CLÔTURE 2024

President Steinmeier

I am in the habit of tuning in to the opening and closing of the academic year in the College of Europe in Bruges, and yesterday (21 June 2024) was the closing of the 2023/24 academic year.

I attended the College in 1967/8 and I don't remember such an occasion. If it did take place it would have been a simple affair. The event has grown over the years and is now a very elaborate presentation and it includes a keynote speaker.

This year's was one of the best I have heard. He was Frank Walter Steinmeier, President of the Federal Republic of Germany. His speech was very personal, to the point, and constructive. You can view it here at 1:32:51.

Bruggeling Honoris Causa

Bruges Mayor de Pauw

Over the years a custom had grown up where the Mayor of Bruges announced that graduating students were now honorary citizens of Bruges. I thought it would be nice to be one of these and applied to the city for retrospective application of the honour.

You can check out my correspondence with the city here. It transpires that what was in mind was effectively a souvenir piece of paper and that actual honorary citizenship had only been awarded about six times in the history of the city and that to people who had made some serious contribution to its history.

So I was interested to note that the Mayor of Bruges dropped any reference to this item in his address though the Rector did mention it in passing.

Year Book

I was interested to hear one of the student representatives refer to a year book. There was no such thing in my day and I was elected to compile one, which I did, but it vanished. In recent times with the advance of technology I have compiled a blog setting out my own impressions of my year at the College. You can check it out here.

Finally, you might like to check out my last visit to Bruges on the 50th anniversary of my graduation, here.

DUBLIN MONAGHAN BOMBINGS

The scene in Leinster Street
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My wife Nora and myself have a particular memory of that day. Were it not for the Pan-Celtic festival in Killarney and our membership of the Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir, we could have been in the middle of the explosion in Leinster Street.

Nora worked in Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge in Fenian Street and I worked in Government Buildings and, were it not for the festival, we'd have been making our way after work to the Berni Inn at the Grafton Street end of Nassau Street.

We only learned of the explosions when we reached Killarney later that evening.

My first reaction, apart from anger, was the feeling that the British were somehow complicit in this. It was not a popular view when I expressed it. The choir was made up mainly of Welsh men with a sprinkling of Scots, English and Irish.

I think, however, in view of what has emerged over the years, that it was not such an extraordinary view as it appeared at the time.

The Dublin Welsh Male Voice Choir in Killarney

REUNITED

Nora's paternal grandparents' grave (c.2001)

Today (26/4/24) Nora was reunited with her grandfather who died when she was a child of 5yrs.

Anthony John was a strong-willed man. He built his stone cottage with his own hands in Meenbanad in the County Donegal just north of Dungloe (An Clochán Liath). Nora's father and his siblings were raised there and from there went out into the world to make their own way.

Nora's father became a teacher and then a headmaster. He was strict in matters of religion and discipline, and however unwittingly, did not do Nora any good when he brought her to a forced confession after she had been sexually abused at the age of 8 by a neighbour.

Nora's relationship with her father was frought throughout their lives. She felt she should love him as a parent but her feelings often bordered on hate.

Then, in the final years of his life, paternal grandfather, Anthony John, came to stay and an easy and intimate relationship developed between the young toddler and her grandfather. She teased him by withholding his daily newspaper, which she read to him, and he let her brush is hair. An intimacy not found in earlier years.

So Nora had a particular attachment to her grandfather and today Donal and I, his great grandson and grandson in law, had the emotional experience of spreading some of her ashes on his grave.

She would have approved, indeed, enjoyed the occasion.

Pól scattering some of Nora's ashes

Donal scattering some of Nora's ashes

The inscription on the gravestone
seriously deteriorated even since 2001

Donal, Pól & Poppy

Donal, Maria & Poppy

Uncle Dannie's grave

Nora also had a special relationship with her uncle Dannie, based on family and music. Dannie was among the cream, if not the best, of Donegal traditional fiddlers. As well as trditional perfection in his fiddling, Dannie always had that extra dimension from his colourful musical past which included playing with jazz bands in the USA. And I have never heard the use of harmonics from any other traditional fiddler.

If truth were told, Nora was the only person on this earth who could adequately accompany Dannie on the piano without destroying the fiddle line, and Lord knows, there were plenty of these out there. Nora had the combination of empathy with the traditionsl and a rigorous classical training which enabled her to adapt effortlessly to the idiom. You'd listen to the pair of them all night.

So it was a particular privilege to include a visit to Dannie's grave in our trip today.

TODAY/YESTERDAY/TOMORROW?

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My last contact with a "graphic narrative", or the nearest thing in those days, the "graphic novel", would have been in the 1950s/60s when some of the acknowledged classics like Sir Walter Scott's novels were rendered comic-cut style for children. As an adult, it is not a medium that appeals to me.

Or should I say "appealed" to me?

So what changed my mind?

Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza.

While he was doing research in Gaza in 2001, Sacco first came across stories about massacres of Palestinians that had teken place in Rafah and Khan Younis in 1956. He was shocked to discover that, but for one brief mention, the incidents had never been fully investigated.

The resulting graphic narrative is a blow-by-blow retelling of how Sacco, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, embedded himself in Gaza and set about interviewing every witness he could find who had been in the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah on those fateful days in 1956.

The graphic narrative is stunning.

Not only does it reveal what went on in Palestine while the rest of the world was distracted by the Suez crisis but it also reveals what was going on there while Sacco was undertaking his researches. And it's all of a pattern. In fact, he might as well have been writing about the last 6 months in Gaza and the West Bank, the ring is so familiar.

But what really comes across to you is that this has been going on solidly since the NAKBA in 1948.

Look closely at Sacco's depiction of grief above and then go to my account of the Fallen Leaves exhibition I encountered at the Berlin Jewish Museum a few years ago.

Same faces !

THE HERZOG DYNASTY

Isaac Herzog, current President of Israel

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

This is the sort of wolf whistling indulged in by the current Presiden of Israel, Isaac Herzog. It is clearly designed to legitimise the current genocide in Gaza. But when faced with publicly acknowledging the implications of his statement he rowed back, fearful maybe of the consequences at a later stage when a Nürnberg type tribunal might see fit to chop his head off.

When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”

But he then stated: “When you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”

The reason I'm bothering to pay any attention here to this racist is that he has strong Irish connections.

His father, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast, but he grew up in Dublin, on Bloomfield Avenue in "Little Jerusalem" off the South Circular Road. The people of that area were immensely proud of him as "local boy made good" when he became President of Israel.

After leaving Ireland, Chaim joind the British Army, in Intellegence, and was one of the first wave to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after WWII. That must have left some impression on him and one wonders how he woud have reacted to both his son's remarks and to the abomination of the current Israeli genocide.

Chaim's father was Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland and later Chief Rabbi of Israel. Isaac was known in Ireland for his Republican sympathies and is reported to have been an Irish speaker.

On what it actually meant to be Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Cormac Ó Gráda, has this lovely quote from Isaac's successor.

"Ninety-five percent of the population of Ireland is Catholic, five percent is Protestant, I am Chief Rabbi of the rest."

THREE MOBILE

I have my mobile account with Three. There was a reason for that at the time. Other members of my family were on three and we got free phone calls between us. That is no longer an imperative as most packages now include national phone calls irrespective of the operator at the othr end.

I'm on a €30 a month package. But I like to keep a little money in the account in case I get caught up in calls not coverd by the package.

Up to recently I had €23 under this heading.

And then one day it when I looked, it had gone. I was trying to figure out what calls I might have made that had eaten away at my store but couldn't think of any. A quick look at my log (but only for the last two months) didn't show any call charges.

So I took to Twitter, which is usually a place to get a prompt response because it's public, to ask Three about my money's disappearance. I got a quick response, transferred over to Direct Messaging and quickly got the explanation that Three had stolen my money.

They don't describe it that way of course. Apparently it had been there for 180 days and their terms of reference allow them to snitch it if it is unused by the end of that period.

Top Up Expiry

Effective from 1st December 2020, any top up credit on your account will expire after 180 days. Your Three Prepay account credit will expire 180 days from the date that your account was last topped up. For any pre-existing credit on your account as of 1 December 2020, the expiry date for that credit will start from 1 December 2020. If you do not use your top up credit or add another top up credit within the 180 days, the credit will expire and your balance will be set to zero. When you top up again, your expiry date will be 180 days from this new date.

Now the implication here is that I should have read the terms of reference more carefully, but really, you don't expect such bad a faith provisions to be included and even after reading them you don't normally think back when you decide to leave a bit of spare cash in the account for emergencies. For God's sake, I'm giving them €30 a month as it is.

Moreover, the piece appears to be badly drafted and does not justify them snitching my money.

I consider this provision, as it is drafted and implemented to be unfair and in bad faith.

I must check and see what is available from other providers.

FALLEN LEAVES

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This post is an extract from a report I did in 2014 of a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

One of the exhibits I reported on was entitled Fallen Leaves in a Void and it made a very bit impression on me.

When I came home, I found it was too emotional an item to write up straight away, but when I did get round to it, crying my way through writing it, I realised that including the item next door to it, on the olive tree, would add a whole new level of meaning, and clicking on the link in my text on that item would break your heart.

Little did I realise that the events of the October HAMAS attack and the subsequent collective punishment/genocide would endow my report with an even deeper meaning. Its relevance over the last decade reminds us that this whole business started with the 1948 NAKBA the completion of which looks to be at hand.

This is a truly creative and provocative piece. Some 10,000 faces punched out of steel are scattered on the ground. The work is dedicated not only to Jews killed in the holocaust, but to all victims of violence and war.

You are invited to walk over the faces and listen to the sounds they make as they shift beneath your feet.

This is what you see in front of you as you try to keep your balance.

And this is what you nearly fall on top of.

It is hard to convey the emotional impact of this place. The noises made by the shifting faces remind you both of screams, varying in pitch and volume depending on the sizes and shapes of the faces making them, and of something like a clanking tank running over fleeing victims. It is quite unnerving.

Then, in the middle distance, a shaft of light which turns the faces to gold. What does it mean? Hope amid despair? Gold from the teeth of the dead? Just plain Shekels? Even more unnerving

And then there is the olive tree. Presented here as a symbol of fertility and peace. Visitors can write a wish or prayer for placing on the tree.

Unfortunately, the olive tree for me has become a symbol of the wanton destruction of the livelihood of Palestinians on the West Bank by illegal settlers. So this item brought me up a bit short.

And then a mental exercise suggested itself to me and I would like you to go back to the beginning of the Fallen Leaves and slowly go through the sequence again. Only this time, still being true to the artist's wider conception, imagine they are the faces of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Even more unnerving.

NEW YORKER CARTOONS

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This is a lovely present Leentje got me for Christmas. She knows me too well and my preoccupation with cartoons. Unlike her father, Albert, I can't draw and am reduced to either appreciating the cartoons of others or messing around on Photoshop to make a point.

I should add that these two volumes weigh a ton, so I am leaving a volume open on a stand to flick through a few more pages from time to time.

My intention is to share some of the cartoons that I most appreciate here with you as I read the volumes. As I don't want this post to be too long I'll have to be extra selective and just include the crème de la crème.

"What's the next best medicine?"

I used to be a great fan of the Readers' Digest when I was young and they had a cartoon/joke section entitled "Laughter is the best Medicine". It's actually true and I have never forgotten it.

Speaking as a photographer, I think this joke is on the photographer. Love it.

"I'm turning into my mother."

This is a work of genius. I have seen it before but didn't know where it came from. A moving picture in two dimensions. It reminds me of the EBRD logo competition. Jacques Attali announced the competition for a logo and specified there should be no birds. This was because the French acronym for the Bank is "La Berd" and he foresaw all sort of smart remarks being made about flying on one wing and so on if there was a bird in the logo. Well the entry that won it was simple, two interlocking links in a chain inside a circle representing the globe. In my view, the absolute best of the entries.

But you can never be up to these arty farties. See what you think.

"I'll be damned. It says. 'Cogito ergo sum'".

This from 1958, anticipating AI in a big way, and we're not all the way there yet. Anticipates Arthur Clarke by a decade. "Open the Hatch, HAL!".

"Nice, but we'll need an environmental-impact study, a warranty, recall bulletins, recycling facilities, and twenty-four-hour customer support."

This one speaks its own volumes. Have we too much red tape, or too little. Is the tape the right colour or should it just be black and white like the Keffiyeh?

BOOK: THE COLLEGE OF EUROPE 1948-1998

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I had heard there was a book on the history of the College of Europe, so when I was there for the 40th anniversary of my graduation I enquired about it. "Sure, I think we have a second copy, I'll go and check." I don't know if they were going to sell or give it to me, no matter. I was dying to read it. But no, just like the Album/Yearbook of my original stay, it couldn't be found.

Then, the other day I Googled it, and lo and behold, there it was. Scanned by the College up to its website and downloadable.

The wait was unfortunate, but certainly worth it. It is a remarkable book, extremely well researched and very well written. I found it fascinating and full of resonances. I was there just short of the middle of the fifty year period covered by the book. Before me was the College in formation and after me its developement to close to today's model.

Residence: Sint-jakobsstraat 41

The book stresses the benefits and impact of living together. In my day we all lived in a single residence, including the Rector. But then we were only 54 students. By 1998 there were around 250, but the College wisely spread these around a number of residences in the city. One big residence would decrease intimacy and a sense of community.

The red line is my year.

The male:female balance seems to have improved since my day. We were males 4:1 females. By 1998 this had significantly evened out, but with females in the ascendant.

Jan Tinbergen. Flying Professor & Nobel Prize Winner

A serious lesson learned in the early days was that then you could not assemble a top quality resident academic staff because simply there was nowhere to go. In a bigger institution you could hope to work your way up the food chain but not there. So reliance was placed on the "flying professor" corps. A large number of professors/lecturers were recruited as visiting academics. So, you got the cream of universities, and even the EC administration, passing through and shedding their knowledge. Even my friend and co-Comenien(ne) Dame Helen Wallace gets a mention for being part of this corps. (P.45)

And the idea of Academic Assistants was gaining ground along the way. These would be students who were employed immediately after graduation to help the student body and manage the "flying corps", keeping their feet on the ground, so to speak, and ensuring they observed consistency with College policy and content in their teaching. Jacques Chabert was one of those in my year (P.46). It was Jacques who gave me the words of "La Charlotte" which could be rendered as a bawdy rugby song or a tragedy in the style of Racine's "Andromaque".

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This table shows the numbers and national composition of students during each five years over the period. I noted that there was one Irish before me (Desmond Murphy, 1963/4) but I'm fairly sure he was not financed by the Irish state as I was. So I think my claim to have been the first "official" Irish student probably still holds. (P.129)

Dining room - Sint-jakobsstraat

The College has retained its language policy from its foundation. Students are expected to be more or less fluent in English and French. There had been pressure from the Germans to add German but the view was that requiring three languages would be too much, and God knows, how would you ever get the French to drop French. I can tell you from my later EBRD experience that they'd prefer to pay a visit to Madame La Guillotine. There was also pressure at one stage to add Flemish but acquiring this would be a transitory advantage at best. Both German and Flemish (Dutch) can be learned or perfected in the language lab these days. In my year the German students generally sat at a separate table to draw attention to their ambitions for the language.

Eventually the College started awarding degrees. David McWilliams, for example, got his MA there. But initially at least this idea was blocked by the universities who didn't want to be upstaged. In my day you just got a Certificate in Advanced European Studies. I think, if you managed to stay on for a second year you got a Diploma. The book makes it clear that the College valued its independence and it pursued this over degree-awarding capacity over the years.

I was surprised to read that the "Bruggeling, Honoris Causa" practice was introduced during this period. I had thought it a later addition. The idea is marketed as "Honorary Bruges Citizenship" and is awarded to every graduating student each year. I, who predated the practice, applied for a retrospective award of "Honorary Bruges Citizenship", only having to grovel when it was pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that there had only been six awards of actual Honorary Bruges Citizenship in the history of the City, and these included the first founder-Rector of the College and the General who liberated Bruges after WWII. So what was this thing then? It was patiently explained to me that it was simply a souvenir piece of paper on which the City of Bruges recognised that you had resided there for an academic year. So now you know.

Three of my Professors:
Lory (history), Brugmans (l'Idée Europénne), Kormoss (Geography)

And how would I describe the College. Well the nearest I can get is an EC/EU Seminary. It's not like a university where you would expect a diversity of views right across the positive-negative spectrum. It is a training ground for missionaries for the "European (EU) Idea".

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There is a handy chronological list of Promotions with corresponding student numbers. (P.210/11)

On my return from my fiftieth anniversary trip I set up a blog with posts describing my own academic year in the College in 1967/8.

While I was in Brugge for that anniversary I spent most of my waking hours taking photos of Brugge 2018, visiting places I had omitted while I was there at the College fifty years before. I set many of these out in a separate blog with commentary.

FALLEN TREES

This was the scene that faced motorists on my estate on Thursday morning after the huge storm on Wednesday night. The road was blocked by a fallen tree.

In the grand Irish tradition of the Meitheal, a neighbour assembled a work group and what had been the topmost branches of the tree were sawn off and cleared from the road, leaving a single lane for cars to exit and enter the estate.

These are the cutaways.

What had come down wasn't a complete tree but one of a number of what appeard major trunks. A substantial weight, though, and it could have done serious damage had there been a passing car, cyclist or pedestrian there at the time. Thankfully this wasn't the case.

On Friday morning the City Council turned up and cleared the road and the path through the green space, sawing the trunk into sections and removing the branches. That was all they were geared up to do. Clear up the mess at ground level.

But the story was a bit more complicated and as some of the tree was rotten, the full tree had to come down. Its height extended to the top of the adjacent apartment bloc and there was one significant branch almost hanging in over the topmost apartment balcony.

The Council were followed by the contractors with the hoist (cherry picker) which was needed to deal with the rest of the tree. The skill here is to cut the tree from the top down having stripped the big branches of their smaller ones so that the big branch don't snag on the way down. These guys knew what they were doing and it was fascinating to watch them.

Their big challenge came with the overhanging branch. I had no idea how they would approach this. They had to be careful it didn't fall into any of the apartment balconies. But they knew what they were doing and had come prepared with a harness.

I thought they were going to attach the harness to the branch and then to the hoist, and wondered if it might capsize the hoist. But they were way ahead of me. They harnessed the top of the branch to a point lower down on the branch and when they cut the top it remained suspended, ready to be guided by hand.

All the small and medium-size stuff then went into the chipper. A noisy and savage beast.

And then came the next and last surprise. A little mechanical grabber to shift the piles of remaining logs into the back of a lorry.

I think I must have spent some two hours looking at all of this smoothly coordinated operation. An absolute education watching people who knew what they were doing.

PALESTINE

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I suppose if I were to start from the beginning, my earliest memory of the Jews, stoked by my church, was that they crucified Christ. Not a good start. As there were no Jews living in proximity in those days this concept had no operational meaning. I'd just add here that it took up to the 1960s and Pope John XXIII to absolve them of this horrendous crime.

However, in the course of my youth I had great admiration for the Jews, and by extension for Israel. The main player here was the Holocaust, and no member of my generation could have been unaffected by it. We were all on the side of the persecuted Jews. We empathised hugely with them and hated the Nazis for what they had done. Truth told, we hated the Nazis anyway, having been raised on British comics and British war heroes.

Then there was the Exodus and the establishment of the State of Israel. A huge achievement for the Jews and a fitting act of reparation for what had been done to them. At last, a safe homeland, not only democratic but sort of socialist as well. We admired the Kibbutzim and many Irish people did a stint in one of them. The coming together of people to help one another. Ar scáth a chéile. The Meitheal.

We became more aware at home of the huge contribution of the Jews to Irish society. And at a later stage, Yanky Fachler wrote a book about a hundred such people. We had never realised there were so many of them.

And there the matter sort of rested until, over time, we came to realise that there was more to it than we had been led to believe.

Israel had not been virgin territory waiting for the return of the Jews who had been scattered to the four corners of the earth two thousand years ago. It had, in the meantime been inhabited by Arabs, Palestinians, scraping a living from a difficult land. And the glorious establishmnet of the State of Israel had a totally different meaning for them.

For them it was the Nakba, "The Catastrophe", which I had been totally unaware of until my later years. The new settlers/occupiers banished half the population out of the area and spent the next seventy years grabbing the land of the rest of them, killing and torturing them, and finally locking them up in a vast concentration camp which was totally dependent on Israel for its existence and day to day survival.

The United Nations, God help us, had decided on a two state solution to the problem. An Israeli state coexisting with a Palestinian one, but this had been long ignored by the Israelis, who actively encouraged Jewish immigration to, inter alia, swell their population while they continued unimpeded in their land grab from the Palestians who they held in general contempt.

To cut a long story short, that's where we are today. And it is crystal clear to me that the displacement of the Palestinians, started with the Nakba, is the ultimate aim of current Israeli action against the Palestinians.

Israel has a habit of getting its own way and harnessing the unqualified support of other states, such as the US and UK, and it currently considers itself unstoppable. In this, it is probably right. A long propaganda war, conflating the Jews and the State of Israel, has struck fear into the hearts of those who might think of supporting the Palestinians but who know that any criticism of Israel will have them labelled as antisemitic and who wants that around their neck.

So, today and tomorrow I am flying the Palestinian, not the Hamas, flag in support of the London march. And I'll fly it again on appropriate occasions.

Which group are you in?

And I will wear with honour my blocking on Twitter by the Israeli embassy in Dublin, whose record on inspection is one of what they most give out about, antisemitism. They are doing Jews worldwide no favours and it is interesting that significant Jewish participation in the pro-Palestinian marches is beginning to emerge.

Fallen Leaves

Check this out. It made me cry, though the experience was is far short of that of the current genocide/ethnic cleansing or whatever you're having yourself that is going on today