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
Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

The role of stupidity in local and global politics

Posted on Sunday, 27 September, 2015 by andypollak

Stupidity. I am going to write this month about the role of stupidity in local and global politics. Some of this comes from having read a number of books over the summer in which such stupidity played a central role. The first was a superb history by William Dalrymple of the first Afghan War in 1839-1842, where the British Raj’s terror of Russia and colossal errors by top Indian civil servants (led by Ulsterman Sir William Macnaghten) led to Britain’s worst military defeat of the 19th century.¹

Then there were the leaders of Europe in the paranoid and self-deluding months on the eve of the First World War.”The protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing,  haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world”, concludes Cambridge historian Christopher Clark in his magisterial study The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914.

Then there was the idiocy of the so-called clever men who ran Britain’s monetary policy in the run-up to the post 2008 Great Recession through their membership of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, and who failed utterly to see it coming. David Blanchflower, the eminent Ivy League economics professor (no relation to the great Northern Irish footballer), who was the lone voice on that committee warning that the country was falling into deep recession, called it “absolute abject incompetence…they missed the biggest event in macroeconomics for 100 years.”²

A (very brief) mention of the obscure province that is my home place: Northern Ireland. Here, for a change, the stupidity which led to the current political crisis was not the fault of the unionists, but of those two usually far smarter organisations: the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Sinn Fein. What possessed the most politically-conscious police force in Western Europe to put out a carefully choreographed series of statements that the IRA was involved in the revenge killing of a notorious former IRA hit man (Kevin McGuigan) if they didn’t have any hard evidence to back these up? Did they not foresee the implications for the stability of the institutions and thus the whole peace process? And what possessed the Sinn Fein leadership to allow the former IRA Belfast commander and Northern Sinn Fein chairman, Bobby Storey – a legendary hard man who has been close to Gerry Adams for 40 years – to become involved in the killing (if he was – the police certainly believe he was)? Did they not see the implications for both the peace process and for their electoral support in the South, which has gone down significantly for the first time for years as a result?

Which brings me to the Great Stupidity of our age: the inability of world governments to agree on anything which will start to tackle the imminent catastrophe of climate change. Following the chaos of the last UN climate change summit in Copenhagen six years ago, the world’s leaders will meet in Paris at the end of November to try again to achieve a legally binding worldwide agreement on how to tackle this gigantic problem. As is now universally known, such an agreement will aim to keep global warming under 2° Celsius above pre-industrial era temperatures.

The latest (2014) report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – representing the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue – concluded that climate change was already having large-scale effects: melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and mega-disasters. They warned that the worst is yet to come, with climate change posing a threat to global food stocks and to human security.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. And the extreme weather events being forecast will take a disproportionate toll on the poor, the weak and the elderly. The IPCC scientists said governments did not have systems in place to protect those populations. “This would really be a severe challenge for some of the poorest communities and poorest countries in the world,” said one of the report’s authors, Maggie Opondo of the University of Nairobi.

Until this summer the Irish government’s draft climate change legislation was pathetic. When a weak Climate Change Bill finally emerged – three years late – last January it seemed that Labour Environment Minister Alan Kelly was not much more engaged than his predecessor Phil Hogan, whose Fine Gael party advisor on the environment was a climate change sceptic (Dublin Institute of Technology academic Conor Skehan).

There was sharp criticism of the absence of any specific target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the draft legislation (and, of course, no mention at all of our main source of emissions: agriculture). Kelly was accused of ignoring some of the key recommendations made by the Oireachtas Committee on the Environment.

These included basic things like providing a definition of low carbon; guaranteeing the independence of the proposed Expert Advisory Council, as was the case in the financial area (taken a thousand times more seriously by the government) with the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council; and referring to the need for ‘climate justice’ – assisting developing countries in their struggle to modernise without producing the huge amounts of carbon emitted by the developed countries.

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan charged that the Bill had neither targets nor ambition. “The Bill contains nothing but vague aspirations,” he said, adding that the first emissions reduction plan would not be prepared in the lifetime of the Government. “Fine Gael and Labour have no ambition when it comes to tackling climate change . . . they don’t give a damn.”

In July Kelly responded to strong lobbying by environmental groups and added amendments to cover some of these objections: a long-term and non-binding commitment was made to reduce carbon emissions by 2050 by 80% from 1990 levels; the Climate Change Advisory Council was given the same independent status as the Fiscal Advisory Council; and a reference was inserted on the need for climate justice – sharing the burden of cutting emissions fairly between developed and developing countries.

We will have to wait until mid-December to find out if agreement can be reached in Paris to keep temperatures below 2°. I am hoping against hope that Naomi Klein’s belief (in her brilliant book This Changes Everything) that the massively powerful multinational fossil fuel companies – the real villains of this piece – will not be too concerned about what happens in Paris will be proved wrong. The omens are not good. In March 2014 ExxonMobil explained to shareholders that new restrictive climate policies were “highly unlikely” and, based on this analysis, there was no need for them to worry that the company’s oil and gas reserves would become “stranded” (i.e. lose their value) in the future.

P.S. For those interested in this all-important issue, the Dublin Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green will be holding five lunchtime public talks (1-2 pm) on climate change in the run-up to the Paris summit. On Thursday 15 October Eamon Ryan will talk about climate change solutions; on 22 October one of the world’s leading environmental theologians, Father Sean McDonagh, will talk about the Pope’s encyclical Laudato Si; on 29 October Ireland’s top climatologist, Professor John Sweeney, will talk about climate science; on 5 November Lorna Gold, Head of Policy and Advocacy at the Catholic aid agency Trocaire, will talk about climate justice; and on 12 November environmental journalist Frank McDonald will talk about the negotiation process from Kyoto to Paris.

 1. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury 2013.

2. The Establishment – and how they get away with it by Owen Jones. Penguin 2014.

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Republic of Ireland | Leave a comment

The Republic is a good place for Protestants now

Posted on Wednesday, 26 August, 2015 by andypollak

As someone from a Northern Protestant background happily resident in Dublin, I know there is little or no point in trying to persuade my co-religionists that they should agree to do away with the border and become part of my society. I may have the nicest Irish house in the world, but the truth is that the vast majority of Northern Protestants and unionists want to continue to live in their British houses, however uncaring and untrustworthy their landlords are.

However for the purpose of provoking a little thinking (and because so many Northern unionists are still woefully ignorant about the South), I am going to argue in this column that in 2015 the Republic of Ireland is a good place for Protestants to live. Ireland, in the words of former Irish Labour Party leader Ruairi Quinn, is now a “post-Catholic secular republic”. The old Roman Catholic Church which they so feared is a shadow of its former self. Priestly vocations have collapsed, graphically illustrated by the dramatically shrinking lists on the graduation boards at St Patrick’s seminary in Maynooth. One rarely sees a priest’s collar or a nun’s habit in the street these days. Some might say that one of the final nails in the coffin of old-fashioned, priest-ridden Irish Catholicism was the extraordinary ‘Yes’ vote – against the instructions of any bishop who was brave enough to oppose it – in the marriage equality referendum in May.

Anti-Britishness, one of the hallmarks of political and popular debate when I first moved to Dublin in the early 1970s, has all but disappeared. Indeed opinion polls show that young people in particular feel they have more in common with the English than they do with the Northern Irish of whatever religious complexion.

Garret Fitzgerald used to say that Irish society had changed more rapidly than any other society in Western Europe in recent times. Nearly 10% of the population are now foreign-born, and while the influx of Poles has served to swell some Catholic congregations, immigration from the US, Africa and other regions has often done the same for Protestant churches.

The Church of Ireland and other Protestant churches are now growing again, helped both by immigrants and Catholics often disillusioned by a lack of spiritual and moral leadership (most scandalously by child-abusing priests) in the majority church. I would estimate that around three quarters of the worshippers at my own Unitarian Church in central Dublin are from an Irish Catholic background. Senior Church of Ireland figures such as the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral and the head of the Church of Ireland College of Education are former Catholics.

Irish Catholicism is itself becoming more ‘Protestant’, with far more emphasis on liberty of the individual conscience and participation by grass roots members than in the previously authoritarian institutional church. What used to be dismissed scornfully by conservative Catholics in the 1980s as ‘a la carte’ Catholicism is now what many people practice: Mass attendance along with the pill; confession along with divorce; gay marriage along with the Eucharist.

In politics, the kind of kowtowing to the Catholic hierarchy that went on in the days of Eamon de Valera, John A. Costello and Sean MacBride is now utterly unthinkable. In 2011, in an unprecedented attack by an Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny accused the Vatican of downplaying the clerical rape and torture of children in the Cloyne diocese in Cork to protect the institutional church’s power and reputation.  Foreign Affairs Minister Eamon Gilmore followed this by closing the Irish embassy to the Vatican as a cost-cutting measure (although it has since reopened as a one-woman mission).

These days there are a significant number of high profile Southern Irish people from a Protestant background, some of them icons of Irish modernity: Bono in rock music, Katie Taylor in sport, Chief Justice Susan Denham in the law, Graham Norton in broadcasting and David Norris in sexual politics. Two cabinet ministers – Jan O’Sullivan and Heather Humphreys – are Protestants (twice the number of Protestant women ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive).

As we approach the centenary of 1916, the role of Protestants in the struggle for Irish independence is being re-evaluated in a more inclusive fashion. In his recent book Vivid Faces, the eminent Oxford-based historian Roy Foster (himself a Southern Protestant) has brought to life fascinating Protestant nationalists, republicans and radicals such as Rosamund Jacob, Cesca Trench, Kathleen Lynn, Alice Milligan, Darrell Figgis and Bulmer Hobson.  The guns smuggled for the Irish Volunteers through Howth and Kilcoole were brought in by the Protestant yachtsmen Erskine Childers and Conor O’Brien. The historian Martin Maguire, who has written extensively about Southern Protestant history and culture, has identified over 80 men and women from that tradition who were active in the War of Independence.

A 2005 study of society North and South¹, based on social survey data from European Values Surveys, found that the two societies shared a great deal. By European standards they both enjoyed high levels of income, welfare provision, individual life satisfaction and social capital. They were both stable democracies governed by similar legal systems which had withstood the tests of time. The old divisions based on religion seemed to be fading as both societies were edging – and the authors emphasised the qualified word ‘edging’ – towards a more secular, post-Christian future. At the same time both societies continued to share more conservative views on family and sexual morality than most other parts of Europe (the May referendum may indicate that this has now changed in the South).

None of the above is meant to persuade my unionist readers to give up their Britishness – I wouldn’t be so foolish. However if I could do two small things I would be content: firstly, to persuade them that the Republic of Ireland isn’t such an alien place these days – in many ways it is an open-minded, tolerant and liberal society (indeed strikingly more so than the North);  and secondly, it wouldn’t do them any harm to admit that they too have a little bit of Irishness in their make-up and it might be interesting, at the very least, to visit the South to explore that small part of themselves. The Progressive Unionist Party leader Billy Hutchinson (a former UVF prisoner) puts it well when he says: “We have to recognise that the Irish Republic has a very special relationship with Northern Ireland. It’s not just a foreign state. We were brothers in a previous time. Partition was like a split in a marriage: one brother went with the father and one went with the mother. We need to recognise that the Republic is not a priest-ridden or an IRA-ridden state. We have to get beyond that. There is a different political dispensation in the Republic now and it’s not to our disadvantage.”

  1. Conflict and Consensus: A study of values and attitudes in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, by Tony Fahey, Bernadette Hayes and Richard Sinnott.

 

 

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 6 Comments

Why we need to be on the same team as the Germans

Posted on Wednesday, 29 July, 2015 by andypollak

Germany is now the undisputed boss of the European Union. Any lingering doubts about this were ruthlessly dispelled during the recent Greek bail-out crisis. Angela Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, forced through a package of reforms even more brutal than the one rejected by the Greek people in a referendum only a week earlier, and the hapless Greek government toed the line, their Marxist principles sacrificed for the sake of national survival through continued eurozone membership.

The European Union is now effectively being run by Merkel and Schäuble along with the French president Francois Hollande (who tried to speak up for the Greeks), one or two other leaders of larger countries (occasionally), and the heads of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But Merkel has the final word. On the face of things Germany appears to have achieved by pacific means what it was unable to bring about through military conquest on a number of occasions over the past century – the domination of Europe. However as a permanent condition, this ‘German Europe’ is a non-starter. The Germans are the first to recognise that such a condition is the source of the deep antipathies that that have divided the continent not for one but for many centuries (as was argued brilliantly in a recent history of Europe by the Cambridge-based Irish historian Brendan Simms)¹.

I believe that the challenge for Europeans, Irish included, is to persuade the Germans that setting up a banking union and transferring some fiscal powers from the EU states to central EU governing bodies must involve what the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens calls mutuality² – that is, shared responsibilities between richer and poorer countries alike (with Germany supporting the weaker EU economies in sustainable ways that it signally failed to do with Greece). This is the only way to a stable Europe and may require further political integration, i.e. a federal solution of some kind, in the relatively near future.

There are other reasons why we in Ireland should seek a closer relationship with the economic powerhouse of Europe. On a short visit to Germany and Austria earlier this month I was impressed again by the sheer scale and dynamism of German industrial and environmental innovation. As we landed in Ryanair’s version of Munich airport (at Memmingen, over 100 kilometres west of the city), I was struck by the multitude of solar panels on practically every rooftop (although perhaps too many of them were made in China!). On days when it is both windy and sunny wind and solar energy can now generate as much as 85% of Germany’s electricity needs. On the outskirts of Munich we passed a towering glass Mercedes Benz showroom with hundreds  of tiny, highly fuel efficient Smart Fortwo cars, the world’s smallest automobile. At the Max Planck Institute of Metereology at the other end of the country in Hamburg scientists from Germany, France and Scandinavia are researching the controversial subject of geo-engineering as a means of curbing carbon emissions.

Germans are big into engineering; something our business leaders tell us we should be better at if we are going to make it as an economically successful nation (and something many people in the north of Ireland used to be very good at 50-100 years ago). Just 7% of Irish school leavers go on to be engineers; in Germany it’s 37%. Sean O’Driscoll, head of Glen Dimplex, the hugely successful border region producer of heating appliances (which also employs 1,200 people in Germany), says that rather than such a high proportion of our young people going to university, more should be doing engineering apprenticeships.  “We need to learn from Germany and start making money out of making things, not out of financial engineering.”

One thing in our favour is that the Germans like – even love – us. Greatly influenced by Nobel literature laureate Heinrich Böll’s 1957 Irish Journal, which portrayed a country of old-fashioned courtesy and humour, omnipresent religion and children, and rainy romanticism (albeit containing some people who believed that Hitler wasn’t such a bad man), most Germans still insist on seeing us through an idealised lens of green pastures, fat cows and extremely relaxed and friendly (if not always quite sober) people. “A lot of it has to do with their search for an untainted landscape and an untainted culture”, says an Irish acquaintance who has lived for 40 years in Germany. He says it is difficult for a foreigner to grasp just how much German thinking continues to be influenced by the shame most Germans feel about what happened under the Nazis. Germans have also not forgotten that it was during an Irish presidency in 1990, despite opposition from Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand, that the EU endorsed German reunification.

They also admire us for how we have worked our way out of the horrendous post-2008 crash. A 2012 Irish Times opinion poll found that Germans believed that of the financially-distressed ‘PIGS’ countries (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain), Ireland was trying hardest to fix its economy while Greece – by a distance – was the one that should try much harder. Joachim Beck, professor of public administration at the University of Kehl, says that German politicians hold up Ireland as an example to others: “Look at Ireland. We were nasty with them but they managed to solve their problems. They showed that with proper leadership difficult reforms can work.”

On the other hand, their fear is that Greece is heading towards being a failed state. “Europeans preach to Africa and Latin America about the values of the rule of law, ethics in public administration, people paying their taxes and so on. Germans worry that these things aren’t happening in Greece”, says Beck. In contrast Ireland is seen as “a serious state and a serious European partner. In Ireland you can see where the billions in Structural Funds have been invested – not so in Greece, where they have fiddled the statistics.”

That skilled networker Enda Kenny has shrewdly both played on the theme of ‘good little Ireland’ and cultivated a personal friendship with Angela Merkel since they both started leading their respective Christian Democratic parties in the early 2000s.

However don’t get the idea that the efficient and orderly Germans are a particularly happy people. They work too hard; they have seen negligible pay rises over the past two decades (and the German dole is about half the Irish equivalent); they worry about having the oldest population in the EU (Ireland has the youngest); and they can be xenophobic and extremely right wing when it comes to immigration (although Germany accepts by far the largest number of asylum seekers of any EU country).

And what about Northern Ireland?  As in so many European countries, it is now largely invisible. However many Germans take their religion seriously (they have a Protestant pastor as President and the daughter of a Protestant pastor as Chancellor, while Bavaria is a strongly Catholic region), and still react with slightly horrified fascination to the news of disturbances around Orange marches every summer.

There is also an interesting North-South implication to my advocacy of closer Irish-German relations. As the Unionists join many (perhaps most) British Conservatives in calling for the UK to leave the EU, could Dublin cosying up to Berlin become another unfortunate factor in building the wall of partitionism higher on this island?

1. Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy – 1453 to the Present (2015)

2. Anthony Giddens, Turbulent and Mighty Continent – What Future for Europe? (2014)

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Views from abroad | 3 Comments

Why does economics matter so little in Northern Ireland?

Posted on Friday, 26 June, 2015 by andypollak

Why does economics seem to matter so little in Northern Ireland?  The biggest political debate in the UK’s contemporary history – whether or not to pull out of the European Union – is now taking centre stage in British politics and will stay there for most of the next two years. It is basically about two things: national sovereignty and national economic self-interest. An answering debate is starting in Ireland, initiated, inter alia, by a thought-provoking book of essays, Britain and Europe: The Endgame – An Irish Perspective, published recently by the Dublin-based Institute of International and European Affairs¹.

A key conclusion of the chapter on Northern Ireland, by the economist John Bradley (who has written extensively on both the Northern and cross-border economies), is that NI faces two broad choices in the potentially tumultuous period ahead: one is to muddle along with “agendas crowded by the mistrust, recrimination and divisiveness of history”, bobbing impotently in the wake of decisions taken in London with not a moment’s thought for the province’s particular needs. The other, which it will certainly not take, is to seize the opportunities offered by ‘island of Ireland’ economic synergies (including a common low corporation tax), lessen the cosy stranglehold of the British subvention’s dependency culture, and take the brave, if risky, first steps towards a possible future as a revitalised European region.

In his remarks at the Belfast launch of this book, Bradley elaborated on his thesis. He said that not only Northern Ireland but all the UK’s regional economies (including northern England) would have to face up to how ‘Brexit’ would affect their futures. “Will there be a preference for remaining inside the EU, with its commitment to greater regional cohesion and equity; its evolving social institutions and protections; and (for NI) a benign context within which North-South and East-West problems can be handled? This is clearly Scotland’s choice.”

“Or will there be a preference for leaving the EU and embracing the exciting, brave new post-‘Brexit’ world, a decision that will be driven by the obvious opportunities for a strong economy in the English south-east, focussed on London, but would tend to be neglectful of the development needs of the less strong regions?” Northern Ireland’s particular weakness as an external trading economy would be “cruelly exposed” in such a situation, he believes.

Few people in London ever think about Ireland, let alone Northern Ireland. The report by the OneEurope think tank on ‘Brexit’ earlier this year contained just three references to Ireland. Two were on British-Irish trade (Ireland is the UK’s fifth largest trading partner and the only one with which it has a surplus) and the third, the most revealing of south-east England’s supreme indifference to this island, was an admission that, in costing ‘Brexit’, the writers had not taken into account the cost of re-establishing the line of customs posts along the Irish border that a UK withdrawal from the EU would almost inevitably require (and which would immediately become a target for some reinvigorated republican paramilitary group).

In Northern Ireland the problem is not one of indifference, although the almost total absence of any public debate there on the massive changes looming for the UK is something I have remarked on before in this column. The issue, as to do with so many things in the North, is identity.

Because in Northern Ireland – unlike in more secure and normally functioning parts of the developed world –  identity always trumps economic self-interest. Senior Unionists will say (the more sensible of them slightly apologetically) that even the province’s unionist-minded farmers  – who have a huge amount to lose if the UK pulls out of an EU powerfully influenced by their counterparts in France and Germany – will plump for following London into the international free market jungle (the words ‘turkeys’ and ‘Christmas’ spring to mind).  Generous agricultural and regional EU support programmes like CAP and the Structural Funds (not to mention PEACE funding) will count for nothing when British identity is at stake.

And it’s not only the farmers. Ireland (the republic) is a bigger trading partner for Northern Ireland than the rest of the EU (outside the UK) put together. Many small and medium-sized firms – by far the largest private sector employers of the province’s workforce – are particularly dependent on the South as their premier export market, a market that the cross-border body InterTradeIreland has worked successfully over the past 16 years to expand. An external EU frontier running from Derry to Dundalk would have an extremely damaging effect on those relatively new relationships. North-South trade over the past couple of years has recovered from the 2008 crash to reach just over €3 billion, not far off the €3.6 billion it reached at its height in 2007.  All that will be in danger from ‘Brexit’.

Does any of this count in the thinking of the North’s politicians and people – and particularly those of the unionist persuasion? I doubt it.  Economic self-interest will take second place as the mindset of a fearful frontier people, with their age-old dependence on an indifferent and unsympathetic metropolis, wins out.

Paradoxically, the debate on the consequences of a possible ‘Brexit’ for both economies on this island has the potential to bring our policy makers closer together, rather than to divide them. The British market looms large for both regions and a UK withdrawal from  the EU threatens the crucial small firm sector in both jurisdictions in broadly similar ways. It would be tragic if the process of mutual strengthening of the island’s two economies through North-South trade and economic co-operation were to be disrupted by a ‘Brexit’ that neglected our geography, our special relationship, and our deep economic and business links.

I want to finish on a different note. I think the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive in its present form is now doomed, despite DUP finance minister Arlene Foster’s last-ditch ‘fantasy budget’ which is likely to be passed by the Assembly in the next few days (only a provincial assembly where economics doesn’t matter could pass a ‘fantasy budget’ that is £600 million short of actual spending commitments!). I simply don’t see Sinn Fein signing up to yet another round of large welfare cuts as part of the £12 billion in overall UK cuts signalled by  British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, for 8th July.

But that doesn’t have to be the end of the world, or rather of the Executive. Watch out for a forthcoming article by my friend Paul Nolan, author of the highly regarded NI Peace Monitoring Reports, who will suggest that Sinn Fein should simply move to the opposition benches at Stormont (with the assurance that  ‘petitions of concern’ can now block any abuse of majority rule). In one stroke, this could bring about the advent of the ‘normal’ left-right politics in Northern Ireland that many of us have been praying for since about 1910!  The DUP, the Ulster Unionists and Alliance could then push through a right-of-centre cost cutting budget, while Sinn Fein and the SDLP could oppose it from the left.

1. Britain and Europe: The Endgame – An Irish Perspective, edited by Daithi O’Ceallaigh and Paul Gillespie. IIEA 2015.

 

 

Posted in General, Ireland, Europe and the world, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments

Will the future be British and/or Irish federalism?

Posted on Tuesday, 26 May, 2015 by andypollak

The big story about the British general election – alongside the surprise overall majority for the Tories – was the extraordinary spectacle of all but three seats in Scotland being won by the Scottish National Party. If anybody thought after last September’s referendum result that the independence issue had been put to bed for a decade or more, they were proved dramatically wrong.

According to Ben Wray of the excellent online Scottish news site, commonspace.scot, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s strategy is now a gradualist one: to build up power until the party’s hegemony is unquestionable, and then cruise to a referendum win. He believes the Scottish first minister would prefer to leave the independence question until the 2021 Holyrood parliamentary election, but has not ruled out putting a referendum into the SNP’s 2016 election manifesto, as most of the 110,000 members of her fast-growing party would expect her to do.

So unionists of all stripes have reason to lose their sleep again, not least the Ulster unionists. Labour backbenchers at Westminster are lining up to echo what Jonathan Freedland wrote on the front page of the Guardian after the result: “The question now is not so much whether Scotland will break away from the UK, but rather what would happen to make a country that has voted en masse for a nationalist party not leave the union…It will require the greatest possible ingenuity and generosity on the part of those who still believe in the union – perhaps an entirely new, federal design entrenched in a written constitution – to persuade Scotland to stay.”

Ingenuity and generosity are not characteristics one associates with Ulster unionism. The DUP were hoping for a return to the old Jim Molyneaux-John Major days of a unionist party propping up a minority British government in return for goodies from the cabinet table for Northern Ireland. That hope is truly dashed.

Could I suggest a really daring way in which the DUP and Ulster Unionists might regain a bit of the initiative?  Instead of uniting around the hoary old sectarian issues of election pacts and Orange parades, why don’t they put their heads together and start the process of coming up with some ideas for a new, federal Britain which a radically autonomous Scotland might be prepared to remain a part of.  Ulster Unionists starting a debate about the future of the United Kingdom – now there’s a novel idea!

There could be something in it for Nationalists as well. In a genuinely federal UK Northern Ireland would have as much autonomy as Scotland and Wales, to the extent that – apart from things like the monarchy, currency union, defence and foreign affairs – it could attain most of the powers of a largely independent state. It would be free to negotiate – perhaps under a future Sinn Fein first minister – an even closer relationship with the Republic of Ireland. A new written British federal constitution could even include a clause reflecting the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and Ireland, and between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The potential for pleasing both sides in the North without actually breaking the constitutional link with London (or ending the £10 billion British subsidy) could be surprising! [Firstly, of course, both sides have to resolve the current impasse over welfare reform – i.e. cuts – which could bring down the Stormont institutions within weeks].

Anyway the people of the Republic will also have a say in whether that constitutional link should ultimately be broken – something often overlooked by Northern Nationalists. Constitutional change through a Border Poll must be approved by the Southern as well as the Northern electorate. And my judgement is that the people of the South currently have zero interest in a reactionary, troublesome and hugely expensive North becoming part of their still fragile but economically recovering and now outstandingly liberal society. In particular, the smart, newly politically conscious young people who turned out in their tens of thousands to make Ireland the world’s first state to bring in same sex marriage by popular vote are totally switched off by the North’s ancient quarrels (and don’t let Sinn Fein tell you otherwise).

Someone should advise Gerry Adams and his colleagues that a united Irish state is nearly as old-fashioned and tired a concept as a United Kingdom within a British empire. In this age of climate challenges, multinational capital, cross-border cooperation, the European Union and even (alarmingly) Islamic State smashing through the old empire-imposed national frontiers of the Middle East, federalism is a much more exciting and relevant idea: a federal Europe, a federal Britain, even a federal Ireland. Could, for example, the Good Friday Agreement be stretched into a kind of overlapping federal-type arrangement in which an autonomous Northern Ireland could have close relationships with both London and Dublin (with, for example, representation in the Westminster parliament and the Oireachtas)?

The liberal unionist commentator Dennis Kennedy wrote in the Irish Times last November that perhaps it was time to revisit one of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s final interventions in Northern affairs in 1998. Warning of an imminent deal between the British government and Sinn Fein/IRA, O’Brien suggested that Unionists should instead reach agreement with Dublin to unite under a federal arrangement that would guarantee all existing rights to residents of the North. The Unionist community, he maintained, would be better able to defend its interests as an important political block in a federal Ireland than it would as “despised hangers-on” and a tiny minority in the UK.

His words, scornfully dismissed at the time, may again become relevant if Britain votes in a referendum to leave the European Union – which will be the over-riding issue for British politics during the next two years  – and Scotland votes to stay in. That would be an utter disaster for Northern Ireland, which would then exist precariously on the edge of a United Kingdom even more dominated by the 90% of the population living in England, which would, in turn, become more English nationalist and in thrall to London and the south-east.

A lot of this will depend on Southern willingness to accommodate the North in some way, either in a united Ireland or – much more likely – some arrangement short of unity. As a wise friend who knows both Irish jurisdictions well said to me recently:

“One of the crucial things that needs to happen if there is ever going to be a united Ireland is that the South has to develop an interest in and understanding of (I won’t say an affection for) unionism. I don’t see the remotest evidence that this is likely to engage the interest of other than a very few people there. And that’s the one essential sine qua non of any consideration of a united Ireland.”

PS  There is an interesting conference taking place at Trinity College Dublin on Saturday 20 June which readers might want to put in their diaries. It is called ‘The North Began? Ulster and the Irish Revolution 1900-25’ and will examine the particular role of Northerners during that tumultuous period.

 

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Northern Ireland | 1 Comment

A constructive Sinn Fein proposal to begin healing and reconciliation?

Posted on Monday, 27 April, 2015 by andypollak

I have been reading Uncomfortable Conversations, an interesting little book on reconciliation published by Sinn Fein earlier this month. It contains one rather good idea, but is also notable for what it leaves out.

The booklet is largely based on a series of articles in An Phoblacht initiated by Sinn Fein national chairperson Declan Kearney, who seems to be a key player in its outreach to unionism. There are a number of responses from Protestant, unionist and other figures, including Heather Morris, former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland; Dawn Purvis, former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party; Lord John Alderdice, the former Alliance leader; Baroness May Blood, chair of the Integrated Education Fund, and Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist ministers.

Unfortunately the opening line of Gerry Adams’ introduction makes it clear that the context here is an ironclad nationalist and republican one: “Sinn Fein is an Irish republican party. Our strategy to achieve a united, independent Ireland marks us out from other Irish political parties.” So there’s clearly not going to be a smidgin of compromise on that in pursuit of reconciliation within Northern Ireland.

However Declan Kearney is more interesting than his leader. In his address to the 2015 Sinn Fein ard fheis in Derry last month (reprinted here), he said: “Healing our society needs to be placed above (my italics) the challenges of the political process. A shared future should be about respect and equality for political, cultural and religious difference. We do share a common humanity. And there is no hierarchy of victimhood.”

He went on to call for “an initiative of common acknowledgement from all sides for the pain caused by and to each other” which “could powerfully contribute to forgiveness and healing. Doing so would require grace and generosity from all sides.”

He continued: “All hurt is the same and warrants acknowledgement with sincere remorse. Expressing remorse and regret for death and injury during the conflict could help deepen mutual respect and understanding, and move us all closer to a healing process”.  In my experience, such language of remorse, forgiveness and healing is highly unusual from a republican spokesman. It is also language understood by Northern Protestants.

24 hours after this speech realpolitik replaced remorse when the Sinn Fein leadership, afraid to be painted as a party of government cuts south of the border, all but torpedoed last December’s Stormont House Agreement by going back on its commitment to welfare reform as part of that accord.

But let us take Declan Kearney’s constructive proposal in good faith.  It is not the first time he has said such things, but previously they have gone largely unreported. They are the nearest the republican movement has come to echoing Gusty Spence’s memorable 1994 UVF ceasefire expression of “abject and true remorse” for the nearly 1,800 IRA killings during the ‘Troubles’. Before this, the closest the IRA ever came to saying sorry was a stilted and unconvincing statement in 2002 that “the future will not be found in denying collective failures and mistakes or closing minds to the plight of those who have been hurt. That includes all the victims of the conflict, combatants and non-combatants.”

Kearney now goes further. He says: “Sinn Fein believes that, with good faith, remorse should be embraced.” He says republicans should “recognise the healing influence of being able to say sorry for the human effects of all actions caused during the armed struggle.” He says: “The political reality is those actions cannot be undone or disowned. It would be better they had never happened.”

Could a campaign – led by a coalition of reconciliation and other civil society groups – provide the drive for Kearney’s idea of an ‘across the society’ acknowledgement of the pain inflicted by all sides which would kick some life into the frozen inter-party talks aimed at finding a formula to deal with the painful past in Northern Ireland? This, in many people’s eyes, is one of the last great blockages to the beginning of mutual understanding there. Writing in An Phoblacht last summer, Kearney appealed for “sustained positive leadership from within civic society on the need for grace, generosity, remorse and acknowledgement”, suggesting this “would introduce an entirely new dynamic. Civic society must challenge politics, make demands of political leaders and set tests for all political parties to do better.”

Could every key figure to do with the North be persuaded to sign such a declaration? Could the British prime minister, the Irish taoiseach, the head of the PSNI and the British Army, and every Northern political, paramilitary, church and community leader, including recognisable former IRA leaders, sign up? It might be difficult for some on the unionist side, but I believe it could be done. It would be a kind of reconciling Ulster Covenant for the 21st century, a major statement that would begin to heal the wounds opened by the original Ulster Covenant and its militant (and military) nationalist response in the 20th.

Sinn Fein is making this proposal from a position of some considerable strength: it may soon become the largest party in Northern Ireland; it may in the not too distant future become the largest opposition party in the Dail; it knows that as long as austerity exists in the South people will vote for it in numbers; it knows that the growth of the Catholic population and the weakness of the SDLP in the North means that it can only get stronger there.[The tensions it will increasingly experience as a party of government in the North and a party of protest in the South are already apparent and can only grow, but that is a topic for another day.]

But a position of strength can also be a position of generosity – something that is always in short supply on the North’s ‘narrow ground.’ Would it be a good idea for leaders of reconciliation groups and groups dealing with the difficult legacy of the past – Corrymeela, Glencree, Cooperation Ireland, Healing through Remembering and so on – to arrange a meeting with Kearney and other Sinn Fein leaders and interrogate them on this very interesting proposal?

Or maybe, given the deep suspicion that continues to exist in the unionist community about Sinn Fein’s actions and motives, it would be better if these peace and reconciliation groups were to take Kearney’s idea and run with it entirely on their own.

What is missing from this little book is any evidence that republicans are ready to consider compromises on their most fundamental beliefs for the sake of a more reconciled North. Is it mainly the unionists who are going to be discomfited by these ‘uncomfortable conversations’? Or will republicans also have to converse about compromising even marginally on their non-negotiable demand for a united Ireland? Should they also be made to consider whether their recourse to violence in 1969 was plain wrong, as Presbyterian minister Steve Stockman and Catholic priest Martin Magill suggest in their joint contribution?

There is other interesting evidence of republican rethinking about the past in this book, notably from Mitchel McLaughlin, one of the Sinn Fein leadership’s most thoughtful members, on the impossibility of denying “the courage or the suffering and sacrifice of the men who fought in the First World War.”

However Declan Kearney’s proposal is what matters: it seems to me to be a real and rare opportunity for all sides to begin to act together. “Moulds need to be broken and initiatives taken,” he concludes. “Unambiguous unity of purpose between republicans and unionists, and significant shared gestures, are more important than ever. These will rebuild confidence and inspire hope. The Peace Process belongs to everyone. It is time to make reconciliation the new phase of the Peace Process.”

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

Why Northern loyalists are running scared of a shared future

Posted on Thursday, 26 March, 2015 by andypollak

Returning to the fearfulness and narrowness of loyalist Belfast after a trip through the magnificent landscapes and massive social contradictions of South America is to come back to earth with a bump. But I had promised myself back in January that I would comment on the (then) recently published report¹ by a group of Queen’s University researchers on the flags protest in Northern Ireland in late 2012-early 2013 because of what it tells us about the current mood in the Protestant, unionist and loyalist community there (and because it went almost totally unreported in the Southern media).

The report does not make for happy reading for those of us who wish to see the North moving towards a more harmonious, less sectarian society. A striking feature of the interviews conducted with loyalists for the research was a common belief that there is a republican agenda to dilute Protestant and unionist culture, and the December 2012 decision by Belfast City Council (proposed by the Alliance Party) to fly the union flag only on specially ‘designated days’ was only the final straw which drove them onto the streets to protest and riot. Although only a tiny section of the overall unionist population actually took to the streets, and despite the violence accompanying many of the protests (and a policing bill of nearly £22 million), there was significant tacit support for them, with 46% of unionists polled six weeks after they started thinking they should continue.

The protesting loyalists saw the relationship between the two communities as “a hierarchical pairing, with unionists now playing the underdog and the Catholic community top dog.”  This perceived reversal of the traditional roles in Northern Ireland (despite statistics showing  that unemployment and poverty remain higher in many Catholic working class areas) makes  them newly resistant to any cross-community exchange. “In the interviews we conducted the issue of Protestant/Catholic reconciliation did not arise unless raised by us,”said the researchers.

Instead, all the emphasis was on building unionist unity and imbuing young people with a deeper awareness of their unionist identity and history, with not a scintilla of understanding that a harmonious future for Northern Ireland must involve seeking some common identity with their nationalist neighbours. One cannot overstate the insecurity and fearfulness of these working class loyalists. In another, smaller study of the impact of the flags protest in the small mixed-religion town of Garvagh in County Londonderry², authors Will Glendinning and James Wilson concluded that the young protesting loyalists “see no purpose in conflict transformation as their cultural identity is built on a glorification of sectarian conflict, and they reject democratic politics as ‘it did not stop the flag from being ripped down.”

The view of a group of  female flag protesters quoted in a third study³, this time of the impact of the protest in north Belfast, seemed to sum up the new depth of the community divide: “The idea of a shared future is one which doesn’t include unionists and loyalists. It is more about protecting their (republican) identity and one that will only see us (loyalists) as continuing to lose out.” Irish unity is no longer the principal threat, it seems, but republican determination to achieve equality within Northern Ireland.

The impact on community relations has been damaging. The Corrymeela Community’s director of development, Susan McEwen, noted that the UVF in Belfast had banned young people in some loyalist areas from going away to a Corrymeela-organised cross-community event over the 12th July Orange parades period, on the grounds that “it was sectarian to take young people away over the Twelfth because we were denying them their culture.” Debbie Watters, assistant director of AlternativesNI, a restorative justice project in the loyalist Greater Shankill area, said that cross-community work, if it takes place, was now much more difficult.  Up to the time of the flags protest the young people she worked with didn’t see things “through the lens of the past” – now they do.

The Queen’s researchers point out that “within the loyalist community the most frequently voiced concern – or at least the most anguished – is the sense that ‘noone listens to us’. Any long-term planning of community relations must attend to this key reality.”

However the desire to be heard is not accompanied by any desire to listen to the nationalist community, or any willingness to acknowledge that nationalism has also had to make compromises during the peace process. The loyalist story is one of unending, one-sided loss for their people. “We have found nothing to challenge the analysis put forward by [Orange leader] Rev. Mervyn Gibson, that the peace accord was never sold to the loyalist community by the main unionist parties, and instead they are constantly warned of the dangers they face.”  This is what unionism has been preaching for the past century and more: that they are surrounded by enemies who are constantly encroaching on their embattled northern fortress (or, more recently, their shrinking strongholds within that fortress). It is not a message that lends itself easily to the concepts of partnership and equality, let alone reconciliation.

The Queen’s researchers finish with two ‘modest recommendations’: firstly, they want a re-assessment of so-called ‘single identity work’ in Protestant and unionist areas – the kind of work that builds on unionist identity to give those communities the confidence eventually to engage with their neighbouring Catholic communities. They want a review of the efficacy of this work to see to what extent it is “moving people towards a reconciliation with those of the other tradition.”  They stress that Northern Ireland will remain within a “power-sharing dispensation” and all communities (including the loyalists) must recognise and learn to live with this reality.

The second recommendation is much more ambitious. It is for the creation of a ‘shared vision, a people’s peace plan’ under which people who work in community relations, peace building, cross-border, ecumenical and reconciliation work take ownership of building a new, non-sectarian society in the North from the ‘tribal’ political parties, notably the DUP and Sinn Fein, who are for different reasons less than interested in this kind of extremely difficult but absolutely vital work. The most uphill part will be with the loyalists, but “without their involvement the passions that ignited the flag protests are likely to flare again.”

The Queen’s team end on a positive note. They point to two success stories in dealing with divisive symbols in the North’s recent history: the successful implementation of the Fair Employment Act’s 1989 code of practice prohibiting the display of flags, emblems or graffiti in the workplace; and the inter-party agreement on the six-flowered flax plant (one flower for each northern county) as the symbol for the Northern Ireland Assembly. Even in the beleagured North history can move, albeit in infinitesimal steps, towards a more harmonious future.

¹ The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest. Paul Nolan, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyer, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford, Peter Shirlow,  Queen’s University Belfast.

² Flagging it Up. Will Glendinning and James Wilson, Church of Ireland St Paul’s Parish of Errigal and Desertoghill

³ Flag and Protests. Jonny Byrne, INTERCOMM

 

Posted in General, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | 1 Comment

Writers, ranchers and revolutionaries: tales of the Irish in Argentina

Posted on Sunday, 22 February, 2015 by andypollak

How many people know that the man who raised the Irish flag over the GPO at Easter 1916 was from Argentina?  I didn’t know this until I was told it earlier this month in Buenos Aires by Guillermo MacLoughlin, one of the leading members of the Irish community in Argentina and editor of its newspaper, the Southern Cross. The Southern Cross, founded 140 years ago – making it the oldest Irish newspaper in the world outside Ireland – has a particular resonance for me:  on the day I started my first journalistic job in the old Hibernia magazine in Dublin in September 1972 I found it lying on my desk.

That 1916 rebel’s name was Eamon Bulfin, and he was the son of William Bulfin, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1884, and was to become a close friend of Arthur Griffith, the best-selling author of Rambles in Eirinn and an early editor of the Southern Cross.  The Bulfins were quite a family. Eamon’s uncle was Lord Mayor of Dublin and his cousin was Sir Edward Bulfin, a First World War general. His sister Catalina would go on to marry Sean MacBride, old IRA leader, co-founder of Amnesty International and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Irish-Argentines are the forgotten people of the Irish diaspora, even though more than half a million Argentines now claim some Irish ancestry. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but it is believed that around 40,000 Irish people emigrated to Argentina from the 1820s to the end of the 19th century. The largest number came from Westmeath, Longford and Wexford,  largely because the pioneers of this movement were three entrepreneurial farmers from those counties.  These were not the destitute Irish who fled from famine and poverty to the cities of North America. They were often the younger, non-inheriting sons of strong farmers, keen to make their fortunes on the broad pampas where the indigenous people had been cleared (in wars described as genocidal by some contemporary historians) and huge tracts of fertile land were going cheap as a result.

And make their fortunes some of them did. Many went as shepherds and took full advantage of the extraordinary ‘halves’ system under which they could look after large flocks of sheep and after a few years, when they had increased their number four and fivefold, divide the flock 50-50 between shepherd and owner. An interesting picture of the Irish community appeared in one of the earliest editions of the Southern Cross in January 1875. “In no part of the world is the Irishman more esteemed and respected than in the province of Buenos Aires, and in no part of the world have Irish settlers made such large fortunes. They possess 1,500,000 acres of the best quality land. They own about 5,000,000 sheep. This vast fortune has been acquired in just a few years.”

Irish ganaderos (ranchers) were thick on the ground in that province. Here is a list of names from a district with the wonderful name Exaltacion de la Cruz, taken from the 1869 census and reprinted in the Southern Cross: Patricio Kelly, Miguel Mally,  Cristian Lynch, Juan Lennon, Guillermo Maguire, Diego Gaynor, Eufrasio Kenny, Tomás Dowling, Santiago Scully and nearly 50 others. As the names suggest, they integrated relatively quickly with their Spanish-speaking neighbours, so that today many Irish-Argentines speak little English and are only vaguely aware of their ancestry.  Their strong Catholicism remains, cemented in particular by Father Anthony Fahy from Loughrea, Co Galway,  who arrived in 1844 and was to become one of those formidable 19th century priests who built powerful Irish Catholic communities in so many parts of the world. Interestingly, his work was supported by a Protestant banker and merchant, Thomas Armstrong, from Offaly, who would become a member of Argentina’s wealthy upper class.

Fahy and Armstrong were among many people from Irish backgrounds who were to make their mark in Argentine society  over the next 170 years. The list is a long one and makes for impressive reading (see the biography section of the excellent Society for Irish Latin American Studies website for a preliminary taster). I have room here to single out only a few particularly fascinating examples.

Probably the most famous Argentine in recent world history was the revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. His grandmother was Ana Lynch, born in San Francisco to an Irish-Argentine family whose roots went back to a clan of  17th century Irish ‘Wild Geese’ merchants from Seville and Cadiz. The most famous Irish-Argentine of the 19th century was the founder of its navy during the 1810-1818 war of independence against Spain, William Brown from Foxford, Co Mayo.

In the fractured and often violent world of Argentine politics there have been people of Irish ancestry on every side. Dalmacio Velez Sarsfield was the 19th century lawyer and politician who drew up the new nation’s civil code, much of which is still in use today (he has also given his name to one of Buenos Aires’ top football clubs). The only Irish-Argentine President was General Edelmiro Julian Farrell, a military appointee in the mid-1940s,  whose Vice-President was Colonel Juan Peron, soon to become a benevolent dictator of international renown. Rodolfo Walsh was a left-wing revolutionary, investigative journalist and outspoken critic of the 1976-1983 military regime which murdered or violently ‘disappeared’ an estimated 13,000 leftist guerrillas and other political opponents in the so-called ‘dirty war’ during that period: he was shot down in the street in a military ambush in 1977. José (Joe) Baxter, from an Anglo-Irish Protestant family background, was another revolutionary: his almost unbelievable trajectory led from a far right nationalist organisation in the 1950s to Cuba, the Tupamaros urban guerrillas in Uruguay, training in North Vietnam, various armed Trotskyist groups and death under an assumed name in a plane crash outside Paris in 1973.

People of Irish ancestry have also distinguished themselves in more benign sectors of society. Juan P. Garrahan (died 1965) was one of modern Argentina’s most distinguished physicians and paediatricians, and its National Children’s Hospital is named after him. Maria Elena Walsh (1930-2011) was an internationally-known singer, poet and children’s writer who has been compared with Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen.  Carlos McAllister is the latest in a long line of celebrated sports stars of Irish background: he was formerly a star footballer with Argentina and Boca Juniors and now represents La Pampa province in the national parliament. Did you know that Argentina also have a cricket team? In 2007 they reached the final of the World Cricket League Division 3 tournament in Australia under the captaincy of a handsome young man called Esteban ‘Billy’ McDermott. [In 2013 Argentina sent a gaelic football team to their first ever international tournament, coming second, and are now looking forward to the GAA world championships in Abu Dhabi next month].

The contribution of the Irish to Britain, the US and Australia is well known. But let’s not forget the high achievements of the world’s fifth largest Irish community in the huge, complex and sophisticated country that is Argentina.

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

Notes from another great little country

Posted on Thursday, 29 January, 2015 by andypollak

We in Ireland (or rather the Republic of Ireland) have a lazy, solipsistic tendency to think we are the greatest little country in the world (and not just to do business in). I have spent most of the past fortnight in another small country on the far side of the world which, I would contend, can lay far better claim to that title.

Chile is a long thin snake of a country squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean and running from the Atacama desert (the driest place on earth) in the north, through the Mediterranean climes and cool rain forest of the centre, to the sub-Antarctic tundra of Tierra del Fuego in the south. It contains the oldest inhabited site in the Americas (12,500 years); the finest wine in the Southern hemisphere; breathtaking mountain and lake scenery that surpass anything in the Alps or the Rockies, and sophisticated seaside resorts that are on a par with many in the Mediterranean.

Chile is a modern social democracy with a socialist single mother as president that has an enviable record of economic expansion in recent years, boosted by record prices for its key export, copper.  It continues to have many problems – it remains a deeply unequal society, with more than 600,000 of its 17 million people living in extreme poverty; its education system is unfair and under-funded;  it is periodically torn apart by earthquakes (the last one in 2010 killed over 500 people and caused US$30 billion in damage) – and the plumbing is dreadful. But it is a country that pulses with youth, pride and energy.

Chile has  suffered to get to its present state of political and economic well-being. On 11 September 1973 (a date Chileans remember for different reasons to the rest of the world) the government of the radically socialist – but passionately constitutionalist  – president, Salvador Allende, was violently overthrown by a CIA-backed military junta led by army chief General Augusto Pinochet (Allende died, probably by suicide, as the air force bombed his presidential palace). During the brutal 17 year military dictatorship that followed, an estimated 3,000 people were killed or violently ‘disappeared’ and over 200,000 fled into exile, including a small group to Ireland, where they did not receive a particularly warm welcome (I was secretary of the Chile Solidarity Committee in Dublin at the time).

However Chile has reason to be grateful to Ireland for another reason. The principal ‘liberator’ of Chile from Spanish rule during the Latin American wars of independence between 1810 and 1818 was Bernardo O’Higgins, the illegimate son of the Sligo-born Spanish Viceroy of Peru. The British were also strong supporters of the Chilean independence struggle (for their own imperial reasons) and there are as many statues in towns throughout the country to Admiral Thomas Cochrane, the Scottish royal navy officer who founded the Chilean navy (and the Brazilian and Greek navies – he was Patrick O’Brian’s model for the swashbuckling Jack Aubrey in his series of seafaring novels) as there are to O’Higgins. In Valparaiso, the wonderfully picturesque and ramshackle main port, the monument in the main square commemorates two Irishmen (O’Higgins and naval officer George O’Brien), one Scotsman (Cochrane) and one Englishman (naval officer Robert Simpson). General Juan McKenna from Monaghan was also prominent on the Chilean side, notably as founder of its army’s engineer corps.

The Catholic religion in Chile remains important, although (as in Ireland) its iron grip on many aspects of social and personal life has loosened in recent years.  Divorce was only legalised in 2004. It remains one of the very few countries in the world where abortion is illegal in all circumstances and where the right to life of the unborn is enshrined in the Constitution.

In the extraordinarily beautiful southern lake and volcano region around Puerto Varas live the descendants of German settlers whose diligence and industry have turned this area into something close to a rural Arcadia. Our local guide related how their ancestors came to lands which had been vacated by Huilliche Indians fleeing the marauding, slave seizing  Spanish conquistadores. The envoy sent by the Chilean government in the 1850s to Germany to recruit them was told to bring back Catholics – instead he returned with Lutherans. Undeterred, the government sent in the Jesuits to educate their children. As a result, the great majority of their descendants are now Catholic, although some of their lovely churches are national monuments.

The next time we are tempted to boast about Ireland being the greatest little country in the world, we should think of Chile.  The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda – winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 – once asked a Soviet cosmonaut whether he had seen Chile while he was out in space. The cosmonaut said he did remember seeing some ‘yellow mountain ranges in South America.’  We don’t even have serious mountains to show to people in the stratosphere, even if there is a Canadian astronaut out there with a fondness for us!

We should think not only about Chile but also about other small, internationally ignored South American countries like Uruguay and Bolivia, where huge numbers of poorer people are being provided with jobs, housing and education for the first time under left-wing governments. Our version of free enterprise plus austerity is not the only model for early 21st century democracies. We need to be less full of ourselves in the little island of Ireland (and the insignificant province of Northern Ireland) and learn more about the small countries of Latin America that are doing great things to improve the lives of their people.

PS  This is very much a sympathetic tourist’s eye view. If any Chilean (or other) reader thinks I’ve got anything badly wrong in this blog, I would welcome a correction.

 

 

 

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