Lisbon Treaty ahoy

Over lunch and in the afternoon it was back to more familiar territory; a meeting of the enlarged Presidency of the Committee, primarily to discuss three important political issues. The first is the Committee’s reactions to the pending implementation of the Lisbon Treaty (1 December!). The Presidents and Vice-Presidents discussed a whole nexus of related considerations; rules changes, changes to procedures and processes, changing behaviour towards other institutions. The second topic was a contribution to the emerging new Commission’s reflections about its five year programme. Here, the Committee has already set out its stall through its Programme for Europe, adopted in March already. But as President Mario Sepi pointed out, once the new Commission is installed there will be a brief window of opportunity for insisting that the views of organised civil society be properly taken into account and the Committee must grasp that opportunity. The third subject was the Committee’s draft contribution to the work of the reflection group, presided over by Felipe Gonzalez, about the medium-term future of Europe. On all three topics there were lively discussions, discussions that will be continued at the next meeting of the Committee’s Bureau on 24 November.

The courtyard of Palazzo Castrone

After the ceremony I raced down the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele to meet up briefly with the parents of a family connection. They, Beatrice and Sergio, live in a historic palace, Palazzo Castrone santa ninfa and, despite my rude short notice and with the most sweet and extraordinary hospitality, gave me both a delicious aperitivo and a whistle stop tour of their home. The palace is, in effect, a microcosm of Palermo itself, built on Roman foundations, through a Norman structure to fifteenth and sixteenth century additions (not to mention a 1943 bombsite next door!). The piano nobile of the palace is currently being converted into a splendid museum of ancient jewellery and, with admirable serenity, Beatrice took me around the building site. But the highlight of the visit for me was a climb up to the rooftop. High above the palace is an ancient viewing platform. From here, we had a view out over the whole of this beautiful and intriguing city, from the cathedral just below our feet to the amphitheatre of moutains and the sea that surround it. The platform would originally have served as a communications post, allowing for signals to be sent from the Porta Nuova at the entrance to the city down to the port below. There are places you visit where you make a mental note that you must come back and visit all of the sites (or sights). In the case of Palermo, I of course must return to visit all of the sites/sights properly but, in addition, I made a mental note that this is the sort of place where you should stay. When I said grazie e arriverderci to Beatrice and Sergio, I truly meant it. Palermo is a city to savour.

Palazzo d'Orleans

This morning the whole of the European Economic and Social Committee’s ‘top brass’ (The President and Vice-Presidents, the Group Presidents and yours truly) set off for the Palazzo d’Orleans, the seat of the government of the Regione Sicilia, for the prize-giving ceremony. It was an impressive but also deeply touching affair. We were first addressed by the President of the Region, Raffaele Lombardo, who also read out a congratulatory letter from the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, and then we heard from the leaders of the two honoured organisations, Ivan Lo Bello, the President of Confindustria Sicilia, and Don Luigi Ciotti, the President of Libera. Confindustria, Lo Bello explained, fights the mafia by seeking constantly to avoid the sort of typical mafioso practices that serve as a constant drain on the local economy, from the ubiquitous pizzo to pre-cooked calls for tender to direct and indirect intimidation. Libera is a militant organisation constantly encouraging and supporting Palermo’s citizens in a fight for a mafia-free life. I cannot do justice to the rich discussion in a short post, but here are a few snippets. Don Ciotti, a priest, explained that he had previously served as chaplain in the local maximum security prison, where he had sought to understand the mentality of the mafiosi. Thus, he realised, doing time in prison is an absolutely indispensable badge of honour for a mafioso and, indeed, whilst the mafiosi are incarcerated the mafia looks after their families – a sort of social security system. Once, when he was arguing the anti-mafia case, he was asked ‘ma l’anti-mafia; e qualcosa che si mangia?‘ (‘but this anti-mafia; is it something that you can eat?’). We heard about the Scuola Giovanni Falcone in the Quartiere Zen. The local school is the only symbol of the state in that quartiere and so it is regularly torched. Two closing soundbites. Our President, Mario Sepi; ‘We should not be afraid of the mafia’s noise, but of the silence of the innocents.’ And Don Ciotti; ‘I look forward to a day when children will ask “Mummy, what was the mafia?”

Capaci

I have just arrived in Palermo. Tomorrow there will be a ceremony to honour the two top recipients of the EESC’s civil society prize, Confindustria Sicilia and Libera, for their fight against organised crime – the mafia. It’s difficult to avoid thoughts about the mafia when you fly in here. At Capaci, on the motorway from the airport to the city, two monumental obelisks record the 1992 death of anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone (together with his wife and three bodyguards), and you can still see the small, white outhouse up on the hill from where the massive bomb, hidden in a culvet under the motorway, was exploded. The airport was named, in his honour and that of another anti-mafia magistrate, Paolo Borsellino, assassinated in Palermo just two months later.

A true hero

I had an hour to kill before a formal dinner in the evening, so I set off from my hotel, guidebook in hand, for a little wander. I found exactly what I was looking for in a small side street near the church of San Domenico. It was a narrow street, full of vegetable stalls, butchers’ shops and bakeries and down at its far end there was an osteria, with people gathered in the street, sipping beer or wine and simply being. Kids drove up and down the street on motorinos, or on bicycles, perilously zipping in and out between the stalls (the street was too narrow for cars). I ordered a glass of wine from a spectacularly surly barman and sat on a bench, beside two lovers, and pretended to read my guide. In reality, I was drinking in the street scene.  As travel writer Jan Morris has written, ‘The truth is that if books furnish a room, people do make a city,’ and here were the people, calling to each other in their almost plaintive but very melodic dialect. It was a truly enjoyable hour and, though it may sound pompous, I set off back to the hotel thinking that I had already understood something of the spirit of this city and of its people. But it was also saddening to think that Falcone and Borsellino were born and brought up in neighbourhoods just like the one I had briefly visited.

One of my aunts is carrying out genealogical research into our family origins. Having just finished Revolver, set in the frozen wastes of north America, I vaguely recalled a story my mother had told about a sea captain being shipwrecked up there somewhere, so I asked her whether there was any truth in that. It transpires that it’s completely true. My mother’s grandfather, born in Horten, Norway, was a ship’s captain, based in Liverpool and normally plying the Liverpool-London route. But in 1903 he and his ship were chartered by a fledgling furrring company to sail across the Atlantic and from there up into the Hudson Bay. So that is what my maternal ancestor, Captain William Barry, promptly did. He loaded up at Quebec and then sailed north and then…. You can read the story from the Montreal Gazette below. It’s quite a story, especially if you trace their route on the map, with surreal episodes, like an encounter in the middle of nowhere with an English big game hunter. You can see a picture of the shipwrecked Eldorado if you Google the following: Eldorado Freres steamer 1903. What I find additionally fascinating is that nobody was aware of the drama until it was over.

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Brussels-born wag

Two days ago I received a courtesy visit from the Director and Communication Head of the Economic and Social Council of the Brussels-Capital Region. In Belgium, as in France (for example), what they call ‘la vie associative‘ and I would call participatory democracy thrives at the local and regional level, as well as at the national and EU level. I agreed to give a talk on participatory democracy in the light of the Lisbon Treaty at a seminar they are organising in March of next year and we started to explore possible cooperation in the context of the Belgian Presidency in the second half of next year. They very kindly gave me a gift of a book entitled ‘Miscellanées Bruxelloises; La Région, sa ville et ses communes‘, which was published to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the Région. Like all the best miscellanies, the book is full of interesting facts and figures that you might otherwise not have known about. For example, I learnt that Brussels has: 285 permanent representations; 1400 international nongovernmental organisations; 4000 people working for NATO; about 40,000 people working altogther for the EU; and between 60,000 and 70,000 international meetings per year. Together with Washington, it hosts the most press correspondents in the world and is the third city for number of international meetings after Paris and Vienna. That last one made me sit up. What about Geneva? London? New York? Interesting. Anyway, the book is also peppered with witticisms from the improbable figure of Jean-Claude Van Damme. You can read some below.

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Brilliant poet, tragic waste

Armistice Day always feel a little strange for EU officials. It is a public holiday in Belgium but not for us, so when I came into work earlier this morning rue de la Loi and rue Belliard – both normally densely congested thoroughfares – were deserted. Nevertheless, this sombre day and what it records is what brought the European integration process into being and it is good to remember that for, in terms of living consciousness, the First World War is now as far away as Waterloo and the Napoleonic wars. As the remaining survivors of that era dwindle into nothingness, we will remember it chiefly now through historical accounts and recordings of one sort or another. In my own case, both my grandfathers saw service in the 1914-18 war, but only one of them was still alive by the time I was born and he never spoke about his experiences (we think he was in France for the first, suicidal, Somme offensive). So, comic book accounts aside, my first proper introduction to the horrors of that war was through amateur dramatics and literature: Oh! What a Lovely War and Sherriff on the stage (I played Mason in Journey’s End), and the war poets – Graves, Sassoon and above all Owen. Chillingly, by the time we got to play soldiers on the stage we were probably older than many of the boy-men we were impersonating. I studied Owen’s poems (most of them published after his death) for O level and they made a very deep impression on me. Owen himself died, shot trying to cross a canal, just one week before the Armistice (his mother received the telegram bearing the bad news on Armistice Day itself, as church bells rang all around her). Having seen the immense promise in his poetry, it seemed such a terrible, terrible waste to me but, then, that could have been a good description for the whole war. I am reproducing what I consider to be his greatest poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, below the cut-off line for this post. But here are the telling last lines:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

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Billy Collins

I am grateful to Vincent for pointing out that, beyond recited poetry there is also animated poetry these days. He gave as an example Billy Collins, the former American poet laureate, reading Forgetfulness. You can hear/see this here. It’s a brilliant poem. Now I’ve had my own experience of recording poetry, I wonder just how many takes it took.

In the continuing deal with N° 2 sprog, I last night finished Marcus Sedgwick’s Revolver. I just wish Sedgwick had been writing when I was a kid. Like The Foreshadowing, this book is different from Sedgwick’s more typical output inasmuch as it is – vaguely – based in a real world. Sedgwick meticulously researched his material, whether by, for example, spending time in sub-zero temperatures in Northern Sweden, or firing live weapons (as the title suggests, a Forty-four Forty Colt plays a major part in the story) in Estonia. This experience led Sedgwick to write the following in an Author’s Note: ‘If I had expected firing a gun to be frightening or difficult, I was wrong. The only scary thing about firing a gun is just how easy it is. Too, too easy. I was also struck by the strong desire I had to do it again, which is also a chilling thing to realise.’  Food for thought.

Gerhard Stahl

A working lunch with my counterpart in the Committee of the Regions, Gerhard Stahl, together with the heads of our respective secretariats. These working lunches are regular occurrences and are part of the overall structure of cooperation between the two consultative institutions which, as regular readers will know, have undertaken a revolutionary exercise in pooling a significant part of their resources into what we call the ‘joint services’, with a view to achieving economies of scale. We exchange information and share views on matters of common concern and generally seek to facilitate cooperation between the two administrations. Today we had a full and varied agenda, but it was, as usual, an entirely constructive meeting.