That was more than two decades ago, in the late 1980s, when the French-educated, leftist history lecturer, cinema buff and mate of the late French Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand, returned to his native Ivory Coast to challenge the octogenarian post-colonial leader Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

    It wasn’t an easy or even particularly safe thing for Gbagbo, then in his 40s, to do at a time when the world’s biggest cocoa grower was firmly in the grips of the authoritarian Houphouet.

    Journalists like myself who went to interview and talk to Gbagbo in his villa in one of the plush residential areas of Abidjan knew at a glance that secret police were keeping tabs on his — and our — every movement. His house probably was bugged. He didn’t seem to mind or pay much attention, at least in the presence of the press.

     He seemed instead to relish the attention, and his self-appointed role as the man who was going to shake up the old order.

    At a time when Ivory Coast’s huge exports of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cocoa beans was managed by a state-run monopoly, which assured that Houphouet had funds to build a mammoth, air-conditioned Roman Catholic cathedral in Yamoussoukro, and his clique remained loyal, Gbagbo talked about giving cocoa farmers their due.

    ”When we are in power, 50 percent of the market selling price for cocoa will go to the planters,” Gbagbo said in one of his populist pronouncements in the run up to the 1990 election, where he was crushed by Houphouet, in the last election before he died.

    Gbagbo couldn’t deliver on his promises then, and didn’t deliver later, when he was proclaimed president in a disputed 2000 election from which his rival Alassane Ouattara, the man who is on the verge of ousting him now, was excluded over doubts about his Ivorian nationality.

    Gbagbo had run as an agent of change, the voice of the younger generation, the man who would help Ivory Coast, and by implication, other countries of Africa, to make the leap into the 20th century where economic growth and democratic government would triumph over autocrats and dictators and be the great leveler to erase poverty and ethnic and tribal rivalries.

    Isn’t it poignant to recall, then, as Ouattara’s forces, aided and abetted by the former colonial power France, besiege Gbagbo in his bunker that Ivory Coast’s first post-colonial ruler Houphouet-Boigny also was considered a progressive in his day?

    He made his mark in the 1940s and ’50s, when Ivory Coast was a colony, as a promoter of peasant rights. He went on to build the famous crocodile pool at his palace (not to be confused with the cathedral — Houphouet had bets both ways on eternity) in his ancestral village of Yamoussoukro, in the rain forest in the centre of the country.

     ”There were no crocodiles in Yamoussoukro before. No one knows precisely what they mean,” V.S. Naipaul wrote in his famous 1984 New Yorker magazine piece named for the beasts. ”But to all Africans they speak at once of danger and of the President’s — the chief’s — magically granted knowledge of his power as something more than human, something emanating from the earth itself.”

     In other words: “Don’t mess with me, you could get hurt — or worse.”

    Ouattara, a former deputy head of the International Monetary Fund and a stayer if ever there was one, is next man up. Will he be able to resist the primal, siren call of power?

Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan

Irish literature and legend is full of boasts, like the claim by Christy Mahon in Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World” that he has killed his da with a loy (Irish for spade), only to have the old man track him down in another town.

Perhaps that’s the way to view Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s announcement two years ago that the state-backed guarantee scheme to rescue the country’s troubled banks, hit hard by the collapse of the property market, was “the cheapest bailout in the world so far”.
 
It seemed too good to be true. And it was.
 
On Thursday, Lenihan, who has spent the last two years scrambling from one fiscal crisis to another, announced that, actually, the cost for cleaning up years of reckless lending was “horrendous” and in a worst-case scenario the price tag would be over 50 billion euros ($68 billion).
 
The bill will shackle Ireland, once the EU’s fastest growing economy, with a public debt burden of nearly 99 percent of gross domestic product.
 
Ireland’s now crippled economy, meanwhile, has done everything but recover. Unemployment is stubbornly high, property prices remain depressed,  taxpayers face years of cutbacks and, in the second quarter, growth again went into reverse.
 
What happened?
 
Maybe what Lenihan said two years ago was wishful thinking, or perhaps it has taken this long for Ireland to wake up to just how colossal a hole its one-time high flying property tycoons have dug for themselves, and for every Irish taxpayer, even though much of what they were up to is so big as to be unmissable.
 
Take, for example, the Battersea Power Station in London, which is Europe’s largest brick building and has been derelict since it was decommissioned as a coal-burning power plant about a quarter century ago.
 
In 2006, a firm controlled by two Irish property magnates, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, bought the building and land surrounding it for a staggering 400 million pounds ($750 million) — even though previous plans to develop it had all come to nought.
 
The boys, as they are referred to in some of the Irish press, had ambitious plans for a new, exclusive, “Knightsbridge”-class development for office, commercial and residential space, including an extension of the Northern Line branch of the London Underground.
 
Four years later, the site is still derelict, promoted, perhaps a bit desperately, as a location for lavish weddings held inside a marquee, and most recently as the venue for a Red Bull-sponsored high-jinx, daredevil motorcycle show.
 
Ronan and Barrett’s property empire, meanwhile,  has seen some of its loans  earmarked for the Irish government’s National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) — Ireland’s “bad bank scheme”, which was  established to purge lenders of commercial property loans, many of them non-performing. 
 
Battersea is at the top end of the scale of Irish property investment during the decade of the Celtic Tiger boom, but replicate it at a lesser level all the way from Eastern Europe to the holiday beaches of Spain and out to Asia, and it becomes clear why Lenihan has had to change his tune.
 
A historical footnote: a Reuters feature informs us that the Battersea Power Station was used during World War Two to burn 120 million pounds worth of banknotes that had to be disposed of to stop enemy forgeries.
 
Something to boast about then. Comparatively small change now.

The issue arose the other night when Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman gave a sold-out, all-Chopin recital in London’s cavernous Royal Festival Hall, which has almost 3,000 seats.

Two young Greeks -– call them Ajax and Diomedes, after heroes in “The Iliad” -– took it upon themselves to seize two empty seats closer up. They were cheeky, slipping into the empty seats before the concert began, with every chance the rightful owners would show up. But Greeks  -– so Homer tells us -– have never been bashful.

At the interval, two ushers -– dub them Hector and Paris -– hovered over the Greeks, as Trojans would, informing them they must go back where they came from.

The concert, after all, was sold out and people do arrive late -– though as late as the interval is pushing it. Having to shoo away interlopers to seat paying customers is very disruptive, especially for a concert in which Zimerman tended to glare at the audience when anyone sneezed or coughed.

But if seats aren’t going to be used, does it make sense they go empty for a rare performance by a pianist recognised as one of the world’s great interpreters of Chopin?

The classical music world wants to reach out to the younger generation -– the existing audiences are largely greying and greyer. But young people have less money, so if they go to a concert at all, they buy cheap. And being young, if they see a chance, they seize it -– or make a try.

In our sample case, luck, or the Fates, and in any case Zeus, in the form of the white-maned Zimerman, was on the side of the Greeks. He strolled back on stage to start the second half of the recital. The Trojans withdrew, leaving the Greeks in possession of the prized seats.

“They (the ushers) told us these are the rules,” said Ajax, whose real name is Alexandros Drosos, 20, a student of music composition. “I couldn’t afford more expensive tickets but he was one of the pianists I’ve wanted to see for a long time.”

His comrade in arms, Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos, a student of economics, had choicer words for the Trojans -– but then Greeks would.

The management for South Bank says the policy in effect for a sold-out evening was to keep people in their proper seats to allow for latecomers, and there’d been a complaint that the students were disruptive — although from at least one spectator’s viewpoint they looked like they were totally absorbed in the playing.

The particular incident aside -– and it is used to illustrate the issue and not to single out a particular concert hall or institution -– should the classical music world -– and theatre owners in general –– follow another famous Greek precept and become, in a way, more democratic?

If a seat remains empty, is it fair game? Or must it remain empty, its tone-deaf upholstery soaking up Chopin? That avoids the rustle and bustle caused by seat-changing Greeks who, after all, may have bought economy with an upgrade in mind. But it does nothing for the appreciation of music.

What do you think?

(Photo: Irish countryside, 26 Sept 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

A little too much so, I discovered shortly after getting into the front passenger seat when the priest — and he was wearing his clerical collar, so there could be no doubt — put his hand on my knee.Suddenly, if I’d been headed to Galway, which I think I was, I decided getting off at the next little village was just grand, and so slipped out of the only awkward experience I’d had hitching around a half dozen European countries.This was years before the world — but especially Ireland — learned all too well that the Catholic clergy of Ireland had a penchant for preying on young men, and especially young boys much younger than I was at the time, and because they were so young, much less able to defend themselves — in fact, totally defenseless.Last week, a second report was published in the massive Irish investigation into sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Dublin archdiocese and the cover up surrounding their predations.  In the spring, the commission headed by High Court judge Sean Ryan released a 2,600-page dossier detailing the abuses inflicted on children in Catholic care run by the religious orders.That made grim reading, with its litany of priests, nuns and sometimes civilians terrorising by beatings, rape and humiliation the 30,000 children put in their care from the 1930s through the 1990s.

(Photo: Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, 26 Nov 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

It would have been hard to imagine anything more shocking but the new report, exposing the extraordinary effort the Church, in collusion with Ireland’s Garda police force and the government, exerted to cover its tracks and to protect the offending clergy rather than the children victimised, comes close.One priest admitted abusing more than 100 children, another said he’d abused children every two weeks for 25 years.But in almost all these cases their superiors, right up to the bishops and archbishops who were running the Church, turned a blind eye.The Catholic hierarchy of Ireland even had a secret weaponfor dealing with those awkward moments when the parents of an abused child, or someone in authority, brought it to their attention that Father So-and-so was swimming naked in a pool with the altar boys.Cardinal Desmond Connell said that while a priest could not tell a lie, he could knowingly leave a false impression, under what Connell said was the concept of “mental reservation.”“There may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be,” Connell said by way of explaining this cleverly nuanced take on St. Augustine’s treatises proving it is never lawful to tell a lie.

(Photo: Cardinal Desmond Connell, 14 May 2001/Paul McErlane)

So although Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who took over after the period when the abuse occurred, said “no words of apology will ever be sufficient,” it seems the Church still has trouble coming to terms with its shocking past. The Irish public, however, has its eyes wide open.“The onus is now on the state, the Garda and the HSE (Health Service Executive, which has authority to investigate child abuse cases) to prove that deference to the Church is gone for good, and that either the state expects cooperation from other bishops, similar to that of Dr Martin’s, or that criminal prosecutions for further perverting the course of justice will commence,” a Cork resident wrote to the Irish Times.“The problem is that for those young people who were abused over the decades, whatever is done now is too late. And I say that with no ‘mental reservation’.”

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