under blankets. Kevin, a slim man with greying hair and a hunched gait, chats with the night worker and other customers, some of whom are just waking up. He seems to know everyone. “This is what we do,” he says. “Come in here for the night, put the head down for a few hours and watch a good film.” He’s been homeless for three months. “My wife got pregnant with my best friend,” he says. “I lost my job, my home, everything.” He says the lads in the café try to get into hostels, but they’re “too full of junkies,” and often booked out.

Early another morning, a bleary-eyed man in a grey hoody asks me to help him find Metallica songs online. He’s not that familiar with computers. He shows me a blood stain on his elbow. “I nicked a bike from O’Connell Street, but the guards must have seen me because when I cycled past the station they tackled me off the bike.” He gets up to leave. Another man follows him out the door, grabbing his sleeping bag and heading out into the dark street.

Tragedy and comedy — an interview with Robert Fisk

I wrote this in 2005, when I was just a young pup editing Sin, the student newspaper in NUI Galway. The university invited Robert Fisk to give a speech, and three or four journalists (myself included) got the chance to chat with him. It may have been a foolish mistake, but I decided there was little I could get out of him on politics or foreign affairs that he hadn't already said, so I tried to focus on his personality instead. Here's the piece that resulted — apologies for some of my clichéd and youthful use of language (and for foolishly overstating the importance of the Independent of London).

Published in Sin, 2005.

Waiting for Robert Fisk is rather unnerving. You expect him to arrive looking forlorn, with a furrowed brow and an air of sobriety that you might think comes with living in the most tragic place on earth for almost 30 years. But the Bob Fisk you expect never shows up.

Instead, a genial and pleasant Englishmen bumbles into the room apologetically, putting everyone at ease. He refuses to take the designated seat behind the front table at a makeshift mini-press conference in the Irish Centre for Human Rights, declaring it to be foreign territory for a journalist, and opts instead to sit with the assembled reporters.

Fisk, middle east correspondent for the Indpendent of London, a paper which has wrestled the crown of the great British liberal newspaper from the Guardian, is in the middle of a worldwide tour to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, which charts his experience reporting on every major event in the region over the last thirty years. In that time, he has reported from both Gulf wars, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the conflict in Algeria, the Lebaneese civil war, and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times. He is scheduled to return to Baghdad in December.

In truth, Fisk is an enigma. An outspoken opponent of American and British foreign policy, he has spent more than half of his lifetime reporting on some of the bloodiest affairs in modern history, and has essentially done so alone, without wife or children to soften the effects of the tragedies he has witnessed. And yet remarkably, he is still able to smile and joke freely, in spite of the grizzly nature of some of his discourse.

“I go to a mortuary every trip to Baghdad, and I stand there all morning counting the corpses in. The last Monday I was there, four weeks ago, there was a woman with her hands tied behind her back shot three times in the head, and a baby that had been shot in the face. Others are clearly blown up by suicide bombers, in which case they come in in bits, and they try to fit the bits together.”

Such sights and comments come naturally to Fisk, who reckons that the estimate of 100,000 Iraqi dead since the war began “may be conservative”. But perhaps it is the ability to laugh in the face of human tragedy that molds the kind of character needed for Fisk’s profession.

He firmly believes that the western public should also be witness to the kind of devastation that he has spent his life reporting on. He recalls traveling on the Baghdad to Basra road in 1991, following two days of sustained US bombing. “We came across these large numbers of Iraqi soldiers who had been blown to bits, and the dogs had arrived – it was lunchtime you see. And they were tearing bits of bodies off and racing off across the desert with arms and legs to eat.”

An ITV television crew was with Fisk at the time, and began filming the scene. “Why are you wasting your time, they’ll never show this?” Fisk questioned. “And I remember thinking they ought to show it – this what the war is about, this is what happens, every time. If you go and see Saving Private Ryan, you can see it. But when it’s real you’re not allowed to. They clean up the war.”

Of course, Fisk’s stoicism has not endeared him to all. His persistent and scathing attacks on US and British foreign policy have led many to question the veracity of his reporting. Fisk is clear in his thoughts on the role of the journalist. “If you go down into Galway and there’s been a bomb, and lets hope there never is, and there are people all over the road dead, you get angry about it, furious about it. Well I’m allowed to get angry too. And I’m allowed to name the people who did it if I think I can find out. I was just down the road when this guy blew up in Jerusalem and killed lots of Israeli kids. There was a child with his eyes blown out. Do you think I’m going to give equal time to Hamas? No, I write stories about the victims.”

Later that evening, Fisk, who has the odd habit of referring to himself in the third person occasionally, addressed a packed out university theatre. He described the process of writing The Great War for Civilisation as being “very distressing. I was endlessly writing about gas and torture and death.” He was saved, he said, from total immersion in horrid memories by a friend who insisted he stop writing and “ walk by the sea and drink a pint of Guinness and think of other things.”

The book, Fisk says, is essentially about this father, who served in the first world war. “I didn’t go to see him when he was dying, and the chapter about him is an apology.” He was, Fisk says, “very right-wing”, but he earned his son’s eternal respect by refusing to command a military firing party during the war.

After his speech and the somewhat docile question and answers session that followed, Fisk received a standing ovation, which despite his apparent taste for the glitz of the book tour, appeared to genuinely humble him.

He is scheduled to return to Baghdad in December, and one must wonder how someone can shift so seamlessly between a world of packed-out speeches, flashing cameras and book signings and one as morbid as Baghdad. But such is the level of bloodshed at the moment that Fisk, one of the world’s most experienced war correspondents, has “serious doubts” about returning to Iraq. “Free reporting is finishing there. It’s so dangerous now in Iraq, it’s the most dangerous story I’ve ever covered. The state of Iraqi anarchy needs to be seen to be believed. Iraq is moving into deeper and darker phases. The project is over. Iraq is gone.”

But such morbid predictions haven’t dampened the spirit of Bob Fisk. Before, during and after his speech, he is brimful of humour. He is also refreshingly humble, carrying his own plastic chair down the steps of the theatre, and sitting on the steps of the theatre for a while too. But behind the joviality of the occasion, there is a deep sense of conviction based upon thirty years of being immersed in human tragedy. “If you saw what we saw,” he says, “you would never support a war.”

Hackers seek physical space in a virtual world

The Irish Times, April 4 2009 Dublin will soon be home to a space for hackers to congregate and get creative, write Lenny Antonelli and Jason Walsh

It's not a word that's used much in polite company – mention the term hacker and it conjures up nothing but negative images. In today's wired world of interconnected computer networks, email, SMS messages, social networking and online banking the stereotype of the computer hacker hasn't kept-up with the times.

At best the outdated image of the 1983 film War Games comes to mind: intelligent kids getting into serious trouble while attempting mischievous pranks. At worst, hackers are only a step away from terrorists, intent on destroying important computer networks and collecting enough personal data to make Google blush.

The reality is, as always, rather different. The personal computer as we know it today would not exist without the work of hackers – mainframe computers share less DNA with a typical PC or Mac than a pocket calculator does and, famously, Apple Computer was founded by a pair of hackers, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in a Californian garage.  More recently, the Linux operating system currently revolutionising the business world is entirely the work of hackers. So much for tabloid visions of "cyber crime".

Dublin will soon be home to a permanent space for computer hackers to congregate and get creative. Named Tóg, Irish for build, this new space will be Ireland's contribution to the growing international movement of "hackerspaces".

Sat in the elegant, if incongruous, surroundings of Dubin's Westlin hotel explaining their plans to the Irish Times, Tóg's Jeff Rowe and Robert Fitzsimons emphasise that hacking is about curiosity: the desire to understand how technology works and the creative urge to build and modify gadgets. The only legal issue at stake here is the rather prosaic one of voiding warranties.

Fitzsimons is perfectly comfortable with the word hacker: "I'll use "hacker" and somebody else will use it and there'll be a completely different interpretation," he said. "My hacking is out in the open. I have the 2600.ie domain – If anybody wants to find out who the hackers in Ireland are, my name is plastered on the site."

Hacking, Fitzsimons says, is a form of self-education in a fast-moving world: "It's about learning things about the electronic environment we live in."

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the omnipresence of technology today, talk among the group does turns to political issues. Hackers, as a group, tend opposed to technology for technology's sake if it doesn't bring anything to the table. E-voting, for example, has been roundly rejected by hackers as needlessly complex and fundamentally unsafe: "The thing that gets me about e-voting is that these computers are essentially black boxes, but a vote isn't a black box. Physical voting is a very transparent process – with electronic devices it's a bit of magnetism somewhere, it's a bit, a 1 or a 0 somewhere," said Rowe.

Speaking to the Irish Times, technology consultant Colin Sweetman explained the term hackers needs to be approached with caution: "The prehistory of even some Microsoft products shows there were developed by hackers working for fun in garages and then bought-out," he said. "A lot of the actual malicious "hacking" is done by what are called "script kiddies" messing around with software they didn't write and don't really understand."

Sweetman also poses an interesting question about the source of malicious computer viruses and scams: "Nobody knows how many "black-hat" hackers in former Soviet states and in China are actually, at least tacitly, supported by their governments," he said.

Scams, industrial espionage and schemes for geopolitical domination are a world away from the reality of computer hacking as practiced in Ireland. Tóg's Jeff Rowe, who spends his days researching devices for the visually-impaired at Dublin City University, is a walking, talking example of the kind of self-motivated learning and playing that hackers engage in. Rowe's work is useful, interesting, technical and difficult. His play may be less important but it shares all of the other characteristics: he is currently designing an exact replica of a 1980s arcade machine in order to play old video games. "I want it to look and feel authentic," he said. "There's no point in just having a desktop unit. Half of the fun is two people standing up against the unit."

An avid cyclist, Fitzsimons, perhaps unsurprisingly a computer programmer by profession, is working on various gadgets for his bike: "Because I cycle and there's potholes everywhere, I'm interested in putting sensors on my bike so you can measure the road surface and how closely cars overtake you," he said.

Fitzsimons and Rowe are among 16 technology enthusiasts, many of them supporters of 2600 magazine, the technology underground's premier periodical, planning to open the Tóg hackerspace in Dublin – a home for hackers to work on projects, collaborate and socialise.

As unlikely as it sounds, similar spaces have sprung up across Europe and the US in recent years. For Fitzsimons, Rowe and the rest of the Irish group it was a trip to the 25th congress of Germany's Chaos Computer Club, one of the most influential hacker groups, that crystallised the idea.

"It really gave us the final push," said Rowe "We decided to get a group and start planning and get it in motion."

Fitzsimons sees the space being conducive to technological creativity and collaboration, but also a place for hackers to relax: "I'd like to see an area with couches and TVs and X-Boxes or whatever, and you wouldn't necessarily have computers in there. And then you'd have another room with computers; people [will] have somewhere to go and get away from computers."

In terms of technological projects, Rowe stresses it will be a learning curve for everyone. "Maybe just one or two people know how to do complex projects [so] it'll start off with making an LED display that flashes different lights and you can program different messages, and then it'll slowly build up and up."

Fitzsimons would also like to see woodwork and kitchen facilities in the space – allowing members to partake in other creative, hands-on activities unrelated to computers. "Some of us like cooking and some of the hacker spaces even have a Sunday dinner," Fitzsimons said, mentioning woodwork, paper-craft and baking as other possible activities. "I hope it wouldn't be the case where people would just hang out and play computer games and not actually participate in the idea of making something or doing something slightly creative with their time and space."

For now, the group will have to settle for "booting-up" in a single room – with 16 members paying €50 a month towards rent, the group is hoping to find a suitable space in central Dublin by May 1. Once the space is up and running the group will hold weekly public meetings for prospective members. "We're at the point where we feel that no new people are going to join until we actually have the space," Rowe said. Once the space is up and running, the group is confident it can quickly attract new members – and enough income to start looking for larger premises.

At a time when more and more communication is moving online, it is ironic that a group of technology enthusiasts would be so anxious to find a physical space to communicate in but Tóg has a rationale: "The highest bandwidth [mode of communication] is obviously fact to face," Rowe said. "It's all about the community. It's the community that drives all these sorts of things. We'd be nothing if it was just a space and there was no community, and no-one knew each other in the space."

Fitzsimons elaborates: "As Jeff was saying, it's about the community, and about that community building and making and creating. If that involves technology, brilliant. If it doesn't, brilliant."

If the information economy means anything at all it requires motivated, intelligent and creative players, just what Tóg and the hackerspaces movement are intent on creating.

Urbex Factor

For many of us, a day exploring Dublin might involve a picnic in the Iveagh Gardens, or a trip to Glasnevin Cemetery... For others, it means investigating the hidden interiors of the city’s abandoned buildings. Lenny Antonelli meets some intrepid “urban explorers” Published by The Dubliner, April 16, 2010

Most people visit Dun Laoghaire for some sea air, a walk along the pier or a trip to the market – only a rare few go to explore the dark innards of the derelict Dun Laoghaire Baths. Dave is an “urban explorer” – one of a growing number of Dubliners who venture into the city’s derelict buildings, tunnels and other hidden spaces. A young photographer from Tallaght, he asked us not to reveal his surname – trespassing is illegal, after all.

Dave isn’t some strange creature of the night though, just a 20-something armed with the tools of his trade – a camera, a torch and a portable sat nav programmed to his favourite exploration spots. He describes the inside of the baths: a warren of dark passages, rusting stairs and decrepit pools, saunas and changing rooms, with badly painted cartoon characters on the walls and drug paraphernalia scattered on the floor. Once among the most popular bathing spots in Ireland, they closed for good in 1997.

It was here that Dave’s enthusiasm for urban exploration – shortened to ‘urbex’ by its enthusiasts – was born. “Me and my friends were just walking about, we just saw the place and thought we’d head in,” he says. His curiosity was piqued, but he thought there wouldn’t be much more to explore after this. He was wrong. “I’d say we’ve seen about 100 places over the last couple of years.” The photographs that accompany this piece were taken by Dave and Tarquin Blake – more about him anon.

Dave’s favourite derelict building is Bolands Mills on Grand Canal Dock, though it’s now inaccessible. The imposing flour mill was occupied by Éamon de Valera and others during the 1916 Rising; the company went into receivership in 1984. He says that unlike other abandoned buildings, there’s little graffiti inside – and the views from the roof are superb.

“All the machinery is still in place; there’s just a really good history to it. It’s so big you’d spend a whole day there. Every time we went we found something new, a whole new section that we missed.”

Redcourt House in Clontarf, which Dave managed to visit and photograph before it was demolished, has a grizzly past; it was the site of two murders over the years, and was dubbed the “Hammer House of Horrors” by locals.

Dave’s closest brush with the law came at a derelict industrial estate in Tallaght. He and his friends were exploring an abandoned factory when a voice boomed out of a speaker, telling him he was being watched, and that the guards had been called. “We legged it and ran all along the Luas track,” he says. “It’s a shame, there’s no way you can do places like that anymore.”

Although breaking into private or public property is illegal under the 2002 Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, Dave makes sure to operate by a simple code of conduct – don’t damage or take anything. The only time he broke this was when he used a crowbar to prise open a window of the derelict La Touche Hotel in Greystones, parts of which were damaged by a fire in 2006. Inside, he photographed the old restaurant, nightclub, conference room and some of the dozens of bedrooms. Others might have been tempted to take some of the valuable furniture; all Dave wanted to leave with was photos.

He’s explored countless other abandoned buildings – Grangegorman Asylum, the Clontarf and Blackrock baths, the Hellfire club in Rathfarnham, Martello towers – but is still keen for more. He’d love to get inside the old mine near Killiney beach – the passage in is small, but he’s heard that there’s a huge cavern inside with a bridge stretching across. He’d like to explore some of the ghost offices and apartment blocks left by the building boom too, but presumes they’re all heavily secured. Dave’s dream exploration surprises me: “The place I’ve always wanted to see is Chernobyl – a whole abandoned city. There are animals living in office blocks and trees growing up through houses, crazy stuff.”

The term ‘urban exploration’ was coined in 1996 by Infiltration, a zine dedicated to the subject, but its history stretches back much further. In 1793, Philibert Aspairt got lost while exploring the Parisian catacombs by candlelight. – his body was found 11 years later just feet from the exit that eluded him, and he’s now considered the world’s first “cataphile.” American poet Walt Whitman described a visit to an abandoned railway tunnel in New York in The Brooklyn Standard in 1884. In the 1950s, a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began exploring steam tunnels and rooftops around the campus, a practice they called ‘hacking.’ In 1994, the Diggers of the Underground Planet – an urban exploration group in Moscow – claimed to have found the city’s fabled Metro-2 subway system, allegedly built so that Stalin and his officials could evacuate the city quickly in case of attack.

In 2001, urban explorers found a maze of utility tunnels under Minneapolis and its sister city Saint Paul – they dubbed it “the labyrinth” and explored and mapped it fully over two years. And during the noughties, urban explorers from across North America organised conventions they deceptively titled ‘Office Products Expo.’ In the past, urban explorers communicated through zines, but the Internet dominates now, with message boards such as urbanexploration.ie, 28dayslater.co.uk and online magazines like Jinx and Explonation.

So far, urbanexploration.ie doesn’t get much traffic, according to Dave, and there’s not a community in Ireland as such – more individuals and small groups of friends who go out together. He’s an old hand at urban exploration at this stage, and is interested in its natural offshoot too – rural exploration. He’s visited castles in the greater Dublin area, and is thinking of compiling a book of his photography. “I went out last week with my dad and went to this place at the back of a housing estate in Navan. It’s like a big mansion ruin, it’s amazing... A demesne, there are derelict farmhouses around it. It’s just crazy that stuff like that is there.”

Photographer Tarquin Blake is an experienced rural explorer – his first book, Abandoned Mansions of Ireland, to be published later this year, will feature photographs and historical background on 50 derelict mansions across the country. Working from old 19th-century maps to find the sites of abandoned mansions, Tarquin was blown away by what he found. “The loss of heritage and architecture is pretty staggering. Some of the mansion houses rate among the largest and grandest ever built in Europe. And they’re completely in ruin now.”

One of the mansions he photographed is Westown House near Naul, though all that really remains now is a shell. “It’s hard to picture the place in all its grandeur, but it was said to be the finest mansion in Fingal.” Built in the early-18th Century, the house was owned by the Hussey family, who couldn’t afford to stay there after the Land Commission took it over in the 1920s. Various tenants rented it in the following decades, including former Fianna Fáil TD PJ Fogarty – they had the run of its 32 bedrooms, three kitchens, orchards and walled gardens. “Apparently a guest fell from one of the upper windows and was found the following morning in a pool of blood,” Tarquin says. “His ghost is said to haunt the place.”

Tarquin started out exploring Magdalene Laundries and asylums in Cork city before switching his focus to the countryside. He’s photographed various Dublin city buildings too, but says rural exploration is a lot more relaxed. “You need to have your wits about you and be a lot more cautious in the city!”

We remind you that exploring abandoned buildings is illegal – do not try this at home please. Tarquin has met enthusiasts more interested in stealing than documenting, but for most urban explorers the goal is simply to capture the history and decline of forgotten buildings, and to record places that we all get close to but never see.

Tarquin is protective of his favourite buildings, and admits he sometimes prefers to be vague about their exact locations to keep them hidden. “I guess the places are special because they have been kind of forgotten.”

Giants of the Celtic Sea

Lenny Antonelli reports on the many questions that surround the behaviour and migration of fin whales in the Celtic Sea. Published in Science Spin magazine, November 2007. With thanks to the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group.

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Right at the southern edge of Ireland, in the open expanses of the Celtic Sea, lives the second largest animal that ever existed on our planet. Here the fin whale (Balaeonoptera physalus) thrives, feeding on herring and sprat among other species. It grows to about 20m in length, weighs between 50 and 70 tons, and its blow can extend over six metres into the air. Only the blue whale is larger.

But it is only very recently that we have become fully aware of the presence of these giants off our south coast. The reason we’ve only heard about them recently, however, is quite simple - the experts have only really become aware of their presence recently too. It was in 1999 that Padraig Whooley, a cetacean enthusiast and currently sightings co-ordinator for the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group, moved to west Cork and began to look for whales from the Old Head of Kinsale. He soon realised that west Cork is, as he describes it, a “mecca for whalewatching”.

Zoologist Dr Simon Berrow, the IWDG’s founder and current co-ordinator, explains: “After Padraig started doing the whale-watches we realised that a pattern was emerging and that the fin whales were coming back year after year. We realised that this was a regular thing and not just a once-off.”

West Cork quickly gained prominence among cetacean (whale and dolphin) enthusiasts, with common and bottlenose dolphins, minke, humpback, and fin whales all to be seen regularly. It wasn’t long, though, before it became apparent that fin whales weren’t just confined to the waters of west Cork. “Our original thinking was that they were just off Cork, then it became the whole south coast, and then it became the south west too,” says Berrow.

Indeed, a quick glance at ISCOPE, a powerful digital tool on the IWDG’s website that allows users to generate maps of species sightings off the Irish coast over any time frame, brings up a huge cluster for fin whales over west Cork, with smaller clusters over east Cork and Waterford, and some scattered dots around Kerry.

Padraig Whooley laughs at his own explanation for the distribution of sightings: “I think it's very much the case that the distribution of sightings reflects the distribution of whalewatchers.” Whooley has spent many days at sea off west Cork recently, camera in hand, as he attempts to photographically catalogue the fin whale population. To date, 29 individuals have been identified, using natural physical markings such as patches of discolouration, nicks on their fins, or scars. “We’ve only touched the surface. There are lots more out there that we haven’t photographed,” he says.

Fin whales – close relatives of other giants such as blue and sei whales - are distributed worldwide, but tend to be less common in polar and tropical waters. They can be spotted off our south coast for almost ten months of the year, generally occurring in small feeding groups of three to eight. They are usually first seen in the waters of the south west in late May or June, persisting right through until February, with their distribution seeming to move eastwards towards Waterford and Wexford when they leave west Cork in December. “When we stop seeing them in west Cork, they start picking them off Ardmore head in Waterford,” Whooley says.

According to Berrow, the explanation for this is simple – they are following their food. “We're pretty confident that the individuals we see in west Cork are the same individuals that are seen further east in Waterford and Wexford. This pretty much mirrors what we know about herring, which spawn in the west earlier and in the east later. And as the herring spawning progresses east, the whales seem to move east too.”

Fin whales usually disappear from our coastal waters early in spring, prompting what remains the most enduring question surrounding their behaviour in Irish waters: Where exactly do they go? The truth is nobody really knows.

The migration of fin whales is generally quite poorly understood. Some textbooks will tell you that they make annual migrations from warm, low latitude breeding and calving grounds to colder, higher latitude feeding waters, as is conventional for many large cetaceans. If this is the rule, however, the Celtic Sea population could be the exception.

Berrow elaborates: “There are only two to three months of the year that they're not in Irish coastal waters. In fact, I'd be surprised if they went all the way out of Irish waters at all, given the time frame. Historically a lot were caught off Spain, so they could be going there to calve, but we haven't seen many fins with calves in Irish waters. One suggestion is that these could be immature individuals just hanging around for a few years before they go off to mate, but some of them are very, very big, and don’t look immature. We’re really not sure.”

To answer the questions that surround the movement and migration of fin whales in the Celtic Sea, the IWDG hopes to tag individuals for satellite tracking. “We want to tag five or six because some tags might fail to transmit. The tags work for about 100 days. I think they’ll show the whales following the fish eastwards along the south coast, and then we’ll get to see where they go when they move offshore,” Berrow explains.

finwhalebeached

Apart from their migration, there is another major question mark surrounding these animals – just why did it take us so long to realise they were here? Even though concerted whalewatching efforts only began in 1999, surely fishermen, yachtsmen, and seaside locals would have noticed these 20m titans and their giant blows sooner? Dr Berrow thinks that they might actually be relatively new arrivals to our south coast. “We've spoken to fishermen and farmers in the area, and I get the impression that maybe they (fin whales) weren't around so much in the past. Maybe it's because they were hunted so intensely, and what we're seeing now is an increase in population after protection was introduced,” he says.

Past locations of whaling stations and old sighting records don’t point to a long established Celtic Sea population. “The old whaling stations in Ireland were along the west coast. The one in Mayo was located there, for example, because it's the closest point to the shelf edge, which we know oceanic Atlantic fin whales migrate along.  The odd fin whale was caught in the 1700s, but mainly around Donegal, but there are no historical records of them off the south coast. So this habitat could be relatively recent,” Berrow explains.

In the past, fins were a major target for whalers. Initially, they were simply too fast for fishermen, as despite their massive size, they are among the ocean’s fastest swimmers, and can travel at speeds of up to 22 knots (40km per hour). But in the nineteenth century the invention of the steamship and explosive harpoon made them easier prey. Fin whales catches increased through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and by the 1950s and 1960s around 30,000 were being caught annually, most in the southern hemisphere. Around 600 were landed at the Norwegian whaling station at Inishkea, Co. Mayo. Padraig Whooley thinks fins were “probably the mainstay” of the whaling industry off the west coast.

But if their appearance in the Celtic Sea is part of a global ‘bounce’ in their numbers, just how many were in the north Atlantic before whaling began? There is considerable debate over the figures.  Estimates based on ships’ logbooks have put the number at between 30,000 and 50,000, about the size of the current population. A recent estimate based on new genetic methods, however, suggests the figure could be far higher.

Researchers in the US examined samples of mitochondrial DNA from north Atlantic fin whales and humpback whales, and compared the genetic “distance” between these two species of the same family. Then, they measured the genetic diversity within the fin whale population. By doing so, they were able to calculate how many breeding females would have been required to account for the genetic variation they found, and thus they could estimate population size. They concluded that there were once a staggering 350,000 fin whales in the north Atlantic.

Critics of this study have pointed out that this could have been the maximum size of the population at any point in history, and that the reduction to their current numbers might have been caused by natural factors over hundreds of thousands of years, long before whaling began.

Nonetheless, fin whale populations do appear to be recovering towards pre-whaling numbers, and Dr Simon Berrow believes the Celtic Sea would present an ideal habitat for recovering populations to colonise.  “They could be colonising a new habitat here along the south coast. The waters there are very different to what they used to be. There is massive productivity down there now that’s associated with the changing climate, with massive blooms of phytoplankton. It could be these oceanographic factors that have brought them here now,” Berrow says.

As news of the Celtic Sea’s fin whale population has spread, a fledgling whalewatching industry has sprung up in recent years. Currently, there are two operators running whalewatching tours from west Cork, with more expected to join them soon.  Whalewatching has the potential to be of massive benefit to local communities, and can provide a viable and sustainable alternative to fishing, but Whooley stresses the need for it to be done the right way.

“Here in West Cork the whalewatching industry is gaining momentum, but we need to try and avoid a situation which has too many operators working in the same waters, as concentrations of tourist boats may well have a detrimental impact.”

He continues: “Apart from the demise of salmon stocks, the second biggest threat to killer whales near Victoria (British Colombia, Canada) is commercial whalewatching. Research has shown that killer whales spend less time in the areas where commercial whalewatching boats operate, and that they also dive more and dive deeper and longer here. I don't think we're anywhere near that stage yet, but it does seem that whales have a preference for water where is no pressure. Of course if a fin whale doesn't want you around it will lose you remarkably quickly. It can dive for fifteen to twenty minutes and resurface a mile away. But that said, fin whales shouldn't have to go out of their way to avoid whalewatching boats.”

A policy document produced by the IWDG providing guidelines to marine wildlife tour operators has since been given legal status by the National Parks & Wildlife Service and the Marine Safety Directorate. The document sets out a variety of regulations, such as the speed whalewatching boats can travel at, how close they can approach whales and how long they can spend with them.

Simon Berrow believes there is “huge potential” for marine wildlife tourism in Ireland, citing Scotland as an example of a country that has successfully developed such an industry. Berrow would like to see a whole ecosystem approach taken in the management of the whales in Irish waters: “I spent a few years working in the Antarctic, and there, when they’re setting quotas for the krill catch, they don t just take into account the sustainability of the krill population, but also the amount of krill needed by predators. This isn't really in the mindset in the North Atlantic. The whole push should be on ecosystem management.”

West Cork and the south coast is now quickly gaining a reputation as one of the premier whalewatching spots not just in Europe, but in the world. Whooley recalls a recent day at sea when he encountered harbour porpoises, common dolphins, minke and fin whales. “You could have whale-watched anywhere in the world on the same day and you wouldn't have seen the same diversity,” he says. And if this is a haven for cetaceans, fin whales are certainly the jewel in its crown. But with pressure on these behemoths likely to grow as the area becomes more popular with tourists and enthusiasts alike, Whooley stresses the importance of ensuring adequate protection is in place. Especially when, as he says “so little is known about the ecology or behaviour of these fin whales in Irish waters.”

The website of the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group provides up-to-date news and records of whale and dolphin sightings and strandings, as well as information on whalewatching, IWDG events and courses, and species profiles. It can be found at www.iwdg.ie.

Channel 4 produced an excellent documentary about the fin whale that beached at Courtmacherry, Co Cork in 2009. Watch it here.

Moral dilemma: what will replace the church as our moral compass?

Irish Times, 19 January 2010,

Interviews by Jason Walsh and Lenny Antonelli

GERARD CASEY Professor of philosophy, University College Dublin

“I can’t understand people losing faith because of scandals. I’m not making light of what happened, but for me it’s not where faith comes from. Religion and morality are not the same thing, but for most Irish Catholics the two are one and the same. When you tell them the moral code associated with Catholicism is pretty much the same as in any religion, they find it hard to believe. “You have to get morality from reason – morals are either a set of conventions in a utilitarian way or a real code to live by. The problem with utilitarianism is that morality only survives when the going is good, otherwise it’s every man for himself. There is nothing specifically Catholic about natural law. When you look at what human beings are, you see they have needs and that means we know the kind of actions that are [morally] destructive.

“A classic way of looking at morality is from Confucian philosophy. “There are four concentric circles. The innermost circle is the basic, natural state where we individually are the centre of the universe. We understand this in children and find it quite cute, but it would be sinister in an adult. The next circle is the utilitarian level: we still want things for ourselves, but have to at least simulate an interest in others.

“The breakthrough comes at the next moral level – this is when you recognise that other human beings are exactly like you: each has hopes, dreams and fears. There can be a sense of shock when we realise this.

“The final circle is the transcendent, where the human world is understood in a larger context. Traditionally this has been religious, but it can be other things, such as politics, for example – anything that says there is a dimension above us.

“The key for us as individuals is to match up the emotional and the intellectual sides of our lives. It’s a developmental process and, to some degree, a pattern of habituation.”

ANN JAMES Secretary, Humanist Association of Ireland

“People are beginning to see that morality can’t be institutionalised, and to give power to an institution that claims the moral high ground is a mistake. Morality should be discussed and argued, otherwise society becomes closed. We’re seeing the whole of Irish society opening up to other views.

“I think there’s a basic morality aligned to empathy. The law is there to protect everybody, and quite clearly it has failed – nobody should be above the law, but also nobody should be beneath it.

“There are certain things that are pretty universal, such as measuring harm: if something does no harm, that’s a simple ‘good’. I want life to be good, so the best way to do is to make the lives around me better.

“Even on the issues that are the source of disagreement, such as abortion, there has to be an openness to discussing the morality of it. I just want a morality that respects people’s right to think for themselves, and doesn’t place one value system in law above one another.

“I regard it as unethical to try and take away freedom of speech, as the Government is doing with its blasphemy legislation.”

AILEEN FYFE Historian of science, NUI Galway

“In the 19th century, the time of evolutionary theory and thermodynamics, people like the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley were arguing strongly for science’s role in society. In Huxley’s time, it was widely accepted that morality stemmed from religion, but he was an agnostic – he actually invented the term – and wanted to show people that it was possible to say no to religion but still be an upstanding, respectable citizen.

“Today, morality and religion can be separated, and Huxley’s fears might seem paranoid. One reason for this is that as soon as Europeans discovered more about the rest of the world’s population, they started asking questions about what moral code people outside Europe had.

“The early missionaries sought to ‘convert the heathens’, but those who stayed abroad began to realise that while other cultures might not be Christian, most still look after their families, take care of older members of the community, and have restrictions on killing.

“This got early anthropologists thinking that morality might be a human construct rather than something that comes from a universal religious truth.

“Huxley believed in the idea of a non-religious moral code for society – and he believed that such a code would probably look quite similar to Christianity. One reason Christianity has been successful is that it helped meet the needs of human society. But, for him, ideally you wouldn’t base such a code on stone tablets, but rather look around and ask what is the best way to live.”

DAVID McCONNELL Professor of genetics, Trinity College Dublin

“Isn’t it remarkable that so many different societies have similar morals? What we call Judaeo-Christian morality is effectively universal. As a humanist, this says to me that it’s not that God created man but that man created God.

“Science has a lot to teach us about morality, but it has to be thought about. You can now construct a family tree of all life on Earth, for instance, and all people have a common human relative just 200,000 years ago. We do have a lot of information that says genetics affects behaviour, [but] I don’t know of a direct genetic explanation for ethical principles, and any that are found are unlikely to be predictive.

“Ireland has been dominated by Catholic ethics and, for the most part, they’re good ethics. The problems arise when we try to prescribe ethics in too much detail and exclude personal responsibility.

“The most difficult, and interesting, areas are when good people disagree. For example, there are two archbishops of Dublin, and one would allow for abortion in certain circumstances and the other would never allow for it.

“My thinking on this is that you must allow for substantial personal discretion – you can place various constraints on things, but each situation is actually different and must be analysed and thought about by the people most involved.”

MARTIN DOWNES Professor emeritus of biology, NUI Maynooth

“In many ways the church has been effective at giving guidance on specific issues, but not so good at encouraging people to develop their own sense of right and wrong. There’s been a lack of emphasis on the notion that in the end it’s the individual who’s responsible. I’m inclined to think individual conscience has to replace the church as our moral authority, though it seems an awfully big job to ask a nation to suddenly engage with questions of ethics that it hasn’t before.

“Is there some way that a country trying to underpin its economic, social and political development with clear principles could go about it? What would happen if the Government tried to get general agreement on how we are to proceed in terms of morality? Science changes our choices by producing more information, and the hope would be that by doing that it can enable us to make better ethical decisions. I don’t think science can provide much with regard to how you go about making decisions, though it may be that science has something to contribute, in terms of psychology, on where we get our sense of right and wrong from.

Gallery: four days on the Royal Canal

In June I took a four day trip up the Royal Canal in a Canadian-stlye canoe with my girlfriend Ruth. I wrote it about it in the Sunday Times, and I'll post that article here soon, but for now here are some photos from the trip. The first three are by Eddie Colgan.

Kerry bushcraft photos

Ireland canal photo set