Is David Cameron West Lothian in disguise?

Scotland has always interested me, and not just because, like Sarah Palin with Russia, I can see it from my upstairs window. My mother, a Donegal woman, used remember the excitement of her “Scotchy” cousins coming each summer and sleeping anywhere and everywhere in the house.  Back in Scotland, one of them played for Glasgow Celtic for some ten years. When they got married my parents went to live in Glasgow for a time, where two of my siblings were born. And of course there’s that fascinating dialect Ulster-Scots (no, Virginia, it’s not  a language), Donegal tattie-hokers and a myriad of other links.

Which is why I’m interested to see David Cameron this morning doing his damnedest to hobble Scottish nationalism.  Alex Salmond’s party, last time out,  ran for election on the promise of a referendum on independence in the second part of their term of office, and it was elected with a firm majority. Now Cameron has decided he’ll tell the Scots when they’re going to hold their referendum, how many questions will be on the ballot and what the wording. Salmond wants it in 2014 and wants two questions – one on whether full independence is favoured, the other on whether, short of independence, Scotland should have more powers devolved to it. Cameron says no, there’ll just be one independence question and it’ll be a lot earlier than 2014.

Both men, of course, are politicians, keen to further their aims; but it doesn’t take a political philosopher to figure out who should decide when and what kind of referendum the Scottish people will face:  the man whose party was elected by the Scottish people with an emphatic overall majority or the man whose party has half as many MPs as there are pandas in Scotland (yes, Virginia, there are two pandas in Scotland).

According to the polls, the numbers in Scotland favouring full independence are growing but still well short of a majority. With that in mind, Salmond is keen that his promise of a referendum be left until  2014 , and there’s talk of having it held on the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, a famous Scottish victory over the English. For the same reasons Cameron wants to force a referendum of his choosing at an earlier date with no historical reverberations. 

But what’s most interesting is the way this matter lays bare the nature of the union. As far as Cameron is concerned Westminster as the senior partner calls the shots, not the Scots. In the north of Ireland, on the other hand, the opposite applies: any movement out of the union with Britain can only come from the people in the north-east of Ireland. The views of others in the UK are deemed irrelevant. 

You probably see the consistency in Cameron’s position vis-à-vis the two regions. Me, I’m going to need three or four years to think about it – say  until around Easter of 2016.

Joe and the Sindo have a go

If it hadn't been for Joe Duffy, I might have missed it. Joe was on his RTÉ 'Liveline' mid-week, getting upset about the TG4 series 'Mna an IRA'. Well, actually about the first in the series, which concerns Dr Rose Dugdale. Joe must have repeated at least four times that Dr Dugdale had said "Fair play" to the people, including her partner Eddie Gallagher, who kidnapped Dutch industrialist Tiede Herema back in the 1980s. Joe then got Mr Herema himself on the line to denounce those who'd put him through such an ordeal back then.  Perversely and to Duffy's obvious frustration, Herema sid he'd found Gallagher  intelligent, friendly and cool under pressure, for which he was glad, since otherwise he, Herema, might today be dead. That wasn't the answer Joe wanted so he brought the conversation to a speedy conclusion.

Today the Sindo takes up Joe's lament, reporting a TG4 board member who thinks 'Mna an IRA' is a "serious stain on the character of TG4". Eh? I watched the programme last week, thanks to Joe's head's-up, and the "Fair play" remark blended to near-invisibility into an interesting if overly-brief programme.  It presented a portrait of a woman from a highly privileged English background -  wealthy parents, happy childhood, 'came out' as a debutante, went to Oxford and studied politics, philosophy and economics (PPE), became an academic. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she then applied the theories she read to the reality of her own life and that of those around her and concluded that injustice dominated. And so a woman who could have led a well-cushioned life at the elite  end of English society became instead involved with the IRA's armed struggle - or on the fringes of it, since the IRA apparently never quite accepted her as a fully-fledged member.  What the documentary showed was a beautiful and highly intelligent young woman who today lives in rural seclusion in Ireland,\ and who regrets nothing of her commitment to the struggle against   what she saw as injustice by the British state forces in Ireland.

Obviously some people will condemn her actions, others applaud them. In the programme she talked of the pain her path in life brought to her parents, and widened this out to note the destructive effect on children and families which commitment to a political cause often exerts. Certainly Joe and one TG4 board member not only don't approve of her choices, they even disapprove of the programme about her being made.

All publicity, even bad publicity, is in some ways good publicity. Lots of people like myself who would probably have missed the programme have now been alerted to its existence. Should it exist? Or are Joe Duffy and the TG4 board member right to lament that such things be given an airing? The answers, in order, are Yes of course it should exist, if you believe it's important to examine the motivation behind the actions of people who resorted to arms during the Troubles; and No,  Duffy and the board member are misguided at best if they believe we should erase any explanation of IRA actions during that time.   Because if the Irish people aren't considered adult enough to listen/watch and then make a judgement about the sacrifice or scurrilousness of people like Rose Dugdale, then Joe and Co should really go the whole hog and campaign to have the vote removed from such morally-inept morons as the general Irish public.

The English? Make 'em laugh

It’s a striking fact and a source of pride to some:  the number of Irish comics  who make it big in Britain. It’s been that way for decades at least: Frank Carson, Dave Allen, Jimmy Cricket,  Dermot Morgan, Dara O Briain, Brendan O’Carroll – and, of course that old perennial, Sir Terry Wogan. They’ve all made the British laugh.

On a BBC interview on Monday last,  Sir Terry reveals that back during the Troubles a parcel-bomb was sent to him at the BBC in London. Typically, he chuckled the event away: “Whoever sent in the bomb with my name on it cannot have been much of a fan because I was on holiday”.

Why do so many Irish funny-men make it big in Britain?  Because Britain is big and  because it’s there.  If you confine your ambitions to this island, as the showbands did, you’re limited to drawing your fans from a population around six million. If you go for it in Britain, you’ve a potential audience that’s ten times as many. There’s also the fact that in England you’re a relative rarity – your accent makes you stand out. I remember a unionist academic colleague of mine years ago telling me she hated going to conferences in England, because as soon as she spoke, people picked up on her accent and turned round to stare. For a comedian that’s a plus: you’ve a voice that’s quickly identifiable.

But as in most things, George Bernard Shaw gets to the heart of the matter with a deft phrase or two.. He said that the English expect the Irish to play the fool, and the Irish usually try to reward  that expectation. It’s true. I spent  a couple of years living in England and there’s a shameful temptation to fit into the pre-assigned broth-of-a-boy role. Had I spent five years there I’m sure the begobs and begorrahs would have bubbled up  in my vocabulary to meet expectations.

Why do the English have this expectation?  They may or may not do it deliberately, but there are few more effective ways of  decomissioning or at least devaluing someone’s point of view than to cast them in the court jester role. Old Sir Terry made a very comfortable living playing that part over the years, as to some extent did Shaw himself. But unlike Shaw, Wogan made sure that  anything interfering with his good-natured whimsy image was quickly pushed away:  Looking back to the Troubles, he declared “What was being done [IRA violence] was not being done in my name”.  In other words, “There are lots of decent Irish people like me who disown the IRA”.  That kind of message was useful to the British authorities. It helped maintain a public image of IRA people as a bunch of psycopaths who gloried in killing and were detested by their own people.

But it’s  the daft-paddy image, not the anti-violence stance,  that the English people really love in us Irish. It allows them the comfort of believing that to be English is to be normal,  and to be anything else   (Scots or Welsh as well as Irish)  is to be raw material for joke-telling. They talk so quaintly, don’t they,  and, bless ‘em,  they have such a weird and hilarious way of looking at the world!

On that belief in  the amusing oddness of others the British built their empire.

Remembering the war fought to end all wars

Sometimes  what people avoid saying is as important or more important than what they do say. A topical example: those Irishmen from the south of Ireland who died fighting in the First World War. For decades there was little public talk of them. The spotlight between 1914 and 1918 shone steadily on the memory of the men of the Easter Rising, not on the men who fought in the First World War. As the saying goes, they had been erased from history.

Nowadays things have changed. Last night Belfast City Council voted on a motion by the SDLP that the Irish government be invited to ceremonies to commemorate the Battle of the Somme and to Remembrance Sunday. Councillor Pat McCarthy said things were changing and that a decade ago the visit of the Queen to the south wouldn’t have been envisaged. “For a long time in the history of the Republic that period [World War I] was forgotten and was something which was never talked about”.

Wrong, Councillor McCarthy.  The Irishmen who fought and died in the First World War were not forgotten and were talked about. I had two grand-uncles who died in the conflict and I remember my mother talking about them quite openly and frequently. Speaking to other Irish people whose relatives died in that war, the same story emerges – the framed photograph in the hall, the story of his leaving to join up, the news of the death at some remote front. What Councillor McCarthy presumably means – and most commentators like him – is that those Irishmen from the south who died were forgotten and not talked about at an official, public level. There is a difference. At the private, family level, those men were never forgotten, frequently spoken of.

Another fact not talked about when this subject arises is  that the men who died in the First World War weren’t wearing German uniforms – they were wearing British uniforms. Slap bang in the middle of the First World War the Easter Rising occurred, and from there to the Black and Tan war was a short step of a few years. Who were the men of 1916 and those involved in the struggle for independence fighting against? Men wearing British uniforms. Thus at a public level it became very difficult to reconcile the value of those who had opposed British soldiers and the value of those who had joined with British soldiers.  Not surprisingly, the southern state chose to have public remembrance of those who had fought British soldiers and to ignore those who had fought as British soldiers. That's the reason why the there was public silence on those Irishmen who died fighting in the First World War,  other than the occasional murmur of “Shameful!”  The reasons behind the official silence – as distinct from private/family remembrance –was and is rarely addressed.

A final point: those Irishmen from the north and south who died in WWI battle are talked of as heroic, and the ghastly number of fatalities at the Somme and other battles are cited in evidence. Indeed - I certainly feel terrified even thinking about the conditions in which those men lived and died. But the notion that they all “answered the call” in a heroic way, keen to serve King and country, is to forget, erase, elide the memory of all those men - very likely the majority, if the history of recruitment over the centuries is looked at – who joined up because they had little or no alternative if they wanted to earn a living.  The war itself was a pointless, imperial conflict sold as the war to end all wars.

So let’s watch if the remembrance of the Somme will include those awkward facts, when, as they're certain to do,  representatives from the south come trooping up. The way that Remembrance Sunday is normally observed, I’d say the chances of complete  honesty about the war and the men who fought in it are zero.

Big wave coming: what to do?

Having confidently stated a blog or two back that predictions are a waste of time, let me contradict myself: on one issue this year there will be lots of predictions. I’m talking sectarian head-counting here.

It’s started this morning in The Irish Times . There’s a detailed article by Gerry Moriarty talking about the rising tide of the Catholic population in the north which will have obvious constitutional implications. If not managed “properly and creatively” (whatever that means), he believes it could land us all “back in the mire”.  He quotes figures from the NI Department of Education for the last school year: 120,415 Protestants and 163,693 Catholics. At third level, the University of Ulster has just over 11,000 Catholics and just over 7,000 Protestants. The teacher training colleges tell the same story. Overall at third level education, students from a Catholic backround represent 59.3% and Protestant background 40.7%.

So clearly the notion of a permanent Protestant majority in the north is on its way out – it’s merely a question of how soon. For those alarmed by this prospect, it’s important to present this kind of calculation as sectarian head-counting and therefore sectarian, while at the same time finding reasons why Catholic votes= nationalist/Protestant votes= unionist won’t hold with the rising generation. Peter Shirlow of Queen’s University is quoted as saying the younger generation “feel politics is too sectarian or too nationalist”. (No, Virginia, it’s not clear if the ‘sectarian’ refers to unionists or to nationalists.) “They [young people] are in many ways – but not completely – sectarian blind, or tradition blind”. 

There’s more stuff – I’ll give you the link at the end – but it’s hard not to conclude that a number of people are going to be trying awfully hard to convince the world, including young people and themselves, that the rising tide of Catholic-background young people will not emerge as a rising tide of nationalist/republican voters. That’s what it boils down to. My own response would be, where’s the electoral evidence that this will happen? Young Catholics, if we judge by election returns, are if anything more republican in their thinking than their predecessors.

And did I mention that the results of the 2011 census will be released in the autumn of this year?

One last point: the Good Friday Agreement says that there can be constitutional change in the position of N Ireland only when a majority so decide. Moriarty’s article and lots of other people believe  that for nationalists/republicans to act on a 50+1 basis would be a recipe for disaster, that only when a majority of unionists favour change should there be change. One question: if that's so, why did they put in the Agreement a clause that meant nothing?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0104/1224309780877.html

Obama's greatest consolation: the Republicans

When he sang at the inauguration of one-term US President Jimmy Carter,  Paul Simon had the chutzpah to choose his song ‘American Tune’, which includes the lines “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered/I don’t have a friend who feels at ease./I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/Or driven to its knees.”

A lot of people must have been humming that over the last four years, as they watched the first (and maybe only) term of Barack Obama’s time in office.  The great black hope, the man with grace and intelligence and eloquence to rival JFK -  what has he achieved? The answer is not a lot. He hasn’t stopped the US (like the rest of the world) from plunging into recession; he hasn’t left Iraq in any better state than he found it; he hasn’t brought a proper programme of Medicare into being; and he still hasn’t closed that affront to civil and human rights, Guantanamo Bay.

Being an intelligent man, Obama probably realizes all this himself. If so, he’ll be comforted  by the sight of what’s happening in Iowa today. There the Republicans are gathered to begin choosing their man (or – less likely- woman) to oppose Obama in November. The man in front in the polls is Mitt Romney and one of the major problems with him is that he looks too much like a presidential candidate  - the looks,   the clean-living and of course the money. Unfortunately for him he’s a Mormon, which’ll turn off a significant number of Republicans. He’s also got a record of being too liberal – he now says he’s rethought his position on these matters,  but at one point in his career he was open in his support of abortion and gay rights.  He’s also not a man to get the blood pumping in Republican veins.

Then there’s Newt Gingrich,  a man who could hold his own in a debate with anyone, including Obama; unfortunately Newt is on his third or is it fourth wife, and that kind of thing doesn’t go down well in Republican core-vote territory.

There were other Republican stars that shone briefly – Governor Rick Perry, until he couldn’t remember the third of the things he had very very strong feelins on; there was Herman Cain, until his sexual past caught up with him; there’s Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, who a few weeks ago was predicted as finishing last but has recently surged.

In short, the Republicans, faced with a Democrat president who is deeply unpopular, can’t seem to make up their minds who would be the man to take him on. All those available are seriously flawed in some way, so amazingly in twelve months’ time, a deeply unpopular Barack Obama may manage to hold on to the White House.

If that happens, Americans have one comforting thought. American presidents in their second term of office, free from the fear of non-re-election, sometimes cut free and actually do the things they promised they'd do. It’s a bit like a class that isn’t faced with a tough examination at the end: the fear removed,  there’s the possibility of something real and important happening.  Or so we may hope. Although don’t forget what Paul Simon sang about hope, above. Maybe that's in the nature of political expectation: it gets driven to its knees by reality. 

The New Year and some crystal balls

New Year predictions? I’ll give you New Year predictions. Back in the early 1970s, republicans would sometimes encourage each other with a posting in a local newspaper declaring “On to 1973 – the year of Victory!” Or 1974 or 1975.  Those who survived learnt that it hadn’t happened. Those who didn’t survive didn’t know it hadn’t happened.

Another prediction: John Hume in in 1972, in the aftermath of Blooday Sunday. His heart heavy with that cruel slaughter, the SDLP leader is said to have declared “It’s a united Ireland now or nothing”.  It hasn’t happened.

Or this one.  Ian Paisley in the 1980s, standing with a sledge-hammer,  waiting to have his photograph taken so they could make posters with the slogan “We’ll Smash Sinn Féin!”  It hasn’t happened. Or Ian Paisley addressing a vast gathering at Belfast City Hall, roaring defiantly that  as far as interference in Northern Ireland’s affairs by the south of Ireland was concerned, it wouldn’t happen - not “Never, Never, Never, Never!”.  It has happened.

Brian Feeney, columnist with the VO, predicted  - took a bet, in fact - that there’d be a dramatic rise in Catholic numbers when the 2001 census figures for here were announced. It didn’t happen.

Eoghan Harris, columnist with the Irish Independent, predicted some years ago that Fianna Fail would ‘mop up’ the four remaining seats of Sinn Féin in the south at the next election. It didn’t happen ( for a thousand reasons, ach sin sceal eile).

By now you’ve probably noticed a pattern in all these predictions: they were all wrong. In fact, I can’t remember any outstanding prediction which actually proved accurate. I can think of a lot of commentary which explained events and pointed to signs which clearly indicated what was going to happen but that was always AFTER the event.  Media people are particularly good at this.  They’re not so hot at looking ahead. Which of them foresaw the collapse of the Soviet empire? Or the Arab Spring? Or Barack Obama? Or Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness?

The truth is, future events are uncertain because they’re shaped by human beings, and human beings are an infuriating, baffling, maddening, totally unpredictable bunch.  What is to be is hidden from us, and will continue to be until it happens, and if we can recognize and accept it when it does, we’ll have done OK.

Bliain ur  mhaith  daoibh -  Happy New Year. But no predictions, no promises.