2 Irelands together

Two states, one system: a novel idea worth considering

Posted on Wednesday, 17 April, 2024 by andypollak

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like new ideas which go beyond the binary unionist-nationalist straitjacket which has dominated (and constrained) debate about the future of this island for most of the past hundred years. Thus over the past few years I have published the heterodox ideas of people like political scientist Padraig O’Malley, reconciliation activist Duncan Morrow, social researcher Paul Nolan, socialist writer Daniel Finn, Derry Protestant community worker Brian Dougherty, and Newry business and community leader Conor Patterson.

I dislike the crude majoritarian thinking of groups like Ireland’s Future, with their insistence that the people of the disputed and divided northern province of this country have to choose between one – and only one – of two diametrically opposed future constitutional options: continued membership of the United Kingdom or Irish territorial unity. I have insisted – although my insistence usually falls on deaf ears – that we also have to consider more flexible options like federalism, confederalism and joint authority (and even Seamus Mallon’s idea of ‘parallel consent,’ although I have come to believe that this is neither democratic nor practicable).

There’s a predictable sameness about the usual reaction from nationalist quarters to such propositions: they denounce them as another version of the unionist ‘veto’ and demand that any discussion of them be closed down. The only veto this results in is a veto on constructive thinking! The claim is also made that such ideas are in breach of the ‘holy grail’ of the Good Friday Agreement, even though Ireland’s Future can also be cavalier with the GFA (as I pointed out in my last blog), and anyway that mould-breaking accord has a specific section allowing for a review by the two governments in the event of difficulties arising.

So I was interested to come across a recent publication called ‘Two states, One system’ by Jarlath Kearney, a Belfast-based strategy adviser and former policy adviser to Sinn Fein’s NI Deputy First Minister, the late Martin McGuinness. Kearney is from strong Northern nationalist/republican stock: his father was prominent as a campaigner for the McBride fair employment principles in the 1980s and his brother is chair of Sinn Fein. His paper is based on a series of articles first published in the Irish News, and he spoke further about his ideas at an Institute of International and European Affairs event in Dublin (sponsored by the Hume Foundation) in February.

Kearney ended any association with party politics a decade ago, spending the interim period working in senior public service roles in the North, and has independently developed some interesting and open-minded ideas about a possible future for Northern Ireland. He opens by setting out his stall, and it is a broadly nationalist one: “We must prioritise the aisling (vision) of reconciliation under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and of uniting Ireland’s people by consent under the solemn mantle and ‘firm will’ of Article 3 of the Constitution of Ireland.”

However, he says that the ground rules for these discussions should be “patience, prudence and partnership, built around a ‘two states, one system’ philosophy.” He emphasises the broad consensus among policy makers and civic leaders across Ireland and the UK that the two states will continue on the island of Ireland for the foreseeable future. In his paper he says this structure will exist “at least into the 2030s – notwithstanding any Border poll. There is no viable short-to-medium term alternative.” During February’s IIEA event, he emphasised that Ireland is entering a long period of evolution that requires a need to think differently, including being aware of unionist fears.

He writes that Ireland and the UK are “inextricably linked in a deeply complex, always oscillating, and ultimately infinite cross-cultural journey. The longstanding status quo is steadily destabilising. Evolution is, by definition, inevitable. But stable foundations are a prerequisite for the sustainability of future arrangements”. The alternative to a patient, prudent partnership between the British and Irish governments to plan the next stage of this evolution would be to “plunge Ireland into further societal chaos.” This political thinker is no simplistic ‘Brits Out’ republican.

If there is a Border poll vote for unity, Kearney suggests an ingenious constitutional compromise. This would involve “Northern Ireland continuing as a state but, post referendum, moving under the constitutional sovereignty of Ireland and its presidency (including full European Union membership) whilst concurrently maintaining its full membership with the Commonwealth (which retains the UK monarch as its head).” Would this even be workable? It is certainly worth further discussion.

However he warns that before any Border poll there will be “relentless hard yards of unspectacular work” which will have to go into “steadily developing systems of rights, respect, rapprochement and reconciliation; a policy culture of economic opportunity, social equality, public inclusion and participation, delivered by creative public sector expertise. It cannot be achieved by artificial deadlines for Border polls with peremptory demands for predetermined destinations.” On the other hand, nor can reconciliation be achieved by “anyone believing that the current constitutional framework will exist for ever, fossilised through some kind of political cryonics” [meaning ‘deep freezing the bodies of those who have just died, in the hope that scientific advances may allow them to be revived in the future.’]

Kearney also warns against nationalist triumphalism, suggesting that nationalists continually presenting Irish unity as the automatic answer to Brexit risks becoming a mirror image of extremist English nationalism. It would promote “an underlying swagger and arrogance replete with the sulphuric stench of Irish nationalistic purity. The risk of that ‘swagger’ is more worrying, prevalent and potent than many have yet acknowledged or even understood in Irish society. Much greater self-awareness is needed.”

He asks that parties seeking unity “now publish their specific proposed changes for the [Irish] Constitution. The difficulty with abstract concepts, such as a headline Brexit demand or a Border poll on Northern Ireland’s future constitutional status, is that they sometimes impair effective outcomes.” He asks proponents of unity to be clear and precise in their proposals. “How else can informed consent precede the exercise of the principle of majority voting consent, unless citizens have clarity about the concepts being put to them? What do proponents practically mean, in the deepest and most detailed terms, by blank promissory notes of a ‘new Ireland’? A ‘united Ireland’? A ‘shared Ireland’? The ‘end of partition’? Six years after Brexit [this was originally written in 2022], detail is a reasonable ask.”

He stresses that reconciliation is not only something that Northern Protestants and Catholics have to strenuously engage with, but, even more importantly, the now largely estranged Irish and British governments must re-energise. He looks back to the courageous efforts by the late Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness genuinely to reach out to opponents they could be forgiven for seeing as enemies. “The pathway ahead must be the careful re-establishment of relationships of partnership between both sovereign governments, especially at official and technical level.”

He proposes a “new Treaty-based rapprochement” between Ireland and the UK. Such a new agreement is “many years off, with bilateral politics first requiring a much more settled EU-UK relationship leading to the return of a stable partner in London later in this decade.” By this he obviously means a Keir Starmer-led Labour government. He believes such an inter-governmental partnership (as existed in the 1990s and early 2000s) is an essential prerequisite if we are going to develop the “unfulfilled reconciliation strand” of the Good Friday Agreement, which still has “substantial potential to deliver societal improvements – and genuine unity of people – across Ireland based on a firm foundation of equal rights and mutual respect.”

At the IIEA event, Kearney outlined that the Ireland-UK partnership needs to come “from the top” in both Dublin and London, and this inter-governmental leadership can then provide the authority for civil servants to do things within that framework. In recommending this path, he emphasised the importance of fully respecting the differing sovereignties, while prioritising North-South cooperation based on pragmatism.

He also says that people coming out of decades of armed conflict require “actual bread and butter on the table today, not just the promised scent of constitutional roses for tomorrow.” He writes: “If proponents of change cannot deliver real social reform at a local level in cities and towns [in NI] by using targeted budgets to address longstanding patterns of structural deprivation and exclusion affecting the sectors of greatest inequality within the areas of greatest objective need, how then do they intend to effect macro-societal transformation with mature public institutions of a neighbouring state at national level?”

Kearney sees the Irish government’s non-threatening Shared Island initiative – and the Shared Island dialogues it includes – as possible “foundation stones” for patiently rebuilding the cross-border process which will be required to bring together politicians, civil society, business and the wider public to discuss Northern Ireland’s future role on the island of Ireland. He says this initiative “deserves much greater credit for its long-sighted, iterative understanding about the need to steadily build bases of genuine dialogue with empirical evidence and creative policy innovation across Ireland.” Far better Micheál Martin’s Shared Island as a forum for this kind of important and open-ended deliberation than Sinn Fein and Ireland’s Future’s proposed all-Ireland Citizens Assembly with its single predetermined outcome.

He cites fair employment in the North – “a steady work in progress” – as an example of “policy patience (with persistence)” which over a 50 year period brought about positive reform in an area in which discrimination was “historically an accelerant for armed conflict.” “Northern Ireland’s workplaces are today increasingly shared and diverse, especially across the public sector. This has directly encouraged much greater societal integration and grassroots reconciliation than was seen in previous generations.”

In the final pages of his 36 page paper, Kearney elaborates further on the interesting idea which gives the paper its title: ”Two states, one system.” He cites all-island sporting organisations like the GAA and the IRFU as examples of all-island bodies which successfully oversee ‘two states/one system’ administrations, thus “creatively transcending any notion of a divisive cultural border.” He could have added post-1998 all-island bodies like Waterways Ireland, the Loughs Agency and Tourism Ireland, or the post-2008 all-island wholesale electricity network. He cites health as another area of great potential for all-island cooperation, but also one with massive resource demands and coordination problems – although I would suggest there is currently less all-island cooperation in this sector than he argues.

Kearney urges that, operating within the Good Friday Agreement, the approach should be one of “maximum joint administration (not joint authority) and joint systems (not joint sovereignty) between both sovereign governments, necessarily involving – where appropriate – the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly and other institutional north-south and east-west elements of the 1998 Agreement.” He concludes: “The next decade should be one in which the fallout from Brexit is faced collectively by encouraging the systematic enhancement of all-island policy cooperation across Ireland in practical and technical terms.” The focus should be “on ensuring that the basic delivery of public policy reforms can become exemplars of good practice by government in Northern Ireland and thereby positive indicators of what might be achieved in any new future arrangements.” At the IIEA event Kearney said what was needed to manage constitutional evolution, including to run Northern Ireland over the next generation, was a “joint management framework” between the two governments.

That was largely the message I was preaching during my 14 years running the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh (1999-2013). It begs some questions: notably whether an incoming British Labour government would be up to playing its part in such a major programme of all-Ireland cooperation. And whether at least some more pragmatic unionist politicians might buy into it. Jarlath Kearney would do us all a great service by researching a follow-up paper on these issues – this first one is an impressively thought-provoking beginning.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Leo Varadkar and Ireland’s Future have very different ideas of reconciliation and consent

Posted on Thursday, 28 March, 2024 by andypollak

I wouldn’t have said this seven years ago, when he first became Taoiseach, but I am sorry to see Leo Varadkar stepping down from that post. I do not agree with many of his right-of-centre policies on economic and social issues. But this straight half-Czech Irishman liked having a leader who was a gay half-Indian Irishman, a symbol of the new openness and multiculturalism of the country.

More importantly, as someone from a Northern Protestant background who would one day like to see a peaceful, harmonious and united Ireland, I believe Varadkar has played a progressive role when it came to the thorny issues associated with my home place and its difficult unionist inhabitants. I remember his reconciling gestures: attending ceremonies to remember the 1987 Enniskillen atrocity by the IRA, walking alongside the unionist Lord Mayor of Belfast at First World War commemorations and visiting the headquarters of the Orange Order. He was rightly steely in his fierce opposition to a post-Brexit hard Border which would have damaged the interests of Ireland, North as well as South (although he won few unionist friends for this stand, and for the resultant trade border down the Irish Sea).

I particularly remember a speech he gave to the big rally by the pro-unity campaigning group Ireland’s Future in Dublin’s 3 arena in October 2022.While saying he believed in a united Ireland, Varadkar suggested that the existing structures of the Good Friday Agreement – internal power-sharing, North-South bodies and East-West cooperation – should be strengthened and deepened after reunification.

He said some other eminently sensible things. “There is a distinct danger that we could focus too much on a Border poll and on future constitutional models, and not enough on how we enhance engagement, build trust and create the conditions for a convincing majority for change.” (He was booed by a section of the nearly 5,000 strong audience, many of them Northern nationalists, when he said this).

“So we need to engage with unionists and that growing group who identify as Northern Irish rather than British or Irish, and indeed those who identify as both. We also need to acknowledge the right of Northern nationalists to have equal recognition in the debate.

“We can’t build our future based on narrow majorities or on the wishes of just one community. For these reasons, I believe the objective should be to secure as large a majority as possible in both jurisdictions in any future poll. 50% plus one may be enough on paper, but won’t be a success in practice. Our only hope depends on presenting a proposal – North and South – that will be able to achieve democratic consent. This will involve compromise.

“It involves accepting a form of unification that is more inclusive and imaginative, one that can achieve the greatest measure of democratic support, and therefore legitimacy, and have the greatest chance of success. We need something that can evolve and deepen in time. And we need to remember that the next step doesn’t have to be the final word.”¹

After that rally I said to Neale Richmond, then a backbench TD from a Church of Ireland background, now likely to become a minister in new Fine Gael leader Simon Harris’s cabinet, that Varadkar was “my kind of moderate nationalist”. I remain convinced that his balanced, humane approach to the North and to the slow and careful steps that will be necessary if the ‘new Ireland’ is to be more harmonious than the old divided island is the correct one, rather than the ‘bring it on’ approach to a Border poll adopted by the militarists and ideologues of Sinn Féin and the passionate nationalists of Ireland’s Future.

I was reminded of this when I read the latest Ireland’s Future report – Proposals for the period between 2024 and 2030² – the latter year being when the group wants to see a Border poll being held. I was forcibly struck in particular by the following paragraph in this paper: “There is no requirement to achieve ‘reconciliation’ (however this concept is defined) in advance of a referendum being held, and our view is that any such objective will only follow the transition to a new constitutional arrangement on our shared island. Reunification is a reconciliation project.”

That is an extraordinary dismissal of the need for reconciliation in such a deeply divided society as Northern Ireland. How on earth are nationalists going to get unionist consent for unity one day if they don’t actively work for reconciliation with that community? I don’t believe reunification in the short term (after a narrow vote for it in a Border poll) will be ‘a reconciliation project’. I believe it will be ‘a victory for nationalism project’, and will be seen as such by the great majority of unionists. Unfortunately, I also fear it will be seen by many Northern nationalists as a ‘boot’s on the other foot now’ project, a triumphant turning of the tables after more a century of discrimination against and repression of their community by the unionists.

Any move to a united Ireland, according to the Good Friday Agreement, is explicitly conditional on the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. But reconciliation in that agreement has no conditions set on it: “We firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all…We will endeavour to strive in every practical way towards reconciliation and rapprochement within the framework of democratic and agreed arrangements”, the two governments and the North’s political parties pledged in 1998.

Ireland’s Future also engages in hypocritical doublethink when it comes to the roles of the British and Irish governments in the run-up to any Border poll. It demands that limitations are placed on the British government to ensure its “rigorous impartiality.” However it calls on the Irish government unilaterally to set up an all-Ireland Citizens Assembly or similar body (thus intruding into another state’s jurisdiction) “to assist in the promotion of inclusive deliberation before, during and after constitutional change.” It stresses that “the template used for Citizens Assemblies in Ireland will need to be adjusted to achieve our basic objectives.” How can one run an exercise in deliberative democracy like a Citizens Assembly (which would normally produce a range of recommendations) when the aim is to have one outcome only – a united Ireland?

As Newton Emerson wrote in the Irish Times, the people who will have the casting vote on the timing and outcome of a Border Poll will be the middle ground voters who support the Alliance party. “They are unlikely to be impressed by the belligerence of Monday’s report from the Ireland’s Future campaign, with its downplaying of reconciliation and disturbingly post-Agreement demand for a Border poll compelled by international pressure.”³

This last comment refers to the following paragraph in the Ireland’s Future report: “In our view, the British government is unlikely to enable a Border poll without a formal request from the Irish government, reinforced by widespread international support. The Irish government must therefore mobilise its international partnerships and networks – within all relevant international and supranational forums – to secure cooperation and support for its desired outcome.”

Ireland’s Future then goes on to recommend a “binding Declaration” to be adopted by the two governments “in the context of wider consultations with relevant international/supranational organisations such as the UN, the Council of Europe and the EU in line with new [Irish] Programme for Government commitments [i.e. on moving towards an early Border Poll]…each government should then commence preparations for the required referendums.” This sounds to me suspiciously like a whole new British-Irish agreement to supersede and negate the ultra-careful checks and balances of the Good Friday Agreement.

Emerson said that Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s speech to Alliance’s annual conference a few days earlier, with its emphasis on the need for Stormont reform and on his pragmatic Shared Island initiative, made more sense than this contentious and misleading proposal. Martin was specific about the reforms needed: ending the ability of the DUP and Sinn Féin to collapse the NI Executive and block Executive decisions; a reset of the NI Assembly’s petition of concern veto mechanism; the replacement of cross-community voting with weighted majority voting; reversal of the St Andrews Agreement changes on appointing the First and Deputy First Ministers, and renaming both posts Joint First Ministers because that is “what they are.”

I might also suggest to Ireland’s Future that there are some very clear defining markers of progress towards reconciliation in Northern Ireland. One is a power-sharing government lasting its full five years in office, agreeing a programme for government and successfully carrying out a significant part of it in areas of real substance: notably tackling sectarianism and inequality and laying some foundations for a flourishing economy. Another would be some dismantling of the nearly 100 so-called ‘peace walls’ still dividing poor Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast and elsewhere.

¹ ‘Is Ireland’s Future effectively a front for Sinn Fein? Or is that the wrong question?’ http://www.2irelands2gether.com, 10 October 2022

² Published on 4 March 2024

³ ‘Martin shrewd enough to play Shared Island unification game’, 7 March

xxxx

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | 2 Comments

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

Posted on Wednesday, 13 March, 2024 by andypollak

Maybe because St Patrick’s Day is coming up and we’re in the middle of Seachtain na Gaeilge, I’m feeling a bit patriotic – so am going to write about why I think the Republic of Ireland is a rather good country now, despite the many begrudgers. Firstly, there are the well-known demographic and economic indicators: in the 50 years of EU membership, life expectancy has risen from 71 to 81.5 years; incomes per head have increased fourfold; the number of people at work has grown from just over one million to more than 2.5 million; since 1999 over 1.6 million immigrants have come to live and work here; and we are now in the top five countries in the world for scientific research in numerous areas ranging from agricultural sciences to immunology, pharmacology to neuroscience. These are the signs of a successful country.

According to the UN’s Human Development Index (which combines life expectancy, education levels and GDP per capita), Ireland was the 20th best country in the world in 2001, and the eighth best in 2021. Tom Arnold, the distinguished Irish public servant and former CEO of the aid organisation Concern, says that the world’s poorest countries where Concern worked had “many disadvantages, ranging from the legacy of colonialism, conflict, poor health and education standards of their peoples, and, increasingly, the impact of climate change. But the single most important factor which explains their poverty and its persistence is the quality and honesty of governance and the capacity to implement consistent policy to improve living standards.”¹ That is what the Republic of Ireland, despite the vagaries of globalised capitalism’s boom and slump cycles and some continuing major policy shortcomings, has achieved spectacularly in recent decades.

We have a fully working democracy here. The electorate telling the government decisively in a referendum last weekend that it would not accept the wording of its constitutional amendments on the role of women, “durable relationships” and care in the family was a powerful sign of that (although it was also a sign of voter disgruntlement with the Dublin-centred governing class). There has been no sign here of any significant electoral surge to the hard right, as has been happening in so many other European countries.

We have been fortunate in our politicians. In more than a hundred years of independence – through the dangerously fascist 1930s, the economic crashes of the early 1970s and the post-2008 crisis, and the anti-immigration 2020s – there has been no sign of any significant dictatorial or authoritarian political figure moving to capitalise on popular discontent. We have lively, heated and occasionally acrimonious political debate on our media. Our Taoiseach and Tánaiste live in modest, middle-class houses in city suburbs with few security precautions.

Compare that with our closest neighbours, where the Prime Minister is a super-rich plutocrat and two MPs have been murdered in the past eight years. Rishi Sunak said last month that Britain was descending into “mob rule”, appearing to blame largely peaceful protests (including pickets on MPs’ houses) against Israel’s war in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss shared a platform with Donald Trump’s wicked former adviser, Steve Bannon, the organiser of international far-right networks, who called English fascist agitator Tommy Robinson a “hero”. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said Islamists, extremists and anti-Semites are now in charge of Britain. The deputy chair of the Conservative Party said Islamists have “got control of London” and its Lord Mayor, Sadiq Khan. And the economic background is the government budget watchdog’s warning that Brexit is still dragging down the economy (0.8% growth forecast this year) and the impact is set to get worse due to new trade barriers.

When I grew up in London in the 1950s and 1960s, it was Britain that was a rather good country, with a fast-growing postwar economy, the Welfare State and the National Health Service, the huge expansion of free secondary and third level education, and the coming of a reformist Labour government in 1964. Now they have post-Brexit stasis and uncertainty, deep economic divides between north and south, and moves to the hard right represented by English nationalism and nostalgia for the exploitation and violence of the British empire.

Of course we have in Ireland our continuing problems. The lack of housing is a running sore. Because of our governing parties’ addiction to the private sector, a sclerotic Department of Housing and planning system and big capacity challenges (including shortages of skilled labour) in housebuilding firms, we had the third lowest investment in housing in the EU in 2022 (after Greece and Poland). Astonishingly, at the end of last year there were nearly 29,000 houses stuck in An Bord Pleanala or awaiting High Court judicial review decisions, not far off the 32,000 completions.² Our government’s inability to reduce hospital waiting lists and complete major hospital building projects on time and without exploding budgets is legendary. Our public transport system is creaking and unintegrated. In common with other European countries, the government has been caught almost completely unprepared by the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers from a low base, and the now frequent arson attacks on buildings meant to become temporary shelters for such refugees are a national disgrace (and why can’t the gardai catch and charge these criminals?).

Like the great majority of Western countries, we have the scandal of growing inequality (although a progressive tax system takes some of the sting out of this). Ireland has the fifth largest number of billionaires per capita in the world, according to Oxfam. I suppose this is part of our country’s success story in today’s multinational capitalist world, but I agree with the left-wing US senator Bernie Sanders that the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few extremely rich people while so many people are in poverty, in Ireland as in the world, is an obscenity. Recently I have been reading Who really owns Ireland? by the journalist Matt Cooper, about the eye-popping wealth of multi-billionaires like the retail empire owner Galen Weston, the financier Dermot Desmond, the gambler J.P. McManus, the horse breeder John Magnier, the telecoms entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, the developer Johnny Ronan, the hotelier Paddy McKillen, and the ‘beef baron’ Larry Goodman, among others. Some of these men were wiped out in the 2008-2010 crash, but now, a decade and a half later, have become richer than ever by employing financial instruments that are an utter mystery to the ordinary Irish citizen. This is the ‘Wild West’ side of the Irish success story.

But to return to my main thesis. I tend to agree with the former Irish Times political editor, Stephen Collins, writing in the aftermath of last November’s anti-immigration riot, that “the contempt for civilised values displayed by the rioters in Dublin echoes in extreme form the pervasive narrative that has taken a grip on public discourse over the past few years, portraying this country as a failed state.” He said it was the “default setting of Opposition politicians [he singled out Sinn Fein for special mention] and much of the media that everything about this country is wrong.”

“The relatively comfortable circumstances in which the vast majority of us live are due to the way politicians and public servants over a number of decades created the conditions for the prosperous modern Irish State to emerge. Of course, lots of people feel they should be doing better in one way or another, but international comparisons show that this country is one of the best places on Earth to live….The fact that so many immigrants have flocked to our shores over the past two decades to work at all levels of society from top to bottom is in itself enough to debunk the narrative of endless misery that so many native-born citizens are prone to accept.”³

Dublin in particular is an extraordinarily vibrant and multicultural city these days (although also extraordinarily expensive). This was summed up for me in an incident on O’Connell Street a fortnight ago. I was part of a small group called ‘Grandfathers against Racism’, who stand with a banner outside the GPO every Tuesday lunchtime. A man came up to see what we were doing and introduced himself as a tennis coach from Kazakhstan (of Korean origin), who lived in Blanchardstown with his Belarussian wife, his elder daughter who had recently become a solicitor and his younger daughter who had just graduated with a degree in chemistry from UCD. He said that in 25 years in Blanchardstown he had never experienced racism or any kind of hostility.

I hope for two things in the future. In the South that voters in the next election will remember that our prosperity and stability owe much to decisions made over the years by the ‘establishment’ parties – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens (although the last two would reject that description) – and nothing to Sinn Fein. In the North that my fellow Protestants will start to look honestly at this remarkable ‘new Ireland’ and decide that, despite the toxic legacy of four centuries of internecine strife between the religious ‘tribes’ on this island, they too can play a role in it. The first thing they need to do is to rid themselves of the antiquated, 1950s-era image so many of them have in their heads about the Republic as some kind of narrow, Catholic Church-dominated, impoverished and inward-looking society. Nothing could be further from the truth these days.

PS As a non-political coda, I asked my wife Doireann, a Dubliner and native Irish speaker, what she liked most about present day Ireland. These are the things she listed:

“Free travel for over those over 66. An enormous gift which I am grateful for every day.
The visibility of the Irish language and the increasing (it seems to me, compared with my childhood) enthusiasm of people of all ages for learning it.
The informality with which we connect with others. Of course there are hidden class divides (not so hidden when it comes to poverty), but in general anyone will chat with anyone else with ease on the street, in the shops, on public transport. We smile at each other and greet each other in a way that is not so common in other developed countries.
The fact that our traditional music is so vibrant, and is played by so many young people with comfort and ease. It’s wonderful to see it being passed on from generation to generation.
We value artistic expression: whether it’s writers, film and theatre makers, visual artists or musicians; we sense that their work adds value to the way we live, and we respect their choice to be artists. Of course we must support them better in practical ways; if they can’t make a decent living or afford a place to live, that undermines any value we may claim to put on their role.”

She added one characteristic which has nothing to do with modernity, but with the extraordinary beauty and nearness of nature in this island (and with which I enthusiastically agree). “The ease with which we can travel to beautiful, wild places. It doesn’t take more than a few hours from anywhere in Ireland to reach the mountains and the sea. We don’t realise what a huge privilege that is.”

¹ Introduction to TASC – Reflections on Equality, December 2022

²Cliff Taylor, ‘Can State deliver 50,000 new homes a year? Irish Times, 24 February

³ ‘Too many people have swallowed the ‘failed state’ narrative’, Irish Times, 1 December 2023

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 4 Comments

Why the Republic of Ireland needs a new John Bruton

Posted on Tuesday, 20 February, 2024 by andypollak

With the death earlier this month of former Taoiseach John Bruton, we have lost an important and courageous voice in the Republic of Ireland. We will need a new John Bruton to appear from somewhere: a nationalist leader who will not allow people to forget Sinn Fein’s continuing support for the murderous violence of the Provisional IRA and who goes out of his way to try to understand the concerns of unionism. Bruton bravely went even further: he criticised this country’s near-sacred foundation myth, that the bloodshed of the Easter Rising was justified and necessary for the birth of the independent Irish state. Not even Micheál Martin, another rare Southern politician to regularly remind us of the unacceptability of the IRA’s campaign, has ever gone as far as that (he would immediately lose the Fianna Fail party if he did!).

Interestingly, the unionist Belfast News Letter marked Bruton’s death by reprinting his 2016 anniversary of the Rising speech: ‘The 1916 Rising was not a Just War’.¹ Bruton argued this on a number of grounds. Firstly, he noted that Rising was launched on a platform that left no room for compromise or democratic negotiation. The Irish Republic was proclaimed on the steps of the GPO not in the name of “a living Irish people” but in the name of “God and the dead generations.” But obviously neither God nor the dead generations were there to be consulted. “The rights of the proclaimed Republic were not conditional on consent, but were ‘sovereign and indefeasible’. By definition, the Irish people would thus have no right to compromise the ‘sovereign and indefeasible’ rights of the Nation, which was treated, in the chosen wording of the Proclamation, as something separate from the people.”

It was in the pursuit of this “absolute and unqualified claim” that thousands of people then continued to be killed in the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. Bruton quoted P.S. O’Hegarty, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council at the time of the Rising, in 1924: “We turned the whole thoughts and passion of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed gunmen, mostly half educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life and death over large areas. We derided the Moral Law and said there was no law but the law of force.”

Bruton noted that for every Irish Volunteer killed in the Rising (including those executed afterwards) three Dublin civilians died as a result of the fighting. “The first casualty to die on Easter Monday was James O’Brien, an unarmed DMP policeman from Limerick, shot in the face at the gate of Dublin Castle. Another early unarmed DMP casualty of the Volunteers was Michael Lahiff, a 28 year old Irish speaker from the West of Ireland, shot in cold blood on St Stephen’s Green. Michael Cavanagh, a Dublin carter who tried to retrieve his cart from a Volunteer barricade, was executed by the Volunteers. These were not ‘Brits’. They were Irishmen. They were the first to die. Their pictures adorn no public building this Easter in Dublin, but they should.”

Bruton asked if the decision to take up arms in 1916 was in accordance with the Catholic Church’s natural ‘Moral Law’ with its emphasis on the ‘just war.’ “It is especially important to ask that question now, because the Irish State has chosen to place such a huge emphasis on implanting the 1916 Rebellion as the supposed foundation event of our democracy in the minds of today’s schoolchildren. Given that one of the purposes of education is to pass on a moral sense to the next generation, it is vitally important that the morality of that decision, to initiate killing and dying in 1916, be examined by, and for, those schoolchildren. That is the responsibility of the Irish State, and if it fails to discharge it, is is failing the next generation.”

Bruton then outlined some ‘just war’ principles to ask ‘Who is entitled to launch a war?’ “Only a competent authority, or popular representatives, has the right to start a war or insurrection….By no stretch of the imagination could that criterion said to have been met before the killing was started on Easter Monday.” “War required a just cause: armed aggression or governmental policies (e.g. genocide) threatening the civilian population”. Bruton pointed out that Ireland was not being attacked in 1916; in fact the Volunteers were allowed by the authorities to drill freely, something that would not be allowed today. The British government’s policies had been in many ways beneficial to Ireland: old age pensions and social insurance, from which Ireland was a net financial beneficiary, had been introduced, and the unjust landlord system had been overturned to a significant extent. “Furthermore, the principle of legislative independence had already been won from the Imperial Parliament in September 1914 by the passage into law, and signature by the King, of the Home Rule Bill.”

“Another criterion for a just war, is that war should be a last resort, not a first recourse. All other methods of redressing grievances ought to have been first exhausted. Given that the principle of Irish legislative independence had already been conceded, in a Bill passed into law only a year and a half previously, it is hard to argue that starting a rebellion in 1916, and the War of Independence of 1919 to 1921, were, either of them, a “last resort”. In fact much of what was being sought had already been conceded, in principle and in law. Home Rule was law and there was no going back on it. For example, Home Rule was accepted even by the Conservatives as a ‘fundamental fact’, the only issue outstanding being that there be no ‘forcible coercion of Ulster’ to go in under it.”

The only open question, said Bruton, was whether Home Rule might apply or not to Antrim, Down, Armagh and Derry (and perhaps to Fermanagh and Tyrone, which had narrow nationalist majorities). “But after all the killing and dying of the 1916 to 1923 period, and the Treaty of 1921, the Free State did not have jurisdiction over those counties…Nor after the ‘armed struggle’ from 1970 to 1998 does this State have such jurisdiction today. Indeed, under the Good Friday Agreement we no longer claim it, and respect the right of the people of Northern Ireland to decide their own future in that regard.”

The 1916 rebels knew only too well the fierce opposition of Protestant Ulster even to a Home Rule administration, let alone a republic. “But in what they wrote in their Proclamation, this reality was swept aside, as it if did not matter at all…The wish of Ulster Unionists not to be governed from Dublin, was assumed by the Proclamation’s signatories not to have been a conclusion they had come to freely themselves, but only the result of ‘careful fostering’ by an ‘alien government”.

Bruton expressed his strong belief that “if we ever do have a United Ireland, it will not be achieved by the methods used in 1916.” Canada and Australia had proceeded to full sovereignty “without the suffering and bitterness of war.” He said it was not credible to say that the UK would have denied to a Home Rule Ireland the powers it freely granted to those countries under the 1931 Statute of Westminster. “The suffering of the War of Independence was thus not needed to achieve Dominion Status”, which is what Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and the Irish negotiators got in 1921 (and which had been the policy of the Irish Parliamentary Party, heavily defeated by Sinn Fein, in the 1918 general election).

Why does all this matter 108 years after the event, when what might have happened differently is just a matter of conjecture? It matters because Sinn Fein may be heading the next government in Dublin, and they are fanatically attached to the belief that the Provisional IRA were the rightful inheritors of what they call the ‘physical force’ tradition in Irish nationalism/republicanism, and thus the violence of their late 20th century campaign of killing and bombing was fully justified. For obvious reasons, Sinn Fein are constantly linking that campaign to the War of Independence, with its democratic legitimacy rooted in old Sinn Fein’s victory in the 1918 election, and the central involvement in that guerrilla war of the founders of the two largest constitutional (or ‘slightly constitutional’) parties in the independent state, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.

It matters because even the most moderate of unionists trace the violence of the Provisional IRA against their community back to the 20th century’s first upsurge of republican violence in 1916 (and continue to believe that Irish republicans “stabbed Britain in the back” at a time when tens of thousands of Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, were fighting side by side in the First World War). And because all parties in the Republic who claim to want a peaceful ‘new Ireland’ still agree on celebrating that anti-British rebellion, supported by a small minority of Irish people at the time, as their state’s foundational act. In the words of that most liberal and pro-Irish of unionists, former rugby international and reconciliation activist Trevor Ringland: “If you take the ambitions of the violent republican movement a hundred years ago, they certainly weren’t about including those Irish who also feel British as part of the island. The identity they drove at that time was very much an exclusive identity, as opposed to the one promoted by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party.”

It matters because the ‘north blindness’ of the 1916 revolutionaries led to successive mistakes which set back the cause of Irish unity: the almost complete absence of the North from the 1922 Dail debates on the Treaty; the development of the Free State along Catholic and Gaelic lines with zero reference to how this would affect partition; the rejection by De Valera of the 1940 offer by Churchill of a British declaration accepting the principle of a united Ireland and a North-South body to work out the practical details in return for the Free State joining the Allies in the war against Nazi Germany (future Unionist prime minister Basil Brooke said that if the choice was between Western civilisation and Irish reunification, he would accept unity); and the idiotic 1949 departure from the Commonwealth, a year before India declared itself a republic and stayed in the Commonwealth. The continuing popularity of Sinn Fein’s simplistic anti-British imperialism in the Republic (particularly among young people), rather than a more nuanced understanding of the historical intermingling of the peoples of these islands, makes me think that more such mistakes are on the way under a Sinn Fein-led government.

I may be a hopeless voice in the wilderness, but I would love to see one of the non-nationalist parties in the Republic – the Greens, Labour or the Social Democrats – having the courage to break with the overwhelming consensus in the South that ‘physical force’ republicanism played a unique and noble role in gaining Irish independence, and with the less overwhelming – but growing – consensus (again, particularly among the young) that the inheritors of that tradition can lead the way to unity. Knowing the ferocious opposition to Sinn Fein by unionists as I do, I believe this is fundamentally mistaken. I would like them to argue that such violent republicanism was always the wrong way to unite the peoples of this island, and to recognise that power-sharing in Northern Ireland along with close cooperation with the Irish Government is the way forward for the foreseeable future: the Good Friday Agreement model, in other words.

In a period of political consolidation and economic growth, I would like to see that party (or parties) adopt a policy of ‘from cooperation to confederation’, recognising that – as the Northern business leader, the late Sir George Quigley, put it – there are in Northern Ireland “two mutually opposed ‘principles of legitimacy’ which are strongly held – one nationalist and one unionist – and that some common ground would have to be found on which the divergent aspirations are transcended in a general consensus….If there is ever a new constitutional configuration for the island, my guess is that the model by far the likeliest to secure consent is the confederal model…On this basis the final agreed Ireland would be a joint, equal venture between North and South, with each having its own governance structure, and with policies related to the powers to be specifically delegated to confederal level by representatives from North and South.”

I put this argument to a meeting of Social Democrats some years ago, but it was clear from the blank faces that greeted me that it was going nowhere. Perhaps it would be electoral suicide to put such a policy to “republicanism is good” Irish voters, who recent opinion polls have shown are not willing to give up one iota of nationalist iconography (changes to the flag and anthem; re-joining the Commonwealth) in exchange for unity. I suggest that electorate also haven’t given one iota of serious thought to how the party of the Provisional IRA are going to bring about a harmonious ‘new Ireland’ that will include hundreds of thousands of abandoned and alienated unionists.

However, those non-nationalist parties might be surprised by the number of people who would vote for a party which proposed putting some distance between the Republic and the troublesome North, while maintaining a strong all-island framework for partnership and mutual action. Similarly, I believe there will be open-minded unionists who would be attracted to the confederal model as the least worst option as Britain’s commitment to the North declines.

¹ https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/full-version-of-a-2016-speech-by-the-late-john-bruton-the-former-taoiseach-the-1916-easter-rising-was-not-a-just-war/ar-BB1hSuJP

Posted in General, Republic of Ireland | 7 Comments

Nobody can deny that Michelle O’Neill’s elevation was an historic moment

Posted on Tuesday, 6 February, 2024 by andypollak

Nobody can deny that the installation of Michelle O’Neill as the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland last Saturday was an historic moment. For a statelet that was set up over a century ago specifically to ensure that NI had an inbuilt unionist majority and thus to exclude it from the newly independent Irish state, to elect not only a nationalist, but an IRA-supporting republican woman as its leader, will be seen by most Northern nationalists as something of a miracle.

O’Neill was smart, gracious and stateswomanlike in her moment of victory. She avoided triumphalism and made no explicit mention of either Irish unity or a Border Poll in an inaugural address that focused on reconciliation and bread-and-butter issues. “I will serve everyone equally and be a First Minister for all,” she said. “Wherever we come from, whatever our aspirations, we can and must build our future together. We must make power-sharing work because collectively we are charged with leading and delivering for all our people, for every community.”

Not so her party leader, Mary Lou McDonald. A united Ireland, she said, was now “within touching distance.” My doubts about McDonald’s judgement (which I outlined in my last blog) are only confirmed. These are the words of a fantasist, an ultra-nationalist ideologue who doesn’t live in the real world. Does she really believe the long, hard grind – a work of many years, decades even – of persuading enough middle ground people and moderate unionists that unity is the answer to the North’s many problems, can be by-passed? Or was she just intent on goading unionists at their point of maximum sensitivity – kicking them when they had lost the First Minister’s post and their hopes of overturning the Windsor Framework and ending the Irish Sea ‘border’ were down (despite Jeffrey Donaldson’s claims to the contrary)?

Because I am not a working journalist these days, I usually turn to the two sharpest political commentators in Ireland – Pat Leahy of the Irish Times and Sam McBride of the Belfast Telegraph – for insightful analysis of key events. Leahy wondered what Mary Lou McDonald was up to with her provocative (but clearly considered) statement. Was it just the old republican adage that Northern Ireland can never be anything but a failed state and they were certainly not going to do anything to make it a successful one? Leahy thought not. He preferred the argument that at a time when Sinn Fein’s opinion poll figures are down in the Republic, and the party is on the back foot on issues like immigration, she was trying to reassure her base.

The problem is that Sinn Fein has two bases and thus two often conflicting messages (one aimed at people in the Republic who’ve never voted for them before): “that Sinn Fein will be a massive change in the government of the South, but also that it would not change things that voters like; that the Republic is a basket-case, misruled for 100 years, but that a Sinn Fein government would not change its economic model; that things under Sinn Fein will be simultaneously different and the same; that we will get both change and continuity”. It’s a tricky message to sell, he said.¹

McBride wrote that the deal negotiated by Jeffrey Donaldson with the British government was not what he claimed it to be. It was “better practically for Northern Ireland, and more constitutionally bearable for unionists, than the original Northern Ireland Protocol. If goodwill persists between Brussels and London, and if blind eyes are turned liberally to continued bureaucratic absurdities, then what has happened this week can work, after a fashion…

“But while the Irish Sea border has been softened, it unquestionably remains. For Jeffrey Donaldson to claim he’s swept away the sea border for goods which are staying in Northern Ireland is as palpably absurd as Donald Trump claiming he won the last US Presidential election… Donaldson should try moving a cherry tree from Leeds to Lisburn, or try moving any other commercial item between Birmingham and Ballymena on the same basis as Birmingham to Brighton.” The British government is still planning to “take direct powers at Westminster to direct NI bodies” in relation to checks on goods. And the continuation of the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland – “not acceptable”, Donaldson has said in the past – will continue.²

Donaldson showed considerable political courage in facing down his opponents – both in the DUP and to the right of it – to get his deal through. However his party’s base – which largely supported the boycott of Stormont over the Irish Sea ‘border’ – will be uneasy and potentially rebellious if it is seen not to work. Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice and that toxic little agitator, Jamie Bryson, will be working hard to stir up trouble for him.

Last Monday, a few hours before Donaldson faced his party faithful and successfully persuaded them to back his less than perfect deal with Whitehall, I had an interesting conversation with two Belfast businessmen. These were men of moderate views (Alliance and SDLP-inclined respectively), but they were frustrated and angry at what they saw as the DUP – a party which had received a quarter of the vote in the last Assembly election – forcing Northern Ireland into the freezer for the past two years. They were “sick of a minority party holding the whole society to ransom, sick of having to kowtow to the DUP because of their paranoia about the Irish Sea ‘border’ destroying their sense of the Union.”

They were worried that young people – and especially young unionist people – had lost faith in politics as it was conducted in Northern Ireland: “It’s very dangerous, they have no regard for politics or politicians here – they never see politics producing any positive results. If the DUP don’t go along with the social changes they think are important – things like equality, women’s rights and gay rights – they will just leave Northern Ireland. The DUP are going to have to come to terms with the liberal culture of a young, modern society.” One man said it was already happening: he knew at least one young gay member of that deeply conservative party.

In contrast, young nationalists could see that Sinn Fein got things done at constituency level (unlike the DUP) and believed the republican party was committed to equality and fairness. They would chant ‘Ooh, aah, Up the Ra’ at public events to give two fingers to the DUP in particular and the Northern political system in general.

The businessmen echoed Sam McBride in worrying that Northern Ireland’s infrastructure was falling apart: houses not being able to be put on the market because Northern Ireland Water can’t connect them to the mains; offshore wind companies not able to set up because of the sclerotic planning system; and major roads full of potholes (“Look at the dreadful state of the Sydenham by-pass, the road to Belfast City Airport – even in Africa they make sure they have a decent road to the airport”).

One cited the head of the Southern business and employers body IBEC, Danny McCoy, who has been forecasting for some time an island population of 10 million by 2050 (today the island’s population is seven million, with just under two million of these in Northern Ireland). This will be “a new Ireland in which our children will have a good future.” He said the challenge for the North would be to absorb around one million of these people. “By 2050 there might be only 250,000 hard-line ‘traditional’ unionists left. It will be a very different place to Northern Ireland in the last century – if it is still in existence.”

There is no doubt that the plates are shifting in Northern Ireland. Last month I was talking to half a dozen people from broadly unionist backgrounds in Fermanagh, and all but one of them said they were no longer comfortable calling themselves British. The man who still called himself British said he was “a very, very, soft unionist.” However he stressed that he wouldn’t say ‘Yes’ to a united Ireland. “I’d want to know exactly what it is we’re looking at. I’d want to be informed, to be consulted. I wouldn’t want to be driven in at the end of an armalite or even surreptitiously coerced into it.”

We should be careful that we do not listen to young people exclusively (this is a man in his seventies talking!). In an Irish Times interview in December, that wise old owl, former Tánaiste and Irish Labour Party leader Dick Spring, warned that young people had no understanding of the 1969-1998 Troubles, and didn’t give them any thought.

He said it would take “an awful long time, as we see in other war zones, for people to recover from all those tragedies and the loss of loved ones down through the years. It has left a long, long memory bank for people, and people have to dig very deep if they are to overcome that and work with people who are, you know, responsible for, or supporting, that campaign of violence.”³ And that includes Michelle O’Neill.

¹ ‘McDonald and Sinn Fein have tricky message to sell’, Irish Times, 3 February

² ‘Despite the DUP’s Trumpian claims, this deal has embedded the sea border rather than removed it’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 February

3 ’Dick Spring interview: I don’t want to be lecturing young people’, Irish Times, 16 December

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

A glimpse into the strange, secretive party that stands on the brink of power in Ireland

Posted on Monday, 8 January, 2024 by andypollak

Over the Christmas holidays I read The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein, by the former Irish Examiner journalist Aoife Moore. I was looking forward to reading this book enormously, since good books on this “strange, secretive party that stands on the brink of taking power” are few and far between. I thought that somebody like Moore, from a working class nationalist background in Derry, whose family had been “touched by British state violence” (her uncle was killed on Bloody Sunday), and Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, might be the writer to shine a light on its hidden workings and inner secrets.

I was a little disappointed. This is a book of occasional insights rather than major revelations. As a former journalist in Northern Ireland, I found I was familiar with much of the book’s earlier section, running up to Mary Lou McDonald’s emergence as the party’s vice-president, chosen on Gerry Adams’ orders, in 2009. Sinn Fein’s famous deep distrust of the media, and its press office dubbing her “the poisonous snake”, did not help. She does not, for example, throw any new light on how Sinn Fein went from failure in the European and local elections of May 2019 to success in the Dail election nine months later.

But there are interesting things here that we should take note of as Sinn Fein appear to be getting closer and closer to power. The first is Mary Lou McDonald’s judgement of people. I’m sure the party is desperately hoping that voters have short memories when they go to the polls later this year or early in 2025, and that they will have forgotten her misjudgement of Jonathan Dowdall: Sinn Fein 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 (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 quotes one local Sinn Fein 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.”

I have doubted McDonald’s judgement for over 20 years. It started in September 2003, when she spoke at a commemoration ceremony for the IRA leader and Nazi collaborator Sean Russell at his statue in Fairview (probably the only public memorial to such a collaborator in Western Europe). Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times: “The bizarre Sean Russell event was presumably a kind of trial – McDonald’s chance to prove that that there was no aspect of the IRA’s history that she would ever disown, even if it involved the Nazis.”¹

The big question for many voters – and particularly older voters who remember the Northern ‘troubles’ – will be: what, if any, is the continuing overlap between Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA? Moore writes at several points about “the grey haired men at the back of the room” at Northern party meetings – former IRA members – who were there in the post-1998 years of electoral politics, but does not make clear whether they are still in attendance. She quotes a close aide of Martin McGuinness saying: “Them people don’t just fucking evaporate. They end up in party positions…I remember decisions being made and being told about decisions – even from a local perspective – that there was no conversation on. It was clearly an army thing. You were told and never questioned it.”

I imagine McDonald will have done her best to make sure that such ‘grey haired men’ have disappeared south of the border. Moore says the influence of former senior IRA figures “has gradually diminished over time, but remains significant.” ‘We don’t sit around talking about politics or legislation”, one senior IRA figure told her, “but we’re consulted and kept in the know for certain things around political strategy.”

The party is famous for its rigid, ‘top down’ – almost Leninist – control of local councillors, activists and members. One woman Ard Comhairle member is quoted as saying: “There is a lot of discipline, you don’t speak out of turn in public.” Moore writes: “Sinn Fein is particularly bad at weeding out local issues and bullying early on. The party’s intensely hierarchical structure makes it hard to complain if the ones you wish to complain about reside higher on the totem pole.” She then outlines a sizeable list of bullying issues, suspensions, expulsions and resignations in Cork, Kildare, Cavan, Westmeath, Wicklow, Galway, and Dublin. Noeleen Reilly from Ballymun, a poll-topper for Dublin City Council in 2014, resigned from the party four years later, alleging “physical assaults, verbal abuse, total isolation, smear campaigns.”

I often wonder if Sinn Fein, sprung from the IRA and still unapologetic defenders of its 30-year campaign of violence, share the values of most Irish people. To judge from the behaviour of Gerry Adams, still a heroic figure to most party members (and, astonishingly, to many otherwise non-political younger people), truth-telling is not one of them. One former IRA man and lifelong Sinn Fein member told Moore that “when he is confronted with any uncomfortable truth, his first instinct is to lie to everybody. That’s part and parcel of politics, but this guy has no qualms at all. And this guy has no conscience about stuff, he’s not troubled by anything.” One Sinn Fein staffer told her: “The thing about Gerry is, he could look his dearest friend in the eye and lie.”

I would say Adams’ whole life, based on his repeated assertion that he was never a member of the IRA, has been a lie. My former colleague, former Irish Times Northern editor Ed Moloney, put that untruth to bed comprehensively in his magisterial 2002 study, A Secret History of the IRA. Moore says he joined D-Company of the Belfast Brigade as an 18-year-old in 1969; it was to become “the most ferocious in the city.” Brendan Hughes, the senior IRA man who who was centrally involved in planning the July 1972 bombings in Belfast that we call Bloody Friday (in which nine people were killed and 130 injured), said before he died in 2008: “Gerry was always the O/C. Even if he was not the O/C in name, Gerry was the man who made the decisions.”

Support for the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ remains mandatory for Sinn Fein members. One senior staff member told Moore: “I remember asking during the meeting if there was a place for people in Sinn Fein who don’t support the armed struggle. Should we not have a situation where young people who join Sinn Fein feel free to say that what happened to Jean McConville was diabolical?…They all just looked at me.”

One of the most revealing and disturbing stories in the book is of a former IRA man and active Sinn Fein member who wanted to apologise in person to the widow of a police officer he had murdered. He initially approached Sinn Fein about this. After consultations with senior party figures, the answer came back: No, not allowed. A senior party member told Moore that the former IRA volunteer may have carried out such a killing, but “it’s not your memory to know, irrespective of how this affects people. The movement has made a decision – there’ll be a story told around this. And it’s not your story.” This man eventually contacted and arranged to meet the widow through a former senior police officer.

I am now resigned to the likelihood that Sinn Fein, formerly the party of the IRA – which between 1971 and 1997 killed nearly five times more people than the British Army, the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment combined – is almost certainly going to be a part (and probably the leading part) of the next Irish government. As somebody over 65, I am now a member of the only age group which opinion polls in the Republic show will not vote for Sinn Fein. As somebody who lived and worked as a journalist and campaign organiser in Belfast during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the atrocities committed by the ‘Provos’ are still a vivid memory.

I simply do not trust this militaristic, ultra-nationalist party to lead us towards some peaceful, harmonious solution to the age-old problem of a divided Ireland. They are the last people on earth able to persuade the unionists to move towards some kind of Irish unity (if they can ever be persuaded). Most unionists see them as unrepentant apologists for the terrorist organisation which murdered their policemen and women, their family members, friends and neighbours. On a lesser note, Moore also details their dubious (if not corrupt) practices while in the Northern Ireland Assembly: referring important ministerial decisions back to shadowy ‘advisors’ in Andersonstown; paying MLAs’ salaries into party-controlled accounts (in order to pay the MLAs a much lower average industrial wage) and claiming MLAs’ expenses with forged signatures.

At the end of his life Brendan Hughes deeply regretted his actions throughout the IRA campaign. “Not one death was worth it,” he said. John Hume used to say the same thing. Do we believe Hughes and Hume or the Sinn Fein leader in the North, Michelle O’Neill, who says there was “no alternative” to the IRA’s campaign of violence? I know whom I believe.

¹ ’The enigma of Mary Lou McDonald’, 15 February 2020

Posted in General, Sinn Fein | 4 Comments

A united Ireland is not inevitable – only persuasion can make it happen

Posted on Monday, 18 December, 2023 by andypollak

What is it about passionate nationalists that when they get less than a third of people in favour of their nationalist project, they still insist they are driving on to victory? That was the situation according to the second big Irish Times/Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South(ARINS) poll on Irish unity earlier this month, which showed 51% of those polled in Northern Ireland in favour of remaining in the UK (up 1% from last year) against 30% in favour of joining the Republic (up 3%).¹ [In 2019 Catalan nationalists went so far as to declare independence after 39.5% of registered voters in a low turn-out voted in favour in an unconstitutional referendum].

In Northern Ireland, three-fifths of Catholics said they would vote for Irish unity, while four-fifths of Protestants said they would vote to stay in the UK. There is a far larger proportion of pro-UK Catholics (one in five) than pro-unification Protestants (one in 25). My guess is that an opinion poll at any time in the last 50 years would have come up with similar results, as it would have done in the Republic, where the Irish Times poll found that 64% would vote for unity in a referendum.

None of this stopped the political scientists overseeing the poll, led by Professor Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania (an avowed nationalist), wheeling out the concept of ‘losers’ consent’: extraordinarily, the ‘losers’ in this case are the Northern Protestants who make up the great bulk of the majority who want to stay part of the UK (51% support) and the ‘consent’ is their willingness to acquiesce in an eventual united Ireland (30% support).

The academics made great play of the finding that the proportion of northern Protestants who said they would find Irish unification “almost impossible to accept” had gone down from 32% to 23%. Maybe one reason for this is the mess that Northern Ireland is currently in largely due to the DUP’s 22 month boycott of the Stormont institutions. As that shrewd observer, Irish Times political editor Pat Leahy put it, the movement towards support for Irish unity (however slow and marginal) “makes it all the more mind-bogglingly inexplicable that the DUP is not trying to make Northern Ireland work…if Northern Ireland doesn’t work, then wavering middle ground voters are likely to consider other arrangements that might work, potentially including a united Ireland.” If this is the DUP’s strategy, he says, it is “bonkers”.²

He has a good point. Most people – in Northern Ireland as elsewhere – don’t care much about the major constitutional changes that politicians, journalists and academics pore over so endlessly. They want continued peace and prosperity and the chance to get good jobs, live healthy lives and see their children well educated (for these reasons they supported the 1998 Good Friday Agreement). If Northern Ireland as it is now can’t provide those things, they might just begin to consider what for most Northern Protestants has for so long been the great, much-feared unmentionable – Irish unity.

Those politicians, journalists and academics might spend their time better by looking at some of the findings from the 2021 Northern Ireland census. The Belfast social researcher Paul Nolan has written a fascinating article on this which will appear in the near future on the ARINS website.³

Nolan highlights a number of ironies: the first is that “100 years after partition Northern Ireland, created to guarantee a permanent Protestant majority, had ended up with a Catholic population larger than the Protestant one. Added to that, the percentage who self-categorised unequivocally as ‘British Only’ was down to 31.9% – a smaller percentage than the beleaguered Catholic population at the time of partition.”

The rise in the Catholic population in recent years has been gradual, if speeding up slightly in the past decade: 40.3% in 2001; 40.8% in 2011; 42.3% in 2021. In contrast, the fall in the Protestant population has been dramatic: from 53.1% in 2001 to 43.5% in 2021. Nolan speculates that this could be simply because more Protestants are leaving the North (it is difficult to know because there are no figures for population movement within the UK), but stresses that this subject needs more research.

However he does not foresee an imminent Catholic majority: “The expectation that there will be a Catholic majority in any foreseeable future would only be true if there was already a Catholic majority in the age cohorts 0-14 and 15-39 and, as we have seen, although it comes very close (over 48% in both cohorts), it is still not in sight because the upward trajectory has levelled off. Secondly, it cannot be assumed that all Catholics aspire to Irish unity. Census ’21 shows that only 33.3% [of NI people in general] identify as Irish to any degree. Ten percent of Catholics opt for a British identity. Even those who identify as Irish are not necessarily going to vote to exit the devolved arrangement secured in the 1998 Agreement. The benefit of the Agreement to middle-class nationalists has been that it allows them to be culturally Irish while enjoying the benefits of UK citizenship. This has proved to be of durable appeal.”

In terms of national identity, the picture is complicated by the Northern census allowing people to choose combined, or hybrid, identities (British only; Irish only; Northern Irish only; British and Northern Irish; Irish and Northern Irish; British, Irish and Northern Irish; British and Irish; English only/Scottish only/Welsh only, and Other). Nevertheless the picture here for unionists is “pitiless”, says Nolan, with those declaring themselves ‘British only’ falling by eight points from 39.9% in 2011 to 31.9% in 2021, while those self-declaring as ‘Irish only’ rose from 25.3% to 29.1%. Perhaps even more significantly, below the age of 40 the ratios reverse: for example, in the 15-39 age band it is 32.1% ‘Irish Only’ versus 25.6% ‘British Only’.

The most popular identity when combined with another identity is Northern Irish, which features in 31.5% of hybrid identities, not far behind ‘Irish plus’. “The Irish Plus identity has also increased, from 28.4% to 33.3%. While this may be considered a substantial increase, it is still nine percentage points behind the number of people who give their religion as Catholic (42.3%), and far below what the proponents of a border poll had expected. No one could see the Census ’21 results as compelling evidence that the time has now arrived for a Secretary of State to call a border referendum, as required by the Agreement, at a point where ‘it appears likely that a majority of voters in Northern Ireland would back a united Ireland.’ One-third is not a majority in anybody’s book.”

Somewhat surprisingly, 13.5% of the population of Northern Ireland consists of ‘newcomers’ born outside its borders; half of these (124,000) were born outside Great Britain and Ireland, and 57,000 outside the EU. Many of these people also declared themselves ‘Other Religion’ (i.e. not Protestant or Catholic). Nolan finds a heavy leaning among such people towards a British identity.

He highlights another, connected irony: that “while the prospect of a border poll has had a polarising effect, with heightened emotions on both sides, the numerical equilibrium between northern Catholics and Protestants means that the deciding votes in any future poll would be cast by those with least interest in the debate: newcomer communities and those with no religion.”

Nolan concludes: “If there is a lesson in the census for unionism, it is that with support for British identity in decline it must reach beyond its traditional heartlands and galvanise the support from other lineages: specifically, newcomer communities, those with no religion, and those Catholics who self-categorise as British but do not identify with Orange culture. If there is a lesson for nationalism, it is to cease to believe in predestination. Despite what is said by politicians, celebrities and church leaders, a united Ireland is not inevitable. Saying so does not make it so. It can only happen when sufficient numbers of people want it to happen. Both nationalism and unionism need to use persuasion if they want to move beyond the present impasse.”

Persuasion? That’s the really hard part. The most convincing persuaders will decide the issue: nationalists persuading unionists of the merits of unity; unionists persuading nationalists of the merits of the Union. A large part of it will depend on how the rise and rise of the Republic as an economic powerhouse will be sustained (and whether Southerners are prepared to pay more taxes and change their precious symbols for the sake of unity), and how the decline of Britain will be continued or reversed. It’s going to be a longish journey.

PS The most astonishing illustration of social change in Northern Ireland, as mentioned by Nolan, is the estimate by the BBC that last year’s Pride March in Belfast had 60,000 participants, while the 12th July Orange parade in the city two weeks earlier had attracted only 10,000!

¹ Poll findings are in the Irish Times, 2 and 4 December

² ’A dysfunctional North makes a united Ireland seem more attractive’, Irish Times, 16 December

³ ’The Imprint of Finality? Partition and Census Enumeration’

Posted in General, Irish reunification, Northern Ireland | Tagged history, ireland, Northern Ireland, politics, the-troubles | Leave a comment

Does Dublin’s anti-immigration riot mark the beginning of the end of Ireland’s image of openness and tolerance?

Posted on Tuesday, 28 November, 2023 by andypollak

Last Thursday morning I sat down to write a blog in which I was aiming to argue that Ireland (the Republic) had been hugely successful in integrating a large number of immigrants over the past 20-25 years, and that this tolerant, multicultural – and economically dynamic – society was one which open-minded Unionists should not be afraid of, and might even (in the fullness of time) consider joining. But early that afternoon a man with a knife attacked and stabbed a group of small children leaving a primary school in Parnell Square in central Dublin, badly wounding a five year-old-girl, and injuring three other people, including two children. It was later revealed that he was an Algerian, a naturalised Irish citizen.

That evening, following several hours of fearmongering by far right extremists on social media, a full-scale riot broke out after groups of people attacked the Garda Siochana in O’Connell Street and Cathal Brugha Street with fireworks, bottles and other projectiles, burned two buses and a tram, and looted shops and hotels in O’Connell Street and surrounding areas. “Seven o’clock, be in town. Everyone bally up, tool up. And any fucking gypo, foreigner, anyone, just kill them. Just fucking kill them. Let’s get this on the news, let’s show the fucking media that we’re not a pushover, that no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country,” said one message on Telegram.

Much of the foreign media, caught by surprise like everyone else by these events, asked whether this could be the beginning of the end of Ireland’s remarkable image of openness to immigration. The Guardian‘s Ireland correspondent, Rory Carroll, wrote: “Among the fumes and shouts and sirens blazed an uncomfortable truth. The Ireland that for so long had seemed to buck Europe’s anti-immigrant trend and offer a ‘thousand welcomes’ to the foreigners who reshaped its economy, society and demography – the Ireland that seemed immune to xenophobia and demagoguery and backlash – was not so different after all.”¹

My half-written blog last week had pointed to 2022 census figures showing that the number of Irish residents born outside the country was now 20% of the population; the equivalent figure in that great melting pot of an immigrant nation, the USA, is 14%. As of last year, over a million people born elsewhere had made their homes in Ireland. Over three quarters of a million people living in Ireland speak a language other than English or Irish in their homes. Living in peace and relative harmony among us were nearly 100,000 people from the Indian sub-continent, 94,000 people from Poland, 42,000 from Romania and 40,000 from Brazil [one can now add over 91,000 Ukrainians], among many others. Three of the heroic people who intervened to disarm the Algerian madman and tend to the injured were a Brazilian motorcycle delivery driver, a Filipino nurse and a teenaged French restaurant worker.

I quoted Fintan O’Toole voicing slightly surprised approval at the census figures: “The settling of such a large influx of people is a great achievement for Irish society. It has been done, mostly, at a low level, in communities and workplaces, in schools and churches, sports clubs and voluntary organisations…Maybe part of the reason society as a whole has behaved so decently is that we are still a migratory people ourselves…The Irish have had a very long training in understanding migrants as human beings in search of a better life. We are those humans.”²

And, of course, Ireland is a big economic success story. That Thursday morning the latest Central Statistics Office data showed that the Irish jobs market continued to surge ahead over the past year. Immigrants played a vital role in this success, filling just over half the 100,000 jobs created. And Irish governments generally can point to dramatic successes in recent years: in the 50 years of EU membership, life expectancy has risen from 71 to 81.5 years; incomes per head have increased fourfold, and the number of people at work has grown from just over one million to more than 2.5 million.

However, amid this new abundance, the government is making public goods (housing, healthcare, transport) seem scarce, leading to widespread dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. A struggle for scarce resources is not, to put it mildly, the best environment for social harmony. Many young people in poor working class areas, like Dublin’s north inner city, are untrained, bored and hopeless: in the words of one youth worker interviewed on RTE, these are “communities left to rot,” with young men looking out from their city flat complexes and seeing “lots of people going places – but they’re going nowhere.”

Unemployment may be at a record low of just over 4%, but many of these jobs are precarious and poorly paid. The housing crisis remains a running sore. There seems to be little official urgency in Dublin to think about what large-scale immigration means for this, the most burning single issue facing the government. Homelessness is at record levels. Government housing plans are based on the expectation of net migration of 220,000 this decade. Three years in and that figure has already been surpassed.

Such instability, topped by last week’s momentary mayhem, is grist to the mill of populist parties. Here in Ireland – thank God – we have no significant far right parties. But we have have Sinn Fein on the left, and like so many of the government’s woes, last Thursday’s events will only benefit them. In countries like the Netherlands – witness the surprise election victory of the far right Freedom Party last week – Italy, Germany, France and Spain, it is the anti-immigrant far right which is benefitting. We are living in frightening times in long peaceful, long stable, long social democratic Western Europe.

As that voice of sanity, Irish Times columnist Cliff Taylor, wrote over the weekend: “There is a sense that younger people have been left behind and the middle ground has not benefited in a world where a lot of the big wins go to corporate profits and the rich. In Ireland young people can get a job, but unless it is in one of the high pay sectors, they will struggle to buy a house or afford to rent. Recent figures from the CSO show that household living standards were 12% higher in 2022 than in 2016, after allowing for inflation. This is a significant rise, but interestingly the vast bulk of the gain was due to households, on average, having more people at work. The living standards of an individual worker rose only slightly, hit by the recent surge in inflation.”

However, Taylor finishes with a warning: “One piece of perspective is needed: Ireland has profited and been shaped by its openness. Growth and economic progress have been driven by trade. And one in four of those at work in Ireland is now a national from another country, according to this week’s figures, without whom the economy and our public services would collapse and we would be a much poorer country. In every sense of the word.”³

P.S. On a separate note, I am glad to see issues like Irish unity, national identity and relations with Britain (and England) being publicly debated these days. However, the standard of debate is often low. I was at two such events in the past month. Last week I attended a panel discussion in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin entitled ‘You can be anything in Ireland now, as long as it’s not English’. I looked forward to a sharp, insightful exchange on anti-Englishness in Ireland. But what was offered was poor stuff. One long-winded English academic (at an Irish university) was so concerned to be politically correct that he confused the audience by using the phrase ‘the North’ to mean two different things: Northern Ireland (perish the thought that he should use its internationally-recognised proper name) and the north of England (where he was from). An Irish academic had never noticed that the Union flag was unique among flags of the world in almost never appearing in public places in the Republic of Ireland. The young chairman, having heard the British ambassador introduce himself as a Scotsman (and later as a working class Catholic Scot), asked him ‘Are you English?’

Last month I was at a Shared Island dialogue event in the Abbey Theatre on ‘accommodating national identities.’ There was a thoughtful opening address from the Tánaiste, Micheál Martin. After that it went downhill. There were academics who failed to address the central issue of how people with two clashing national identities on this island can learn to share it in peace and mutual understanding; token Southern Protestants (I suppose I count as one of those now!), one of them Irish-speaking; a London-Irish playwright and a Church of Ireland minister who had little or nothing to say about the deeply problematic topic of the debate . Apart from nice John Kyle, the former Belfast city councillor, strong unionist voices, as usual, were notable by their absence, although the head of the Orange Order, Rev. Mervyn Gibson, was in the audience. Another missed opportunity.

¹‘Remember who we are: race, riots and the end of the ‘Irish Welcome’, Guardian, 26 November

²‘In Ireland we barely talk about immigration. It’s easy to see why’, Irish Times, 14 November

³ ‘Ireland would be a much poorer country without immigration’, Irish Times, 25 November

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Republic of Ireland | 3 Comments

What have the British ever done for us? Quite a bit, actually

Posted on Wednesday, 1 November, 2023 by andypollak

One of the recurrent themes of these blogs is that if we are going to welcome 900,000 Unionists into a ‘new Ireland’, we are going to have to accept and respect their passionate Britishness. And that is going to be a hard task for a society that fought a war of independence against Britain a hundred years ago, and has adopted a political and popular ethos which has been largely anti-British ever since.

Occasionally that anti-Britishness has softened: notably after particularly horrifying IRA atrocities in Britain in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: for example, after the bombing outside Harrods in London in December 1983, in which six people were killed and 90 injured, Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald told Margaret Thatcher that the two governments now faced a common enemy; and during the peace process period of the 1990s and early 2000s, when excellent inter-governmental relations were built up, started by Albert Reynolds and John Major, and greatly strengthened by Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair. But following Brexit, and with the rise of Sinn Fein, the undercurrent of anti-Britishness has risen again. One sees it even in the opinions of people who should know better: prominent former diplomats, political scientists and journalists. They should know that any coming together of people on this island into a closer constitutional arrangement also has to involve the British government. They should know that anti-Britishness does nothing for movement towards a careful, harmony-building unity agreement between the British and Irish tribes in Ireland.

One thing we need to do – and it won’t be easy – is to start to recognise that not everything the British have done in Ireland over the past couple of centuries has been bad for this country. I am going to cite examples of three things the British government did that were good for Ireland: in pensions, housing and education.

In 1908 the then Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, introduced legislation to bring in non-contributory pensions for the elderly, funded out of general taxation, making the UK the third country in the world (after Germany and New Zealand) to take such a radical step. The lack of adequate records meant that many Irish people applying for this new pension received the benefit of the doubt. In 1912, of the 942,000 pensioners in the UK, 205,000 were in Ireland, a proportion far greater than the relative populations of the two countries at the time would warrant.

Five years later John Redmond, the head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, told the House of Commons that a wartime increase in the pension to 2s 6d per week was “an extravagance which would not have been indulged in by an Irish Parliament comprised of Irishmen responsible to the country and knowing the country.”¹ Sure enough, when Ireland gained her independence in the early twenties, an Irish government headed by W.T.Cosgrave and Ernest Blythe cut the old-age pension for the same reasons Redmond had outlined.

Then there was housing. While the Irish Civil War was raging, the first of 289 houses were started in Killester Garden Village in north Dublin, one of several estates built for ex-British servicemen in the First World War by the Irish Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust with British government money. This was the largest such estate built; over 2,600 such homes were eventually provided throughout Ireland. When Lloyd George, now Prime Minister, had promised “homes for heroes” at the end of the World War, he could not have envisaged that most of Ireland would be an independent nation by the time they came to be built.

The Killester estate was arranged in ‘garden village’ style so that residents had plenty of open space and large gardens and thus could grow their own food. At an Armistice Day ceremony a year ago, the then Green Lord Mayor of Dublin, Caroline Conroy, said it was “well ahead of its time”, “a perfect blend of nature and city”, and could provide a vision of housing that enhanced mental health during our current housing crisis.² If you are interested in seeing this little gem of urban planning, take the DART to Killester (whose station was built to serve the estate) or look for The Demesne off the Howth Road.

Thirdly, there was education. Áine Hyland, the distinguished former Professor of Education at University College Cork (and co-founder of the Dalkey School Project), wrote to the Irish Times in August, as follows: “The Government decision to provide free schoolbooks to all primary (national) school pupils is very welcome and long overdue.

“It is, however, worth noting that when the national school system was set up in 1831 (almost 200 years ago) every school received a stock of free books. The books were renewed every three years. For a school with an average attendance of 125 pupils, 30 first reading books, 30 second reading books, 15 third reading books, six English grammars and six arithmetic texts were provided. Extra books were available on request. In addition, copybooks, slates, slate pencils, quills and ink were also provided, either free of charge or at a reduced price.”³

I’m going to finish with a quote from the eminent archaeologist, historian and writer, the late Liam de Paor. Speaking to the Irish Association in 1973, he said: “The element of shared experience is enormous; but in the South we have liked to forget about the British parts of our inheritance; in the North we have tried to forget about the Irish parts. Saving the important matter of religion – and this is, of course, a major part of anyone’s culture [although less in 2023 than in 1973, AP] – the cultural traditions of by far the greater part of the present population of this island are not all that different. It is the myths that have differed, and these no longer serve the health of either of our societies…In this whole matter of identity, we should, rather than try to bully one another into accepting the Britishness of Ulster or the Irishness of Ireland, endorse the principle of individual liberty, which is nowhere more important than here, and offer to everyone who lives on this island his or her free choice.”

PS I heard a story recently about two County Armagh men who had taken the midnight train from Portadown to Dublin in April 1916 to join the Easter Rising. If they had been trying to do the same thing today, they would have had to take the last train at 8.39 – more than three hours and twenty minutes earlier than 107 years ago!

¹ Padraig Yeates, A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-18, pp.200, 265

² ‘Dublin village built for WW1 veterans hailed as ‘model’ for urban living a century on’, Irish Times, 13 November 2022

³ ‘Letters to the Editor’, Irish Times, 12 August 2023

Posted in British-Irish relations, General, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | 2 Comments

A half-Jewish Irishman’s view of the war in the Middle East

Posted on Monday, 16 October, 2023 by andypollak

I am an Irishman from a half-Jewish background – the other half is Presbyterian, so I am utterly untypical of people in this republic. However as a person with such unusual antecedents, I feel reluctantly impelled to add my two ha’apence worth to the millions of words on the terrible disaster unfolding in the Middle East. As with so many of these blogs, I am going to borrow unashamedly from journalists and commentators who are much better-informed than me.

My first conclusion is to agree with that fine Irish Times columnist, Justine McCarthy.¹ She writes that two wrongs – the horrific massacre by Hamas of hundreds of Israeli civilians and Israel’s equally appalling revenge bombings of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza – do not make a right. “True friends would caution the aggressors in what we used to call the Holy Land that the way to a genocidal cul-de-sac is paved with retaliation,” she says. She quotes a Japanese proverb that, when you are seeking revenge, you should dig two graves – one for yourself.

I know that nothing will be simple in the armoured tunnels and teeming tenements of Gaza, but if the Israelis go beyond an understandable mission to cripple Hamas’s military capacity, and kill thousands of innocent people in the process, they will be only storing up more hatred and anti-semitism and catastrophic violence for the future. If you continually oppress a whole people – as Benjamin Netanyahu’s dreadful governments have done to the Palestinians for so many years – they will fight back with all the means (some of them appalling) at their disposal.

Netanyahu has promised “mighty vengeance” for the Hamas attacks, and most of the Israeli people appear to agree with him. The Israeli government says it is determined that, after ‘Black Saturday’, 7th October, it must wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, and its allies, led by the US, seem to have given it a green light to try. That way surely lies mutually assured destruction and genocide.

As so often in these desperate situations, I turn to the views of brilliant left-wing Jews. The author and climate change activist Naomi Klein writes that callous displays of international indifference to (and even celebration of) Israeli deaths are “a gift to militant Zionism, since they neatly shore up and reconfirm its core and governing belief: that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will – look, even the bleeding-heart left is making excuses for our killers and thinks that Jewish kids and old ladies deserved death merely by living in Israel.²

“For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, anti-semitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.”

So how do we confront the violent ideology of both the Israeli government and Hamas? Klein writes: “For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as anti-semitism by a great many Jews. And anti-semitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.

“What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including anti-semitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love. It’s certainly worth a try. In these difficult times, I’d like to be part of a left like that.”

One practical (or maybe not so practical) example: it is a great shame that the enfeebled United Nations could not fly in 15-20,000 armed peacekeeping troops (including Irish soldiers) to enforce a humanitarian corridor to allow hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people from Gaza to find temporary refuge in Egypt.

The Guardian columnist, Jonathan Friedland, writes that all the 16 million Jews around the world feel more vulnerable after the Hamas massacres.³ He points to anti-semitic attacks quadrupling in the UK in the days afterwards and pro-Hamas demonstrators in Sydney chanting “Fuck the Jews! Gas the Jews!” He calls those attacks “a pogrom…multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before.”

He goes on: “I suspect there are some progressives who – even unconsciously – hesitate before expressing full sympathy for the murdered young festival-goers and ageing kibbutz peaceniks because they worry that, if they do, that will somehow diminish their support for the Palestinians. That is a mistake.

“Because Hamas is not identical with the Palestinian cause: it is a curse on it. With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating.

“It isn’t that difficult. You can condemn Hamas and name its actions as evil, even as you support the Palestinians in their quest for a life free of occupation and oppression. And there should still be room in your heart for a Jewish child whose last moments were filled with unimaginable terror – the same terror his grandparents, and their grandparents, thought they had escaped for ever.”

Back at home, I find myself agreeing more with former Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell, a man of the moderate right, than my left-wing friends who are passionate supporters of the righteous cause of Palestinian self-determination and independence. McDowell writes: “If Hamas deserves to be toppled – and it does – how will the reduction of Gaza to stone-age rubble address the long-term security needs of Israel? How will that play across the Islamic world? Who knows how the Saudis and the Gulf states will view the Hamas massacres, or how they will play out if Gaza is razed and many thousands of Palestinians die? Could Israeli-Arab rapprochement survive?⁴

“Europe sat on its hands on the annexation of the West Bank. Those of us in the Seanad who passed the Settlement Goods Bill as a small but important symbolic rejection of the creeping illegal annexation of the West Bank were described by the Israeli government as anti-semitic. Ireland must now shout out loud against total war in Gaza. The only response that will avoid further long-term catastrophe is restraint and adherence to international law. Israel’s right to self-defence must be proportionate, lawful and humane. That response might echo across the generations.”

In a letter on the following page of the Irish Times, my friend Betty Purcell, whom I know as a good and decent left-wing person, says that Ireland must make its voice heard by calling for the dismantling of what she calls the anti-Palestinian “apartheid’ system in Israel. But in her lengthy letter, she has not a single word of condemnation of Hamas’s murder of over a thousand Israeli civilians.

¹ ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right, they make a vortex of horror’, Irish Times, 13 October

² ‘In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun’, Guardian, 11 October

³ ‘After the pogrom in Israel, the angel of death is licking its lips’, Guardian, 13 October

⁴ ‘Gaza must not be made pay for Hamas atrocities’, Irish Times, 11 October

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

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