The Marshall Review

Ireland’s public policy challenges are becoming more complex. They cross domains. Housing affects transport. Transport affects energy. Energy affects climate and the cost of living. These systems cannot be understood in isolation. They need clarity. They need structure. They need explanation.

Marshall on Policy has always tried to make public policy understandable. But essays alone cannot carry the weight of a changing system. Essays explore ideas. They test arguments. They follow a line of thought. They are valuable, but they are not enough. A more structured form is needed. Something that explains how a system works and why it matters. Something that shows the choices ahead without turning into advocacy. Something that is calm, clear, and constructive.This is where policy briefings come in.

A policy briefing is not an opinion piece. It is not a reaction to the news cycle. It is not a polemic. It is a way to explain a public policy system in a structured way. It sets out the landscape. It defines the forces at play. It outlines the choices. It shows the consequences of those choices. It gives readers a clear picture of how a system works and where it is going.

Ireland needs this. The public conversation often jumps from headline to headline without explaining the system underneath. We talk about housing without talking about land. We talk about transport without talking about demand. We talk about energy without talking about storage, tariffs, or spilled electricity. The result is confusion.

People know the symptoms but not the structure. They know the problems but not the system that produces them.Policy briefings are a way to fix this.They are slow. They are deliberate. They are structured. They build understanding over time. They give readers a clear foundation so that later debates make sense. They are not about winning arguments. They are about explaining the system so that arguments can be made on solid ground.

This is a new direction for Marshall on Policy. It is a shift from essays to architecture. The briefings will sit alongside the essays, but they will do a different job. They will build a coherent picture of Ireland’s public policy systems. They will unfold slowly. They will be supported by technical notes at insights.marshall.ie. They will form the backbone of a larger project to explain Ireland’s energy system clearly and constructively.

The first briefing looks at Ireland’s spilled energy problem. Later briefings will explore flexible demand, storage, tariffs, infrastructure, and the longer‑term question of export potential. Each briefing will be supported by detailed notes. Over time these notes will grow into a full index of insights. This will become a reference layer for the entire project.

This is the beginning of a new phase for Marshall on Policy. A shift toward clarity. A shift toward structure. A shift toward explaining the systems that shape Ireland’s future. David Marshall Dublin

Marshall on Policy https://policy.marshall.ie

The Marshall Review can now be found directly at https://rvw.ie.

The new address is shorter, easier to type and easier to share, but nothing else has changed. The journal's essays, reviews and ongoing series will continue to appear as before.

Existing links to review.marshall.ie will continue to work and will redirect automatically to the current site.

I write for readers. Whether you arrive regularly or happen upon an article by chance, your visit is appreciated. I hope you'll find a reason to return to rvw.ie from time to time. You're always welcome here.

David Marshall Dublin

From a village bypass to a €900 million energy bill, the pattern is the same: commitments made first, questions asked later. Ireland has lived through this logic before.

Not far from my home in north county Dublin is a road. It began life as an arterial road, purpose‑built to carry considerable commuter traffic in and out of Dublin, with increased safety.

But built as a bypass around a small village, it facilitated new homes, new shops, new schools on both sides of the road; the inevitable (or is it?) ribbon development. So now we have school students, mums with pushchairs, people out walking dogs, joggers, and village cyclists using and crossing the road daily. That’s a dangerous mix of village life and commuter traffic. I’m not pointing the finger here, but a little planning would have avoided this disturbing combination.

I’m simply saying sequencing is substance. The development that has unfolded in that area over the last decade needed a little more forethought, a little more analysis in context. Yes, we want the homes, the shops, the schools and the like. But we want them assembled into new communities, safely.

When the order of decisions is not thought through, outcomes drift. And the same pattern is visible far beyond local roads. The Strategic Emergency Reserve Bill is simply the latest example. The State is advancing a €900 million infrastructure commitment before the cost analysis, the alternatives assessment, the emissions modelling, the operating rules, or the governance framework have been published. Let’s cut through the fog and the rhetoric and look at what is actually being said: “Let’s spend €900 million and see what happens — the Minister can field the problems.”

Let’s not mince words. This is the worst kind of government. And the Irish people deserve better. This is not about political stance or political preference or one party being superior to another. It’s about the basic skill set required to govern: understand the problem, consult those affected, evaluate the options, then act. The Strategic Emergency Reserve Bill reverses that order. And with no expressed justification or legitimacy for the order of decisions, the State has weakened its own case before it has even made it.

Across the NGO sector, the expressed concerns are consistent. Planning law has been set aside. Environmental safeguards have been narrowed. Judicial review has been restricted. Costs remain unclear. And the long‑term system effects have not been assessed. Ireland has lived through this kind of decision‑making before. The government is repeating the mistakes of the 19th‑century British, who panicked into building unnecessary barracks across Ireland. And it is a strange place for an independent State to find itself, after all we’ve come through.

Sequencing is not a procedural detail. It is the substance of good governance. When analysis follows commitment, it becomes justification rather than guidance. When exceptional powers are used without exceptional explanation, scrutiny thins. And when infrastructure is approved before its operating rules exist, the system begins to shape itself around the gap.

Ireland’s energy system is entering a decade of structural change. Decisions made quickly will be lived with slowly. The question is not speed. It is sequence.

Sequencing is substance.

The full LNG analysis can be found here: https://go.marshall.ie/LNG-bill-analysis

I was educated in a school founded eight centuries ago, given its Royal Charter by Elizabeth I, and governed, in spirit. and often in daily practice, by Oxford and Cambridge dons. It was the kind of place where language arrived not as a living medium but as a set of obligations. You did not “learn English”; you inherited it. You spelled organize with a Z because that was the proper, etymological form. You cast your sentences in the passive because it was dignified. And in sixth form classrooms, you spoke a kind of Middle English that had never quite admitted the existence of the twentieth century.

It was a beautiful education in many ways. But it left me with the sense that language was something to be obeyed rather than understood.

I’ve spent years unlearning that stance. Not rejecting it, there is value in precision, in etymology, in the long continuity of English thought. But loosening its grip. A writer cannot live by rules alone. A writer must live by judgement.

This is why my style sheet has begun to change. It is no longer a ledger of prohibitions inherited from Hart, Butcher, the ghost of some medieval grammarian, or the Elizabethan drive for a language fit to govern by. It is becoming a record of decisions: small, careful, reader‑facing choices about how thought should appear on the page.

The shift is simple to describe and difficult to practise. I’ve begun to prefer relation before interruption. If secondary material has a clear logical connection – cause, concession, condition, definition – I try to express it through syntax rather than punctuation. Let the reader feel the continuity of thought. Use parenthesis only when the mind genuinely steps aside.

This tendency has changed how I see the page. A style sheet is no longer a set of instructions; it is a companion in editorial judgement. It asks: what does the reader need at this moment? How do I help them enter, follow, trust, and remain with the essay? And how do I make my thinking visible without making it burdensome?

In a way, the work feels like reclaiming the language I was given; not rejecting its history, but choosing its future. Not Middle English in a sixth form classroom, but a living English shaped by the needs of the reader and the movement of thought.

I’ve written a short note about this evolution on write.as here in my essayist’s notebook: esy.ie https://go.marshall.ie/style-sheet-essay-notes

We tend to treat revision as a mechanical step – a tidy afterthought to the “real” work of writing. But in the digital age, revision has become something else entirely: a way of knowing. When the tools of composition allow infinite re‑expression, the act of rewriting becomes a miniature epistemic cycle. A sentence is no longer a declaration; it is a conjecture. Its next version is a refutation. And the movement between them – the quiet, iterative negotiation – is where understanding actually forms.

Montaigne wrote in a world where revision was costly. Ink dried slowly, parchment resisted correction, and every alteration demanded labour. His thought had to be pre‑considered, almost pre‑lived. Today, the writer’s field kit – keyboard, screen, cursor, delete key – makes revision cheap, abundant, and cognitively central. We discover our arguments not by holding them in the mind but by reshaping them on the page. Knowledge emerges through the drift between versions.

This is a dialectic Popper never anticipated. Not the grand clash of hypotheses, but a micro‑dialectic enacted in every paragraph: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, repeated until the sentence feels true enough to stand. Revision is no longer a repair mechanism. It is a method of inquiry – a way of testing the world by testing one’s own phrasing. In this sense, writing has become a form of epistemology conducted in real time, one keystroke at a time.

Tension:| observer vs doer

Shared characteristic: attention

Explore: the essayist attends to a thing the activist attends to a thing attention precedes both description and action

Ending: perhaps this is where the essayist and activist meet not in advocacy in attention

view

This is where I stand.

This is what I can see from here.

Come and look with me.

There is a question that has followed me through trade union education, universities and politics, though it rarely appears directly in policy documents or party manifestos. – How do people come to believe that their own judgement matters?

Over the years I have watched people discover a confidence they did not know they possessed. Sometimes it happened in a union classroom. Sometimes in a seminar room. Often it began when people recognised that their own experiences were not isolated incidents but part of a wider pattern shared by others.

That confidence was never simply personal. It emerged through recognition, conversation and collective understanding. People who had considered themselves spectators began to see themselves differently. They became participants.

The experience has made me increasingly sceptical of political arguments that focus exclusively on leadership. Leadership matters, of course. But politics is also shaped by assumptions about the public itself. Do we imagine people as capable of acting together, or primarily as recipients of decisions made elsewhere?

Much of our political culture is organised around representation. Others will speak. Others will decide. Others will carry the burden. There is a certain comfort in that arrangement, particularly during periods of uncertainty.

Yet there remains another tradition: one that places participation at the centre of public life and assumes that democracy is strongest when people exercise agency rather than merely delegate it. The tension between these traditions runs through many political institutions, including Labour.

I've explored that argument at greater length in a new essay, looking at confidence, participation and the cultural assumptions that shape political life. Read the full essay here: https://go.marshall.ie/acting-for-acting-with-marshall-review

There are places where life is a sequence of tasks. And then there are places where life is a sequence of encounters.

East of Tardets, the world is made of materials and people who care about them.

Oak planks that draw neighbours into conversation. Limestone tiles that teach you how to listen to a house. Workshops where a plane is offered like a handshake. Espadrille machines humming in the hills. Coffee poured as part of the craft. Cheese from La Madeleine, carried down from slopes that know more seasons than most people do.

It’s all one thing.

A culture that doesn’t announce itself – it reveals itself slowly, through wood grain, stone dust, rope fibres, and the way people greet you when you walk into a room.

Montory, France

The octave belongs to nature. The guitar fretboard belongs to culture. The space between them is where the story of music unfolds.

I’ve walked into many a pub session in Ireland, cathedral choir rehearsals in England and Germany, and bluegrass and country-blues gatherings in Kentucky. And whilst I’ve never yet managed a conservatoire in Paris – I’m still waiting for the invitation – I can guarantee that they are all very different musical worlds.

Different instruments. Different customs. Different ideas about what makes a performance good. Different ways of learning. Different musical languages.

Yet beneath all that variety lies a curious fact. Whether the music comes from a sean-nós singer in Connemara, a Bach chorale in Leipzig, or a mandolin player on a Kentucky porch, everyone is listening with the same pair of ears.

And that simple observation has been the thread running quietly through my column on The Story of Music.

When I began the series, I thought I was writing about the theory behind music. Looking back over those ten articles, I realise I was really writing about something older and deeper: the conversation between nature and culture. The octave belongs to nature. The guitar fretboard belongs to culture. The space between them is where the story of music unfolds.

I began with something so ordinary that most of us never think about it: the octave. One note vibrating at exactly twice the frequency of another. Two sounds that are unmistakably different, yet somehow recognisably the same.

The octave appears in every musical culture not because musicians agreed to adopt it, but because it is written into the physics of sound itself. A vibrating string, a column of air, the human voice – all reveal the same relationship. Long before there were music schools, examination boards, manuscripts, orchestras, guitars or YouTube, there was the octave.

That discovery led humans to an even larger question. If the octave provides the frame, what happens inside it?

And here we encountered one of the great surprises in musical history. Nature gives us the boundary, but she does not provide the map. The space between one octave and the next contains no convenient grid, no easy markers. Human beings had to invent one.

Centuries of experimentation, much like you noodling on the fretboard or tinking at a piano. Singers found intervals that felt beautiful. Instrument makers found ways to reproduce them. Theorists searched for numerical relationships that explained them. Every culture developed solutions, and Western Europe developed several. Some favoured purity, others flexibility. Some worked beautifully in a handful of keys, while others made wider musical travel possible. Yet every solution carried the seed of a new problem.

The twelve-step chromatic scale emerged from that long negotiation. It was not inevitable. It was ingenious. By dividing the octave into twelve equal intervals, Western music acquired a shared framework. The wolf intervals that haunted earlier systems could be tamed. Musicians could move between keys without the entire structure collapsing. Instrument makers could build fretted and keyboard instruments capable of speaking a common language.

But it seems to me something curious happened. The new twelve-note framework did not erase the older musical world. Instead it settled over it like a transparent sheet laid upon an older map. The ancient seven note names survived. The old modal melodies survived. Even the strange symbols we call sharps and flats turned out to be fossils from an earlier age when names remained constant and pitches were nudged to suit circumstances.

Again and again we encountered the same pattern. New ideas rarely replaced old ones. They were layered upon them. The modes provided another example. Modern textbooks often present them as theoretical constructions, but history suggests the opposite. People were singing Dorian and Mixolydian long before anyone gave them Greek names. The patterns emerged first. The theory arrived later. Human beings discovered recurring ways of moving through sound and only afterwards developed the language to describe what they had already been doing.

Harmony followed a similar path. A vibrating string contains relationships within itself. The octave, the fifth and the third are already present as natural consequences of vibration. Musicians did not invent these relationships. They discovered them. When they began combining notes into chords they were, in a sense, making audible, possibilities already hiding within the sound.

Here the story became complicated. For all our talk of notes, scales and chords, nobody has yet produced a single explanation of why music moves us. The acoustician points to the harmonic series. The theorist points to the behaviour of chords within a key. The psychologist points to expectation, memory and emotion. All three are probably right, and all three deserve more attention than I could give them in a single article. Part Eight was less a conclusion than the opening of a door I expect to revisit more than once.

From there the journey became increasingly human. The seven degrees of the diatonic scale ceased to be mere positions and became behaviours. Some felt like home. Some invited movement. Some created brightness. Others carried shadow, tension or longing. What began as acoustics became psychology. We were no longer asking what sound is, but what it feels like to be a listener.

And finally we arrived at pitch itself. Modern musicians assume that A is 440 Hz because that is simply what A is. History suggests otherwise. For most of Western music’s existence there was no universal pitch standard. Notes wandered from city to city and generation to generation. Only through an extraordinary process of standardisation did we arrive at the world inhabited by modern guitars, pianos, orchestras and electronic tuners.

Even then, compromise remained. Equal temperament is a compromise. A440 is a compromise. The tuner in your pocket is enforcing a policy decision rather than revealing an eternal truth. Which brings us back to the question that has quietly accompanied every article in the series.

What exactly is music?

I wrote those first ten parts to suggest a simple answer. Music is neither arbitrary nor purely cultural.

It is not arbitrary because it emerges from physical realities that exist whether we recognise them or not: vibration, frequency, resonance, the octave, the harmonic relationships hidden inside sound itself.

Nor is it purely natural. The chromatic scale, note names, accidentals, modes, harmony, notation, pitch standards and instruments are all human attempts to organise, standardise and communicate those physical relationships. Every time I sweet-tune my guitar, I am participating in that long conversation between physics, culture and human judgement.

Nature provides the raw materials. Culture provides the architecture. The story of music is the story of the conversation between the two. The octave asked the question. The rest of music is our attempt to answer it.

Further Reading This essay reflects on the first ten articles in The Story of Music. Readers who would like to explore the journey can begin here:

Part 1: The Octave – Enigma https://go.dm.ie/the-octave Full Index: https://go.dm.ie/the-story-of-music