Forget being sorry - just remember it right

I note that Arlene Foster is keen for an apology from the present Irish government for the failure of the Irish government during the Troubles for not being sufficiently efficient in manning the border and putting an end to the activities of the IRA. A short answer to that might be that since Britain imposed the border with the threat of terrible force,  Britain should have been the one to patrol it.  But that would be dismissive and even unfair. I'm sure Arlene is sincere in her request and isn't thinking how her request might play with her constituents. At the same time, this whole thing of apology is  at core pointless. It doesn't change what happened or didn't happen, it's being asked in this case of people who, for the most part, had nothing to do with the events of which Arlene complains, and were it to be made, the past would continue to be exactly the same. Once deeds are done or neglected, they cannot be changed by an apology or anything else.

The best we can do with the past is remember it as it actually happened and try to learn how to do better in the future. I've been reading a bit about an even bleaker period in Irish history, the Famine, for which Tony Blair made a fatuous apology of sorts, and if ever there was an event which was presented falsely in history, it was and is the Famine. Starting with the name. In Irish it's An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, which is nearer the mark although still relatively mild. How so? Well, here are two short excerpts from that time. They were written in the same month  by two different sources. Read  and then tell me you still think 'Famine' is the best word to describe what happened over 150 years ago, and why its memory scars the Irish psyche to this day.

"Famine - pale, gaunt, ghastly - is walking throughout Ireland, withering up men like the flowers of the field, consuming millions of human beings with the breath of his mouth; and pestilence is following fast behind him to devour what he leaves, and yet there are men who have the hardihood to deny his presence". (The London Universe, May 1846)

"Ireland must in return behold her best flour, her wheat, her bacon, her butter, her live cattle, all going to England day after day. She dare not ask the cause of this fatal discrepancy - the existence of famine in a country whose staple commodity is food - food - food of the best - and of the most exquisite quality". (The Chronicle and Munster Advertiser, May 1846)

Ask the average English person - or Irish person - why so many died in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. I'd lay odds the answer you'd get would be "Because the potato crop failed".  Which is true, but only a half-truth. The other half is a lie of omission, and one which many historians continue to propagate. Reading accounts like that above explain something of Irish people's hunger for Home Rule in the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Enda Kenny is full of, um, surprises

It's strange, really. You think you know someone, then they go and do something that seems completely out of character. Take Enda Kenny, for example.  Did you know that he's in favour of a united Ireland?  It's not something he talks a lot about  but on his recent trip to the States he told guests at some big do or other that he believed re-unification would happen "one day". Sort of like "Somewhere over the rainbow" only different.  He further explained that "This will require a referendum to be approved in both countries, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and is not likely to happen in the near future. The priority is keeping peace on the streets."

Mmm. So it's not going to happen tomorrow or in the near future, which probably doesn't rock you back on your heels; and it'll require a referendum, which you probably knew as well. But  "in both countries"? Odd sort of thing for a United Irelander to say. If you're a United Irelander ( or to be exact, Re-United Irelander), you'll surely consider the south a state, not a country. Likewise the north. In fact, even if you were a United Kingdomer, would you not think of the north as a state, not a country? 

As for 'peace on the streets' - presumably he's talking about the near-to-weekly drugs-related killings that occur, mainly in the Dublin area. Is he saying he's too busy chasing the drugs barons to have time for re-uniting Ireland right now? Because as I'm sure Enda knows, there have been about ten times as many drug-dealer killings than there have been dissident-republican killings over the past few years. 

 But there you are - that's Enda. Full of surprises, some political, some factual, more financial.

Controlling the poor

It’s amazing what you can get away with if the brass in your neck is sufficiently thick. George Osborne and his Cameron cabinet cronies have decided that too much money is going on benefits, so they’re planning to cut them by £10 billion. That’s on top of the £18 billion cut they’ve already got in the pipeline.  Osborne says he simply must cut the budget further - the “wallets of the rich” alone aren’t going to get Britain out of recession. 

You never spoke a truer word, George. The wallets of the rich will stay firmly in the pockets of the rich. For example, remember the ‘mansion tax’ - the proposal to put a 1% tax on wealthy homes? The howls of the rich will make that one a non-runner. And just to make sure it’s a non-runner, they’ve  managed to convince those who are hard-working tax-payers that people on benefits are a shower of lazy cheats who should really be forced to get off their bums, pull the curtains and go out and get a job 

There are a lot of questions that need to be asked here. The first and most obvious one is, how many of the people shaping up to pass these cuts in the British parliament  - how many in Cameron’s cabinet, for example -  will be affected?  How many of their relatives? It’s a safe bet the answer is none, zilch, zero.  Cameron’s cabinet is stuffed with people who are extremely wealthy - millionaires and in some cases  multi-millionaires. 

What you have here is a classic example of the top of society kicking the bottom of society until they do what they’re told.   The Tories, who were never done telling Labour about the need to free people from the interfering hand of the state, have now themselves reached into the heart of families and squeezed with deadly intent. 

You thought you had the right to decide what size your family would be? Uh-uh. Theoretically, you still can decide. But while you’re deciding, Georgie Osborne will be pressing a financial pistol against your forehead. The more children you have, the more you’ll suffer as your benefits shrink rather than grow to match need. The state, in short, is going to decide  the number of children  you have.  Now where have we heard that one before? Ah yes - China. Mmm.

The other change the Tories are keen to make is to have anyone under 25  go back home living with their ma or da, rather than draining the benefit system.  You think  that by 25, people should be running their own lives, rather than returning to the family nest, maybe with a husband/wife/partner? And that if they do, it could well mean friction and discord for family relations?  You think right.  But hey, this is a recession and David Cameron is worth £12 million.

They say you can tell the level of civilization a society has reached by looking at how they treat the most vulnerable in it. You don’t get much more vulnerable than being on benefits, or being dependent on a funds-starved health service, or being a second or third or fifth child who, along with his/her parents, suffers financially for having been born. Meanwhile, the British government plans to spend somewhere between £20billion and £35 billion on a replacement for the Trident nuclear programme.  In other words,  Cameron and Co. are happy to spend billions upon billions in building weapons aimed at killing foreign civilians (that’s what nuclear weapons do, Virginia) while they kick the financial stuffing out of those at the bottom of the social scale at home. 

All this, by the way, will have a direct effect on similar people here in the north of Ireland. Which goes to show how dependent we are, despite our Assembly, on Mother Britain. 

Don't read this - it's depressing

Sometimes it’s the small things.  A week or so ago I was watching a news clip of a band on the march to Stormont celebrating the signing of the Covenant and half-listening to the commentary from the BBC news reporter. The band wasn’t at the St Patrick’s flash-point nor at St Matthews, where by all accounts the old atavistic tendencies were let off the leash. No, this was somewhere non-contentious, as they say - in other words, nationalists/republicans weren’t protesting. It wasn’t anything to do with the tune that was being played or the name of the band or the place it was passing. It was more the appearance of the band and marchers: the collarettes,  the quasi-military all-step-in-time-boys. But above all it was the swagger. I once had a teacher who tore into a classmate because, as he left the classroom, he had shown (and I still remember the phrase) ‘dumb insolence’.  That’s what was in that swagger - dumb insolence. It brought home, more completely than words ever could , that these people considered themselves The People, that those they were celebrating triumph over  were  several notches below them in the humanity chain, and that we run this show and call the shots.

You’re right, that’s a lot to read into a passing band, but it’s what I felt. In fact, there was a distinct flavour of the Ku Klux Klan group or Afrikan apartheid to the marchers: red-neck, red-cheeked, no surrender.  Watching them was a depressing experience. After all these years since the Good Friday Agreement, here we were back where we started in the late 1960s: marching, so to say, in circles. 

That glimpse matched, oddly enough, not with the Urinating Man or the repeated flouting of the Parades Commission ruling, but with another news item that caught my eye  - the number of American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. It hit 2,000  a couple of weeks back and there was a sadness there too. It didn't just mean body bags and coffins being unloaded well away from camera lenses in the US. It meant young men, who could have gone on  breathing the air, eating food, drinking, chasing women, raising a family, growing old - all that had been cut in the bud, annihilated forever.

But - and this is where it links with that marching band - there was no mention of how many Afghans had died since the Americans invaded their country. The precise count is uncertain but Jonathan Steele of The Guardian figured that up to 20,000 Afghans may have died in the first four months of US air strikes. That’s ten times as many Afghans dead within one four-month period. Each year since, thousands more Afghans have died. You get the same sort of proportions when you consider the Vietnam War. I’ve been to the Vietnam Wall in Washington where the names of some 58,000 US soldiers killed in Vietnam are written, and the place has a mute melancholy to it. But there's no wall for the Vietnamese who died in their own country at the hands of the Americans. Maybe they couldn't find a big enough wall: figures for Vietnamese casualties in that war are reckoned by some to be around 5 million. 

In both Afghanistan and in Vietnam,  the massive losses were suffered by the people who live in those countries, as distinct from the people who invaded them. Which raises the question: why do so many people in the West know about  and mourn the casualties suffered by US forces,  and so few know or mourn the many casualties suffered by the invaded country?  It’s simple, really: because the American lives are seen as more valuable than those of Afghans or Vietnamese. Behind this is the notion that, as in all its foreign ventures,  the US was bringing the benefits of democracy to these countries. And yes, there’s no doubt that in some cases the countries invaded have derived some benefits from the American presence. Just as the presence of the Roman Empire and the British Empire indisputably brought benefits to the countries which they invaded and ruled for so many years. 

But what did the countries under domination do, the first chance they got? They threw off the yoke of their invaders. Despite all the supposed benefits of being shaped in the image of the dominant power, despite all the assumptions of superiority held by the dominant power, these countries wanted to be left alone to decide their own destiny. 

Sinn Féin MP Conor Murphy summed up the recent celebrations pretty well. "Saturday was about supremacy, it was about intolerance and it was about triumphalism".  Imperial thinking hasn't gone away, you know. 

How to put manners on burglars, by Chris Grayling

Don’t you just love the Tories? George Osborne had barely closed his mouth from announcing that the British government would be using the benefits system in the UK as a financial gun to force families to be smaller and to drive under-25s - whether they wanted to or not - back into the family nest, when Chris Grayling was on is hind legs to tell the conference that soon home-owners would be able to use disproportianate force without fear of prosecution, should they encounter a burglar in their home. 

Don’t you just love it?  This sets a political hare running in the opposite direction from the brutal benefits cutbacks.’ Take their minds off the cut-backs’  Grayling was instructed, and by God he did the job. His proposals did their best to stir into life the primitive beast that sleeps within us all - the one that wants to wreak havoc on people who dares mess with our property or goods. 

If a fire had started in your home what would you do?  You’d follow Fire Service recommendations, get out and stay out.  Put as much distance between you and Mr Fire as you possibly could. Common sense tells you the same thing applies to burglars. As the police told me when a couple of years ago I heard an intruder downstairs and phoned them: ‘Do not go downstairs under any circumstances. The last thing you want to do is confront a burglar.’ I followed their instructions.

But now it seems we’re to be given encouragement. Don’t worry if you use ‘disproportionate force’ - you won’t be prosecuted. So now we have governmental encouragement to deal with intruders pretty much as we see fit.

The net effect of which will be one of two things. Either burglars will stop burgling because they’ll be frightened, or they’ll keep on burgling but will bring a knife or a gun in case they’re confronted by a have-a-go Charlie. Guess which of those two options is more likely?

We pay the police to tend to law-and-order; why then do the Tories want to change it so private citizens assume the job of putting manners on burglars? I’ll tell you why, shall I? Because secretly we’d all love to be the guy who does the Dirty Harry thing and scares the crap out of lawbreakers. Even more important, this move won’t cost government a thing. 

On the other hand, it may cost the burglar or more likely the home-owner his life. 

Let's stop sparing the details

I like George Monbiot. For a start he knows an awful lot of stuff, and for another he’s not afraid to speak out. He had an article in The Guardian  the other day that almost literally took my breath away. It was about those Kenyans who had been mistreated by the British during the struggle for independence.

As he says himself, he spares the reader no detail. 

“We have been sparing ourselves the details for far too long. Large numbers of men were castrated with pliers. Others were raped, sometimes with the use of knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels and scorpions. Women had similar instruments forced into their vaginas. The guards and officials sliced off ears and fingers, gouged out eyes, mutilated women's breasts with pliers, poured paraffin over people and set them alight. Untold thousands died.”

And of course it was all covered up as officialdom lied and lied again about what they had done and were doing. It’s hard to believe that human beings could do such things to one another but it’s obviously possible. Monbiot suggests it’s because people have been persuaded to think of those they are oppressing as being ‘the other’ -  not like us, a lesser species. Almost certainly something of the same thinking obtained in the time of the Irish famine - or An Gorta Mor, to be more exact - the Great Hunger. A million people were allowed to die and a million more had to emigrate, many dying en route in the ‘coffin ships’. 

What’s that - the British didn’t  let them die? Mmm - sorry, can’t go along with that. If food is being shipped out of a country - food of all kinds  - while the people of that country are starving, I’d call that letting the people die. In fact, I’d go further - I’d say An Gorta Mor looks suspiciously like genocide. I’m not saying that the British attempted to wipe out the entire Irish population but that’s not the definition of genocide. What was inflicted on the Irish people killed a million, forced another million to leave the country, and left a psychological scar on the Irish that remains to this day. 

I’m writing these words from London, where I’ve always found the people to be at least as good and pleasant as in any other city. So how could their ancestors have been so stony-hearted in the face of Irish starvation? I think Monbiot got it - they thought of the Irish as ‘the other’, and there are still traces of such thinking among portions of the English people. 

It’s a hugely interesting as well as ghastly period of our history, the mid-nineteenth century. Maybe we should know more about it. 

Does history offer anything worth learning?

I was down Dungannon way yesterday at a local history conference. Predictably, their theme was the decade of centenaries and how to respond to them. I enjoyed it considerably. When you’ve informed and skilled speakers like Diarmaid Ferriter and Brian Walker, you can hardly go wrong.

What I felt was lacking, though, was a commentary on the purpose of studying history. You could start, I suppose, by saying that just as someone losing his/her personal memory leads to a dysfunctional present and bodes ill for the future, so too with history - we need the past to inform the present. Yes,  but what will it tell us?  You get that other old chestnut - those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. Sounds like a good reason for studying your history, except if your history was a happy one wouldn’t you be pleased to repeat it? I bet  the British empire would be happy to press the replay button, when they ruled a dominion on which the sun never set. 

I did a short talk on my book and its interviewees, and how the notion of learning from the past was emphasized by most of them. But there again, what was to be learned remained vague. At the conference Brian Walker, I think, suggested empathy was the great lesson to be learned from the past. Mmm.  Yes. That makes sense. Widen your vision, the boundaries of your thinking. But what’s the idea behind that - is it that we then understand where people are coming from? OK, what then? I understand your unionism, you understand my nationalism - what now? Do we go out for a drink? Get into bed together? Forgive each other, never fight again and live happily ever after?

The three centenaries that my interviewees considered were the Signing of the Covenant, the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme. As I pointed out, all three have one thing in common - they all involved the use or threat of violence to achieve political ends. We, on the other hand, hail the achievement of political goals through strictly peaceful means. In which case, what are we doing commemorating or even celebrating any of these three politically violent centenaries? Isn’t there a contradiction there somewhere - that when Hardy comes to Hardy, human beings talk about achieving political goals through peaceful means, but the way they act is far from peaceful.

Maybe that’s the lesson of history: that we’re a bunch of short-sighted, violent  hypocrites.