Today's Ireland is built on political compromise. The UK could learn from its success
Brexit wounds. Covid failures. Fairness in retreat. Nationalism on the march. It is hard to find reasons to be cheerful about this country’s future as a successful state in the modern world. Yet in the west there is a gleam of hope. To see the kind of politics that the UK needs to learn from in this time of troubles, look no further than Ireland.
To many, this will seem counterintuitive. The suggestion that Britain can learn from Ireland flies in the face of the former’s long self-image of dismissive superiority towards “John Bull’s other island”.It upends the centuries in which
British governments saw Ireland as a problem to be mastered and controlled, not as an island offering solutions, insights or lessons.
That is precisely why learning from Ireland is important. The lessons embrace habits of thinking and habits of doing. The two are umbilically linked. The habit of mind is the one that the president of Ireland, Michael D
Higgins, set out here last week when he wrote of the post-sectarian “ethical remembering” in which modern Ireland is reflecting on the centenaries of the state’s birth between 1916 and 1922. The habit of practice is the constant search for political compromises in 21st-century relations within these islands. These are currently exemplified by the row over the Northern Ireland Brexit protocol, but there are many others.
Neither of these habits is a magic wand to wave over complex and jagged problems. In the end, trying to learn and apply the arts of acknowledging different perspectives and seeking to accommodate them honestly are what matter most. This is what the late John Hume and others embarked on in a deeply divided Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Today it is the same approach that British politicians need to reinvent if the multiple national, political and cultural divisions in 21st-century Britain are to be overcome and turned to constructive and shared effect.
This honest grappling with differing approaches and interests has borne fruit in many aspects of Irish life, north and south, in recent decades. The consequence is an Irish nation that, at least to this occasional visitor, often seems far more at ease with itself as a modern state than the UK or any of its component parts can claim to be. Given Irish history, that is an achievement to envy and study.
These habits of mind and practice were not conferred arbitrarily upon Ireland by some beneficent deity of good governance. They had to be hard won in the crucible of experience, through processes of trial and error, amid the passage of time and at the expense of a lot of blood, much of it innocent. An extraordinary new book, The Dead of the Irish Revolution, puts names, dates and details on each of the 2,849 violent deaths that occurred between 1916 and the end of 1921. A similar volume, long out of print, called Lost Lives, attempts something similar for the Troubles, during which more than 3,500 died.
These deaths form a potent reminder that Ireland and Britain were once places of harder-edged identities and allegiances than they are today. Some of these still endure, and should not be denied. Others have evolved into what Higgins called “post-sectarian possibilities for the future”. Nevertheless, modern Britain remains a reluctant pupil. It is too hung up about its own supposed greatness. Higgins is right that until the UK engages more openly with its own imperial past, little is likely to change. Britain urgently needs a more capacious and more pluralist view of its history if it too is to be a nation at ease with itself.
And yet the UK shares the same experience as both parts of Ireland in multiple ways. A century ago this spring, Britain partitioned the island into two. The result was a violent civil war in the south and decades of sectarian rule in the north, ending in the 30-year Troubles. Until well into many of our own lifetimes, Ireland – and sometimes the UK – lived with the often lethal consequences. Yet the centenary of partition, like the years of Irish revolt that preceded 1921, is not being much considered in Britain.
At last, in the 1980s, a search for better ways began on both sides of the border, and in Britain too. The result, in 1998, was compromise, change and peace. It is an approach to politics which today’s British government urgently needs to reaffirm, as do Northern Ireland’s own leaders.
The Northern Ireland protocol is a compromise in the tradition of 1998. It guarantees the soft Irish land border that helped end the Troubles, in return for post-Brexit port checks on various goods, mainly food, travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It has been in force for less than two months, and it is facing increasing threats from unhappy unionists. The protocol is indisputably messy. But, in its imperfect fashion, it can still work. Neither the British government nor the European Union has a spotless record on implementing it. But they both insisted again this week that they are now committed to de-escalating the tensions.
This has to be the right approach. That doesn’t mean it will succeed. Brexit has set a bull loose inside the delicate china shop of post-1998 power sharing. But the deliberately overlapping ambiguity of the protocol is more valuable than dangerous. It represents another step away from the zero-sum approach. It is neither an isolated example nor something that only applies in the supposedly special conditions of Ireland. It is a way of political thinking and action that Ireland has learned from bitter experience and which, if only it was learned and applied here, may hold the key to the future of the UK too.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
“My mother: I should be able to see her whenever I want,” a man pleads to a judge at the start of the splashy new Netflix movie I Care a Lot. “She doesn’t need to be in a care facility, she doesn’t need a court appointed guardian. She has a loving son to take care of her. I just don’t understand how the court can entrust my mother to this stranger.”
Increasingly anguished as an icy Marla Grayson, played by Rosamund Pike, looks on, he pleads: “Miss Grayson forced my mother into the home when she made it very clear that she didn’t want to go and now she’s auctioned off my mother’s house, her car, her personal belongings and she uses the proceeds to pay herself. And now Miss Grayson’s barred me from seeing my mother at all. It’s a goddam nightmare. She’s kidnapped my mother!”
The film is fiction but the story all too familiar to thousands of Americans whose elderly parents have been entrapped by little scrutinised guardianship programmes. Many speak of a sense of helplessness in the face of system rife with the abuse, neglect and profit-driven exploitation of vulnerable people.
The opening scene of I Care a Lot, for example, would strike a chord with Doug Franks. When he and his brother Charles could not agree where their 89year-old mother Ernestine should live, the dispute led a judge to appoint a guardianship company to take over her care. It was the beginning of a four-year nightmare.
Franks, whose visits to her were restricted to just a few hours at a time, recalls: “They would go out and buy meals like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken for my mom. She needed to have a heart healthy diet and she wasn’t on one, so she was on food that was actually causing her demise sooner than it should have.”
Guardianship describes a legal relationship created by a court between a guardian – a family member or a professional – and a person who is usually elderly and deemed to be of diminished capacity. Guardians wield remarkable power, often deciding where that person should live, how much access family members should have, when to seek medical care and how to spend their retirement savings.
An estimated 1.3 million adults are under the care of guardians who control about $50bn of their assets. The little understood system has long suffered a lack of oversight, transparency and basic protections.
Karen Buck, executive director of the SeniorLAW Center in Pennsylvania, said: “It is the state coming in and taking away your most fundamental decisions, your fundamental right to autonomy, and giving those decisions to someone else who may be a total stranger to you. So it is a very drastic measure and it just simply doesn’t get that much attention until there is crisis and scandal.”
This a reflection on the way that older people are not valued in America, Buck added. “Most of the people under guardianship are older and in this country we have historically not valued the lives of older people, not valued their healthcare sufficiently, not valued their long term care sufficiently, not valued their independence and their contributions.”
In I Care a Lot, Grayson is an unscrupulous court-appointed legal guardian who defrauds her older clients and traps them in her care. She divides the world between predators and prey with herself firmly in the former category. Although the movie, costarring Peter Dinklage and Eiza González, soon veers into deliciously improbable dark thriller territory, its initial premise is grounded in harsh reality.
Sam Sugar, founder of the organisation Americans Against Abusive Probate Guardianship, says: “I’ve seen previews and it accurately depicts what a guardian does and how they act with absolute impunity and brazen cold hearted no-care-whatsoever as long as they win and as long as the winning means they get the money of the person they protect.
“It’s an astounding phenomenon. I was shocked when I learned about it 10 years ago and 99% of America, 99% of the world has absolutely no idea how dangerous it is and how easy it is for anyone to be trapped in it.”
He noted the case of Rebecca FierleSantoian who, at one time had 450 guardianships in Florida, was last year arrested on abuse and neglect charges following the death of a 74-year-old man under her guardianship in Tampa. A local law enforcement agency said she had obtained an order to cap the man’s feeding tube, ignoring doctors who told her this would probably cause his death.
Sugar, author of Guardianships and The Elderly: The Perfect Crime and one of the sharpest critics of the system, continues: “What happens in these cases is litigate, isolate, take the estate, cremate. In other words the lawyers identify, or have identified for them, a potential victim, go to the judge and the judge starts the process of evaluating someone for incapacity. It’s all done in secret; no one shares any of the information.
“The affected person or their family has little or sometimes no notice at all that this is happening and, by the time they’re aware of it, it’s too late to even hire a lawyer. The whole system is based on one thing only and that is a transfer of wealth. No one in the court system cares about the elderly person and if you try to fight that system, you will become bankrupt.”
He adds: “The elderly are stripped of their rights: every dime, every asset, every holding, every account. All goes under the control of a guardian who is neither monitored nor supervised.”
Yet the issue has received far less attention than child abuse. Precise data is notoriously hard to come by. Each of the 50 states has its own system, court records are often sealed and there is a lack of standardised reporting. In Nevada, for example, the situation used to be “pretty egregious”, recalls Barbara Buckley, executive director of the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada.
“We had one for-profit guardian who was taking advantage of individuals and families though predatory behaviour,” she says. “She would knock on people’s doors and say there’s now a guardianship placed and I’m your guardian and proceed to take them out of their lovely home, sell all their memorabilia and put them in a horrible place, isolate them.
“And then when the family members found out about it, they would contest it and the guardian’s attorney was very wily. They would say, ‘Oh, well, this family member has an anger problem or had a drug problem’. And they would somehow make it seem like they were the fair one, the neutral one, the one that had no blame.”
In 2015, the Nevada supreme court created a guardianship commission to examine the guardianship system and introduce reforms. One is that when someone files a guardianship, a legal counsel without a profit motive is appointed for the proposed protected person, who gets a say in choosing their guardian and what the rules are.
Buckley says: “That’s our office and the key to the statute is that it’s independent. We are not paid for from the estate. We have no vested interest in seeing it drag on or have our own financial motive and we operate by principles that we feel the proposed protected person has rights. Just because someone’s under a guardianship doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to control key aspects of their own care. Someone doesn’t become a piece of chattel.”
In I Care a Lot, an elderly woman is put in a care home by Grayson and is soon denied her mobile phone or even the right to step outside for fresh air. Her angry resistance to the incarceration is seen as proof that she is unstable and poses a risk to herself and others.
Franks, however, did finally win his mother’s liberty after lobbying officials testifying at numerous hearings, although he says by then more than $200,000 had been withdrawn from her trust fund, partly to pay her guardian’s lawyers.
“She was terribly impacted but she got over it,” says the 63-year-old from Acworth, Georgia. “I had to give her an enema and I had a care worker there. To do something like that for your mom is like, ‘Jesus, I don’t really want to do this’, I had to, whatever it took. I got her so that she was regular. That’s how much I loved her and how much I didn’t want her to be in pain and these people didn’t give a shit.”
Franks, a tech consultant who continues to push for guardianship reforms, becomes emotional as he recalls how he was born with dyslexia and his mother did everything she could to get him help after school. “For something like this to happen to her and for me not to fight wasn’t an option.
“I was never going to stop until I freed her and I did. I got her free and had the opportunity to be with her for 45 days of freedom and she died in my arms. That day was one of the best days we’d ever had. We laughed and joked and I was able to tell her I loved her and that everything would be all right. She was about two weeks away from being 95.”
I Care A Lot is available on Netflix in the US on 19 February and on Amazon Prime in the UK
with existing filtration systems, such as those in wastewater treatment plants (most of which are unable to sufficiently filter out microplastics).
In the future, he plans to test out whether he could use the device to make a self-cleaning filter for ocean engines. “It could be built into the already existing water intake and outlets of the ships used to cool the engines, so as they’re taking in the water and as they’re driving around the oceans, they could be cleaning the water that passes through those engines,” he says. (In autumn 2020, Suzuki Motor Corporation announced plans to introduce a microplastic filter into its watercraft outboard motors using similar logic.)
Using bottom feeders as ‘living vacuum cleaners’
Dr Juan José Alava, an expert in marine eco-toxicology and conservation, believes the answer to the microplastics problem could already be in the environment. Alava studies organisms he calls “living vacuum cleaners”, including bottom feeders such as sea cucumbers, as well as the much smaller organisms that make up “epiplastic microbial communities”: strains of bacteria able to break down synthetic material, some of which originally evolved to metabolize naturally occurring polymers such as lignin and wax, and others which evolved to eat plastic garbage specifically.
“The idea is to identify communities of bacteria and try to enhance them – not by incorporating a new mix of genes created by humans, but by stimulating them to break down plastic,” he says. When an organism can eliminate more plastic than it accumulates in its body or waste, it becomes “our best ally” in the fight against microplastics, says Alava.
A screen that can catch ‘plastic dust’
Marc Ward first became concerned about microplastics over 15 years ago while studying threats to wild marine turtle populations in Costa Rica. Not only were turtles swallowing toxic microplastics, but the secluded beaches on which they nested were choked with plastic particulates.
Ward began surveying beaches in both South America and near his home of coastal Oregon, sifting through sand with a static-charged screen able to capture plastic particles as small as 50 microns – essentially plastic dust. In some areas, he found 10 pounds of microplastic in each square meter of beach.
The last straw for Ward came when, shortly after co-authoring a paper on marine plastic toxicity, he brought his two-year-old to their favorite beach in Oregon only to watch the child immediately try to put a piece of plastic garbage in his mouth.
Now, Ward works with a team to filter thousands of pounds of plastic out of Oregon’s beaches every year as part of his non-profit, Sea Turtles Forever’s Blue Wave initiative.
It may be that filter-cleaning sand at the beach is akin to chipping away at a mountain, and that ocean currents can undo such work in one fell swoop, yet Ward retains a positive outlook. “I know we are not the solution to ocean plastics,” he admits. But he is extracting vast amounts of plastic from beaches nonetheless.
Plant-based nets than can collect even the tiniest particles
A new kind of water filter made from plant-derived nanocellulose mesh has been created by scientists at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.
Nanoplastics – as tiny as 0.1 micrometers in diameter – have long proven particularly difficult to remove from drinking and wastewater given their minute size, and they have been found to accumulate in the tissues of humans and other organisms.
Hopefully, they have finally met their match. The porous, colloidal structure of cellulose allows the material to bind to nanoplastics without using any chemical or mechanical interaction, says Tekla Tammelin, a research professor.
The gist (which this short video on the technology captures) is that cellulose filters can help researchers study nanoplastics, as well as keep them out of our water when integrated into wastewater filtration systems, or even laundry machines, where they could catch the tiny microfibers from synthetic clothing that comprise a subset of microplastics. And while these findings are in their early days yet, the nanocellulose product has already garnered industry interest.