This week I had a chance to spend time in both London and Dublin. It has been some years since I have been able to do this because of family circumstances. It was good to be “back on the road again”.
I first visited London in 1968, a very different city then than it is today. I have been back many times since, and always felt comfortable there.
But recently I have read newspaper articles about what a hellhole it has become, with people afraid to walk the streets at night, with criminality rife.
So, it was with some trepidation that I took the Eurostar from Brussels to London. After spending the day in meetings, I took a taxi to my hotel near Paddington to leave off my case and freshen up a little after a long day, before heading into central London for dinner with colleagues.
As soon as I got off the Elisabeth Line at Tottenham Court Road and started walking towards Leicester Square, I was immediately terrified. Terrified of the high-spirited crowds heading towards the theatres and cinemas of the West End. Terrified of mostly good-natured young people of many ethnic backgrounds standing outside pubs enjoying a drink with friends in the soft evening air. Terrified that I wasn’t terrified when screaming, newspaper articles told me I should have been.
I concluded I must have been in the wrong London. There must be another London somewhere else, because this was the same London I have felt at home in for close on sixty years whenever I visited.
I was early for dinner, so I sat at a café and ordered a glass of wine. I looked at the news on my phone. I saw that President Trump had told the UN that London was about to fall to Sharia Law, as a result of the badness of the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim. Suddenly, I was again terrified. Having taken a glass of wine, would I turn a corner on my way to the restaurant to meet my colleagues, only to be confronted by the Sharia religious police, incarcerated for drinking alcohol, and subject to who knows what penal sanctions?
Of course, that never happened because there are no religious police in London and there never will be. London is an open city, welcoming of all those who want to make a home there. Whether they can afford to make a home there is another matter, but that is sadly true of many of the major cities in the world.
While London is abuzz, I am only too well aware of the fact that London is not the United Kingdom, it is not even England, and the rest of the country has deep-seated economic problems, for which there are no easy answers.
The canard that ending immigration would solve all of the UK’s economic problems is plainly wrong. Without intelligent immigration, the UK would be worse off than it already is. But that discussion is for another day.
Would I visit London again anytime soon and spend some more time there? In a heartbeat, I would. I am open to invitations.
Then, it was on to Dublin, where I was born and where I lived for most of my life. Even if it is some twenty-five years since I left Dublin to settle in mainland Europe, it will always be my hometown, and it is a joy just to be there. As soon as I land, my northside accent comes back, and I am a “Dub” once more. The Dublin concrete is in the blood. I would not have it any other way.
The Dublin that I was born into in 1950 has changed from a small, provincial city, where cows were still herded up streets to market, to a city of glass and steel, the European hub for many major US businesses, office blocks on either side of the river Liffey, where once stood disused warehouses and grubby lock-ups. In my younger days, you would not go down there because you might never come back. All changed, changed utterly.
My visit started with a drink in the Harbour Master pub with a friend, someone who shares with me a common interest in industrial relations matters. No better place than a Dublin pub to discuss such things. If you come away from such a “session” thinking about issues, feeling the need to rework your ideas on this or that, well then, it was time not wasted.
The focus of my visit to Dublin was a lunchtime meeting of HR Policy Global/ Europe hosted by the law firm, Matheson, which is 200 years old this year. I did not ask if some of the original partners were still practising, but hey, you never know. I thought I saw one or two quill pens lying about the place alongside the computers, but I may have been mistaken.
With the Matheson team (check out the HR Policy Global posts on LinkedIn), we discussed the new EWC Directive, Pay Transparency, and other employment and labour law issues coming down the road in Ireland. It was good to be back in my hometown, talking about what I know best, labour relations, in the city where I began my career in this business in 1972. That’s how old I am.
While I was in Dublin, the posters began to go up for the candidates in the Irish presidential election. The President of Ireland has no executive powers; it is largely a ceremonial role. The president serves for seven years and has a decent house in the Phoenix Park. More recently, occupants of the office have sought to project “soft power”, offering themselves up as the “Voice of Ireland”.
To run for president, you have to be nominated by 20 members of the Oireachtas, the lower and upper houses of the Irish parliament, or by four county councils. The major political parties have no difficulty in having their candidates nominated. But, as is the way with these things, some people with no political record decide they want to be president because they think they would be good at it and go looking for nominations.
While I was in Dublin, the major political talking point was the failure of a conservative Catholic woman to secure a nomination. She had never stood for any elective office in her life but seemed to believe that she was entitled to be nominated because, well, she wanted to be nominated and was upset when those who could nominate her refused to do so because they did not agree with her political views.
You want to be President of Ireland? Start at the bottom and work your way up. Build political momentum. Put in the hard yards. Never work off the assumption that your political opponents are going to give you a free pass. That is not the way things work. Play within the constitutional rules as they are, not as you would like them to be.
This is not a comment on the character or integrity of those from “outside the system” who sought nominations. They tried and failed. Politics is a rough trade. Maybe try again in the future and be better prepared.
There are now three candidates for the Irish presidency, nominated by the major political parties. My little teckel dog has more charisma than the three of them put together. And she sleeps all day. This is more a comment on the political parties than on the candidates themselves. They had seven years to prepare, and this is the best they could come up with.
I am of the left-of-centre social democratic political family. Have been all my life. If I had a vote in the Irish presidential election, would I vote for the candidate who is backed by the Left parties?
Not in a month of Sundays.
Her views on everything from the war in Ukraine to Ireland’s role in Europe and the wider world are not my views. I have little time for the political, self-righteous, for politicians who want to lecture the rest of the world because they think, for no apparent reason, that they stand on the moral high ground.
With Trump in the White House, the last thing Ireland needs is a “secular saint” in Áras an Uachtaráin, the home of the Irish president.
But then, I do not have a vote because I have lived outside of Ireland for over 25 years and pay my taxes elsewhere. It is up to the people of Ireland living in Ireland to decide who gets to vote in elections, and for now, they have decided that this should be restricted to those who live in Ireland. I am good with that.
Anyway, it was great to breathe the Dublin air again. I shall miss it until the next time.
Tom 100% agree Blair