Author Archives: aidanjmcquade

Leadership in the “grey-zone” 

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Summary: Remarks to the conference “Leadership in Dialogue: Exploring the Spaces between Ideas, Communities, Worldviews”, Birmingham, 8 to 10 December 2024[1]

There are diverse perspectives on leadership. Mine is leadership as a responsibility to choose – particularly in choices that affects the lives of others, in organisations or in wider society.

That has been most the defining feature of my experience of leadership, and something you never really appreciate until you are in that role. Key aspects of leadership involve decisions on resource allocation. Such choices are always fraught because there are always winners and losers, upset and distress, and lingering resentments. 

Of course it can always be worse – I spend a good number of years leading humanitarian operations in, among other places, Angola during the civil war there. This led to some choices that were even more filled with anguish than the difficult but routine budget allocations that all leaders have to deal with. I write in my book, Ethical Leadership, about having to prioritize the lives of one group of people over another and how you have to learn to live with that after. That thought experiment with the runaway tram can get very real in some leadership roles. 

So given that these are leadership realities, ethical leadership is self-evidently important: by ethical leadership I mean the attempt to make the most life affirming choice possible, irrespective of the difficulty of the situation. A life affirming choice is one that optimizes the protection of the environment on one hand and the protection of human rights on the other.

Now, when we are making choices it is important for leaders to remember that those choices are made in, what I call in my book “a cruciform of agency”.

That is, there are aspects of the choice – whether that choice relates to a love affair, or work, or war – that are in the social world: those are the rules and resources associated with the choice:  the laws, polices, practice, finances or people who will be affected.

Then there are the personal aspects of the choice: the ones relating to the choice maker’s aspirations and experiences, and most fundamentally to their moral values.

The dialogue between these personal and social aspects of choice can be conceived of interacting orthogonally, hence the idea of a cruciform of agency emerges.

Now there is a 2002 paper by Craig and Greenbaum on a mining operation in South Africa. In that paper they recount how when they raised concerns with the mine management about issues such as health and safety, or labour terms and conditions, or the environmental damage that the operation caused, the managers they interviewed would express sympathy, but assert there was nothing they could do. The company they worked for caused the problems. Their responsibility was simply to get on with the job. They seemed to believe that they had no moral responsibility for the damage caused by the company despite the fact that it was they themselves who constituted the company. 

This denial of personal responsibility of policy makers and business executives for the consequences of their choices is a central constraint on obtaining progress on many of the world’s contemporary problems including slavery, something that affects an estimated 50 million people in the world today. 

I have rarely met anyone who has been in favour of slavery in principle. However, many in reality are in favour of slavery in practice. And if you doubt that, to take just one example, look at the hostile environments for migrants that many political leaders, from left to right in rich countries, take such pride in. This, despite the well documented fact that such hostile environments lead to the trafficking into forced labour and sexual exploitation of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. 

If the personal aspects of leadership, particularly the moral responsibility of the leader for the consequences of their choices is abandoned then ethical leadership becomes impossible, and indeed much worse may emerge. But this is not uncommon.

You all know the history: The Nazi’s used the idea of “just following orders” to try to evade personal moral responsibility for their atrocities.

Henry Kissinger infamously used the notion of “realpolitik” to justify his murderous foreign policy that devastated the lives of millions in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Today, Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Keir Starmer and David Lammy use the formulation “Israel has the right to defend itself” to justify their craven complicity in war crimes and genocide.

While the words used in each of these examples are different, their purpose is the same. They are explicit attempts to disguise moral bankruptcy and evade basic leadership responsibilities for the catastrophic human consequences of their choices. For this they deserve utter condemnation in “history and eternity” as Abraham Lincoln once put it.

The evasion of personal responsibility in a choice is the anathema of ethical leadership, and it brings with it a loss of authority: what follower worth their salt is ever going to respect a moral coward.

And there is always something more moral that leaders can do, even in the most extreme of circumstances. At the very least they can protest.

The current British prime minister likes to boast that his is not a party of protest. Which of course is true. Because protest is leadership. Protest is a way in which a society can open dialogue with itself and change the ways it thinks about itself. 

Protest is sometimes the only way more formal dialogue with power can be obtained. Protest is how women’s rights and gay rights, minority rights and, indeed, all human rights have been advanced in the world. Protest matters nationally and internationally as the struggles to end apartheid in South Africa and bring some measure of justice to the north of Ireland have shown. 

It also matters internationally because the failure of the West to protest Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria, compared to our volubility on Ukraine exposes an ugly, frankly racist, double standard at the centre of Western policy. 

Much of the progress towards human dignity, including limiting contemporary forms of slavery, has been through advancing international rule of law. This avenue for progress has now been struck a grievous blow, because the profound undermining of the principle of the universality of human rights that Western policy towards Gaza has asserted. This has undermined in a fundamental way the ideal of an impartial system of international rule of law. 

Many European leaders are expressing concern at the threat that Donald Trump poses to international order. But the damage done to that system of rule of international law by Biden, Starmer and Scholz is already catastrophic. 

At the heart of ethical leadership is the ideal once set out by the Irish patriot and anti-slavery campaigner Roger Casement who said, “We all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong and to protest brutality in every shape and form.” 

That is a commission which we must all take up. Because, more than any other time in my life, the challenge for all of us to lead ethically is at its most urgent. We are all leading in the grey zone now. Indeed, it is almost night.

[1] In his essay collection, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi wrote of the “grey zone” a morally ambiguous space where the ideas of right and wrong are no longer absolute and “good” decisions are impossible. 

My best reads of 2024

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Summary: some humanitarian assistance for book shopping this Christmas

As Christmas approaches some of you may be pondering books for yourselves or the bibliophiles in your life.

So here, in (more or less) chronological order are my best books of the year. Four entries are Irish; three about aspects of the British empire and one is about an aspect of the American empire; two trace the roots of Israel’s genocide in Palestine; two are feminist dystopian thrillers and one is a bit of feminist literary criticism; and there is one that is about pretty much everything. And there is some stuff about the Roman Empire, because there sorta has to be.

Each item has a link to a longer review if you want to know more. Hopefully some will supply some of you with some inspiration. 

  1. The Kidnapping: A hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy – a lucid and gripping account of an incident in the Troubles that illustrates just what an all-Ireland affair they were.
  2. Empireworld, by Sathnam Sanghera – an elegantly written exploration of the contemporary impact of the British Empire on the world.
  3. Brotherhood: when West Point rugby went to war, by Martin Pengelly – an important insight through the prism of rugby into American war-making amongst the post-9/11 generation of American officers.
  4. Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my home place, by Martin Doyle – An outstanding portrait of the pity of war in the North of Ireland, that also builds a picture of the pervasiveness of collusion between British state forces and loyalist paramilitaries.
  5. Resting places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, by Ellen McWilliams – an exceptional book in which the interplay of the most personal of histories with the political helps illuminate some of the most shameful aspects of Ireland’s past.
  6. Spent Light, by Lara Pawson – “It’s quite hard to describe really. To begin with, it’s about a toaster, but it ends up being about everything,” the Kirkdale Bookshop on Spent Light.
  7. Ghosts of the British Museum, by Noah Angell – a fascinating exploration of the dark side of British history and culture through the spooky stories of one museum
  8. Sweet Home, by Wendy Erskine  – a wonderful collection of short stories of contemporary Belfast
  9. (A twofer) The General’s Son, by Miko Peled; and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe – two outstanding works of personal and national history that amount to a searing protest against genocide and apartheid by two Israelis of conscience and exceptional moral courage.
  10. Another twofer: The Handmaid’s Tale, and the Testaments, by Margaret Atwood – two all too believable dystopian thrillers, set in a United States that has been transformed into a theocratic dictatorship of the sort imagined in the fevered dreams of the legions of Trump’s incel supporters
  11. The Flashman Papers, by George McDonald Fraser – not sure if this is a thoughtful rumination on Empire masquerading as a scurrilous romp or vice versa. A sort of Carry on British Colonialism with all the casual racism that entails.
  12. Of course, you may still be thinking about the Roman Empire – some of us are men after all. So there are these: Palatine, by Peter Stothard; Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard; Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, by Tom Holland
  13. Finally there is Monsters: what do we do with great art by bad people? by Clare Dederer – a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the audience and the monstrous artist, included, not least, for having the chutzpah in recognising that Stephen Fry can be an awful eejit sometimes.

That makes 13. A lucky number.

A Thread of Violence, by Mark O’Connell

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Summary: I would be more forgiving of this book if there had been more about Bridie and Donal in it.

I worked with a lot of Irish nurses in Ethiopia and Angola. They were a tough, sexy bunch, ruthlessly professional and deeply committed to social justice. (The character of Sophia in my novels The Undiscovered Country and Some Service to the State was modeled in no small part on some of them.)

As a professional group, certainly as an Irish professional group, they have probably done more than any others to make the world a better place. 

I imagine Bridie Gargan must have been quite like them. A 27 year old in 1982 she was already making the world a better place working as a nurse. Having just finished a long shift one day she decided to reward herself on her way home with a spot of sunbathing in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. It was there she had the misfortune of encountering Malcolm Macarthur, who proceeded to beat her to death with a hammer. 

After Bridie, Macarthur went on to kill Donal Dunne, a farmer, with his own shotgun. It seems that these killings were part of a half-baked plan that he had to commit an armed robbery to replenish his finances after he had squandered an inheritance. Macarthur was such a wastrel that he simply could not contemplate working for a living. 

Having finished it, I am left with very mixed feelings about A Thread of Violence, Mark O’Connell’s account of a protracted series of meetings that he had with Macarthur following his release on licence for the murders of Bridie and Donal. O’Connell had set himself the task of trying to get to the bottom of what motivated Macarthur to such grotesque violence. 

It is a beautifully written book, and it is important, I believe, to try to understand violence to better prevent it. But in the end O’Connell adds little illumination to these dreadful events and he admits that he never did get to the bottom of the question of motivation. 

So, what justifies this literary treatment of Macarthur, a worthless man who has led a worse than worthless life? I am left feeling not much, particularly as O’Connell writes so little about Bridie and Donal who barely feature in this book other than as victims. O’Connell missed the opportunity, in my view, to show how these much more consequential people deserve more attention than their self-important killer.

I can understand how O’Connell, as a working writer doubtless with a contract to fulfil, must have felt he had to write something in spite of his admitted failure to achieve his aim. But I am sad to say that I do not think this book adds much to human understanding. 

A roundup of Unusual Suspects: Isolation Island, by Louise Minchin; The Trials of Lila Dalton, by L J Shepherd; Long Time Dead, by T M Payne; A Limited Justice, by Catriona King.

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Summary: books that it would be criminal to overlook!

I once met a woman who had given her newborn daughter the second name of “Danger” just so when she was older she would be able to say, like the heroine of a 1930s movie, “Danger is my middle name!”,

There is a strong hint of such movie heroines in Lauren, the investigative journalist protagonist of Louise Minchin’s Isolation Island. 

Minchin uses her experience of journalism and having been a contestant on the storm ravaged set of “I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here!” to craft a fun, Agatha Christie inspired, tale of murder amongst game show contestants. 

Minchin brings a lovely devilment to her tale, fattening up the despicable before despatching them while Lauren desperately tries to unearth the evil genius behind the mayhem.  

Minchin has described her heroine as being braver than herself. That may or may not be true – Minchin is also a triathlete and having done one myself I can attest that those are daunting things. But, perhaps as importantly Lauren is driven by a sense of journalistic ethics and a conviction of the importance of truth, which must be Minchin’s own. 

In a time of in which even genocide is being made undiscussable, it is important to be reminded that some truths, no matter how inconvenient, must be spoken. 

On the opening page of The Trials of Lila Dalton, the titular Lila, a barrister it seems, stands up in court with no knowledge of how she got there, but with a client to defend. LJ Shepherd, the author, a barrister herself, describes her book as an “ontological mystery”. That is, not only does her protagonist have to get to the bottom of the facts of her case – the defence of a man accused of a bombing atrocity – but also work out who the hell she is and what she is doing there. 

Shepherd’s is an entertaining and intriguing story. I am not sure that it really required the reality questioning elements as the issues she deals with – the importance of the right to a defence in a criminal trial no matter how seemingly heinous the accused, and the question of how democratic societies protect themselves from violent assaults by those who do not share their values – are important enough.

These quibbles aside, the quality of Shepherd’s writing is exceptional, particularly when describing the treating of casualties in the aftermath of an explosion: these recalled for me some of the accounts of the survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. In this Shepherd does that most difficult of things: she forces the reader to empathise with victims that they may prefer not to think of.

In Long Time Dead, an extra body shows up in a grave and it is identified as a man suspected of murdering a cop and grievously injuring a bystander seven years earlier. The investigation eventually falls to Detective Inspector Sheridan Holler. 

It was Chandler, I think, who conceived of his tales of gumshoes as updated versions of the stories of Knights Errant from Arthurian legend. So, whatever else was unclear in his mysteries, no matter how corrupt the world in which they ventured, one thing you could count on was that his shamus would endeavour to do the right thing, protecting the innocent and unmasking the guilty. 

TM Payne’s peeler protagonist in Long Time Dead is an inheritor of that tradition. While she may find the sort of defence barrister of which LJ Shepherd writes somewhat distasteful, she is still fundamentally decent and committed to the finding the truth. 

There is an echo of Payne’s book in Catriona King’s A Limited Justice. Like it, it is a police procedural – a type of crime novel for which I have a particular affection. 

Both have the bonus of being written by writers who know what they are talking about: Payne is a former cop; King has worked as a police forensic medical examiner. Both eschew the brooding detective for sympathetic professionals – the sort of people who you might actually like to work with. 

A Limited Justice begins with King’s investigator, Marco Craig, opening a probe into a particularly grisly killing on a Belfast garage forecourt. As with many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, as the investigation unfolds the story of the perpetrator and their motivation becomes as important as that of the investigators. Consequently, King is able to use her story to explore not just the crime itself, but contemporary Northern Ireland. As is typical of Northern Ireland the story is replete with black humour. 

Both King and Payne have founded book series based on their protagonists. It is easy to see why: both are appealing companions on the mean streets of the imagination, and King and Payne, like Minchin and Shepherd, are both very gifted writers. 

Israel’s Offensive: A Case Study in Racism and Human Rights

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Summary: Netanyhu’s war is racism and should be condemned as such

Perhaps I have missed it, but I have not seen many anti-slavery organisations condemning the mounting slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and now Lebanon, over the past year.

I wonder about anti-slavery organizations more than other specialist NGOs or human rights issues because, for the past 20 years this has been my principal area of professional practice and so is a sector with which I have some familiarity.

Perhaps some anti-slavery organization feel that something like Gaza is not part of their mandate and so would be inappropriate for them to raise their voices. Perhaps others are afraid of upsetting donors by raising question about another specialist area – human rights in war – and losing funding for other important work. Maybe others are afraid of annoying the governments of the US, UK and Germany, or certain parts of the EU Commission, who may be complicit with the policies of Netanyahu’s cabal and so losing precious access and the occasional invitation to convivial cocktail parties. 

The thing is this: if we survey the realities of slavery through history right up to the present day we see very clearly that it is rooted in racism and the dehumanisation of others. Hence, anti-slavery organisations must be anti-racist if they are at all serious about tackling the causes and consequences of enslavement. If they fail in that fundamental then they are not truly anti-slavery. They are merely performative distractions. 

Consider now Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference at the start of the assault on Gaza to the Amalek, a nation that, according to the Bible, King Saul was commanded by God to kill every member of. Consider the Israeli blockades of aid to Gaza to deploy famine as a weapon of war, and Israel’s vote on 28 October 2024 to, in effect, ban the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, the UN relief and works agency (UNRWA). Consider how IDF soldiers can  cheerfully make videos for TikTok of their demolition of homes, schools, universities, hospitals and every other vestige of civilian infrastructure that makes Gaza habitable. Consider now Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” as he called for a “complete siege” on Gaza, an imposition of collective punishment that is illegal in international law. 

Gaza, after Israel has “defended itself”

Each of these examples, and there are many more, is a naked expression of racism against a whole people. Racism is at the root of every atrocity that is committed by Netanyahu and his cronies.

The continued acquiescence of US, UK and Germany in this, up to and including the provision of money, material and intelligence to sustain the Israeli offensives, in spite of overwhelming concerns regarding both their morality and legality, has dealt a grievous blow to international rule of law. It has also done something that would have seemed unbelievable a mere 18 months ago. It has established a credible case that there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of Biden’s America, and Putin’s Russia. Both appear ready to shred law and the most basic principles of human rights when it is convenient for them.

It is upon meaningful rule of law and a common adherence to the fundamental principles of human rights that the cause of anti-racism, and anti-slavery, have been advanced. Now, however, if campaigners challenge transgressing governments that their policies are in breach of human rights many will laugh and point to Gaza and Ukraine and say that the US and the UK, Germany, Israel, and Russia have demonstrated that the only right is might.

So, every anti-racist organisation on this planet, and that includes all anti-slavery organisations that are worthy of the name, and every organisation that derives its mandate from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, must add their voices to the international condemnation of the Netanyahu government’s racist wars. If they do not then they will seem as hypocritical as the western governments who facilitate these wars in spite of the mounting evidence that the bloodshed that Israel perpetrates is foul murder.

As the Irish anti-slavery campaigner Roger Casement put it, “we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong and to protest brutality in every shape and form.” 

That commission was never more urgent than it is today as we daily bear witness to Netanyhu’s unfolding policy of genocide.

Not ethical leadership: a rocky start to Starmer’s first days in government

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Summary: things can sometimes only get worse.

Keir Starmer’s government prides itself in not being idealistic. “We are not a party of protest!” they declare.

The smug, self-satisfaction that this statement implies might be better sustained if the party were conducting itself with unimpeachable professionalism now that it is in government. But its first 100 days in office have been notably rocky. A survey of this period by the Guardian was headlined, “We all hope it’s teething troubles – but worry it’s something worse.”

Well, I suspect it is something worse.

This thought will likely have occurred to many students of organisations. It will be a particular worry to those concerned, as I have been, with what is required to lead ethically: that is, the struggle to make organisational decisions that optimise life-affirming choices by seeking to protect human rights and advance environmental restoration. 

For me, there seems to be three inter-related structural problems with Starmer’s Labour party that are the root of the Labour government’s shaky start and shady future. The first of these is that Starmer’s Labour party is strikingly authoritarian. 

Everyone who has ever effectively led people in organisations will be aware that sometimes a directive approach is needed. For example, if it is necessary to evacuate a building due to an emergency, it is not appropriate to ask everyone how they feel about that first. It is necessary to point folk to the fire exits and tell them to get out. 

However, Starmer seems to privilege such an approach over more collaborative ones even when there is no compelling need. Indeed, his leadership seems to have a problem with any independence of thought and voice.

The run up to the 2024 general election was marked by accusations of a purge of left wing and pro-human rights candidates, and the parachuting into various constituencies of Starmer loyalists, some of them morally repugnant.

Starmer and his acolytes present this as “discipline” and “strong leadership”. It is a peculiar notion of strong leadership when a leader is afraid to countenance a bit of criticism or consider different perspectives on issues. 

From the longer-term view of organisational health this approach is even more problematic. Because if organisations exclude dissent, they reduce their capacity to think critically, to test ideas and winnow out the stupid or counter-productive ones. 

All leadership teams, no matter how smart, will come up with poor ideas from time to time. But truly smart leaders understand that they need processes in place to guard against such things. The restriction of dissension in Labour undermines the necessary processes.

This leads to a second structural problem which will increasingly emerge for Labour as this government proceeds. The purging of intellectual and philosophical diversity, and the fear of being seen as disloyal that is bred by leadership authoritarianism, will reduce Labour’s capacity to generate new ideas as time and events evolve. This will make it more difficult for the government, and the party as a whole, to right recent wrongs and to respond to the new challenges that will inevitably emerge. 

Both these problems, of authoritarianism and lack of intellectual diversity, are dwarfed by the most fundamental of Labour’s current structural problems: that is its moral bankruptcy. 

This was most starkly on display in the infamous interview that Starmer gave to LBC in which he endorsed collective punishment on the people of Gaza for the attacks on Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, something that he should know as a lawyer, is a war crime under international law. Later assertions that Starmer misspoke or was taken out of context are undermined by the fact that in the weeks following this Labour front-benchers, including the crassly cynical Emily Thornberry and the craven Peter Kyle also publicly endorsed their Dear Leader’s position.

There was a softening of Labour’s Gaza position in the run up to the 2024 election, when it looked as if such an inhumane policy might cost it seats as Israel’s apparent genocidal intent became ever more explicit. However, on attaining power, it has, with a few cosmetic changes, returned to its substantially uncritical support of Netanyahu’s far-Right government. Hence Starmer is notably more reticent on the carnage inflicted on Palestinian civilians in comparison with his public anguish over Israeli casualties.

It is in the context of these three structural failures that we should consider the votes in the first 100 days of this government on maintaining the two-child limit on child benefits and cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, these votes look more like a process for the breaking of the human spirit of backbench members of parliament rather than any cool consideration of regrettable financial necessity. 

In bringing these matters to a vote when they did, the Labour leadership sought to purge any residual dissent by demanding that, in the name of loyalty, backbenchers should betray their constituents and their consciences on the issue of the poverty of English people, until now a residual Labour moral value.

Having done this, the thoroughly compromised backbenchers have been truly initiated into the moral bankruptcy that is at the core of the British Labour party. So, all will have diminished credibility if they are ever tempted to mount a future principled challenge to the leadership’s proposals, no matter how stupid or morally repellent those proposals might be. 

Starmer’s Labour may be better than the Tories that they replaced. But there seems to me to be a rot at their heart, the stench of which may soon become overwhelming. 

Some Service to the State

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Summary: why partition in Ireland has been such an injustice.

“… sometimes it is absence itself which is the hardest thing to hide.”

I grew up in South Armagh, just a mile or so from the British-imposed border in Ireland. That border is a thing that, in many ways, has cast a long shadow over my life. It was, I sincerely believe, at the root cause of many of the problems for both parts of Ireland during the Twentieth Century, not least the squalid little war known as the Troubles during which I grew up.

With partition, the British sought, successfully, to create two sectarian states in Ireland rather than one plural one. My novel, Some Service to the State, is at heart an exploration of some of the human rights abuses that Irish people had to endure as a result of this.

Hence it is an indictment of the injustice of partition’s continuation. As the impetus takes hold for an end to partition and the establishment of a new Ireland, I hope that this book will resonate with an audience that wants to understand better why the status quo has been such a poisonous thing for ordinary people living on the island of Ireland.

But Some Service to the State is also a gripping detective story, about the repercussions of an enquiry into the fate of a girl who seems to have gone missing in that politically divided island.

Here is what other authors said about it: 
Ronan McGreevy, author of Great Hatred: the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, has said of Some Service to the State that it is “a superb book with dialogue that would not be out of place on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. … [in Mick McAlinden} McQuade has created a character whose travails highlight the thwarted dreams and the tragedy of partition for so many people in post-revolutionary Ireland.” 

Rosemary Jenkinson a multi-award winning playwright and author of Marching Season, has said that the book shows a “prodigious skill in shining a spotlight on the scandal of the mother-and-baby homes and in brilliantly imbuing the past with … [a] potent blend of heart, soul and wit”

If you would like to get a copy, the book is available in the UK from Bookshop.org and in the US from Barnes and Noble. It is also available on Amazon.

I hope you will read it, and if you do, I would love to hear what you think in the comments below.

Keep safe and many thanks.