Waiting for the Barbarians

As we wait - as the 2.3 million people of Gaza wait - for the IDF's 'ground offensive' to begin, with its inevitable enormous suffering and loss of life inflicted, and its potential ethnic cleansing and genocidal effects, civil society in the Middle East and in the Atlantic West is galvanised.    Petitions of writers are organised, protest marches take place, the media is alive with discussion.   Governments, alas, ooze on in their nefarious, dishonest and Orwellian support for the cruelty of the powerful - Netanyahu, Macron, Biden, Sunak, Scholz among the greasiest slugs heedlessly and hypocritically trailing their slime over the international discourse.   If the worst happens, and there are plenty of signs that it may, these craven and shitty politicians will have nowhere to hide.  It will not be possible to say 'I didn't know' or 'If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have taken action'.   What is happening and going to happen is clear - it is clear all across the Israeli political spectrum - and the time for action has actually already passed.

The London Review of Books, awful as its Irish coverage often is, has long been a place where strong writing on Palestine was published.   Veterans of this work were and are Edward Said and Judith Butler.    The current issue carries excellent pieces by Adam Shatz, the brilliant Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, Amjad Iraqi and Francis Gooding.

Adam Shatz · Vengeful Pathologies · LRB 20 October 2023

Eyal Weizman · Exchange Rate · LRB 2 November 2023

Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023

Francis Gooding · The Leaflet · LRB 2 November 2023

Conor

Gaza: Darkness Visible

Hi comrades

This posting consists just of suggested reading, though I realise that most of us now have lots of good places to go for information on Palestine and Gaza.

Bashir Abu-Manneh, brilliant Palestinian scholar at the University of Kent, and a contributing editor at Jacobin, explains a great deal in this superb interview/article:

We Must Mobilize Against the Carnage Being Inflicted on the Palestinian People

Daniel Finn, features editor at Jacobin, has published several excellent articles:

Israel’s Western Backers Are Still Running Interference for Netanyahu’s War Crimes

Israel’s Western Allies Have Done Everything Possible to Criminalize Nonviolent Resistance

The Verso site has several excellent articles on its blog:

Gideon Levy, distinguished Israeli columnist at Ha'aretz:

Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price

Shadi Chalesh

For the last time: Rejecting the conversation ‘between the sword and the neck’

Richard Seymour

The equanimity of lunatics

Alberto Toscano

The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate

Conor

Eyeless in Gaza - Scattered Thoughts on the Present Crisis

I. The State of Israel may be about to commit grave crimes against humanity - ethnic cleansing or genocide - against the people of Gaza.   Warnings about this terrible and apocalyptic prospect come from sources as various as Jewish Voice for Peace, the American Middle East news site Mondoweiss, and the respected Palestinian politician Mustafa Bargouthi. 

Here is the account of the Gaza Strip given by the renowned Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem.  This is not up-to-the-minute, but gives essential background:

The Gaza Strip | B'Tselem

And here is a video lecture by Sara Roy, a brilliant scholar of Gaza:

(220) Gaza: When is life grievable? Personal reflections on decades of research in Palestine by Sara Roy - YouTube

Here is Dutch scholar Sai Englert on the impending threat of genocide:  

Sai Englert, Impending Genocide — Sidecar (newleftreview.org)

II.  Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but committing crimes against humanity against the civilian population of a territory of which Israel is the occupier is not a mode of self-defence.

III. Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but they very rarely talk about the right of the Palestinians to self-determination,  and the right of an occupied population to resistance, including armed resistance.

IV.   Many commentators make much of Hamas, according to its charter, being 'sworn to Israel's destruction', as a BBC website puts it.   There are a couple of things to say about this.  First, while it is true that Hamas sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy, it must be recognised that it has done very little to achieve this alleged aim.  This is because it is incapable of doing much, militarily, to achieve this aim.   Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades constitute a popular resistance militia, or 'terrorist group'.   But nothing in this formation's military capacity could bring about Israel's demise.   On the other hand, while Israel may not be 'sworn to destroy' the Palestinian people', in some explicitly articulated doctrine, its very presence and juridical being is predicated on exclusion of non-Jews, who are, in practical terms, Palestinian Arabs.  Further, it is equipped with every modern weapon which such a task might require, and it has done a very great deal to scatter, dispossess, expel, break and destroy the Palestinian people, from 1947 to this day.   What is more important - a political-ideological document, or the 'facts on the ground'?   The facts on the ground suggest that Israeli policy is driven by the intention to ruin the Palestinian nation in every way possible - political and military but also economic, cultural, legal and social.   This is what should be our focus, not the Hamas charter.

V. In Terrorism and the Ethics of War (2010), Stephen Nathanson argues that condemnation of terrorism is really only credible when combined with sincere. unbiased and consistent opposition to the targeting of the innocent, no matter the identity of the killers or the victims, and no matter the cause.   This puts most of the condemnation of Hamas we've been hearing or reading in the non-credible category.

VI. Those who demand of Palestine activists that before any other discussion of the Gaza crisis can take place, they condemn Hamas, need to be challenged as to their adhering to the tenets in V above.  Where were these blowhards, when the opportunity was presented to condemn the treatment of Gaza over the last 15 years?   Where were these blowhards when Israelis murdered or lynched hundreds of Palestinians in the last year?    The fact is that the display of moral outrage comes very cheap, and it is always more about virtue signalling and anti-intellectual self-pleasuring than any real thought or understanding.  It nearly always is unrelated to a real connection to the people or situation in whose interest it is apparently deployed - indeed, it stands in for and occludes such a connection.

VII.   Defenders of Israel who ask Palestine activists not to endlessly have recourse to the past to justify their positions need to cop themselves on and remember the Holocaust.

VIII. Liberals who tell us that violence is committed by 'both sides' need to remember that what we are observing in reality is a rich first-world state, with an economy predicated on advanced technology, with one of the most formidable military apparatuses in the world, which is armed with unacknowledged nuclear weapons, crushing a people without a state, without a standing army or airforce or navy, a people impoverished, scattered and abused, denied most of its rights, dispossessed of its homeland, and armed only with rifles, shoulder-held grenade-launchers and crude unguided rockets of the most limited effectiveness.  The 'conflict' is not one of equals, and never has been.   As Frantz Fanon once suggested, the native knows that liberal Western 'objectivity' will always be used against him.

IX.   In the actions it has taken since the weekend, and in the actions it seems about to take, Israel has enjoyed almost total support from 'the international community' - that is, from the United States and its European allies, including Britain, Germany and France.  If ethnic cleansing or genocide are committed by Israel, those other countries will be complicit in these crimes against humanity.  

X.   Israel removed its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2005, in a unilateral 'disengagement' plan led by Ariel Sharon's government.   But Israel has constructed a security fence around the entire Strip (other than along the Egyptian border), and it controls the airspace and the coastline.  Israel controls all food supplies, medical supplies, fuel, and electricity for Gaza.  Dov Weisglass, a former adviser to the Israeli government, suggested in 2006 of the regulation of produce allowed into Gaza that 'the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger'.   An Israeli report, compiled in 2008, but repressed by the government until 2012,  revealed that calculations had been made of the calorific intake Gazans needed to avoid starvation and malnutrition.    Yet Israel, precisely because of this extraordinary amount of control of the Strip, and in spite of the 'disengagement', remains in international law the occupying power.  An occupying power has, in fact, a duty of care to the civilian population under its control.   Reducing that population to a condition of 'bare life', in Giorgio Agamben's famous term, is a crime against humanity.

XI.  Returning to VI. above, when challenged to 'condemn Hamas', one needs to pause and think.  What exactly is at stake in such a demand?  What lies behind it?  What does the person making the demand hope to achieve by it?    It seems to me to be a very particular kind of rhetorical-ideological manoeuvre.   Firstly, in any discussion or debate, to make a forcible demand of one's interlocutor is to demand control of the discussion.   Second, it is implicit in the demand that the person to whom it is made will be reduced, weakened, arm-twisted, by both the request and the problem of reacting to it, whether or not a 'condemnation' is issued.  Third, the language of 'condemnation' is a moral or ethical language, not a political language, and so the demand seeks to shift the ground of discussion from politics to morality.  Fourth, the demand is present-ist: it seeks to strip a concrete human and political situation of any of the wider frameworks which help to constitute that situation.  Implicit in the demand is the idea that trying to think or learn any kind of background or context, any kind of establishing historical narrative, is irrelevant or even, of course, immoral.   To talk of the past or of context is, apparently, to indulge in 'whataboutery', or, as the historians call it, counterfactual speculation.  The point, though, is that one party to a purported discussion, in issuing the demand to 'condemn Hamas', is arrogating to themselves the right to police that discussion.  And it is incorrect to suggest that seeking knowledge about an action amounts to justifying that action - indeed, a proper 'condemnation' of an action requires a full understanding of what that action was and where it came from.

The overall conclusion one comes to, then, is that the demand to 'condemn Hamas' is more a matter of form than of content.   The claim of the person making the demand to be concerned about the situation in Israel or the situation in Gaza, is fictional.   The demand is made as a debating point; it is not made from or even seeking to take up, a coherent moral position.   The demand should, therefore, be refused.

Here is Judith Butler, in the London Review of Books, saying similar things to me, but saying them better:

The Compass of Mourning

And Frédéric Lordon, also:

Totalitarian catalysis

Conor

"What is critical consciousness, if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?" - Remembering Edward Said

Twenty years ago today, Edward Said finally succumbed to the leukaemia he had so bravely battled for the previous decade.     His early death - he was only 67 - was greeted with sadness and dismay by his allies and friends, and no doubt with a grim glee by his enemies.   I can still remember getting the news by phone from a scholar friend, and feeling that the world would never be quite the same again.

I've spent much of my adult life reading Said, and, I hope, learning from him.  I first became aware of him as a third year undergraduate, when I heard about this book of his called Orientalism, which was represented to me as the greatest Foucauldian book by someone other than Foucault.    This was long before the internet or Amazon or other modes of rapid access to books, and my first copy of Orientalism was brought to me by a friend and former teacher from Minneapolis.   Now I would say that Orientalism is only superficially a Foucauldian book, but one's knowledge - one's critical consciousness - has to begin somewhere.

A year or so later, I took a Master's degree at University College Dublin, and began to read Said properly.   I was very fortunate that teaching me on that MA programme was a trio of brilliant and important scholars - Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd and Thomas Docherty - who took criticism very seriously, and who thought with rigour and intelligence about what it meant to be, or to try to be, an intellectual.   Not merely this but Deane and Kiberd had been crucial to the mediation into Irish literary studies of what we then called 'postcolonial theory': Kiberd, after all, had invited Said to the Yeats Summer School in 1986, and Deane had published the resulting talk as a Field Day pamphlet in 1988.  In those days, this 'theory' mostly consisted still in the work of Said and Spivak and Bhabha - postcolonial studies was still something relatively new and radical in the Irish academy and it was not yet a full orthodoxy elsewhere in the Anglophone world.    I gravitated to Said most of all - not only because his writing, while never simplistic, avoided the extraordinary obscurantism and neologisms with which the Indian critics larded their discourse, but I also was excited by the sense that, of the three, Said was most clearly an intellectual, an activist-writer who reached and addressed much wider audiences than those of the seminar room.

I read Orientalism with Kiberd, and immediately was compelled by it - the erudition, the wonderful readings it contains (those of French writers such as Nerval and Lamartine and Flaubert in particular), its polemical verve and urgency.  I could see, too, how the discourse of 'Orientalism' could be compared fruitfully to that of 'Celticism': that body of colonial themes and ideas which suffused much writing in and about Ireland in the nineteenth century, and which could be politicized by English figures such as Arnold and Froude, and their Irish antagonists such as Yeats and Synge.   

But I also independently was reading the book which I now consider superior to Orientalism, and to be  Said's masterpiece: The World, the Text, and the Critic.   The World, as I'll call it, is a collection of essays Said published between 1969 and 1982, and it's mostly concerned with the politics of intellectuals in the academy.     If Orientalism's scandalous success was partly attributable to its steely intervention in the realm of European and American ideas and policy in the Middle East, The World turned its critical weapons on Said's own institution - the university and the discourse of critique.   Part of what was so exciting about these essays - 'Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism', 'Travelling Theory', 'Reflections on American "Left" Literary Criticism' - was that Said could write convincingly about the then-new and vogue-ish poststructuralist scholars in the ascendant in America and Britain - Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes - while showing himself to be equally comfortable with the themes and  ideas of the New Criticism and, even more, the great tradition of Romance philology, whose legatee he could justly claim to be. This was the world of Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Karl Vossler and Ernst Robert Curtius, extraordinary scholars who helped in the early twentieth-century to invent modern comparative literature.   Furtheremore, Said was also imbued with ideas taken from the greatest names of Western Marxism - Lukács and Gramsci - and these in particular helped him work out his devastating readings of the ever-widening gulf between the radical rhetoric of the 'New New Criticism', and its actual and dreary institutionalization and self-reification in journals, curricula, conferences and departments.   Said could notice all of this, and call powerfully for what he called a 'worldly' criticism, which was, and is, a criticism which is aware of the relationship between the classroom and the street, and seeks to bridge it and analyze it.   

I should admit that it took me a while to grasp fully the implications of this work of Said's, and that I initially read him in a rather instrumental and callow way - when I wanted to investigate Foucault's ideas but recoiled from the difficulty of some of his texts, I turned to Said for a handy gloss.   When I wanted to understand Gramsci, I turned to Said for a handy gloss.  I would find my interest in cultural geography fired up by his spatialized criticism in Culture and Imperialism, and my reading of Adorno was stimulated by his lucid readings of the Western classical music tradition in Musical Elaborations.   Later, of course, I came to realise that Said was always a heterodox Foucauldian, that his geography was insufficiently grounded in the material realities of capital, that his reading of Adorno was arguably incomplete.  But I always went back to Said's work and read it again, each time learning a little more, each time maybe understanding it a bit more, and gradually allowing it its own integrity and heuristic power.   Said was berated so often by putative allies for being insufficiently Foucauldian or Marxist or, indeed, humanistic, that one came to long for due attention to be paid to the constructive and innovative and effective things he did and thought with Foucault or Lukács or Adorno or Auerbach, and his capacity to conjugate them together.   Equally peculiarly, such critique still continues in some quarters, making one wonder just what is at stake in such repetitive polemics.  Somehow, Said's putatively sympathetic critics need at once to possess him and to renounce and apparently transcend him and his work.  

I became familiar with some of the developing literature about Said's work.  I learned from Abdirahman Hussein's splendid reading of the whole oeuvre.  I thrilled to Paul Bové's appropriation of Said in his magnificent Intellectuals in Power.   I winced at Aijaz Ahmad's withering and doctrinaire critique in In Theory.   It dawned on me that Said was, in fact, not a Marxist or a post-structuralist - he'd never toe the line that Ahmad demanded or that Robert Young demanded.   Rather, Said was a radicalized humanist, who had realised with Gaston Bachelard that a humanism that did not press itself up to its own limits was not worthy of the name.   

It took me a while to read Said's first book, on a writer who obsessed him throughout his life, and who happens to be one of my own favourites - Joseph Conrad.   It took me a while, too, to read Said on Palestine: I read the literary criticism long before I read After the Last Sky or The Question of Palestine.     I realised immediately, though, how he had brilliantly deployed the weapons he'd acquired as a critic in his political writing - 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its  Victims', a major chapter of The Question of Palestine, has to be one of the most impressive instances of the 'worldly' criticism Said advocated so passionately.  

Timothy Brennan's biography of Said, Places of Mind, portrayed a fiercely engaged and active life.    Reception of the book has not been without controversy - with such a subject, how could it be otherwise? - but I enjoyed it very much.   I might have wished for a little more of the private man - someone who clearly lived, felt, acted, argued so intensely, right up to his very last hours, could only be fascinating and intriguing.  I myself met Said on a few occasions but could not properly claim to be a friend of his.    But his brilliance, warmth, and, in spite of the big ego, his interest in the people around him, no matter their high prestige or complete lack of importance - these were immediately obvious, and wonderful and admirable traits.    The world is, as many said at the time of Said's death, a quieter, dimmer, less interesting place without him.   

For a while after the death, I wondered what we, what I, could do without Said in the world.   And then, with colleagues and friends, and with all due modesty, I realised that the best way to honour his memory was to try to do similar or proximate or affiliated work, and to try to think my way to my own positions as he, autodidact in the style of Vico that he was, had sought to do.

To help with the task of remembering Said today, I am posting five pieces here.  Two are my own - my review of Tim Brennan's biography, in the Dublin Review of Books, and an essay commissioned by Dan Finn at Jacobin on Said's worldly intellectual performance.    The third article is the excellent and intelligent review of Places of Mind in the Boston Review, by Esmat Elhalaby.   The last two articles are the wonderful and heartfelt obituaries by Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch (which never fails to make me emotional), and Michael Wood at the London Review of Books.  

My DRB review of Places of Mind: 

Intellectual Insurrection

My Jacobin essay:

Edward Said Showed Intellectuals How to Bring Politics to Their Work

Elhalaby's review of Places of Mind:

The World of Edward Said

Michael Wood at the LRB:

 Edward Said

And Alex Cockburn at Counterpunch:

Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate Heart

Conor

"Discipline In War Counts More Than Fury" - Learning From Victory at Maynooth

On Tuesday morning, the Governing Authority of Maynooth University met in emergency session, to discuss its planned change in the way staff members of GA are to be chosen, from election (which has been the status quo) to selection by private consultants.  This plan was a tributary outcome of the Government's 2022 Higher Education Authority Act, which shrinks 'governing authorities' to a maximum headcount of 19, and fixes a permanent non-university majority of members at 10.  Faced with a letter from the Irish Federation of University Teachers rejecting this measure out of hand, with letters from international scholars in support of their Maynooth colleagues, and with the results of a petition organised by IFUT which had accumulated over 1160 signatures in a couple of weeks, GA voted to accept the current arrangement, to reject a 'hybrid' model which had been proposed (three to be elected, two selected), and to reverse its original proposal for the selection of all five members.

This victory has been achieved by the redoubtable and brave work of the IFUT Maynooth local, by IFUT staff and members more generally and by the support of a large network of Irish and international scholars and other persons interested in the future of Maynooth, of higher education in Ireland, and indeed of higher education and academic freedom everywhere.   

A victory, yes, but while one wishes to see the University work harmoniously after a period of tension, we who have fought for this achievement must not drop our guard.  We must never underestimate the forces arrayed against us.   Those forces will rally and return.   The victory achieved is one which does not wipe away many other problems at Maynooth or at Irish universities generally - commercialisation, the whole vacuous rhetoric of 'excellence', the mushrooming of often unaccountable management, the hegemonic re-purposing and use of 'radical' ideas and language to achieve undemocratic and empty ends ('equality, diversity and inclusiveness', top-down, management-led 'decolonisation' of curricula, the by-passing of departmental and disciplinary structures and democratic forms by the creation of 'schools', and much more).

We in Maynooth are deeply grateful to our comrades in Ireland and abroad for their support.    But we also have much to learn, as we strategize for the struggle which undoubtedly will continue.   We have much to learn from the crisis of public universities in the United States and from the struggles produced by the British Brown Report 'reforms'.     Even as we in Maynooth celebrate a victory today, Brighton University's management is seeking to eviscerate many of that institution's programmes and is cutting staff by 10%.   Compulsory redundancies wantonly axe careers, destroy departments, and wreck the learning opportunities of students.    All of these tactics may yet come to Maynooth.   

 

There will be much talk in Maynooth about the need now to put aside differences and work in the belief that 'we' all have the University's interests at heart.  But we do not all have the same interests at heart.   Management is concerned with students, teaching, and research only as 'inputs' and 'outcomes'.  It is in the thrall of a profoundly reified conception of learning and pedagogy.   It has no sense of the intellectual vocation, of the value of critique and dissent, and of education as a public good.

Maynooth staff and students have achieved a fine victory.  But we must remember that the moment of victory is that of the preparation for the next war, and we must plan accordingly.

Conor

The Future Will Only Contain What We Put Into It Now - the Maynooth crisis continues

 

Aontacht is the website of Irish Student Left Online.    Aontacht is a non-sectarian media collective of left-populist character, which seeks to challenge Irish society from the viewpoint of political parties, trades unions, tenants' organisations, student groups and workers' interest groups. It welcomes contributions, video and media contributions coming from a revolutionary socialist perspective.

Maynooth activists Steph Collins and Naoise McManus have published an extremely valuable article on the Maynooth crisis.  Collins and McManus are socialists and both are members of Students For Change at Maynooth.   Their article brilliantly outlines not only the current constitutional crisis at Maynooth - epitomized by the drive to appoint staff members to Governing Authority by private selection, rather than by democratic election - but offers a deeper history of the rise of neoliberal managerialism at Maynooth.   They also offer important background on the recently appointed President of Maynooth University, who is clearly the crucial and most ruthless driver of this process and of the wider process now underway of the bureaucratisation and commercialisation of Maynooth.  

Here is Steph and Naoise's superb article: 

Maynooth University “Systematically Excludes” Staff From Key Decisions in Trend Towards Commercialisation

It Is Forbidden To Forbid

Part of what is most sad and unfortunate, as well as infuriating and frustrating, about this current situation is that there are plainly staff - senior and maybe not so senior - at Maynooth University who consider that a good sharp dose of neoliberalism and the 'New Public Management' is what Maynooth 'needs'.  Otherwise, the current increasingly authoritarian and aggressive - and deeply anti-intellectual and anti-pedagogical - regime would never have been set up, the current spate of largely untransparent and barely accountable senior managerial appointments would not be taking place, and the bizarre and Orwellian 'Strategic Plan' would not have been created largely over the heads of staff, students and their contributions.

  

Students often have a much clearer and more profound sense of what the commercialisation of higher education looks and feels like than their teachers and supervisors.    Academics should listen, and co-operate with their student comrades.   We have universities, education and the future to protect.

Conor

The Wolf at the Door - Democracy Threatened at Maynooth University

Comrades -

For a long time, it seemed that Maynooth University enjoyed a degree of shelter from the chill winds of managerialism and commercialism which have eviscerated so much of what is good in the British and American university systems.   In truth, various pressures have been encroaching on Maynooth, its staff, its students, its facilities, for a couple of decades but these things were hidden or cushioned by the expansion created in the Celtic Tiger years.   Now, especially in the wake of the global pandemic, there is no mistaking the threats.   A beast approaches.    

The beast comes in various forms.  It comes in the form of an ever-greater stress on digital and electronic education, modes of teaching, learning and teaching environments.   It comes in the form of a highly aggressive top-down managerial style which the senior administration is content to deploy in all interactions with staff.   And it comes in the form of the cynical corruption and arrogant avoidance of Maynooth's legally constituted systems of governance by that senior administration.    

The immediate context is current government legislation, promulgated by Simon Harris, Minister for Higher Education, which seeks, inter alia, to shrink the 'governing authorities' of Irish universities, and to fix a structural majority on those governing authorities of non-university members.  In Maynooth specifically, the situation is massively worsened by the existing administration which wishes to abolish the electoral process by which staff have hitherto democratically chosen the university representatives on Governing Authority.   Staff members are instead to be selected by (no doubt handsomely paid and utterly unnecessary) outside private consultants.    

What the senior administration of Maynooth University is doing,  in pushing forward this harshly anti-democratic policy, is destroying one of the fundamental pillars of what constitutes Maynooth University and any proper university.   That pillar  is the principle of self-governance.   The original medieval universities were groups of scholars, with collective legal rights protected by charter, and independent of both secular and ecclesiastical power.   This too is the root of academic freedom - in 1155, the University of Bologna issued its Constitutio Habita, which guaranteed a scholar unimpeded passage in the interests of scholarship and pedagogy.    The senior administration of Maynooth is tearing up these rights, and is casually and ignorantly gutting the institution's status as a university.    Maynooth is well advanced on the road to being what Bill Readings called a 'university in ruins'.

Here is a superb blogpost by my comrade and friend, and the Head of the Maynooth English Department, Conrad Brunstrom, on this crisis: 

Representative Governance at Maynooth. Please read and sign.

Conrad urges readers to sign the petition organised in defence of Maynooth's vestiges of democratic self-governance.   Here is the link to the petition.  Please sign it and please pass it on as widely as possible.   

https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/defend-democracy-at-maynooth-university

Conor