Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Yesterday’s Gazeta Wyborcza had an article about the decline of the Irish economy. It’s headlined “Womens’ Spendthriftery Caused The Crisis” and consists of quotable quotes from people affected by the depression in Ireland. Among them is one Newton Emerson, Irish Times columnist, who is quoted as saying “In the majority of marriages it’s the woman who decides about spending. Unlike men, they cannot stand saving and go shopping much more often than men. Their oestrogen runs wild. Women were the driving force leading to Ireland to its downfall. In my opinion sacking women would blunt the effects of the recession. It will reduce their appetite for spending and men will find work which will enable them to maintain families. And they will finally regain their wallets.”

Awful stuff, isn’t it? Too bad GW didn’t do a little background reading. Emerson is a satirist. He published this article way back in February, exciting quite some controversy at the time.
(I used my own translation from the Polish because the words quoted by the GW do not correspond with what is on-line at the Irish Times.)

Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the - so hard to avoid a cliche here - tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the journalist’s name - or perhaps modesty forbade. The “article” asks us to take the validity of its headline entirely on the word of one person: Ciaran Farrell of Kroll Ontrack Ireland, which is in the data protection and retrieval business and is the only company mentioned in the piece. Of 357 words, 147 are direct quotes from Farrell and 37 are paraphrases of what he said, leaving 210 to come from the anonymous journalist. If you put the title of the - I can’t call it an article - the thing into a search engine you will see the Irish Times/Kroll’s piece of work has spread its noisome wings all over the world.

A good thing about the internet is it allows you to check if that vague feeling you had about the lie of the media land is correct. The vague feeling I had - vague because I don’t monitor newspapers - was that there has been a rash of articles about how this recession is not such a bad thing after all. You know: we (not I) had been getting a bit up ourselves, a bit stressed out by shopping. The vague feeling I have is that a crowd of lifestyle journalists have been giving the impression that a recession is like a holiday - welcome respite from the pressures of eating out, going skiing, investing in a second property and all that. So, have I been misled by quickly scanned headlines, snippets of articles read over shoulders on the bus? Not entirely. Here’s Brian O’Connell in the Irish Times (Friday, Sep 26th): “It’s official: the economy’s bust. Look on the bright side - this is a good time to be a customer…” Amazing: booms are good for consumerism but so are slumps.

Of course, the other good thing about the internet is you can also check to see if someone got in there ahead of you:  “I had written a light-hearted piece for the paper today in which I mentioned that a lot of media people seemed to be actually enjoying recession nostalgia and thinking that this latest recession is a good thing, and I open the Sunday Times and, honest to God, two of their main columnists are actually saying that this recession is a good thing.” That’s from Brendan O’Connor, not normally someone I would read, writing way back in July…

Word comes my way of a book by the name of There’s an Egg in my Soup by one Tom Galvin describing his experiences as an Irishman in Poland. It sounds awful but that may well be the fault of the publicity machinery behind the book. Here’s the cliché ridden summary on the publisher’s website:

Queues for groceries, unfathomable bus timetables, inexplicable traditions and truly bizarre soup – this is Poland in the mid-1990s, where Tom Galvin innocently went as a trainee teacher… Tom spent five years dealing with long and freezing winters, lack of good food, loneliness and hardship, as he discovered the misery as well as the joy of Polish life. He returned in 2007, to find surprising changes to the country that had been his home for the first years of his working life.

Queues, bad food and hardship – ah yes, brings back memories. To be sure – of the eighties, not the nineties, but perhaps his publishers have picked up the Polish authors’ fascination for accurate detail: how else could Mr. Galvin have spent five years here in the mid 90s and only return in 2007? I might add here that Polish bus timetables, despite recent slips in standards, are models of clarity and accuracy especially compared to the miserable specimens on display (sometimes) in roaring, modern Ireland.

Galvin is also ill-served by Bridget Hourican’s lazy, preening (”my own Grand Tour was spent in St Petersburg and Budapest”) review in the Irish Times. She spills the out-of-date clichés too:
“Your bathroom’s full of cockroaches? I have to share a communal loo.”
“bread queues and unravelling Orwellian bureaucracies out east”
“For five years he lived in an apartment with no TV” (the horror! The horror! Next we’ll be hearing that he had no car!)

Which brings me to my point: Poland is a thriving, thrusting, dynamic, modern state. Socially, culturally and aesthetically, it could not be further away from the stereotypes peddled in the west. As this clip from a popular TV show will demonstrate:

Monica Leech, a PR consultant to a government minister, has unexpectedly lost her libel case against the Irish Independent. The Indo had published a story about what had happened the previous day on RTE radio: a caller introducing himself as “Norman” had stated that Leech was winning public contracts in exchange for performing sexual favours for the minister (Martin Cullen). An interesting aspect of the case comes out briefly in Miriam Lord’s article on it in Friday’s Irish Times. The judge referred to the caller as a “nutcase” in the presence of the jury. The prosecution thought that this might “take from the case’s serious nature,” as Lord puts it, so the jury was recalled and “Norman” was reclassified as “malevolent.”

The more credible the accuser the…

Leech’s lawyers argued, then, that the word of a random, anonymous, prank caller - malevolent, but not a nut - carried enough weight to “destroy” (her counsel’s words) her reputation.

Some reputation.

As you might have guessed from the long gaps between posts, I am on holidays — holidays in dial-up land, also known as Ireland. Here, without links or diacritics, are some random observations:

As the number of Poles in Ireland continues to rise, journalists continue to make no attempt whatever to spell their names right. A helpful Pole will tell a gullible Irish journalist that his name is “Martin” and so into the paper of record goes “Martin” instead of the interviewee’s real name: “Marcin.” Journalists seem unfamiliar with the idea of writing down names and checking them. So the Irish Times wrote last week about “Magdalena Sobezak.” It should be “Sobczak,” as thirty seconds using Google would have shown. In fact, Google even suggests the right spelling for you. It is all too evident that print journalists use the internet to write their stories. Could they not use it to check spellings? Or better yet, get the spellings right first time?

Irish bread is still inedible. A Polish bakery has been established in Dublin.

The University of Limerick is looking for a Research Centre Administrator on a salary of �45,000. Too bad if you are merely an academic: the salary for a junior lecturer in politics there starts at �39,911. There’s better money for top gun big brains to be made in University College Dublin: they’re looking for a professor of geography and offering from �105,927 to �136,299. The president of
UCD is behaving like an English football club manager, which is great news for the David Beckhams of the academic world but a little less exciting for the lower third of staff in UCD who are denied pension rights because they are on fixed contracts. I wish the new professor of geography two thirds of the best luck.

Staying with matters academic: on a visit to Trinity College Dublin’s library I was met by new automatic doors. And I do mean “met.” They do not slide across; they open out — towards you as you walk in.

Thursday’s Irish Times reports Primesident Lechoslaw Kaczynski saying that there is no anti-gay bias in Poland. It’s all a media myth. (It’s funny how the media everywhere in the right-wing, capitalist, neo-liberal, free-market west is implacably left-leaning, at least according to those who are most right-wing, capitalist, neo-liberal and pro free-market. And yet it’s the lefties who are accused of being conspiracy theorists.) Kaczynski is quoted as saying “In Poland, there are homosexuals who take very high [political] positions.” Who could he have in mind?

Since I am now outside the jurisdiction of Poland I can say that both Kaczynskis are *********, ******** ********** without being arrested and questioned. No, wait a minute: they’re trying to sue a German newspaper for breaking Polish anti-free speech laws. Maybe I’ll go back and delete the above.*

The Kaczynskis could learn something from the example of Zachary Guiles, a US student who won in court the right to wear a tee-shirt that is critical of his president, George W Bush. God Bless America!

New civil service offices built outside Dublin in a move to decentralise the administration of this sprawling nation have been found to have a few “snags.” 400 pages of snags, to be more precise. The company that won the tender to build the offices turned in a bid that was far lower than that of any of its rivals. The result is numerous breaches of fire safety regulations and offices whose light switches are in the corridor. If this were Poland everyone would assume that a bribe had been paid. But this is Ireland, so it was probably greed and incompetence.

The minister of state for housing has come out against housing speculators. He thinks they should be taxed out of existence. So far so Big-Government good but here’s where the greed and incompetence come in: the minister said that such people should be “playing the commodities market in the London stock exchange on oil or cocoa beans or whatever…” See? It’s perfectly okay to “play” with the livelihoods of impoverished south American cocoa farmers but not with the houses of first world property owners.

*Duly deleted. I am back in Poland.

“They queue at the check-in desks in near silence, the weather-beaten, mountainy men in their cleanest dirty clothes with the tell-tale spatters of plaster; the sprinkling of women of a certain age, with the sprayed-rigid hair-dos in unlikely colours…” So begins a model of sloppy reporting and editing entitled “A Polish homecoming” in the Irish Times’s weekend supplement on Dec. 24th and bearing the sub-head “Kathy Sheridan joins Poles on a flight out of Dublin for a long-awaited Christmas trip home, to emotional family welcomes.” (Why Kathy Sheridan had long awaited this flight to her home, Poland, is left unexplained.)

First, the boring complaints: it’s “Zakopane”, not “Zacopane”; “Łukasz”, not “Lukas”; “szczęśliwy”, not “szosowy”; “Katarzyna”, not “Katarzaena”; “Krzysztof”, not “Krysztof”; “Janina”, not “Janena”; and “Joanna”, not “Johanna”. That’s a total of six proper names misspelled. Furthermore, there is no letter “v” in the Polish alphabet so it is unlikely that the Konrad mentioned in column two comes from “Vistola”. While the surname “Adamizyk” might be right, it’s more likely “Adamczyk” and Kielce is definitely north of Kraków, not south - I checked this in a big book called an “atlas”. Oh, and the whole tone of the piece is condescending in its pity for the poor Poles with their “near-empty, shabby little holdalls” and their “sad, beloved” country.

But it’s with the editing that things gets interesting - though I realise that not everyone will share my fascination with the art of editing. It’s a front page article, continued on page five. Apart from the photographer, Witold Krassowski, only Kathy Sheridan is credited on page one. The result is that half way through the article she appears to pull off the feat of bi-location, for not only is she on the plane from Dublin with the returning migrants, she is also on the ground in Katowice with their families waiting for their loved ones. Only at the very end of the article, at the foot of page five, is the miracle explained: “Additional reporting by Marcella Gajek”. My spies in the DfA tell me Marcella Gajek is Polish, so you might expect that the spellings would be more reliable in her part of the article. But no, it is at the Katowice end that the most outrageous mistake occurs: “‘Da! (Yes!) they’re real!’” The Polish for “yes” is “tak”, not “da” - that’s Russian, and you can probably imagine how the average Pole views the surprisingly widespread western belief that Poles speak Russian.

But was it Marcella Gajek who was in Katowice, waiting for the returning Poles? After all, the “young blonde woman” speaks to her in “perfect English”. Maybe my spies have been extracting confessions under duress and Ms. Gajek is not in fact Polish. Or maybe there were two people in Katowice - one who wrote “They [Kate’s family] chat easily” and one who wrote a couple of paragraphs later “She [Kate’s mother] can hardly speak without her eyes welling up”. Or maybe there were three reporters there - including the American who wrote about the toy “airplanes”.

These articles are sent out to the printers as .pdf files so the printers can no longer be blamed. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to treble-check the grammar and spelling of this entry…

News comes to me of an article in the Irish Times (Dec 8th) about the plight of Poles in Ireland. It seems that many of the estimated 120,000 emigrants have been lured there by unrealistically optimistic stories about Ireland in the Polish media. (These stories started before Poland’s referendum on joining the EU, when Ireland was constantly held up as the great success story of the EU — the grim 1980s having conveniently been forgotten. President McAleese even graced Poland with a visit days before the referendum.) Much to nobody’s surprise, the streets in Ireland are not paved in gold and there is some bad feeling.

But back to the Irish Times article. Its author, Marcella Gajek, sought out some more positive opinions about Ireland and found them issuing from the mouth of “Polish roofer Chris Bujak (25)” who has been in Ireland for a year and is just doing just fine � much better than in his previous “10 years working in Germany.”

Those of you less familiar with the Polish language might be interested to learn that “bujać” means to lie, fib, make up stories. (”Bujda” means “eyewash.”) “Bujak” is a genuine Polish surname and there is no suggestion that the roofer is a spoofer but 14 is a very young age at which to emigrate in search of work.