Ireland,before the end: A psychically numb and partially alienated kayfabe state,accepting of biopolitical commodification and predation upon sections of its population

Beginning

Maybe at the start we should talk about what this is so everything is clear and no one will be disappointed. Even though I guess that disappointment is part of life. This article is a work of creative writing; it is attempting to do sociology through creative writing. As such it might, or might not, come across to you as different. It's also actually different even from what you might initially interpret it to be if you study sociology. It's not that. It's something else. I once worked for a psychiatrist who told me that everything has an emotional flavour for people. If something has the wrong emotional flavour for you then you will immediately spit it out if you put it into your mouth. So this, for whatever reason, might have the wrong emotional flavour for you and you might spit this out. On the other hand, it might work for you. But I realise that it might not.

I guess that there are standard ways of writing sociology (regular journal articles); less standard ways of doing them (for example autoethnography); and what might be considered to be more experimental ways. Creative writing is even more different and is much less standard. However, creative writing also has a history within sociology (Gordy and Pearly, 2005; Watson, 2016). Researchers have noted over the years the importance of attempting to write differently when doing sociology, especially if you are trying to change the world or reach non-academic audiences (Kilby and Gilloch, 2022; Watson, 2022; Zebrecki, Diamond and Greatrick, 2024).

Creative writing causes problems for sociologists who do it (Zebricki et al., 2024). Sociologists who employ creative writing are often doing something that is different from typical academic writing. Rather than ‘tell’ they ‘show’ (Zebricki et al., 2024). Overexplaining is the wrong way to do sociological creative writing but the right way to do more typical academic writing. Sociological creative writing requires the reader to sometimes do the work that more typical journal articles present as a fait accompli. The advantage of this is that creative writing says to the reader though that you don’t have to accept this thing that is presented to you. You can think about it and interpret it if you think that there is something in it that is worth thinking about or interpreting. There is, I think, a lot of use in this position. But again, all of this is non-standard from the point of view of more typical academic writing. Brown (2008) notes that learning to do sociology means learning to lose the ability to write creatively, to ‘cripple ourselves’.

The ultimate goal of sociological creative writing is to produce something that might resonate with some readers (Felski, 2022). It is not to straightforwardly explain events but to capture some feeling about the world (Felski, 2022; Mannon and Camfield, 2019). C. Wright Mills encouraged sociologists to try to develop a voice, to escape from machine language and structure (Mannon and Camfield, 2019). Baumann (2000) noted that to avoid becoming ‘false sociologists we ought to come as close as the true poets do to the yet hidden human possibilities’.

So that's where this article is coming from. Like I said, it might or might not work for you. If it doesn’t, that's ok, something else will have the right emotional flavour.

1

On Christmas day 1989 I am standing with my brother at the top of Ravenscourt hill. Douglas, Cork, to be precise; the centre of the universe. I have only one brother – maybe not for long – and no sisters. My father is a bar manager, my mother a lifeguard. Anyway. Ravenscourt hill is steep, and gets steeper the higher you go up it, and halfway down on the right hand side it intersects with Ravenscourt road. Ravenscourt hill is lined with cars along the left hand side. We are looking at the slope of the hill with professional interest, trying to calculate the angles, to see if we can stop at the end. And if we can’t stop and we hit the footpath what will happen. Probably something awesome. The real danger is that a car that comes straight out of Ravenscourt road without looking. As far as we can tell, no cars are coming. We listen again. My brother decides to go for it. He puts his skateboard down and is accelerating. I’m not totally sure if he will be able to slow down when he reaches the end. I’m not totally sure, to be honest, if he will reach the end. He is wobbling all over the place but staying on it. The further he goes, the faster he goes, the more he is oscillating. He is in control and out of control. He is, even though I would never admit this, pretty cool. I can’t really conceive that anything bad could happen. Thirty years later I read an article that says that what he is doing is called bombing and should only be done by experienced skateboarders. He is 8 years old.

In summer all of the kids gather by the lamp-post by the alley at the top of the Circle. We are playing tip the can. One kid stays by the lamp-post and all of the others fan out to hide in gardens, front gardens, back gardens, trees, bushes. It's generally no fun being the kid by the can. The kid at the can shouts, ‘tip the can! I see you’ when he sees someone, and they become his prisoner. You can free the prisoner by reaching the can. Sometimes parents look out their back garden to see kids being boosted over their wall, running along their wall, climbing up and down their trees. Kids go through the houses, through the kitchen, then the hallway and when it's safe, out the frontdoor. There are some houses you don’t go near. Sometimes I tell the other kids, ‘everyone listen – I think I have a plan’. There seem to be as many kids as there are stars in the sky.

We go exploring down the woods. One time I get stuck in mud and I lose a shoe (at least it's better than losing my life I say). My friend next door gets Hero Quest and Space Hulk which are really cool. His older brother tries to teach me chess but I have no interest as, basically, it does not involve a barbarian ripping the head off of a goblin or blowing the head off of an alien. His other brother buys a slingshot and tests it out. He puts a perfectly shaped hole through his upstairs window. He is, we realise, in. So. Much. Trouble. The thing was though, he didn’t get into much trouble. His parents got a lot angrier at him over smaller stuff. My friend gets in a fight with another group of kids in another park. I am sitting on an electricity box eating ice cream and see his older brother walk by carrying a really big plank of wood. He is on his way to sort out those kids.

Sometimes I get in fights myself. Kids form their identities around their park. The kids in the next park over are different. You might see them but don’t interact with them really. One kid from another park drops a concrete block on my back. Even though he was young there was something kind of off about him. Another pushes me outside the shop and I fall straight back and whack my head off the concrete. I still remember thinking that is such a weird feeling. I get up and say I have to go home, and when I get home, I say I have to go to bed. I remember somehow then being downstairs and screaming and screaming – ‘mum! Mummy! Mum!’. I got sick on the way to the hospital. I don’t remember screaming at the doctors and nurses.

Kids play marbles all over the place. Marbles are commodities, and like all commodities they can be exchanged for different commodities or turned into different forms of capital. Older kids get younger kids to lie down in the grass, and then try to ramp them on their BMX bikes. If they ramp three kids they then get four to lie down. Even the youngest kids have a general sense you didn’t want to be at the end of the line. Some kids get distracted while they were building up speed. Sometimes this could happen if a parent shouted out to the Bmxer rider, ‘come in, it's time for dinner’. If you were waiting to be ramped hearing ‘come in for dinner’ was like being told that there was no god and your parents had both been killed.

I loved Transformers totally and absolutely. I was unusual in the strength of my interest in them, which continues in some form into my forties. I made lists of all the Transformers names and their affiliations, the Predacons, Aerialbots, Insecticons, Constructicons. I would line my copy book and then have name in one column, affiliation in another, then strengths and then weaknesses. My favourite was Sludge, then as I got older they were all given away one by one until I only had one left and used him to represent all of the others that had been lost to time. I liked Thundercats and GI Joe but they were nothing compared to Transformers. I couldn’t understand how one year they just seemed to stop being popular, replaced by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I remember telling my parents when you like something, you like something. You can’t stop liking it. I went down to the shop when I was eight and there were two Transformers comics there and I only had the money for one. Shops at that time had spinner racks for kids comics. I started to talk out my dilemma to myself. The woman who worked in the shop came over and said don’t you know that talking to yourself is a sign of madness?

On Halloween all of the kids in the parks would go down to a clearing in the woods and build a giant bonfire. They found wood, crates, tyres. Some of the more entrepreneurial ones went looking for petrol. I remember a parent looking at the bonfire one year just before it went up and going Jesus Christ. One year in summer the woods itself went up on fire. You couldn’t really see it but you could feel the heat even from a distance. I remember on summer days jumping through sprinklers with my friends in order to stay cool day. It was fun for all of us at the start, and stayed fun for me, but gradually became less fun for them.

One of those boys was one of my best friends. I went over to his house to read X-Men comics. I have always liked the X-men. I once showed my father a picture of Cyclops kissing Madeline Pryor to show how grown up I was. I didn’t understand that Madeliene Pryor was the double of Cyclops's old girlfriend, Jean Grey, who had been killed while trying to eat the universe. Me and my friend would talk about the relative strengths of the Avengers and play Top Trumps. We would go on adventures together and go climbing. One day he said that he and his family were moving. That's ok I said. We can still be friends and can still see each other. He wasn’t going too far, a few suburbs over. Once he moved I never saw him again. I expected that I would, for the first few weeks anyway, but then after a while I realised that that was it. I guess in some ways a world that had been totally alive and coherent became somehow less alive and less coherent. As the rest of the kids in the park got older the slight age difference, a year or two, between us somehow became more important. The older kids no longer wanted to hang out with the younger kids. Even though there were a lot of kids around things became more disconnected. Tip the can stopped being played at a certain point. After a while the rest of the kids in the park who were our age moved away one by one.

The father of one of the kids in the park died unexpectedly. In my mind dying was like you had gone down to the shopping centre and would be back later.

2

I moved school a few times, sometimes because of what I would now probably call low level social ostracism, sometimes because there wasn’t a straight fit between me and the school. I went to a school for 2 years for junior and senior infants. I developed my first crush, on a girl from Germany, though she didn’t want to be friends. It was difficult fitting in there for whatever reason and when I became upset, I would go to a corner of the room and cry into my hands so no one know how I was feeling. I went to another school which was ok and was close to my father's work, and then to my final primary school. On my first day there I asked the kid sitting next to me if we could be friends and he said yes and I still remember the feeling of relief and happiness. I guess looking back I kind of drifted into a social role as a neutral outsider, not disliked but not having loads of people wanting to be best friends with me either. On our school tour in sixth class we went to Amsterdam. On the bus trip over the kids were bored and the teacher said has anyone read a story that they can tell. I said I have. I think he was expecting something like the Famous Five. I had just read Dracula. I spent the next eight hours on the bus recounting, word for word as far as possible, as much as I could remember about the book (‘and then they EAT. THE. BABY!’). It blew their minds. When we came home a lot of kids wanted to be friends with me. Someone asked if I would read Frankenstein next and tell them about it.

I lived in my own mind a lot. I always liked reading and connected totally to fantasy and science fiction. I guess a pattern in my life is that I have always bonded with things ionically, never covalently. It's sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness. Easons bookstore in Cork had a pretty well stocked fantasy section in the late 80s. I bought all of the Dragonlance books there I could get my hand on. I loved the covers, the colours, the realism of the fantasy images. Now, these days, I could tell you instantly the names of the artists and something about their individual style, but at the time I just loved their coolness. They were about four pounds each to buy. Once a man browsing next to me said I should have a look at Raymond Feist's Magician. I said I have no time for that. I was 11 years old and focused on Dragonlance. When I was 12 years of age I went to Dublin by myself for the first time. My parents dropped me off at Kent station and picked me up when I came back. I got off the train at Heuston Station, got the bus up to O’ Connell Street, and walked over to Easons. I spent two hours choosing Dragonlance novels and reading X-men comics and then headed back down to Cork. I read the Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew and as much Stephen King as I could get my hands on. I got Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World out of Douglas library. I read it four times in the 2 weeks that I had. I returned it, waited around for it to be put back out on the shelf, then got it out again.

I watched cartoons a lot, would get up at 6am on Saturdays to go down and watch Transformers. My parents wanted me to do karate classes, art classes. I probably drove them crazy, refusing to go to class because Scooby-Doo was going to come on next. I was a pretty good drawer when I put my mind to it. I even came third in a competition when I was about 7 years of age. I knew even then that third place was better than coming fourth.

My parents never talked to us directly about money. Sometimes when I was in bed I could hear them talking about it downstairs.

3

The first kid to drop out of secondary school was someone I liked but didn’t know very well. I knew that he was slow, but we didn’t really think of people in terms of identities or categories. At least apart from those times when we only thought about people in terms of identities or categories. They were who they were. I think that these days they would say that the kid came from a socioeconomically deprived background and had a learning disability. One of my friends told me that the kid was going to work in the local garage. We just accepted it.

I liked some subjects, like English, but didn’t like others. I really didn’t like languages. I had a degree of ability, so my lack of interest was compensated for by intelligence; at least until it wasn’t. I liked science. I guess I did enough to get by. What I was mainly interested was reading fantasy books, and endured the school day so I could read what I wanted in the evening. I think that some of the teachers struggled to figure out what to do with me. I was reasonably smart but if something didn’t interest me I had zero interest in it and could not be motivated to become interested in it. As the years went on, the reports from the parent–teacher meetings got worse, and my parents grew more stressed. ‘You’re not a child anymore. You have to work’, people told me.

I still had that one single transformer

At the weekends we would go into Cork city centre and played Quasar or would go to the arcade in the Savoy, where my mother had seen the Rolling Stones play a few decades before. I loved Street Fighter 2 and liked Mortal Kombat but could never figure out the special moves. Trying to figure out how to decapitate someone and rip out their spinal cord while other kids are standing around you shouting finish him isn’t easy. Some evenings we would go to school discos in Rochestown. I had zero ideas how to meet someone and when the slow songs came on would stand by the gym wall and watch the couples on the dancefloor and wait for it to be over. I had my first kiss in Cork city hall when I was 15. We stood holding each other at arms length not sure what to do. Her friend kicked me pretty hard. ‘Hurry the fuck up. We’re being collected’.

My dad would usually collect myself and my brother from school at 1pm and drop us back at 2pm. We always had dinner at 1pm. I don’t remember the first time that I saw November Rain by Guns N’ Roses but I remember watching the video every lunchtime on MTV. I asked my parents if I could get a Guns N’ Roses CD for Christmas, and they said yes. There was something about the sound of Slash's guitar that connected to me when I was 14 and never let go. As I became older I began to understand more of the nature of the rage and the systems and ideologies that drove that music and began to feel more conflicted about some of it. I had to stop listening to some of it. Guns N’ Roses opened the door for me to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica. At a certain point about 1995 Guns N’ Roses became less cool and a lot of kids stopped listening to them. I couldn’t understand why they stopped. They had liked them a few months before.

There was a competition to attend a summer camp for what they called gifted children in Dublin. I took the test and got in on the strength of my English. I did ok on the maths section but trying to figure out in my mind which way those dice rolled…no way. I’m not sure if I couldn’t do it or I couldn’t interest myself to do it. I remember my parents leaving me there in my room and feeling sad and also that the world had opened up. We were all staying in university accommodation that students had vacated for the summer. The heat from the paving stones and the bricks in the summer evenings. We were in and out of each others rooms, listening to metal and grunge and talking about books. No one in school ever talked about books. We would watch The Offspring and Metallica on MTV in the evening. I had never been in a girl's bedroom before. There were discos where the slow song was Under the Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. An American girl asked me to move in with her when we were older. I cried when I left and tried not to cry in front of my parents. I went back the next year. It was good but a few of the kids from the first year weren’t there. I went back a third year and knew instantly, even at 15, that I had stayed too long.

I skipped transition year, the break year between junior cert and leaving cert, and left my friends behind and went straight into leaving cert with older kids who I didn’t know. I got on ok with them but began to struggle a bit. I guess finally the workload was beginning to overcome whatever natural ability I had. I had enough ability though to see things through to the end. Even planes that lose their engines can still glide. A little anyway.

We flew to Florida. I watched the red sun descend into the water and thought about the end of the world.

4

My father worked split shifts. He dropped us off at school in the morning, went to work, collected us from school for dinner, slept in the afternoon and then went to work from about half 6 until 2 in the morning. Sometimes we would help out in the bar when something big was on. If a team's supporters were from places like Clare or Tipperary and they won their match they would sometimes buy a Guinness and then give a tip of ten pounds. Bingo nights were on Thursday and people from all over would come. At half past midnight the bar would shut and all of the staff would go into the back room and sit on coke crates, eat a packet of crisps and have whatever drink they wanted. I would have a coke or club orange. My father always had one heineken.

My father had my build, kind of tall and slim, but surprised me sometimes by his strength. He was able to manoeuvre kegs, which could be enormously heavy, fairly easily. He was always doing accounts and going over the inventory, filling out huge white sheets. Once the money was counted it would go in a leather bag and then he would go to the bank in Douglas to deposit it. He was always careful when he walked out the front door with the money and would sometimes say, ‘go, go’. The bar was one of the few that was open on Christmas day, from about midday to early afternoon, and people from all around would come after Mass in the morning. Some of them got in really bad states by the time we closed at two in the afternoon and we would have to step around them in the cark park. We would drop some of them home before we went home for Christmas dinner ourselves. I knew that some of them, or at least some part of them anyway, didn’t want to go home.

When she was young my mother would go far out on the water on Christmas day and then drop over the side of the boat and swim to shore. Although she was a strong swimmer it would still have taken a lot of strength to do that. She would bring us swimming in Gurranabraher swimming pool and we would sit in the lifeguards canteen and eat chips and potato cakes from the chipper.

5

On my last day of university, I sat with my friend in his kitchen. He played the Pixies Where is my Mind and we knew that it was the end of something. I finished my Master's degree on the morning of 11 September 2001 and went outside and people in Douglas were talking about World War 3. I had walked past the World Trade Centre myself 2 years before, when I was working in America, but paid no particular attention to it. It was two huge skyscrapers in a city of huge skyscrapers. I met a man there whose name was Wayne. He dressed like Rob Zombie on the cover of Astro Creep 2000. He said most people were hallways and he was a doorway. A girl was self-harming next to us. He said to her, ‘whatever gets you by, sister’.

I lived in Seattle for a while and saw grafitti saying another world is possible. I lived in East Germany and met a woman who had been blacklisted by the Stasi and who was studying Spinoza. I was too young, maybe too naive, to understand what that meant. Spinoza, a radical thinker, had been excommunicated from his community for heresy.

I returned to Ireland in 2006. I went to an apartment viewing in Dublin and there were 50 people already there. By the time the queue had moved ten people the estate agent came out and shouted the apartment is gone. I went to another apartment viewing, and my girlfriend whispered ‘tell them you are a doctor’. They looked at my Metallica t-shirt and didn’t believe me. A Polish builder was there – he tapped on the wall, didn’t like what he heard. Then said to his wife ‘come on, let's go’.

We found, through a friend, an apartment in Dublin city centre. I walked by children on Talbot Street who were trying to rob bikes, and when they couldn’t, kicked them to pieces. I saw young people inject heroin into their feet because they had no more veins to use. I saw cats tied together with wire around their necks and thrown into the water.

I read a government report that said that entrepreneurs are the heroes of the Irish economy.

I heard professionals say that the economy was working. There might be a soft landing.

Around 2010 I began to realise that the weather was getting worse. The rain wasn’t stopping.

6

We bought the best house we could afford. It was a lot smaller than my childhood home. It took a year of being outbid to get it. I went to one viewing ten minutes after it opened and the estate agent said the price had gone up fifty thousand in those ten minutes. The estate agent at one viewing said that he was praying for me and for all young people. I put in a bid and he said that he wouldn’t accept increments of less than five thousand. My parents thought the price was crazy. Then 2 years later said we were lucky, that they didn’t understand.

There were, are, few children on the street in the place where we bought. A neighbour once told me that she thought the area was cursed because of the absence of children. No one could afford to move in. It's not cursed, I said. It's capitalism. I might as well have said it was cursed for all the good I could do about it. Global corporations began to buy up property in the area. I attended a local meeting about the build to let developments that began to emerge in the late 2010s. The lawyers and politicians lined the sides of the room and watched the audience with flat eyes that recorded everything. It struck me that every reaction in that room had probably already been predicted and accounted for and priced in. I wondered if anyone in the audience would sell out the others in exchange for a stone wall or a kitchen.

My son became sick and we brought him to a health clinic. Before we said anything the receptionist pointed at a chart on the wall and said are you familiar with the charges. When I became sick myself I went to A and E in a public hospital. I think that the junior doctor there saw something in me that was similar to himself. He looked at the people sitting on the benches up and down the hallway where he was treating people and said to me, ‘I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be like this’.

After a child was stabbed I walked down O’ Connell Street to see what was going on. At the top of O’ Connell street by Fibbers pub, I saw a large group of young men waiting around dressed in black. I walked down Henry Street and saw another large group of young men with their faces covered walking up towards O’ Connell Street. I didn’t take that much notice. You always see those types of guys all over Dublin city centre. I went over to Dawson Street for coffee. When the Luas didn’t arrive, I called my wife. ‘They’re burning everything’, she said. I stood at the Luas stop and watched the lawyers and accountants and bankers as they took out their phones and tried to figure out what they were going to do next.

7

Sometimes at night now I walk up by Ravenscourt and stop at the top and remember how I used to go down the hill on my skateboard with my brother 30 years ago. I sometimes think of all the kids who were there with me at that time. Some went on to be successful in life. Some became divorced. Some died from accidents and some died from suicide. Some were happy and some were sad and some left to find work and became lost to time and space. Thirty years ago this was a place full of laughter and shouting and voices calling out in the twilight tip the can I see you.

I sometimes wonder what that 9-year-old boy – that younger version of me – would make of what he became.

Coda

You might be reading this after the world that I experienced as a child is long gone and long forgotten, and maybe the world that I experienced as an adult as well. This coda is an attempt to outline some of the forces that I think were there at the end of my world and the beginning of yours.

I guess what you are reading until now could be interpreted as what Kebede (2009) calls plain autobiography. The sociological analysis in it is there it but implicit. In what follows the sociological concepts are more foregrounded. Well, maybe anyway.

During the time that I was in secondary school, Ireland went through a period of rapid social and economic change. This period was broken into two parts. The first part was considered in some ways to be ‘real’ and featured increasing levels of money and wages in the economy, increasing levels of education (tuition fees were abolished when I was in transition year, which meant that I could go to University) and increasing levels of personal freedoms. The population rose by about 17% (Norris and Coates, 2014). I started this period regularly going to Mass and finished it never going to Mass again. Economic growth during this time stemmed from large amounts of foreign direct investment, which was encouraged by the government through a combination of tax incentives and weak regulations (Dellepiane and Hardimann, 2011). House prices increased rapidly, though from a relatively low baseline point. Suicides also increased rapidly during this ‘golden years’ period, reflecting the iatrogenic risks of all social transitions (Szakolczai, 2014).

The second half of this change, from about 2000–2008 is seen as a more unreal time when financial speculation around housing began to grow rapidly, and Ireland's economy basically became a fantasy bubble that eventually burst. Irish banks had catastrophically bad lending practices (Dellepiane and Hardiman, 2011) and could not control risk once it began to proliferate systemically. I largely missed the boom as I was studying abroad for my PhD between 2000 and 2006. When I think about why I didn’t get caught up in it and end up in negative equity like a lot of other people I know the answer is two words: dumb luck.

Following the crash, Ireland went through a liminal period of draconian austerity. Unemployment skyrocketed, house prices collapsed by up to 50% (Thomas, 2009), and public services were pushed to the edge. From about mid-2015 onwards to 2024, when this article was written, house prices began to increase rapidly. The population increased, housing eventually increased in price beyond what it was in 2007, homelessness figures reached record numbers and Ireland became ‘no country for young people’ (Hosford, 2024).

A kayfabe system

The Irish state and economy had a number of interesting characteristics during the period that this article was written, in the mid-2020s. I was in my mid-40 s at that point. One is what I sometimes call its kayfabe nature. Kayfabe is a term that comes from professional wrestling. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 1980s, when I was young I was really into WWF professional wrestling. My favourite wrestlers were The Ultimate Warrior and The Undertaker (all caps). A few years ago when I was in my 30s I went to a wrestling match in Dublin. One of the fights was between two women, both super athletic. I forget their exact names but one woman was introduced as something like Mary from the Flats. Her opponent was something like Saoirse from D4. Saoirse, the announcer said, worked in HR. It kind of struck me that everyone, men, women, children, and there were a lot of people there, knew immediately to boo Saoirse and cheer Mary. The guy next to me was chanting work-place rel-a-tions com-miss-ion. Mary and Saoirse were both incredible athletes and while the story of class conflict they were telling was fake (well…) the stunts were real. This is what is called kayfabe. Kayfabe describes something which appears to be sincere and true, authentic, when the ‘truth’ is that everything that is on display is partly real and partly performative, an act, there for show, possibly in fact only a distraction. The audience's role in a kayfabe situation is to suspend their disbelief, even though they know that what they are seeing cannot be totally real, and to actively pretend what they are seeing is real. By doing so, actors and audiences at wrestling matches maintain kayfabe together (Moon, 2022). Everyone is in on the game, apart perhaps from children or the similarly naive. Interestingly, Moon argues that even smart fans, aware to kayfabe, sometimes long to be ‘marks’ and want on some level to be conned, to fully believe what they are witnessing is true. In fact explicitly acknowledging what you are witnessing is kayfabe can ‘ruin the magic’ for everyone and attract negative reactions from other audience members and performers (Rogers, 2017).

This sense of kayfabe I think goes right throughout the Irish system, state and economy. Irish systems and entities are often partly real and partly fake. What they promise, what they actually do, is often partly real and partly fake. They are often partly one genuine thing and partly something else; that something else, that hidden part, is often driven by money and is rarely acknowledged, even though, like dark matter, everyone knows it's there even though you can’t see it. Now this doesn’t meant things are entirely fake. But they are not entirely real either. People have a sense that both things are true and hope that maybe, this time, the real part will win out and things will be ok. Kayfabe kind of means creating or encountering a fantasy and then wanting to believe in it yourself even though part of you knows it's just a fantasy. A good friend of mine, for example, had a child who was diagnosed with autism. The diagnostic process took too long, but it was kind of real. When she asked what would happen next she was told that the child would be put down on a waiting list for services that she was told that the child needed. How long will we be on the list she asked. She was told that it might be a few years. She could go private though. The person telling her this was professionally committed to their line, trying to convey to her that they were giving useful and practical advice. Her role was to pretend that what she was hearing was genuinely useful and practical advice. She had a mortgage and childcare fees to pay. She couldn't afford to go private. This was just fantasy. None of them would have used these words, but they all knew- at least on some level- that they were in the middle of a kayfabe system. You're promised help and there's kind of help there, but at the same time, not really. You all understand this, but you all pretend otherwise. What's the alternative? The kayfabe nature of entities and systems often becomes exposed when things go wrong and ordinary people need something to strongly intervene on their behalf. People often have a belief, an assumption, a hope, that is, should be, a state, an agency, a system, public, private, whatever, there to look after and protect people in a meaningful, not a performative way; something driven by vocation and not money. And why wouldn't they have these expectations? Everywhere you look in Ireland individuals and institutions are promising best services, best in class, best practice, best evidence-based whatever. But people often find out that what is promised is often just a show, something gossamer. In many cases they find out that what they are really dealing with is something darker, more exploitative. Things often work only as long as people have a belief that they are working and do not actually demand actual meaningful goods, services, protection. And when things go wrong and people look for help they often find that they are engaging with individuals, institutions and systems that either cannot effectively protect them, or worse, are simply indifferent to their suffering. The Cassandras who point out the kayfabe nature of Irish systems, that there is something that is not real, not right, here, are often attacked, sometimes advised to commit suicide.

Biopolitical capitalism

A second important feature of Ireland in the 2020s is the presence of biopolitical capitalism. Capital in Ireland, international and local, is often attracted to what Marx calls commodities of necessity such as property and healthcare (Cullen, 2023; Pope, 2024). These things are seen as highly profitable assets where demand is inelastic and cannot easily be reduced, thereby ensuring the steady extraction of surplus value (Daly, 2023; Hosford, 2024; Specia, 2024). Privatised healthcare in Ireland in the 2020s for example became ‘an enormous industry…owned by ...[international] hospital groups, global private equity funds, billionaires and private investors’ (Keyes, 2023). It is worth thinking about why capital, international and local, was attracted to these commodities. This capital was, I think, seeking to obtain control over commodities that were necessary for the maintenance of life. In Foucault's (1990) terms, capital owners were seeking to become biopolitical ‘managers of life and survival’, to seek ownership over things that regulated ‘the biological existence of a population’. Once they possessed sufficient control over these commodities they then possessed the ability to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault, 1990). If people could not afford to pay to access these commodities they were easily at risk of dying socially, economically; in the extreme, perhaps literally. So they had to pay. They couldn't go without these commodities. It was inevitable that once investors acquired these commodities, in the absence of controls rents and prices always (often dramatically) went up; Marx (1990) would say that the actors who assumed possession of these commodities fed on the life force of the individuals who are forced to depend on them for their survival. In a way this would not be a problem if this biopolitical capitalism was contained or limited; but it's increasing spread across Ireland in the 2020s meant that more people in Ireland were at risk of being locked into ongoing situations of biological dependency and surplus value extraction across multiple dimensions of life. At some point, though, these people would become sick, or would have a child, or lose their job, and might no longer be able to generate surplus value; what would happen to them then? Biopolitical capital's way of managing this risk was sometimes to say that its commodities are for young professionals; the healthy childless, the key subjects of twenty-first century capitalism.

Acceptance of predation

The Irish state in the 2020s could probably not be described predatory; though I sometimes think that in some ways it had predatory tendencies. A predatory state is one that seeks to feed on its population and extract – by force is necessary – resources that enrich the state and its political and economic elites (Vahabi, 2020). However, I think an argument can be made that the Irish state was accepting of, or least indifferent towards, at least a degree of capitalist predation upon its population and systems. In the case of commodities such as housing in the 2020s, for example, the state accepted the rights of investors, institutional and local, developers, bankers, funds, and all of their attendees, the lawyers, accountants and other servants of corporate capitalism, to extract substantial profit from biological entities in Ireland. This type of rentier capitalism is, in Marx's terms, based around unproductive labour exploiting productive labour (Christophers, 2021). Estate agents, developers and banking analysts frequently urged the state not to intervene to control the rising costs of commodities as it would disrupt the workings of the free market. The problem for people trying to survive in this system is that they often lacked options to resist or to flee (where was there to really go to, the planet was becoming more nationalistic, violent, unstable and was beginning to collapse) (Vahabi, 2020), meaning that they were vulnerable in an ongoing way to predation. The solution that some, maybe many, people came to in this system was to become predatory themselves, to extract as much surplus value as they could from the commodities and services that they offered to those who, unfortunately for them, had no choice but to accept them. In this type of system, it is not that surprising to see the emergence of scavengers who wanted things like sex in exchange for access to biopolitical commodities (Soares, 2023). Desperation fuels vulnerability and vulnerability is always attractive to predators.

Protecting the use value of some, not all

At the same time, this system wasn’t totally laissez-faire, ‘let the strong devour the weak’. In many cases, though certainly not all, some of the very weak were protected from the harshness of the economic system that surrounded them through things like free healthcare and free housing. Again and again Irish elites noted the importance of protecting the weak and vulnerable. As if everyone wasn’t vulnerable in such a system. Marxist medical sociologists note that in two tier health systems, like Ireland has, the private system is often presented as a supplement to the public system. Whereas in reality, the public system is often there so the weak won’t riot and tear down the private system. And also so those who feel that they must use the private system also feel that the system as a whole is fair and they can continue to support the private part of it. So by using socialist policies to support a certain part of the population, the state can allow, or at least tolerate, capitalist forces to be unleashed on the other parts. This is how the state enables capitalism to work on a practical and psychological basis.

So for example to protect the people who the state considered to be vulnerable from the exploitative forces that the state allowed to develop, in the second half of the 2020s the state did begin to become more interventionist, active. For example, it began to buy more and more housing; in some years, along with institutional investors, buying up to four in ten new build houses (McWilliams, 2025). In 2023, the state and private sector investors bought the majority of apartments in Dublin (Woods, 2024). There are different ways to conceptualise this state actor and its interventionist orientation. It could be thought of as a type of state capitalist entity, guaranteeing and assuming direct ownership over commodities and capital (Alami, 2023). It has been described as a ‘crisis post-neoliberalization entity’ (Byrne, 2024). At the same time, it was not a straightforward socialist entity in any sense of the word; it wanted more capitalist investment in commodity production and bought commodities from capitalist entities, did not really want to produce them itself (Sirr, 2025).

One of the most vulnerable groups in this system was the lower middle- to middle- class who had to rent and buy at market prices (Byrne, 2024a). Basically averagely paid wage labourers with no ownership of commodities. A system was emerging around them that was focused on housing for ‘the better-off, or the poorest’ (Sirr, 2025). Special schemes to try to protect this middle income group by controlling their housing costs had ‘2800 applicants for 50 properties’ (Creed, 2025); other schemes had 2000 applicants for 20 properties (Towey, 2025). The lucky few got to escape free market capitalism, the vast majority were left to try to survive in a state of ‘horror’ (Creed, 2025).

In effect, in a system where individuals were becoming increasingly seen for their exchange value, the state sought to protect the use value, the inherent worth, of some. However, the individuals who fell outside the system's protection understood that they were to be exposed to intense market forces. They were the people who said things like ‘I feel so abandoned and neglected and forgotten above…we’ve no security…we’re just waiting. Like, when's it going to happen?’ (Doyle, 2024). This statement could as easily be describing someone waiting to die as waiting to be evicted. In fact, these people could find themselves, in relation to housing, competing against the very state entity that was seeking to protect others from the capitalistic forces that the state itself had allowed to be unleashed on them. This is what Marx calls alienation; some young house buyers were competing against an entity that their life force helped to create and maintain.

Experiences of anarchy and psychic numbing

Capitalist entities who assume control of biopolitical commodities like housing and healthcare produce rationalised commodities. This means that their commodities are based around concepts like calculability, quantification, control, order. The apartment buildings and private healthcare that they produce are commodities that are often controlled, disciplined, high quality; they are what Ritzer refers to as islands of rationality.

The psychological experience of living in a system characterised by high levels of biopolitical commodification and insufficient supply of those commodities, however, is something different, something more like a scream. Psychologically I think it is experienced as almost effectively like living in a type of anarchocapitalism (this isn’t a totally inaccurate description – Ireland has been called the ‘Wild West of European finance’, a state where anything goes in relation to capital) (Lavery and O’ Brien, 2005). In anarchocapitalism the state plays only a very limited role in controlling and regulating private institutions and corporations, and society is seen as being composed of individuals and institutions who choose, or at least are forced to choose, to interact with one another in a free market place. This is a system where individuals and corporations freely compete with one another in a social Darwinist struggle for possession of the limited resources necessary for life and survival (Daly, 2023). Unless you have experienced this yourself it's difficult to understand the stress and fear that comes with realising you are encountering a social Darwinist system where only those with protection or the strong, those with the most money, will survive, where there is no authority but the free market, and where you, because you lack protection and are weak, will die or end up in a situation of exploitation; and if and when you die, no one will care. So the system produces feelings of despair, fear and hopelessness in exposed groups. These feelings are natural responses to trying to find a place to rent and showing up to a viewing and realising that hundreds of people are also queuing (Hennessy, 2022), to skyrocketing house prices, to a thousand people putting their names down to buy newly built houses only to be told that a corporation had bought them all from under them, to needing a child to receive health services and being told that the waiting list will take years, to health insurance going up multiple times a year at rates of 5, 6, 7%. This is a system where some owners of capital ask potential tenants what is ‘the top rent they would be willing to pay’, thereby encouraging people to compete against each other for the privilege of exploitation (Fox, 2022). It is a system where state officials note ‘that's effectively where we are really’ when asked if, in 2020s Ireland, only those with a substantial amount of money can have any degree of security in life (Ni Aodha, 2022).

This is also a state/system that is characterised by high levels of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton and his colleague Richard Falk, (1991) term psychic numbing. Psychic numbing refers to an individual or group mentally closing themselves off from the experiences of others, especially from their suffering. I think on some level everyone, in Leonard Cohen's words, knows what's going on here, that this is a kayfabe system characterised by exploitation of biopolitical commodities by predatory entities, and where protective systems protect some some of the time but not all all of the time. It is for some, maybe for many (probably not for all, but a sizeable minority), a system of horror. For others though, for example because they are outside it, either because they own sufficient commodities, or because they own the means of production of those commodities, the system is either something that they do not – they cannot afford to – think deeply about; or possibly the system seems beneficial to them. Even people who are less inclined to psychic numbing are themselves exposed to acceleration processes (Rosa, 2015) and their own need to ensure access to biopolitical commodities, and often simply do not have the time to imagine what is happening to many.

Lifton talks about three types of psychic numbing and I think all three are present in Ireland. One type of psychic numbing comes from societal-level death immersion. I think that it's possible that the Crash, the end of a particularly intense kayfabe period in Irish society, was experienced as a type of unacknowledged societal death. However, at the same time nothing meaningful was learned from it since in many ways an even more exploitatively intense system emerged from its wreckage. The fact that nothing was learned, that something truly different did not develop, just the same but more so, suggests that a type of social dissociation, some block on social learning, was present. We don’t have to be naive about this. This block might have been as much actively put there as it spontaneously happened. A second type of social numbing is the blocking of certain images from the social mind because they are too unacceptable to consider. For example, you might have an ambient awareness that there are children with disabilities in Ireland who cannot access school places, or if they can, who cannot access sufficient – if any – services or special needs support. However, you might find it difficult to actually imagine the day to day lives of these children and their circumstances, their parents’ stress. Their suffering is in some way blocked from your mind. Now extend this lack of imagination out to most of the society. The third type of numbing is called numbing of enhancement. Lifton says it refers to diminished awareness in some spheres, and for some groups, in order to allow feeling for others. Numbing of enhancement I think is present right across state and capitalist entities in Ireland, across all types of agencies and organisations, across all types of individuals. They have awareness of the needs of certain groups and individuals, but awareness of the suffering of others that falls outside of, for example, their bureaucratic or capitalist remit or their personal cause or group interest is more suppressed. What I think you could call genuine system level or sociological awareness of suffering is much more uncommon. Maybe we’re not talking about a total disregard of the suffering of others, but their – your – ability to exist outside of a psychically numb state for those people and groups is time limited.

You, after all, have your own job to do.

You have your own problems to deal with.

14

The Ireland that I grew up in was transitioning to becoming a kayfabe, psychically numb state that was tolerant of the biopolitical commodification of its population. And yet within that emerging world, there was room for young kids to go bombing down hills, to listen to rock music, to go do discos, to play with dinobots and predacons, to play tip the can, to go climbing in the woods at twilight. There were other worlds that were parallel to mine in Ireland where children were, and still are, basically living in really bad circumstances. I have driven through parts of Dublin which have some of the highest rates of suicide in Ireland; but you wouldn’t know it, they look the same as everywhere else. Ten minutes away from these places corporations are building the highest of high end apartments. Ireland has always abandoned and devoured its children, used their life force to feed the appetites of those more powerful than them. In the twentieth century it was their bodies. In the twenty-first century, it is their money, their future. There will be kids today in their own pockets of enchantment who will be skateboarding and playing Transformers and laughing in the twilight. I think their context has changed though. The wider world in which their work is embedded is becoming increasingly rationalised and privatised; and, as such, paradoxically increasingly anarchic, characterised by a breakdown of meaningful order.

I think looking back that maybe I was part of a liminal generation in Ireland that lived at the end of one world, a twentieth century conservative Ireland, and the beginning of another, a social Darwinist capitalist twenty-first century Ireland (Keohane et al., 2003). I remember something different than what I see before me now, a world where people say things like ‘there's nothing like extra competition to drive better value for consumers’ (Brennan, 2024) and others that, despite this competitive marketplace, ‘rates are increasingly significantly for the second time in five months’ (Weston and Caulfield, 2024). Even while Ireland was transitioning from one system to another there were nested pockets of enchantment, which like all enchantment co-existed next to pockets of horror, where things felt magical, but genuinely magical, not the charlatan alchemy promised by financial institutions and systems (Szakolczai, 2014). I was lucky enough to grow up in one of those pockets while the world around me was becoming rationalised, disenchanted, structured according to capitalist imperatives and the need to extract surplus value from biopolitical commodities.

15

Where this is ultimately going I don’t know; the trajectory of things might make sense to you in retrospect but is unclear to me.

I hope in your world you have managed to control pleonexia, uncontrolled greed. I hope you have managed to strengthen the centre of things. I hope you have achieved justice and accountability. I hope you have rejected kayfabe. I hope you have achieved an economic system that is not based upon your exploitation. I hope you have found a form of genuine equality and not the often false, partial form that we had.

You might not have.

You might, as Keohane said, be in an inferno. The people and institutions who come to you, who promise to pray for you while seeking to prey on you, will be part of this inferno too. Do not trust them. They only seek to make their own lives in the inferno more comfortable.

Your question, like our question, might continue to be how do I live right in wrong times? (Keohane, 2021).

16

Even in the worst times, though, never forget that there is the possibility that things can change. In fact, change might be the only universal constant. It is not the case that things will always change for the better, but the possibility of change will always be at least latently there in any system. Marx differentiated between use values and exchange values. Use values are something like a things inherent worth. Exchange values are what it can be bought and sold for under capitalism. Ireland in the 2020s shifted to a place where, if they weren’t protected, a person's exchange value was seen as their only real value. However, this was wrong – it was wrong morally, but it was also wrong in its understanding of human nature – and done primarily to justify and feed the interests of capitalism.

Where you can, try to seek the use value in people. Where you can, avoid becoming involved in predatory systems. Try to see if you can strengthen systems that protect people. In my time, we often mistook bureaucratic formalism for genuine protection. The vocational drive in the systems was often lacking however. When I was a precarious researcher I remember once being shown an email that someone from HR had written about me, saying that the institution that I worked for at the time needed to be protected from me. I think they meant that they were worried that I could put in a claim for my worker's rights in the future. There were a lot of people in my situation. I sometimes wonder what the person who wrote that email thought that they were doing. If you ever find yourself in a situation that you can’t do anything about and which is destructive, what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton called an atrocity producing situation, try to walk away. Try not take part in it.

Never forget that this was a world that was created by people who may not have your interests at heart but also that everything that is made by people can be unmade by people. You do not need to let people or ideas from the past determine your future. Never underestimate, however, the power of entrenched interests and systems and the extent to which they will fight to protect their power and their ability to generate surplus value from you and your life force. Never underestimate the complacency and indifference of those who are supposed to be there to protect you. Always be aware that these same institutions may well pretend to be helping you even when they are not. But also never underestimate yourself and the light that you bring to the world. Try to find others who also have that light.

One day when you were young and I was waiting for you to finish playing I talked to a man whose child had recently been diagnosed with special needs. I asked what help the child was getting. There is no help he said. There's pretend help that promises to keep coming and never does.

While the child moves forward in time and slips further and further behind.

Later that evening I was talking to your mother and (because I sometimes get worked up about things that I have no power over) and said to her that capitalists, technologists, increasingly have the future locked up and the future belongs to them. You must have been listening because you turned to me and looked serious and said

No daddy, the future belongs to us.

17

There was once a time in Ireland when two young boys went skateboarding on Christmas day.

After my brother reached the bottom of the hill he waved up at me to go.