Post-Brexit confessions of an anglophile Irishman

Posted on Saturday, 25 June, 2016 by andypollak

So Brexit has happened. Fear, lies and stupidity won the day (although these were not only on the Leave side) and dangerous new forces of right-wing populism and English nationalism were unleashed in the British body politic. It was gratifying to see Northern Ireland voting by 56% to 44% to stay in Europe, which meant that a small but significant element of unionism supported Remain. However a large proportion of unionist-minded farmers voting to leave the entity which provides 87% of their income, and the DUP effectively campaigning for the break-up of Britain, defy all logic. But then Ulster Unionists have always had a deep nostalgia for a past of British imperial power, a great nation standing alone with a strong sense of its own identity, one that unionists identified with totally because their existence as a small, beleagured, colonial people depended on it.

The North is now left in a “horrendous bind”, in Fintan O’Toole’s words, “cut off from the rest of the island by a European border and with the UK melting around it. Its future as an unwanted appendage to a shrunken Britain is unsustainable.”¹

Many Irish republicans will rejoice in Britain’s difficulties, hoping in their hearts that the break-up of the United Kingdom will speed up an unlikely transition to Irish unity. If I came from the Bogside or Ballymurphy, which have felt the ruthless edge of British military occupation, I might be one of them. But I don’t and I’m not. I worry that this vote may signal the final end of a British social democratic consensus, now near its last gasp, which is 70 years old. I worry deeply about the rise of opportunistic and toxic figures like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, let alone some extremely unpleasant elements further to the right. The old British Labour values of solidarity, equality and decency have never been more in jeopardy.

Because I don’t hate Britain or England. I was born into Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan’s UK welfare state, son of a left-wing Czech refugee father and a Northern Irish mother. I was raised largely in England, cared for by a free health service – the marvel of the Western world – and prepared for adulthood by a free secondary education system. As a teenager I was out canvassing for a Labour Party which promised greater redistribution of income to people of modest means, free third level education for their children and the ‘white heat’ of Tony Benn’s technological revolution. That was in 1964, at a time when universal free second level education had not yet been achieved by the Republic of Ireland, which four decades earlier had opted for an inward-looking, impecunious and church-dominated form of limited independence rather than Connolly’s socialist vision. I believe that British social democracy in the 1940s and then again in the 1960s was as close to the ‘good society’ as these islands have ever come.

In a powerful short address from the stage of the Abbey Theatre in January 2014 at the end of James Plunkett’s play about the 1913 Lock-out, The Risen People, the historian of that emblematic event, Padraig Yeates (himself the son of poor Dublin working class parents who had been forced to emigrate to Britain), called for a return to the values not of 1913 Ireland, not of the 1916 Rising, but of late 1940s Britain and Europe. “I don’t believe we have much of a future unless we make our starting point the sort of social solidarity values that made post-war Europe a better place…Is it being too ambitious to hope that we can at least guarantee our children and grandchildren the same basic rights and opportunities I grew up with in post-war Britain almost 70 years ago? James Plunkett shared those solidarity values: what I suppose we can christen the values of the welfare state. If we are to challenge the rule of Murphyism [called after the 1913 employers leader, which Yeates equated with contemporary neo-liberalism], we have to have the courage to demand the basic requirements of any civilised society: free health care, free education, free childcare, a secure roof over our heads, decent job opportunities and a pension we can live on in old age. We also have to be willing to pay the price to achieve them. This is hardly Larkin’s New Jerusalem, but it would better than life in the cellars of the new Babylon.”²

For despite the large working class vote in England and Wales outside London for Brexit, the likely next prime minister, Boris Johnston and his ilk offer only an intensified version of this new Babylon. To quote O’Toole again:”Those who will take over from David Cameron will be right-wing market fundamentalists whose policies will deepen the very inequalities and alienation that have driven working class voters towards Leave.”³

I love Ireland – that doesn’t mean I have to hate England. I don’t want to see the far right in power in Britain. I don’t want to see the dismantling and privatisation of the National Health Service. I don’t want to see the decline of London as one of the world’s greatest and most successfully multicultural cities. I don’t want to see the British values of fair-mindedness and tolerance savaged by xenophobic nationalism. I don’t want to see these islands divided acrimoniously into a ferret’s hole of squabbling mini-states (ourselves included). In Europe I don’t want to see far right eurosceptic parties in France, Holland and Denmark following the UK’s example and demanding ‘in-out’ referenda. I fear all of these things may on the cards in the next decade following this fateful referendum.

PS Next month’s blog will be a little different. In the first fortnight of July (1st-16th) I will be walking from Belfast to Dublin, using paths and back roads, and talking to people along the way. Why? Firstly, I hope to write a book about my cross-border journey. Secondly, I want to raise funds for two charities working with homeless people: Depaul in Dublin and Belfast Central Mission(BCM) in Belfast. I will be giving my first impressions of this walk – starting eight days after the Brexit vote – in my July blog.

If you would like to support my walk by donating a small amount to either of these charities, I would be really grateful. If you want to donate to Depaul (in €), please use http://www.everydayhero.com/ie (find a supporter>andy pollak>give now). If you want to donate to BCM (in £ or €), please use www.justgiving.com (search for a charity, friend or project>andy pollak>donate). Many thanks to people who have already donated.

  1. ‘Brexit is driven by English Nationalism – and it will end in self-rule, Observer, 19 June
  2. https://www.academia.edu/s/a4880226d0
  3. http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-brexit-is-an-english-nationalist-revolution-1.2697874
Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Ireland, Europe and the world | 6 Comments

Lessons from Ireland’s great forgotten philosopher: Francis Hutcheson

Posted on Wednesday, 25 May, 2016 by andypollak

This August marks the 270th anniversary of the death of one of Ireland’s greatest philosophers: Francis Hutcheson. Who has heard of this County Down-born sage, son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, today? He ran a ‘dissenting academy’ in Drumcondra Lane in Dublin in the 1720s and during his time there wrote two of the most influential philosophy books of the 18th century; as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University (1729-1746) he was called  ‘Father to the Scottish Enlightenment’ and taught the economist Adam Smith and the philosopher David Hume; his ideas about the right to resist enslavement, the desire of human beings to contribute to the ‘public good’ and the centrality of happiness to a good society influenced Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, the architects of the US Constitution and the United Irishmen; and he – rather than the English Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham – originated the famous line: “that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers; and that is worst, which, in like manner, occasions misery”.

Hutcheson’s core belief was that human nature is inherently prone to sympathy and kindness. In his 1725 book, Enquiry into the Original of Beauty and Virtue, he asserted that “there is universal determination to benevolence in mankind, even towards the most distant of the species”, and that it is this instinctive “moral sense” that stimulates men and women to acts of charity that go beyond mere self-serving affiliation with family and friends. This belief in instinctive human benevolence made him urge political leaders to devise constant opportunities for the individual to “concern himself with the common good.”

The corollary of this was opposition to despotism. “The moral sense of individual men and women must be allowed to function if the virtuous society that flows from the free exercise of this sense is to be given a chance to flourish.” So wherever government takes place without “the universal consent of the people”, there arises “a right to resistance.” This was written over 50 years before the American Revolution and over 70 years before the French Revolution.

In a 2011 essay on Hutcheson¹, the Northern historian and playwright Philip Orr, writes: “Clearly if these arguments about humanity’s innate moral sense possess any modern validity – even in an age where we have witnessed so much war and violence – then the political philosophy that underlies much of 21st century capitalism has questions to answer, given the dominance within that economic philosophy of a model of human beings as consumers and competitors who are motivated by self-interest, and a rigid model of the state as a gigantic and all-pervasive market place.”

Orr says that for Hutcheson “morality was not to be understood as a painful shackle on human desire and aggrandisement, but rather as a guide to the highly pleasurable exercise of man’s capacity for altruism.” He goes on, quoting Hutcheson: “Missing out on the satisfying reality that ‘human nature is formed for universal love and gratitude’, the citizens of an inferior society that does not prize benevolence and reciprocity are in danger of experiencing ‘the misery of excessive selfishness.”  This warning goes to the very heart of the experience in too many countries, including Ireland, during the ‘boom’ years of the late 1990s-early 2000s, which although they brought many material benefits, also “suffused society with the values of conspicuous acquisition and consumption, leaving an aching sense of precious things that have been lost – community, decency, reciprocity and simple trust.”

Hutcheson’s moral teaching about the need to disseminate happiness among the greatest number of people, is also starkly significant, says Orr, “given the huge gap in present-day Ireland, in many other western nations and all across the world, between the physical comfort and educational prospects of a secure minority, and the much more vulnerable and perilous fate of the rest of society.”

Some modern philosophers have dismissed Hutcheson’s philosophy as utopian. However his most famous pupil, Adam Smith, who is held up as the guru of free market capitalism, often agreed with him. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (considered by its author to be superior to his  classic work on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations), Smith argued: “Howsoever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Another Irish philosopher, the US-based scholar Philip Pettit, has argued in a 2004 book (co-authored with Geoffrey Brennan)² that our economic models are flawed because they do not acknowledge the role played by the psychology of esteem in human behaviour (echoing Hutcheson’s belief that “we measure our own self-esteem by the benefits we bestow on others”). Pettit suggests that a desire for recognition and regard by colleagues, peer groups, family and friends – and even the approval of imagined future generations – often trumps the desire for personal wealth and material gain. Many of our policies in the capitalist world fail to take this into account. And so humanity is often debilitated by being told to strive towards an unnatural norm of material acquisition and ‘success’.

Hutcheson’s teaching at Glasgow University, and the atmosphere of free intellectual inquiry it encouraged among the young Irishmen training for the Presbyterian ministry, served to make them amenable to revolution during the tempestuous Irish decade of the 1790s, argues Orr. “By the time of the 1798 rebellion, over 50 ordained and trainee Presbyterian clerics had decided on an insurrectionary remedy for a country in which the public good was being denied by an Anglo-Irish elite, backed by an exploitative and oppressive British government.” His ideas are most directly evident in one of the founding documents of the Dublin branch of the United Irishmen in 1791: “…there is not an individual whose happiness can be established on any other foundation so rational and so solid as the happiness of the whole community.”

Orr also claims that – through inheritors of his thinking like Archibald Hamilton Rowan in Ireland and William Goodwin (partner of the early feminist Mary Wolstonecraft) in England  – Daniel O’Connell was also greatly influenced by Hutcheson’s ideas. In O’Connell’s case, however, his “peaceful mass campaigns for Repeal of the Union were founded, not on insurrectionary violence, but on the conviction that change could be effected by enlisting public opinion behind a schedule of reform, binding vast groups of citizens together with ties of mutual affection and common purpose.”

We are very far from ties of mutual affection and common purpose either in Ireland or the insecure Western world of neo-liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy today. We have a right-of-centre government which is almost entirely in thrall to the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Pfizer and Allegran (albeit in return for the provision of high value jobs) and remains mired in unsustainable international debt (although there have been significant improvements on this front). We have a huge housing and homelessness crisis and deeply unfair health and education systems. Our sense of community and equality has been sorely tested by the post 2008 financial meltdown and a very partial post 2011 recovery which does not appear to have reached the majority of poorer people.

Is it time to rediscover the peaceful mass politics of O’Connell backed by the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest numbers’ philosophy of Francis Hutcheson?  Is this what, in their often aggressive and fractious way, the Trotskyists of People before Profit and the Anti-Austerity Alliance are trying to do? (Or are they merely trying to set class against class?)  It would be a happy by-product for this still deeply divided island if in this way we might also marry the militant but peaceful politics of a visionary 19th century Kerry Catholic leader with the radical and benevolent thinking of a wise 18th century County Down Presbyterian philosopher.

¹The Secret Chain: Frances Hutcheson and Irish Dissent – A Political Legacy, by Philip Orr. TASC/The Flourishing Society, October 2011

² The Economy of Esteem: an essay on civil and political society, by Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

The inspirational volunteers of the Calais refugee camp

Posted on Monday, 2 May, 2016 by andypollak

It was a surreal scene: a soccer tournament on a sand-covered space which looked more like a rubbish dump than a football pitch; the players (all wearing tops reading ‘We are Human’) drawn from half-a-dozen countries ranging from Sudan to Afghanistan; in the background a small squad of heavily armed French CRS riot police and the pipes and tanks and gantries of a multinational chemical plant. Welcome to ‘sports day’ in the ‘Jungle’, the infamous refugee camp outside Calais in northern France.

Because it hasn’t gone away. Despite the authorities enforced clearing of half the camp two months ago, the refugees keep coming: from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan – the whole benighted crescent of countries smitten by Western invasions, abortive popular uprisings, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Isis. According to a recent census carried out by charitable groups, there are nearly 5,000 people in the camp (also counting the 1,400 who live in containers next door as the first step into the French asylum system), including over 500 children and 300 unaccompanied children (the youngest eight years old). It is particularly disturbing that after the evictions in early March 129 children disappeared from the statistics.

A trickle make it across illegally to England, either by paying traffickers to bribe lorry drivers (the going price last month was €10,000 per person) or using ingenious and highly risky stratagems to smuggle themselves onto lorries, trains and ferries. The young men in this desolate place dream – most of them hopelessly – of a new life in an English haven of peace and prosperity and of eventually bringing their families to join them.

I worked briefly last month as a volunteer for the remarkable British charity Care4Calais, founded six months ago by a Cheshire accountant with a very large social conscience, Clare Moseley. Every day we opened a container in the middle of the Jungle and gave out clothes, shoes, sleeping bags and blankets, toiletries and food bags. 95% of the people in the long queues that formed were young men under 40. Many of these men have been ‘trafficked’ by criminal people smugglers, which is an expensive and dangerous business, involving multiple illegal border crossings and terrifying trips across deserts and seas. Determination, toughness and and a ‘never say die’ spirit are what it takes.

If the residents are a resolute lot, the young long-term volunteers – most of them in Care4Calais and its larger French equivalent, L’Auberge des Migrants –  are simply inspirational. I count it a real privilege to have been able to work alongside them for eight days.  If you want to be reassured about the idealism and competence of the younger generation, come to Calais. These are young humanitarians of the highest calibre: hugely selfless and committed; superbly skilled and organised; wonderfully sociable and humorous; and impossibly hard working. They toil into the night to deal with daily crises such as the sudden arrival of new groups of refugees ill-prepared for the bitter easterly winds and rain that sweep the camp; the discovery of small, needy groups who fled the Jungle in March and are now camped out in villages hours away in other parts of Normandy; and the need to find drainage equipment and building materials to deal with flooded tents and flimsy huts made of planks and tarpaulins .

Most of the volunteers are in their twenties and early thirties and are English, although I also met French, Irish, Welsh, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Spaniards, Italians and Czechs. They come here because they are disgusted with the uncaring, begrudging efforts of their governments when faced with Europe’s greatest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Anger and shame were the sentiments expressed during the week I was there after the House of Commons defeated an immigration bill amendment (proposed in the Lords by Labour peer Alf Dubs, who was saved from Nazism by a Kindertransport and spent a part of his early childhood in County Tyrone) which would have allowed 3,000 Syrian and other refugee children into Britain. Would Dail Eireann have been any more compassionate? I have my doubts.

The long-term Care4Calais volunteers – or team leaders – are a particularly striking group. Joe Bergson from Birmingham is a professional development worker, who will return to his ‘day job’ in Myanmar after his stint in Calais. Before that he will spend the summer organising a new information system for refugees arriving in southern Europe so that they know what faces them as they move painfully northwards, and then go to Nepal to make a film about child soldiers.

Some volunteers intend to move on to Idomeni and other camps in Greece, following John Sloan, who co-founded Care4Calais six months ago with  Clare Moseley, and has set up a similar warehousing and distribution operation on the Greek-Macedonian border. Ellie Tideswell is one of these. In the meantime this charming young woman from Surrey leads an all-woman roofing team to mend the makeshift huts, to the astonishment of the Afghan camp residents who live in them.

22  year old Irene Santing from Tuam is in charge of one of Care4Calais’s two warehouses and runs it with all the efficiency of a highly experienced logistics manager. She is using her experience for a third year project as part of her course in politics, sociology, Spanish and human rights at NUI Galway.

Chris Bedford is an electrical engineer who told his employer that if he was not given three months leave of absence to come to Calais, he would quit his job. He walks around the Jungle with a furry toy stuck in his neckband in case he meets a refugee child, and doubles up as a Care4Calais administrator every evening, clocking up a 16 hour day on most days.

Kai Kamei has a Japanese father and an Irish mother and in the autumn will go to Edinburgh University to do a master’s in advanced Arabic. Charlie Whitbread, a tree surgeon from Hertfordshire, is known as the ‘human Swiss army knife’ because there is almost nothing he can’t turn his hand to. Alex Green works in sustainable development and is planning a four month overland walk to Athens when he leaves Calais. Rosanna O’Keefe, whose father comes from Fermoy, is a Cambridge graduate who will go to Oxford University in the autumn to do a postgraduate course in migration studies. Gareth Roberts from Brighton used to work with autistic children but now lives in the heart of the Jungle as a much in-demand builder and repairer of collapsing shanties (at the moment he badly needs plywood sheets). Nina White from New Zealand is on her way home from an internship with the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

Sami and Richard are more mysterious. The former is North African, an Arabic-speaking tough guy (if he needs to be) who is a vital support in a camp full of desperate young Arab and African men (and very few women). In contrast, the latter is a gentle Anglo-Caribbean who lives in a hippy van and has chosen to give up speaking, with the result that his endearing home-made sign language is a valuable calming element when things get a little tense.

Several of the camp residents asked me about finding refuge in Ireland. I did not know what to tell them.  That our leaders and, in particular, our Department of Justice, are as resistant to calls for a compassionate stance on refugees as any other group of hard-nosed politicians and senior civil servants in Europe? I agree with the Wexford TD Mick Wallace, who visited Calais recently, and in an emotional plea in the Dail and on radio last week asked that at the very least a group of Irish officials should go to Calais and the neighbouring camp at Dunkirk to see if they can rescue a few of the extremely vulnerable unaccompanied children there. I am sure there are plenty of Irish families who would be willing to take them in. However I fear we will be waiting a long time for such a gesture of human solidarity with the poor and oppressed from the powers-that-be in our formerly poor and oppressed little country.

PS If anybody wants to volunteer with or donate to Care4Calais, I cannot recommend the organisation highly enough. Its website is http://www.care4calais.org

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Views from abroad | 2 Comments

Was the Easter Rising commemoration a 26 county affair?

Posted on Monday, 18 April, 2016 by andypollak

Forgive me, gentle reader, if I add my two ha’apence worth to the millions of words that have been written about the Easter Rising commemoration in recent months. It seemed to me, as a Northerner who is a Dublin resident, that it was essentially a celebration of the birth of the 26-county Irish national state. The North – or Northern Ireland – was nowhere to be seen and rarely, if ever, mentioned. Only two weeks after Easter, at a marvellous (but invitation-only) event of poetry and music at the Abbey Theatre to mark the 18th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, was the North allowed to intrude.

Maybe this makes sense. Maybe the deeply divided North is still too raw, too sensitive, too subversive to bring into the commemoration of the foundational event of the modern European republic of Ireland. After all, even Pearse, Connolly and the planners of the 1916 Rising decided that it should take place in three provinces only. Because of concerns that any action in the North would provoke bloody retaliation from armed unionists, Northern volunteers were told to assemble at Coalisland and march to the Shannon to meet up with their Connacht comrades.

Contemporary Sinn Fein did their own thing and played little part in the official events over the Easter weekend. Overall the weekend was something of a triumph for the Fine Gael-led caretaker government and its various agencies: notably the defence forces who led the impressive Easter Sunday parade and RTE, which put together with admirable flair and efficiency a vast array of lectures, debates, concerts, street theatre, battle re-enactments, children’s shows and hundreds of other events on Easter Monday. The people of Dublin and Ireland (and large numbers of tourists) came out in their hundreds of thousands, determined to enjoy the spectacle and the feeling of collective well-being in the spring sunshine. And if it occasionally veered into excesses of sentimental nationalism (particularly the televised TV extravaganza Centenary on the Monday night), sure what harm for one day every century or so?

But visiting Northerners felt a little different. One northern friend from a nationalist background wrote to me afterwards as follows:

“The swell of pride that we first noticed – and shared, I should add –  when we stood in Westmoreland Street watching the parade seemed to settle on the whole city as the day progressed.  A sense of significance began to suffuse the events, even the frivolous and recreational. People would tell their children and grandchildren they had been in Dublin for the centenary. Was there an element of re-claiming the Republic after the humiliation of the banking collapse?  I don’t know, but it was clear that while people were ready, more than ready, to criticise the recent failings of the Republic, this commemoration was to be shielded from criticism. No begrudgery here, thank you.

However there was another factor. Those of us from the North were left unsure whether we were part of this nation that was being celebrated. I listened again to Paul Muldoon reading his poem ‘One Hundred Years A Nation’ and wondered what nation came into existence a hundred years ago. Certainly as a title for a poem it works better than ‘Ninety-four Years A State’, but where do we fit in? My sense is of an impatience with the North and its bothersome arguments. It really would be neater if we weren’t here.”

Of course, unionists never do themselves any favours at times like this. There was a piece of unthinking vitriol from First Minister Arlene Foster, calling the 1916 leaders “egotistical…doing it to bring glory on themselves” (did she realise she was echoing Protestant Irish Republican Brotherhood leader Bulmer Hobson’s criticism of Pearse?). More thoughtfully, Alliance leader and Minister of Justice David Ford declined an invitation to go to Dublin because he felt “uncomfortable” about commemorating those who had used violence and from whom dissident republicans recently responsible for murdering policemen and prison officers still claimed inheritance.

The outspoken Northern Attorney-General John Larkin, a devout Catholic and representative of the old constitutional nationalism that has been so sneered at in the South, was tougher. He said in an interview for an interesting evangelical Protestant publication, 1916-2016 The Rising and the Somme: “Looking at 1916, you have individuals of huge moral worth, individuals capable of huge self-sacrifice, doing something that was profoundly wrong…The Rising wasn’t justified in terms of any of the traditional Just War criteria – there was no mandate for it.”

These are legitimate arguments, which have been rehearsed cogently and endlessly in recent months by historians (including Northern historians like Eamon Phoenix), journalists and others in the lecture halls, radio and TV studios and columns of the Republic’s newspapers. Contributions ranged from a powerful argument for the efficacy of violence in 1916 in the face of British government perfidy from UCD historian Ronan Fanning¹ to a passionate denunciation of that violence from the magnificent contrarian, singer and campaigner Bob Geldof². Former Taoiseach John Bruton made a sturdy but hotly contested case why Ireland would have become just as independent if the Rising had never happened³. The South is now a mature society that can debate these difficult issues openly with little rancour. It was particularly fitting that the final event of the week was a moving ceremony (led by acting Taoiseach, Enda Kenny) to unveil a memorial wall in Glasnevin Cemetery to commemorate all those who had died in Ireland in and after Easter Week: rebels, civilians (including 40 until now anonymous children), soldiers and policemen.

This new style of inclusive commemoration was indicative of an important and welcome change in the public ethos of the Republic, in evidence particularly since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. For it should be searingly obvious to anyone who cares about the well-being of Ireland, north and south, that the often fierce anti-British ethos of the Irish state and society during the first 50-60 years of independence was no way to begin to try to persuade the three quarters of a million Northern unionists – for whom Britishness is so central to their sense of identity – to contemplate some future all-island constitutional arrangement.  That job of bringing about an Ireland united by consent is going to be difficult enough as it is, without starting from a position of congenital antagonism to all the unionists hold most dear.

It has also allowed people in the South a new freedom to speak out about relatives who were soldiers or policemen. For example, a member of my wife’s traditionally republican family was able to say publicly for the first time that his great-grandfather had been killed during the War of Independence by the IRA, who mistook him for one of his sons, an RIC man. “How sad that it became such a shameful thing to have been a policeman, and it is indeed great that at last both sides are being recognised and honoured for what they (mostly) were, ordinary people caught up in the tides of history who did what they did for good motives,” he said.

Overall the 1916 commemoration has  been a good process for the Republic. On the one hand, questioning historical ‘truths’ handed down from one’s parents and grandparents is usually a liberating experience. On the other, a bit of pride in one’s country and in the idealism and courage of its founders isn’t a bad feeling either. It only makes me sad that, when it comes to both pride-inducing official ceremonies and mind-freeing intellectual argument, the North tends to get left out.

PS The Guardian‘s Irish correspondent, Henry McDonald, reminds us that 75 years ago more than 1,000 people died in two nights German bombing of his native Belfast (compared to 485 who died in Dublin in Easter Week), the vast majority of them civilians. It’s “worth not forgetting who was allied to the Nazis in Ireland at the time too”, he adds.

¹’Historian challenges Bruton over necessity of 1916 Rising, Irish Times, 18 September 2014

² A Fanatic Heart: Geldof on Yeats, RTE 31 March 2016 (second programme of two)

³’Home Rule could have led peacefully to independence’, Irish Times, 8 April 2016

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

The divided worlds and parallel universes of Irish education

Posted on Sunday, 27 March, 2016 by andypollak

As a former education journalist, I should write about education more often. However as a passionate advocate of greater North-South cooperation in Ireland, I find the lack of progress in bringing together children and teachers across the border in the vital field of education deeply dispiriting.

In a report to the two Departments of Education six years ago I wrote about the estimated 18,000 children every year who were involved in cross-border educational exchanges (most of them funded by the EU) at the height of the peace process in the early years of this century. I went on: “This must be the largest cross-border movement of young people for the purposes of education and mutual understanding anywhere in the world in recent memory. This movement affects not only the students themselves, but their teachers, their families and their communities. There is a great opportunity here for consolidating the present peace and future reconciliation of Ireland by continuing to work with the more open minds of children and young people. This must not be lost by lack of foresight on the part of the leaders and planners of the island’s educational systems. If the gains of the extraordinary explosion in North-South educational cooperation of the past 10-15 years are allowed to peter out, what will the people of Ireland say in 10 or 20 or 50 years?”

A decade further on all I can say is that my worst fears have been borne out. There has been zero leadership by our policy implementers. North-South educational exchanges are now down to a miserable trickle. We have almost returned to the pre-Troubles situation described by one of Ireland’s most distinguished educationalists, Professor John Coolahan, who has said that when he was a young trainee teacher in the Republic in the 1960s ” as far as education in Northern Ireland was concerned it could have been Timbucktu… it was just out of one’s consciousness.” There are one or two shining exceptions to this turning our backs on each other once again: notably the SCoTENS all-island network of teacher educators.

For if the two Irish jurisdiction have one thing in common, it is that education is traditionally given huge value by parents, teachers and society in general. Teaching as a profession is prized in a way that is probably unmatched in any European country outside Finland and Scotland. The training of teachers is high-quality, although it now takes more time, is more research-based and is therefore higher in the South. The internationally renowned Finnish expert on teacher education, Professor Pasi Sahlberg, has gone so far as to say that entrants to the profession in the Republic of Ireland are the best in the world.

There are also some obvious problems that are shared. The funding of universities, and the inevitable move to a student loan system – apparently successful in England but so far resisted in both parts of Ireland – is a common and major headache, as it is for all developed countries. In the Republic a billion euro will be required to bring our universities up to international standard and cope with a 30% increase in student numbers by 2030.

However at school level the most urgent priorities are strikingly different. In the Republic they include the issue of high birth rates leading to overcrowded schools; the churches’ (and particularly the Catholic Church’s) reluctance to give up their 94% control of the management of schools in the face of a rapidly diversifying and secularising population; and finding innovative ways to assess young people aged 12-16 in the creative and critical thinking necessary for the modern world in the face of opposition by unions wedded to the old exam-oriented system.

In a growing economy, the hope is that the first of these will be solved by building more schools, and the third by the unions eventually seeing sense and getting some of the pay rises they have foregone during the years of recession. The second is a particular conundrum. Two reforming Labour ministers in the last government, Ruairi Quinn and Jan O’Sullivan, tried to begin to solve it by persuading Catholic school patrons and management boards in areas where there were a large number of schools to ‘divest’ one to another patronage body like the multi-denominational Educate Together (which faces huge demand for places in its schools). But in the absence of any real direction from the Catholic Church in particular (i.e. the patron, usually the local Catholic bishop), this process has stalled (or maybe never even started properly – only eight schools have been ‘divested’ to date). The underlying problem is that the churches own the schools and that ownership is protected by the Constitution. It seems that the churches will only be moved by the people voting in a referendum on this thorny issue, which is not going to happen any time soon. Meanwhile school access for children from non-believing families is becoming a political issue, especially in urban areas.

This remains a central educational fault-line in both jurisdictions: the continued division of children’s schooling according to the accident of the religion they were born into. As Ireland becomes more diverse (with large numbers of immigrants), the nonsense of this is becoming apparent to a growing number of unhappy and increasingly vocal parents. The multi-denominational sectors – the integrated schools movement in the North, Educate Together in the South – may be dynamic but they remain very small: 62 schools (including 18 secondary schools) out of around a thousand in Northern Ireland; 81 (including four secondary schools) out of 4,000 in the Republic. Educate Together has ambitious plans to grow this to 300 schools by 2020. The expansion of integrated education in the North, by contrast, seems to have plateaued in recent years.

The chair of Educate Together, Diarmaid Mac Aonghusa (himself the son of a Northern Protestant mother), sets out the problem simply and cogently: “We have to stop separating citizens at four years of age in both parts of Ireland. This is not a faith issue; it’s a tribal issue. The North won’t be fixed overnight, but people are far less likely to fight each other in the future if they grow up friends as children.”

The North’s school system remains deeply and multiply divided by religious denomination, class and gender. The main current problem here is that, unlike in the Republic, many second-level schools have been badly hit by falling pupil numbers. This has particularly affected the lower-performing secondary schools, which have seen many of their stronger prospective pupils poached by the selective grammar schools. The situation is graver in the mainly Protestant schools, which range from extraordinarily high achieving grammars (although recent school-leaving exam results have shown their Catholic equivalents to be pulling ahead) to rock bottom ‘failing’ secondaries. A 2013 report¹ found that disadvantaged Protestant boys at NI secondary schools were among the lowest achievers in school-leaving exams anywhere in the UK.

A second issue is teacher education. Far too many teachers are being trained for the number of places in Northern Ireland schools. Successive reports have pointed to the nonsense of four teacher training providers – two universities and two colleges of education – in such a small province. Common sense would dictate that the two denominational colleges of education – Stranmillis and St Mary’s – should merge with Queen’s University while keeping a modicum of autonomy. But the Catholic Church – followed by Sinn Fein and the SDLP – is fiercely determined to keep control over their own teachers. As in too many areas of Northern society, sectarian vested interests trump good policy-making.

There is one educational ‘good news’ story from the North. Shared education, which sees schools on both sides of the divide sharing classrooms, sports and other facilities, is on the increase. All the political parties support this concept to a significant extent. There are now 70 schools (primary and secondary) in cross-community partnerships, with over 240 more preparing to become involved. This means that in the very near future almost a third of all schools in Northern Ireland will be actively sharing teaching and other activities with schools across the divide. It’s not integrated education – which must remain the ideal, however unlikely to be realised – but it’s a big practical step in the right direction.

¹ Paul Nolan, Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report – Number Two. Northern Ireland Community Relations Council and Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

 

 

 

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | Leave a comment

The South Ulster town I loved so well

Posted on Wednesday, 24 February, 2016 by andypollak

It’s not very often that this column tries to escape from politics, especially by heading across the border!  But earlier this week I took a break from a rather uninspiring election campaign in the Republic and spent a day in Armagh, where I lived for nearly 14 years when I was running the Centre for Cross Border Studies.

The small city of Armagh – really a south Ulster market town – is one of the largely undiscovered jewels of Irish tourism. A travel writer in 1829 called it “probably the most beautiful inland town in Ireland”, and – with the exception of Kilkenny – that description remains an apt one to this day. Its origins are far more ancient than Dublin’s. Ireland’s only female ruler, Macha, ruled from the fort of Eamhain Mhacha (now the Navan Fort visitor attraction outside the town) either in the 5th century BC (according to Geoffrey Keating) or the 7th century BC (according to the Annals of the Four Masters). St Patrick built not only his first church there in 445 AD but also a monastic school of theology and literature which was to become famous throughout Europe. In the 9th century the Vikings attacked and sacked it regularly as one of Ireland’s principal centres of wealth and population (in 832 three times in a single month). After the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, Brian Boru, the Clare-born High King of Ireland, who was both a hardened warrior and a skilled peacemaker, was buried in the cathedral grounds (his burial plaque is prominent on the Church of Ireland Cathedral’s northern wall).

This mixture of a rich religious and intellectual life and regular bloody military incursions was to continue for another 600 years. In the 12th century Norman leaders like Sir John de Courcey and Philip of Worcester frequently attacked and pillaged the city and its churches. In 1162 the Synod of Clane decreed that nobody should be the director of a monastic school in Ireland who was not a graduate of Armagh. In 1598 Hugh O’Neill’s forces defeated the English two miles outside the city at the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the heaviest defeat inflicted on the English army in Ireland up to that point. In 1646 Owen Roe O’Neill did the same to a largely Scottish army at the Battle of Benburb, just across the nearby Tyrone border. Four years later Archbishop James Ussher, the Church of Ireland Primate, published his enormously influential study (still cited by some US creationists), drawn from a literal reading of the Bible, which put the date of the earth’s creation at 22 October 4004 BC.

Armagh’s role as a key ecclesiastical and intellectual metropolis was in decline for much of the 18th century, but came to life once more towards the end of that century. The background to this was a pre-Industrial Revolution ‘golden age’, when the rural areas around the city became briefly one of Ireland’s economic powerhouses based on the spinning and handloom weaving of linen.

The Church of Ireland Primate from 1765 to 1794 was Archbishop Richard Robinson, son of a wealthy Yorkshire family. He took the unusual decision, for an aristocratic Anglican cleric of the time, to live in Armagh.  There he spent much of his large personal fortune attempting to create a Georgian city along the lines of Bath (he also applied unsuccessfully to George III for approval for a university). He brought in leading architects like Thomas Cooley and Francis Johnston to design and build fine public buildings like the Primate’s Palace, the Public Library, the Royal School (where the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Castlereagh were pupils), the Armagh Observatory (now the oldest working astronomical observatory in these islands) and the County Infirmary (which 200 years later would become the home of the Centre for Cross Border Studies and the North South Ministerial Council). He and his successors oversaw the lay-out of a new Georgian core, centred around the Mall, a pretty elongated city square-cum-public park. Here on sunny summer afternoons, with its shady walks, war memorials and cricketers on the green, one could more easily imagine oneself in an eternally peaceful English village than a historically fought-over Irish border town.

In the 1880s, according to George Henry Bassett’s encyclopedic Guide and Directory to County Armagh, the city, with a population of just over 10,000,  was a “comfortable and somewhat genteel neighbourhood” complete with a London-style gentlemen’s club, rugby and tennis clubs, and one of the finest markets in Ulster. The magnificent decorated Gothic Catholic cathedral, finally consecrated in 1904 after its foundation stone had been laid 64 years earlier, served a noticeably poorer Catholic community.

The partitioned Ireland of the 20th century did not serve its ecclesiastical capital well. In the early 1920s there was even a proposal to the Boundary Commission that it should be joined to the Irish Free State by a Danzig-style corridor. It was a town deeply divided by class and religion, with the usual discrimination in housing and jobs practised by the unionist majority on its council.  During the ‘Troubles’ more people died in County Armagh than in any other county of Northern Ireland outside Belfast. In a 1983 Irish Times report I quoted local priest Father Raymond Murray saying that the policing of an alienated Catholic population by the nearly 100% Protestant RUC and UDR had given the city “a terrible and emotional civil war tinge.”

All that has changed, thank God. Under the surface Armagh is still divided by a kind of polite sectarianism, much less obvious than its rougher relation up the road in Portadown. But it has now largely returned to its 18th and 19th century state as a peaceful and picturesque Ulster town, well deserving of a visit from people throughout the island who are interested in Irish history, religion, mythology, literature, archaeology and architecture. Its Public Library, on the hill beside the Church of Ireland cathedral, is for me simply the most beautiful small library in Ireland (‘The Healing Place of the Soul’ is the Greek inscription above its door). Beside it is one of the island’s most charming small museums, No 5 Vicars’ Hill, containing an array  of Roman and Greek coins, archaeological artefacts, paintings (including by Reynolds and Hogarth), maps, and ancient ecclesiastical documents from the private collections of Archbishop Robinson and his 19th century successor, Archbishop George Beresford. The town is coming down with museums and libraries: the County Museum and the Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum on the Mall and the Tomás Ó Fiaich Library under the Catholic cathedral are also well worth a visit. The Armagh Observatory – whose astronomers have included  internationally celebrated figures like Patrick Moore and Ernest Opik – and its public Planetarium (one of only two in Ireland) are another highlight.

The conundrum is why more people – particularly from south of the border – do not visit this lovely town. Its central place in 2500 years of Irish history – even if much of that centrality stems from our religious past – should be a source of great continuing interest in a country still fascinated by its history.

A particular barrier is the lack of civic energy among Armagh’s local politicians and other prominent citizens, leading to a certain incapacity to do anything imaginative about publicising the city’s many attractions (despite tourism, rather than industrial promotion, having been the local council’s top priority in recent years). Armagh is not Derry or Newry, which contain people – notably business people – who would lay down their lives to improve their local places. It is a complacent town, maybe even a little superior: former town clerk Don Ryan remembers that when he arrived in the 1960s: “Other places jumped up and down to try to tell the world they were there, but Armagh never felt the need to do that…In those days they would have regarded themselves as  a cut above most other centres in Northern Ireland.”

Another problem is the lack of good accommodation, restaurants and night life. The largest hotel, the Armagh City Hotel, is modern but character-less (although its pleasant cafe is a relaxed meeting place across the communal divide). Most other hotels and guest houses are simply shabby. In my 14 years there I never found a good restaurant (although I am told that a local man and his Polish wife have recently opened a nice place in Vicar’s Hill). Armagh is famous for bringing down its shutters and going home at 5.30. When I was looking for a convivial pub I used to go to Sheils in Tassagh (near Keady) or over the Tyrone county line to Tomneys in Moy. Dubliners these days wouldn’t dream of spending a weekend anywhere with such inadequate accommodation, food and entertainment.

Maybe this is changing a little.  I hope so. There is already a platform of three excellent festivals: the William Kennedy Piping Festival (an initiative of the amazing musical, artistic and sporting Vallely family) in November; the John Hewitt Summer School of literature and politics in July, and the Charles Wood Summer School of choral and organ music in August. Another good sign is the formation of a local Armagh Ambassadors group – ranging from teenagers to people in their seventies – who have a “suppressed passion” for the place and have pledged to promote it more imaginatively in the future. If they want advice about how to ‘sell’ their lovely little city here in the Irish capital, my details are on the web.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | 3 Comments

Why do people like me demonise Sinn Fein?

Posted on Wednesday, 27 January, 2016 by andypollak

In a response to the revised version of my last blog published in the Irish Times, which began with a laudatory profile of Julie-Anne Corr Johnston of the Progressive Unionist Party, a reader called Joe Nolan chastised me in the following words: “This lady is no different to any of the innumerable young females canvassing for Sinn Fein in the upcoming general election. Yet one person is feted as the most impressive politician in 2015; the others are part of a political party demonised relentlessly in the media in this state and portrayed as an impediment to political progress on the island by many, including yourself.”

Because of that general election – expected within the next month at time of writing – this criticism forced me to think again about why I, and people like me, do ‘demonise’ Sinn Fein and see it as an impediment to political progress in Ireland.

First of all, as a former journalist who spent many years reporting from and working in the North, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the Sinn Fein leadership, and particularly Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. These two men have shown huge leadership and vision in undertaking the extremely difficult task of persuading the Provisional IRA to make the transition from terrorist violence to democratic politics over a period of three decades and more. They are still playing a key role in that politics long after their co-authors of the Northern Ireland peace process – Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, David Trimble and John Hume – have left the stage.

And they have human qualities which are worthy of admiration. I remember Gerry Adams’ courage in going into the lion’s den of loyalist East Belfast to attend David Ervine’s funeral in 2007. He showed a different kind of courage when having to deal with child sex abuse accusations within his family at a particularly fraught time in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement. I have personally experienced Martin McGuinness’s courtesy and thoughtfulness, and listened to unionist-minded senior civil servants sing his praises for the same qualities.

But these men are not made of the same stuff as other democratic politicians – or leaders in any other area of Irish society. They have spent most of their lives as revolutionaries, wielding violence for political ends and taking enormous risks in the fanatical pursuit of their ultimate aim: Irish unity.  I once recall asking McGuinness a question he didn’t like during an interview and to which he responded that I was ‘demonising’ the republican movement. I saw the flash of steel in his eyes and I remember thinking: “This is a man who has sent out men to kill people”.

That is at the core of what worries me as Sinn Fein stands ready to be in government in both parts of Ireland. How committed to democracy are their leaders?  To what extent is Sinn Fein still run by a secretive and unaccountable cabal of senior republicans – most of them former members of the IRA army council? Is the thinking of these people still informed by the kind of ruthless militarism – or perhaps an equally ruthless Leninism – that sees the gaining of power by whatever means possible as the ultimate goal (or rather the penultimate goal)?

In the words one of the key architects of the peace process, Fianna Fail’s Martin Mansergh (in an interview in Deaglán de Breadún’s excellent book on the rise of Sinn Fein, Power Play): “The perception is that all the important decisions are taken by a kind of politburo, a group of eight to ten people. Adams and McGuinness don’t take decisions on their own. It’s not necessarily a fixed group. I am not convinced it’s formalised and it’s not the army council of old, as it includes people who were never involved in the IRA or are too young to have been involved; if it’s the army council, it’s a civilian version…The feeling that the Sinn Fein people sitting at the cabinet table wouldn’t actually have the power to make definitive and in principle irreversible decisions, that is what other parties would find uncomfortable about working with Sinn Fein.”

I also worry about a thuggish element I still see when I come across Sinn Fein marches in Dublin and border towns. The ghosts of Kevin ‘Jock’ Davison and Kevin McGuigan loom large. The sight of Adams praising former IRA chief of staff and criminal super-smuggler Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy is another troubling sign. Of course, I am now a middle class Dublin resident of a certain age (although unusual in coming from a Northern Protestant background) – but I am also a slightly disillusioned Labour Party supporter and would normally be looking for a party of the left to vote for. However nothing in my political, social and religious background would incline me to support Sinn Fein.

I would also disagree with them radically on how we should move towards a united Ireland. Given that the great majority of people in the Republic are not interested in this Sinn Fein article of faith if it means higher taxation or threats to social peace, the party will have a mountain to climb if and when they get into power here. As I have said many times in these columns, I believe the only kind of unity that will work will involve the real consent of a significant proportion of Northern unionists, and for that reason it remains a distant dream. Sinn Fein’s strategy comes out of a shorter-term realpolitik founded on demographics. It is based on the calculation that in the near future republicans and nationalists will have an electoral majority in Northern Ireland. This conveniently overlooks the fact that even 49% of the North’s population being virulently opposed to enforced unity is a recipe for only one thing – renewed conflict.

None of that will stop the current, largely Northern leadership. Their current aims are to become the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, thus entitling them to the First Minister’s job; and to hold the balance of power in the Dail (in an Irish Times interview last year Adams talked about the possibility of “a three or five party coalition”). If they get into office in both jurisdictions, their ministers will be able to meet each other in the context of the North South Ministerial Council, which they will present as a further step along the road to unity. Fresh pressure on the British for a Border Poll will be the next step.

Is the Southern electorate ready for all this? At a time of renewed if still fragile economic growth in the South (and an extremely uncertain international economic and political climate) and relative stability in the North, are they ready for the return to insecurity and destabilisation that these moves will cause? I think young people in particular are going to come out and vote Sinn Fein in numbers (as I might do if I was a young Dubliner with no knowledge of the North and a concern for equality and social justice). I only hope they don’t sleepwalk us into putting the party of the Provisional IRA into power.

P.S.  Another interesting series of Thursday lunchtime talks (starting at 1 pm) – this time on aspects of Dublin life in 1916 – will take place in Dublin Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green over the next two months. On 25 February Padraig Yeates will open with ‘Political and social life in Dublin in 1916’; on 3 March Elaine Sisson will speak on ‘Irish education and Pearse’s St Enda’s school in 1916’; on 10 March Mary Muldowney will talk about ‘Women in work, trade unions and the Irish Citizen Army’; and the final talk on 24 March, by Martin Maguire, will be ‘Dublin Protestants and the Easter Rising’. Entry is free and all are welcome.

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

My politician of the year is a lesbian loyalist from Belfast

Posted on Saturday, 26 December, 2015 by andypollak

The most impressive politician I met in 2015 was Julie-Anne Corr Johnston, a 28 year old member of Belfast City Council, representing the small left-of-centre Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), many of whose members are former UVF prisoners. Julie-Anne is a lesbian and gay activist.

At a talk in Dublin’s Liberty Hall earlier this month she spoke movingly of growing up in north Belfast; self-harming as a teenager because she felt different and excluded; and ‘coming out’ and marrying her beloved partner. She also spoke about how her initiation into politics had come through the Belfast union flag protest three years ago, when PUP leader Billy Hutchinson had spotted her at a street demonstration and persuaded her that politics was about a lot more than flags.

Here was a young woman who personified all that is best in politics in this day and age: idealistic, radical, working to correct the injustices of poor health, housing and education in her  working class constituency, and a fighter for the rights of LGBT people. In this she is no different from thousands of young people who campaigned so successfully for marriage equality in the Republic of Ireland last spring.

However there is one thing that marks her out from those young Irish people: she is a passionate Ulster Unionist. She told the audience in Liberty Hall: “When the flag came down from Belfast City Hall I felt my identity and sense of belonging as a British person were under attack.  I feel British; that’s who I am, that’s how I was brought up, I don’t know anything else; I identify strongly with Britain as an inclusive, progressive, multi-faith and multi-cultural society.”

What are my republican and anti-partitionist friends going to do about this impressive young woman and people like her? She goes against the handy (and handed-down) nationalist stereotype that all Unionists are right-wing, bigoted and impossibly intransigent and therefore the best thing to do with them is to go over their heads and ‘persuade’ their British masters to hand them over to an all-Ireland republic.

The alternative is much slower and more difficult, and may not even work in the end. That is to find some common ground with Nationalists that may – just may – persuade them in the fullness of time that they have something they can share with the other people on this island. Here we can learn from the Dutch, the French and the Germans, who after the Second World War set about the slow, painstaking work of building peace and mutual understanding between peoples who had experienced the horrors of war and occupation to a degree that was almost unthinkable to the self-obsessed Irish, ignorant as we too often are of comparable situations in other regions.

For example, I have listened to several speakers from the Dutch-German border region explaining the 60 year process – beginning in the 1950s – which has led to it becoming the prototype for successful cross-border cooperation in the European Union. They all emphasised that the first way people divided by war and bloodshed can start coming together is through ‘people to people’ cultural and artistic activities. When the people of that region started to work to heal the wounds caused by centuries of conflict – in their case going back 350 years  to the Thirty Years War – they began with exchanges in music, sport, the arts and education.

Through a system of twinning 100 town and cities, within 15 years they had over 150,000 people every year involved in these enjoyable and life-enhancing activities. This allowed mutual knowledge and trust to build up and contributed enormously to the success of the second phase of the cross-border process: a business and economic development programme. I heard one Dutch leader emphasising that this very long-term process needed to be continually renewed, with each new generation being “made aware of its neighbours needs all over again” and taught how to overcome psychological barriers and prejudices. This process was beginning to happen across the Irish border in the early 2000s (helped by significant EU funding), but it has dwindled to a trickle in recent years.

Could the Irish language play a role here? Another speaker at Liberty Hall was Linda Ervine (sister-in-law of the late David Ervine), who told the extraordinary story of how she had led the development of Irish in loyalist East Belfast. There are now several hundred people learning the language in that unlikely quarter – usually known for its fierce antagonism to anything Irish – who are comforted by the thought that the Celtic languages are spoken in Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland (and in Scotland by considerable numbers of Presbyterians), so Irish can be a unifying rather than a dividing element in these islands. As Linda said: “As long as it’s used as a weapon, the language has no future. But as a bridge it has a bright future.”

The arts are another area where high barriers put up by centuries of bad, divisive politics can be overcome so that ordinary people start seeing those divisions differently. The author and historian Philip Orr, a third speaker at Liberty Hall, recalled a play of his on the Ulster Covenant in front of an enthusiastic audience containing everyone from dissident republicans to Orangemen in the deeply polarised town of Lurgan. “Theatre gives people a licence to listen to the unlistenable”, he said. Museums also have an important role, Orr stressed, singling out the splendid exhibition ‘Belfast Boys’ – based around the common experiences of a young Unionist and a young Nationalist in the First World War – which is currently showing at the Glasnevin Cemetery Museum.

The Glencree Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Wicklow is planning a conference next June on these issues under the title ‘Imagining Reconciliation through Culture’. However this kind of cultural change is necessarily a very long-drawn out business: changing mindsets forged over several centuries of fear and conflict will take something like the same time to put right. Nothing is going to happen quickly. That wise woman Mary Robinson said in a BBC interview three years ago that a united Ireland  “doesn’t need to be on the agenda” and “isn’t relevant in the context of what is happening on the island now.” I would suggest it will take the best part of another century (if then) for the kind of necessary trust to build up through healing inter-personal and cultural exchanges in order to begin to re-consider unity as a serious item on the political agenda. It would be most refreshing – although extremely unlikely – if such a message were to go out from at least some political and civic leaders of this republic on the eve of the centenary of the foundational event of our national independence movement.

 

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 5 Comments

Most Irish people don’t want unity if it means more taxes

Posted on Wednesday, 25 November, 2015 by andypollak

Irish people aren’t stupid: when it comes to the big issues, they vote with their heads rather than their hearts. In an opinion poll carried out for RTE Prime Time and BBC Northern Ireland’s Nolan Live earlier this month only 11% of people in Northern Ireland and 31% in the Republic said they would like to see a united Ireland in their lifetime if it meant they had to pay more taxes.

This represented a dramatic reduction from the 30% of people in the North (57% of Catholics) and 66% in the Republic who said they would like to see unity in their lifetime before there was any mention of higher taxes. As the Labour politician Pat Rabbitte, on the panel in the RTE studio, commented: “Some of us are dreamers…When asked if I would like to see a united Ireland in my lifetime, in my heart I would say I would like it. But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of paying for it, that’s a different issue.”

Irish people’s hard-headedness was further illustrated in their answers to the question about constitutional change ‘in the short to medium term.’ In the North 66% wanted UK solutions to their constitutional issues: 42% wanted continued devolution, while 24% wanted a return to direct rule from Westminster. 52% of people from a Catholic background wanted UK solutions (3% of people from a Protestant background wanted Irish unity). In the South more people (36%) wanted UK solutions than a united Ireland (35%).

The ‘don’t knows’ were also a significant element: 27% of Northerners and 20% of Southerners didn’t know whether they wanted unity in their lifetime; 18% of Northerners and 17% of Southerners didn’t know what their preferred constitutional status was for Northern Ireland in the short-medium term.

None of this prevented the Sinn Fein representative on the RTE panel, the normally impressive Pearse Doherty, using make-believe figures to claim that the subvention from the UK Treasury to Northern Ireland was not £10 billion per year – as universally accepted – but only £3 billion, and therefore unity wouldn’t lead to tax increases.  The DUP finance minister, Arlene Foster, was more convincing (indeed she was by far the most convincing politician on either the Dublin or Belfast panel) in arguing that the poll results were ‘very positive’ for unionism.

Overall the joint RTE-BBC programme – ‘Ireland’s Call’ – was a poor one. The RTE producer made the extraordinary decision that the opening voice – that of a woman in the Dublin audience – would be to express the old, xenophobic, now widely discredited republican view that Britain should “get out of Ireland and hand Ireland back to the Irish…if you don’t want to be Irish, go back to Britain.” There followed a cacophany of inarticulate and partisan voices, from politicians and people alike. For a nation of self-proclamed good talkers, we had remarkably little coherent to say about this huge foundational issue.

There were a few good points.In his bullying way, the BBC’s Stephen Nolan managed to force an answer out of Minister for the Diaspora, Jimmy Deenihan, about whether the Irish government could could afford a united Ireland at this time – “No, not really”, mumbled the Minister.

The professor of Irish history at UCD, Diarmaid Ferriter, on the Dublin panel, pointed to a central flaw in the 1916 Proclamation, which declared that the new Irish Republic would be “oblivious to the differences that have been fostered by an alien government.” Ferriter went on: “The imposition of partition was a great tragedy. Even those on the British side responsible for Anglo-Irish relations at that time were willing to admit that in private.  But what was the alternative?  You could have been looking at a civil war as the unionists would have resisted coercion. If there’s a history lesson in that, it’s that you can’t be oblivious to differences.”

I was asked to speak from the audience. I based my remarks on the wise words of the often unjustly derided Brian Cowen in 2010: that improving North-South friendship and cooperation should be given a greater priority than campaigning for unity. He said then that the genius of the Good Friday and St Andrews Agreements was that they allowed the people of Ireland to go on “a common journey together where we have not decided on the destination.” He said both traditions in Ireland are legitimate – “one loyal to Britain, the other looking to Irish unity as a legitimate objective, but one that will only be pursued peacefully by common consent” and not “forced or imposed on people on either side of the island.”

That kind of nuanced and sensitive thinking from the leader of nationalist Ireland  represented a huge change from the ‘Brits out’ (and leave the key to the money-box on the mantelpiece) unthinking of old-fashioned republicans. It had been there under the surface for 40 years, just waiting to be said openly. Diarmaid Ferriter quotes the British ambassador in Dublin in 1972 reporting a conversation with the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch.  He had asked Lynch how important the issue of reunification was to the Republic’s electorate. “His answer amounted to saying that they could not care less. As far as he was concerned, he wanted peace and justice in the North, and close cooperation and friendship with us.”¹

The eminent political scientist, the late John Whyte, identified 25 Northern Ireland opinion polls between 1973 and 1989 about the North’s constitutional status, and there were broad consistencies. A united Ireland had miniscule support from Protestants, far from complete support from Catholics, and the solution that attracted most support from both communities was power-sharing.

So what’s new in 2015? Two old words: Sinn Fein. Ironically Sinn Fein have played down their united Ireland rhetoric (and their past connections with IRA violence) south of the border because they recognise that the route to power in the Republic requires them to win over an electorate that wants nothing to do with violence and does not see unity as a priority. They have put themselves forward instead as the most effective anti-austerity party and seen their vote soar as a result. When will this contradiction come back to haunt them? We are in for some interesting times ahead.

P.S. There wasn’t a lot that was fresh in the ‘Fresh Start’ agreement reached between the governments and the Northern parties (mainly the DUP and Sinn Fein) on 17 November: a re-established international paramilitary monitoring body and a multi-agency initiative to tackle cross-border crime are the two most significant elements. After the Stormont House Agreement last December, one Irish official commented “with a bit of luck it will last a couple of years.” In the event it lasted three months. One hopes that this latest deal will allow the parties to stagger through until NI Assembly elections next May. We should be grateful for small mercies.

  1. The Irish Times, 7 November 2015
Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

Why Enda Kenny should say ‘thank you’ prayers for Kevin McGuigan and other killers

Posted on Tuesday, 27 October, 2015 by andypollak

Taoiseach Enda Kenny should be saying ‘thank you’ prayers these days for Kevin McGuigan, Gerard ‘Jock’ Davison and the other IRA killers and lethal Northern leopards who cannot change their spots. Just as he is beginning his election campaign around the theme of ‘stability or chaos’ (i.e. urging voters to put the Fine Gael-Labour coalition back in to continue the economic recovery or take their chances with the political party of the IRA and a bunch of Trotskyists and independents), events in Belfast conspire to underline his message in bright blood-red ink.¹

That perceptive Irish Times columnist Noel Whelan called it right after the publication last week of the British government-appointed panel’s report on the continuing structure, role and purpose of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland (set up in the aftermath of McGuigan’s killing). That report suggested that the IRA army council remains central to setting the strategy for the Republican movement – albeit this strategy is entirely geared to peace these days and the council does not necessarily tell Sinn Fein what to do. Whelan’s assessment was that the IRA’s continuing influence over Sinn Fein was probably achieved by “an overlap between the army council and some at the highest level of Sinn Fein…Many have long spoken of a sense that there is a controlling West Belfast clique that exerts considerable influence on Sinn Fein’s strategy even in the Southern political market place.”

His colleague Stephen Collins added that “over the past couple of years members of the army council have been observed in the precincts of Leinster House, notably at times when Sinn Fein was under pressure to deal with the fall-out from republican abuse claims” (e.g. Mairia Cahill’s allegations last year).

This has clear historical echoes, of course. Gerry Adams likes to compare the Provisional IRA to the old IRA of the War of Independence, and himself to Eamon De Valera. One major difference – and there are many others – was De Valera’s reluctance to have anything to do with an oathbound, anti-democratic secret organisation like the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

All this should give Southern voters food for thought before next spring’s election. Fianna Fail leader Micheál Martin, who has always courageously set his face against any future coalition between his weakened party and Sinn Fein, put it well when he told the Dail: “The fundamental question for our republic that we must answer, and which this report does not ask, is the threat to democracy from an organisation that is involved with politics but which retains a military structure, with an active intelligence-gathering department and access to weaponry.”

Meanwhile in the North the indications are that the DUP and Sinn Fein are desperate to get back into government with each other. Nothing else could explain Peter Robinson’s surprising eagerness to accentuate the positives in the panel’s report, emphasising the importance of the current talks to save Stormont. We have come a very long way from Robinson’s 2007 comment that he didn’t see power-sharing with Sinn Fein as “a lasting and enduring form of government” to his words to RTE’s Tommie Gorman last week (in response to a question about whether power-sharing had a future) that he “didn’t think there’s any other future for Northern Ireland than our community working together to try to resolve outstanding issues.”

Even if the hurdles of continuing paramilitary structures (and let’s not forget the continuing violence and gangsterism of elements of the UVF and UDA) and welfare cuts can be overcome in resumed inter-party talks, there is a huge backlog of issues yet to be tackled by a NI Executive that has all but ceased to function as a decision making regional government in recent years. Look at the promised things that have not been done by the Executive since it took office in 2007: implementation of a strategy to deal with the North’s endemic curse of sectarianism; a strategy to deal with the past; implementation of an economic strategy; tackling the social housing crisis; progress on contentious parades; a Bill of Rights; a Single Equality Bill: an Irish Language Bill; a renewed Civic Forum – the list is a long one.

The distinguished Belfast journalist David McKittrick was writing last month about the disillusion of many ordinary people in Northern Ireland with Stormont’s politicians. He cited quotes from people in a recent opinion poll that they were a  “waste of time”, “a bunch of clowns”, “useless at running a government”, “unproductive but grossly overpaid”, “dysfunctional”, “unfit for purpose”. However he also noted that the same poll suggested that, although many are deeply irritated by the Assembly, more than two-thirds of nationalists, and about half of unionists, still regard it as valuable.²

Maybe a new independent monitoring commission to oversee another attempt at winding down the paramilitaries (I personally believe the loyalist paramilitaries continue to pose a greater threat to the Northern peace process than what’s left of the IRA), plus an extra slice of ‘laundered’ British exchequer money to take the edge off the welfare cuts, might square the circle and get the ancient enemies back into government together again. Even those of us who have spent a large part of our lives working in, reporting on and occasionally trying to make a bit of peace in Northern Ireland get weary with the endless sectarian shenanigans of the North’s politicians. But what’s the alternative?  An eventual slide back into mayhem.

P.S. Dubliners with a concern for the North might be interested in a series of lunchtime public talks at Liberty Hall (1-2 pm) in November and December at which people from the Belfast’s working class loyalist communities – voices rarely if ever heard on a Southern platform – will speak. The series – ‘Our Friends from Belfast’ – will be opened by the  leader of the small left-of-centre Progressive Unionist Party (and former UVF prisoner), Billy Hutchinson, on Thursday 19 November. He will be followed by the East Belfast Irish language activist, Linda Ervine, on 26 November: the author and historian of the First World War, Philip Orr, on 3 December; gay rights activist and PUP Belfast City councillor, Julie Anne Corr, on 10 December; and the East Belfast playwright Robert Niblock on 17 December.

  1. For more see Jim McDowell, ‘Kevin McGuigan: An IRA enforcer who lived and died by the gun. But did his old friends pull the trigger?’ Belfast Telegraph, 14 August 2015
  2. ‘Stormont survival depends on goodwill of both sides’, Irish Times, 15 September 2015
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