Waiting for the Sun

Myself and Steve Ryan spent a night on the hill of Tara for midsummer last year and wrote about it this year. My strongest memories from the night were cold, wet feet and doubling the speed limit on minor roads at 4am to make sunrise on time.

It’s five ‘o clock in the morning on top of a hill in the middle of Ireland and some guy with a beard, a ponytail and a Native American print poncho comes up to us and asks, “Why are you here?” We turn and give him a quick reply, “curiosity”.  He glances at the girl beside him. Her name is Cello and she’s from Madrid. She’s holding a long, knobbly piece of wood with glass and stones embedded into its sides. She smokes black tobacco and her teeth are stained yellow. Cello smiles a lot. She glances back at him and then they both roll their eyes. “Your spirit lead you here,” he says, “You came here as part of your spiritual journey.”  Cello nods knowingly and then reaches into the pocket of her hemp blouse to fish out tobacco for another smoke.

‘Gong man’, her boyfriend, starts to disassemble his giant golden gong and calls her over to help shift the huge disc back to his car. He came from Newport Beach in California to be here and his baby blue headdress and face paint are the brightest colours on the hill this morning. ‘Shanno’ walks by, or prances even, dressed head-to-toe in green leaves and body paint. He speaks in poems that sound vaguely like Led Zeppelin lyrics and flits about the hilltop like a PR intern who’s just discovered networking. Everyone likes ‘Shanno’ on the hill. There are old ladies too, not too dissimilar from Grandma Death, barefoot with long white-hair, cradling giant quartz stones in their arms and mumbling to themselves.

The scene is like something from a never-before-seen Guinness advert. Any moment now you expect to see a band of fairies invading the horizon swinging hurley sticks over their heads with a stirring musical accompaniment from Enya.

People have been coming to the Summer Solstice at Tara since the time of the Tuatha De Danann and the ancient High Kings of Ireland. This is our first one. And with so much at stake for the Boyne Valley, with the proposed motorway due for completion in July 2010, there is a sense around the hill that most people are here not for themselves and the spiritual benefits they may reap but for Tara itself.

The Spanish firm Ferrovial Europa have been contracted to build the M3 motorway in Ireland. The fifty kilometre stretch of road will cut approximately nine to twenty nine minutes off the average Navan to Dublin commute, which is a huge amount of time and an enormous improvement in the quality of life of a tired commuter who may well find themselves with the guts of an extra hour to play with every day. The road falls into the government’s National Development Plan and Irish ministers are under no obligation to order a full excavation of the area. So all that’s left for people interested in the preservation of the hill to do is try and drum up some international support or maintain a solid vigil.

Laura Grealism is known locally as ‘Mrs. Tara Watch’. She’s been camping on and off beside the Lismullen Henge since 2005. The Lismullen Henge is one of the sites in the Tara complex currently being demolished to clear a space for the stretch of motorway. Twelve years ago Laura was sneaking out of her bedroom window and sleeping in trees in the Glen of the Downs valley to protest the expansion of another stretch of road. She looks like Lara Croft in her leather hunting hat and raincoat, albeit a Lara Croft who smokes tobacco and drinks cans of bargain basement beer. “I’ve been through it before and I’m not afraid,” she says, “I have hope. We have some good legal angles and public support is getting higher.”

The road is being built by a mixed group of Polish, Russian and Irish labourers. Strong men, built for digging earth. Since joining the protest Laura’s made a bizarre friendship with them. “If we’re not there on time they give out to us and say, ‘Where were you, you’re half an hour late’. I think they like having us here as it means that sometimes they don’t have to work.”

Internationally, Colm Tóibín has written for The New York Times arguing against the building of the motorway and in February of this year the American Smithsonian Institute listed Tara amongst fifteen must-see endangered heritage sites in the world. That the list includes an ancient village in Peru and the battered Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is an embarrassment to a wealthy, peaceful country like Ireland, and the view from abroad is of a country, too eager to develop and lacking in respect for its own heritage.

The procedure to truly appreciate the splendour of the Summer Solstice on Tara is to arrive before sunrise and stay up till after sunset. That can be as long as sixteen hours so the faithful bring tents, blankets flasks of coffee and buckets of sandwiches and granola bars.
Those who’ve travelled from abroad have been camping around the hilltop for days. It’s an exposed place except for clusters of thin trees and boulders, and last night a lot of the tents were blown over in the wind. Everyone looks chapped and frozen as a result, but as the sun rises on the dawn of Midsummer’s Day, breathing heat into the chill morning, the mood improves and the drums start banging. The crowd of around a hundred and fifty drop their shawls and blankets on the wet grass and throw their arms into the air shouting “glory” and “yes” and the Irish word for beautiful, “álainn”. They hug and embrace and say prayers, and then they head off for veggie breakfast and herbal teas in the local café, which only seems to do any sort of sustainable trade on the longest and shortest days of the year.

During the afternoon, there are ceremonies and recitals but like any group of like-minded individuals thrown together in the outdoors, there’s a lot of match making going on too. The small channels that form paths between the long grasses are like catwalks for hippies. Barefoot is this summer’s footwear of choice; gentlemen must have beards, long curly hair and Aladdin trousers while ladies should be wearing multi-layered, flowing dresses, each one a different primary colour with have silver pendants and medals in their naturally clean hair.

Iwona, a Polish au pair, came here last year with a group of friends and was snagged by a Galwegian drum maker. She’s now engaged to him and they plan to come back and have their wedding ceremony on the hill. “Tara brought out a spiritual side to me that I never realised existed,” she says, “Even though I’m not from here, I feel roots on this hill.”

That afternoon there’s a grand druidic ceremony. ConConnor the arch druid of Leinster, who comes from the rough Dublin suburb, Clondalkin, and does a steady line selling replica druidic clothing and accessories, and whose grandfather was a lieutenant in the IRA, leads the show. They pile a small mountain of quartz into the centre of a circle and beat drums around it while a mixture of barefoot children, women in Marino wool, men in flowing cloaks, a group of teenagers with Downs Syndrome and a blind man dance in the centre. Quartz is of major significance for the Irish pagan community. They draw a power from it. Not only does the stone feature prominently in the Newgrange passage grave but its Irish name, ‘griancloch’ translates as stone of the sun. It’s used extensively in healing and spiritual ceremonies and is believed to cure what traditional medicine can’t.

ConConnor rallies the faithful with “Wake up” and “Get up”. He has a staff, a white beard and a long white cloak – a type of Gandalf figure for the unwashed. Later back at his tent, where he sits upon a wooden stool in the awning and greets visitors, fans and the occasional drunk redneck asking him if he’d mind turning his mates into frogs, we ask him how someone becomes a druid.

“First thing you have to do,” he says, “is throw away your TV.” He doesn’t talk like a druid, more like a taxi-driver, any second now you’re expecting some comment about foreigners, football or how much money ‘the wife’ spent in the sales. Then he says to throw away your mobile phone and all other technological barriers. “There’s a spiritual path for you he says,” honing in, “Even you can find your own spiritual destiny if you’re true to yourself.”

The Tara faithful operate with the same amount of zeal and confidence as Jehovah’s Witnesses. And the hill of Tara is a most fertile ground for claiming souls today.

Maura from New Jersey again inquires about the direction of our spiritual path – at bus stops you carry on a commentary about the weather, on Tara the small talk is sacred. This is Maura’s twelfth time flying back from the States for the Summer Solstice. “I’m a white witch,” she says and it’s very hard to believe her. Dressed head-to-toe in sensible raingear in a very conservative navy, wearing a little make-up and a cookie cutter hair do, Maura looks more like a home economics teacher than a white witch. “Well it’s impractical to go around in a cape all the time,” she explains. Maura didn’t think she’d make it out to Ireland this year on account of what she calls the ‘credit punch’. But with all that was at stake for Tara she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if she’d not showed face.
“I don’t mind the camping or the rain, but trying to stay awake all day on the longest day of the year gets harder and harder for me,” she says, “I’ll probably grab a few naps between now and tonight.” And with that the white witch from New Jersey walks, not flies, to the other side of the hill.

As night approaches on the longest day of the year, the Hill of Tara is invaded. The Druids and witches; the spirit guides and the hippies disappear to different corners on the hillside and hoards of locals descend. The area becomes like a festival car park, where those who couldn’t get or afford tickets drive up anyway just to get drunk in close proximity. They bring guitars and alcopops. There are young guys going up to the girls saying, “I’m a hippie. Do you want some free love?” and then pushing each other into the muck. The girls just ignore them and concentrate on their out of tune guitars and their Cat Steven’s covers.

People from all over Dublin, in jeeps and family saloons, drive up to watch sun go down on the longest day of the year. If the motorway goes ahead, they’ll be able to make the trip in less than half the time it took but they’ll probably have to say goodbye to quiet, starry nights like this. When the floodlighting is erected and the traffic starts rolling by, the scene will be transformed terribly.

The Hill of Tara is in the process of being awarded UNESCO World Heritage Status. Minister for the Environment John Gormley has said that he doesn’t see the construction of a motorway affecting this decision and that UNESCO will grant the award regardless. If the application succeeds, and it looks likely to – the site can be dated back to 4000BC after all, which is even older than Newgrange – Ireland will have the unique pleasure of having a motorway inside the border of one of its World Heritage Sites.

The next morning traffic is heavy on the N3 from Dunshaughlin into Dublin City. Back on the Hill of Tara, some people are packing up and some are staying a day or two longer. All in all less than a few hundred people showed up for the longest day of the year, compared to the 17,000 Meath residents sat in traffic the next morning, that figure’s miniscule.

Pragmatism is king when the chips are down, but Ireland’s heritage county, where Tara is located, will soon be invaded by three motorways feeding our nation’s hunger for progress. It’s hard to argue that the progress isn’t necessary but we don’t have to look further than Stonehenge in England to see an example of the damage wrought by unchecked progress. Pollution damaged and noisy, perched between two major roads, the prehistoric monument is less like the birthplace of pre-Christian Britain and more like a purpose built and easily replaceable, civic artwork.

The Forgotten People

The forgotten people
Sunday, May 11, 2008 - By Conor Creighton
With its biblical connotations and low priority in the medical research stakes, few are aware that hundreds of thousands of people are still suffering from the living hell of leprosy.

The day is hot, the lights are low, and the operation room smells so strongly of iodine that you could be swimming in the stuff. With a few dashes of the blade, a strong tug on the tiny white bone and two thumbs up from the patient, it is all over. The toe is free.

Doctor Krishna places it on a small tin tray for the patient to see. It looks like an offering, or the last cocktail sausage on the plate – the one etiquette dictates never gets eaten. The patient smiles. This is not the first toe he has had amputated, nor will it be the last.

‘‘We’re a bit like a prison for young offenders,” Doctor Krishna says as he sews the remaining skin up with thick fishing line. ‘‘We take them in, we treat their wounds, we care for them till they’re better, but we know they’ll be back.”

‘‘When were you here last?” he asks the patient, who looks down at his foot. ‘‘Last year,” he says, ‘‘for the little toe.”

It’s business as usual in Lalgadh leprosy hospital in the south-eastern Terai Plains of Nepal. Lalgadh is the busiest leprosy hospital in the world, yet it has a staff of only three doctors and seven nurses.

On an average day, among the hundreds of people who present with various complaints, they will discover up to 12 new cases of leprosy. These range from patients with the small white spots on their arms which denote the early stage of the disease, to those who are – literally – being eaten alive.

Such people are generally so incapacitated that they arrive at the hospital gates in ox carts.

For Krishna, the worst part is the smell. ‘‘The rotting flesh from the lesions smells like nothing else. When we go out into the field looking for leprosy sufferers, the people who have to leave their village or go live in the woods, the smell is often how we find them.”

Leprosy has existed for thousands of years and the disease was once present on every continent in the world. Medication introduced in the 1940s and a global improvement in immune systems led to a dramatic reduction in its prevalence in the latter half of the last century. There are now fewer than two million leprosy sufferers worldwide.

However, it remains an infectious disease which, it is believed, could be passed through the respiratory system. ‘Believed’, because even though leprosy has been around since Old Testament times, there is still little known about it. Doctors working to cure and prevent the disease base much of what they know on assumption.

A vaccine is yet to be developed and the only treatment for sufferers is a trial and error-style multi-drug programme so severe that side effects include hepatitis, psychosis and a violent reaction where the skin peels off.

While the respiratory route is considered the most likely way of transmission, doctors aren’t sure how people contract it. Another belief is that leprosy is passed through touch and newer theories suggest that it may even be transmitted by insects, who in turn might have picked the disease up from chimpanzees or armadillos – which are carriers but don’t actually get infected.

Despite the horror of the disease, leprosy doesn’t look like it will become any less of an enigma any time soon. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has called it a neglected disease, meaning that funding originally intended for research into the disease has gone elsewhere, which is not good news for sufferers.

The fact is, the disease could do with some good PR. While cancer has Bill Gates and Aids has Bono, leprosy has no celebrity support. It’s an unattractive field for researchers, and doctors don’t want to specialise in a subject that involves lancing ulcers and amputating legs on a daily basis. As a result, it’s slowly being forgotten about.

A previous WHO plan to eradicate leprosy by 2000 was shelved for the more realistic strategy of eliminating it. For a disease to classify as ‘eliminated’ it must be contained so that only one in 10,000 people in any given population catch it; eradicated means it is wiped off the face of the planet.

Today, the disease has been successfully eliminated in all but four countries: Mozambique, Tanzania, Brazil and Nepal. While poverty is a huge barrier to its elimination, the tangled mess of myth and fiction that surrounds the disease has also hampered work in the area by creating a culture of stigmatisation, from the country’s doctors right down to its rickshaw drivers.

A ‘leper family’ will have difficulty finding jobs, partners for their children or even sympathy, as the predominant Hindi culture supports the idea that leprosy is retribution for wrongs done in a previous life.

Lalgadh aside, doctors and nurses from every other hospital in southern Nepal turn away anyone who as much as displays warning signs of leprosy.

Here, the biblical image of crumpled characters in rags and loose bandages, ringing bells to warn of their approach, is not just something for the history books. ‘‘We find a lot of our patients at the end of the road, out on the east-west highway. We don’t know how they get here. People must just put them on the bus and the drivers know to drop them off outside the hospital,’’ says Krishna. ‘‘Some of them can barely walk.”

However, leprosy is only mildly contagious and further, only affects people with low immune systems. The chance of a healthy Nepalese person catching leprosy is remote; the chance of a western person catching it is about as likely as a piano dropping from the sky and landing on top of their head.

The US reports new cases of leprosy every year, but all from recently arrived African or South American immigrants. In the remote countryside of Nepal where subsistence agriculture is the norm, malnourishment is common, and the only certainty is the daily blackout, maintaining a strong immune system and avoiding disease is not easy. At Lalgadh hospital, nothing is easy – let alone getting there in a country rocked by regular periods of political unrest and strikes.

A bundh is the Nepalese word for a strike. But unlike strikes in the west, where people down tools for the day, in Nepal people continue to work but close the roads to all traffic. Also, unlike our strikes, the impetus does not come from the workers but from the militant groups operating in the area.

Lalgadh hospital is situated at the junction of a major conflict zone between the indigenous Madheshi tribe fighting for autonomy, the Nepalese military and the Maoists rebels fighting for control of the country.

On the day we arrive the Madheshi have called a bundh and as we travel to the hospital we pass a burned out shell of a bus – its driver having ignored the previous bundh a week ago. Two people were burned inside the bus. To ensure that this doesn’t happen to us, we have white flags and a giant blue ‘H’ for hospital attached to our jeep, and a member of the Madheshi tribe rides up front.

The hospital began as a wooden hut on a patch of scrubland infested with scorpions, tarantulas and cobras, but in 1994 it began to be funded by the British and Irish charity, the Nepal Leprosy Trust. Fourteen years later, it has expanded to house over 150 in-patients, the hospital staff and all their families. The scorpions, however, are still here.

It is a beautiful, tranquil location for a hospital which is filled with sufferers of one of the world’s most gruesome diseases. Birds sing in the trees, wild garlic delivers a strong perfume, and buffalo sleep in the long grass. On clear days you can make out the small white tips of the Himalayas from the top of the watchtower.

In the cool evening, staff play football with their children on a proper pitch with goal-posts, the patients sit down together to eat huge plates of dahl baht and rice and the only moans in the middle of the night come from Jackals skirting the perimeter fence.

The hospital was the idea of English missionary Eileen Lodge, who worked to feed and educate the children born in the leper colony in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

One of the children she helped was Krishna, as both his parents and grandparents had leprosy. The 40-year-old doctor had been surrounded by leprosy all his life, but had never shown any symptoms of it. ‘‘I think that’s why my resistance is so strong,” he says, before joking: “But I still check my arms for spots every now and then.”
Krishna says his mother had deformed claw-hands and her leg had to be amputated. ‘‘It was really hard growing up. My father had no deformities and worked and my mother was on her own raising the family. Other children called me ‘leper’ in the streets,” he says.

The doctor was put through school with the help of a Swiss and a Dutch charity, after which time Lodge sent him for training as a leprosy doctor. The hospital’s lab technician is also a son of leper parents, as are many of the nurses.

While pretty from the outside, inside the hospital’s wards and operating rooms remind you of something you might have seen on M*A*S*H: chicken wire for windows, beds that are more rust than metal and an X-ray machine so old it’s dangerous for both patient and operator.

The doctors perform skin grafts and amputations under single-bulb lamps that give off about as much light as a mobile phone. They have two theatres: the ‘‘clean’’ one and the ‘‘dirty’’ one. The dirty one is where they do amputations. When the daily blackout commences, all lights are run off a small generator, but if the roads have been closed by whichever tribe is protesting that week, then they can’t get fuel for the generator and the hospital is effectively shut down – thankfully this doesn’t happen too often.

Despite the fact that they do a job no one else wants to do, lack of funding means the medical staff at Lalgadh work for half the salaries that they would get in a state hospital. Yet the level of care that they extend to the patients at the hospital would lead you to believe they were running an exclusive clinic for rich patients.

How leprosy begins
Leprosy starts in the peripheries: toes, fingers, eyelids and skin. Someone with leprosy feels no pain, just the sensation that bugs are crawling up and down their skin, followed by the slow loss of feeling in certain parts of their bodies.

Limbs don’t fall off – they rot. It’s an incredibly slow process, described by the patients at Lalgadh as a ‘‘living hell’’. It doesn’t kill you like other diseases do. Left untreated, an Aids patient can die within a year, but with leprosy you can live a long, long life.

Bakumari, a tiny shell of a woman with short grey hair and limbs that poke out from under her sari like the branches of a blackthorn tree, is one of the most critically affected patients at the hospital. She can’t tell you how old she is, but can say she was born the same year as the great earthquake of Nepal. That took place in 1934,making her 74 years old.

Bakumari, who has had leprosy for 14 years, says she ‘‘thought it was a curse of God’’. Part of her hospital treatment involves education about leprosy; teaching her that it’s not a form of divine punishment or karma but a simple disease. ‘‘I know that leprosy is a disease,” she says, ‘‘but I still think maybe I was cursed.”

It’s hard to disagree. Bakumari has no sensation in her feet or hands and is blind since her disintegrated eyelids left her exposed to infection. Flies land on her nose and eye-sockets but she doesn’t feel them. A cobra could slide out of the grass and wrap itself around her feet and she wouldn’t have a clue. This intelligent old woman is physically less capable than a two-year-old.

The saddest thing for the staff at Lalgadh hospital and all those working in the field of leprosy is that Bakumari’s physical destruction could have been prevented easily.

‘‘When she first saw the signs of leprosy,” Krishna says, ‘‘she covered herself up. She was ashamed. When we found her, she was living by the edge of a riverbank in a small hut, all on her own.”

If Bakumari had entered the hospital in the initial stages of the disease, she could have retained feeling in her limbs and the use of her eyes by entering its multi-drug programme, and not have lost her feeling or the use of her eyes. Instead, she travelled to see witch doctors and medicine men who sprayed her in chicken blood and convinced her to hide her leprosy.

But a leper covering up their skin doesn’t fool anyone for long. As the feeling disappears from the skin, a person loses the ability to protect themselves and they don’t notice when they get a cut or a burn.

They can walk on broken glass and not know. Ulcers form in the soles of their feet and they only find out when the smell of rotting flesh catches up with them. Bakumari’s community recognised she had leprosy from the smell and sent her away to live on her own.

Blind and with no feeling apart from the most acute pain, she had to forage for wood, light fires and boil water on her own. ‘‘I was ready to die there,” she says, ‘‘I had decided that would be the place I would die.”

When she was discovered by the Lalgadh field team, Krishna spent hours treating her, removing the rotting flesh and ulcers around her knees and feet. With no family she now refers to him as her father.

Fieldwork, he says, is the future of leprosy treatment. If the doctors can get out into the countryside and check people for early signs of leprosy, then they can stop the disease before it has caused irreversible nerve damage. If people can be organised to take care of themselves, even better.

In Kuwarampur, about half an hour’s drive from the hospital, a self-help group is run with seven people who are cured of leprosy but have been left with the physical deformities of the disease. Their feet and hands need daily attention to avoid infection and further damage, so they meet up in full view of the local community and wash and rub oil into their skin.

Up to two years ago, such an open meeting would not have been possible, but the Kuwarampur leprosy sufferers have managed to rejoin the community they were once sent away from. They’ve defeated the stigma of the disease and with the help of the hospital, have set up a micro-financing system, bought buffalos and rickshaws, and entered the workforce again.

They are also educating those around them about the need to get treatment for the disease early.

Their hard work pays off when a patient arrives at the hospital early. Ram is 14 years old, and when his uncle spotted the tell-tale white spots on his face and arms he sent him to the hospital. In six months, Ram will never have to worry about leprosy again, and will have no physical deformities or nerve damage. He’ll be able to go to school, work and have children.

Australian Graeme Clugston oversees operations at the hospital and is the only non-national staff member. ‘‘If we get the message about self-diagnosis out there,” he says, ‘‘then we won’t have people coming in here with ulcers and rotted flesh any more.

One day in the future, we won’t be a leprosy hospital, as there’ll be no need for one.” Clugston’s words underline the fact that global numbers of leprosy are dropping rapidly. Only 250,000 new cases were discovered in 2006, a drop of over 40,000 from 2005.About 10 per cent of these new cases were children.

However, at Lalgadh hospital the numbers haven’t so much dropped as plateaued. ‘‘I don’t know why,” says Clugston, ‘‘maybe it’s because our reputation is so good and people are coming from all over Nepal and northern India to be treated. We are the only hospital in Nepal where the numbers aren’t dropping significantly.”

When asked if he can imagine the end of leprosy in his lifetime, Krishna says: ‘‘Leprosy is a mystery. It’s always been a mystery. In my lifetime, I don’t know. In my children’s, maybe yes. Please God.”

The WHO has a ‘Final Push’ strategy for leprosy elimination with self-diagnosis and multi-drug therapy at its core. The last big disease it managed to eradicate was smallpox, and that was nearly three decades ago.

Ridding the world of leprosy would be a major boon for an organisation which has not had much to show for its efforts since then. There is a sense of urgency among experts that now is the time to act, before the disease mutates or becomes resistant to the multi-drug therapy.

That sense of urgency is nothing like the feeling the Lalgadh staff have when they know that tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, they’ll have people arriving from dawn with stumps for feet and claws for hands, confused as to why the gods have punished them.

For more information, or to make a donation, visit www.nlt.org

In for the Long Haul

Sunday, January 25, 2009, Sunday Business Post - By Conor Creighton
The Argo K has a green deck. Anybody who knows anything about fishing will tell you that you don’t want the colour green anywhere near a sea-faring vessel.

‘‘Ah, but it’s a nice colour all the same. I’ve always liked green,” says skipper Andrew Markey, before being reminded that the Asgard II was also a nice shade of green, although it’s harder to appreciate that now -as it lies at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay.

Another no-no on board a ship is saying the word ‘pig’. Pigs can’t swim -if they ever attempt it their trotters slice back and forth, eventually slitting their throat, and they drown. Fishermen have been fired for simply saying the word. It’s also best that you don’t see a red-headed woman on the day you set sail. So when the Argo K pushes off and Howth Harbour recedes into Dublin Bay, I say a prayer that the last flicker of red I saw on dry land came from a bottle of hair dye rather than someone’s mother.

Superstitions aside, this is not a good time to be a fisherman in Ireland. Restrictive quotas, high costs and the crippling fuel prices of last year have turned many fishermen into hobbyists, rather than businessmen, as they simply aren’t making any money.

The Irish government has €66 million to spend on decommissioning Irish boats. Decommissioning makes sense for a skipper, who can get €500,000 or so, enough to set them up in another business on land. But that’s only if you own the boat. The bank owns the Argo K, and a house and a hefty mortgage are the only things preventing them from taking it back.

So the Argo K never stops. When the weather is favourable the boat just about kisses the harbour wall before relief skipper Adrian McDaid and a fresh crew swap places with Markey and head out again. Adrian is 32 and from Culdaff in Donegal. His crew are made up of three Egyptians, two Italians and, for this trip, two Irish journalists whose only ambitions onboard are to not be completely useless.

The Argo was built by the Russians in the 1980s; the K came from a man named Kelly who subsequently bought it. Andrew Markey bought it from him, and the boat hasn’t had a day of rest since. Adrian McDaid remembers it in Greencastle Harbour from when he was younger.

‘‘I used to think it was the greatest crock out there, and now I’m the skipper,” he says. It’s true that the Argo K has seen better days, but the only boats that stay pretty are the ones that don’t fish.

On land, McDaid is an ordinary chap who might do the odd silly thing, but at sea he’s a wise hunter who smells his way to the prawns which the Argo K fishes for, and pulls in two-tonne hauls when everybody else is catching ‘‘maggots’’.

After two hours of steaming, he drops the nets and six hours later brings them back in – and this is when all the drama on a fishing trawler unfolds. The rest of the time, which is spent sitting in the kitchen reading a two day old newspaper or smoking on deck, is all just a prelude to the main event. First the alarm rings, then the doors – giant metal slabs that drag the net under – are hauled to the surface. Then the wheels roll into action and the boat sucks the net into the hopper, and you see straight away whether the trip has been worth it or not. On a good week, each crew member might make as much as €1,000, but there aren’t many good weeks, and on this trip they won’t reach even half that amount.

The trawler is not only a hunting vessel, it’s a fish-processing factory at sea. The prawns get shovelled into buckets and then dumped onto rough tables, where their heads are ripped off and their bodies thrown back into the buckets. Everything else gets dumped overboard, but only the crabs and the occasional strong cod are still alive at that stage.

The boats leave mile-long trails of dead fish behind them, floating on the surface for the gulls to get fat. The EU calls it discard and is constantly coming up with new net sizes to try to eliminate it, but at sea it’s impossible to pick and choose what ends up in your net.

Mohammed, one of the older Egyptians, picks up a cod in both hands and looks pleadingly at McDaid. ‘‘And I’ll end up in prison,” McDaid shouts, and the cod goes back into the sea. Cod quotas for 2009 are down 25 per cent on 2008,yet fishermen argue that stocks are up and they should be allowed to fish them. The EU disagrees, yet over the course of the week, we will throw as much as €1,000 worth of cod back into the sea.

The processing can take anything up to five hours if your skipper is hunting well. You have to stand up for so long that your ankles swell, and you have to tear at your boots to get them off.

Your wrists swell up too and your back goes through short spasms of pain as you try to keep your balance while beheading a thousand prawns. Some of them fight back and bite through your gloves to the flesh, so you crush them and watch them die slowly. ‘‘There aren’t many Irish boys doing the crewing work anymore,’’ McDaid says. ‘‘Sure there’s way easier work to do on land.” The week before our trip, a Northern Irish fisherman who crewed the Argo K jacked it in. ‘‘There was no one to talk English to him. He was going mad,’’ McDaid says.

Hassan, Sahid and Mohammed play loud Egyptian pop on their mobiles, smoke cigarettes constantly and cook everything in hot spices. Ciro and Francesco, the Italian fishermen, are forever opening tins of tomatoes or capers, and their racy magazines make the Egyptians blush. McDaid is always on the bridge, jumping from binoculars to radars to horse racing on a tiny, eight inch screen. He’s been a skipper for just two years and is one of the youngest working in Irish waters. He has a good attitude, in spite of the current climate in the fishing industry. ‘‘It’s like they waited for me to get my skipper’s ticket before they brought all these quotas in. It would depress you, but it takes a lot to depress me,” he says.

The other skippers talk to each other on CB radio. Only 24 hours into the trip and two boats have already gone back to shore, deciding that their boats will be more profitable tied up than at sea. ‘‘A lot of the boys are talking about jacking it in. They reckon that if you don’t make your quota in six days, then you’re losing money,” says McDaid. Prawn quotas in the Irish Sea have gradually been dropping, and will drop a further 2 per cent this year. Extreme whitefish quotas, which threatened to destroy fishing altogether in the north-west, forced many fishermen to convert their boats to prawn trawlers and come to hunt in the same waters as the Argo K.

If you factor food, insurance, ice and diesel – which can be as much as €1,000 a day – into your costs, you can see why a skipper would turn around almost immediately if his first couple of hauls weren’t anything special. If you’re not fishing well, then your boat is leaking money fast.

Life on a fishing trawler is simple. Your day is divided into four, so every six hours the nets are brought in and the fish are processed. If you’ve free time, you either sleep, eat or climb up on deck to see if you can get phone reception and send text messages to the real world.

The crew have Irish girls back on land, and the Egyptians have pictures of them on their mobiles. ‘‘Irishwoman is crazy,” says Sahid. ‘‘They happy, then they drink so much, then they cry, then they drink again and they happy again.”

Sahid has a tattoo of a seagull on his bicep done in Indian ink. Above it he has the letter ‘M’ for his mother. With the money he makes, he travels back to Egypt every couple of years to see his family, but he likes Dublin.

There are two bunkrooms on the boat with four beds in each. They’re blacked out and right next to the engine room, so after a day or two of steaming at sea, they’re warm and smell like saunas. It’s a matter of stumbling into one and hoping there isn’t an Egyptian or Italian lying beneath you. We are all inhabiting the same little cells and breathing the same mouldy air.

‘‘The less you boys are sleeping, the more money I’m making,’’ McDaid says. He himself gets by on about two hours a day; the rest of the time he keeps going on instant coffee and roll-up cigarettes.

He’s friendly with the crew – they come up onto the bridge and watch TV with him- something that wouldn’t happen on most other boats. But he still works them hard. ‘‘These Egyptian boys get a bang and they lie down, but you could cut the arms off a Russian fisherman and he’d still fish,” he says.

Accidents do happen. Rusty winches, loose nets and short, sharp knives on an 80foot trawler out at sea are a recipe for them. McDaid tells a grim tale of one fisherman who was once torn in two between the metal net cables. And on only his second day as skipper, an Egyptian sailor took a hit to the head and had to be airlifted to shore, costing McDaid €1,500.

After a few days at sea you fall into a rhythm. You remember to stand with the roll of the wave so you don’t smack your head off doorways; whenever your hands are free for a second you get your tobacco out and roll a cigarette for later, and if you think you’re going to have more than half an hour to yourself, you head down to a bunk and get some rest.

There’s not much hygiene on board. We don’t wash and we never bother to change our underwear or socks, because everything already stinks of fish. Four days in and we hear a strange sound coming from the hall. Everyone looks around, a little worried, until Ciro pops his head up and says: ‘‘Francesco take a shower.” So that’s what that room is for.

The high point of a fishing trip is the halfway mark, because then you can start talking about the things you miss at land without torturing yourself. You can talk about women and know that, in just a few days, you’ll be in their company again. Adrian’s more focused on a drink – he sees a beer advert on the small TV screen upstairs and jumps out of his seat to grab it.

The Argo K does most of its travelling at night. Prawns come closer to the surface during the day and that’s when the best fishing is to be found. During the day, we sit tight in the same area, but at night the trawler skirts up and down the coast as far north as Carlingford Lough and east to the Isle of Man and the English coast.

We run through a series of big hauls towards the end of the week. It means more work and more decapitating prawns, but more importantly, it means more money for everyone.

Returning to shore, we’re one of only four boats left from a group of 20 which left a week ago. The rest gave up long ago. ‘‘It’s almost useless sometimes,” says McDaid, ‘‘but I love fishing. I love getting the experience.” Irish fishermen are few and far between, and in comparison to farmers, they have very little power. The future of Ireland’s most romantic and cursed industry looks bleak. A total of 75 boats were decommissioned last year. More will follow in 2009, and it’s hard to imagine more young Irish men signing up on a boat when they might only get €30 a day for the hardest job they’ll ever do in their life.

But McDaid has big plans. He’d like his own boat, he’d like to travel. ‘‘I was thinking of moving to Alaska,” he says. ‘‘To go fish for king crabs. I heard a boy went up there and bought his house after a summer. That’s some money.

Creating Kosovo

Creating Kosovo
Sunday, March 22, 2009, Sunday Business Post - By Conor Creighton

Last month, Kosovo celebrated its first year of existence as a sovereign state, and the party lasted for three days. But, independence from Serbia aside, the youngest country in the world doesn’t have much to dance about.

To start with, only 54 states recognise Kosovo’s claim to independence, and its economy is highly dependent on international props and remittance cheques. More worryingly, the UN recently reported that cocaine was now entering Europe through Kosovo, complementing the existing heroin and human trafficking trade routes in the country.

As for jobs, they’re thin on the ground and, with most of Kosovo’s industries on their knees from a lack of investment and modernisation, that doesn’t look like changing any time soon.

The outlook is bleak. Tales of corruption involving carrier bags full of dollars, high to ranking politicians and by-the-hour escorts travel through the bars and coffee shops of the capital Pristina. And the only pedestrian street in the city, Mother Teresa Street, has been built, unbuilt and rebuilt so many times that locals maintain they could have put a Kosovar on the moon for much the same price.

But while Kosovo may be lacking many things, one thing it does have is an abundantly young population. Over 70 per cent of the country’s people haven’t yet celebrated their 30th birthday, and it’s from within this group that the most dynamic and exciting attempts at nation building are occurring.

Networking in Pristina is a lot like a game of dominoes. If you meet one creative person in the morning, by the time evening draws near you’ll have met them all. The city is no bigger than Cork and its youth culture functions similarly to a collective, with focal points in half a dozen bars and venues in different parts of town. Here, away from the politics of their parents, young Kosovar artists and entrepreneurs scheme big.

‘‘Pristina is the ultimate punk city,” says Toton, a local music producer regarded by many as the person responsible for putting Kosovo and Kosovar techno on the musical map. ‘‘We have the politics, economic problems, social problems, not-so-peace-loving neighbours, lots of mud and lots of alcohol. It’s the perfect environment for creating.”

He’s not lying about the mud. Kosovo is built upon a rich collection of minerals and metals. In Tito’s time, the country was mined extensively, sending tonnes of dust and particles high into the atmosphere. Today, whenever it rains, the water that falls carries a dirty sediment that sticks to everything.

Toton is a resident DJ at Pristina’s most famous nightclub, Spray. He’s the head of PUG Music, a type of artists’ union that attempts to preserve local musicians’ livelihoods, and he is also one of the few Kosovar DJs to have been granted a visa to play abroad.

He has spun discs in some of the biggest clubs in Europe, but he doesn’t even have a record player in his own home. ‘‘Everybody shares and borrows equipment here. There’s absolutely no way we could afford to buy our own,” he says.

Isolated by visa and financial restrictions, young Kosovars have developed interdependence, like a family in the midst of a crisis. When a band play a gig, they have to bring along every piece of equipment they can scrounge from their friends. Some venues only provide a roof and a bar, and most of the time, if they’re lucky, electricity.

The same goes for gallery spaces. Rron Qena is an abstract artist who is known not only for his high-quality output, but also for defacing his own paintings. He installed a light in a damp cellar beneath a bar, hung up a few canvasses and was in business. You have to knock on a metal door to get in, and it’s as cold as a freezer, but it does the trick, and the fact that the paint perishes fast in these extreme conditions motivates Rron to sell his pieces as quickly as possible. Berna owns a bar called Llocks, which translates as mud; young Kosovars are anything but pretentious. She opened it two years ago, and it soon became the place for young musicians to get debut shows and for young artists to display.

Rron has a couple of his paintings on the wall; one of them, customarily, has a big chunk sliced out of the corner. As well as the bar, Berna is also responsible for the day-today running of a hip young station called Urban FM.

Berna, or Bassface as people call her on the radio, has been involved at the station for over five years. In that time it has been the only private station in Kosovo. ‘‘I’m amazed it’s never gone bust,” Berna says. ‘‘But we worked for a long time for free to keep it going. And our listeners are very patient – they don’t change channels when there’s a blackout.”

She gets requests and messages relayed to the station via mail and text, with the majority coming from Germany and the US. The Kosovar diaspora is close to half a million in number, and Urban FM provides them with one way of staying in touch with home.

Mainstream international news stations don’t have many positive things to say about Kosovo, but Berna’s news on parties, gigs and events shows that, beneath the political ineptitude, the country’s young people, at least, are getting things done.

Besa was part of the original diaspora. She moved to the US and found work with the New Yorker magazine, and for a time she lived in Manhattan and shared desks with the city’s literati. But in the end, she decided to go home, and returned to Pristina before Christmas with the intention of launching her own publication.

‘‘I want it to reach all areas of Kosovo, the villages and the small communities, and for once to have something of real quality here,” she says. It’s hard to imagine someone trading Park Avenue for the lopsided tarmac pits that constitute Pristina’s high streets and footpaths; harder still to imagine a young writer giving up the opportunity to be edited by David Remnick in order to try her hand at publishing in the poorest place in Europe. But Berna loves her country, and like many of her peers, seems compelled to try to get things done.

It would be wrong to suggest that the newly-installed Kosovar government is not helping the country’s situation, but more often than not it gets it wrong. The Ministry for Trade, for example, spent €500,000 on getting 1980s pop star and former Page 3 girl Samantha Fox, an Abba tribute band and a team of Elvis impersonators to perform at a one-day festival intended to encourage the national identity.

There’s a lot of money to be made in Kosovo. Ipkonet, the latest mobile phone provider to enter the country’s half-baked telecoms market, enlisted hip-hop star 50 Cent to play at a football stadium and sold 25,000 tickets, each of which came with a free sim card. The rapper flew in and out on the same day, leaving a booked-out hotel and a hundred bottles of Dom Perignon for the bellhops to enjoy.

Some people have rather excitedly suggested that Kosovo is the region’s Kuwait, and that the huge coalmines in the country are the key to kick-starting the economy. Swiss and British mining companies have been looking into the viability of restructuring the old mines and exploiting new ones that may lead to oil. Eastern Europeans looking for an alternative to getting their energy from Russia may also be persuaded to invest in Kosovo.

But for the moment, average monthly salaries are less than €200, and nothing investors could do in the short term would bridge the gap in disposable income between Kosovar artists and their western European peers.

‘‘I guess it is in our, and generally in the Balkan, culture to improvise,” says Toton. ‘‘I remember people making electric guitars or amps, and rather unique-sounding drums from floorboards.”

But improvising and making do with patchwork equipment can only go on for so long, and Toton fears that all the hard work put in by underground producers might be lost unless the government makes stronger efforts to address the infrastructural problems in the country.

‘‘We’re probably the only electronic music producers to make electronic music without electricity,” he laughs. ‘‘But seriously, the restrictions on what we can and can’t do are so bad that I worry that our whole scene might vanish.”

Toton wrote a song called Coca-Cola in response to the situation in Kosovo. It’s a spoof piece in which he begs the owners of the corporation to buy the country, rebrand it with their name and do whatever they want to it – so long as they keep the power on. As any Irish musician knows, making it big in your home country is not enough, and to be successful you have to take your music to a wider audience. But that isn’t too easy for Kosovars. The country’s visa regime is based around a ‘‘proof of return’’ agreement, so young DJs with no track record of regular employment, savings or family obligations look very bad on paper. Most Kosovar artists fall victim to a visa rejection at some stage or another.

Being allowed to join the Schengen territories would be a step in the right direction towards relaxing travel restrictions, but so long as Slovakia, Spain, Cyprus, Greece and Romania refuse to recognise Kosovo’s independence that won’t happen. However, it’s likely that some day, these five reluctant EU members will have to acknowledge their new neighbours. Kosovo already uses the euro, and France, Germany and Britain all want the country to join the EU.

Strangely enough, one place Kosovars can travel to is Serbia, as in Serbian eyes it is still the same country. Toton was one of the first Kosovar DJs to play in Serbia after the war; his Serbian promoters felt there was enough of a threat to post a bodyguard by his side for the duration of his visit.

Alban Muja is an art activist who accepted a residency in the Serbian town of Novi Sad only weeks after Nato shelling had stopped. He asked for sign printing equipment and cheekily replaced all the Serblan guage road signs with Albanian ones – before the war, they’d been in both languages. He made headlines in the Serbian papers, and returned home a hero.

Alban is one of the few Kosovar artists who gets out oft he country often, and his art has taken him to the US and most European countries. The last time he returned home, crossing the disputed UN-controlled border in northern Kosovo, the Serb soldiers on duty accused him of being a CIA agent because he had so many stamps in his passport. ‘‘It’s important to get out every four months,” he says, but he knows he’s one of the lucky ones.

Likatek is another electronic musician based in Kosovo. He has had to turn down invitations to play festivals in Italy and elsewhere in Europe because he can’t satisfy the visa requirements. ‘‘It can set you back and make you depressed, because you spend so long trying to get international exposure, and then can’t take the opportunities when they arrive,” he says.

Confounding the predictions of many, Kosovo has not imploded since it won independence. The black market continues to thrive, because the alternative legal market is still not out of the starting blocks, and promised investment is not materialising as quickly as hoped. To call from abroad, you have to use Monaco’s international dialling code, as Kosovo doesn’t yet have its own code, while the road into Pristina from the airport is so bad that it shakes the fillings loose in your mouth.

But the people have got a taste for peace. Toton fought in the Kosovo Liberation Army, as did many of the other artists in Pristina today. ‘‘People here have had enough of wars,” he says. ‘‘1999 was just the most recent; before that we had Yugoslavia’s prison democracy, the Nazis, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Apart from this bloody history, we’re happy, tolerant people.”

Young Kosovars go to the mosque with raging hangovers and cite Mother Teresa as an inspirational hero. They look on their past with a sense of emotional balance and cheeky humour – one performer who lost his leg in a bungled operation goes under the name DJ Legoff.

The country has no shortage of creativity and drive. What it needs now is exposure, investment and a shot in front of a bigger audience. If modern Europe ever needed a poster boy for religious, social harmony in a young creative society, it could do a lot worse than look here.