2 Irelands together

A rare story of mercy and forgiveness between former combatants in Northern Ireland

Posted on Saturday, 28 December, 2024 by andypollak

At year’s end, and in the spirit of my last blog about the need for hope, I am once again going to shamelessly lift a whole column from another writer, and once again it’s from the superb Belfast Telegraph journalist and Sunday Independent columnist, Sam McBride. I admire McBride for his loyalty to and determination to tell the truth about his much maligned home place. This is his story about mercy and forgiveness between former combatants in that home place, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland).

“Lying bleeding on the Crossmaglen ground after being shot by a Royal Marine Commando, the IRA man thought he was dying. The soldiers he’d attacked were now attacking him and continued to do so after a shot brought him to the ground. As death loomed, a soldier saved his life. That one moral act now might be central to solving a mystery stemming from one of the most immoral acts of the Troubles.

That former IRA man has now spoken not just about how he escaped death, but to reveal a secret personal crusade to find the body of Captain Robert Nairac, the undercover soldier who was abducted, killed and secretly buried by republicans in 1977.

The man’s remarkable motivation is told in a podcast ‘Assume Nothing: The Secret Search for Captain Nairac’ by Gordon Adair, a former BBC NI journalist. He had been a contact of Adair’s for years and had told him the story — but only now agreed to be interviewed.

It takes a lot for a former IRA man to spend three decades on a secret personal search to honour a former foe. Yet the reason is stunningly simple. It’s a story of hope from one of the most hopeless times.

All’s fair in love and war, or so the aphorism goes. Yet we know it’s not. It’s not OK to sleep with your best friend’s wife. It’s not OK to kill a defenceless civilian. In the Troubles, such basic morality often seemed absent, yet in truth it was everywhere. It was why the vast majority of the bereaved didn’t respond by bombing or shooting their neighbours. It’s why so many victims made tearful appeals for no retribution. It’s why the bloodshed never tipped into irretrievable civil war.

Adair’s contact wasn’t involved in Nairac’s abduction, murder or burial. Most of those involved in that weren’t IRA members, even if they were sympathisers. Yet one incident altered this south Armagh man’s perspective on humanity and ultimately drove him to a personal crusade to find Nairac’s body.

While attacking Crossmaglen army barracks in the mid-1970s, the man was shot and seriously wounded. He recalled: “As I lay on the ground, I thought of really only one person. I thought of my mother. I knew it was going to destroy her.”

Lying defenceless, he said he was “treated badly” by the soldiers, “but I was expecting that”. Then one individual changed his life. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one man coming toward me and he just put his finger to his lips to let me know ‘don’t saying anything; be quiet’. He stopped them from doing that. I can still hear his words now: ‘Leave him alone. Leave him alone. He’s a soldier,’” he said.

Bleeding through the mouth and nose, he thought he was dying, but he survived. The gratitude he still feels many decades later is audible in how he speaks: “This man was exceptionally kind to me… it had a profound effect on me… this man saved my life.” He described summary execution, irrespective of the circumstances, as “a disgusting thing to do” and Nairac’s death as “a disgusting war crime”.

There were lurid stories that Nairac’s body had been put through a mincer. Adair’s contact said that after years of talking to a host of individuals, some of whom were directly involved, he’s definitively clear that’s wrong: “He’s definitely available.”

Similarly, after conducting his own investigations into allegations that Nairac was involved in atrocities, he doesn’t believe them. “Robert Nairac was an honourable man. From his own narrative, from his own idea of why he was posted to Ireland, he was acting, I think, at all times with morality… In a different conflict, in a different period, in a different epoch, I’d be very glad to have Robert Nairac by my side because he was a very brave man,” he said.

To the staunchest ideologues on either side, this man’s story is challenging; it doesn’t easily fit the black-and-white depiction of irredeemable good fighting irredeemable evil. Yet it’s compelling because it’s so deeply human. The man said: “I could not give up. My own life being saved by a decent man in a British army uniform has a profound effect on you… that experience created an indelible mark on my own sense of fair play and moral compass.”

He now wants to “show the man the respect he deserves” and a few months ago led the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) — set up to recover the bodies of the Disappeared — to a field in County Louth where he believes Nairac’s body was buried. In October, that search was halted without success because the ICLVR said “more information is needed”. Nairac’s body may be there, but finding the bones of a man in a field after almost half a century isn’t straightforward without precise information.

Yet even the telling of this story has had a powerful reconciling impact on some of those who’ve heard it. Former Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie — himself a former Royal Irish Regiment captain highly decorated for bravery — said the IRA man’s words were “as close to true reconciliation between enemies from our Troubles as I’ve heard”.

There’s a wider truth here. Some ex-paramilitaries cling to the belief that they had no choice; they were simply products of their environment which inexorably pushed them towards killing. This simplistic and self-serving belief system is demonstrably nonsensical when we consider that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, whatever their politics or religion, rejected the murder which surrounded them.

It’s too easy to say ‘we’d no moral choice’. What both the Royal Marine medic and the IRA man demonstrate is the impact one moral person can have. Our actions have consequences which echo for good or evil long after the instant in which we exist.”

If you have information about the location of the bodies of the final four Disappeared victims — Joe Lynskey, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire — you can contact the ICLVR on 00353 1 602 8655, or secretary@iclvr.ie, or ICLVR PO Box 10827 Dublin 2.”¹

¹ ‘One Small Act of Mercy – Captain Nairac, Sunday Independent, 22 December

Posted in General, Northern Ireland | Tagged Northern Ireland, the-troubles | 1 Comment

The need for hope in a hope-challenged world (according to Heaney and Havel)

Posted on Wednesday, 18 December, 2024 by andypollak

Hope is in short supply in the world at Christmas 2024. We are seeing the second coming of the megalomaniac Donald Trump to the American presidency; the genocidal war of Israel in Gaza; the brutal war of Russia in Ukraine; continuing civil wars in Sudan and Syria (although there is a glimmer of hope in the latter with the overthrow of the evil Assad regime); the rise of the far right in previously stable European democracies like France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands; and, above all, the failure of our leaders to grasp the greatest challenge of modern times, how to tackle catastrophic climate change.

Contemplating any one of these huge challenges would would make an ordinary person feel hopeless, let alone all of them together. But it is precisely at times like these that we most need hope. As Seamus Heaney said 30 years ago, quoting the Czech president, playwright, philosopher and dissident Vaclav Havel: “Hope is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out. Its deepest roots are in the transcendental, beyond the horizon”.

Of course, hope is not only something needed by people in societies full of violence and injustice. To have hope in the future is absolutely essential for all human existence – without it we would have nothing to look forward to except suffering and death. Sometimes when I’m sitting on the bus or walking down the street I look at the faces of all the scores and hundreds of people around me, and wonder: “What are their problems and worries? What keeps them going through difficult times? What hope or joy or love – or perhaps, hope of joy and love – do they have in their lives that sustains them? “

I am not writing about the Christian teaching on hope. I know that in the past 60 years or so this has moved beyond the barren ‘doctrine of the last things’, the events which traditional Christians believe will break upon humankind and the world at the day of judgement and the return of Christ. Christians are now divided – as they are on so many things – when it comes to answering the question ‘What can we hope for?’ The American theologian Michael Scanlon says traditional Christians answer “eternal life after death for the purified soul”; liberal Christians say “Yes, ultimately eternal life, but penultimately a more just, a more peaceful order.” I am referring to hope in this world rather than hope in the world to come (which is something that as a doubting Unitarian I have real problems with), although I believe with Heaney and Havel that the virtue of hope in this world is rooted in something transcendental, that is, not of this world.

I’d like to look very briefly at the two linked elements of hope that Vaclav Havel says are fundamental: that hope is “a state of soul rather than a response to the evidence”; and it is “not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out.” And I’m going to cite philosophers and political thinkers rather than theologians for these propositions.

Soul is a difficult concept. The soul is that part of a person which drives him or her to search for a deeper meaning to life: something beyond the immediate and the material, something transcendental which if we glimpse or feel or experience it, however momentarily, will make our lives richer, more meaningful, more worthwhile. Acts of human love, human goodness and solidarity with our suffering fellow human beings are clearly ways in which one can glimpse the soul. It is in this sense that I believe Havel is using the term ‘soul’.

And, again as Havel points out, one does not have to be religious to glimpse the soul. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has written about the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington by Al Qaeda (he was in New York at the time): about the frightening contrast between the “murderously spiritual” – the Muslim fanatics piloting the planes of death – and the “compassionately secular.” By the latter he meant the mobile phone messages sent by passengers on the doomed planes to their spouses and families in those desperate last minutes. He writes: “Someone who is about to die in terrible anguish makes room in their mind for someone else; for the grief and terror of someone they love. They do what they can to take some atom of that pain away from the other by the inarticulate message on the mobile. That moment of ‘making room’ is what I as a religious person have to notice.” That secular ‘making room’ for love could also be characterised as ‘making room’ for the soul at the point of death.

In his essay ‘The Politics of Hope’ Vaclav Havel writes: “I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison)[Havel spent multiple periods in jail as a political prisoner under the Communists], I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation…it is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

“I feel that its roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can’t – unlike Christians, for instance – say anything concrete about the transcendental. An individual may affirm or deny that hope is so rooted, but this does nothing to change my conviction (which is more than just a conviction; it’s an inner experience).The most convinced materialist and atheist may have more of this genuine, transcendentally rooted inner hope than ten metaphysicians put together.”

Havel goes on: “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of this breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

Remember that this was written in 1985, not long after Havel had been released from his latest four year spell in prison, and – apart from the glimpse of hope promised by the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, then an unknown quantity as leader of the Soviet Union – there was no reason to believe that the communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe would not go on for another 30 or 40 or 70 years. Yet less than five years later communism was in freefall throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and the peaceful ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Prague was about to propel Havel into the Czech presidency. Havel was truly writing in the darkness before the dawn.

Take another great political leader, perhaps the greatest of our age, Nelson Mandela (Have you ever noticed that the two greatest and wisest political leaders and thinkers of the past century have been black and brown men, Mandela and Gandhi?). I have been reading recently about the 1963 trial for sabotage which led to Mandela serving 27 years of a life sentence in a South African jail (he was 46 when he was convicted and 73 when he came out in 1990).

His speech in his defence is an extraordinary testament to hope. This was a man who fully expected that he would be sentenced to death, so he must have believed that these would be his last public words. And what they are is a justification of his life as an African leader trying to overthrow the unjust and inhuman system of apartheid – for many years peacefully and when all peaceful avenues had been closed, with the minimum and most controlled amount of violence. That justification, he made clear, was based on a vision and an ideal. Mandela risked his life for “an imagined possibility”, a vision of how a deeply unjust, firmly entrenched system of treating millions of people as sub-humans could be changed into a just, democratic and multi-racial South Africa.

The account of that speech I took from a book entitled Acts of Hope written by one of America’s most distinguished academic lawyers and classicists, John Boyd White. White compares Mandela’s ‘act of hope’ to a similar stand taken nearly 2,500 years earlier by Socrates. The Greek philosopher had been unjustly sentenced to death by a court in Athens for corrupting the young with his ideas. His friend Crito tries to persuade him to escape to another city. He declines, calmly preferring an unjust death because such a death, unlike escape, would not require him to give up the central purpose of his life: to persuade the Athenians to build a community based on justice. His huge success in doing this – despite and perhaps partly because of his death – is shown by the fact that his teachings (as relayed to us by Plato) have provided much of the foundation for political thinking in the Western world ever since. In White’s words, this Socratic thinking “depends on our being able to imagine ourselves not merely as individuals who happen to be found together, our interests in temporary conflict or harmony, like rats in the maze of life, but as a larger polity, as a city or nation or society that has a moral life and career of its own of which we can ask the question – is it just?”

Once again, Socrates’ decision to stay in Athens is based on a courageous act of hope or “imagined possibility”. Despite the almost certain death that awaits him, he will not walk away from the sense of the possibilities of human improvement to which he has devoted his whole life. Boyd White puts it like this: “It had been a central part of his lifework to turn the Athenians in a certain direction, towards thinking of justice as their ultimate collective concern, and though he is never optimistic about the prospect, it is the imagined possibility that he might succeed upon which he will not turn his back.”

When I see the genocidal slaughter in Palestine and the grinding First World War style warfare in Ukraine, I think about what hope is left, what “imagined possibilities” are left for the ordinary people of those countries. In the most wretched and hopeless places there are always people who are full of hope – who have “hope within them” as a “dimension of their souls,” to use Havel’s powerful image. As a journalist I have been privileged to meet them in Central America, in Ethiopia, in Northern Ireland. I think now about people in countries like Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Ukraine – countries perhaps written off by our comfortable Western world as hopeless – ordinary people doing their best in the face of the kind of poverty and persecution, war and rape and violence that would drive most of us very quickly to despair. And I marvel at the quality of human hope in the face of such unbelievable adversity.

I’m going to finish with an excerpt from a famous Irish poem about hope. As so often, you have to turn to poetry to find the best expression of our deepest human qualities and yearnings. This Seamus Heaney poem is from his verse play, The Cure at Troy, written several years before the Northern Irish peace process got under way. These are his much quoted, but still enormously powerful and prophetic lines about the eve of the end of war in ancient Greece and modern Ireland:

‘Human beings suffer/They torture one another,/They get hurt and get hard./No poem or play or song/Can fully right a wrong/Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols/Beat on their bars together./A hunger-striker’s father/Stands in the graveyard dumb./The police widow in veils/Faints at the funeral home.

History says Don’t hope/On this side of the grave./But then, once in a lifetime/The longed-for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up,/And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change/On the far side of revenge./Believe that a further shore/Is reachable from here./Believe in miracles/And cures and healing wells.’

Posted in General | Tagged death, history, hope, inspiration, philosophy, politics, seamus-heaney, vaclav-havel | 1 Comment

One reason to vote Sinn Fein in this week’s election, and six reasons not to

Posted on Wednesday, 27 November, 2024 by andypollak

Posted in Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

One reason to vote Sinn Fein in this week’s election, and six reasons not to

Posted on Sunday, 24 November, 2024 by andypollak

We in the South have a general election this week. The campaign has been an uninspiring one, with the three expected topics dominating debate: housing, the cost of living and (to a lesser extent) immigration. If you are under 35 and not well-off, it is the first of these which has been top of the agenda, given the extreme difficulty such people have in buying any kind of house or apartment.

Not surprisingly Sinn Féin’s impressive housing spokesman, Eoin O Broin, has been front and centre of this particular debate. Several parties have promised to build 300,000 housing units over the next five years, or 60,000 per year compared to under 40,000 at present . But only Sinn Féin have come up with an innovative plan to deliver such an ambitious target in the problematic affordable housing sector, where prices continue to be far above the levels affordable by most people of modest means.

They are promising a much more interventionist approach by the state, with one particularly interesting new twist. New owners will not own the land on which their houses will be built – the state will. This means they will not be able to sell these houses on the open market, but only to another affordable buyer (or leave them to their families). As that excellent economic commentator, Cliff Taylor of the Irish Times, points out, this goes against the time-honoured Irish practice of buying a house and expecting its value to shoot up over time.

There are housebuilding issues which such a policy will not address. Sinn Féin claim to have cleared this policy with the banks and other lending institutions, a claim which is contested by other parties. And there are serious capacity issues in the construction industry, with, for example, 80,000 new building workers needed if Sinn Féin’s (and other parties’) ambitious targets are to be met. Nevertheless, if I were a young couple in my 20s or 30s, I would be seriously tempted to allow O Broin to try to succeed where so many Fianna Fail and Fine Gael ministers have failed over the past decade or more.

So that is my one reason why I would understand people – and particularly young people – voting for Sinn Féin. But there are lots of compelling reasons why one should not vote for the former party of the Provisional IRA (and I speak here not as a typical middle-class Dublin voter but as a peace-loving non-republican from the North). I will enumerate six of them.

Firstly, there is party leader Mary Lou McDonald’s poor judgement of people. As I wrote last January when reviewing journalist Aoife Moore’s insightful book on Sinn Fein, The Long Game, the party will be hoping that voters will have forgotten her misjudgement of Jonathan Dowdall: Sinn Féin Dublin city councillor (briefly), accessory to murder as a close associate of the Hutch criminal gang, kidnapper, torturer and ‘supergrass’. When Dowdall resigned after only four months as a city councillor in 2015 (and before his criminal involvement was known), McDonald issued a statement in which she praised him as a hard worker and “a very popular and respected member of the community.”

Moore quoted one local Sinn Féin cumann member in McDonald’s home area of Cabra saying she “seriously lacks judgement. She’s not learned from this entire shambles at all. She surrounds herself with people who are subpar. In a constituency like this…that’s a foolish game. Look at Gerry Adams – he had serious heads around him. Mary Lou hasn’t a clue.”

Secondly, Sinn Féin are not a normal democratic party, with relatively transparent procedures for making decisions when in cabinet. The only evidence of how they behave in that situation of power is what they have done when they have been jointly in charge of the power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland. DUP leader Peter Robinson, who shared power with Martin McGuinness from 2007 to 2015, said of that period: “If I was dealing with any other political party…I would sit across the table and would say ‘here is the issue – let’s resolve it’, and we would sit there and try to work it out. They [Sinn Féin] will never take a decision with you in the room. It goes out into this labyrinth of an organisation. Whether it goes to Connolly House [Sinn Féin’s Belfast headquarters], whether it goes to the Dáil, or whether it goes to their Assembly group, or where in the circle of advisers decisions are made, nobody is quite clear. You will never get a decision for a very long period of time…because of the process that Sinn Féin has in government.”¹

Thirdly, would you trust McDonald if she was the Taoiseach of this country? I know democratic politicians are known for being economical with the truth, but if Sinn Fein were in power, you would be dealing with what I would call ‘turbo liars’. The party’s culture of falsehood and secrecy has been inherited from the IRA. Gerry Adams was the prince of liars: his absolute and repeated denial of his IRA past is his crowning dishonesty. In his magisterial book on the IRA, my former colleague Ed Moloney has detailed his brilliant lying in the cause of the peace process, when he continuously told the British and Irish governments one thing while telling his former IRA comrades something entirely different. One former IRA man and lifelong Sinn Féin member told Aoife Moore that “when he is confronted with any uncomfortable truth, his first instinct is to lie to everybody.” Former Fine Gael minister Regina Doherty used to say in the Dáil that she didn’t believe a word that came out of Adams’ mouth.

McDonald has inherited at least some of this untruthfulness. During an autumn of Sinn Féin linked scandals – a senior TD found guilty by a party inquiry of “gross misconduct” towards a woman member and accusing the party of getting rid of him through a “kangaroo court”; a rising star forced to resign from the Seanad because of “inappropriate messages” to a 16 year old; and party officials giving references to a former press officer convicted of child sex abuse – she repeatedly expressed her “anger” and “disgust” at such happenings. But as Pat Leahy, the Irish Times political editor, put it: “She has not faced up to the fact that several aspects of the Sinn Féin account stretch credulity, to say the least. To accept the Sinn Féin story, we have to accept as true a number of things that seem unbelievable.” That’s a polite, Irish Times way of saying: “You’re lying.”

Fourthly, in a recent interview McDonald said the “Free State establishment” needed to move on from holding her party accountable for the actions of the IRA during the Northern ‘Troubles’. As the distinguished journalist and broadcaster Olivia O’Leary pointed out: “If McDonald wants people to forget about what the Provisional IRA did, and to stop linking it to present-day Sinn Féin, why does she attend so pointedly the funerals of IRA figures?” She gives the example of the funerals of former IRA chief of staff Kevin McKenna and former IRA head of intelligence, Bobby Storey.²

I have written before about why I believe that if Sinn Fein ever gained power in this country, far from forgetting the ‘Troubles’, they would start rewriting history so as to commemorate and glorify the mass killers of the IRA. As Gerry Adams said in his eulogy to Kevin McKenna: “We will not let the past be written in a way which demonises patriots.” Foreign affairs spokesman Matt Carthy has spoken glowingly of one of those ‘patriots’, fellow Monaghan man Seamus McElwain, believed by the RUC to have murdered up to 28 people, most of them off-duty policemen and UDR men.³

Here’s a fifth reason. While continuously reminding voters that Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have been in power since the foundation of the state, Sinn Féin would love everyone to forget the century of republican opposition to this State’s very existence. Such a narrative “takes some nerve,” said Micheál Martin during the leaders’ debate last week. “Someone needs to ask the searching question. Where was the Sinn Féin movement for the last 100 years? They opposed every single thing that built this country. They opposed membership of the European Union, which was transformative. They opposed every trade deal which created hundreds of thousands of jobs. You opposed our Constitution for the vast majority of that 100 years, and you murdered gardaí and soldiers as well. For the most part in the last 100 years, you opposed the State.”

A sixth reason is Sinn Féin’s extraordinary tax policies – extraordinary for a party which likes to think of itself as left wing. They would abolish carbon taxes and would reverse excise duty increases on fossil fuels, both essential tools in any serious policy to tackle climate change (but when did Sinn Féin have any serious policy on climate change?). They would abolish local property tax, an absolutely fundamental way of taxing people’s wealth. They would abolish the universal social charge – already a very progressive tax – for incomes under €45,000. This proposed narrowing of the tax base would come at a time when Ireland’s highly successful economic model – based to a significant extent on low corporation tax to attract foreign direct investment – is looking very precarious with the advent of a tax-cutting, tariff-imposing Trump presidency in the US.

There are other reasons: Sinn Féin’s intimidatory legal actions against politicians and journalists; the chilling proposal to investigate RTE’s excellent coverage of the conflict in Gaza “and other international conflicts”; the abstention by the party’s MEP on European Parliament votes condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and the tunnel vision ‘magical thinking’ that Sinn Féin, the party of the IRA, can be the ones to win over any significant numbers of unionists to Irish unity.

As Olivia O’Leary puts it: “All of this has an air of autocracy about it.” I would rather call it “an air of Leninism”. I believe Sinn Féin’s ethical system is different from most people in this republic, based as it is on 30 years of ruthless violence in the North and a relentless drive to power in the whole island. I hope and pray that the good sense and judgement of most Irish people will not put them anywhere close to that power.

¹ The Democratic Unionist Party, Jonathan Tonge and others, pp.55-56

² ‘Sinn Fein’s approach to media inquiry carries an air of autocracy’, Irish Times, 23 November

³ ‘Two disturbing videos which show the huge gulf of misunderstanding between the peoples of Ireland’, 2 Irelands Together, 6 May 2021; ‘Sinn Féin will be re-writing recent Irish history when it gets into power’, 2 Irelands Together, 31 March 2022.

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | Tagged history, ireland, Irish election, irish-politics, news, politics, Sinn Fein | 1 Comment

Four wise voices from moderate nationalism and sensible unionism

Posted on Monday, 28 October, 2024 by andypollak

Moderate, sensible, cautionary voices from Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism are rare enough. But they are still out there. In the past month I have been reading or listening to four of them: a former Tánaiste, a Southern Protestant, a Northern Orangeman and a distinguished international academic.

There is a lot I disagree with Michael McDowell on (particularly on refugees and migration). But he often talks sense when it comes to the North. He was writing in the Irish Times earlier this month about most voters in the Republic wanting “Northern institutions to bed down rather than polarise the North with a Border poll for which there is no likelihood of a majority [for unity] for a decade at least.

“Rekindling smouldering constitutional and sectarian questions in Northern Ireland at this point is counter-productive; slow and steady reconciliation and positive mutual engagement in the North is what is needed by both parts of the island.”¹

Ian D’Alton, a historian and member of the Southern Protestant community, had an interesting letter in that paper last month.² “They still don’t get it,” he wrote. “Northern unionists don’t want Irish unity. It’s not transactional; it’s existential. They do not envisage themselves, ever, as citizens of an Irish republic. And the likes of Leo Varadkar’s call for all-island ‘unity’ as an objective of all political parties will do nothing to change unionists’ minds. It will be as successful as the Anti-Partition League which tried this tack between 1945 and 1958.

“Indeed, it is likely to increase further the sense of siege and cultural colonisation already provoked by the promotion of ‘Irishness’ in Northern Ireland, principally through the language…To get a flavour of what this means for unionists, try turning it around. How would we in the South feel if Northern unionists aggressively started and funded a campaign for the Republic to rejoin the United Kingdom?

“Things should take their course. It may seem boring and agonisingly slow. But for the foreseeable future there will be no Border poll. Despite the demographics, there’s still a sizeable majority for Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. All we can usefully do is to dial down the rhetoric and excited talk of imminent unity.”

He then quoted Bolton Waller, Anglican cleric and moderate nationalist, who a hundred years ago made a submission to the Boundary Commission. He argued that three things had to happen to allow the island to find peace with itself: “a customs union which would mitigate the worst economic effects of the Border; the satisfaction of legitimate grievances of the minorities, north and south; and cooperation between the two jurisdictions.”

D’Alton says it took until the 1990s for these “three conditions to be met even in part” [although I would argue that the Good Friday Agreement and pre-Brexit joint membership of the European Union by the UK and Ireland largely satisfied all of them]. He concluded that “we still do not have the sort of Ireland that Waller imagined it could be if they had been met in full. And until we do, ‘unity’ as an objective rather than an aspiration is a dangerous chimera that will only entrench attitudes on both sides.”

‘Choyaa’ is the pen-name of a straight-talking Fermanagh Orangeman who often contributes to the widely-read Slugger O’Toole website. In his latest contribution,³ he was critical of the apparent priority of many unionists of opposing an Irish language nursery and primary school in East Belfast. “In light of this narrow focus, it is little wonder that many are turning away from unionism. My own journey as a Unionist has been exhausting and frustrating, witnessing a series of humiliations and yielding little in return, leaving me to question whether this movement is – or ever can be – fit for purpose.”

He bemoaned the growing sense of isolation that many Unionists in Fermanagh and other parts of the west of Northern Ireland feel. This was particularly evident during July’s Westminster election. The Ulster Unionist Party locally “expressed its reluctance to continue being the standard-bearer for unionism in the west, stating this would be their last attempt if they lost, as the seat would no longer be winnable. The towel was well and truly thrown in before the polls had opened. Eastern Unionists appear to agree with the UUP’s assessment and have now deemed Fermanagh South Tyrone unwinnable, adding it to a growing list that includes West Tyrone, Mid Ulster, North Belfast, South Belfast, South Down, and, undoubtedly, East Londonderry will soon join this list. For a movement that often regurgitates the mantra of ‘no surrender,’ Unionism is very quick to declare seats as being unwinnable once they’re lost.

“There is a growing sense among Unionists that, outside of areas like Lagan Valley, East Belfast, Bangor, Donaghadee, Ballymena, and Newtownards, the rest of Northern Ireland is of little concern to the main parties. On election night, the DUP candidate for West Tyrone, Tom Buchanan, was notably mentioned by a BBC reporter as “feeling confident.” However, this confidence was only in retaining second place in West Tyrone – a rather dismal position, being 16,000 votes behind Sinn Féin and just 973 votes ahead of the SDLP. In 2001, the UUP held this seat, but today Unionism’s goal in the region has been reduced to merely clinging to a distant second place and even that looks precarious.”

‘Choyaa’ said Mike Nesbitt had returned as UUP leader “seemingly by default, with all other alternatives exhausted…However, the party remains as divided and directionless as ever, unsure whether it wants to be liberal or conservative, a softer version of the DUP, or a moderate alternative like the Alliance Party.”

Turning to the DUP, he said one of the few bright spots for Unionism in the Westminister election had been “Gavin Robinson’s comfortable return as MP for East Belfast, triumphing over a formidable opponent in Naomi Long and despite facing two additional unionist challengers. Robinson benefits from significant goodwill, partly due to the circumstances in which he assumed leadership within the DUP, and his personal popularity often extends beyond that of the party itself. However, this goodwill is not indefinite. To maintain and expand support, Robinson will need to be seen as a reformer, bringing change across the board within the DUP…Currently the DUP is synonymous with religious fundamentalism, incompetence, scandal, and corruption, and these negative associations are unlikely to fade without significant reform…The DUP must overhaul its internal processes, leadership, advisors and engage with a broad section of the public if it wishes to survive politically.”

He gave the example of the party’s failure to discipline Ian Paisley Junior. Ultimately voters in North Antrim grew tired of the repeated controversies he was involved in and voted to remove him. “Gone are the days when scandals can be brushed under the carpet or dismissed with sentiments like ‘Ian will be Ian’. Similarly the loss of South Antrim was down to Paul Girvan’s invisibility both in the constituency and at Westminster. The historical sex abuse charges Jeffrey Donaldson faces “cast a long shadow over both the DUP and Unionism more broadly. The DUP will struggle to distance itself from this, and Donaldson’s legacy will likely affect the party for some time to come.”

“Compounding the individual issues within constituencies is the fact that the DUP faces a profound trust deficit. A spate of scandals over the years has exhausted the public and it’s always a case of when and not if the next one will appear. Its inability to acknowledge its mistakes – particularly in the handling of Brexit – and its persistent tendency to shift blame onto others only serves to further alienate voters. The party needs to take responsibility for its failures, clearly outline how it plans to address the significant challenges facing Northern Ireland, and present a cohesive vision that people can support. The DUP cannot expect other Unionists to rally behind it while it appears directionless and perpetually in crisis mode. The lack of new talent coming into the party should also raise alarm bells.”

‘Choyaa’ then turned to the strange prominence of the unelected young loyalist agitator Jamie Bryson. “While I don’t seek to deny Jamie Bryson his right to free speech, I have serious concerns about the platform he enjoys, particularly the disproportionate airtime on the BBC, the connections he maintains within various Unionist parties, and the damage he inflicts on unionism. His tweets and messages seem solely aimed at causing division, attacking individuals, and contradicting almost every topic he touches upon. Bryson continually attacks the violent wings of republicanism, yet is happy to defend loyalist paramilitaries, even appearing on the BBC defending the East Belfast UVF.

“Unionists, myself included, are guilty of allowing Jamie Bryson unlimited airtime to promote his views as if they represent mainstream unionism. In doing so, we have allowed unionism to be mocked, derided, and caricatured, and frankly, we deserve nothing else. Unionism urgently needs new representatives across all media platforms, including TV, radio, newspapers, and online forums.

“The lack of civic unionist forums in Northern Ireland to discuss and collaborate on unionist concerns remains a glaring issue. While a few small online groups exist, they lack real-world engagement and have little presence. In contrast, the nationalist camp boasts multiple groups, widespread engagement, and numerous forums dedicated to furthering their cause. Unionism is poorly organised at the grassroots level, evident in the absence of clear leadership among loyalists, who are instead represented by figures like Jamie Bryson and the Loyalist Communities Council (LCC). The LCC itself is extremely controversial. Its goal was to transition loyalist paramilitaries away from violence, but with these groups still active, it is clear the LCC is failing.

“Unionism, and by extension loyalism, has become obsessed with what it opposes, pouring the majority of its energy into resistance. Rarely, if ever, is a positive case put forward for the Union, leaving opponents to easily point out that there is none. Unionists oppose the Irish language school but do little to address the significant educational underachievement within Unionist communities. They heavily criticise IRA commemorations; yet this criticism is undermined when the same Unionists (including politicians) attend loyalist paramilitary parades or negotiate policies with active paramilitary groups. They oppose people like Leo Varadkar advocating for Irish unification but fail to present a counter-case for the Union. Unionists oppose unification while, ironically, doing everything possible to make it possible. Unionism must start driving forward messages and initiatives of its own rather than latching onto everything it opposes, which usually ends up being implemented anyway. Unionism is truly in a sorry state, and whilst I am not currently on a constitutional road to Damascus, Unionism is doing everything possible to change that.”

Finally, a few words from Professor (and Dame) Louise Richardson, who after Mary Robinson is probably the most distinguished Irishwoman in the world today. This renowned expert on terrorism and international relations (who is a fluent Irish speaker) has been successively vice-chancellor of St Andrews University in Scotland; the first female vice-chancellor of Oxford University, and president of the Carnegie philanthropic corporation in New York. I heard her speak at an ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) event in the Royal Irish Academy earlier this month on Britishness and Irishness. I asked her to comment on the contradiction between the instinctive anti-Britishness still felt by large numbers people in the South (which she admitted she shared as a young person) at a time when we are trying to attract Northern Unionists, that instinctively and passionately pro-British community, into a united Ireland.

She said because Irish unity is “not a realistic proposition” currently, we haven’t had to face up to the difficult “trade offs” that will eventually be needed if it is ever to come about. She pointed to the example of Irish neutrality. What will be the trade off to bring that part of Ireland which is currently within NATO into a currently neutral Irish state?

¹ ‘Sinn Fein’s leaders like puppets for unseen controllers’, 23 October

² ‘Varadkar should dial down talk of unity’, Letters to the Editor, 27 September

³ ‘Unfit for Purpose? Unionism’s struggle for relevance in modern Northern Ireland’, 29 September

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Tagged brexit, history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics | 1 Comment

Talking to a Northern Protestant woman who is passionate about Irish language and culture

Posted on Wednesday, 2 October, 2024 by andypollak

Catherine Pollock (no relation – different spelling) from Derry is an unusual and remarkable woman. From a working class unionist background, she now works for the Irish language and cultural organisation Cultúrlann. She says of herself: “I’m not a unionist, but I’m not a nationalist or a republican either. I am British, and also Irish. My politics are left of centre – very left of centre for some people. I’m a socialist.”

Is the British element in her culture and identity important to her? Yes. “It’s the culture I grew up understanding. I understand how the place works. English is my first language. I went to university in England and lived in England. I feel comfortable getting off a train in Glasgow, Birmingham or Swansea. I like the secularism of Britain – they’re not rooted in a religious identity. I love its trade union history and can identify strongly with working class communities right across the UK. I love a lot of its music. If I’m watching the Olympics I feel that wee beast in my stomach whenever there’s a British athlete competing. I have an emotional reaction which is maybe not rational but it’s there.”

On the other hand she is passionate about Irish language and culture. She lives in the Fountain, the last Protestant and unionist enclave in the overwhelmingly Catholic and nationalist City Side of Derry. Very unusually for somebody of her background, 15 years ago she got a job in the adjoining Catholic working class area of the Bogside as a community development worker. “And one day I walked into a Gaelscoil, into a roomful of nine-year-olds who spoke fluent Irish. I was blown away! I lived three or four hundred yards from that school and I had no idea of what was happening there, that you could raise children in this place bilingually – that they could be fluent in two languages by the age of seven or eight. I had quite an emotional reaction to that school.” Now she sends both her children – aged eight and ten – to a Gaelscoil and runs a project which makes the Irish language accessible to people in all the city’s communities, and particularly its unionist communities. She is Derry’s answer to the East Belfast Protestant language activist, Linda Ervine (with whom she works from time to time).

Pollock goes on: “I feel a sense of responsibility to be really restorative and generous to the Irish language because of the history of its suppression. I feel a responsibility to change perceptions and to get people to think more empathetically about the value of the language and how important it is to this place, and to this island as a whole.”

She quotes Traditional Unionist Voice leader Jim Allister’s remark that “we’re kowtowing to a foreign language” as evidence of the antipathy to Irish in much of the unionist community. “There’s definitely a huge fear, and it’s a fear that is stoked, and it comes from not understanding why English is the main language spoken on this island and in many other places around the world, the world of the former British empire. Irish was violently and institutionally eradicated. English became the language of the State, of law, of business, of education – primary schooling through the medium of English was compulsory in Ireland before it was compulsory in Britain, and that was in order to eradicate the language. The response to Irish from a lot of unionist people in the North is quite dismissive and arrogant, and lacks any empathy or understanding of what the loss of their language would have had for a whole nation.”

Her championing of the Irish language has led to some challenging conversations with people in her unionist family and community. However she feels particularly supported by a 20-25 strong group of women friends, who are “as politically diverse as you have ever seen. I, as a socialist, can have a conversation with someone in that group who thinks Trump is the best thing to happen to American politics.” Most of this group are Protestant (and mostly still believers, although few go to church any more) and most of them describe themselves as unionist. “If something goes wrong with my life, they’re the first people at the door, the first people to support me.”

She acknowledges that, despite differences of political opinion and her very different cultural endeavours, her family have never shunned or excluded her. “The door is always open, and there is a security and type of freedom that comes with that. Not everyone is so lucky.” The same with the working class unionist community where she lives: “people just let me get on with life.”

When I ask her about how the big ‘soft power’ of Irish culture – the language, the music and dance, the gaelic sport – can be made less threatening to unionists, she responds: “When an immigrant community comes to Britain, we expect them to assimilate. The British came here as colonial settlers, yet now it’s as if Irish culture has to become less threatening in order to make the British people in Northern Ireland feel OK about being here. Irish culture has to be contained and softened: it’s almost ‘put your culture in a box because it’s making us feel unsettled’. We do live on the island of Ireland after all.”

I point out that it was rather undemocratic for Belfast City Council to pass a by-law allowing 15% of people in a street to vote to have a bilingual street sign. Her response is “calling somewhere Victoria Road is not very democratic either” (Victoria Road in Derry is the road to Dublin!) and “the original ‘English’ names of many streets in the North are actually a transliteration from the Irish. I wonder if you went to any other country in the world where English is now the first language and the indigenous population say we would like to have our indigenous language included on the street signs, would the reaction be the same?”

She is unsure about unionist identity and culture. “I think unionism is really grappling with what its identity is. Because marching bands are a military culture and bonfires are global. Then there’s this idea that we’re not Irish so we can’t connect with anything Irish – and if you do, it’s as though you’re a traitor to your identity. And I wonder if putting culture in a biscuit tin and sticking a label on it and painting it red, white and blue and saying to people ‘this belongs to you’ amounts to the cultural identity of a whole community of people.” Most things are more complex and nuanced than that, she insists, pointing out that adopting Ulster-Scots as a NI linguistic counterweight to Irish is not helpful – there’s a whole community of Ulster-Scots people in Donegal, for example, many of them Presbyterian.

She uses the example of Irish dancing, “which has been a cultural tradition of every community” in the North. In recent years Scottish highland dancing is being actively promoted in working class Protestant areas. “I can understand that if you come from a community where pipe bands are part of your cultural tradition, there might be a natural inclination towards highland dancing. But if you say to a whole community that Scottish dancing belongs to you and that Irish dancing doesn’t, you’re sectarianising culture and I don’t think that’s helpful.”

“It’s not the people who are dancing who are the problem. Any endeavour like this is a positive way to express yourself. Rather, it is the political, community and ‘peace’ infrastructures we have to operate within that insist on painting things one colour or the other. If you’re not obviously one side or the other, then you will miss out on all sorts of opportunities for performance and funding.”

She goes on: “If we are looking for a new cultural identity for Northern Protestants, let’s be honest and say that as Protestants the only things we have are marching bands and bonfires and the English language and a range of Protestant religious denominations. But have we damaged our relationship with Irishness so much that while my mum went to an Irish dancing school when she was a child with no problems, my daughter or son are unlikely go to an Irish dancing class now?That’s a problem because we are putting ourselves into two very different encampments again. Does everything, including culture, have to have such defined parameters?”

Pollock has an interesting take on how we should approach and prepare for a Border Poll. If there is to be a Border Poll, she would want a genuine choice between two future visions: Northern Ireland as part of a future UK and the North as part of a future united Ireland. “If people are going to be asked to engage in a discussion about a ‘new Ireland’, then the other choice – remaining in the UK – also needs a new vision. People should be asked to decide on two visions for the North. I would like people to contribute to both discussions so that we are presented with a real tangible choice and everyone will understand what that choice is. Because the present situation is not meeting the needs of very many people in Northern Ireland.”

“What will those two things – remaining in the UK or reuniting with the rest of Ireland – look like? I think if you have such a dual process – which all groups in Northern Ireland participate in – then you take much of the sting out of that conversation. You couldn’t be accused of participating in a conversation which was just about advocating for a united Ireland. If we’re going to stay as part of the UK, what will that look like? To me that is as big a process as what will a united Ireland look like.”

“I am constantly struggling with this,” she goes on. “How do I have conversations with unionist people about their response to the Irish language, to a Border Poll, to a united Ireland without getting their backs up, without them being afraid, without them digging their heels in and saying ‘I will never have that conversation’?”

“That’s my challenge to unionism. You can’t keep beating people with a stick, you can’t keep saying ‘I’m entitled to this piece of land.’ You have to be creative, you have to be progressive, you have to envision what a good future here might look like. You have to tell people why they would be better off with the North still in the UK. What would a Northern Ireland that is fair and prosperous for everybody look like? It you can’t do that, you’re going to lose.”

She desperately wants unionists to sit around a table with others to discuss the things that need to be improved to ensure a better future for the people of Northern Ireland. Is it the health system, which has deteriorated dramatically in recent years, or an education system which she calls ‘bonkers’, deeply divided by religion and class? She understands unionists’ need for a “sense of belonging”, but believes “the cultural identity British bit” which many unionists set so much store by is “almost additional to these core things of everyday life.”

She is not convinced by Irish nationalism either: “draping yourself in the flag and everyone living with the one identity. But the idea of redesigning a society that works better for everyone’s needs really does excite me. I would like to say to the people of Northern Ireland: Do you realise that you will have an opportunity to redesign the entire governmental and social infrastructure – the economy, health, education, agriculture, climate change – based on the real needs of the people of this island. Don’t you want to be part of that conversation?”

One problem with both Northern communities, Pollock believes, is “a serious lack of self-reflection – we’re always looking at the other community to do things to make us feel better…So if I identify as British, what parts of British history am I uncomfortable with, which parts require self-reflection and restorativeness and reparation? Equally with Sinn Fein and the IRA and republicanism, they also have to look at their practices, and ask ‘What was wrong about those’? You could talk all day about the treatment of women and young people, and the rough justice they imposed on their own communities. Some of the killings by the IRA – for example of the young census taker Joanne Mathers in Derry in 1981 – were horrific. I think young members of Sinn Fein, and particularly young female members of Sinn Fein, are now challenging the old guard in terms of ‘you need to deal with this. You need to reflect on and own your wrong actions.”

And the same within unionism. “You go into any loyalist working class estate and there will be an honour wall to a paramilitary organisation. Is that OK? And, if so, can people who fought for Irish freedom not do the same?” She gives another example: “Every November there’s a big remembrance service to remember British war dead in the Diamond, 200 yards from where Bloody Sunday happened. Are those two things the same? Both need to be recognised and reckoned with. I don’t think Irish people, including Sinn Fein, are that callous or lacking in empathy that they don’t see this. These are the kind of conversations that have to happen.”

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland, Protestantism, unionism and loyalism | Tagged history, ireland, irish-language, Northern Ireland, politics | 4 Comments

As immigration issue becomes toxic, beware the hatred and cruelty of the European far right

Posted on Tuesday, 17 September, 2024 by andypollak

I have just returned from a holiday in Spain. The main news story while I was there was an argument between the central government in Madrid and the regional government in the Canary Islands about who should take responsibility for the daily stream of refugees and economic migrants arriving on those islands on flimsy small boats from West Africa. Over 22,000 have arrived so far this year, and some charities are warning that there may be another 150,000 – many fleeing the conflict in Mali – waiting to come. The UK, with a population of 67 million compared to the Canaries’ 2.2 million, has taken over 15,000 of these ‘small boat’ refugees.

Immigration has become a toxic issue all over Europe. While I was in Spain the election season began in Germany. In regional elections in Thuringia and Saxony in former East Germany the far-right, anti-immigration party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), won over 30% of the votes and became the strongest party in Thuringia.

The Austrian writer and essayist, Robert Misik, writing in Social Europe (the online social democratic journal edited by Robin Wilson, my friend and former fellow editor of the Belfast magazine Fortnight) warns that the post-war European order which we have become familiar with was of “liberal democracy, moderate parties in government (turning from centre-right to centre-left), modest compromises, pluralism, media and artistic freedom and the rule of law. That order is everywhere embroiled in a defensive struggle that is becoming increasingly desperate.”¹

He says the impact of the results in Germany, although anticipated, go far beyond these provincial elections. “The ruling centre-left, three-party coalition in Berlin no longer knows how to help itself and is dragging itself into the last year of its term, while the ultra-right—including barely camouflaged Nazis—has been able to win relative majorities on the local scale and a significant share of support on the national level.

“As they achieve such electoral success, the ultra-right parties can no longer be dismissed as fringe phenomena. Not so long ago, the general perception was that they would have to moderate themselves to have a chance of winning majorities or entering governments. No longer.”

Misik says the opposite seems to be the case. The more they “engender polarisation and hatred” the broader their support base appears to become, as what he calls the “polarisation entrepreneurs” of social media fuel resentment and hatred of immigrants. Bjorn Höcke, the sinister leader of the AfD in Thuringia, openly declares that “well-tempered cruelty” is needed to drive migrants and refugees out of Germany. He has been convicted of repeatedly shouting ‘Alles für Deutschland’ (‘Everything for Germany’), the banned slogan of the Brownshirts, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

In his own country, Austria, Misik writes that the right-wing populist Freedom Party demands the homogenisation of the people: “differentiation and heterogeneity are purportedly bad for the nation.” At its rallies, the party increasingly resorts to violent language. The party leader, Herbert Kickl, boasts that he wears the accusation of ‘right-wing extremism’ like a medal. The party’s leading European politician, Harald Vilimsky, recently described the trio of female presidents of European Union institutions—Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, Roberta Metsola of the European Parliament and Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank—as three ‘witches’, who would be “made to feel the whip”. The Freedom Party’s rhetoric “could not be more anti-democratic and openly National Socialist,” said an artists’ open letter, led by the Nobel Prize winning writer Elfriede Jelinek and the celebrated film and theatre director Milo Rau, published at the end of August.

Misik concludes: “We are confronted with fascist mass parties grasping for power and with a followership that derives pleasure from the cult of cruelty, a language of contempt and a rhetoric of violence. The followers would not tip over into full-blown fascism without the leaders to agitate them; the leaders would not escalate into full-blown fascism without the followers to encourage them.”

We in Ireland are very fortunate that we have no significant fascist parties. But we should not be complacent. I have seen the snarl of hatred and cruelty on the faces of the thuggish young men, followers of far-right leaders like Gavin Pepper (now a Dublin city councillor), Philip Dwyer and Derek Blighe, as they harass and attack homeless asylum seekers on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal. I have seen them call those vulnerable young men “pigeons” and “animals”. It is not a huge leap from calling people animals to beating and even killing them.

And it’s not only the asylum seekers who are afraid of the far right. My daughter, the Irish Times journalist Sorcha Pollak, was writing last week about the scores of volunteer and community groups which have sprung up around the country to help asylum seekers and refugees and in response to anti-immigrant protests (these are the real heroes of the hour in my opinion).² “There’s been an over-reliance [by the State] on community groups, without recognition that the threat of attack from far-right groups is exposing us to danger”, one volunteer in Phibsboro for All in north Dublin told her. A volunteer in the IPO-asylum seekers help group in south Dublin (the group’s goal is “keeping the men warm and dry…we just want them feel someone cares about them”) says many of their volunteers have pulled back because they are afraid of the aggressive behaviour, verbal abuse and “cameras in your face all the time” of the far-right activists.

A group in north Cork echoed what many volunteers believe: “What we really need is positive messaging from the government that these people are not to be feared. The Government is shying away from doing that properly.” If I was a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I might think the Government is quite content to do very little, allowing the climate of fear and aggression around asylum seekers to become a deterrent for any more vulnerable young men fleeing war or poverty who are contemplating coming to this country (I exempt decent Green ministers like Roderick O’Gorman and Joe O’Brien from this suspicion).

For their part, the gardaí have issued several statements that despite fearmongering about “unvetted, military age men” posing a threat to local communities, women and children, there is no evidence that crime has increased in areas where asylum seekers are housed (or homeless). But they have arrested very few of the far right aggressors. There seems to be confusion about whether or not aggressively videoing asylum seekers without their permission constitutes an offence and, of course, the absence of any effective hate crime legislation makes it difficult to bring offenders to court. But it is striking how few people have been arrested and/or charged in connection with the burning of multiple accommodation centres (or buildings believed to be planned for accommodation centres) or attacking homeless asylum seekers in their tents.

Amandine Branders, a clinical psychologist working with refugees rescued from the Mediterranean by a Médecins Sans Frontieres ship, says experiencing violence or abuse in Europe can be particularly devastating for new arrivals because “they come here with so much expectation. They have this hope that there is humanity and humanity is what I’m going to find in Europe. [They think Europeans] were supposed to be the good guys. It confirms, somehow, the lack of hope in the world.”³

I know that the asylum issue is complicated and difficult, for all of Europe, not just Ireland. I know that national governments have the right to decide who to let into and who not to let into their countries. I know that Sinn Fein have toughened their immigration policy, believing that being too soft on refugees and asylum seekers was one of the reasons they did so badly in May’s European and local elections. But we are not Spain or Italy or Germany or Britain, having to cope with huge numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. I hope the traditional compassion for and solidarity with the poor and the persecuted which is one of the more attractive traits of Irish people will not be lost as this now prosperous country, with its full employment economy, lines up with the rest of ‘Fortress Europe’ in closing our gates to all but a very few of these unfortunates.

¹ socialeurope.eu/the-ascendant-far-right-the-lust-for-cruelty

² ‘You feel you’re doing the State’s work: Volunteers step in to help asylum seekers’, Irish Times, 13 September

³ Sally Hayden, ‘Rescue ship tries to save minds as well as bodies in Mediterranean’, Irish Times, 16 September

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

‘Oh, ah, up the Ra’: they killed 1,771 people in the North and some gardaí too. Was it all worth it?

Posted on Thursday, 29 August, 2024 by andypollak

Young people chanting ‘Oh, ah, up the Ra’ is becoming commonplace in nationalist – and not-so-nationalist – Ireland. Primary age children were at it during the big homecoming parade for the Olympic team in Dublin earlier this month. And it drew arguably the biggest crowd of the day for those ancient IRA fellow-travellers, the Wolfe Tones, at the Electric Picnic music festival in Stradbally, County Laois.

“People are going to sing that chant anyway. It’s like the Jackie’s Army song,” Victor Williams from Swords told the Irish Times at Stradbally. “It’s a chant they know. I’m sure there are some who are going to sing it politically, but everybody here is just having a good time. I don’t think there is any badness about it.”

Sinn Féin must be delighted that a laudatory chant about the IRA, who killed nearly five times more people in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ than the British Army, RUC and UDR combined,¹ has become so popular and normalised among children and young people. As former IRA man and Sinn Féin Assembly member Paul Butler told Irish Times journalists Mark Hennessy and Gerry Moriarty²: “They’re obviously nationalists. Obviously, whether anyone likes it or not, a lot of young people see the IRA as a kind of movement, as freedom fighters, even if they don’t think of it very often.”

“They know that it was about getting Britain out of Ireland and ending discrimination,” says Butler. Were those two aims worth killing nearly 1,800 people, the great majority of them Irish people? one might ask. John Hume believed the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence for unity was not worth one human life, and I agree with him.

I hope fervently that Sinn Féin do not get into power in the next seven months and start rewriting history to make the men and women of the Provisional IRA into heroes. I fear that will be relatively easy in this republic, given the state’s foundational myth, rooted in the justice of the 1916-1921 War of Independence, Sinn Fein’s insistence that they are the legitimate inheritors of that mantle, and the re-emergence of anti-Britishness in the post Brexit period.

Laurence McKeown, former IRA man, Maze prison hunger striker and now a playwright, does not agree with those (like me) who argue that the civil rights campaign, the SDLP’s peaceful politics and demographic change would have left Northern nationalists roughly where they are now, minus 30 years of conflict and 3,700 deaths.

“I don’t think we would be where we are today without the armed struggle. Unfortunately, so many people died. I still don’t see a generosity on the part of unionism to engage with all the issues that nationalists had,” he says. “I do not see any point where unionism voluntarily would give any concessions; everything had to be fought for. Hopefully that is changing now”. He might have added: “now that Sinn Fein are winning.”

Michael Culbert, director of the ex-republican prisoners support group Coiste, also insists the IRA’s campaign was justified, but he is a rare ex-IRA man who admits that the views of the unionists were not understood. “We weren’t overly thinking of their views, that this is their home. It is only with hindsight I am looking at that.”

These men are clearly uncomfortable when the matter of the men they killed is raised. Butler says he was contacted by “a grandson, or something” of the 50 year old RUC officer he killed in 1974, and he offered to meet him, although the offer was not taken up. He was only 17 when he carried out that murder.

Culbert says he has often thought of the man he killed. “What can you say, the awful stuff that happened, the killing etc. As far as I am concerned there was a war on. How can you talk about this without sounding cold? I don’t know, but I am really not cold. I was a participant in the struggle. I was a member of an armed group. I don’t want that to sound vicious. It is awful that anybody died, it really is, but the British were not going to give – that is my firm view.”

One problem with this argument is that members of the British security forces were not the largest number of people killed in the fight to end discrimination and the British presence in the North – not by a distance. Over 2,000 were civilians, compared to 503 British soldiers and 509 members of the RUC and locally recruited UDR/Royal Irish Regiment. The IRA killed 1,771 people, compared to the British security forces 361 and loyalist paramilitaries 1,035.

In the Republic, the IRA and the smaller INLA also killed 11 members of the Garda Siochana during the ‘troubles’. Over the summer I read The Kidnapping, by Tommy Conlon and Ronan McGreevy, the story of the November 1983 kidnap by the IRA of supermarket boss, Don Tidey, and the shooting dead of one Irish soldier (Patrick Kelly) and one unarmed trainee garda (Gary Sheehan) by IRA gunmen in the course of his rescue from Derrada Wood in the wilds of County Leitrim.

The gardaí let it be known that they were looking for five IRA members in connection with the kidnapping and killings: Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, Gerard McDonnell, Tony McAllister, Oliver McKiernan and Seamus McElwaine. The most notorious of these, and the only one who ever appeared in a court in connection with the kidnapping, was McFarlane. He had been convicted of the murder of five Protestants in a bombing and shooting at the Bayardo Bar on Belfast’s Shankill Road in August 1975. Six years later he was the IRA prisoners’ leader in the Maze during the 1981 hunger strike. In his classic book about the hunger strike, Ten Men Dead, Guardian journalist David Beresford described him as a “sectarian mass murderer – or at least that would be the tag which could easily be attached to him by a hostile press. That is why he was never chosen for a hunger strike – he was potentially a one-man public relations disaster.”

In June 2008, over 24 years after the events at Derrada Wood, McFarlane was brought to trial on charges of false imprisonment and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. The gardaí felt they had a strong case because they had photographs of McFarlane’s fingerprints at the scene and a statement – denied by McFarlane in court – that he had been there. But after the court ruled that his statement, allegedly made 10 years earlier, was inadmissible, the case collapsed and McFarlane walked free. David Kelly, Patrick Kelly’s son, who attended the trial, said; “Unfortunately, it looks highly probable that no one will ever be prosecuted for the kidnapping or the killings.” That proved to be the case – and to add insult to injury, two years later the European Court of Human Rights awarded McFarlane €15,500 in compensation and costs from the Irish state for delays in bringing his case to trial. He is now a “feted individual in republican circles,” say the authors.

In 2012 David Kelly confronted Martin McGuinness in Athlone, where he was canvassing for votes in that year’s presidential election in which he was a candidate. Kelly asked McGuinness for the names of his father’s killers. McGuinness said he did not know their names and denied that he was on the IRA’s Army Council. Kelly called him a liar. Ed Moloney, author of the authoritative book, A Secret History of the IRA, believes it was inconceivable that McGuinness did not know who was involved at Derrada Wood: “McGuinness was on the Army Council, so would have been intimately aware of crucial detail such as who was involved.” David Kelly told McGuinness: “Before there can be any reconciliation in this country, there has to be truth.” “Murder is murder” he added, as a section of the crowd witnessing the exchange broke into applause.

People like McGuinness and McFarlane were hardened revolutionaries, well used to killing for the cause of Irish unity. Gary Sheehan’s sister, Jennifer McCann, hoped that those who killed her brother had his death on their conscience. “But I don’t really know if people who carry out these crimes, do they have a conscience?” she asked. Not if those crimes were carried out in pursuit of so-called ‘Irish freedom’ is my response. “Young people in West Belfast, or anywhere else, don’t see me as a criminal,” says Paul Butler.

40 years ago the IRA were not viewed as the patriotic freedom fighters many people – and particularly young people – see them as today. The then Labour Party cabinet minister Barry Desmond wrote in his autobiography: “I walked behind the coffins of the gardaí and army, public servants who were murdered in cold blood by the Provos. As I tried to convey my sympathy on those awful occasions, I never forgave these IRA apologists for the pain and suffering I witnessed on the faces of the widows and children they maimed for life.”

The Chief Justice, Tom O’Higgins, justifying the ban on Sinn Féin appearing on RTE, called the party of the IRA an “evil and dangerous organisation whose object was to overthrow the state and its institutions, if necessary by force.”

Everything has changed now, of course. Over the past 26 years since the Good Friday Agreement Sinn Féin in the Republic has become just another left-of-centre party. The IRA’s violence is now seen as ancient history. We are well on the way to large numbers of younger people believing it was justified.

Meanwhile, successive opinion polls and focus groups have shown that most people in the Republic are not prepared to make the slightest sacrifice in their symbols and laws – flag, anthem, constitution – to help unionists feel more welcome in a united Ireland. A group of Trinity College Dublin politics students I talked to two years ago said they were “uneasy about bringing British colonisers [i.e. unionists] into a united Ireland.”³ All this confirms me in my belief that we in the South are in for a very rude awakening if and when there is a narrow vote in favour of unity in a border poll in the next 10-20 years.

¹ The data in this article is taken from Lost Lives: the stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton (Mainstream Publishing, 1999). The figures cited are for the years 1966-1999.

² Interviews with former IRA men in ‘I think we were right to do it’ – 30 years after the ceasefire, former IRA members look back’, Irish Times, 24 August

³ ‘Discussing Irish unity over dinner with Trinity College politics students, April 2022

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland, Sinn Fein | Tagged ireland, the-troubles | 3 Comments

Is Olympic success a sign that Ireland can be made attractive to Northern Protestants?

Posted on Wednesday, 14 August, 2024 by andypollak

In all the wonderful hype about Ireland’s four Olympic gold medallists, there was one aspect that went relatively unreported – at least here in the republic. The fact that two of them – Daniel Wiffen in the 800 metres swimming final and gymnast Rhys McClenaghan on the pommel horse – were from Northern Ireland was, of course, widely highlighted. What was missing from most of the coverage I saw was that these Olympic champions were two rather atypical Northerners wearing the green of Ireland: Daniel Wiffen may be a Catholic but he speaks with the same northern English accent he had when he arrived in NI from Yorkshire aged two, and Rhys McClenaghan is from the solidly Protestant and unionist town of Newtownards.

You won’t see any Irish tricolours at Larne Swimming Club in County Antrim, where Wiffen was a member, or in Origin Gymnastics, the club McClenaghan and his coach Luke Carson opened in Newtownards earlier this year. These are bedrock unionist areas. Yet McClenaghan told the Irish Independent: “Not one person has said one negative thing to my face about what country I should represent.”

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but it seems to me to be a sign that for somebody from a Northern Protestant and/or unionist background to represent Ireland has become more acceptable in that often fearful and blinkered community, paranoid about all things Irish. Of course Northerners of that persuasion have been playing rugby for Ireland ever since partition. And boxers from Protestant areas of Belfast such as Wayne McCullough and Carl Frampton have never had any problem with wearing the green of Ireland in the ring.

Northern Ireland being the binary place it is, athletes from the province also won medals competing for Great Britain: Hannah Scott from Coleraine and Rebecca Shorten from Belfast getting respectively a gold and silver as part of rowing teams, and Jack McMillan from Bangor, who switched from Ireland to GB in 2022, getting a swimming gold as part of the 4×200 metres relay team. Northern Ireland athletes competing for both nations brought back six medals, only one less than Team Ireland did.

In the Irish Times Ronan McGreevy pointed out that of the 41 athletes from the North, 34 chose to represent Ireland in Paris. For some of those athletes competing for Team Ireland was an expression of their identity, but for others it was a purely sporting decision. He went on: “Team Ireland is a reminder that most Irish sporting organisations ignored the rupture of partition and carried on as if it never happened. The GAA is the most obvious example, but it also extends to most international sports. There is only one Ireland rugby, cricket, hockey, basketball, show jumping, swimming, boxing and athletics team [the major exception, of course, is football/soccer]. Sporting bodies in Ireland have long understood that it makes no sense to have separate entities on a small island.

“Rhys McClenaghan had already represented Britain and Northern Ireland as a youngster before his coach, Luke Carson, was made redundant from Rathgael Gym in Bangor. Gymnastics Ireland stepped in and provided him with the training facilities that he needed. McClenaghan is British enough to accept a British Empire Medal for his service to gymnastics and Irish enough to respectfully stand for Amhrán na bhFiann and for the Tricolour.”¹

It was not only the large proportion of Northerners which showed that Team Ireland was truly representative of the ‘new Ireland’. The most popular champion of all was lightweight boxer Kellie Harrington, who won her second successive Olympic gold medal in Paris. She is a married lesbian from a poor inner-city area of Dublin, who wears both her gay and working class credentials with impressive pride. Another particular heroine was Rhasidat Adeleke, a 21 year old Irish-Nigerian woman from the Dublin suburb of Tallaght, who came fourth in an intensely competitive women’s 400 metres, but is clearly destined for greater things.

I believe our new sporting prowess – in rugby, as in athletics, rowing (Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy from Skibbereen retained their lightweight double sculls title, and the north-south combination of Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch won bronze in the double sculls), swimming and gymnastics – is part of a new, strong, confident Ireland that is riding on the economic success of recent years. We are no longer the poor, emigration-ridden, barely solvent small nation we were when Ronnie Delany won Ireland’s last athletics gold medal in 1956 (he was nearly not sent to the Melbourne Olympics because of lack of funds). I wrote in March that we are now rated as the eighth best country in the world according to the UN’s Human Development Index (based on life expectancy, education levels and GDP per capita).² So why are we surprised when we are now in the top twenty nations when it comes to winning Olympic medals?

As Irish Times columnist Una Mullally wrote: “The self-assuredness among so many creative Irish people – and sport is a creative endeavour – demonstrates a novel openness to success.” She quoted Rhys McClenaghan commenting while watching footage of children from Newtownards leaping in delight at his achievement: “Anything that you put your mind to, believe in it enough, are dedicated and determined enough – you might one day achieve it.” That’s American ‘can do’ with a Northern Irish accent! Mullally concluded that there is a huge amount going in in Ireland these days in sport, cinema, literature and music, and urged people “not to break the spell, because there’s so much pleasure to be found in just sitting back and enjoying this green and golden generation.”³

This is what I have been trying to say for many years. An economically, socially and culturally fair and successful Ireland is the best passport to some kind of eventual political unity. It won’t come next year, and probably won’t come next decade. But if we make the new Ireland a good place for ordinary Northerners – including ordinary thoughtful unionists – I believe many of them will come round to understanding that their most hopeful future is to find a way of sharing this wonderful island with their erstwhile nationalist adversaries. Persuasion, however difficult, remains the key. Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, Sir James Craig, was right when he said over a century ago that coercion was the last way to persuade Ulster unionists of the value of unity.

That is why I think sport is so important. Sport is a life-enhancing activity that makes everyone feel good. I feel at my best when I come down from climbing a mountain in Wicklow or the Mournes, or come out from a sea swim at Seapoint, or pedal across Ireland on my annual cross-country cycle. Similarly, some of my happiest memories are of watching great Irish rugby and soccer teams successfully take on the world. I have a vivid memory of Dubliners in the streets in January 1999 – nine months after the Good Friday Agreement – cheering Ulster fans returning from Lansdowne Road after their team had won the Heineken Cup European rugby championship. I have a similarly strong recollection of sitting in a bar in Rome at 3 o’clock in the morning after the Republic of Ireland were narrowly beaten by Italy in the quarter finals of the 1990 World Cup with a farmer from Macroom and a Protestant schoolteacher from Belfast.

The Wiffen and McClenaghan families were happy and proud to wear green Ireland t-shirts when celebrating their sons’ Olympic success. For obvious reasons Irish tricolours were not much in evidence in Magheralin on the Down-Armagh border (the Wiffens’ home place) or in Newtownards. Do we need to tone down the flag-waving side of Irish nationalism – most unionists associate the tricolour with Sinn Fein marches and IRA men’s coffins – if that makes it easier for Northern Protestants and/or unionists to feel Irish and identify with Ireland? I have always thought that a green banner with a gold (or orange) harp on it would be the perfect flag for a re-united Ireland.

So I agree completely with Ronan McGreevy when he concluded: “Team Ireland reflects the long-stated axiom of John Hume that you cannot unite territory without uniting people first. The Irish athletes have done that with the minimum of fuss. They are the true ‘Team of Us.”

¹ ‘Team Ireland shows what an all-island approach can achieve on the world stage’, 9 August

² ‘Ireland in 2024 is a rather good country, despite the begrudgers’

³ ‘Ireland is different to the begrudging country that I grew up in,’ 5 August

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

Cycling through the ‘hidden heartlands’ of this wondrous island

Posted on Wednesday, 31 July, 2024 by andypollak

July is the month I take a break from political commentary and go cycling around Ireland. Two years ago – with my friend David Ward – I cycled from Mizen Head in west Cork to Fair Head in north Antrim. In contrast, this year we decided to cycle from north-west to south-east: from Derry city to Rosslare in Wexford.

That involved putting the bicycles on the train to Belfast and Derry and back from Rosslare. I have often wondered why we have met so few other cycle tourists in our midsummer perambulations around the island (just one other couple this year). One of the reasons must be the extraordinary lack of provision for bicycles on Irish Rail trains. There was a time when at least on the trains between the three main cities – Dublin, Belfast and Cork – there were guards vans, and therefore plenty of room for bikes. Now every train has precisely two clumsy racks for bikes in one single passenger car. I had booked those racks for our trip back in April, the full allowable three months in advance. I wonder how many disappointed foreign cycle tourists have discovered there was no possibility of bringing their bikes on Irish trains this summer. I have tried in vain to book myself and my two cycling daughters onto trains. It’s a crazy, self-defeating system at a time when sustainable tourism is all the rage.

So David and I set off from Derry on 1st July. The first two significant places we passed were a contrast in national and sectarian styles. Newbuildings is a loyalist village: Orange flags and First World War memorials abound, with every small settlement seeming to sport a cricket ground. Strabane is a strongly nationalist town (although it too has a cricket club), with Sinn Fein’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill canvassing in the main street, surrounded by a group of adoring women, and republican hunger strike memorials in the Catholic housing estates.

The cricketing theme continued in the tree-lined, former industrial village of Sion Mills, just south of Strabane. Here, in July 1969 – in the last piece of good news before Northern Ireland descended into 30 years of violence – Ireland caused one the biggest upsets in late 20th century cricket by defeating a powerful West Indian side, bowling them out on a soggy pitch for an astonishing 25 runs.

We spent the first night in Omagh, watching Orange bands march through the streets as part of the Battle of the Somme commemorations. If you take away the anti-Catholicism, there is great colour and pageantry in these band parades, not to mention musical virtuosity. In a united Ireland we are going to have to find some way of making them acceptable, even enjoyable, to the great majority of people in the present-day republic who are implacably hostile to the Orange Order.

The following morning we cycled through Fintona, a classically divided Northern Irish village, with a big, modern gospel hall at one end of the main street, and a splendid GAA complex at the other. In the middle is a pub, The Poet’s Bar: one can only hope that members of the two communities occasionally come together here under the benign eye of John Montague, one of Ireland’s finest late 20th century poets, who was raised in nearby Garvaghey.

In Lisnaskea in Fermanagh, we had a tasty lunch in the charming Cherry Tree bakery, one of those remarkable home bakeries for which Northern Ireland deserves to be better known. Isabel Charles and her husband Norman converted a badly rundown building into this bakery and cafe, opening it in June 1970, just as nearly 30 years of darkness descended on the North. These are the kind of unheralded, extremely hardworking people who kept open the lines of civility and prosperity during the worst of times.

Then it was across the border into Cavan. Cavan town gives the impression of being an unusually industrious and thriving place. Whether it’s big multinationals like Liberty Insurance, St Gobain or Abbott, or smaller local enterprises in everything from data analytics to cider making, digitisation in construction to homemade chocolates, this unfashionable town is a place of enterprise and entrepreneurship. And it shows in the lines of plutocratic five and six bedroomed houses on many of the roads out of the town.

The next stop was Loughcrew in north Meath. This extraordinary passage tomb on a hill is estimated to be 5,200 years old, 2,000 years older than nearby Newgrange and older again than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. As sun and showers swept across the countryside, leaving a brilliant lucidity in the sky, I was able to see the whole central plain of Ireland and the mountains that ring it: the Cooleys, the Mournes, the Wicklows, Slieve Gullion, the Slieve Blooms, Cuilcagh on the Fermanagh-Cavan border and the mountains of Sligo and Leitrim. Here for more than five millenia people have been celebrating their ancestors, their gods and nature. It is a truly humbling experience to stand on its small summit and think about the countless ancestors who have stood here before me and contemplated this celestial view.

We crossed Westmeath in bright sunshine. One of my glimpses of heaven on earth (I have others) is to be cycling through the hayfields and meadows of Ireland’s rich agricultural counties under blue skies and scudding clouds with the smell of silage in my nostrils. Then it was along the banks of the Royal Canal, past young canoeists learning the ropes at Longwood and the engineering marvel that is the Boyne Aqueduct, built in 1795 to bring the canal over the Boyne river.

From canal to canal: west of Naas is a very picturesque and little-known wooded stretch of the Grand Canal, complete with cafes and coffee kiosks, which lands one conveniently in that town’s main thoroughfare through the short Basin Street. We spent that night in the hospitable company of my astronomer and adventurer friend John Butler, late of Armagh Observatory, who spends much of his time now in his converted farmhouse outside Hollywood, with superb views of the Wicklow Mountains.

We skirted those mountains through Baltinglass, Tullow and Bunclody to make Enniscorthy our final overnight stop, breaking for lunch in the Green Lemon café in the pretty village of Rathvilly (home place of Kevin Barry, the 18 year old Irish Volunteer and medical student executed by the British in the War of Independence). I have written before of my wonder at the excellent cafés in so many small places these days, one of the most pleasurable aspects of the arrival of prosperity in Ireland. Two more on this journey were the Limetree coffee shop at Loughcrew and the Sugar and Spice café in Bunclody. As a longtime café lover, I cannot recommend these pleasing establishments highly enough.

We ended our six-day journey at Rosslare Strand in County Wexford with a moment of happiness as I posed with my bicycle on the beach for a photo taken by a group of friendly women from Carlow. This was a journey through part of what Tourism Ireland has dubbed the ‘Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands’ (with a bit of ‘Ireland’s Ancient East’ thrown in): effectively the Shannon basin and the midlands, because due to the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s idiotic reluctance to get involved in Tourism Ireland’s highly regarded international campaigns, it has to stop at the border.

The ‘Hidden Heartlands’ campaign has never really taken off, unlike Tourism Ireland’s spectacularly successful ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ along the west coast. As I was cycling our 450 kilometre route through the heart of the island, I was mulling over what one might be able to sell to overseas tourists in the 10 counties we passed through. There are plenty of fine attractions in these relatively unfashionable and unvisited regions, some of which we experienced on this trip. Here is an indicative list: Derry’s walls; Tyrone’s Orange band parades (they do good republican parades too, if that is more your bag); the Marble Arch caves and the lakes of Fermanagh; the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ steps up Cuilcagh mountain on the Cavan border; the passage grave at Loughcrew; the 18th century folly that is Belvedere House in Westmeath; the Curragh of Kildare; the Wicklow Mountains; the Borris Festival of Writing and Ideas (with some of the world’s leading novelists, historians and journalists) in Carlow and the marvellous beaches of Wexford. Ireland is a uniquely beautiful and fascinating island, and the often overlooked Irish midlands are part of that fascination.

PS (1) One can’t get away from politics completely, even in midsummer. I was struck by the shameless populism of Sinn Fein who – six weeks after their poor performance in the European and local elections (partly attributable to their previously generous stance on housing asylum seekers) – produced a policy paper which basically advocated moving the accommodation of asylum seekers from working class to middle class areas. I live in the middle-class area of Rathmines/Ranelagh in south Dublin, where we have four buildings owned by property developers and a hotel housing several hundred asylum seekers. And there has been no trouble. Praise is due, in particular, for the small group of brilliant people in the area – most of them women – who have single-handedly supported the homeless asylum seekers for whom there is no accommodation, and whom the authorities cruelly keep moving along and erecting high fences to keep them and their tents out of small green areas. One can only imagine the exhaustion, fear and hopelessness of these young men from poor and war-torn countries.

PS (2) Congratulations to Armagh on beating Galway to win the All-Ireland football championship. I lived for 14 years in Armagh city when running the Centre for Cross Border Studies, and have a very soft spot for the place. I’m particularly glad for manager Kieran McGeeney, whose determination and refusal to say die during the bad times over the past 10 years are worthy of real admiration.

Posted in General, The island environment | 4 Comments

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