McGuiness’ Albatross

In June of last year I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph reader’s blog site, one headed Machine Gunn McGuiness – it’s time for some answers. It was written in the wake of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when a number of people were shot dead by the British Army in Londonderry.

The Parachute Regiment was held to blame for that tragedy, but the responsibility was also thrown obliquely on Martin McGuiness, the public face of Sein Fein/IRA, a man for whom I have nothing but the deepest contempt. I concluded my piece with the following remarks;

There are, however, some more immediate questions to be answered by a man now in government in Northern Ireland; there are questions to be answered by Martin McGuiness, Deputy First Minister. The dead of Londonderry had to have their day and David Cameron was right to make the statement he did in Parliament. But that day has passed. Now I hope the Tory back-bench will ask some pointed questions when Saville is subject to more detailed scrutiny. Was it, perhaps, the custom, I have to ask, to walk around with sub-machine guns in Northern Ireland? Was McGuiness giving it some air or intending to practice for a knee capping or a dozen? It really is time for some toughness here, time to make Machine Gun McGuiness smirk on the other side of his face.

Not only is this man still smirking but he is attempting to smirk his way into the office of president of the Irish Republic in an election to be held towards the end of this month. But everywhere he goes he is followed by his own legacy, a legacy of IRA violence. This is a man who was imprisoned twice in the 1970s for membership of this terrorist organisation, the first time after being caught near a car containing 115kg of explosives and 5000 rounds of ammunition. And as the Saville Inquiry concluded, he was likely armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and probably used the weapon. He and his kind certainly contributed to the tensions which lead to the shootings.

He says he left the organistation in 1974, but as a recent Times report concluded, few believe this to be true. All the evidence suggests that he went on to become the IRA’s northern commander and the head of its army council. There are atrocities thereafter that he certainly knew of or approved, like the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing

Thankfully he is pursued by his murderous legacy even in the Republic, where people generally might be inclined to be more sympathetic. In Athlone he had an encounter with the son of an Irish soldier, who’s father was killed by the IRA in 1983, demanding to know who was responsible. Another uncomfortable encounter followed with the brother of an Irish policeman, killed in County Meath in 1984, who accused McGuiness of having his "family’s blood on his hands." The sister of Mary Travers, shot dead in Belfast in 1984, called his campaign "an insult to the victims of the IRA."

And so it is, to all the victims of the IRA, north and south of the border, north and south of the island’s religious and political divisions. He offers the usual weasel evasions, saying that he never killed anyone himself but refusing to say if he ordered others to kill. He says that he cannot remember the oath he took on joining the IRA. And if you believe that you will believe anything.

He is a liar, a coward and a killer, of that I have not the least doubt, one who hides behind the worst kind of hypocrisy and dissimulation. The past cannot be discarded, the past of a man like this, which he carries around his neck like a curse, the same curse as the Ancient Mariner.

Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung."

Skinning the tiger

Shortly before the Irish general election last month, which saw the worst defeat of a sitting government since the formation of the Free State in 1921, a letter appeared in the Irish Times, saying that the title of the European anthem should be changed from Ode to Joy to Owed to Germany. It’s good to see that at least some people in Ireland preserve a sense of humour, even if it’s in the shade of an economic gallows.

It’s become the fashion to blame those irresponsible bankers for the woes that have overtaken the world economy since 2008 that we are overlooking the fact that stupid and short-sighted politicians bear a far deeper responsibility. The business cycle is part of our economic life; it always has and it always will. It really should be repeated endlessly: that which goes up must inevitably come down.

People are so easily deluded, forever trapped in the short-term. We should be immune to arses like Gordon Brown, the former British Chancellor and Prime Minister, who announced “an end to boom and bust”, or Bertie Ahern, the former Irish Taoiseach, who said that the “boom can only get boomier”; but we are not; sadly we are not.

There are so many lessons in the Irish farce, which has seen a country that struggled centuries for dignity and independence subject to a new kind of fiscal colonialism, forced to accept the indignity of an EU-IMF bailout, forced to accept that it no longer has sovereign management of its own economic affairs. Where now is the tiger economy? That’s easy: it’s been shot and skinned, its hide hanging on the wall of the IMF.

Bankers do what bankers do, which is to take risks. Politicians do what politicians do, which is to exercise caution. But when politicians join bankers in playing at risk one ends in the Irish Bubble. I make no apology for this expression, echoes of England’s infamous eighteenth century South Sea Bubble, though I may be in danger of downplaying the stupidity involved; for at least the English government of the day did not underwrite the speculators.

So, exercising no restraint at all, believing that the ups would be ups for ever, the Irish government panicked when property prices started to slide, leaving the banks hopelessly exposed. An emergency meeting was held in September 2008, in which Brian Lenihan, then Finance Minister, offered the bankers guarantees not just over deposits but also most debts. Debt, in other words, was nationalised. Taxpayers, in still more words, were defrauded, patsies for the politicians. Amazingly the state took on a potential liability more than two and a half times the size of the national economy. The boom got bustier.

Where has all Ireland’s capital gone, long time passing? Again the answer is easy; look around the place, see all those ghost estates, homes that nobody wants, builders can’t complete and buyers can’t afford. Liquidity has turned to stone, and there it is likely to remain, at least until the bulldozers return the sites to pasture.

I read in The Economist that when the IMF delegation arrived in Dublin last November to rescue the politicians from their monumental stupidity that the Irish Times ran a lachrymose editorial, asking if this is what the heroes of the 1916 Easter Rising had died for. It continued by observing that “The true ignominy…is that we ourselves have squandered our sovereignty.”

Indeed they have: in embracing the European Union as the universal panacea, in embracing the euro, that one size fits all currency, in embracing the finances of Berlin that have no place at all in the finances of Dublin. Now with credit almost impossible to get, Ireland’s membership of the single currency means that it lacks the flexibility to manage the situation with its own internal fiscal tools. In place of the tigers have come some rather desperate looking cattle. Oh, for the power of prophecy.

Then Pharaoh said to Joseph: “Behold, in my dream I stood on the bank of the river. Suddenly seven cows came up out of the river, fine looking and fat; and they fed in the meadow. Then behold, seven other cows came up after them, poor and very ugly and gaunt, such ugliness as I have never seen in all the land of Egypt. And the gaunt and ugly cows ate up the first seven, the fat cows. When they had eaten them up, no one would have known that they had eaten them, for they were just as ugly as at the beginning. So I awoke. Also I saw in my dream, and suddenly seven heads came up on one stalk, full and good. Then behold, seven heads, withered, thin, and blighted by the east wind, sprang up after them. And the thin heads devoured the seven good heads. So I told this to the magicians, but there was no one who could explain it to me.”

“Never mind all that”, Joseph replied, “the boom can only get boomier.”

In Memory of Jean McConville

I’m generally quite a controlled person. I do get angry but I prefer not to let emotions get the better of my judgement. I prefer to look at things in a detached manner, especially items on the news which have little direct bearing on my life. But sometimes my guard slips. It did at the weekend after I read a story by Amanda Forman in The Observer. It concerns a nobody; it concerns a woman who was turned into a nobody: it concerns Jean McConville.

Perhaps you’ve never heard of her. I hadn’t until I opened the paper. She’s dead now; she’s been dead for years, her remains long incarcerated in a hidden grave. She was a victim, the victim of an IRA murder squad, who kidnapped her in front of seven of her children from their home in West Belfast in the winter of 1972. Their father was already dead and they were never to see their mother again. Sent to orphanages, they were told a malicious lie – that she had deserted them.

Jean McConville was a victim long before those IRA thugs took her. A Protestant by birth, she married one Arthur McConville, a Catholic, converting in the process. But this just made her a double outcast, rejected by the Unionist Community and suspected by the Nationalist. She and her husband both suffered repeated sectarian persecution. Forced to move from place to place, they finally ended up in the Falls Road. After her husband’s death from cancer in 1971, Jean’s position, already bad, became intolerable. When her neighbours reported that she had been seen aiding a wounded British soldier she was taken away by an armed gang, never to be seen alive again.

We now know that she was tortured prior to being murdered; that she was beaten with such force that her bones broke and her hands were mutilated. After she was shot in the back of the head, death in the well-practiced Moscow style, she was taken over the border and buried on Shelling Beach in County Louth. For the next thirty years, as Forman says, the IRA denied that they had anything to do with her disappearance.

The murder was only the beginning of the crimes against Jean McConville. It was almost as if she had never existed, that she did not matter, that her disappearance did not matter. The then Royal Ulster Constabulary did not even trouble themselves to record the complaint of her abduction. More than that, they refused to accept that she was even missing, insisting on the basis of an anonymous tip-off (no real need to guess from whom) that she had absconded with a British soldier.

That would have been that but for the fact that a silent witness turned up. In 2003 the earth gave up its secret when a storm washed away part of the Shelling Beach car park, finally exposing her body. The IRA now admitted responsibility for the crime, justifying the act on the basis that she had been an ‘informant.’

It was only now, after years of shocking negligence, that the authorities began to take the matter seriously. Robert Carswell, the Lord Chief Justice, ruled that, in the circumstances, the government should break its neither confirm or deny policy on such intelligence matters, to reveal if there had been any secret dealings with Jean McConville. There were none. In 2006 Baroness Nuala O’Loan, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, ruled that she had never been an agent at any time, that she was “an innocent woman who had been abducted and murdered.”

The police have apologised for their negligence. The IRA, an organisation I hold in the deepest contempt, has also offered a hypocritical, self-serving ‘apology’, saying that it “regrets the suffering” caused to Jean’s family. Remember, most of them were small children, including six year old twin brothers, when their mother was taken as they screamed and cried.

Jean McConville is just one among the legion of the lost, totally unimportant then and too insignificant now to derail the so-called peace process, which has seen terrorists enter government in Northern Ireland. But justice, unlike law, never sleeps; justice bleeds from open wounds. We now know who exactly was responsible for ordering Jean’s abduction and murder. He is Gerry Adams, president of Sein Fein, accused by former confederates, the same man who is about to enter the politics of the Republic, who is standing for the Dail for County Louth, the same place where Jean was hidden all those years ago. I fully share Foreman’s disquiet;

Ireland is a member of the International Criminal Court whose charter clearly states that the definition of a war crime includes the murder of civilians in “an armed conflict not of an international character”. Thus a man who is alleged to be a war criminal, who is alleged to have broken the law in one of the worst crimes in Irish and Northern Irish history, is poised to become a governor and make that country’s laws.

There are so many things done for the sake of expediency, but this can be pushed too far, even for peace. To reach any accommodation with a wretch such as Adams, to vote for a wretch such as Adams, to breath the same air as a wretch such as Adams would be too much for any normal human being, anyone who entertains even the most elementary concepts of moral rectitude and justice. Jean McConville, friendless and isolated, murdered for no good reasons, an uneducated woman without connections, a victim of the worst kind of prejudice, is his abiding legacy. Like Foreman I will not forget. This blog is dedicated to her memory.

Pigs no longer fly

Hjalmar Schacht, the German financier and banker tried and acquitted for crimes against peace at Nuremberg, was a bit of a magician when it came to money, attested by the fact that one of his books is called The Magic of Money. He more or less ended the German inflation of the early 1920s by announcing that it was over, by replacing old paper money with new paper money which remained - you guessed it - paper money! But the Germans were seduced and reassured by this legerdemain. The inflation was over. One crisis had ended; the next was over a distant horizon.

Oddly enough, or understandably, perhaps, it was Schacht who came to mind when I was thinking about the present crisis of the euro zone, the crisis of Ireland, a seriously-ill patient to be kept alive by liberal transfusions of cash, including our cash, pounds as well as euros. We have to help a friend in need, we have been told, of course we do, though I wonder if our government is aware just how wasteful public sector expenditure is in the Republic, the pork barrel for a corrupt and clannish political elite. It's really quite something, it says a lot about Ireland's political class, when Gerry Adams rides in as a possible saviour.

But there are wider lessons to be taken from the Irish fiasco, lessons about the magic of money and the stupidity of politicians. The euro, that one size fits all currency, was based not on economic and political realities but on a bizarre dream, a dream that a strong economy like Germany could happily bed down with weak economies like Ireland and Greece. Piigs might fly, piigs did fly, but now they are falling one by one, the piigs of course being Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.

The unemployment rate, high in Ireland, is ludicrously high in Spain, running somewhere at around 26%, a level that destroyed European democracies in the 1930s. But neither Spain nor Ireland can devalue; they are tied in to a monetary system that looks good in Berlin but dreadful in Madrid and Dublin. The warnings were always there, that buying into euroland involved the potential surrender of all fiscal flexibility, the ability to tailor one's financial policy to one's economic circumstances. Ah, but the piigs thought, the euro is riding high, it will never fall, we must ride high also. That, you see, is the magic of money. Or is it the witchcraft of money?

Not so long ago Ireland was being referred to in economic terms as a 'Celtic Tiger.' Well, now the tiger has been shot, skinned, and mounted on the wall of the German Chancellor, a woman who really knows about the magic of money, Europe's new Fuhererin. Ah, poor old Ireland, if only it had kept the punkt and not been seduced by the euro. There is no reason to suppose that the present crisis would still not have happened. It's the nature of capitalism to move through peaks and troughs, and those who tell you that it is possible to bring and end to 'boom and bust' are fools, or liars, or both. Under its old independent monetary system Ireland would still have been struggling, it may even have needed to ask for IMF loans, but it would have had the capacity to deflate, to let values and prices fall, thereby stimulating demand.

The insanity of the present position was wonderfully illustrated by Charles Moore (I'm his groupie in chief!) in this week's Spectator. As he says, it's possible to buy a decent hunter in this country for £6000. But in Ireland the same horse costs the euro equivalent of £7000. It simply makes no sense. Domestic demand in Ireland has grown much weaker over the past few years but the price for sterling buyers still remains artificially high. But this is the logic, the crazy logic, of euro land.

The single currency has benefited Germany, achieving a power over the outer fringes of Europe without the expense of sending in the Wehrmacht. The euro is operating in its magic a little like Schacht's Rentenmark, producing its own political logic. It might even be a jolly good idea to take the magic that one step forward and rename the currency the Euromark.

And there is Ireland, holding out the begging bowl, stuck in the economic and political margins, suffering a more complete humiliation than at any previous point in its recent history. Centuries of struggle against the English for this, a pot full of cash and eyes full of EU stars. What an irony it is to think that the country would be better off, as Moore suggests, if the Union Flag was still flying over Dublin Castle. Money is magic, yes, but it's also a curse. Or is the real curse the stupidity and the venality of politicians? How Schacht would have laughed.

Seanchaí

Over the years I’ve derived so much enjoyment from short stories, in some ways my favourite literary genre alongside the critical essay. I really began when I was little with myths and folktales, a tradition for which I still retain considerable affection. By the age of ten or so I was reading Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. From there, in successive stages, I discovered such wonderful story tellers as William Somerset Maugham (his Far Eastern stories are a particular favourite), Isaac Bashevis Singer (a magician in words), Nikolai Gogol (my favourite Russian writer in the medium), Graham Greene (who writes extensively in this genre though he is better known as a novelist), Anton Chekhov, Alphonse Daudet, James Joyce, Ambrose Bierce, Franz Kafka, H. H. Munro (better known as ‘Saki’), William Porter (better known as ‘O Henry’) along with so many others, including Balzac and Dickens, not generally associated with this literary form.

Now I’ve discovered William Trevor, an Irish writer, having not long finished The Collected Stories, published by Penguin Books. I suppose it’s not quite true to say that his work is a totally new discovery because I came across him previously, one story, I think, in an anthology of Irish writing, but not enough to form a proper impression. Now I have and there is no doubt in my mind that he will last as one of the great masters of the medium. He writes with such amazing fluency, beautiful limpid prose with a simple realism that reminds me so much of Chekhov. His work is rich in gentle irony with slight overtones of sadness, of empty lives and frustrated hopes.

His stories are mostly set in England or Ireland, often among the most marginal people, those on the edges of society, people often buffeted by an uncertain fate, unsure of who they are and where they are going. Yes, there are elements of pathos and melancholy, offset quite often by an undercurrent of humour. This is the thing about life, something the best writers have always understood: comedy is never that far removed from tragedy.

Some of his female characters caused me to laugh out loud at points, including the impossible Mrs da Tanka in A Meeting in Middle Age, the first in the collection, who teams up with the unfortunate Mr Mileson, a sort of agency detective, in a hotel together to spend the night, thereby providing grounds for a divorce in the days when such matters were complicated. Yes, they team up together in a way that a lion teams up with a gazelle!

In general Trevor shapes characters, in complexity or simplicity, who are totally believable. He is there as a narrator, as a third presence, only in the lightest possible way. He does not ‘create’ his people; he allows them to create themselves, to build themselves up through their own words and actions. There is little in the way of a narrator’s prologue; this is life unfolding as we go along, as fate works away.

The language, the use of words, is quite delicious: precise, beautiful, simple and elegant. There is nothing in the least artificial about Trevor’s prose style, which has directness and a sense of realism that I so admire, largely free of a tangled undergrowth of adjectives, something that only the very best writers can command. For the most part these are small and intimate dramas, not covering a huge range of possible situations, and yet paradoxically immense. In over eighty stories at no point did I feel that I was going over the same ground: each situation seemed unique and fresh.

Did I have any favourites? Well, yes, I suppose I did, though I find it immensely difficult to make a distinction in that having favourites seems to suggest that those not selected were somehow less worthy. At over 1200 pages long this is a compendium of favourites. I should make special mention, though, of Beyond the Pale, where a woman is confronted with the tragedy of Irish history, confronted by a legacy of love, loss and terrible bitterness. The tale she tells destroys a lying idyll. And then there is Matilda’s England, a story in three parts, an enchanting and poignant narrative of time and tide and fortune, of happy highways where people went and can never come again.

I sit here in here now in her drawing-room, and may perhaps become as old as she was. Sometimes I walk up to the meadows where the path to school was, but the meadow isn’t there any more. There are rows of coloured caravans, and motor-cars and shacks. In the garden I can hear the voices of people drifting down to me, and the sound of music from their wireless sets. Nothing is like it was.

This is immediately followed by Torridge, quite different in tone, with a bitingly humorous ending, one that completely dismantles the comforting illusions of a nauseatingly self-satisfied group of old school chums.

These are just a few examples. I could go on and on but there is really not much point. I can only pay proper tribute to Trevor by retelling his tales one by one. You can do justice, if you are minded to, in reading them for yourselves.

Reflections on Reflections

My copy of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France comes with a splendid introductory essay by Conor Cruise O’Brien, onetime academic, politician, journalist and writer. I understand that he also wrote a biography of Burke which his Wikipedia page describes as ‘unorthodox’, though I think he may have used that term himself to describe his interpretation. I’ve not read it so I can’t say if it is or not. What I can say, and say with assurance, is that his essay brings out aspects of Burke’s life and work that I might otherwise have missed, particularly in relation to Catholicism and Ireland, and the bearing this had on his perception of the upheavals in France.

Burke belonged politically to the English Whigs and - at least by outward association - to the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland; he could never have advanced his political career as far as he did if he had not. But O’Brien identifies a tension between what he calls the ‘outer Whig’ and the ‘inner Jacobite’, between a Protestant gloss and a Catholic tradition. It was this friction that helped drive the irony in Burke’s critique. Here his first target was not the Parisian revolutionaries but the London rationalists, those who identified the Revolution as the triumph of Reason over Superstition and Tradition.

O’Brien’s point here is quite subtle, as subtle as Burke’s intellect. Protestant he may have been but the Irish Catholic tradition was there, part of his makeup and part of his background;

…if Burke as a Whig cherished, at least in theory, the Glorious Revolution, Burke as an Irishman, with close emotional bonds to the conquered, detested the Protestant ascendancy which that Revolution had riveted on the people of his country.

There are things here that could not be said openly, were not said openly, at least not until towards the end of his life. But there were things that could be said indirectly, if you like, things that could be said in the context of a critique of the French Revolution.

The crucial point of departure here is that events in France were welcomed by the likes of Dr Richard Price, a leading Protestant dissenter. In November 1789 he delivered a sermon entitled Discourse on the love of our country in which he compared the political transformations in France with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a common theme in the early days.

But if the Glorious Revolution, the Whig touchstone, meant one thing in England it meant quite another in Ireland: it meant hostility to Catholicism; it meant the oppressive Penal Laws. It was the identification of the first event with the second, the English with the French, O’Brien maintains, that wakened the “slumbering Jacobite” in the elderly Whig. The creative tension here goes that one step further; for while in relation to England and France the Jacobite perspective was clearly counter-revolutionary, the opposite was true in the context of Ireland.

The Reflections begins, then, as a rebuttal to Price, begins as a way of getting the English establishment to see that their interests were bound up with Catholicism in Europe; that there Catholicism was the bastion of order, of property and of tradition. It’s a wonderful exercise in intellectual gymnastics, for Burke is getting people to see that it is the militant anti-Catholic Protestantism of the dissenters that is the natural ally of Jacobinism.

So, while preparing the most effective counter-revolutionary polemic ever penned Burke was also planting the seeds of sympathy for Catholicism in the minds of the English, the very antithesis of the message on the Glorious Revolution. Growing hostility towards the Jacobins was, with wonderful irony, accompanied with increasing sympathy towards the Jacobites. That is to say, it was in part thanks to Burke that English policy towards Ireland began to change, evidenced by the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 followed two years later by the foundation of Maynooth Seminary with state support.

In a letter written five years after the publication of the Reflections Burke made plain that his whole politics centred on anti-Jacobinism. He was particularly incensed by the hostility towards religion on which that movement was based. For him the practice of Catholicism “forms as things stand, the most effective barrier, against Jacobinism”. He further argues that in Ireland in particular “the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration.”

It’s an impressive argument, one which deepens, if such a thing is possible, the profound respect I already have for Burke as a thinker. My politics, my conservatism, begin with Burke and end with Burke, begin and end with words he wrote in a letter of March 1790, the most devastating critique of bloodlessly bloody ideology ever written. The emphasis here is in the original;

“I have no great opinion of that sublime abstract, metaphysic revisionary, contingent humanity, which in cold blood can subject the present time and those whom we daily see and converse with to immediate calamities in favour of the future and uncertain benefit of persons who only exist in idea.”

Here is the key to the horror of much of modern history, from Robespierre to Pol Pot and beyond.

Saville and Jarndyce

Bleak House happens to be one of my favourite novels by Charles Dickens. It centres in part on an interminable legal battle, a case known as Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Nobody quite understands the original causes of the case. All they know is that it's a dispute over a will, a dispute that serves only the interests of the lawyers, people for whom time is money; for the more time they spend wrangling over Jarndyce v Jarndyce the more of the legacy is eaten up in fees and expenses. In the end the case is settled...but only when there is nothing left.

The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

So says Charles Dickens in the novel. I'm sure he would be pleased to discover that nothing much changes; that the inquiry of Lord Saville into the events of Bloody Sunday, the shooting by British troops of Irish protestors in Londonderry back in 1972, took twelve years to report at a cost to the tax payer of almost £200million.

Actually, on reflection, even the Lord Chancellor in Jarndyce v Jarndyce may have been shocked by this mad profligacy, this legal joke at public expense. Let's have a look at the figures, shall we? According to a report I read today in the Daily Mail Saville spent £34million on computers alone. That means that every page of his report cost £7000; yes, every page. It actually gets worse. His lordship spent more than £200,000 on furniture and £62,000 on something called 'media monitoring', paying a company to check the press, the television and the radio to see what they were saying about Jarn...sorry the Saville Inquiry.

The dear old judge claimed a mere £20,000 in personal expenses, not bad, I suppose, for twelve years. But, wait a moment: look at his travel expenses. For bills which involved commuting between London and Londonderry he claimed £322,413. It seems to me that it would have been better to buy this man a private jet; it may have been a lot less expensive in the end.

The tedious bill goes up and up and up: the fourteen barristers involved made several millions from the inquiry, with the best rewarded pocketing four million pounds each. Eversheads, one of the legal firms involved, was paid more than £13million for interviewing witnesses. And then there is the £23million that went on offices and halls, as well as £25.8million listed in the accounts as 'operation of systems/maintenance.' Best not to say anything about the £2.5million written off as 'general office expenditure'

In the end the whole bill came to exactly £191.2million, roughly the equivalent of £4 for every man, woman and child in the whole of the United Kingdom, and that is not the end; for legal bills and other expenses are still coming through. It's a joke but sadly the joke's on us.

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

Happy Blooming Day!

Tomorrow marks one of the most important days, no wait, the most important day in the history of modern literature (no qualifications here!) It's 16 June, Bloomsday, the day all of the action in James Joyce's Ulysses takes place, the day also that the author and Nora Barnacle, his future wife, first went out together. Ulysses, that wonderful, panoramic and magical book, is set entirely within the confines of 16 June 1904, although all time seems to be drawn in, a day when Leopold Bloom, after whom it’s named, wanders around Dublin as Homer's Odysseus wandered from Troy to Ithaca. The various episodes also allude to the journey outlined in the Odyssey, one step removed by the Roman translation of the name of the epic hero.

Joyce described Ulysses as his encyclopaedia, and in a sense that's exactly what it is with dozens and dozens of literary, poetic and historical allusions. I went so far as to say that if Ireland disappeared from the face of the earth it would be possible to recreate it using this book as a template. I was warned in advance when I announced that I intended read it, warned even by people who specialise in English literature, that it was 'impossible', that it was a real brain blower! But just as one would never sit down and read an encyclopaedia systematically from cover to cover, forgoing all else, I decided to read Ulysses 'discreetly', if I can put it like that, absorbing an episode at a time, with a day or two in between, interspersed with other reading. It worked and worked beautifully.

It was the Oxford Classics version that I read, based on the original 1922 text and annotated by Jeri Johnson. I'm so glad I did because the notes, which take up over a hundred pages, alerted me to so much that I would have otherwise have missed. The episode I enjoyed the most was Oxen of the Sun where Joyce writes in the style of a number of different authors, moving with ease from people like Defoe and Dickens, capturing their modes of expression with utter conviction.

Ulysses is one of those books that is met either with love...or incomprehension. In an early review H. G. Wells, outraged by Joyce's revolutionary style, described it as 'literary Bolshevism', a mark of his own fertile but limited imagination. If I were to describe it, or to try to match it to an image, I would suggest that it's a kind of cubist painting in words. I love cubism also, especially the paintings of Picasso and Braque, where a single object is seen in a myriad of facets, almost as if from the compound eye of a fly. That's Ulysses, a progress in a time looked at from a whole variety of angles, a whole series of perspectives.

A happy Bloomsday to one and all and please do raise a glass to one of the most creative and original authors who ever lived.

What about every other Bloody Day?

Lord Saville’s inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland is scheduled for publication tomorrow, the fruits of a promise made twelve years ago by Tony Blair to ensure that the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness signed up to the Good Friday agreement. Indications are that this exercise in gesture politics has cost close on £200million, and for what? To turn British soldiers into possible scapegoats, at least according to advanced reports that I have read.

After all this time, effort and expense we are no closer to the truth of what really happened on that day in January thirty-eight years ago, as Douglas Murray says in this week’s Spectator. In no way do I wish to minimise the tragedy but any objective assessment would have to conclude that the innocent victims were caught in crossfire; that they were effectively used as a shield by the IRA, which has never admitted any responsibility for its actions.

There is unlikely to be any closure here, just deeper and deeper wounds. The whole inquiry, it seems to me, was little better than an act of appeasement, one that may very well open up the prospect of criminal proceedings against former soldiers of the Parachute Regiment. I’m sure all serving soldiers will be mindful of the precedent being set here.

There are indeed times when the dead are best left to bury the dead, times when a tragic past is best forgotten. Otherwise all sorts of additional issues might be raised, old ghosts released from the grave. Now we have former terrorists in government in Northern Ireland; now we have convicted IRA killers set free. How will it sit with the British people, Murray asks, if British soldiers are sent to prison against that background? Perhaps they will remember the words of a former commander of 1 Para;

I have to ask what about Bloody Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and every other day of the week? What about Bloody Omagh? What about Bloody Warrenpoint, Enniskillen, Hyde Park, or Bloody Aldershot and Brighton – bloody everything the IRA have ever touched.

Justice, it would appear, is a one-way street. It seems such an obvious point to conclude on but sometimes the price of peace is just too outrageously high.

King Billy

There is perhaps no better illustration of the process by which history is, and can be, turned into mythology than William of Orange's sojourn in Ireland. For the Protestants he became an iconic figure, mounted on his white horse with sword raised, a detail taken from Benjamin West's painting of the Battle of the Boyne, and once reproduced on a thousand gable-ends! For Catholics he was also an icon, one of an unwelcome Protestant ascendency, expressed, at its worst, in the Penal laws. But William came to Ireland not as a crusader but to fight a campaign that was part of his more general struggle against Louis XIV.

It is crucial to understand here that the French king offered his support to James II, the exiled Catholic king of England, not out of a sense of dynastic and confessional solidarity, but simply as a useful way of opening up a fresh theatre against William, his great Continental rival. In this regard the Irish campaign of 1689-90 was merely a small part of a more general European war, in which religion played only a minor part. As such William was a representative of a more general alliance against Louis and his imperial ambitions, an alliance that included Pope Innocent XI. After his famous victory on the Boyne the bells of Rome were rung out in celebration!

It seems likely that William, if the matter had been left to him alone, would have favoured a large measure of religious toleration throughout his lands. But the matter was not left to him alone; he was dependant on the ruling aristocracy in both England and Ireland. After the final victory in 1691, and the Treaty of Limerick, the ruling Protestant minority in Ireland were in no mood for any form of compromise. For them William, living and dead, was the expression of their power, depicted in statue and paint. The divisions between the communities became even more acute in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the Orange Order, committed to the Protestant cause by constant reminders and celebrations of the past.

Beyond the Pale; English Perceptions of the Irish

Negative English attitudes towards the Irish date as far back as the reign of Henry II. One could do no better here than examine the things written by the chronicler Gerald of Wales, who visited the island in the company of Prince John. As a result of this he wrote Topographia Hibernia (Topography of Ireland) and Expugnatio Hibernica (Conquest of Ireland), both of which remaind in circulation for centuries afterwards. Ireland, in his view, was rich; but the Irish were backwards and lazy;

They use their fields mostly for pasture. Little is cultivated and even less is sown. The problem here is not the quality of the soil but rather the lack of industry on the part of those who should cultivate it. This laziness means that the different types of minerals with which hidden veins of the earth are full are neither mined nor exploited in any way. They do not devote themselves to the manufacture of flax or wool, nor to the practice of any mechanical or mercantile act. Dedicated only to liesure and laziness, this is a truly barbarous people. They depend on their livelihhod for animals and they live like animals.

Gerald was not atypical; for one can find similar views in the writings of William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh. When it comes to Irish marital and sexual customs Gerald is even more biting, "This is a filthy people, wallowing in vice. They indulge in incest, for example in marrying-or rather debauching-the wives of their dead brothers."

Even earlier than this Archbishop Anselm accused the Irish of 'wife swapping', "...exchanging their wives as freely as other men exchange their horses." You will find these views echoed centuries later in the words of Sir Henry Sidney, twice Lord Deputy during the reign of Elizabeth I, and in those of Edmund Tremayne, his secretary. In Tremayne's view the Irish "commit whoredom, hold no wedlock, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience." In A View of the Present State of Ireland, published in 1596, Edmund Spencer wrote "They are all papists by profession but in the same so blindingly and brutishly informed that you would rather think them atheists or infidels."


This vision of the barbarous Irish, largely born out of a form of imperialist condescension, made its way into Laudabiliter, one of the most infamous documents in all of Irish History, by which Adrian IV, the only English Pope, granted Ireland to Henry II, "...to the end that the foul customs of that country may be abolished and the barbarous nation, Christian in name only, may through your care assume the beauty of good morals."


All and every method was to be used in this 'civilizing mission' over time. In 1305 when Piers Bermingham cut off the heads of thirty members of the O'Connor clan and sent them to Dublin he was awarded with a financial bonus. His action was also celebrated in verse. In 1317 one Irish chronicler was of the view that it was just as easy for an Englishman to kill an Irishman as he would a dog. Later when the English control of Ireland shrunk back for a time to The Pale around Dublin, all beyond was considered as given over to savagery, hence the expression 'Beyond the Pale'.


What we see here is the same thing that appears time and again, throughout the whole world, and over all time: it begins when an entire community is condemned as barbarous; it ends with the justification of all and every method in the creation of 'civilization', no matter how barbarous. It is against this background that one must place the Cromwellian Conquest and all that followed, in both Hell and in Connaught

Fuck You, Parliamentary Style

I had a really good laugh over my cornflakes yesterday morning reading a piece in the latest issue of Prospect by Colin Murphy, a Dublin-based journalist. It concerns the use of ‘mental reservations’ in the Emerald Isle, which, without mental reservation, would be described as hypocrisy by people elsewhere.

Murphy supports his article with some amusing political anecdotes. In 1927 Eamon de Valera entered the Irish Parliament after taking the oath to the crown, a major step considering his position during the Irish Civil War and his previous refusal to take an oath to a British king. He was later to deny that he had ever taken it, claiming that he signed as if he was giving his autograph!

But on the scales of self-deception that counts for nothing compared with Bertie Ahern’s acrobatics. In 1997 he denounced Charles Haughey, his former boss, for taking payments from businessmen, saying that he “could not condone senior politicians seeking or receiving from a single donor large sums of money”.

Ahern, then Taoiseach, seems to have had a slight memory lapse here, for in 1993 and 1994 he himself had received some 39,000 punts in gifts from associates. When the story emerged in 2006 he claimed that the payments were to help him through a ‘bad period’ following the break up of his marriage, which, as Murphy says, had happened some six years prior to the payments. That must have been one hell of a bad patch! When questioned two years later about further payments he claimed these were ‘winnings’ on the horses.
:-))

To accuse an opponent of ‘hypocrisy’ is one of the terms disallowed by the Irish Parliament. This came up after a debate in December when Paul Gogarty, a Green deputy, apologised in advance for using “unparliamentary language” just prior to shouting “fuck you” at a member on the opposite benches. Amazingly –and I do stress that I’m taking Murphy’s word on this –‘fuck you’ is not unparliamentary language in Dublin, though ‘brat’, ‘buffoon’, ‘corner boy’ (corner boy?), ‘coward’, ‘fascist’ and ‘guttersnipe’ are, along with hypocrite. So if a cowardly fascist corner boy ever enters Parliament he or she will have some built in protection!

The Age of Outrage, or Irish Blasphemers

Ireland’s new blasphemy law came into force at the turn of the year. So, if you intend to exercise your right to free speech, the right to criticise religion, just don’t do it there; for, if you do, you may very well find yourself poorer by 25,000 Euros.

My own position here is quite clear: I would never knowingly attack or denigrate the faith of others, never knowingly cause offence. But what is one to make of a law that defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion”?

I really don’t know the background here but I wonder if Irish legislators paused to consider that we live in an age of outrage, an age when people are all too eager to take offense against perceived insults, intentional or otherwise. What a backward step in this second decade of the twenty-first century for a European nation to attempt something as dangerously abstract as silencing people to protect ideas. I offer no apology for this because religion, all religion, is based on an idea or a system of ideas, some good, some bad, some dreadful.

I’m not an atheist, though my personal beliefs are quite subtle. I despise the likes of Richard Dawkins, an intellectual bully who seems to be advancing old intolerant absolutes in new clothing. I do, however, wish Atheist Ireland, an organisation set up to mount a challenge to this law, Godspeed! They have now published a book of twenty-five quotations guaranteed to cause outrage amongst the outrageable. (Yes, I know it’s a neologism; please don’t be outraged!).

Michael Nugent, the group’s chair, said that it would challenge the law through the courts if charged with blasphemy. In a civilized society, he said, people have the right express and hear ideas about religion even if other people find these ideas to be outrageous. Here are two of Atheist Ireland’s quotations to outrage you;

1. Also it has another name - The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies... But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy - he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty... What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it

2. There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all... Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require... It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender' as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.


The first is by Mark Twain, describing the Bible, and the second by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens might be an easy target but who in their right mind is going to weigh into Mark Twain? :-))

Actually, I find the whole thing slightly amusing. I’m a little surprised that Atheist Ireland can’t also see the humorous side to this fatuous legislation. It’s really no more than a piece of legal window-dressing intended for the multi-cultural age, the age of supermarket faith, pick and choose as you will.

The Irish Constitution previously only offered protection to Christianity, a technical oversight that has now been made good. I assume the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions will have the good sense to ignore Atheist Ireland’s provocation, but what if the offended masses start beating down the door? The sensible thing here would have been to get rid of the anachronism of blasphemy legislation altogether and introduced some measure based on incitement to religious or racial hatred. Never mind: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it…unless you happen to live in Ireland.

The Fairy Witch of Tipperary

Are you a Witch?
Are you a Fairy?
Are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

I have a story for you, a story of witchcraft or the most horrendous abuse of a husband by a wife that I have ever read of; I simply can’t be sure which. It’s from Ireland and it concerns one Bridget Cleary, tortured and roasted to death in Tipperary in March 1895; yes, that’s right, in 1895, long after the burning times had passed into European history.

Bridget, whose maiden name was Boland, seems to have been a remarkable woman, not at all typical of the peasant society into which she was born in February, 1867. When she was twenty years old she married one Michael Cleary, a cooper, who moved into the house she shared with her parents. Her mother died in 1894, leaving Bridget alone in the house with Michael and her father, who would also be implicated in her death.

Bridget, by reputation and report, was a single-minded woman, independent and enterprising. Unlike most of her female contemporaries she had an income of her own, earning money from the sewing she did with her Singer machine and selling eggs from the poultry she kept. Although after eight years of marriage she had no children this seemed to cause her no distress at all. More than that, she seems to have relished in the relative freedom she enjoyed, coming and going as she pleased. According to reports gathered after her murder she had a defiant nature. In The Cooper’s Wife is Missing, a book written by Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates, she is described by her neighbours as having the ‘disturbing habit’ of looking men straight in the eye, a trait attributed to Pagan women.

Bridget’s mother had the reputation of being a ‘fairy expert’ and a witch. Bridget herself is reported to be fascinated with fairy lore. Her story is an interesting demonstration of the way in which fairies and witches were closely associated in the popular mind. In the last year of her life Bridget is reported to have visited so-called ‘fairy forts’, prehistoric earthworks reputed to be the favourite haunts of the supernatural spirits. The reason for this is unclear, though one suggestion has it that she was trying to make contact with the spirit of her dead mother.

Michael himself had some experience of fairy contacts. When he was a boy his mother, also called Bridget, is alleged to have disappeared with them for days at a time. When she returned she began to practice as a ‘fairy doctor’, supposedly using supernatural attributes gifted to her. Whatever the truth of the matter Michael was left with an abiding fear and hatred of fairies, obsessed with the notion that they would also take his wife, leaving a changeling in her place.

The earliest evidence that the subject of fairy forts caused dissension between husband and wife comes around Christmas 1894, when Michael ordered Bridget to stay away from these places. True to her nature, she refused, even though Michael threatened to burn her as a witch, according to evidence later gathered at his trial.

Bridget’s last reported visit to a fairy fort came on 1 February 1895, the first anniversary of her mother’s death. The following month she took ill, supposedly showing signs of a fairy-related illness: aches, pains and chills. To begin with she received conventional medical treatment, the doctor diagnosing nervous exhaustion and slight bronchitis, but as time went by Michael began to believe that the real Bridget had been abducted by the fairies and a changeling substituted. It was soon after that the horror began.

With the aid of some neighbours and Bridget’s father, Michael attempted his own exorcism, forcing his wife to swallow bitter potions prescribed by ‘fairy experts.’ When that failed to work ever more drastic remedies were applied. She was finally put into the grate and effectively roasted, a little like a character in a fairy tale. A can of paraffin was then poured over her by her husband. Witnesses reported that he said he was not burning his wife but a witch, who would go up the chimney. Her screams of agony were ignored because they were said to be those not of the woman but the invading spirit. When some of the Cleary’s female neighbours attempted to stop Bridget’s ordeal Michael threatened to roast them also.

Bridget’s remains were later discovered almost a mile from the Cleary home, wrapped in a sheet and buried in a shallow grave. Her entire back and lower abdomen had been roasted to the bone, her internal organs all visible. In all eleven people were arrested on a charge of murder. Michael was eventually convicted of manslaughter not murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison, of which he served fifteen. Other defendants received lesser sentences depending on the degree of their involvement. On the face of it does indeed seem that Bridget was a victim of entrenched forms of superstition, mixed, perhaps, with some spousal resentment.

Superstition followed Bridget into death. No Catholic priest would officiate at her funeral because they were strictly charged against performing the sacraments where fairy-craft was suspected. Those who died under such suspicion were refused a Church burial. She was finally buried at night by four policemen, one of whom read the burial service, outside the church walls in an unmarked grave beside the body of her mother.