White House Chronicle

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An Authentic Dublin Pub Crawl in Celebration of St. Patrick’s Day

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People who are no more Irish than the King of Siam or the Paramount Chief of the Bumangwato will, come March 17, celebrate an island nation famous for its skill with words and its fondness for drink.

It all began, of course, in the 5th century with a Romano Christian missionary from Britain, Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. As a bonus, he chased the snakes out of Ireland. Where the fondness for something brewed, distilled or fermented came from is not recorded, but it is an intrinsic part of Irish life.

Life in Ireland often revolves around having a drink. It is treated much as we would treat having a cup of coffee. In Dublin once, I ran into a friend who I had not seen in a year: a serious man with a big job in government. He thought, in the Irish way, that we should catch up over a glass of something, although it was just after 10 in the morning. “I think Murphys is open,” he said as naturally as someone in an American city would have said, “There is a Starbucks on the next corner.”

In Ireland St. Patrick’s Day was, until recent years, a somber religious festival. It was in America where the idea that the Irish could have a huge craic, as the Irish call a party, took hold.

Even so, the biggest celebrations, to my mind, are in Boston, Chicago and New York. But there are celebrations everywhere the Irish have set foot from Hanoi, Vietnam to Ushuaia, Argentina, off the tip of South America.

But if you are very lucky, you will celebrate in Dublin. And what better way than with an authentic pub crawl.

I know just a bit about pub crawling in Ireland because I was lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful Dublin pub crawl in 2012. It was not a bunch of celebrants struggling from one pub to another, but rather a work of planning art.

I was in Dublin for an engineering conference which coincided with the 60th birthday of one of our number, Sean O’Neill — by birth an American, but otherwise through and through Irish.

A pub crawl was organized by the engineers with precision: times, distances, and safety procedures.

There was a map and the 12 pubs were selected with fiendish skill. The early ones were fairly far apart. But as the crawl went on, they grew closer together, and the last two were next to each other — in consideration of possible loss of mobility.

We were urged to go with a buddy, eat something about halfway and, in case of pub fatigue, to call a taxi.

If you get to Dublin and want to try the engineers’ crawl, here are the pubs in order: Toners, O’Donoghues and Doheny & Nesbitts on Baggot Street; Dawson Lounge on Dawson Street; Kehoes on St. Anne Street; Davy Byrnes on Duke Street; O’Neills and O’Donoghues on Suffolk Street; The International Bar and Stags Head on Wicklow Street; The Long Hall on Georges Street; McDaids and Bruxelles on Harry Street.

I think I made it as far as The Long Hall, one of Dublin’s most famous bars, before I cried uncle, refused a last drink and hailed a taxi. Others persevered and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale.

You probably know that Ireland is so lush that its flora is supposed to support 40 shades of green.

Well, there is another shade of green not mentioned in the tourist brochures. It is the 41st shade and you see it in the bathroom mirror the day after a pub crawl. Surely, some of you will see it on March 18.

 

Photo: DUBLIN, IRELAND – SEPTEMBER 5, 2016: The Long Hall on September 5, 2016 in Dublin. The Long Hall is a famous landmark in Dublins cultural quarter visited by thousands of tourists every year. Editorial credit: Millionstock / Shutterstock.com

St. Patrick’s Day and the Delicate Matter of Irish Immigration

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St. Patrick’s Day is hard upon us. The green dye is being added to the beer in bars across the land, while more than 40 million Americans will remember their linkage to the Old Sod, even if that is sometimes tenuous.

Aye, it’s time for a wearing of the green and we will do it on March 17, in the great celebration of a small Irish nation and its relatively obscure patron saint.

On St. Paddy’s Day, we are all Irish whether we are, in fact, African-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American or any other hyphenated American. We all watch the parades, maybe take a drink or two and wear some green, from a hair ribbon to a whole suit.

If Britain has a special relationship with the United States, then Ireland has an extra-special relationship.

As has become a modern tradition, the taoiseach — as the prime minister of Ireland is called — will visit the White House and lobby President Donald Trump.

The prime minister, Enda Kenny, heads Fine Gael, which is more conservative than Ireland’s other two parties. Kenny will, one supposes, present the customary bowl of shamrock and talk of the long history of Ireland and the United States. Ireland has always looked to the United States as kind of safety valve — a place where Irish immigrants could find safety and hope, particularly during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-49.

Kenny also will have a purpose: lobbying Trump on behalf of the 50,000 Irish who are in the United States illegally — “illegal aliens” in the lexicon of the administration.

But the Irish PM will eschew that term in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” He will want to invoke that long history of migration from Ireland to America. He might even point out that the “wearing of the green” was illegal during the Irish Rebellion against the British in 1798.

The language is as loaded in Ireland as it is here. The Irish like to refer to their paperless migrants to the United States as “undocumented” — suggesting a slight matter of language, rather than an implicit indictment of “illegal.”

By contrast, and several Irish commentators have pointed out, workers in Ireland who do not have papers to work or live are referred to by Irish politicians as “illegal aliens.”

The Irish intelligentsia and many Irish analysts say this is racist. That the unspoken message Kenny will convey to Trump is: Take it easy on the Irish undocumented, they are white and Christian. Not brown or Muslim. We are you.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole rages against what he sees as the race preference, and points out that the Trump administration is loaded with those of Irish descent. O’Toole calls them the “enablers” of Trump’s immigration policy: They are advisers Steven Bannon and Kellyanne (nee Fitzgerald) Conway, press secretary Sean Spicer and homeland security secretary John Kelly — as was short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Another Irish journalist, Cillian Donnelly, makes the same points and fears that Kenny, who has said his mission is to speak up for the undocumented Irish in America, will become complicit in the Trump immigration stand and the deportation of “brown” migrants.

Trump himself has links to Ireland. He owns a huge golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, on County Clare’s Atlantic coast.

Ironically, there he is enmeshed in a dispute over building a seawall. It seems when it comes to Ireland, Trump believes in global warming and sea rise: He has tried to get permission to build a 1.7-mile-long wall to keep severe storms from flooding his resort.

Trump’s request to build the original masonry wall were turned down, and he is pushing for two more limited rock and steel structures. Environmentalists are opposing them, too. They maintain that these structures will not end the erosion, but rather will increase it with time, destroying the dunes. However, Trump is the largest local employer and his wall is supported locally.

If all this is enough to drive you to drink, St. Patrick’s Day is a good time to start. Slainte!

Ireland Diary: Dublin and Kilkenny

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By Linda Gasparello

“But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.” — James Joyce, “Dubliners”

Ireland is always an adventure.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have traveled there frequently since the early 1980s. Our first trip, on which we drove with friends from Dublin to Dingle, gave us some of our most memorable impressions of the country.

Nearly every summer from 1989-2010, we traveled to Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland, to participate in the Humbert Summer School (named after one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert), founded by journalist John Cooney for “the study of Ireland and Europe.” It was a Brigadoon-like event, attracting academics, politicians, musicians, writers and many faithful regulars – who Cooney called “Hubertians” — from all over Ireland and abroad.

The school’s sessions took place in many Mayo venues, from Moyne College and Murphy Brothers Bar & Restaurant in Ballina to the Golden Acres pub in Kilalla and Bessie’s Bar in Kilcummin — a beachead on the county’s northern coast, where a French expedition commanded by Gen. Humbert landed on Aug. 22, 1798, in an attempt to assist Irish rebels during the 1798 Rebellion.

During those summers Humbertians did a lot of thinking, heightened by a lot of drinking.

Shortly before the election, Llewellyn and I traveled to Ireland to attend the Association of European Journalists’ (AEJ) annual meeting, held in Kilkenny this year. The association skirts the high cost of holding meetings in Europe’s big cities by holding their annual in small ones, like Maastricht, Netherlands, Burgenland, Austria and Sibiu, Romania.

In addition to its serious purpose, the AEJ annual meeting has much of the fun and good fellowship as did the Humbert School. A few of its members were also Humbert regulars, including our friends David Haworth, who lives in Brussels and writes for The Irish Daily Mail, and Joe Carroll, who covered Washington and the Clinton White House for The Irish Times.

“There’s no friends like the old friends,” Joyce also wrote in “Dubliners.”

Two Celebrations in Dublin

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The 12th-century Kilkenny Castle from the porch of the Rivercourt Hotel. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Christmas is nearing in Ireland. The shops on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare — and one of the widest in Europe — are brimming with decorations and merchandise. But even as the Irish start celebrating the holidays, they have not yet finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on the path to its independence in 1922.

The holiday light vines on the lamp posts in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street illuminate banners that say, “Dublin Remembers 1916.” Walk down the street to Eason and you’ll see the bookstore’s front display tables laden with 1916-23 histories, from Fearghal McGarry’s “The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916 to Tim Pat Coogan’s “DeValera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow.”

Abeba, an Ethopian woman visiting Dublin, leafed through Sinead McCoole’s “Easter Widows: Seven Irish Women Who Lived in the Shadow of the 1916 Rising.” She told me, “ I took the 1916 bus tour. Now I want to read about women of the time.”

She had taken Dublin Bus’s “The 1916 Tour — Beyond Barricades,” in which on-board actors and film immerse passengers in the rebellion. “Dublin was in flames, and you really felt like you were there,” Abeba said.

The previous day, a bank holiday, my husband and I had taken the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. One loop included Kilmainham Jail, where the seven signatories to the declaration of The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic were executed from May 3-12, 1916.

Our driver told us that he had named his daughter Grace, after Grace Gifford, a gifted artist and cartoonist who was active in the Republican movement. Gifford married her fiance Joseph Mary Plunkett in the jail’s chapel only a few hours before he was executed for being a leader of the rebellion.

As we neared the jail, our driver sang a refrain from “Grace,” often sung by the late Jim McCann of The Dubliners folk band fame:

Oh, Grace just hold me in your arms, and let this moment linger,
They take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love, so we must say good-bye.

Our driver told us that Kilmainham is a very busy site, and prebooking tickets is essential, especially during this centenary year. However, he said, there is easy access to the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where our tour ended and where the Rising began.

“It came under heavy bombardment for a week. You can still see the bullet holes on the pillars and walls. Gutted by fire, it did not reopen until 1929,” he said.

The Rising began on April 24, 1916, and lasted six days. Early Easter Monday, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, under the command of Patrick Pearse, a Gaelic scholar, schoolteacher and poet, and James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, with others seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now called O’Connell). On the building’s front steps, Pearse read the declaration, addressed to “The People of Ireland” and signed by himself, Connolly, Plunkett and four others.

Almost 500 people were killed in the Rising, more than half were civilians. More than 2,600 were wounded during heavy British machine-gun fire, shelling and fires that left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, amid much strife and bloodshed. But the Irish state has retained close ties with Britain and is the only European Union country that it shares a border with.

It is sad and ironic that Ireland is not only celebrating the start of the British exit from their country in 1916, but it is also concerned about the start of the British exit from the EU – Brexit — next year.

Kilkenny’s ‘Medieval Mile’

If you’ve ever been daunted by a walking tour of a medieval European city, say Prague, then Kilkenny’s “Medieval Mile” will delight you.

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The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 and named after the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. Photo/Linda Gasparello

“Good goods sometimes come in small parcels,” Colette Byrne, CEO of the Kilkenny County Council, told the Association of European Journalists.

Just a mile-long, circular walk in Kilkenny (Ireland’s capital in the Middle Ages), Byrne said, will take you past a number of its marvels, including the 13th-century St. Mary’s Church, whose graveyard has a rare and significant collection of tombs, and The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. The abbey is famous for its five-gabled, stained glass Rosary Window.

Along the mile, there are plenty of non-medieval buildings, notably the limestone Thosel Town Hall which dominates the High Street. Its name comes from two old English words “toll” meaning tax, and “sael” meaning hall. Built in 1761, it served as a custom house and guildhall – today, it’s where Kilkennians pay their taxes.

Across the street from the town hall, there is the Hole in the Wall: a tiny tavern in the inner house of a Tudor mansion built in 1582, and Ireland’s oldest surviving townhouse. Around 1660, in order to gain access from the High Street to the rear of the inner house, a hole was punctured in a wall.

“It was a favored haunt of Captain Arthur Wesley, who was stationed at Kilkenny barracks before being seconded to the British army in Spain and India, and eventually becoming the Duke of Wellington and British prime minister. Later it developed a reputation of ill renown due to duels, arguments, highwaymen, etc., and this led to its eventual demise,” a Hole in the Wall brochure says.

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Standing in front of a pair of ghoulish murals, a visitor asks a local woman for directions to the High Street. Photo/Linda Gasparello

On St. Kiernan Street, behind the High Street on the circular walk, there is an inn with a notorious past: Kyteler’s. Ireland’s only witch trials took place in Kilkenny in 1324 – supposedly, they were Europe’s first witchcraft trials. Dame Alice Kyteler, an innkeeper and moneylender, was accused of using poison and sorcery against her four husbands, having amassed a fortune from them. Before she could be tried, Alice pulled strings and fled to England, but her maid was flogged and burned at the stake.

Down the street from Kyteler’s, there is long mural, commissioned by the Keep Kilkenny Beautiful Committee in 2013, with ghoulish images: ghosts, black cats with bared teeth, and a warning that “witches are amongst us.” Behind it, another is in the works: a blue-faced woman in a white dress, lying on her back, either asleep or dead. This mural seems to float above the one in front of it.

Kilkenny is a haven for muralists. Cast your eyes up on the High Street, and you’ll see a cheery pink wall of the Smithwick’s Brewery. Cast them down, on a corner of Friary Street, and you’ll see a black cat with a curled tail, waiting to cross your path.

On all our trips to Ireland over the years, Llewellyn and I don’t know how we missed this magical little city.

→ See more photos from Kilkenny in our photo gallery here.

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A man pushes a stroller down the High Street, as a painted black cat waits to cross their path on the corner. Photo/Linda Gasparello

When Ireland’s Pain Was America’s Gain

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By Llewellyn King

There will be the “wearing of the green” all over the world come St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. Nowhere more so than in Boston, Chicago and New York. That’s right, not even in Ireland; although they’ve gotten the hang of their own saint’s festival in recent years.

For centuries, until the Americans showed their cousins in Ireland how to party on St. Patrick’s Day, it was a somber, religious feast day.

St. Patrick was what was known as a “Romano-British” missionary, who went to Ireland in the 5th century, probably in the latter half of the century. We know this from fragments of his own writing. He settled around Armagh, in the north of Ireland, and became the first bishop of Armagh, Primate of Ireland. He described the Irish as “heathen men.”

Myth tells of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. But myth has many faces in Ireland, and is part of the charm of the Irish – a charm that has affected the whole world, and stirs people far removed from that small and at times very troubled island to wear something green, drink and pay homage.

Not the least of the celebrations this year, as in recent years, will be in London, where so many of the agonies of Ireland had their genesis. The English — and I was born into the British Empire — have treated Ireland savagely down through the centuries. Oliver Cromwell, the English reformer, wrote of his incursion into Ireland, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” At the battle of Drogheda in 1641, about which Cromwell was writing, the English killed some 3,500 Irish patriots. Hard work with broad swords.

William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant ruler who became William III of England, Scotland and Ireland, invaded Ireland on July 1, 1690 to fight massed Catholic forces, led by James II, the deposed Catholic king of England. The two armies faced each other across the River Boyne, just to the north of Dublin. William won the battle, but his victory left a divide between Irish Protestants and Catholics which exists in modified form to this day.

The “wearing of the green” most likely dates from the uprising of 1798, when the Irish tried to throw off the English yoke with French help, and were soundly defeated by Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who was seething from his defeat in the American Revolution. The Irish, who were rounded up and hanged in groups of 20 a day by some of the English general’s officers, showed their defiance by wearing something green — often a shamrock in their hats. The English considered that an offense: sedition.

Cornwallis also oversaw the formal incorporation of Ireland into Britain. But to his credit, he fought with George III (remember him?) over Catholic emancipation, and for a while resigned his commission.

More horror from England was on the way — and persisted essentially until Irish independence in 1922. During the potato famine (1845-49), England refused to allow relief ships with grain to land in the belief that the famine was part of a natural order, as laid out by the philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus. One million people died as potatoes were their only sustenance.

In this case Ireland’s pain was America’s gain. Hundreds of thousands of Irish fled starvation for a new life in America. This diaspora changed Ireland and America, forever. It is how 50 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.

The Irish in America began to celebrate the national saint of their motherland in their new land — and so was born the St. Patrick’s Day joyous celebration.

To my mind, the final Irish reprisal against England is not the world recognition but that Irish writers, writing in English, not the Irish language, have had such an incalculable impact on English literature. To take a few names at random Beckett, Behan, Goldsmith, Joyce, Shaw, Synge, Swift, Wilde, and Yeats.

In Ireland, there is an endless flow of wonderful language. The Irish will never say “yes” or “no” when they can give you a sentence with a flourish, which makes the mundane poetic.

Once in Dingle, my wife asked a waiter: “Is the fish fresh?”

He answered, “If it were any fresher, it would be swimming, and you wouldn’t want that would you?”

Also in Dingle, when I asked an elderly man whether the pub he was sitting outside of was open, he replied, “He would hardly be open now.”

The English occupied their land, but the Irish occupied their language and added to it with their genius. Erin go bragh! — For InsideSources

St. Patrick’s Day and the Computer-Aided Drinker

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I’m going to get right to it: If you want to do it up right on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, you really should go on a pub crawl. That's the time-honored way to enjoy a good deal of what the clergy in Ireland have been known to refer to as “the devil’s buttermilk.”
 
The important thing about a pub crawl is the crawl – visiting a number of establishments and not tarrying too long in any one. A real pub crawl in Dublin would begin as early as 2 p.m. and last until six or more establishments have been visited. Ideally, this should be accomplished on foot and in the company of friends, who can look out for each other in the the event that sudden loss of vertical stability should occur.
 
The crawl establishes a kind of discipline on the proceedings. You are advised to drink the native brew of Ireland, stout, usually Guinness, but there are other brands like Murphy’s; or beer, the most popular in Ireland is Smithwick's ale from Guinness, but other low- carbonation beers are quite acceptable. But for safety, stay with Guinness, it's slow to draw (properly done, it can take five minutes or longer to get the head just right) and you can’t drink it too fast.
 
As I've done on many a night in Ireland, along the way you might have a whiskey, Bushmills or Tullamore Dew. But these are, as Thomas Jefferson warned, “ardent spirits” and can cause an abrupt deterioration in vertical stability.
 
A good pub crawl can be undertaken anywhere in the world where liquor is sold. Remember it's not about getting drunk, but rather about good company and holding off inebriation; you parry with the demon drink, not succumb to him.
 
You may wonder how such indulgence, such frivolity, such selfishness, such pampering of the dark side of self, such willing abandonment of Christian rectitude, such sinning can take place during Lent? Rest easy, both the Anglican Communion (the Church of Ireland) and the Catholic Church give dispensation for drinking on St. Patrick’s Day. Probably, they calculate the sinner will be punished more on March 18 than he can offend the rules of God and man on March 17.
 
There are few parts of the world in which St. Patrick’s Day is not celebrated. Would you believe the wearing of the green and the flooding of the pubs is prevalent in Argentina?
 
For nearly 70 years, the pubs of Ireland were closed officially on the great day after over-celebration in the country in the early part of the 20th century. But the Irish started to feel left out of their own festival and overwhelmed by the greatest of all St. Patrick’s celebrations: the convulsion that shakes New York every year in memory of the man who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 4th century, and possibly drove the snakes out of Ireland.
 
I'm excited to report on the eve of this St. Paddy’s Day, science has wrested pub crawling from the poets and musicians and handed it over to mathematicians and engineers. At a conference in Dublin of largely PhD engineers that I was oh-so-lucky to attend last year, the engineers, having apologized that the timing was truncated and that the boozy perambulation couldn't start after lunch, but had to be delayed until evening, we were issued a pub crawl itinerary with engineering-type specs — and an awesome thing it was!
 
There were details of when the celebrants and “spiritual advisers” should arrive at each of the 13 pubs, how many drinks they should order at each pub, the precise time they should head to the next pub, and how to watch for danger and slowdown. It even suggested at which pub a sandwich should be eaten, and at which point of danger a taxi should be summoned and the whole project delayed a year.
 
The engineers laid out a vigorous tour of Dublin — one refueling station after another noted, no substitutions allowed. The engineered-pub crawl has a lot to be said for it; call it “structured imbibing” or “computer-aided drinking.” It even has a default position – home to bed. Cheers! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Ireland: Trouble in Threes

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BALLINA, Ireland–Even by Ireland’s legendary standards for rain, this summer has been particularly wet. But it not the weather that accounts for the gloom in the Emerald Isle. As heavy rains were pushing the River Moy, which flows through this Co. Mayo town of 8,000, above flood stage, the attendees of the Humbert Summer School (a kind of think tank) were pondering this solemn subject: “Can Ireland be redeemed?” The answer was maybe, if there was a single answer.

Ireland is in the grip of two crises and is facing a third—three crises that undermine its national self-confidence and imperil its economic future.

Crisis One: A shattering report on child abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland has found that it was systematic and extended possibly over centuries; that it was known and tolerated by the highest levels of government; and that it was also known and tolerated by the Vatican. Indeed Tom Arnold, head of Concern, a Dublin charity, told the conference that the Vatican did not act because it believed the church would be undermined and it wanted a devout Christian country to counter the secular nature of neighboring Britain.

The child abuse scandal, which dwarfs church sex scandals elsewhere, is alleged in Ireland to have been more pervasive, more institutionalized and to incorporate cruelty, especially by the notorious Christian Brothers, a disciplinary educational order. For the Irish, with their large families and sense of family values being paramount, the full extent of the scandal has been devastating, causing a great swath of the population to wonder how long they have been living a lie.

Crisis Two: The Irish economy is in tatters and, by most analysis, will not recover in tandem with the rest of the world.

In recent years Ireland has enjoyed prosperity, the like of which it has never known in history. It boomed partly because of European Union structural funds and partly because of American computer companies, which located there to take advantage of the population’s high literacy rate. Computer firms flooded cities like Galway: once a dreamy seaport city more famous for its bookshops than its millionaires.

The boom caused Ireland to be dubbed “The Celtic Tiger.” Ireland was growing faster than any other economy in Europe.

With dynamic growth came overheating and property speculation. And with property speculation came banking insanity. The banks were eager, too eager, to lend against inflating property values. Sound familiar?

But now, the banks are being bailed out and the taxpayers are howling. Justice Vivian Lavan told me that no houses are being sold because no one knows how to value them. Unemployment, under control for 15 years, is back and climbing beyond 13 percent.

On the horizon is Crisis Three: Once again, the Irish have to vote on the Lisbon Treaty: a document that tidies up odds and ends in the structure of the European Union. A year ago, Irish voters rejected the treaty to the considerable annoyance of the rest of the EU and the embarrassment of the Irish government.

Now Irish objections have been met and a new vote, critical to Ireland’s continuing influence in the councils of Europe, is scheduled for Oct. 2.

Ireland, with a population of only 4.5 million, has worked tirelessly to extend its influence through “good offices” and diplomatic maneuvering. Now, that is imperiled. Ireland may well again bite the hand that has fed it generously.

In favor of the treaty are the main Irish political parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail); the Irish business establishment: and the inward investors, including American companies like Shell Oil and Dell. Against is a strange coalition that includes the nationalistic Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Irish Republican Army), extremely conservative Catholic groups, Greens and a band of hippie activists. On paper they are not much, but they defeated the Lisbon Treaty last June. They argue that Europe will legalize and promote abortion, imperil Irish neutrality, raise taxes and dilute labor laws. Proponents say there are cast-iron guarantees on all of these issues, but detractors say they are not worth the paper they are written on. The Oct. 2 referendum on the treaty will test a battered island. –For North Star Writers Group

 

Obama Diagnosis, Won’t Prescribe

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President Barack Obama starts from a pretty compelling argument: In the rich industrialized nations, the rich and the poor should be able to afford to get sick. They surely will. Disease does not means test.

 

But after that, the health care argument gets away from the president. In fact, he hasn’t made his own argument.

 

This week Obama has argued passionately for reform, as he did in his prime-time news conference Wednesday night. But we have yet to hear his personal view of what an American health care system should look like. One suspects that it is the solution that dare not speak its name: a single-payer system, a government system. Yes, a–dread word–socialist system.

 

The empirical evidence from Australia to Ireland, Canada to Norway is that this is the way to go. Every country with a national health service pays less for health care per capita than does the United States. And not one has contemplated canceling their system.

 

Yet it is a concept that may be too radical for Americans. It also may be too late in the evolution of the health care industry to nationalize the system.

 

Canada had the most difficulty nationalizing health care of any major country, and is still groaning. Canada did not plunge in; it waded into a state system, and put it all together in an age of sophisticated medicine. But it is not without problems: for example, Canada failed to comprehend that if everyone who needs to see a doctor sees one, more doctors will be needed. There is a chronic shortage of doctors in Canada.

 

Britain, by contrast, nationalized its health system after World War II, when medicine was simpler and the process was easier. It was also a time of post-war idealism. Today, like most state systems, it functions well enough but not perfectly. Well enough for Britons living abroad, including in the United States, to fly home for major surgery.

 

The world of single-payer does allow for private insurance, and it is flourishing in countries like Ireland. This provides a second tier for those who feel the basic system is too rudimentary. Under this arrangement if you want a procedure for a non-life-threatening ailment, which would require a long wait in the state system, you visit the specialist–called a consultant in the British Isles–and the insurance company picks up the tab. The idea is that the well-off get what they want, and the rest get what they want.

 

Obama’s problem is that he can diagnose the problem but has failed to prescribe a solution that he appears to believe in. He is waiting for Congress to produce something that he can sign onto, called reform, and that will not expand the budget. Where European and some Pacific countries have allowed private systems to piggyback on state systems, Congress is struggling with the reverse and the president is going along. Congress is planning to have the state piggyback on the employer-paid system.

 

The idea that employers should carry the health care burden probably goes back to the 19th century when railroads, coal mines and ships found it best to employ a doctor to keep workers on the job. Today, it is an incongrous burden on American firms in an age of globalization.

 

The three principal schemes for a new day in health care seek to preserve private insurance as primary, mandate portability, demand that commercial insurers do not reject pre-existing conditions, and provide some kind of safety net from the government. And, yes, the whole new edifice will be revenue-neutral.

 

At his press conference, Obama was ebullient, funny at times–the very picture of a man about to get what he wants. By contrast, in the halls of Congress, the lawmakers who are supposed to deliver this package are despondent. They do not know what the president will accept and are not persuaded that huge federal spending will not result. There is real political fear on Capitol Hill. Wednesday night did not allay it.