These days, even the bosses in France are going on strike. From the beginning of December, members of MEDEF, the employer’s union, together with members of the CGPME, which represents small and medium-sized businesses, are mounting a week of action. This could well include street protests, the favoured action of most strikers in France. The employers are complaining of the severity of working conditions, the fact that part-time workers have to work at least 24 hours a week, and the taxation of dividends. Employers’ strike action doesn’t quite have the same public appeal to general bloody mindedness as strikes by public sector workers, but it’s significant nonetheless, that employers feel just as frustrated as everyone else. But France being France, yet more taxes appear with depressing regularity. The government has approved plans that could see the tax on second homes going up by as much as 20 per cent, but in true French style, several local authorities in the south of the country have already refused to implement these new taxes.
Protests can and do work, however. For long, the residents of the 15th arrondissement in south-west Paris have been protesting at plans to build a revolting looking glass pyramid, 42 storeys high, called the Tour Triangle. It was to have been the first skyscraper built in Paris for just over 40 years but now city councillors have voted by a narrow margin to ban the project. Local people are breathing a great sigh of relief!
Meanwhile, the French Senate has been debating whether the presidential term should return to being a seven year stint. I can’t see too much public approval of this; after all, who would want a seven year term of office for the present President, Francois Hollande? But at least the French state seems on the point of recognising the state of Palestine, following the Swedish example.
Mind you, all of a sudden, people in Ireland have become just as bloody minded as their counterparts in France. Since the recession started in 2008, people in Ireland have been dumped on endlessly by their masters in successive Irish governments, who in turn, have been the willing puppets of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Now, with the possible introduction of water charges, this has been the final straw. The dam of public anger has been breached and the level of public outrage and protest is astonishing. The next big demo is planned for December 10, in Dublin, and everyone’s hoping that a vast assembly of protesters won’t be marred by fringe activists, as some of the recent protests have been decidedly nasty. Politicians wouldn’t need to be softies if they start reading some of the social media comments about them!
It’s all hardly surprising. Ireland is fast becoming like Wild West, where the rich just get effortlessly richer, with few if any impediments, while the poor are confined to their poverty for ever. The other day, on RTÉ radio, there were chilling stories of all the people in Ireland who are currently so lacking in money that they can’t afford to cook an evening meal, and are simply going to bed early.
There was a perfect description of Dublin on social media the other day, a playground for the rich, a nightmare for the poor. And the powers that be, who have made such an utter hash of introducing water charges that they have provoked all the current wave of protests, have a lot to answer for because of their sheer cackhandedness. One socialist TD (MP), Ruth Coppinger has posted a photo of a mother and her two children living in a car, with the slogan that Joan Burton, the Tanaiste (deputy prime minister) through all her social welfare cuts, has made thousands of people homeless, forcing them to live in their cars. Ruth Coppinger says that as far as the political elite is concerned, this is perfectly acceptable.
In little over a year’s time, the centenary of the 1916 Rising will be celebrated, although it looks more like Disneyland meets the Easter Rising. The other night, when the taoiseach (prime minister) was announcing the plans, inside the GPO, he couldn’t make himself heard for all the protesters outside shouting their heads off and banging at the doors. There’s plenty more chaos in store for next year, when the new national postcodes come into effect; Ireland will be the last country in Europe to get postcodes. Now it turns out that there won’t even be any obligation on people to actually use their new postcodes! One of the most likely results of their introduction is that people will just get swamped with yet more junk mail.
At least, there’s one bit of good news about the media. The Mayo News, a weekly newspaper in the West of Ireland, has just been declared local newspaper of the year in Europe, beating off competition from 193 other titles in 27 countries. The paper’s staff will be collecting the honour at a ceremony in Vienna in May, but this is the second time they’ve won such an honour.
Dissatisfaction with the way things are run isn’t confined of course to this part of Ireland. By the end of this week, expect UKIP to have unleashed a political earthquake in English politics. There was a good and very sad example of bureaucratic thinking at work, this time in the north of Ireland, although of course the symbols of bureaucratic inefficiency are worldwide. In Co Antrim, the local education and library board has the responsibility for providing school transport. In the case of one particular family, a stretch of very dangerous road separated their house from the pickup point for the morning school bus. The board wouldn’t do the pickup in the mornings to save money, yet dropped the children home in the afternoons. The childrens’ mother had long warned about the dangers involved but in typical bureaucratic style, nothing was done. Her worst fears were realised last week when a car ploughed into her and her six children walking to the morning school bus along that dangerous stretch of road. Little Adam Gilmour, aged eight, was killed and most of his siblings, as well as their mother, were injured.
Someone who narrowly avoided an awful fate last week was Bono of U2 fame. He was on his way from Dublin to Berlin by private jet, when somewhere over the German coast, the rear door fell off the plane and all the luggage tumbled out. Miraculously, the plane managed to put down safely in Berlin. Then shortly afterwards, news emerged that Bono had fallen off his bike in New York’s central park and had broken his arm. Being rich is no protection against life’s misfortunes, but fortunately for all his fans worldwide, Bono has survived to tell the tale. It’s strange, but Bono’s plane accident came 30 years to the day when a private plane taking some Irish journalists to the Beaujolais Nouveau celebrations in France came down, with no survivors.
It has also emerged in the past few days, that one of the bugbears of the 30 million tourists who come to Paris every year, that the serious crime wave in the French capital is actually abating. But tourists can’t be too careful of their cash and belongings in Paris, not just when they are getting cash from a hole in the wall machine.
There’s also been an interesting leisure industry development in France. Jin Jiang, one of the leading tourism operators in China, has just struck a deal to pay the US company, Starwood, between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion for Starwood’s French subsidiary, Louvre Hotels group. This operates 1,200 budget hotels, including 850 in France, under such brand names as Tulip.
Lots happening on the artistic front as usual. In Lille, the Lille 3000 major contemporary art event is getting underway again and this year, one of its aims is to seek out 18 collectors of such art in the south-west of Flanders, just on the other side of the border with Belgium, and link them with similar collectors in north-east France. Then in Paris, Pierre Cardin, the 92 year doyen of the fashion world, is opening his new museum, dedicated to the passé, présent et futur of fashion. For the last eight years, his collections have been housed in a museum at Saint-Ouen in Paris, but Cardin’s new dedicated museum is in an old converted tie factory in rue Saint-Merri in the 4th arrondissement, the Marais district. Entry will be €25,but it sounds like a good investment for interested tourists.
Another cultural event has also attracted much interest as always, the 154th annual wine sale for the Hospice de Beaune. Last year, this wine sale realised €6.3 million, for local healthcare services. In this year’s sale,€200,000 was paid for a bottle of Corton-Bressandes Grand Cru, sold to someone from Quebec.
A rather bizarre and dangerous form of art has become fashionable in Paris. Surfing on the outside of RER trains in the Paris region has become quite popular and two young men who did it recently managed to make a video of their antics, which has already been viewed by well over half a million people. On the safe side of train travel, however, the news of the introduction of the new 320kph trains on the Eurostar service will cut about 15 minutes off the travelling time between London and Paris.
All the while, the floods in the south continue. The other day, in Saint-Césare-de Gauzignan in the Gard department of central southern France, a huge flood swept away a car. Three of the occupants, a woman and her two children aged one and four, died, and the only person who could be rescued was her husband. In northern Italy over the past few days, about a dozen people have been killed in widespread flooding, while in the Italian part of Switzerland, a landslide in a small village swamped a house, killing two women, leaving the Italian man who was the partner of one of the women, the sole survivor. Over the past few days, this region, southern Switzerland and north-eastern Italy, has had more rain that it would normally get in an entire year, and in places like Locarno, the only way of getting round the flooded streets is by boat.
France has also seen the death the other day of one of its more obscure geniuses. Alexander Grothendieck came from a German Jewish background, but lived all his life in France. As a mathematician, his work on algebra and geometry was marked in 1966 by him being awarded the Fields medal, the equivalent for maths of a Nobel prize. But he refused to accept the honour and even though job offers poured in from universities all over the world, he ignored them all. Inspired by the Paris revolt of 1968, he gave up maths and turned his attention to environmental and anti-establishment politics generally. But in the last few years, he had become a recluse and a religious maniac, living in south-west France, where he died the other day, aged 86. A few years ago, he tried, unsucessfully, to get his entire catalogue of work removed from libraries and he always refused to allow his work to be republished. A strange genius indeed!
But he would have been pleased, surely, by a recent development in Provence. A new law has been passed to protect the last wetland in the Golfe de Saint-Tropez, a saline wetland that’s home to countless bird and other species. Any future development of the wetland has been banned. And also in Provence, the cathedral at Sospel, the second largest church in the Alpes-Maritime, has just reopened after a year’s refurbishment work that cost €1.6million.The cathedral was given national monument status back in 1951.