Social Items

TPQ
Showing posts with label Jim Duffy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Duffy. Show all posts
Jim Duffy ➤ Excellent article: There is a striking contrast between the funerals of Bobby Storey and John Hume. 

Storey's funeral was a triumphalist performance, a glorification of Irish republicanism, that ignored all the rules in place to protect people during the pandemic. The organisers couldn't care less about the impact of their actions on the community they claimed to serve. They endangered them. They endangered the mourners and they showed that their concern about the staff in the NHS was a lie - as they didn't care about the possible impact on their actions on numbers of people ending up in hospital. Irish republicanism cared about nothing but celebrating Irish republicanism.

In contrast, John Hume's funeral was arranged entirely with the concern of the community he served in mind. There was no public display. Crowds were urged to stay away. The attendance was kept low. Social distancing was strictly followed. John and Pat's son wasn't willing to travel back from the US to attend the funeral because he would have had to break quarantine to be there and that would have put others at risk. The whole funeral was arranged to protect people from risk - to avoid some members of the community John Hume came from ending up in hospital.

The Storey funeral was the epitome of "Sinn Féin" - "ourselves". Nobody else and nothing else mattered but republican self-congratulation and promotion. The Hume funeral was entirely focused on others: their needs, their safety, their protection.

It summed up the lives of both men perfectly. Hume spent his life serving others, thinking about others, trying to protect others, and in death continued to do so on his journey to the grave. That is why one man will be remembered with awe and admiration in history, when the other is long forgotten and just a footnote. It will be John Hume's name that will be remembered - with admiration and pride.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Striking Contrast

Jim Duffy shares some views on a monarchy versus a republic, promoted by reading an Irish Times  piece by Ronan McCreevy. 

Remember, before 1918, the default in Europe always was monarchy. Republics were practically the freaks. France was on by accident as the imbecilic Comte de Chambord, Henri V, declined the offer of the throne over a row about the tricolour. Otherwise it would have had a king in 1916. Portugal was a republic since 1910 and there was strong support for re-instating the monarchy. Switzerland was . . . well, Switzerland, and nobody wanted to be Switzerland.

Russia was only a republic from 1917.

So being a republic in 1916 was the oddball choice. Being a monarchy was seen as logical. Norway had voted in a referendum to become a monarchy over a republic. There is little doubt also that very few Irish people were republicans. Most were naturally monarchists. Royal visits, where of the British royals or international royals, drew mass crowds.

So the question isn't "why would they become monarchy?" but why in 1916 would they become a republic? The answer is - as a stop-gap before they offered the throne to someone. They never actually described Pearse as 'president' in the Proclamation, just a different document. Indeed Tom Clarke, according to his widow, believed He was the president, not Pearse.

In 1917 Sinn Féin almost split on the issue of a monarchy versus a republic. They had to hold two ard fheiseanna to find a compromise. The compromise was not, as people presume, to have a republic, but to have an interim republic while holding a referendum on whether to become a republic or a monarchy. Most expected the vote would go for a monarchy - so it was specified that no British royal could be offered the throne.

The reason for Joachim I suspect was simple - timing. He had married in the weeks before the rising. The papers had extensive coverage. So he was on everybody's lips. In addition, he had no English - so could learn Irish and have an Irish court. Plus as he was just married he had no children, so his first son would be an Irish prince, born and reared in Ireland.

We make the mistake of looking back from a different world where republics are the default and think "why on earth would they become a monarchy?" But in 1916 being a monarchy was normal, natural and in Europe almost universal. Being a republic would have been the odd-ball choice with only a small Irish republican fringe attached to the idea. To borrow Yeats, everything changed, changed utterly in 1917 and 1918 when the Emperors of Russia, Germany and Austria fell, as did the crowned heads across Germany. That changed how republics came to be seen. From 1918 they were all the fashion. Before 1918 they were bizarre oddities - an accident in France, a potentially temporary one in Portugal and that utter oddball Switzerland. 

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

The Republic Of Oddballs

Jim Duffy ➤ An interesting programme on RTÉ presented by Michael McDowell called Rome V Republic, about the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Unfortunately, whether due to the superficialities of television histories where there isn't the time to go into detail, or the editorial stance of the makers, it seriously misrepresented the power of the Catholic Church in the 19th century in Ireland.

It created the impression of a passively accepting congregation doing as priests ordered. That simply is not true. Go through the archives and you find constant evidence where the church was disobeyed and mocked.

For example, one of the reasons the church was against wakes was because people at them consistently mocked the church and the sacraments - holding mock masses to the fury of the clergy. Sex outside marriage was commonplace. Illegitimacy was commonplace. In tracing ancestors in Navan parish I was shocked to find in the baptismal registers around 80% of children baptised in the town were illegitimate in the 1850s. I literally came across pages of the register that listed nothing but children with the word 'illegitimate' in a side column. I began to wonder if I had found some register of illegitimate births - but it seems to be the normal register.

In rural areas, illegitimacy was much lower, but still surprisingly common.

The Catholic Church in the 1870s tried to set up a Catholic Party - but it flopped miserably as ordinary Catholics voted for the Home Rule League under the Protestant Isaac Butt rather than Cardinal Cullen's party. The fact that his new party was created almost directly after the passage of the Secret Ballot Act added to the freedom of voters to do what they wanted, not what they were told to do.) That also contradicts the McDowell narrative.

In the 1890s the church took a strongly anti-Parnellite stance. The clear majority of the population were on that side too - but it is not clear how influential the church stance was. The party also took an overwhelmingly anti-Parnellite line. So did the main newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. Did they turn on Parnell because they were appalled at his long-time relationship with a married woman? The fact that he was the father of her children? The condemnation of the bishops? Or the fact that they resented his dismissive treatment of critics in the party? Or that the Liberals were taking a holier-than-thou stance based on their own religious base and threatening to abandon home rule? Perhaps it was a combination of some or all of them. It is way too simplistic to conclude that they simply took their instruction from the bishops. They had been frequently ignoring instructions from bishops for years on issues like the Plan of Campaign.

What is striking is how openly many people took their pro-Parnell line literally in front of their priest - again contradicting the McDowell thesis of an obedient populace. In my parish, the parish priest, Fr. Cole, was a particular hardliner. At one stage he denounced Parnellites from the altar and ordered his parishioners Not to go to a Parnellite rally in I think Kells. A brass band was assembling outside, and directly after mass a sizeable chunk of the massgoers assembled behind it, as the furious priest stared at them, and set off to march to the Parnellite rally in Kells. Again, that contradicts the image of an obedient loyal membership of the church. They openly disobeyed the priest and the bishop. (The bishop lived in Navan.)

In a court case which recounts in detail the open disobeying of priests, possibly involving Cole (I forget but have the impression it was him), a story was recounted of an angry parish priest hitting his parishioners with his blackthorn stick at a Parnellite rally. One of them took the stick off him and whacked him hard across the body with it. Another man took great pleasure in telling the court how the priest had bribed him not to attend the Parnellite rally but to go to an anti-Parnellite one instead. He took the money and went to the Parnellite rally anyway, spending the money in the pubs afterwards.

My great-grandfather, Patrick Duffy, was anti-Parnellite. Two of his closest friends and next door neighbours were Parnellites. The priest may have been calling Parnellites the devil incarnate but Patrick maintained his friendship with the Kane and Collins families, and Joseph Collins was a witness to Patrick's mother's will.

Cole banned Joseph Collins from holding the traditional station mass in the Collins home. It made no difference. Joseph Collins stuck to his guns and remained a Parnellite, while still going to mass in the local church. Eventually Cole was moved by the bishop as he was too disruptive in the parish. Again the experiences in the 1890s in my local area, and numerous other areas, contradicted the thesis of parishioners passively obeying the church. They were not the sheep McDowell seemed to think.

In the 20th century there was widespread disobeying of instructions of the priests, and open contempt shown for the Bishop of Meath. The bishop lived in Navan, though officially based in Mullingar, and the church in Navan was known informally as 'the cathedral'. The bishop stormed off to live permanently in Mullingar because locals in Navan, a Parnellite town though the Parnellite split had officially been healed, flung horse dung in on him in his carriage. Flinging horse dung in the face of a bishop again hardly supports the theory of a subservient obedient Catholic populace.

The clergy in 1916 were openly hostile to the Easter Rising. So were most people. The support for the priests and people was shown when the local priests in Navan carried the bodies of the R.I.C men killed in the so-called Battle of Ashbourne into the County Infirmary, as hundreds gathered outside in a show of support. Clerical condemnation made no difference to the Irish republican minority at the time. (Due to the chronic mishandling of the aftermath, the British managed to turn public opinion against them, allowing republicans then and since to spin the myth that the rising had popular support. It didn't.)

Church condemnation of the Plan of Campaign, of the Land League, of boycotting and other issues in the 1880s had also made no impact. In 1923 the church condemned the anti-Treaty IRA and threatened members with excommunication. It made no difference. It was lack of public support, not church condemnation that forced the anti-Treatyites to end their campaign and that lack of support long predated the condemnation by bishops. Deeply religious figures like Sean T O’Kelly and de Valera didn’t suddenly quit the anti-Treatyites the moment the excommunication threat was made. They ignored it.

In the 1930s, de Valera refused to support the Nationalists in Spain under Franco, earning a furious condemnation from the church. The Irish public were strongly pro-Nationalist but there is no clear evidence that was due to church pressure but was just the wholesale fear of communism that was a feature across Europe, with the Republicans seen as communists. Yet de Valera went on to win the general election in Ireland in 1937. He lost seats. So did the pro-Nationalist Fine Gael. Labour, which was split between pro-Nationalists and pro-Republicans, gained seats. Though priests called on people to go to Spain to defend religion by supporting the Nationalists, and support for Nationalists far outweighed support for Republicans, only a small number joined Eoin O'Duffy's Greenshirts. (No. That isn’t a typo. Contrary to myth, it was not the Blueshirts who went to Spain, not least because the Blueshirts were abolished two years before the start of the Spanish Civil War. It was O’Duffy’s new group, the Greenshirts, and his National Corporate Party, that went to Spain.)

You will probably have heard how the Catholic Church got what it wanted in the 1937 constitution. That is another myth. In fact, its key demands were all rejected. In particular, the demand from Maria Duce and Fr. John Charles McQuaid that Catholicism be made the established church was ignored (leading to a temporary rupture in the friendship of de Valera and McQuaid). McDowell made a point of how the 1922 constitution was more secularist than the 1937 one. Of course it was. All constitutions drafted in the 1920s tended to be. They were a product of the quite secularist revolutions across Europe. The only problem was that they were very much liberal elite documents wildly out of touch with public opinion – which was one of the reasons why so few constitutions of the age had public support. By the 1930s, new constitutions adopted Europewide tended to be more religious - reflecting the grassroots opinions of voters. That was not unique to Ireland. It simply reflected the fact that across Europe the revolutionary elites that took power from 1918 on tended to be much more liberal and secularist than their populations. While I may prefer the 1922 constitution’s secularism (though the 1937 one is better written), it undoubtedly wasn’t reflective of the views of the Ireland of the time, whereas the 1937 one was closer to the views of ordinary people. Indeed it does pose a rather difficult fundamental problem in democracies - what happens if the majority of the public hold views that are the antithesis of the minority elite liberal democratic fringe?

The scale of how much liberal commentators fundamentally misunderstand the church and the time period is captured in the 1937 constitution. Liberals think the “special position” of the Roman Catholic Church in the constitution reflects the church’s control over the text. They entirely misunderstand that article and Catholic teaching at the time. The church believed it was the embodiment of divine revelation and truth. Whether it had one member in a country, or 100% of citizens were members, was irrelevant. As the supposed embodiment of truth and divine revelation it had a right to superiority in law. In church teaching at the time, “error has no rights.” All other faiths had broken away from the truth church, Catholicism. Therefore they had No rights.

Yet what did the “special position” article, Article 41, say?

1. The “special position” was not based on the church being the “true church”. It was based on being “the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” That was an outrageous line for a church who believed its authority came from right as the “true church” - not simply a head count.

2. The article said:

The State also recognises the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Methodist Church in Ireland, the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, as well as the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations existing in Ireland at the date of the coming into operation of this Constitution.

In other words, while Roman Catholicism believed all other faiths were “in error” and “error has no rights”, the article in the constitution that gave the Catholic Church a largely meaningless recognition based on a sectarian headcount, also said quite frankly that “error Has rights” by recognising all the other religions as valid.

So, the idea that the article, since amended, embodied Catholic power, is a nonsense. In almost every way it contradicted Roman Catholic teaching. As a result, yet again, what Michael McDowell and many liberals think the past was is actually based on a fundamental lack of knowledge.

Michael McDowell also suggested that Ireland in a host of ways was the odd one out in Europe, with a more powerful Catholicism ruling the roost. One of the many fundamental flaws in McDowell's thesis about the past is that it fails to grasp that society in general worldwide was quite religious in the 19th century. Ireland wasn't the odd one out, but quite typical. It was spoken of as if the grotesque Catholic idea that its canon law is superior to the law of the state was unique to Ireland. In fact, that has been the Roman Catholic Church's view in every state.

I was surprised to hear McDowell claim he only discovered this as Attorney General. Seriously? I’m not a lawyer yet I knew that decades ago. It was hardly a secret. Roman Catholicism believes that as a divine-created organisation it outranks secular organisations and states. That is why popes claimed the right to crown Holy Roman emperors centuries ago. Anyone who ever studied history or law should always have known it. It was not remotely a secret. That has been at the core of the clerical abuse scandal – the belief that Catholicism outranked all secular organisations, so it didn’t have a duty to report crimes committed by its clergy to ‘inferior’ secular states. In other words, their laws are god’s laws, and therefore outrank man’s laws. It has believed that for two thousand years and has been at the core of almost every clash between Catholicism and any state. If McDowell didn’t know that he was astonishingly ignorant about history and law, and the relationship between Catholicism and law in countries worldwide. How on earth did a senior counsel not know something like that, let alone imagine it was unique to Ireland?

McDowell also showed no understanding of why Catholicism was so important in independent Ireland. Catholicism over the centuries had become the central badge of identity to differentiate Ireland from Britain. Even if they didn’t believe in Catholicism as a religion, people used it as a badge to stress its difference to Britain: Protestant Britain, Catholic Ireland. Many independent states adopt a unique symbol - and in Ireland, the role of Catholicism as being the voice of the ordinary suppressed Irish person right through the penal laws gave it that badge of being a unified cultural symbol. Had the Irish language not largely died out in the 19th century it may well have been that badge of difference.

So, the crowds going to the Eucharistic Congress weren’t just making a religious statement, but also a political statement about their own nationhood. It was independent Ireland’s first chance to host a major world event - and Eucharistic congresses were big world events. It was, in some ways, Nationalist Ireland’s first chance to party on the world stage as an independent state. The papal legate was being welcomed by the Irish Air Corp flying overhead, the Irish flag flying, the Irish prime minister (and Irish governor-general, though de Valera tried to marginalise him). There was nothing British about it.

To caricature the 1932 Eucharistic Congress as simply about triumphalist Catholicism, and not understand that the event was as much a badge of political identity as religious identity, shows very poor historical knowledge. It was as much a celebration of independence as it was a celebration of Catholicism. That is why it was the Irish flag, and not just the papal flag, that flew everywhere. It was a symbolic assertion of independence.

A critical flaw in McDowell’s programme was that it presumed a hierarchical structure of authority from bishops and priests down to obedient Catholics. In fact that wasn’t the case. As mentioned, people regularly ignored diktats issued by those at the top if they didn’t like them. McDowell mentioned the banning of divorce, and the introduction of censorship.

Neither of those, however, were top-down diktats of the hierarchy. Far from it. They came from ordinary people. It was often grassroots demands that produced them. It wasn’t Rome being enforced on the state, but grassroots citizens, many Catholic, some of other faiths or none, who lobbied to say “we don’t want these. We want you to ban them.” In the 1925 all Ireland election for the Seanad (the only popular election for the Seanad to take place), Gaelic League founder Douglas Hyde, expected to be a shoe-in, was humiliatingly defeated by ordinary citizens because they thought he was pro-divorce. There was no instruction from Maynooth to defeat him. In fact the bishops found many ordinary Catholics reported them to Rome – accusing them of being too liberal, or “modernist” (to use the idiotic phrase so loved of Pope Pius X). It was the ordinary citizens who instead of electing Hyde, or another respected figure, chose as a poll-topper a non-entity councillor from Monaghan.

One final flaw in the McDowell thesis was the idea of not just the uniqueness of the Irish relationship with Catholicism (he obviously doesn’t know about the similar relationships in a host of countries across Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Italy only legalised divorce in the 1970s) but that Catholicism’s abuse of power was unique, as well as being unique to Ireland. The clerical abuse scandal is closely associated with Catholicism (and I am one of its victims) simply because it was the first one caught. Since then almost every other religion has been caught up in similar scandals – the most recent one being Mormonism. Indeed, strikingly, figures from John Hopkins University show that the scale of abuse in Catholicism is almost identical to every other religion. Each has a sexual abuse rate of 5% - which does disprove the theory that Roman Catholic clerical sexual abuse is linked to the male priesthood or celibacy, as the percentage remains the same whether religions have a married or unmarried clergy, whether they have a male clergy or male and female clergy. Given that sexual abuse is slightly lower in religions than in the general population, it seems to suggest that all organisations will reflect the popular prevalence of sexual abuse, with in or around 5-6% of their staff abusers.

The truth about Catholicism in Ireland is a lot more complicated than the rather clichéd, cartoonish liberal version portrayed by McDowell in his programme on RTÉ. The Irish historically were far less under the thumb of Catholicism than he seems to think. They were more than able to ignore it when it suited them – whether it be in not voting for Cardinal Cullen’s Catholic Party, ignoring papal condemnations through the 19th and 20th centuries, ignoring the Church on the Plan of Campaign, boycotting, Parnell, or their sex lives. They could blame the church where necessary to avoid personal responsibility – as when they decided to put relatives into mother and baby homes for convenience and pretended it was under duress (contemporary accounts contradict the duress claim). The image of the obedient masses doing what Father said because Father said it is wildly, almost comically, exaggerated.

Overall, while McDowell’s programme was an interesting polemic, it was dubious history. It made sweeping generalisations that simply aren’t supported by the detail. It presumed a special relationship between Catholicism and Ireland that actually occurred in many states. It presumed uniquely appalling behaviour by Catholicism in Ireland that was in fact neither unique to Ireland or indeed unique to Catholicism. It presumes a rather clichéd image of ordinary Catholics in the past as obedient sheep ready to be hunted wherever their shepherd priest or bishop wanted them to go. In that, it had no idea of just how independent ordinary Irish Catholics have tended to be throughout history, and how many times Catholics entirely ignored and often disrespected the priests and bishops (and you can hardly get any more disrespect than flinging horse dung into the face of the Bishop of Meath!)

The reality in Ireland was much more complicated, and far more independent-minded and nuanced than McDowell’s thesis allowed for. As a polemic, the programme was interesting. As an accurate understanding of the history of Ireland, it was cartoonish and superficial.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Polemically Interesting But Historically Cartoonish And Superficial

Jim Duffy casts an eye in the direction of the Shinnerbots.

 I see the Shinnerbots are up to their usual disinformation and psychological manipulation again. They never stop. One of their tactics is to claim to be a voter/supporter/member of another party, and announce how they will "never again" vote for the party if the party does something that is not in the interests of Sinn Féin.



So, when Leo Varadkar announced that Fine Gael would not go into government with Sinn Féin, Shinnerbots flooded Fine Gael pages with furious rants about how "I voted Fine Gael in the last election, but never again if you don't go in with Sinn Féin." The thing is that a lot of the bots aren't the sharpest. I asked one whether he was a member of a Fine Gael 'cumann'. He said he was. He was going to raise Fine Gael's refusal to go in with Sinn Féin at the cumann meeting.

He went further. He was going to have it raised at the Comhairle Dáil Ceanntair and Ard Comhairle. I let him go on and on about how angry members of his cumann was before casually mentioning that Fine Gael doesn't have cumainn. It has branches - which he would know if he was really a member of the party. I then twisted the knife by pointing out that it doesn't have comhairles either, and the top body is called the Executive Council, not Ard Comhairle. He disappeared from the page! LOL

Another trick is challenge them about something else a party member would know but a member of Sinn Féin wouldn't. There are other ways to catch them out.

I see they are now flooding Green Party pages doing the 'outraged Green voter/supporter/member' act in full rage at the proposed coalition deal with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. A few seconds checking their account usually is all you need to know to realise they aren't a Green at all, but a Shinnerbot. They are similarly flooding Fianna Fáil pages and probably Fine Gael ones.

I literally don't know anyone in Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Labour or the Greens who engage in this type of nonsense. It seems to be a particular feature of Sinn Féin - where dirty tricks and mind-games, a technique known as 'rat-fucking' that was a particular feature of Richard Nixon and his supporters, are standard.

So I guess the Greens in particular, but also Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, can expect to experience a lot of Sinn Féin rat-fucking in the next few weeks in an effort to manipulate them. 

And then Sinn Féin wonders why no other party will touch them with a barge pole.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Sinn Féin Rat-Fucking

Jim Duffy feels that the war on statues amounts to censorship of the past.

Here we go. Now the perpetually offended fringe have found new things to be perpetually offended by.

Yes Mitchel's view were vile and extreme - and not just on slavery. But you'd be hard-pressed to find any monument that references someone whose views, attitudes and behaviours would not be offensive today.

Literally everyone in the past held views on race, gender and orientation that would appal us today. Even Lincoln didn't see Blacks as equal to Whites. Support for the US confederacy was strong in Ireland. Significant numbers if they researched their family history would find they had ancestors, direct or indirect, who fought for the confederacy. (I have collateral ancestors who fought for either side in the US civil war.)

Should we 'allow' de Valera's statues and monuments remain up, when he expressed such comments as "Ireland is now the last white nation that is deprived of its liberty." (1920)

Should we allow Michael Davitt's statues remain up, as he shared the racism of the Boers to Black Africans and called them "savages"?

Should the respected 19th century historian and Liberal politician Edward August Freeman still be remembered in monuments in Britain given that he wrote:

If the Chinese controlled the press of half the world, as the Jews do, there would be a cry everywhere of "Frightful Religious persecution in America," because of the bill which has just passed Congress. The only difference is that the Russians have punched some Hebrew heads irregularly, and the heathen Chinee (sic) has before now suffered from California mobs; but there is no religious persecution in either case, only the natural instinct of any decent nation to get rid of filthy strangers.


And of America he wrote "This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it".

And what of all the statues of Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist, historian, mathematician and writer - who wrote the controversial pamphlet "Occasional Discourse on the Ni***r Question" that supported slavery and led to walkouts when he read it publicly in 1853? His views even for the time were controversial? Should all his statues be removed?

Speaking of racist bigotry, what about that other Scottish man James Connolly? In 1916 he wrote:

No work in Ireland for Irishmen, lots of work in Ireland for Brit-Huns – every ship that goes to England carrying away Irish men to jobs in England; every ship that comes to Ireland carrying over Brit-Huns to jobs in Ireland. Was ever a nation so beset?"

He also called migrants "swarms of locusts". Should Connolly's monuments be removed?

Or what about Keir Hardy, an intolerant xenophobe who indulged in crude racial stereotyping and castigated foreigners for taking Scottish jobs? It was a far cry from the public image of him but his words were unearthed by a former Labour First Minister of Scotland while researching a biography of him. In 1887 he castigated migrants coming to Scotland from Europe, saying:

In former years if a slave escaped in America and crossed to Canada he was a free man, but here we have a batch of men sent from their homes into our midst for the purpose of bringing you down, if possible, to their level. The authorities are at fault to allow it in view of their filthy habits.

When it was pointed out to him that more people left Scotland than entered it, Hardie replied:

It would be much better for Scotland if those (Scots)were compelled to remain there and let the foreigners be kept out. Dr Johnson said God made Scotland for Scotchmen, and I would keep it so.

He seems to have particularly despised Lithuanian immigrants.

I could go on. Arthur Griffith? Antisemite. Padraig Pearse? A very creepy poem with hints of paedophilia with fantasies of kissing a child in it ('Raise your comely head/Till I kiss your mouth . . . There is a fragrance in your kiss/That I have not found yet/In the kisses of women/Or in the honey of their bodies.')

If you apply the standards some on the left want to, then there would not be a single monument that could stay up.

Instead of thinking of statues as glorification, recognise them as memorialising incidents and people - good or bad, and include honest accurate signage to the base.

So keep the monument to Mitchel - but mention that he was a slave owner with extreme views on race that offended many even in his day and would be abhorred today. Keep Carlyle but mention his defence of slavery as a negative along with his positives. Keep Davitt but mention he held deeply racist views that tarnish his reputation. Don't censor and destroy the past because it is inconvenient. Use it to teach how complex the past really was.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Perpetually Offended

Jim Duffy on a seriously limiting British Exceptionalism.

I have annoyed some British people, curiously almost all Brexiters, in criticising the impact of British Exceptionalism on Britain's bungled handling of the coronavirus. 

Exceptionalism is the tendency of some countries (the US and UK are two infamous examples) to believe in their own exceptional gifts and skills and how those gifts and skills make them uniquely superior, or uniquely important, compared to others. 

In Brexit, it saw Brexiters convince themselves the Europe Needed Britain more than Britain needed Europe, and that without Britain the European project is doomed to failure.

The same mindset of exceptionalism had been shown, with tragic consequences in Britain, in the handling of the coronavirus. Numerous other countries had the virus earlier than Britain, and had unique experience they shared with other countries. Britain, however, paid little attention to the advice - believing that British experts are, by definition of being British, better experts on the virus than those in countries with earlier experience.

Similarly, Britain ignored the advice of the World Health Organisation, and the European Centre for Disease and Control. So while most of the world followed the WHO and ECDC recommended stance of test, trace and contact on the virus, Britain decided it wouldn't, and limited its tests to hospital patients, and did no contact tracing. That has proven to be a catastrophic mistake.

I was watching a programme on the virus earlier. What was striking in it was how little awareness there was of anything outside Britain and British research. Hold a discussion on the science of the coronavirus on Irish television, French television, German television or anywhere else and there would be constant mentions of WTO studies, ECDC studies, reports from China, from Italy, from Singapore, etc. Yet I only heard ONE mention of the WHO on the entire programme (speaking, naturally, to a British scientist there), and no mention of the ECDC or other countries. For example, people on the programmes talked about the reality of how antibody testing will work, once Britain gets the right test. There was no mention of an exceptionally worrying report by the WHO that the required antibodies are not being found among those who were infected in far east countries. If antibodies are not being generated then the whole antibody plan of Britain's may be dead in the water.

Yet it was as if no-one in Britain dealing with the virus even noticed the ground breaking and ominous WHO data. British experts were still debating whether or not to contact trace - despite WHO evidence, ECDC evidence, and evidence across the world that it was vital and necessary.

Nor did anyone mention the crucial new wave of infections in Singapore, and how people who had been infected are becoming infected again - something that should not be happening. Or that places in China are back in lockdown, as is Singapore.

Listening to the British debate, it really seemed entirely British-centred, and almost oblivious to the world outside Britain. It was as if Britain was on its own dealing with the pandemic, and isn't interested in the contributions of 'foreigners' even where they are giving it vital advice it needs. It really does come across as "fortress Britain", not wanting help and indeed believing itself superior to any guidance given.

It was deeply depressing, yet also so reminiscent of the mindset that was appearing more and more in Brexit - one where the drawbridge was up and Britain was shouting from the ramparts to all offers of advice. "We're British. We don't need your help." 

It is so very sad.

⏩Jim Duffy is a writer.

British Exceptionalism ➤ A Catastrophic Mistake

Jim Duffy thinks that in the midst of the current pandemic journalists need to calm down and stop rushing their fences. 

I like the media a lot, contribute to it occasionally, and respect many journalists. But like all professions it is flawed. 

One of its major flaws is its tendency to get carried away with things. Journalist R reads what journalist S wrote in a newspaper or said on a bulletin, and tries to take the story on, and the momentum gets faster and faster - often based on the media losing the run of itself and covering something journalists have only a superficial knowledge of. (Saying they have a superficial knowledge of it isn't a criticism. By definition, in covering all of society, most issues that crop up will be outside their knowledge base and they will end up talking and writing about issues they don't actually know much about.) 

That tendency for a journalistic frenzy to build up is one of the negative aspects of the media. I remember a very respected broadcaster, normally so calm, getting so carried away with a story that he literally roared a ludicrous question into the face of a candidate and "demanded" an answer to a question no-one could possibly answer.

After a period of calmness in covering Covid-19, elements of the media are in an increasingly frenzy in running wild with stories. A mis-informed media frenzy has been building on the issue of when will the lockdown "end", and how soon will a vaccine be available. To take the latter case first, the UK chief medical officer tried to impose a dose of realism into the media getting carried away by mythical vaccines. They report every successful testing of a potential vaccine in a lab as a "breakthrough". One US media outlet reported "vaccine found."

It was garbage. Just because something in a lab works is no indication that it will work outside it. The vast majority don't. Some do but have such horrendous side effects that it cannot possibly be used. It is quite possible that all the successful lab tests reported to date between them will not produce a single workable vaccine. Then there is the fact that every prototype vaccine found has to be tested to make sure it has no worse side effects. There is no point having a vaccine if its side effect, as with Trump's lunatic promotion of a drug, is to kill the patient by causing a heart attack, or triggers strokes, or raises blood pressure to dangerous levels, or causes epilepsy, or makes the patent susceptible to cancer!

Even when you finally have a vaccine that works and is safe, there then is the problem of mass manufacture. Billions of people will have to be vaccinated. Both the manufacture and the vaccination will take a long time. One expert was overheard after a press conference saying that the next journalist that asked him would vaccination be available by June was liable to have a paper cup of water thrown over them. Of course it fucking well won't. The expert guess is that a vaccine, If one is found, probably is 18 months or longer away.

But too many journalists still talk as if vaccines are just magicked up in a few weeks.

Then there is the lockdown. So much media coverage is based on the question "when will the lockdown end?" It is like asking 'How long is a piece of string?'. Others talk as if the lockdowns are going to be over in a couple of weeks. Even worse, they get carried away with easing of lockdowns in other countries - oblivious to the fact that different countries are at different points of the coronavirus journey.

Experts try to explain, with extraordinary patience, that the ending of the lockdowns will not occur in the foreseeable future. We may be in lockdowns a year from now. The experts try to explain that the lockdowns will be Eased, not ended, and are likely to be eased very, very slowly. We are not going to see 80% of the population going back to work. We may see 5%, and maybe another 5% a month later. Even then, every easing is temporary. If the reproduction number climbs above 1 in any country, then it is back into a lockdown to get it down again. Even if the lockdown is eased, bit by bit, the re-imposition of it will be on the cards well into the future, right down to the day when everyone has been vaccinated. Various Asian states that eased lockdowns initially had to re-impose them again. We could have an eased lockdown in May or June, and be back in it again in July, be eased out of it slightly in August and be back in it in September.

Journalists really do need to calm down their frenzy, and stop getting carried away with mythical impending vaccines and mythical complete ends to lockdowns soon. We are in this for the long haul. It may be a year or two before we are having a normal life again.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

Media Frenzy

Jim Duffy considers his options as an Irish general election looms.

It looks like a general election is likely. I come from a long-term Fine Gael family, and worked for Fine Gael for a number of years. That said, my politics has always been driven by policy. I have never bought into the idea of politics as just a brand you unthinkingly endorse. I have on occasion voted for Labour, or the Greens. I voted Green in the locals and Fine Gael in the Euros.

I am completely undecided over who to vote for in this election - though the likes of Sinn Féin, Aontú, PBP and the various alphabet soup far left parties are absolutely out. I have fundamental policy differences with Fine Gael on this occasion. Firstly, electing any party to a third term is ill-advised because by then they are so institutionalised by government they usually reek of arrogance. Fine Gael in particular do so. They usually do in government in any case. A classic 'rational-legal' party, they are entirely at home by process and tend to need a strong coalition partner like Labour to rein in their worst tendencies (and Fine Gael rein in the worst tendencies of Labour). I was worried by Fine Gael being in government without Labour - and all my worst fears were realised. Fine Gael has become insufferably self-righteous, woefully out of touch and blinded to reality.

As someone dealing with depression, I have seen the public health system up close – and it is not a pretty picture. Fine Gael policies have made it worse in key areas, as it applies theories and presumptions that are not merely wrong but counterproductive. Basic services are at break-down. Treatment that I needed quickly took three years to get – by which time the illness had gone from mild to critical and life-threatening, entirely thanks to government policy. I do have some sympathy for them in one sense. A key problem was the disastrous creation of the HSE by Micheal Martin as Minister for Health. It created such a monstrous mess of a bureaucracy that trying to untangle it, much less fix it or abolish it, is almost impossible. Many of the worst problems that dog the health service are a direct result of the policies of Martin, and Mary Harney, for example, mass closure of beds and hospitals, and creating a bureaucratic monster so overstaffed at bureaucrat level that it now swallows up an appalling amount of the health budget and, barring mass forced sackings of many of the bureaucrats, and abolishing many of their roles, it will continue to be a monster that swallows up funds that are needed in hospitals and to hire vital on-the-ground staff.

But as set up by Martin, there is no command and control leadership the minister can use, as the HSE is akin to its own country that fights off any ‘interference’ and is big enough to be able to. I doubt anyone can really tame the HSE monster, and it is so big it is almost impossible even to abolish. It is a perfect reminder that if you create a mass bureaucracy you need to know what you are doing and get it right. Get it wrong, and because of its size you may not be able to fix the mistakes later.

Homelessness and lack of housing is a serious problem, but Fine Gael is critically incapable of solving the problem – simply because of its blind devotion to the market and wrong belief that the problem is that the right conditions have not been created yet to enable the market to flourish. Fine Gael, like many right-of-centre parties, genuflects before the market and thinks the solution to every problem is a better market. They are oblivious to the fact that it is an entirely discredited theory that in the past gave us a notorious famine, the tenements, mass emigration and mass poverty. It has never worked anywhere, ever. Yet they cling to it as an article of faith. Every approach they have adopted to the housing shortage is based on “let’s get the market fixed”. So if builders aren’t building enough houses, the Fine Gael approach is to axe planning controls that were “restricting the market.” And axe design standards to give people living in the buildings proper standards of life – as that ‘obviously’ is restricting the market too. And axe the right of people to challenge ill-considered developments as they too are supposedly ‘restricting the market’. And abolish restrictions that take into account historically sensitive locations because they too are ‘restricting the market’. Fine Gael’s approach, frankly, under the catastrophic Eoghan Murphy, the worst planning minister since the notorious Kevin Boland in the 1960s (whose decisions on Dublin we now curse), is to screw proper planning, the rights of residents and occupiers, any concern for history or heritage, or pretty much anything and give developers what they want, because that will supposedly ‘get enough houses built’. Except it won’t, but will create catastrophic problems that will haunt future generations and be cursed by them.

For me, Murphy’s screwing up of planning to help developers is a deal-breaker. Unless Fine Gael says it will reinstate the planning rules he scrapped, then I simply cannot vote for the party. If Fianna Fáil, Labour or the Greens commit to reversing his planning policies, they will get my vote. It is that simple. As a historian I am aware of how big a deal his catastrophic mistakes are. Planning is no minor issue. Get the planning rules wrong, and they produce outcomes that directly affect people’s lives pretty much forever – because it is so hard to row back a catastrophic planning mistake. If you, as has happened, row back on proper size of apartments, people for decades to come will have to live with those new cramped unhealthy spaces. If you scrap controls that protect heritage, the loss of that heritage is permanent. You cannot get back what you have destroyed. The planning mistake that was high rise in Ballymun in the 1960s haunted the northside of Dublin, and the residents of the complex, for decades – leaving people to live their lives in a botched planning scheme that ended up almost unfit for human habitation.

So planning is not some minor point. Get it wrong, and it can create long-term impacts on ordinary people that can destroy the physical and mental health of people, their quality of life, generate social and personal alienation and add to state costs in terms of the necessary health costs to deal with the side effects. None of that is understood by this government.

The market will never solve the housing crisis. The market is not about providing homes, but generating profits. That is fine. There is nothing wrong with profit. As with the famine, with tenements, with emigration, with poverty, only the state and local government can provide the solution – never the market. An extensive state-building and local-government building programme is needed for houses at a cost ordinary people can manage. Nor is the homelessness problem simply a product of a lack of houses. Many of the people homeless are in fact homeless not because they haven’t got a home but because of psychological issues, drink and drug issues, they got kicked out for or could not cope with living in a home. Different types of medical supports and inventions are needed there.

So for me, planning is the deal-breaker with Fine Gael. I will vote to get the government’s incompetent meddling in planning reversed. That is my bottom line.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

Planning Is The Deal Breaker

In a piece written before Charlie Flanagan's decision to defer a planned commemoration for the RIC, Jim Duffy felt the original idea for a commemorative event was a positive one.  

As someone with members of the IRB and RIC in my ancestry I applaud their decision. The real history, as opposed to the myth, is complex. My great-grandfather was a republican. Two of his brothers were in the RIC. (Another was in a police force in Britain.) His son fled to the US in 1915 to avoid a gaol sentence for attacking an RIC member. His daughter helped that son escape. That daughter herself had two brothers-in-law in the RIC. She was my granny.

There are IRA guns buried in the garden of her family home. In that home, pictures of RIC relatives were on the wall.

The local RIC station was opened in the 1880s - following a petition by local nationalists and Catholics to the Chief Secretary for Ireland Asking for it to be opened, as a minority of local republicans were making life a misery for the local people. Some of the local republicans harassing the locals were ancestors of mine. Other ancestors of mine were among the people signing the petition. When the War of Independence led the British government to withdraw from local police barracks the local barracks was closed, to the anger of local people who complained they were being left without police to protect them from ordinary criminality. The old barracks was let to the widow of the local RIC member - until it was burnt out by Sinn Féiners in 1920, again to local anger as it left a local woman homeless.

General Richard Mulcahy once told some friends years later that the RIC were a big problem for the IRA - simply because they genuinely were accepted by the population, and republicans really annoyed many people by attacking them. It was the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans who were despised. The RIC on the whole weren't, though some individuals were.

I spent New Year's Eve at a party in a relative house. On the wall of the room we were in was a picture of my cousin's grandfather and colleagues in the RIC, in full dress uniform. He was my grand-uncle by marriage. On my wall is one of my great-grandfathers who was a republican. On the same wall is a picture of another great-grandfather who supported the RIC. His best friend was a republican who was in hiding during the War of Independence.

That is the reality of Irish history - a complex intertwined set of identities and loyalties. The reality, one carefully hidden by the propagandistic history projected since independence, was that more Irish people joined the RIC, DMP and British army in a Single year than joined all republican movements in Irish history in two hundred years In Total.

So Of Course people like John O'Brien, Christopher O'Brien, James Gaughan, Michael Crowley and many others should be commemorated. They are part of our nation. The inconvenient fact is that the organisation they were part of had more support than all the Irish rebellions put together, was respected and treated as a normal police force.

➽ Jim Duffy is a writer.

RIC More Popular Than Republican Rebellion

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)