Martin McGuinness - From unbending hardliner, to the humanised andacceptable face of republicanism

Northern Ireland politicians from the early 1990s, by Gerald Scarfe for the New Yorker

In present Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness is viewed as the more moderate and conciliatory politician compared with the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. Yet a quick down historical accounts and observations show that the reality is the inverse. As is often the case in Northern Ireland, perception is incongruent to fact. Northern Ireland poet Nick Laird wrote:

"Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972."

Ireland's Capitalist Crown

Just as Ireland had a "parallel Monarchy" in the form of the imperial Roman Church, so Ireland now has a "parallel Crown" in the form of capitalist bonds and debentures.

Ireland's venerated martyr James Connolly wrote in 1914 that "Ireland has no war with Germany, it welcomes the German as a brother struggling towards the light", and went further than David Cameron by calling migrants to Ireland "hordes", a "swarm of locusts", "boys of the bull-dog breed" and "Brit-Huns", making Ireland "Rotten" with a "new plantation". James Connolly wrote in a 3 part essay series titled 'Slackers'.

Irish teachers must be Catholic missionaries

Eamonn de Valera genuflecting at the feet of Bishop John Charles McQuaid

Michael Nugent wrote following the publication of the report, 'Irish school teachers must be Catholic missionaries,' that religious discrimination against the irreligious and non-Catholic is accepted as part of the Irish way of life, adding that "Irish school teachers must be Catholic missionaries." He wrote:

"Religious discrimination, like all discrimination, undermines the dignity of the human person. In this case religious discrimination in our education system has undermined the human rights of parents and their children. It also denies atheists and religious minorities from their right to access the teaching profession in a democratic Republic without religious discrimination.

The "weirdness" and "freak show" of apartheid education in Northern Ireland

Cartoon by Ian Knox (@IanKnoxcartoon)

Ninety-three per cent of children in Northern Ireland attend segregated elementary schools. Causing what the New Yorker's Patrick Redden Keefe called, "sheer weirdness." Jude Whyte said:

"Politics has replaced the gun and the bomb yet in many ways I feel that we live in a more segregated society than ever. We live apart, educate our children apart... while sport (the source of such unity in the world) remains sectarian, poisoned and divisive."

Irish Americans looked and sounded like Orangemen



Cartoon of Bernadette Devlin by Aislin (Terry Mosher)

The words in title are the words of Bernadette Devlin, the youngest person ever to be elected to Westminster, and the figure in the cartoon. You can read her Maiden Speech in the Commons, April 22 1969, here. On her rise to the London parliament and prolific profile her face was seen around the world and she travelled widely, including to America. She was the figurehead of Ireland's discriminated-against and the disposed and had the sympathies of Irish-Americans. A hearing from Irish-America was as natural so as to breath, since animosity based on "England's historic wrongs" were closely and long held. As the Spectator wrote in 1882:

"The hatred of England is cultivated by the American branch of the Irish race “as a sort of religion,” we can well believe. The history of the last two or three years shows it to be so."

Fintan O'Toole - Ireland's parallel monarchy

Fintan O’Toole wrote in ‘Enough is Enough: How to Build A New Republic’ (page 28) about Ireland's 'parallel monarchy’ of the Church:

"Having shrugged off one culture of deference to titled nobles, the new state embraced another. The elected representatives of the people always kneeled before a bishop and kissed his ring. The fact that the bishop was addressed as ‘My Lord’ and lived in a house that was always called a ‘palace’ did not seem to cause any great discomfort to Irish people who would have been enraged by any sugges- tion that Ireland should honour an aristocracy. Indeed, Mary Kenny has argued persuasively that the Church occupied the place where the monarchy had been: ‘even the ardent Republicans would find a vehicle for the pomp and ceremony that every society either derives from tradition or reinvents – the Holy Roman Catholic Church would soon fill the vacuum left by the departed pageantry of His Majesty.’7 She points out that the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, which was the Irish state’s first great public ceremonial, ‘followed in almost every detail the format used for royal visits and royal events in Ireland… Not coincidentally, words and phrases previously applied to the monarchy were at- tached to the papacy: “allegiance”, “loyalty”, and “kingship” (of Christ).’ The ‘parallel monarchy’ of the Church preserved all the habits of awe, obedience and humility that might have been thrown off in a genuinely democratic revolution."

In an article in the Irish Times, 'Why do we allow a foreign state to appoint the patrons of our primary schools?' Fintan O’Toole wrote:

"Why do we allow a foreign state to appoint the patrons of our primary schools? If some weird vestige of colonial times decreed that the British monarch would appoint the ultimate legal controllers of almost 3,200 primary schools in our so-called republic, we would be literally up in arms. Why should we tolerate the weird vestige of an equally colonial mentality that allows a monarch in Rome to do just that?"

Ireland - A cynical tax haven?

Fintan O'Toole by Jon Berkeley

Fintan O'Toole wrote in May 2013, Ireland needs a better economic strategy than ‘come here to avoid tax'. He said: "An official White House report categorised Ireland as a tax haven in 2009 and last week’s Senate hearings on Apple’s creative accounting embedded the phrase in public discourse. If it takes permanent hold, the consequences could be enormous." He then said:

"I was browsing Forbes, the magazine for billionaires, online about a year ago. There was a piece about Ireland’s status as a tax haven. Apparently through some technological glitch, you could see that two phrases had been edited out and replaced with euphemisms. Thus “Ireland’s tax favoured status” was struck out and replaced with “Ireland’s hospitality”.

And the statement that “US companies can pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to avoid US tax” was doctored to say that US companies can “set up shop in Ireland”. This kind of thing is amusing, but it’s also deadly serious."

Fintan O'Toole explained how critical language is to international community's perception of Ireland:

"The Forbes piece is a perfect illustration of how vulnerable the perception of Ireland is to changes of language. Ireland is either a hospitable place where you can set up shop like a friendly village grocer or a cynical tax haven, and increasingly, in the US, it is routinely referred to as the latter.

We are deluding and damaging society if we cannot speak freely of the public dead

Cartoon of Paisley with Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and then Blair and Ahern. By Ian Knox.

[UPDATE* - Ed Moloney spoke about the passing of Paisley on New York radio here, and said among several rich comments that "Although Brian Faulkner was brought down by a broad coalition of Loyalists, the scene was set years before that by Paisley’s agitation."]
[UPDATE II - Clifford Smyth wrote on Ed Moloney's blog that when Paisley began his political career in the 1960s Northern Ireland was a stable and peaceful society and Irish Republicans were reflecting on why the IRA campaign waged between 1956 and ’62, had failed, and how a reshaped strategy might succeed.]


Compulsory praise, homage and adulation. The scurrilous sanctimony of it. I've written about it three time before, the death eiquette (here, here and here), and will go one more time. When Paisley passed, there was as expected, and on schedule, a mass outbreak of moist and dewey eyed encomium and panegyrics. A bombardment of hagiography and neuteured, one-sided reqiuems. Pure, leader-reverent propaganda. Total distortion. Total self-delusion of the worst most self-harming kind. If the man was a thundering bigot, incubator and mobiliser of hatred for over half a century that needs ruthless examination and full public acknowledgement.

Yet death in Ireland is a time for seeing only good and burrying the bad. Fintan O'Toole wrote about it and said:

"Death is one of the things we do well in Ireland. There is a decency, a kindness, a communal instinct to try to lessen a family’s grief by taking a little bit of it onto ourselves...

Irish racism, Ctd "incredibly dehumanising"

Implying Northern Ireland is a colony is incredibly dangerous rhetoric, usually restricted to the ethno-fascist fringes of republicanism.
— Newton Emerson (@NewtonEmerson) March 20, 2014

@ChristopherOCon @AlexKane221b If every transfer of population in the past 500 years makes a place a colony, almost every place is a colony
— Newton Emerson (@NewtonEmerson) March 20, 2014

'Colonists' get de-colonised. That's clearly still the dream for some.
— Newton Emerson (@NewtonEmerson) March 20, 2014

 As I said:

""[Britain]" is not in Ireland. There is no occupation. This language of "England Out" and British occupation is incredibly dehumanising. There are people, like me, who wish to remain in the Union with great Britain. As John McCallister said: "I am no settler. No colonist." I am one of 800,000 citizens who want "England [in]". This language is tremendously dehumanising. This the sort of debasing language which allowed the IRA to murder innocent civilians and serving officers. As Tom  

Hartley, Sinn Féin strategist, said:

"In a way we made them [Unionists] a non-people... We didn't even see them as part of the problem, never mind as being part of the solution."

Saint Patrick's Day - We need to end the identification of Irishness with monolithic Catholicism.

There is not such thing as a proper Irish person. There is no doctrinally orthodox and prelapsarian pure way to be an Irish person. It may exist as a demented ideal is some puritans, but these notions are racist, xenophobic and the most obvious bar to peace in Ireland. This is the Celtic nationalism that worked to make Irishness irrevocably incompatible with Englishness. It is a dangerously and wrecklessly conservative, idiosyncratic and reactionary view of identity. On par with the purist ideology of the BNP and EDL.

 

Éamon de Valera typified the little-Irelander mentality perfectly. Gearoid O Crualaoich explained that de Valera had 'a static conception of a "truly Irish" way of life.' De Valera and others cherished and pursued the "fior Gael" ("true Irish"). This was explicitly shown in his famous but loopy 1943 speech 'The Ireland That We Dreamed Of'.

 

It was the ireland of "cosy homesteads", the rural countryside, neo Gaelic, Catholic Arcadia. As J. T. Morahan said in 1931*:

"[English] culture is not the culture of the Gael; rather it is poison gas to the kindly Celtic people."

Taoiseach Éamon de Valera said in 1951:

"I am an Irishman second: I am a Catholic first and I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong."

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said in 2013:

 "I am proud to stand here as a public representative, as a taoiseach who happens to be a Catholic, but not a Catholic taoiseach."

Fintan O'Toole - Libel action should be an absolute last resort

In December 2010 The Sunday Times carried a long, anonymous profile of Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole and included the assertion that he drove home from an Irish Congress of Trade Unions rally in a BMW 5 Series. As Fintan O'Toole said, the story "was pure invention and almost every “fact” that followed was wildly and demonstrably wrong." He could have sued, but choose not to. He explained:

"The “profile” was, in other words, a gold mine. I had hit the libel jackpot. The Sunday Times couldn’t possibly go into court to defend an article that was so sloppily written and badly researched. Even the most aggressive lawyer would tell them to stuff my mouth with gold and make the whole thing go away fast."

La verite est en marche et rien ne l'arretera , Ctd

Fintan O’Toole wrote in The Irish Times here:

"Over time mainstream opinion comes to recognise that honest beliefs once held by decent people were reprehensible, not because the people were bad, but because the beliefs were shaped by prejudice. This will happen, probably quite soon, with beliefs about sexual orientation."

He continued:

"Sincerity is as irrelevant here as malevolence – it simply doesn’t matter why people uphold structures of discrimination. Throughout history, decent, moral people have believed with complete sincerity that slavery is a moral good, that women are lesser beings who must be protected from their weakness by being obedient to men, that Jews should be confined to ghettoes, that the Irish are incapable of rational thought, that Catholics are unfit to live in democracies and so on."

He continued:

"This is true even of very great men. Aristotle thought slavery entirely natural. Abraham Lincoln thought for most of his career that when slavery was abolished blacks should be shipped out to Africa because they couldn’t possibly live side by side with free whites. Does this make Aristotle and Lincoln bad men? No. It just makes them examples of highly moral and intelligent people who cannot escape inherited structures of discriminatory thought."

He concluded:

"The whole point of the law is that it’s not about giving people equal status because you like them. It’s about freeing people from subjection to the arbitrariness of other people’s benevolence. Gay men and lesbians shouldn’t have to care one way or the other whether the members of the Iona Institute love them or not. Just as the rest of us shouldn’t measure the rights of our fellow citizens by what they get up to in bed."

In full here.

Fintan O'Toole - "A parody of culture"

Northern Ireland makes a lot more sense if you replace the word 'culture' with 'hobby'.
— Newton Emerson (@NewtonEmerson) September 12, 2013

In an article in The Irish Times from August 29 2000, 'When bigotry takes on a life form of its own,' Fintan O'Toole questioned loyalist culture and it's definition. Calling some loyalist "cultural events" as a "parody of culture". He wrote of Johnny Adair and elements of loyalism:

"For the peace process to work it was necessary to sustain certain myths about Northern Ireland. The most potent, and potentially the most dangerous, was the idea that NI was divided between two "cultures" or "traditions", one catholic, the other Protestant. 

This notion was useful and perhaps indispensable, for how can you show "parity of esteem" to two different cultures if you don't recognise their clear existence? Yet it is also a lie. For one thing, it ignores the fact that surveys of attitudes in NI have consistently shown that something like 40% of the population does not identify with either the unionist or the nationalist (i.e. politically Protestant and politically Catholic) "traditions". For another, the most dangerous mindsets in NI don't belong in any real sense to a "culture" or "tradition".

Pictures - Fintan O'Toole at work

As you may have guessed, I'm a bit of a fan of Fintan O'Toole. He spoke to The Irish Times here inside the Dublin offices which included some nice panoramic shots of the office, his books, workstation and him typing. Call me a stalking, but I thought these inside glimpses were fascinating. You can see what he's reading, how he organises his affairs, and that he's an old-timer - as per his one-finger-stab-the-keyboard typing style! 

You can see the original footage and accompanying article here and here. He made two especially interesting remarks. One:

"And what we know in Ireland is, unless something is being driven very very clearly, what happens is it goes back to the default mechanism in Ireland which is patronage, which is cronyism, machine politics. Which is the way these things get done."

Myth, misrepresentation and misinformation in Northern Ireland

The amount of myth, misrepresentation and misinformation, and plain misuse and abuse of language and emotion in the debate in Northern Ireland is shocking. The idea that young Catholics had no option other than to join the IRA is kicked around with absolute abandon - it's reckless, absurd, outrageous and preposterous.

Fintan O'Toole said in 1998 in The New York Review of Books:

"Most of the current leadership of Sinn Fein is made up of men who were, in the 1960s, angry young Catholics."

Angry young catholics are doing the same in 2013. I wrote about this generational cycle of extremism here. Young men with over-sized adrenalin glands. Anyway Here's Tom Kelly setting Gerry Kelly's IRA narrative straight in the August 19 edition of The Irish News:

"Gerry kelly recently said young people like him in the early 1970s had no choice but to join the IRA but that is simply not true. Back then as now they had choices. The Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 was actually stronger in nationalist terms than either the Good Friday or Saint Andrews Agreement. The vast majority of young nationalists did not join the ranks of the IRA. Had they, the Maze would have been five times the size it is."

Newton Emerson said in Slugger:

"I didn’t say the IRA started the Troubles. I said Sinn Fein is advancing an anti-discrimination ‘fight for equality’ narrative as a consistent explanation for why the Troubles began and ended." 

He continued: 

"During the Troubles the vast majority of the nationalist electorate pointedly rejected IRA violence but since the ceasefires a reassessment of that violence was necessary and warranted by ‘unionist misrule’ has crept into the nationalist mainstream.  

By extension, as Mr Kavanagh seemed to imply, a ‘discriminatory’ special advisers bill threatens to take us back to where we started. In fact, there is no risk to peace from this minor inconvenience to Sinn Fein’s party machine. 

A far greater threat is pretending the entire 30-year span of the IRA campaign was justified, its violence was successful and victims like Mary Travers were an accidental aberration. A clumsy law may be a small price to pay to remind ourselves that this was not the case."

On the IRA delivering rights for Catholics, it was said:

"I don’t know what equality measures were achieved as a result of violence. Five of the six demands of the Civil Rights Movement were achieved very early on before violence got going, the Housing Executive was a Hume idea, fair employment legislation was put in place in the teeth of Provo violent opposition and the Provos opposed every aspect of the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement."

Another:

"The main reforms took place in 1968, nearly 2 years before the formation of the SDLP, directly as a result of the actions of NICRA. Of course, some members of NICRA went on to prominence in the SDLP.  

Not only did the Provos not achieve reforms, they didn’t actually want reforms – having a single entirely different objective in mind: a united Ireland. Judged against their sole aim, their achievements were nearly 2000 deaths and no actual progress."

Eamon McCann said:

"So for the time being a fractious alliance held together. And it seemed to be getting some results. The civil rights demonstrations which took place throughout Northern Ireland, but most frequently and dramatically in Derry, in the weeks after 5 October forced concessions from the Unionists. On 8 November a specially requisitioned meeting of the Corporation accepted a Nationalist motion setting up a three-man committee to allocate houses. Alderman Hegarty and two Unionists were elected to the committee. Shortly afterwards O’Neill announced a five-point package of reforms. These involved a plan to abolish Derry Corporation, universal franchise, and a promise that sections of the Special Powers Act would be ‘put into cold storage’ (but not so cold as to prevent rapid re-heating when the occasion arose)."

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/crights/mccann93.htm

The reality is that the civil rights marches achieved 80% of their aims a full two years before the PIRA started its campaign of violence.

Fintan O'Toole - Folly of sectarian 'solutions'

The Good Friday Agreement is a dual purpose document that seeks to do two things. One, stop the IRA and other paramilitaries from killing people. Two, it was supposed to be a founding document that would allow Northern Ireland to move from sectarianism into a new world.

In 2005 Fintan O'Toole wrote a fascinating article on the peace agreement on September 13 2005 in the Irish Times under the title, Folly of sectarian 'solutions'. He said on the second plank of the agreement:

"[The agreement is] supposed to be a kind of constitution. It defines Northern Ireland as a political space and seeks to do so in a genuinely radical, exciting way. It is, indeed, perhaps the boldest constitutional document ever agreed between sovereign states. It creates space that is not ultimately claimed by any state, defines national identity as potentially both mutable and multiple, and rests sovereignty, not on history and geography but on that most complex and fluent of things - the collective mind of a majority of the population."

On the first plank of the agreement, Fintan O'Toole explained:

"[The agreement] built the internal architecture of Northern Ireland's governance on a static notion of "two traditions" which were to be appeased and given "parity of esteem". The hope was that even though sectarianism was built in to the power-sharing system by the requirement of simultaneous majorities on the unionist and nationalist sides, the experience of working the new institutions would in fact diminish it. But there has been no momentum, and the division have been formalised, entrenched and deepened."

We need to achieve what the founders intended, diminish sectarianism. This requires a break with the negative feedback loop of mutual hatred, loathing and recrimination. It needs a break from management and towards vision.

Read Fintan O'Toole from 2005 in full here.

Conor Cruise O'Brien - Marching through areas that don't want them is not good policy for the Orange Order itself

Fintan O'Toole cited Conor Cruise O'Brien in the Irish Times in May 11 1996 after he announced he would run for election as a unionist candidate in Northern Ireland. Conor Cruise O'Brien said:

"I feel that unionists are essentially besieged. They're under a pan-nationalist siege, of which the main stimulus is being supplied by Sinn Fein. So I don't see it as my job to get out and annoy unionists. I think they're been annoyed quite enough. I have, in an Orange context at an Orange House, urged them to see that marching through areas that don't want them is not good policy for the Orange Order itself or for the unionist community."

The article 'Cruiser's new voyage provokes 'no qualms, no heart-searching'' can be obtained from the Irish Times archive here.

Fintan O'Toole on the hyper-inflation of language and emotion

Father Alec Reid claimed on October 18 2005 here that Ulster unionists treated the Catholic community "like the Nazis treated the Jews." Fintan O'Toole responded to this with an article in the Irish Times with the title 'Comparison with Nazis is absurd'. He said:

"I happened to be in the Polish city of Wroclow. At lunch that day, when there was some talk about historical memory, I was on the brink of mentioning the controversy to my Polish hosts, but I just couldn't do it. I was too ashamed.

Fintan O'Toole called it a "combination of historical ignorance and monumental self-pity." He continued: 

"How could you possibly explain that Irish nationalists, who are thought to be so steeped in the past, know so little about the recent history of the continent they inhabit? There is no excuse for not having at least a general sense of proportion, for being wary of camparisons that are as inaccurate as they are offensive."

He spoke of the cognitive dissonance and contradictions:

"The irony of all the hyper-inflation of the experiences of Catholics in Northern Ireland after partition by involving the Nazis or, as Sinn Fein tends to prefer, apartheid Africa, is that it actually occludes those experiences themselves. It discredits history itself as a context in which we can understand the present."

In full here. Fintan O'Toole also wrote in The New York Review of Books here in 1998 that, "The analogy between Irish Republicans and Mandela is not in fact valid."

Fintan O'Toole on the Good Friday Agreement

In 2005 Fintan O'Toole wrote a fascinating article on the Good Friday Agreement on September 13 2005 in the Irish Times under the title, Folly of sectarian 'solutions'. On where the agreement ranks in human achievements, Fintan O'Toole said:

"[The agreement is] supposed to be a kind of constitution. It defines Northern Ireland as a political space and seeks to do so in a genuinely radical, exciting way. It is, indeed, perhaps the boldest constitutional document ever agreed between sovereign states. It creates space that is not ultimately claimed by any state, defines national identity as potentially both mutable and multiple, and rests sovereignty, not on history and geography but on that most complex and fluent of things - the collective mind of a majority of the population."

Conor Cruise O'Brien said the challenge was to move beyond nationalism and unionism

Cartoon of Conor Cruise O'Brien by Martyn Turner

Fintan O'Toole wrote of Connor Cruise O'Brien in a feature for the Irish Times in May 11 1996:

"His [Conor Cruise O'Brien] disavowal of Irish nationalism is based on his belief that it is ultimately inseparable from Catholicism."

Fintan O'Toole explained O'Brien's philosophy for Irish politics: "He does not accept that the really important challenge at the moment is not to move from nationalism to unionism, but to move beyond both." Fintan O'Toole then quoted O'Brien: "The main pressure is coming from the nationalists. It's dangerous not just for the North but also for us. In that context, I'm more useful taking a stand with unionists than I would be on some kind of neutral ground."

The article 'Cruiser's new voyage provokes 'no qualms, no heart-searching'' can be obtained from the Irish Times archive here.