Ian Knox on the Royal Visit

A nice cartoon from Ian Knox, one that got away. 

Why we need to know Sayyid Qutb

There is no such thing as the End of History or the inevitable ascent of man and liberal democracy. Ideas are in sempiternal competition and anyone can win out and dominate, but there is no such thing as hegemonic finality. Triumph and Disaster are two impostors just the same. People make a particular fetish out of claiming their generation as particularly afflicted, and of their epoch of especially violent and unstable. W.B. Yeats wrote about "the growing murderousness of the world." Those words apply today; proving that history teaches us we learn nothing from history; and that madness and murderousness is inevitable and unavoidable. All we need to ensure is that good men do not do nothing.

T.K. Whitaker - A United Ireland would pose a "formidable" if not "intolerable" burden (1968)

Jack Lynch and Terence O'Neill, with T.K. Whitaker in the rear-ground, Ireland's rough equivalent to Sir Kenneth Bloomfield

Stormont is like a giant ATM, a quango spending a budget. Ireland has unshackled itself from the worst of Troika rule but stills faces severe fiscal headwinds and uncomfortable belt-tightening. Northern Ireland is an overgrown man child dependent on parental handouts. Southern Ireland is a recently graduated student trying to find a job and a stable footing in the world. Neither is in a position to make matrimony. Not at the moment and not without substantial reforms and rehabilitative measures from Northern Ireland and a more rebalanced economic structure in the south.

Being of planter stock

British planter in Jamaica, by George Spratt

John Hewitt, of "planter stock", wrote he was 'As native in my thought as any here.' Belfast poet and son of a British soldier, Michael Longley said that Hewitt's verse taught people not to be embarrassed or ashamed of their connection to colonialism. It's not something I was conscious of growing up. I was always Irish and British, I watched the BBC and lived on the island of Ireland.

David Remnick - Gerry Adams has no right to the comparison with Mandela (1994)

Gerry Adams, by Martin Rowson

David Remnick visited troubled and torn Belfast in the early 1990s. He wrote about his experience and interpretation in the New Yorker, published in April 1994. You can read Remnick's account of his meeting with Gerry Adams in his Sinn Fein office in early 1990s Belfast here. It was an incredibly broad and detailed account of life in Belfast and Northern Ireland at the time. A note on how Belfast was very serene outside of the hotspots, how loyalist and republican paramilitaries are simply base gangs like in any other city; he painted a picture from his trip to Paisley's church, Martyr's Memorial; told us about Gerry Adams's hallowed republican forbears; and retold us about his ramble in the greens of outer Belfast with Michael Longley. One of the aspects of the long essay that most hit me was when David Remnick said that Adams no right to the comparison with Mandela or Arafat:

Dublin in Easter 1916 through the eyes of a Trinity Student

Dorothy Stopford Price, a Church of Ireland Protestant born in Dublin who lived through and recorded Easter 1916

Dorothy Stopford Price was was born in Dublin, on September 9th 1890. She was in Dublin for Easter 1916. Writing from the Under-Secretary’s Lodge in Phoenix Park in Dublin, home of Sir Matthew Nathan (a key figure in the British administration of Ireland), the 26 year old recorded her view of a city in revolt.

Day 7 and the last of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

Portrait of James Stephens by Irish writer, poet, and painter George W. Russell (AA), circa 1910.

James Stephens was an Irish writer living and writing in the age of Irish writers, where his contemporaries were Joyce, Yeats, George Russell, O'Casey, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Horace Plunkett, Synge, Oliver St John Gogarty, George Moore and many others. Stephens was a Dubliner living in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916. He logged for posterity his experience of that week in his book 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished his account of Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, the Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday and the Saturday. You can read his account of the Sunday, Day Seven and the end of the Rising, April 30 1916 below. He wrote:

"The Insurrection has not ceased.

Day Six of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

James Stephens and James Joyce in Paris, circa 1934.

James Stephens was in Dublin during the Easter 1916 Rising. He documented his take on events in 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished his account of Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. You can read his account of Saturday April 29 1916, Day 6 of the fighting here, where James Stephens wrote:

"This morning also there has been no bread, no milk, no meat, no newspapers, but the sun is shining. It is astonishing that, thus early in the Spring, the weather should be so beautiful. 

Day Five of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

James Stephens, James Joyce and John Sullivan talking on Rue Raspail, Paris.

James Stephens, fellow Dubliner, writer and and friend of James Joyce, spent all of Easter 1916 in the Irish capital, the theatre of the republican Rising. He documented his experience of life in the city among the lead and the cordite his book 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished his account of Easter Monday, Easter Tuesday, the Wednesday and the Thursday. You can read his account of the Friday, Day Five of the Rising, April 28 1916 below. He wrote:

"This morning there are no newspapers, no bread, no milk, no news. The sun is shining, and the streets are lively but discreet. All people continue to talk to one another without distinction of class, but nobody knows what any person thinks.

Day Four of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

James Stephens, by Patrick Tuohy, RHA.

The Dublin native James Stephens did a lot of travelling. He was in Dublin for the entire duration of the Easter Rising in 1916. An event he documented in detail in 'The Insurrection in Dublin'. I have republished Easter Monday and Tuesday and his account of the Wednesday. You can read his account of Day Four of the Rising, April 27 1916 below. He wrote:

"Again, the rumours greeted one. This place had fallen and had not fallen. Such a position had been captured by the soldiers; recaptured by the Volunteers, and had not been attacked at all. But certainly fighting was proceeding. Up Mount Street, the rifle volleys were continuous, and the coming and going of ambulance cars from that direction were continuous also. Some spoke of pitched battles on the bridge, and said that as yet the advantage lay with the Volunteers. 

Day Three of the Easter Rising - By James Stephens

Troops of the Ulster Volunteer Force move into Dublin to support the British Forces during the Easter Rising of 1916.

The Dublin writer James Stephens was in Dublin for the whole of the Easter Rising in 1916. He documented what he saw and experienced in 'The Insurrection in Dublin.' I have republished his account of Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday, and below you can read his account of Day Three of the rebellion. James wrote:

"It was three o'clock before I got to sleep last night, and during the hours machine guns and rifle firing had been continuous.

Easter Tuesday 1916 by James Stephens

James Stephens by Sir William Rothenstein

Ninety-nine years ago the Dublin writer James Stephens lived and worked and wrote in and about Dublin. He was there on Easter Monday when the Rising leaders and rebels commandeered the GPO and other landmark buildings across Dublin in a failed attempt to overthrow British rule. He recorded the Saturday and Sunday that preceded the bloodshed, and gave and an account of Day One, Easter Monday 1916 here. He carried on and documented each of fighting that followed. And here you can read in full his experience of the Easter Tuesday, Day Two of the Easter Rising, the 6 days that would change Ireland forever. Compared with Easter 2015 when skies are open blue, the weather of 1916 was markedly more inclement. James Stephens began:

"A sultry, lowering day, and dusk skies fat with rain. 

James Stephens describes Dublin on Easter Monday 1916

Dublin writer James Stephens.

James Stephens is a Dublin writer from the turn of the 19th Century, the time of the Celtic Revival and the age of Irish independencem, the era that produced Yeats, Joyce, George Russell and set the bar for Beckett and Behan and today's writers like Toibin and others. James Stphens wrote a book, 'The Insurrection in Dublin.' In this he documented the six days of hostilities as republicans under Connolly and Pearse sought and fought separation from London, describing Easter Monday 1916 as a day with "the rumour of war and death in the air."

According to Stephens, the republican offensive commenced at 1100 and ended at 0400 the following morning. James Stephens opened Chapter 1 with a swift account of the Saturday and Sunday that preceeded the rising, and thereaftr in detail documented his experience of the city for each day of the fighting, from Easter Monday 1916 to the Saturday after. Here's how his preface began:

"The day before the rising was Easter Sunday, and they were crying joyfully in the Churches “Christ has risen.” On the following day they were saying in the streets “Ireland has risen”."

Christopher Hitchens on partition

W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden wrote, "Two peoples fanatically at odds, With their different diets and incompatible gods." Marya Mannes wrote in 1959 

"Borders are scratched across the 
hearts of men

By strangers with a calm, judicial 
pen,

And when the borders bleed we 
watch with dread

The lines of ink across the map 
turn red."

Is the Irish tricolour a "symbol of compromise"?

Robert Lynd, republican writer born in Belfast. by David Low

Robert Lynd, a former pupil of RBAI, wrote in June 1936 in the New Statesman, ‘In Defence of Pink’:

"Possibly, my love of a blending, a moderation, of colours is due to the fact that I grew up in a country in which the political colours were, in Mr. Chesterton’s phrase, “rich and glowing.” In the Ireland of my youth, orange was not permitted to be blended with green, and green was not perceptively diluted with orange."

G.K. Chesterton on Belfast

G.K. Chesterton by David Low.

[UPDATE - Read here and here for G.K. Chesterton on Unionism and Home Rule respectively]

The Protestant turned Catholic G.K. Chesterton wrote 'Irish Impressions', published in 1919 he shared his thoughts with great contemporary relevance on his time in Ireland. He devoted a chapter to the Ireland's leading industrial centre, 'Belfast and the Religious Question,' in which he wrote scathingly of the superiority of the northern Protestant creed. He began with thoughts on Ireland and poetry:

"Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift over so many Irish poems and impressions, I felt very little in Ireland. There is a real meaning in this suggestion of a mystic sleep; but it does not mean what most of us imagine, and is not to be found where we expect it.

The Calvinist Ulsterman is more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised

Cartoon by Ian Knox

G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book 'Irish Inpressions':

"The Calvinist Ulsterman may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised, especially by himself."

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."

The vanity and narcissism of the small difference in Ireland

Thomas Nast, ‘St. Patrick's Day, 1867--'The day we celebrate.'’ Harper's Weekly, April 6, 1867.

[UPDATE - Interesting and relevant comments from David Trimble and Daniel Hannan here and here.]

Tomorrow the world will celebrate Saint Patrick's day. Tomorrow the Irish in the troubled Northern region will continue to celebrate and cherish the minutiae that divides them. John Hewitt, Ulster protestant and Irishman, wrote:

‘St Patrick’s Eve,The country came to wake him, men and boysSmoking round the hearth’

AWIT - 'Articulating What I Thought'

'Portrait de poètes' (1942) by Serge Ivanoff: Yanette Delétang-Tardif, Maurice Alphonse Jacques Fombeure, Jean Follain, Rémi Masset, Eugène Guillevic

When I read Orwell, I am reading someone who has written what I'm thinking. I read:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is war minus the shooting."

And thought, 'finally someone has expressed and articulated exactly what I felt about sport and the culture around it!' Seamus Heaney wrote:

"One perceptible function of poetry is to write a place into existence." 

That is the role of the writer and poet: to put reality and the everyday experience into words. Jean Follain, friend of Francis Ponge, who Ciaran Carson introduced me to, said:

"Le mot fait corps avec la chose." (The word makes body with the thing)

Roddy Doyle, deviating a little, said:

"Like a lot of writers, I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. When I wrote The Commitments, it clicked. I felt this was the world that was familiar and I could make it a bit unfamiliar and sparkling."

But the point remains. The role of the writer is to articulate what everyone thinks; doing it in a way that adds spice and energy. They make it everyday but with excitement. They make the mundane profoundly readable.

Except the funny thing was that while I recognised this phenomenon I didn't have the words or terms to express this phenomenon.

That represents a great irony. So I propose 'AWIT' - Articulating What I Thought.