Bring on the clown

On Saturday, in cities all across the world, people are set to gather to protest against the election of US President Donald Trump.

At first, when I heard about the Galway protest, I decided I would not bother to attend.

I felt it was time to bite the bullet and accept a democratic vote as, after all, more than 62 million Americans voted for the New York businessman and reality TV star.

The 45th President of the USA.

Never mind the fact that Hillary Clinton polled over 64 million votes – I wasn’t a great fan of hers either – Trump was the legitimate winner of the US election.

I felt the Galway march would be organised and attended by the “protest against everything” brigade, the kind of people who condemned An Taoiseach (the Irish Prime Minster) Enda Kenny for congratulating Trump on his election victory in November.

Some of these people are never happy.

Whether they like it or not, they conveniently forget that the tiny Irish economy is over-reliant on American jobs in a globalized world.

They forget or ignore that sometimes in politics it’s important to play the game.

Kenny may have called Trump a racist during the election campaign, but it would be political suicide for an Irish leader to antagonize an incoming US President before he has even taken up office.

The US has always been close to the hearts of Irish people. It was an escape valve during tough times, when the ‘coffin ships’ set sail from Cork or Galway to allow people on one-way trips to flee from persecution and famine.

There are 40 million Irish-Americans and few countries as small as ours have such a big influence at the White House, where the Taoiseach gets to socialise with the President every year on our national holiday.

So I decided I would find something better to do this Saturday afternoon.

And then I began to read the comments on-line in response to the Galway protest, in which people felt free to vent their hatred towards immigrants, Muslims, or liberals.

They defended, and tried to justify, a presidential candidate who mocked a disabled reporter in front of millions of TV viewers. And claimed we had not seen the evidence we had witnessed with our own eyes.

Some of them genuinely believe that this billionaire businessman, whose father famously gave him a “small loan” of a million dollars to give him a start in life, is the answer to America’s problems.

This is a man who tweets with venom when he dislikes a piece of brilliant Alec Baldwin satire on ‘Saturday Night Live’.

Or who takes the time to send out a vitriolic reply to Hollywood actress Meryl Streep after she dares to criticise his views, at a time when he should be focused on putting his new Government together.

If Trump can take such offence when actors express concern about what he’s about to do to their country, how’s he going to behave in the Oval Office if he feels slighted by the Russians or the Chinese?

Presidential? Protests will take place across the globe on Saturday

Unfortunately, he will have access to a lot more damage than the Tweet machine.

To judge by so much bile and hatred on-line in recent weeks, the election of this man seems to have emboldened people who think it’s ok to spread hatred of immigrants, or Muslims, or Mexicans on-line.

It’s scary that 62 million people felt so angry or disillusioned that they voted for a man who boasted about "grabbing" women "by the pussy". Because he was rich and famous, he could act as he pleased.

It’s even scarier that Trump is a buffoon and a liar when it comes to climate change.

He has surrounded himself with people who have a vested interest in fossil fuel industries at a time when the very future of our planet is under threat.

Senior members of his Government have already admitted that short-term gain is more important than the state of our planet over the next 50 years.

The ice cap is melting, the oceans are rising, but Trump wants to reopen the mines and to "make America great" again by building gas-guzzling cars.

We can see it everywhere … global warming is no longer an abstract concept. We can see it in rising temperatures or freak storms, or the terrible air quality in big Asian cities which threatens the health of millions of people.

His treatment of a CNN reporter at a press conference last week brought to mind the way tyrants like Hitler or Stalin went out of their way to suppress and silence a free press in the 20th century.

But who cares what CNN say when you can get updates from Breitbart or Fox News?

This week, I've had people argue with me that Trump is not a racist, a sexist, or Islamophobic. They send me to obscure extreme right wing websites in a bid to discount what I've actually seen with my own eyes.

They'd rather keep the Mexicans out than look at the uneqaul power structures in this desperately unfair world. They'd rather build walls than bridges, when it was the immigrant experience which made America "great" in the first place.

It’s astounding that a property speculator with racist views is now seen as the salvation for so many people who are angry at the state of the world.

The people who pour scorn and venom at "illegal" immigrants see no irony in the fact that their own ancestors, many of them impoverished, set sail for the Americas in search of new and better lives.

Few of the people I have heard ranting about the Islamification of Europe and America seem to have spent much time in the Muslim world, where most people just want to get on with living happy and peaceful lives.

It’s simply absurd to condemn all Muslims – there are 1.6 billon of them across the world. It’s frightening, rather than absurd, that people still voted for Trump after he threatened to tag Muslims in America with special IDs just as Hitler targeted the Jews in 1930s Germany.

By voting for Trump, people chose ignorance over understanding and hatred over love. And I don’t want to live in that kind of world.

Like millions of others, I really hope that Trump will be a success, that he will shock the “lefty liberals”, and that he won’t destroy America and the world.

But he has said too much before and since the November election for people to face the future with anything other than concern or trepidation.

Which is why I feel it’s important to attend the protest against his inauguration on Saturday.

Not because we don’t accept the result of the election, but because Trump’s message of fear, loathing, and division is capable of destroying the entire world.

·         * There are two Galway events taking place on Saturday at 2pm. Check out the Facebook pages for Celebrate Diversity https://www.facebook.com/events/559992617530274/and the Women’s March on Washington Galway https://www.facebook.com/womensmarchgalway/

Check out my Facebook page: Ciaran Tierney Digital Storyteller

Check out my website: http://ciarantierney.com/

Let's hire a racist

Let’s hire a racist.

Because it’s good for ratings and we all know that’s all that really matters in this “post-truth” world.

It doesn’t matter that she referred to refugees fleeing terror as “cockroaches”, because we know she will get people talking.                                                  

Why would those  "cockroaches" want to escape this?

She will revive our flagging show.                                
It doesn’t matter if her country is partly responsible for the terror inflicted upon them, for forcing thousands to flee their homes.

She says she doesn’t care when she sees them drowning from capsized boats or queuing up for food on a cold Greek island.

She wants to set gunboats upon them, because they have no right to land on our shores.

She mocks them when they live in squalor, when they flee bombs and bullets in search of a better life.

“Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches,” she says. They are a threat to her beloved society and built to survive a nuclear bomb.

An ideal guest for a light entertainment show on a Friday night, don’t you think?

Let's overlook the fact that her country, the UK, has played an appalling role in supporting the kind of "rebels" who terrorise ordinary people and imposed Sharia Law across huge swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Let’s hire a racist. Sure, isn’t it fantastic that we don't need to import one from the UK when we have a home-grown one of our own?

“Our own” – now, perhaps they are the Irish words of the year in "post-truth" 2016.

Why look after refugees living on €19.10 per week for the past 15 years when we have so many homeless people of our own?

Why allow Muslims into this country when we have so many people lying on trolleys in hospital wards?

Funny, how these migrants always threaten the poorest in society – not the tiny elite who bankrupt the country eight years ago or the multinational corporations who have no interest in paying a proper level of tax in the Emerald Isle?

Columnist Ian O'Doherty: racism's good for ratings

Funny how we stage protests to make sure that Apple locate their factory in Athenry, but none at all to reclaim the estimated €13 billion plus they owe us in taxes.

Yes, we do need to talk about “our own” homelessness, health crisis, and the lack of job security faced by so many.

But do we really need to hand over our TV screens to people with false claims about the number of rapes carried out by Muslims?

It's easy to forget there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world when people who thrive on shocking us insist that there are "swarms" of them arriving on our shores, hell-bent on destroying our wonderful way of life in the West.

Most of the Muslims I met in at least 15 trips to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco have no interest in invading the "infidels" in Britain and Ireland. They are ordinary people who just want peaceful, happy lives.

Do we really need to mock the unfortunates fleeing places like Aleppo in terror only to face derision and racism on our shores?

But it’s ok to feature commentators who thrive on hatred, because we know they’ll get people talking and watching our fading shows.

If people like Katie Hopkins or Ian O’Doherty were in New York in the 1840s, they would have mocked the starving Irish as they fell off the ‘coffin ships’ on their way to the ghettoes of the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen.

They would have called for the gunboats to turn the starving Irish back as those desperate people sought new lives so far from home.

And now we invite the kind of people who would have erected “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” signs in London 50 years ago onto our Friday night entertainment shows.

Trump's election has emboldened racists
on this side of the Atlantic

But it’s ok. We Irish can mock those who voted for Trump because, yes, he’s a racist, sexist, xenophobe.

Even though we now have racist, sexist, xenophobic buffoons of our own.

Who cares about ordinary people fleeing bombs and bullets in terror as they try to build new lives for their children?

Because the only thing that matters is that we look after “our own”.

And racists are good for ratings in 2016.

It could be argued that those who give people with xenophobic views a platform are just as guilty as the racists themselves.

Whether we like it or not, our annual €160 TV licence fee is being used to invite people who get a kick out of spreading fear and hatred onto the airwaves.

But don't complain about the lack of informed debate guys, because complaints will get you nowhere as Katie Hopkins showed. 

Tough luck, because racism's good for ratings ... and we should only look after "our own". 

Walking through the ruins of eastern Aleppo this week

Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. You can hire Ciaran to ghost write your company's blog. 

Check out Ciaran Tierney Digital Storyteller on Facebook. 

A life without fear

If I had one wish for 2016, it would be for a life without so much fear.

Not just for myself, but for the whole wide world.

Because fear seemed to overwhelm too many people over the past year. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of the unknown.

I have quite a few scuba diving friends who usually travel to Egypt or Thailand in search of sunshine and fun at this time of year. Now, for obvious reasons, they are abandoning their sense of adventure this time around.

People don’t want to travel in the face of the threat posed by ISIL terrorists, and who could blame them in the wake of attacks in Paris, Tunisia, and Egypt over the past year? 

Nobody wants to risk their life for a holiday and the fear is understandable following the appalling scenes in Paris in November. But it seems so sad that people are letting fear rule their lives.

By not travelling, they are not meeting ordinary Muslims, which is scary too at a time when xenophobia and racism are on the rise across Europe and North America.

How can we possibly understand each other if we never interact any more?

The saddest image of 2015 was that of a three year old boy from Syria washed up on a European beach in late August. His family’s bid for freedom, their desire for a new life, ended in appalling tragedy.

In the wake of the subsequent outcry, it was hard not to forget that some of the newspapers who raised the most concern had been referring to “swarms of migrants” only a week before.

Some papers used the migrant crisis, caused by military intervention by the West, as an excuse to generate fear.

Across Europe, people were being told that the migrants entering Europe included ISIL terrorists determined to cause havoc.

The reality was that toddler Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing fierce fighting in the northern Syrian town of Kobani. His parents took desperate measures in a bid to escape terror and to build new lives in Canada.

In my own case, fear dominated life far too much and curtailed my ability to live in the moment. I had a seven month battle with the MRSA bug, only getting the all-clear in late May, which seemed to be incredible timing just after I took voluntary redundancy from a job I’d held for 22 years.

It’s too easy to let fear take over, to worry about an uncertain future, when none of our futures are set in stone.

During my daily visits to the clinic in Galway, I built up a huge affinity with a small group of community care nurses who did wonders to boost my spirits and speed up my recovery.

When the nurse who took care of me most dropped dead suddenly, leaving a devastated husband and three young children, I had more time to contemplate how fleeting or temporary life can be.

I will never forget how much care and attention I received from that nurse during one of the most troublesome periods in my life.

She taught me a lot about acceptance and the importance of focusing on the positives in life.

During 2015 I completed courses in digital marketing and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and I’ve experienced new jobs.

And yet I’ve allowed the judgement and uncertainty which followed the redundancy to dominate my life and take away from my sense of fun and adventure.

It’s too easy to close your mind, to allow your world to shrink.

It’s too easy for Europeans to distance themselves from ordinary Muslims, to build up an irrational fear of the unknown. Terrorists don't represent ordinary Muslims any more than the kind of people who shoot up US abortion clinics represent Christians.

And I've been guilty of my own irrational fears.

It’s too easy for someone who has been made redundant to despair that he or she will not find a rewarding job.

We all have spontaneity, adventure, bravery and excitement within us, if we don’t allow our lives to be dominated by fear. 

So that’s my only wish for 2016, not just for myself but for everyone on the planet . . . that our lives won’t be dominated so much by fear and that we will see the huge possibilities out there in this crazy, cruel, but wonderful world.

http://ciarantierney.com/ 

The less we know, the easier it is to hate ...

The less we know about each other, the easier it is to hate. And did you ever get the impression that, for all our technological advances over the past few decades, we live in increasingly intolerant times?

Last week, it seemed that a third of the people I knew on Facebook turned their profile photos blue, white, and red in sympathy with the victims of the terrible terrorist atrocities in Paris the previous weekend.

Of course they had every right to do so, they were horrified by the images they'd seen on their TV screens.

But why sympathise with victims in one place, and not another? Those who wondered why Sky News don’t broadcast 24/7 from bombed out cities and towns in Syria, Palestine, or Afghanistan were told that people have a right to sympathise with terrorism victims in Paris, simply because they live closer to us.

US troops in Shannon: How many of us ever ask what destruction they cause?

And it’s true. The Irish do have more connections with the French than we do with people in Palestine, Iraq, or Syria. But we do the people in those countries a great disservice by airbrushing them out of our lives, when our own governments in the West play a big part in their troubles.

We let airplanes fly through our airports on their way to bomb them, we sell arms to despotic tyrants who abuse them, we turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, and then we wonder why some of them have an irrational hatred for people in our part of the world.

We didn’t see Sky News outside the Afghan hospital bombed by the US last month, but the channel spent an entire week broadcasting from Paris, interviewing victims, who had gruesome stories to tell about how a night out at a rock concert, a football match, or a restaurant turned into a nightmare in which 130 innocent people lost their lives.

Significant elements of the media make it clear that some lives are more important than others. Whether due to geography, inconvenience, or simple editorial policy, Sky never showed us interviews with the victims of the Beirut terror attacks which claimed 43 lives just 24 hours before the Paris attacks.

A suburban neighbourhood full of ordinary people became a "Hezbollah stronghold".

A few weeks earlier it was “politically inconvenient” to dwell on the bombing, by US forces, of the Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) hospital which claimed 30 lives. It wasn’t an act of terror, it was “human error” we were told. And it doesn’t rest easily with our narrative about who the good and the bad guys are.

So the victims of bombings in Afghanistan or Beirut never make it onto our TV screens and we don’t play their national anthems to honour their dead at our football games.

We say it “could have been us” when we talk about Paris or London, but never consider that ordinary people in far more troubled places are also trying to just get on with their lives.

Perhaps some of the refugees fleeing Syria are ISIS terrorists, hell-bent on causing havoc across Europe. But the vast majority are ordinary people who are escaping horrible lives in war zones. No father or mother puts a toddler into an unsafe boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea unless they are fleeing genuine horror.

Selective viewing renders a joke of objectivity. When 2,200 people were murdered in Gaza last summer, it was hard to find a reporter in the UK or Ireland – apart from Jon Snow on Channel 4 and a few others – who was willing to travel to the enclave and gather heart-breaking stories from the survivors.

So we didn’t get exposed to their grief, in the same way as we’ve been horrified by the loss of so many innocent lives in Paris.

It’s been horrible to go on social media in recent months and to see all the Islamophobic bile being spread about the thousands of refugees who are seeking new lives in Europe as an escape from the war-torn Middle East.

We didn't hear about the French air raids on Syrian towns back in September and few make a connection between European intervention in that strife-torn region and the terrorism on our own doorstep. But how could they not be related?

So the people who set off suicide bombs in Paris are a threat to civilisation, but the people who drop bombs on Syria and Iraq with no risk to their own personal safety are hardly ever highlighted by the media.

They don't strap on suicide vests outside crowded theatres, they press a button well out of reach of their victims.

Since 9/11, Muslims are blamed for the misdeeds of a tiny minority of extremists in a way which would have been absurd if the same criteria were applied to the Irish during the IRA bombings in the UK in the 1970s.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but you’d never think that if you read through the comments on some social media sites. I’ve seen people call on their Governments to “nuke the bastards” as though wiping out the entire population of some cities or regions would eliminate the threat posed by terrorists, instead of creating a whole new generation of jihadists.

It is in the interests of the extremists on both sides that ignorance should prevail.

And it takes some degree of ignorance and extremism to believe that a place in paradise awaits those who shoot young rock fans in a crowded theatre on a Friday night.

When we go to Egypt, Morocco, Jordon or Tunisia on holidays, we get to enjoy fun times with ordinary, decent Muslims. The interactions work both ways – they get jobs in the tourism industry and to see that not all Westerners are as decadent or arrogant as they’ve been portrayed in their own biased media.

When we stop travelling – which is understandable in the wake of suicide bombings – our Governments can stoke up hatred against the Muslim world and continue to justify the sale of arms to regimes which have no regard for human rights.

We have seen this type of ignorance in Ireland for too long. When Catholics and Protestants attend different schools, play different games, support different sports teams, and even work in different places, it’s too easy to build up an irrational hatred for each other.

But it’s also in the Catholic Church’s own interest to keep children of different faiths apart from the moment they attend school.

Technology has changed our lives so much in recent years. We can now record or watch the news on our mobile phones 24/7. We can be connected no matter where we are, day or night.

But if we continue to put barriers between ourselves and ‘other’ civilisations we continue to be as ignorant about each other as Muslims and Christians were a thousand years ago, during the Crusades.

When our media only highlight terrible loss of life in Paris, New York, or London, rather than atrocities which take place around the world with far more regularity, they add to the false perception that there is some sort of Holy War going on between “us” and “them”.

Protesting against US troops in Shannon

Most people, whether they live in Paris or Beirut, only want peaceful, happy lives. But you’d never think that innocent lives in Beirut matter much if you relied on the likes of Sky News for your information about what’s happening in the world.

https://www.facebook.com/ciarantierneymedia/

Destroying the present with irrational fears

Fear is such a strange thing.

It can grip virtually all of us in different ways and different settings - and it's truly amazing to note the different ways in which people react to day-to-day situations.

When I worked as a volunteer in Nicaragua, I was amazed by the irrational fears of many North Americans. They didn't trust the local people, because they lived in such poverty, so they would do whatever they could to avoid them on travels around the country.

They would pay $25 to get a 'gringo shuttle', a minibus which was only for foreigners, for a two hour trip to the coast, whereas I had no problems spending €2 to travel the same route on the 'chicken buses' favoured by the locals.

If anything, I found the local buses to be much better fun, watching people haul chickens or bags of cement or half a dozen children on board. They would pass the children around among strangers, because Nicaraguans don't really understand the concept of 'strangers'. Their community spirit reminded me of my Granny's home village in East Galway. And it seemed so alien to the irrational concerns of the American expats.

It helped that I spoke Spanish, but the truth was that interacting with the locals was half the fun during weekends away. If I'd listened to many Americans, and their fears, I would have missed out on such adventures. People had warned of car-jackings or tourists being forced to withdraw cash from ATMs after taking 'collectivo' taxis.

Nicaraguans themselves have a fear of silence. Which is why bus drivers get to install huge sound systems and you can have salsa and reggaeton blaring for the entire journey between two provincial cities. Even 70- and 80-year olds prefer loud music to total silence on their journeys around their land.

I was amazed, too, by the irrational fear many Americans in Central America had of Muslims. I lost count of the amount of North Americans who would ask me how many Muslims there were in my country. Most of them had never been to Ireland and I found it really strange that it was one of the first questions they would ask about my native land.

It seems that, post-9/11, Muslims have become some sort of new enemy. Or we've regressed to the era of the Crusades.

When I told people from Texas or New Mexico that I had been to Egypt a dozen times, and loved the place, they would be shocked at my perceived bravery. They would not believe me when I said it was a very safe country (at the time) or that the locals were lovely people.

People would also be shocked that I had scuba dived over 300 times. Some people simply have an irrational fear of water, others of anything that involves change. I myself was gripped by fear before I went to Central America and all my fears were completely unfounded. Despite travelling alone to many parts of Nicaragua, and staying out late in Granada, I was never robbed or held up at gunpoint.

There seems to be a fear of Muslims gripping the people of Europe now, in the wake of the horrible attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris.

At the weekend, I heard one old friend say that she "didn't like Muslims" ... as though she meets many of them in her day-to-day life in Galway. She would not rent out an apartment to them, for example, she told me.

Yet blaming all Muslims for the crimes of a tiny group of terrorists is completely irrational, just as it was wrong for the leaders of the world to march in solidarity in Paris while ignoring a horrific attack by extremists which left 2,000 people dead in Nigeria on the same day.

That sent out a terrible signal: that some lives are more important than others. But I guess we have all known that if you contrast the reaction of the western world to 2,200 deaths in Gaza or 2,000 in Nigeria to those of less than 20 in Paris.

When leaders from Egypt (where Al Jazeera journalists are in jail), Israel (which murdered 17 journalists last summer) and Saudi Arabia (where a man has been flogged because of what he wrote in a blog) march in Paris for "freedom of expression", you know there is something terribly wrong.

Muslims are not the enemy, fear of the unknown is.

The reason why the conflict went on for so long in Northern Ireland is because Catholic and Protestant people never mixed at work, school, or in terms of the games they played. It's far easier to hate when you don't know the people living on the other side of the street.

If you go to different schools, play different sports, work in different places, and live on different streets then it's easy to build up irrational fears about the other side.

As for me, the scuba diver who has travelled through so many parts of the world, I still have plenty of fears of my own. I have ridden through Phnom Penh on a motorbike at 4am or walked the back streets of Granada, alone, at 3am. I have done so many of the things foreigners are told not to do in poor countries such as Cambodia or Nicaragua.

And yet I have fears about the future after leaving my job. I have fears about my health after being told I need surgery on my shoulder for a second time, 11 weeks after spending four days in hospital.

Post-redundancy, my life has not gone to plan. It's no fun to have to get a wound dressed every day for almost three months, while wondering where this crazy adventure called life is going to take me next. Sometimes the 'comfort zone' or the safe harbour can be the scariest place of all.

And yet my recent set-backs have taught me a few lessons and maybe given me a real resolution for 2015. It's time to conquer my fears ... or at least take a look at why worries over the future can take away from enjoying life in the here and now.

Life should always be seen as an adventure because, ultimately, none of us knows what's next to come around the corner. Who can really guarantee where they will be 12 months from now?

And yet we can destroy the present with worries and irrational fears.