Flailing around in the fact free zone that is Brexit

Posted on Sunday, 25 September, 2016 by andypollak

We are now in the phoney war period between the Brexit vote and the British government invoking Article 50 of the European Union Treaty to begin negotiating to leave the EU. And nobody – neither citizens nor governments – knows what’s going to happen next. It was best summed up by the Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt at the British Irish Association conference in Oxford earlier this month when he said: “We went on a fact-finding mission to Brussels recently. It was a failure. There are no facts.”

At the same conference an uncharacteristically angry Peter Sutherland, who as former head of the World Trade Organisation should know what he’s talking about, was adamant that if the post-Brexit UK was going to enter into trade agreements with countries outside Europe, a hard British-Irish customs frontier (including along the Irish border) was inevitable.

I don’t know much about international trade but I do know about cooperation across the Irish border. And it is clear that this is in serious jeopardy from Brexit.  EU support has been absolutely central to the implementation of the North-South ‘strand two’ of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. This is one of the quiet success stories of that Agreement: Peter Robinson used to say regularly that as a result of it relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have never been better.

By far the most important financial supporter of cross-border cooperation on the island of Ireland has been the European Union. Since 1990 the EU has supported the cross-border INTERREG programme to the tune of €810 million (with another €324 million coming in the required matching funding from the Irish, Northern Irish and, in recent years, Scottish governments). Uniquely in Europe Northern Ireland and the Irish border region also have their own cross-community and cross-border PEACE programme. Since 1995 this has received nearly €1.6 billion in EU funds, with an additional €702 million being provided by the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive. That’s nearly three and a half billion euro provided as a result of EU programmes to Northern Ireland and the Irish border region in 25 years. That is all at risk now from Brexit – for does anybody believe that the British Government is going to step in and replicate such huge sums?

Here is a small flavour of some of what this EU funding has led to: more than 1,300 businesses collaborating across the border as a result of networking projects; over 100 projects to promote cooperation and exchange of best practice between public bodies; 50,000 people taken off hospital waiting lists and benefiting in other ways from cross-border health cooperation; over 150,000 school students involved in cross-border educational exchanges; the building of the Peace Bridge in Derry and the modernisation of the Belfast to Dublin Enterprise train service. One could go on and on.

The then head of the EU Commission, Jacques Delors, explicitly aimed the EU’s funding to support the objectives of ‘strand two’ of the Good Friday Agreement, namely “to develop consultation, cooperation and action within the island of Ireland – including on an all-island and cross-border basis – on matters of mutual interest.”  I know as somebody who worked with the relevant policy makers for 14 years up to 2013  that all but a small part of North-South cooperation during that period (in economic development, local authority partnerships, education and health) would simply not have happened without EU funding.

So what about North-South cooperation in the future? All I can say at this point in time is that it is extremely uncertain. The EU’s regulations do allow for cooperation between EU and non-EU countries. Norway, for example, is involved in four INTERREG programmes with Sweden, Denmark and Finland (although there is a long history of cooperation between those countries that predates their membership of the EU). However participation by non-EU countries requires them to follow all the relevant EU policies and regulations, and, most importantly, contribute significant national funding. There are also a few examples of cross-border cooperation initiatives outside EU programmes – for example, along the French-Swiss border – but these are backed by special legal agreements and dedicated governmental funding.

Post-Brexit participation in EU programmes would not be at the discretion of the NI Executive but would need the consent of the UK government. In the post-Brexit environment of political confusion, anti-European sentiment and ever tighter budgets can anybody see Westminister/Whitehall negotiating on Northern Ireland’s behalf for EU cross-border programmes? Or, in the absence of EU funding, deciding whether the required cross-border funding would come from Stormont or Whitehall? Or sanctioning a complex, stand alone, legal agreement to allow cooperation between the peripheral and traditionally neglected counties along the Irish border?  As a recent Centre for Cross Border Studies/Cooperation Ireland paper put it: “The crucial question is whether the political will would exist, with accompanying financial resources, to sustain the current levels of cross-border cooperation.”¹ My personal opinion is that this is extremely unlikely. While the North South Ministerial Council, the seven North-South bodies and companies, and the limited areas of inter-ministerial cooperation under the Good Friday Agreement will continue to exist, elsewhere we are likely to be returning to the kind of small-scale, piecemeal cooperation, with little regional impact, that was the situation before the 1990s.

When it comes to trade and business, the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin has concluded that the Republic of Ireland is more important to Northern exporters than vice-versa: €1.8 billion exported from north to south, but only €1.2 million from south to north. Those small and medium enterprises in the North for whom the Republic is their premier export market are going to be hit hardest by the erection of tariffs along the border. These are also the labour-intensive firms which employ the largest proportion of the North’s workforce. And then, of course, there are the North’s farmers, who are 87% dependent on EU single farm payments for their income!

The post-Brexit situation is a real nightmare for the Irish Government, as it struggles to reconcile its new and utterly changed relationships with its closest political and trading partners, the EU and the UK. The government has made the calculation that the Northern Ireland peace process, including North-South relations, is the best weapon it has in its arguments in Brussels that a special case should be made for Northern Ireland in the unhappy post-Brexit future (perhaps including channelling EU funds for the North through Dublin?). Its current row with the European Commission over the €13 billion in unpaid tax it has been told to recoup from Apple isn’t helping that case.

The Taoiseach’s mishandling of the proposal for an all-island forum to discuss Brexit – immediately shot down by Arlene Foster  because she hadn’t been consulted  – indicates that it is not only in London where there is considerable confusion. I expect this eminently sensible suggestion will re-emerge in some form in the near future. Enda Kenny’s echoing of Sinn Fein’s call for a Border Poll because he wants a future united Ireland scenario to be facilitated inside the EU like German re-unification, is another confusing signal, upsetting the unionists unnecessarily for no obvious post-Brexit purpose. It will be interesting to see if provision for a future poll on Irish unity ends up in any eventual UK-EU agreement. This is something the Scottish SNP Government would dearly like to replicate to avoid a lengthy and difficult negotiation to join the EU if one day its people vote for independence.

¹Referendum Briefing Paper 3. The UK Referendum on Membership of the EU: Cross-Border Cooperation, Peace-Building and Regional Development. Centre for Cross Border Studies/Cooperation Ireland

Posted in British-Irish relations, Cross-border cooperation, General, Ireland, Europe and the world | 1 Comment

Can we have a bit of realism about the border, please?

Posted on Thursday, 25 August, 2016 by andypollak

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am one of those rare Irish people – outside Sinn Fein – who thinks quite a lot about the border. I don’t talk about it much: there’s nothing more likely to put a dampener on a pub or dinner party conversation in Dublin than somebody going on about the bloody old border. ‘Spare me the North’ in the words of one middle-class Dubliner in Declan Hughes’ play Digging for Fire. Similarly, I note that when I write about the border the readership of this column goes down markedly. However one day I would dearly love to see it gone – for the reasons I outline below – although for the life of me (and in my lifetime) I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

After Sinn Fein in their Pavlovian way demanded a Border Poll following the 56% Northern Ireland vote in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union, I phoned around my liberal unionist friends to ask them if they felt that this vote indicated any weakening of unionist determination to remain part of the United Kingdom. I could find not a single one who thought that it did.

Similarly I asked everyone I met on my Belfast to Dublin walk last month (see July blog) whom I identified as being of the unionist persuasion: ‘Do you and your unionist friends and neighbours have any element of fellow-feeling with people in the Republic that might one day provide the basis for a coming together of the people North and South into a closer political relationship on the island?’ Not a single one said ‘yes’.

The most liberal unionist public representative I know puts it like this: “Very few people here nowadays think when you’re going across the border that you’re going to a foreign place you know little about. That has transformed in recent years, and people want that transformation to continue. However Northern Ireland is always going to be a bit different: not as British as Basingstoke, very different from northern England, from Scotland, from West Cork. I’ve always felt that the best place for all of us here in Northern Ireland is to stay in the union, but at the same time I’ve always wanted really good relationships, indeed firm friendships, across the border.  I think we should be building unity between people in that way, rather than focusing on political unity. Once you introduce the idea of a united Ireland, the barriers go up on the unionist side.”

One reason that, in the distant future, I would like to see a coming together of the people on this island into some sort of all-Ireland state is because I fear for the Unionists in that future. I believe that the Northern Protestant and unionist community will begin to find itself increasingly isolated and friendless as the United Kingdom becomes more disunited: as more powers are devolved from London to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast; as Scotland moves inevitably to a second vote on independence; and as English nationalism becomes an important force in British politics following the exit of the UK from the European Union. I believe it is only a matter of time before politicians and people in England, in particular, begin to question the expensive link with a distant province for which they have little or no affection or fellow-feeling.

In these circumstances I hope that the people of the Republic of Ireland will reconsider a closer constitutional relationship with the people of the North, and vice versa. I stress that this is a personal hope: I see no evidence of it at the moment. One problem is that, whether it is in London or Dublin, nobody is interested in Northern Ireland these days; few people feel any warmth towards the Unionists in particular, and everybody wants to stay well clear of the North’s age-old and unchanging (or changing at a glacial pace) internecine quarrel. Stories about continuing unionist bigotry and stupidity only reinforce this determination. Two recent examples: the non-attendance by unionist political representatives in Derry at the funeral of the much-loved Catholic bishop, Dr Edward Daly; and an account from mid-Ulster of a unionist-minded farmer who explained that he had put an annual EU farm payment of £100,000 in jeopardy by voting Leave in the Brexit referendum because it would ‘consolidate the border.’

The second reason I believe it makes sense for Unionists to begin to reconsider a new and closer relationship with the Republic is because the South is now a modern, liberal, largely well-functioning society – a far cry from the backward, old-fashioned Catholic, near failing state of the 1940s and 1950s. It appears to have dragged itself back from the collapse of the Celtic Tiger to a position where it has one of the highest growth rates in Europe (discounting, of course, the crazy ‘leprechaun economics’ of a 26% rise in GDP); thriving and internationally competitive IT, pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors; more than two million people at work and nearly twice as many workers coming into the country as leaving it. Last year’s marriage equality vote seemed to show that it is now one of the most socially liberal countries in Europe. There are, of course, continuing problems of crippling international debt, deep social inequality, housing crises and an almost dysfunctional health service. But these are problems shared by many countries in Europe, not least the UK.

Making sense is one thing. Unionism’s deep feeling of insecurity as a former colonial minority on this island is another. I won’t be holding my breath for any rapid movement on the constitutional front. In any case I believe that the Good Friday Agreement’s marvellous architecture, allowing the Irish-Irish and the British-Irish to begin the painstaking and long drawn-out task of learning to live together, is the only way forward for the next 30 to 40 years at least. Increasing levels of North-South cooperation until we find we have much more in common is what we should be doing, not ill thought-out chatter about Border Polls and Irish unity.

I only ask for a sense of realism from the political leaders of my own state. It is clear that when Enda Kenny last month bizarrely added his voice to Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein in calling for a Border Poll in the wake of the Brexit referendum, he was not thinking about Irish unity at all. He was aiming his words at Brussels, where Irish diplomats have been surprised at the strength of feeling in the EU institutions that they have been a key player in the Northern Ireland peace process.

In the words of that shrewd Irish Times political analyst, Pat Leahy, the Irish Government “believes that stressing the importance of Ireland’s trading links with the UK carries much less weight with other EU countries than one that insists upon protecting the peace process.” The Taoiseach is “pursuing a strategy of putting the peace process and the North-South relationship at the forefront of the Government’s negotiating concerns as it faces a period of profound – and possibly lengthy – uncertainty between its two most important external partners, the EU and the UK.”

It is also worth pointing out that when the UK leaves the EU in a couple of years, the only government that will continue to speak up for Northern Ireland’s interests in Brussels (and maybe even in London) will be the Irish Government. Maybe that point is slowly getting through in some political, civil service, business and farming circles in the North. It will be interesting to see if there is any increase in Dublin-bound traffic by forward-thinking Northerners – including Unionists – in the coming months and years. Cross-border realism would dictate that it makes good sense for them to take this road.

 

Posted in British-Irish relations, Cross-border cooperation, General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 2 Comments

Between two Irelands: walking and talking from Belfast to Dublin

Posted on Thursday, 28 July, 2016 by andypollak

Earlier this month I walked from Belfast to Dublin, talking to people along the way. I tried as much as possible to avoid main roads, using back roads, green roads, hill paths and beaches. My route took me along the Lagan valley through Lisburn and Dromore; then east and south across Slieve Croob into the Mournes above Hilltown and Rostrevor; over Carlingford lough and through the Cooley mountains; across Slieve Gullion and through South Armagh to Dundalk; and then along the Louth, Meath and north Dublin coasts, via Clogherhead, Drogheda, Laytown, Skerries, Malahide and Howth and into the Irish capital.

Why did I do this? There were three reasons: firstly, I simply love walking through the Irish hills and countryside; secondly, I wanted to raise some money for two charities, BCM and Depaul, working with homeless people in Belfast and Dublin (I raised €5,000); and thirdly, I had the idea that I might write a book about my cross-border journey, which coincidentally began eight days after the UK’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, with a 56% vote in Northern Ireland for staying in the EU, placed a new question mark over the border.

This blog can only essay a few first thoughts from what turned, with all the zig zags, into a 200 mile walk lasting more than a fortnight. My overriding impression was of a fortunate country: peaceful (despite the violent recent past of its northern quarter), beautiful in the summer showers and sunshine, with friendly and generous people, and some towns and villages with a strong community and even entrepreneurial spirit.

What was the evidence for these initial conclusions? I was greatly cheered on my first morning at the Cenotaph in Belfast to see a possible future Taoiseach – the gay doctor of Indian parentage, Leo Varadkar – walking alongside the DUP Lord Mayor of Belfast at the centennial commemoration of the Battle of the Somme. This ceremony was very much a meeting of the two cultures: the British flag, anthem and Irish regiments of the British Army led by Irish pipers playing Irish airs and an Irish wolfhound, and veterans in the crowd wearing Irish worsted suits and telling me they were “first and foremost Ulsterman, but then Irishmen.”

The generosity was shown by the £200 I collected in Dromore Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church for my two charities; free boat rides across the Rogerstown and Broadmeadow estuaries courtesy of Rush Sailing Club and Malahide marina; and the insistence by three bed and breakfast owners south of the border that I should pay them nothing but should instead give an equivalent amount to the charities.

As our lives become increasingly privatised – lived in and through cars, alarmed and gated houses, mobile phones and PCs – public friendliness and community spirit are a little rarer. One meets very few fellow-walkers along Irish country roads these days – the absence of footpaths and the quizzical looks of fast-driving passing motorists are witness to the deviance of such ambulatory activity. The proliferation of children’s swings, slides and bouncing castles in people’s gardens – in my childhood they were largely confined to public parks – makes one wonder how these small people are going to learn the skills of meeting strangers that are so essential to successful adulthood. Around Hillsborough, in Belfast’s well-heeled commuter belt, the spread of large, almost plutocratic, gated residences is quite astonishing.

But the traditional Irish friendliness and hospitality are still there. People whom I only vaguely knew gave me a bed in their houses in Lisburn and Dromore. An AirBnB owner in Hilltown invited me to join the extended family’s welcoming dinner for his son, home from Australia. A community leader in Forkhill gave me the use of the local women’s centre to wash and change after I had camped out on the site of the former British Army base there: a small symbolic act on my part to show that South Armagh is now peaceful, beautiful and open for tourism.

Local community spirit and entrepreneurship were more evident in the Republic. The North’s divisions are unfortunately conducive to neither. Once bustling mainly unionist mill and market towns like Dromore and Rathfriland have a neglected air, full of boarded up shopfronts and those strange ‘make believe’ window displays that local authorities (or is it estate agents?) put up in a vain attempt to convince residents that classy new shops and restaurants are only a buyer’s call away. Outside Lisburn I passed the derilect hulk of the Hilden linen thread mill, a century ago the largest of its kind in the world, employing over 2,000 people, which finally closed in 2006. A mile further on I came across the spanking new local council offices-cum-arts centre, part-financed, like so many things in Northern Ireland, by the European Union. Regional dependence, whether on the EU or now on London’s declining resources, is what makes the North tick these days.

The contrast with an equivalent Southern town, such as Dundalk or Drogheda, was striking. Dundalk and its region has multinationals like Xerox and PayPal, but also high-achieving indigenous entrepreneurs such as Martin Naughton, the late Edward Haughey and the McCann family. Just across the border from Forkhill I caught a glimpse of the architectural monstrosity that Haughey was building for one of his sons before he died in a helicopter crash two years ago. The unoriginal thought occurred to me that for all their faults – and Haughey had a few of those – a society without driven, risk-taking entrepreneurs is a society that’s going nowhere. The odd vulgar mansion in a place long beggared by poverty, emigration and sectarian division (Haughey opened his first factory in Newry in 1969 as the North descended into near civil war) is a small price to pay for dynamic business leadership that brings in jobs and prosperity. Northern Ireland could do with some of the entrepreneurial spirit which seems to be in the water in Louth, Ireland’s smallest county.

I also noticed more multiculturalism in the Republic. After spending a long evening in South Armagh discussing the ancient, unresolved quarrel between native and planter, it was something of a relief to turn into Dundalk and meet three strapping, handsome Nigerian teenagers on Castletown bridge. The cafe where I stopped for lunch in the town centre was owned by a man with a Panamanian wife and the waitresses were Romanians and Serbs.

Further south again, in Rush in north county Dublin, I came across a suburban shop converted into a venue for a myriad of community activities: from positive parenting to Pilates; from Capoeira to set dancing; from drug awareness to English conversation; from Gaeilge to physical fitness; from ballet to police liaison to youth work to yoga.  A woman instructor in the sailing club said: “I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world except Rush.”

However a relatively contented, middle class society tends to breed smugness and a wilful blindness to continuing deep social problems. This is certainly the case in the Republic. On the last afternoon of my journey, walking along Dublin’s North Strand with community workers Mick Rafferty and Brian Treacy, we came across two young homeless couples living in tents  on waste ground within sight of the upmarket offices, apartments and conference centres of the Financial Services Centre and Spencer Dock. In the warm summer sunshine this was just about bearable, but what must it be like in the depths of winter?  The gaping social divides of Southern Irish society – and the unwillingness or inability of the Irish state to do much about them – never ceases to surprise and shock.

Despite this, the strongest impression from my midsummer cross-border trek was that most Irish people, north and south, are plain lucky. During my journey 84 people were mown down by a Tunisian madman in a lorry in Nice and a failed military coup in Turkey sparked a wave of repression by that country’s authoritarian government. The civilian death toll from bloody wars in Syria and Iraq rose relentlessly. In marked contrast, this quiet green island has a lot going for it and we, its fortunate inhabitants, have a lot to be grateful for. I hope to explore this and other themes in a short book  – the hard work starts here!

 

 

Posted in Cross-border cooperation, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 1 Comment

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