We are delighted to announce that every member of our voluntary board has been nominated for the Dublin City Good Citizen Awards 2016, which are being held this evening (May 17). We’d like to take this chance to thank them for all their hard work. First Fortnight wouldn’t be possible without them. We’d also like to thank all of our volunteers and everyone who has helped us, you are all Dublin City Good Citizens in our books!

JP Swaine is attending this evening’s awards and has written a piece on the ethos behind First Fortnight….

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Tom Garvin was a man like no other. At least that’s how it seemed to me when sitting with that sense of fear and wonder of all things new in a Belfield lecture theatre in 1998. “What is a state? A state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force”.  This was a parlour trick he had well rehearsed to scare the freshers. “It is nothing more!!”

This permission to enforce; the power to deny freedom; the legitimacy to get away with it. It is impossible to decouple the factors that we deem an individual as “mentally healthy” from the definition of the state that Tom Garvin scared freshers with. This is why mental Health is a human rights issue. It is the only health issue that can lead to in certain circumstances a citizen being denied his or her liberty. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Ireland lead the world in locking people up. Per head of capita we incarcerated more citizens than the Soviet Union by a considerable margin.

For politics students, 1998 was a colourful year to be beginning  learning. The Bi-centenary of the 1798 Revolution was in full flow and with a brittle peace forming between modern day catholic, protestant and dissenter, the past lay heavy on the big ideas of the day. The nationalistic bloodshed of the Balkans had left me wary of nationalist rhetoric. The Republican ideals of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite trumped notions of a nasty, brutish state. Or at least in that’s how I remember it.

In this, the centenary year of 1916, ideas of the republic and the citizen should be foremost in our minds. While much of the focus has been on the birth of a nation, I am much more inclined to look to 1916 as the beginnings of citizenship. Egalite may not be evident while others make decisions on your liberte and often it depends which fraternite you happen to belong to.

First Fortnight seeks to get underneath the fingernails of our relationship to our own and each other’s mental health.

Toxic attitudes and behaviours don’t change as quickly as people sometimes wish they would. While a tolerant attitude to those experiencing mental ill health is fast becoming the standard norm when stress tested, these responses show a different hue. We still fear mental ill health and particularly those affected by psychotic disorders. Equally we have an underdeveloped vocabulary for responding to those dually affected by addiction problems and mental ill health.

Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that many of us would still feel this way even if it has become (rather ironically) unacceptable to be fearful of mental ill health or those it affects, when it affects them. But in truth, the more we explore our family, community and national history with mental health the more shame we find waiting for us. The State provided us the tools to dispatch those citizens amongst us who were different, or the wrong type of  pregnant, or outspoken, or inconvenient to the inheritance plan. But we asked them to – us, our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents. We asked the State to take citizens away so that those of us that fitted the norm could better control them to our purpose. Its a cruel story that we learn over and over again when we wonder aloud why we never hear much about a certain aunt, or why we live here when granddad was not the eldest but the second eldest. There is a darkness in our mental health history that we don’t even know where to begin to bring light to.

But we may have begun without knowing it. First Fortnight and its partners have been making a concerted effort to engage the nation in real conversation on mental health. By utisling themed arts events we have sought to imbue the conversation with various starting points and topics. The hope is that we may get in the habit of talking about mental health in a routine and typical fashion and that the conversation will be rich, diverse and critical. When some of us take permission to talk about our own mental health we encourage others to talk about theirs. This shortens the distance between the “them” afflicted and the “us” who are sympathetic

Perhaps we have ceased the crawling stage in Ireland’s relationship to mental health. It is now time for us to understand why we were immobile for so long and then think about where it is we might walk. I would like to think that the next 100 years of citizenship in this republic might bring us to a point of being kind to our own and each others mental health in everything we do. I’m happy for that simple rule to begin my proclamation.