Who turned the lights off?

Tim Pat Coogan wrote in 1980 that “nationalism in Ireland is like electricity flowing through a covered flex. It is powerful and unseen until someone frays the covering”. In 2011, one might think that someone had turned the electricity off.

Certainly, nationalism has been a powerful force in Irish history, even if its bulwark was nearly always the underlying economic conditions. If nationalism, in Coogan’s analogy, was a covered flex, then in nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland what ‘frayed its covering’ was hard, measurable realities, like the sectarian skewing of the economy that caused the Protestant Wolfe Tone to write his famous pamphlet in defence of deprived Catholics and pledge his life to the United Irishman on a Belfast hill, or the agrarian sectarianism and mismanagement that inspired the Young Irelanders, the Fenians and the Home Rule movement. It was this movement that formed the wider backdrop to the Easter Rising in 1916, and in the 1960s the continuing socio-economic marginalisation of Catholics in the North – not lofty idealism or quixotic anti-imperialism – fomented renewed national sentiment throughout the country. At all times, history teaches us, Irish nationalism has been closely allied to the real world of ‘bread and butter’ politics, to use that awful phrase of the parish-pump county councillor. The national and the practical have ever been two sides of the one coin.

In recent decades, however, it has become fashionable to deride national sentiment as an anachronism in the modern, multicultural world. Middle-class liberal types point (with justification) to the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, the ever-present perils of jingoism, the theoreticians who have shown that nationalism relies on an ‘imagined community’ (as Benedict Anderson has termed it), a ‘horizontal comradeship’ of the misty-eyed and maudlin, the simple-minded and the dangerous. Nowhere in this reductio ad absurdum is any concept of how, for example, someone like Roger Casement could be a consummate internationalist while also harbouring a powerful, egalitarian and inclusive commitment to his nation. Middle class liberals are likely to scoff that nationalism, a form of ‘primitivism’, ‘tribalism’ or ‘atavism’, is simply no longer palpable or relevant in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, but then you’re very unlikely to bump into these people down the local in the middle of an Irish international soccer game.

One the one hand, this type of event illustrates unambiguously that national sentiment is still a very tangible and resilient force, something that brings people together for genuine outpourings of fraternal affection and pride. On the other, the recent presidential election, in which Free Statism came out of the woodwork and unceremoniously catapulted the Six Counties into orbit around a distant planet called ‘Not in my universe’, illustrated also why this nation is in such a mess.

Today, the Republic paid out €700 million to unsecured bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank (i.e. gamblers who lost their bet), at the behest of the European Central Bank. In January a further €1.2bn will be paid out. This, of course, is bonkers. The bondholders, a nebulous group of the filthy rich, from blue chip banks and corporations to pension funds, have no means of extracting the money from us and no right in law, morality, or common sense to get the money back. Today also, the first significant arrest in a long time in relation to the banking crisis took place. It would be wrong to speculate on this arrest – and the person arrested should be dealt with by the law rather than the media – but it is disturbing that, from a broader perspective, so little has so far been done to bring about justice in relation to our sorry fiscal state of affairs.

Now, if we had a functional level of communal, comradely sentiment in this country, or any liathróidí (that’s balls to all you post-nationalists), we’d be hopping mad that our country, our people, are paying severely for the mistakes of venal, self-serving elites both in Ireland and abroad. If we had Roger Casement’s kind of national sentiment, we’d stop worrying about how this will affect mé féin and start thinking more broadly about how the unprecedented austerity will affect the greater number of our compatriots. Nationalism – that dirty taboo – might help us get the monkey off our backs. Nationalism – of a modern, non-chauvinist, inclusive and progressive variety – could be our twelfth man at the twelfth hour.

The reason that Southerners are so blithe and callous about our abandonment of the North in its time of crisis is the same reason that we are so blithe and craven in our abandonment of our country’s present social and financial interests. The selfishness underlying both was intensified over the past decade; during the boom we built up a sort of sectionalism (typified by the trade union movement’s embrace of factional lobbying), in which all of us were encouraged to see ourselves as social units, shoved together arbitrarily, for the purpose of individual enrichment. As Thatcher put it: ‘there is no such thing as society’. This sort of anti-nationalism, or at its extreme, misanthropy, insulates us from the sort of fellow-feeling that might serve us well in this time of economic upheaval.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Justine Delaney Wilson’s excellent exposé of the drugs trade in Ireland, The High Society, in which she quotes from an interview with one of the shining social consciences of the past twenty years, former Mountjoy governor John Lonergan. In explaining how we have lost our way in relation to crime, Lonergan posits how rich and poor youths are treated differently in the courts:

‘Take two young people, just for example. If a young lad, eighteen or nineteen years old, gets into difficulty and he comes from a very deprived background, almost the first consideration is a term of detention or something. It’s almost as if the system is saying, “I’ll do you a favour, I’ll send you into the prison or into detention and you’ll be saved from this horrible existence that you have and the potential damage it might cause you by sending you to St Pat’s [a young offenders’ centre],” never thinking that a criminal conviction is going to be a huge disadvantage. The opposite psychology automatically kicks in when it’s a young lad from a privileged background. Every effort is made to stop him getting a conviction; the last thing we want to do is to give him a criminal conviction because look at the consequences for him: He can’t go to America, he won’t be able to do this and that. It’ll follow him around forever.’

The problem with a society that relies in the first on individualism, is that the individuals who have influence and power, and the ability to evade prosecution, are those who have money. 96 per cent of prisoners in Mountjoy are from the lowest socio-economic groups, not because 96 per cent of crime is committed by the most disadvantaged sections of society – and certainly (as illustrated by the banking crisis) not because the 96 per cent of the most damaging crime emanates from these sections – but emphatically because the richest sections have maintained an unfair advantage in terms of how crime, and how society, are measured. True patriotism is about measuring all members of society equally and not measuring those of any other society any less. True fraternity is about valuing the welfare of each citizen above any financial institution, and true nationalism, surely, is that sense of generosity and fellow-feeling which inspires our most valuable and admirable activities as a people. If this nationalism is, to return to Coogan, ‘electricity flowing through a covered flex’, then surely the injustices being meted out to the Irish people by faceless international markets should be, like imperialism and lardlordism and the other incendiary tyrannies of the past, the generator that will bring us to our senses once again and jolt a slumbering people once more.  If we fail to stick together in defiance of this injustice, then we may become truly post-nationalist, but we might become post-nation as well.     

I read the news today, oh boy …

In Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, two weavers make an emperor a supposedly fantastic suit of clothes that will be invisible to people of low virtue, low intellect and low ability. When the emperor parades his new attire before his subjects, they, in turn - desperate not to look stupid - pretend that he isn’t in fact naked. Only a child has the courage to say it as it is: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all”.

Although this popular Danish parable, a classic cautionary tale on the dangers of obedience to authority, has been translated into over one hundred languages, it has yet to be translated into the vernacular of the Irish peasant: Imapuckingthickpaddygluttonforpunishment-eze. At least that’s according to two significant polls to be published in today’s papers, which show that almost half the Republic’s population speaks nothing pucking else.

If Andersen were alive today and living in Ireland, he’d probably have written a cautionary tale about a former Fianna Fáiler who looked like a Fianna Fáiler, sounded like a Fianna Fáiler, acted like a Fianna Fáiler, but had a fantastic cloak of invisibility woven by two spinners who’d previously worked for Fianna Fáil (see http://judecollinsjournalist.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-me-fianna-fail.html). This splendid garment, they guaranteed, would be invisible to those of high virtue, high intellect and high ability, but bestowed with wondrous, hypnotic gorgeousness for those in the asinine majority. Only a goat on a blog had the courage to say: “Puck this for a game of darts”.

What the HELL is going on? Fianna Fáil screwed the economy. It’s left us impoverished, indebted, the laughing-stock of the industrialised world. IT HAS LEFT US WITH THE BIGGEST MOUND OF DEBT REPAYMENTS PER CAPITA OF ANY NATION IN THE WORLD (Debt/GDP: 490%), OWING MORE THAN THE GERMANS DID IN REPARATIONS AFTER WORLD WAR I. It’s also got the Brits back to laughing at us again. 

Over the last couple of years I’m sure others have had the same experience: you’re watching the BBC or Channel 4 of a weekend evening because RTÉ will no doubt be featuring some B-Lister interviewing another B-Lister on some stony faced issue of national importance that will have you reaching for the Prozac. While merrily tittering away at 9 Out of Ten Cats or Have I Got News For You or, my favourite, Mock the Week, you’re suddenly stopped in your tracks when someone makes a wise-crack about the reckless, feckless Irish. The audience cackles heartlessly; the normally ebullient Dara Ó Briain just puts his head down and reddens, wounded, trying to laugh it off, looking like that big kid in school who wouldn’t be bullied so if he only knew his own strength.  You feel for him and suddenly realise you’d probably do the same: we can’t blame the Brits for this; we deserve to be mocked; we made this mess ourselves. In the old days, when English comedians derided the Irish as terrorists or potato eaters, you’d fling the remote at the telly and yell something unprintable with a face on yeh like Daniel Day Lewis after he’d been sent down for the Guildford bombings. Now you just resign yourself to being one of the silly colonials who’d been told they couldn’t rule themselves but wouldn’t listen. “Just look at sub-Saharan Africa—” Tory dames probably reason over Châteauneuf-du-Pape at dinner parties in Chelsea, “—or Ireland; they were much better off in the empiaah”. 

Being so ashamed of your compatriots, so acutely, cringingly demoralised by our beggar-on-horseback squandering of one of the most successful and sustained national economic booms worldwide in the last fifty years, leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth. That men and women sacrificed their lives so that a squalid, corrupt, inept protectorate populated by privately schooled shoneens and superannuated ninnies would transform a once proud nation into a money factory for hedge funds is, well, deeply depressing. But while it’s one thing to make a monumental mistake, to keep making the same mistake and expecting different results, well, that’s just stupid. When the Irish people vote for Seán Gallagher for President next week, we’ll be electing the most nakedly unsuitable object of forelock-tugging that we could possibly have representing us at this time. To paraphrase a seething W.B. Yeats, you’ve disgraced yourselves once again. 

Norn Iron: where the rules don’t apply

The current self-righteous storm in England over the nefarious activities of police agents in radical organisations is slightly hilarious in the context of what went on in the North of Ireland over the last four decades. Moreover, it got me thinking about how the North has become a sort of west European Bermuda Triangle, sandwiched between two jurisdictions that view its denizens in the same way as the wider science community views quantum physicians: strange people who inhabit a bizarre place where the normal rules don’t apply. 

Yesterday, the Guardian newspaper revealed allegations that police officers embedded in fringe protest groups were involved in falsifying evidence in court in order to protect their identities. The allegations relate to the Reclaim the Streets campaigns from 1995-2000, which, let’s face it, were fairly innocuous affairs: groups of dishevelled looking crusties on bikes taking to the streets in symbolic reclamations of public space. Don’t get me wrong: fair play to them and all that, but they’re hardly the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The fact that taxpayers’ money is spent on monitoring the activities of such peaceful, progressive, non-threatening organisations should be the bigger scandal; left alone, they’d probably end up falling out with each other anyway, rather in the manner of the Judean People’s Front (or is that the People’s Front of Judea?).

But these allegations come on top of other revelations, earlier this year, about another police agent, Mark Kennedy, whom the Guardian had found to be involved in all manner of questionable behaviour in similar groups, such as allegedly having sexual relationships with environmental activists he was monitoring. Some of the women making these claims are expected to bring civil cases against the police and understandably felt violated on discovering Kennedy’s true identity. However, such activity is hardly a big surprise: the idea that British agents leading a double-life would end up having sex with, or marrying, or having children with people in the community they were monitoring would barely raise an eyebrow in the Wee Six.

And that nonchalance when it comes to considering reckless behaviour by supposed security services illustrates the most salient point in all of this: however worrying, what happened in undercover policing in the last two decades in England seems utterly bland when juxtaposed with the activities of the RUC in the North, and juxtaposed it was this week, as the Guardian revelations coincided fittingly with Monday night’s BBC Spotlight revelations about unusual goings-on in the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland’s office. Spotlight suggested a number of things which, due to their as-yet unproven nature, may be unwise to speculate on in blogosphere, but one item in particular bears scrutiny.

In 1988, Derry man Eugene Dalton was one of three people killed in an IRA bomb in the Creggan area. Well, I say IRA bomb because they made it, and planted it, and tried to ensure it killed as many RUC members as possible, but paradoxically, it now seems that the IRA may not have been responsible for the atrocity itself. 

According to the programme, the IRA had tried a number of tactics to lure RUC personnel into a vacant flat, whose owner they had kidnapped. Firstly, they parked a car outside the flat; it was known to have been used in another IRA operation, and those involved thought it would trigger a red light for the RUC. When that didn’t work, the same IRA unit staged a robbery of a business in Derry. At the scene they left ID belonging to the flat owner. This, they thought, would surely lead the RUC to their bomb, but still there was no sign of anyone coming near the flat. 

Spotlight revealed the suspected reason why this happened: unbeknownst to the IRA, a mole at the heart of their operation had advised his/her handlers of the bomb. They, in turn, had allegedly issued an “out-of-bounds” order to RUC and British Army personnel, strictly advising that the vicinity of the bomb was out of bounds. When Eugene Dalton and a number of neighbours became concerned about the flat-owner’s whereabouts, they immediately went to his door to see if there was something wrong and were the first to come on the bomb. They died instantly; the bomb was triggered by the opening of the flat’s door. 

While Spotlight didn’t make the obvious conclusions explicit, it seems inconceivable that the flat was not under surveillance by someone at this stage, if the allegations are true; surely, one might reason, the whole rationale for issuing an exclusion zone order was to see if the bombers returned to defuse the bomb for fear it might go off and kill someone. If the flat was under surveillance, or even if it wasn’t and RUC  Special Branch knew it presented a potential loss of life to local residents, there can be only be a small number of reasons why it was left for Dalton and his unfortunate neighbours to find. Spotlight broached a “suspected attempt to protect a mole”.

If one soldier plants a bomb meant for an opposing soldier (and you can refuse to acknowledge that IRA volunteers, or RUC members, were soldiers, but bear with me), and the second soldier finds that bomb but stands back and allows an innocent to set it off, well, that’s pretty bad. But if that second soldier also lays claim to being a policeman, well, it’s pretty absurd. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, serious questions arise for what the RUC was or was not doing. Either way, the bombing became a propaganda victory for crown forces: the IRA, it seemed, had wantonly risked civilian lives in an area where it enjoyed considerable support. This is the kind of thing Kevin Myers columns are made of.

Back to Merrie England, and the not-so-merry presidential election in the Republic. In one jurisdiction, media correspondents complain bitterly about the idea of a cop working undercover and getting involved in a few sit-in protests and illicit losing-the-run-of-yourself-and-thinking-you’re-James-Bond style liaisons; yet the same people often glaze over, nonplussed, when confronted with evidence that they subsidised and enabled torturing, colluding, murdering paramilitary bigots just across the water. 

In the other jurisdiction (the Republic), politicians seize on a celebrated handful of very harrowing atrocities carried out by people on one side of the conflict, but compulsively refuse to recognise the role of the other side in such horrendous abuses as Spotlight has revealed.  Just tonight Gerry Adams was forced to release what is by now a ritualised and tiresome condemnation of the (utterly wrong) killing of Gerry McCabe, because media elites (who are prepared to ignore stories such as the one we’ve just explored) seem to have tunnel vision when it comes to the Northern conflict. Only a handful of lives lost in that conflict merit scrutiny it seems.

In the South, the subtext of what revisionist media reactionaries have to say about the North reads: “keep your Troubles up there”. In England, there is no subtext, or text: Northern Ireland might as well not exist. Like the Higgs boson particle, the idea of justice in the North is still hypothetical for both neighbouring jurisdictions. It can’t be seen by the naked eye and might only be made apparent when sent hurtling through some sort of extremely expensive contraption, called a tribunal.  

Either way, there’s a reason unionists in the North get on better with republicans than unionists in the South seem capable of doing. The simple fact is that the former realise, privately and grudgingly, that there is something in what republicans have to say about the rottenness at the heart of the Orange state. Even if they’re loath to admit it, they can’t ignore it: crown forces conspired over many decades to kill people they ostensibly claimed to be protecting. Unionists in the south, however (and I’m talking here also about those people who say things like ‘I want a united Ireland’, but we know very well don’t), are quite happy to put the blinkers on and pretend such things simply didn’t happen. Search the main daily newspapers this week and you’re unlikely to find a story on how crown personnel operating less than 20 miles over the border may have facilitated the deaths of innocent civilians in order to protect an agent. You’re more likely to find a picture of Dana looking like Bambi beside a dodgy looking spare tyre (and no, I don’t mean Gay Mitchell). Where, oh where, is the objectivity or integrity that might treat of these issues with the level of gravity and concern they clearly require?

Related articles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/19/police-undercover-officers-court-perjury-claim?newsfeed=true

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/14/mark-kennedy-eu-summit-protest?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-15363891

McGuinness Áras bid reveals ingrained anti-republicanism

Observing the recent series of interchanges between Martin McGuinness and his varied and many opponents in the Republic’s media and political circles, An Puc has been minded of experiments carried out by the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. 

No, not all that weird stuff about phallic symbols and Oedipal urges (although Freud would no doubt be interested in Gay ‘Oliver Twist’ Mitchell’s much trumpeted childhood deprivation and Enda ‘The Artful Dodger’s’ role as a surrogate father). In his studies of the concept of “negative hallucination”, Freud proposed a fundamental principle about how human beings make sense of the world that seems instructive when it comes to the collective amnesia many in the South’s elites seem to suffer.

Freud set out by experimenting with hypnotised patients, whom he would convince to deny the existence of something patently obvious e.g. that there was furniture in a room packed to the hilt with tables and chairs. He would then ask the patients to retrieve an item from the other end of the room and Freud would watch as they carefully plotted a path around the furniture, which, in the hypnotic state, they genuinely believed wasn’t there. The interesting part came when Freud pointed out the route they had taken around the furniture and asked why they simply didn’t walk straight to the item with no deviations on the way. Various responses, such as “I moved to examine a picture on the wall”, or “I saw a friend and moved towards her”, illustrated something very revealing about the way we think.

Freud concluded that his subjects had made up reasons for – or “rationalised” – their behaviour because of the “falsifying character of the ego”. The ego’s task is to maintain a fabricated appearance of consistency and completeness at all times — to comfort us in our belief that we understand things, particularly our own behaviour. In short, Freud argued, our brains develop all sorts of fancy explanations for our behaviour when we simply find it difficult to explain or justify. In some ways, subconsciously, we all tell ourselves a few lies now and again to explain away uncomfortable or inexplicable truths: baldness is a sign of virility; nasal hair makes me distinguished looking.  

But could these theories be applied to more widespread narratives, such as our concept of history, or more specifically, the Irish revisionist view of political violence? Could it be that we compulsively ignore things that we find uncomfortable in our recent history because of our own collective guilt about inaction or evasion?

An Puc has been mulling over this question of late as his humble caprine mind becomes increasingly bewildered by the anti-republican tone of the presidential debate. Gay Mitchell continually blames Martin McGuinness for the entirety of the Northern conflict — inexplicably, because his ranting is not doing him any good in the polls. Last night Mitchell said that if republicans had accepted Sunningdale, the conflict would have ended in 1974. Nowhere in this anti-logic was any consideration of the fact that, historically speaking, large-scale loyalist violence and civil disobedience aided by British capitulation ended Sunningdale. Mitchell had actually, in a curiously gymnastic act of intellectual acrobatics, turned the course of events in 1974 on its head.

In this regard, the contrast between the incredibly uncritical, rhapsodic reception lavished on the head of the British army some months ago and the increasingly hysterical vitriol being heaped on Martin McGuinness could not be more glaring. How do revisionists and anti-republicans square this circle? How can they become so exercised by the (tragically plentiful) errors of the IRA, yet be struck dumb by the arrival of a monarch whose army, along with others, has killed the best part of a million people in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade?

The compulsive refusal to recognise the central role of the British government in the conflict in the North of Ireland is characteristic of Freudian negative hallucination; zig-zagging across the laboratory floor, the revisionist avoids all the things he cannot see and then makes up a load of reasons why he’s taken this particularly irrational historical path. Perhaps it’s that those who can’t rationalize their inaction following the pogroms, and the beating and shooting dead of civil rights protestors in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feel the need to project their guilt onto republicans: the IRA didn’t fight a clean war (was there ever one); therefore we’ve turned our backs on the lot of you beastly Northerners. Such a plague-on-both-your-houses mentality can only justify itself by compulsively ignoring the atrocities of the British government, the Orange state and loyalism, the effect of internment without trial and of course the origins of the conflict in sectarian inequalities.

If you don’t believe this, or think I’m just doing some rationalizations of my own, well just consider how many times politicians and journalists in the south take an interest in the cases of Pat Finucane or Rosemary Nelson – solicitors shot dead in highly questionable circumstances, in which British complicity is suspected – and then compare it to their fascination with a handful of republican killings. Elites in the Republic have managed to purge their guilt for inaction, when Irish citizens ninety miles up the road were being tortured and burned out of their houses, by reimagining the tragic origins and sustained injustices of the thirty-year conflict. The IRA is to blame, they say; the British government is nowhere to be seen. This evacuation of the British from their own conflict – the historical equivalent of saying bankers have nothing to do with the recession, or X Factor has nothing to do with ruining the weekends of middle-aged men – requires a significant capacity for rationalized denial.

Martin McGuinness pointed out the irony last night, on RTÉ’s largely predictable and ponderous Primetime debate (until the Danagate moment), that Tony Blair had a greater grasp of the dynamics of the conflict in the North than the reactionary media and politicians of the South do. Senior figures in British governments and intelligence agencies have long recognised their disastrous role in fanning the flames of war, while Irish elites, with grotesque postcolonial sycophancy, seek to reassure them that they did nothing wrong. As G.B. Shaw once put it: “put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.” The prime example of this servile posturing in the current campaign has been Gay Mitchell’s somewhat mischievous suggestion that we re-join the British Commonwealth and take on the queen as Irish head of state (making his own presidential bid a bit of a paradox).  

Joining the Commonwealth would mean forgetting why we’re independent in the first place, and this kind of “remembering to forget”, as the great thinker Michel Foucault might put is, is characteristic of the pathology of reactionary revisionism. In this peculiar way of thinking, it was okay for Fianna Fáil founder-member and government minister Frank Aiken to blow up a British troop train in 1921, but not for the IRA of 1982 to do something similar; it was okay to fight tyranny without a mandate in 1916 (for that could be achieved retrospectively in 1918) but not to do so in the present phase of the conflict (after which Sinn Féin has ended up in government). British collusion in the murder of intractable solicitors or many of its own alleged citizens is to be forgotten, as is the British government’s obdurate determination to secure a military, rather than political solution to the conflict, until the 1990s brought a new dispensation. Most of all, you must remember to forget.

Strangely, those who lived with the chaos of the conflict north of the border have moved on, whereas south of the border the Miriam O’Callaghans of the world can’t help themselves when the opportunity to excoriate a modern-day republican presents itself. As McGuinness and Sinn Féin rise dramatically in the polls, and as Fine Gael and Labour brace themselves for the consequences of their first dirty deed in government - the budget - the likelihood, nonetheless, is that such attacks will act as a boon to a party seeking to position itself in opposition to the cosy consensus. The very negative hallucination of further "austerity" will make it difficult for media pundits to continue their tunnel-vision focus on Sinn Féin's past as the party marches ever more confidently into the future.