Category Archives: History

Damn you Dick Roche

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This post may be a couple of days late but fuck it. I need to get this off my chest.

For readers unfamiliar with Irish politics, Roche was Ireland’s Environment Minister until last week when he was demoted to a junior ministry following a general election.

He’s now my least favourite politician because his last act as a Cabinet minister was to give the green light to build a motorway through one of Ireland’s richest archaeological regions.

Before we go any further here he is, the focus of my bile:

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The motorway will pass less than a mile from the Hill of Tara, a site of enormous historical and mythological importance. In folk tales it was the home of the high kings of Ireland, and it is believed to have been a major ceremonial site for various royal families in the north of the country.

Tara was put on the World Monument Fund’s crisis list only a couple of weeks ago.

I could live with it were that the limit of Roche’s actions.

However, earlier this year a vast site was discovered. This henge, which dates back to the late Bronze Age, was a site of outdoor worship. The Lismullen site was declared a national monument shortly after it was found and Roche ordered work on the M3 to be stopped.

But last week Roche, who says he consulted with the director the national museum, Dr Pat Wallace, decided this national monument should be “preserved by record” and the motorway built on top of it. “Preservation by record” involves archaeological sites or monuments being removed and photographic and written records made before construction begins.

I can appreciate the need for the roadworks. The nation’s infrastructure needs it. But to obliterate so much history is too high a price to pay. Imagine removing a couple of pyramids to make way for a highway across the Giza Plateau (and before I’m accused of exaggerating, many of the monuments in the Tara region are contemporaneous with the Egyptian sites).

Roche’s actions were a blatant attempt to undermine his successor as Environment Minister, John Gormley of the Green Party.

What really got to me though was Roche’s smugness. He said it would have been “mean-spirited” to leave such a “thorny decision” to an incoming minister.

I think in fact any minister sitting in my office in Custom House making the decision on the basis of that file would have made the decision I have made. I did the man some service by not passing the buck to him.

Dick, how can you breathe when your head is that far up your asshole?

Gormley, who had campaigned against the motorway, says he may be unable to reverse his predecessor’s decision. However, the Labour Party has claimed Gormley does indeed have the power.

So Dick — or Cock Roache as one graffiti artist rechristened you on an election poster — I hope you’re happy. I take some satisfaction that you’re back on the junior benches, but it doesn’t really take the sting out of the incalculable damage you’ve done to the nation’s heritage.

Damn you Dick Roche.

Mummies

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Sudan has arrested 12 people accused of smuggling antiquities including two mummies.

As this Reuters mini-story points out, Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt and its rulers are sometimes referred to as the “Black Pharoahs”.

But why they’ve used a picture of Chachapoyas mummies from the Andes to illustrate the story is beyond me.

Conflict of interests

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The Virginian-Pilot has an interesting biog-piece on Marcus Ross, who holds a doctorate in geosciences yet is also a creationist. I like how the spark for his internal debate was the fact he liked dinosaurs while being raised a Christian fundamentalist. His 197-page thesis was described by his supervisor as “impeccable”, yet Ross doesn’t believe a word of it.

Up in smoke

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AFP have a story of an Australian scientist with an unusual idea to help tackle global warming — ending the practice of cremation.

The guy, Professor Roger Short, is a reproductive biologist at the University of Melbourne.

“What a shame to be cremated when you go up in a big bubble of carbon dioxide,” he says. “Why waste all that carbon dioxide on your death?”

And he even has a suggestion for a ‘greener’ death: be buried under a tree in a cardboard box (as ’tis biodegradable). The body would nourish the plant which would in turn convert evil CO2 into gorgeous, sexy oxygen, keeping us all going that little bit longer.

Not that cremation is a leading cause of climate change (as even the man himself admits, hastily adding that he did not want to prevent people disposing of their bodies according to their beliefs).

But it does raise the issue of how little things can make a difference, whether it be washing clothes at a lower temperature, turning off the lights when you leave a room or being buried under a tree. And that’s something which will always fascinate me: how the most insignificant or run of the mill events can make a huge impact further down the line.

The best exploration of this notion I can think of would be ‘virtual’ history. This is perhaps better known as ‘what if?’ history.

For instance, William H McNeill, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, wrote an intriguing article focusing on disease, “one of the wildcards of history”.

He looked at the siegeof Jerusalem by the Assyrians in 701 BCE. The siege was lifted because a disease swept through the army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib. As Judah was a minor kingdom in the region, poorer and weaker than its neighbours, the Assyrian force moved on. McNeill points out that Sennacherib’s forces had already dominated the tiny kingdom anyway; what was one more city? The larger, wealthier part of David’s kingdom, Israel, had been extinguished some 21 years earlier.

McNeill notes that “common sense” in the region was “that the gods worshipped by different peoples protected their worshippers as best they could. Victory and defeat therefore registered the power of rival deities as well as the strength of merely human armies”. The departure of the Assyrian force was a propaganda victory for Hezekiah and the refomers.

“Thus, according to the Bible (e.g., the Book of Isaiah), God saved his people and destroyed the impious Assyrians by spreading lethal pestilence among them. Such a miraculous deliverance showed that both King Hezekiah and the prophet of Isaiah (whom Hezekiah consulted with) were right to rely on God’s power and protection.

More than that: it proved God’s power over the mightiest ruler of the age. Who then could doubt that the prophets and priests of Judah, who so boldly proclaimed God’s universal power, were telling the truth?”

The result was that a religious reformation the king of Judah, Hezekiah, had supported was able to sink roots. And it meant that when Jerusalem was finally conquered by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, and its inhabitants brought into exile in Babylon, their faith was strong enough to endure. The idea of an omnipotent God was so ingrained in the people that even the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem was not enough to encourage them to abandon His worship.

The people of Israel had lost their identity following their conquest; “by accepting commonsense views about the limits of divine power, they abandoned the worship of Jahweh, who had failed to protect them”. Not so for the citizens of Jerusalem, who interpreted their defeat as punishment for Judah’s failure to obey God’s commandments as well as they ought. Ultimately, these exiles “reorganised their scriptures to create an unambiguously monotheistic, congregational religion, independent of place and emancipation from the rites of Solomon’s destroyed temple in Jerusalem”.

So, one little plague outside the walls of a city in a minor kingdom some 2,700 years ago ultimately led to the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What would the world be like without them? Would we have a world full of gods? A world without any?

And now it is time to sleep.