Hardcore for Nerds

» Anglo-Irish Agreement

Further on the previous post: some choices phrases of Unionist reaction - if you thought the graffiti was intolerant, here’s what the politicians said:

“The UUP MP Enoch Powell asked Thatcher in the Commons the day before she signed the Agreement: “Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?”

The UUP leader James Molyneaux spoke of “the stench of hypocrisy, deceit and treachery” and later said of “universal cold fury” at the Agreement such as he had not experienced in forty years of public life.

Ian Paisley, a few days later to his congregation, compared Thatcher to “Jezebel who sought to destroy Israel in a day”.

He wrote to Thatcher: “Having failed to defeat the IRA you now have capitulated and are prepared to set in motion machinery which will achieve the IRA goal…a united Ireland. We now know that you have prepared Ulster Unionists for sacrifice on the altar of political expediency. They are to be the sacrificial lambs to appease the Dublin wolves”.

In his letter to FitzGerald, Paisley said: “You claim in your constitution jurisdiction over our territory, our homes, our persons and our families. You allow your territory to be used as a launching pad for murder gangs and as a sanctuary for them when they return soaked in our people’s blood. You are a fellow traveller with the IRA and hope to ride on the back of their terrorism to your goal of a United Ireland. We reject your claims and will never submit to your authority. We will never bow to Dublin rule”.

(to be fair to Paisley, the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 did result in Ireland giving up those constitutional claims - see here - but the idea of Garrett FitzGerald as IRA ‘fellow traveller’ is a bit of a stretch, and the 1985 agreement also incorporated the basis of the principle of consent which is in effect a Unionist veto over Irish unification.)

Interestingly, given the central role of Thatcher in signing the agreement, it was also opposed by the future first female President of Ireland, Mary Robinson:

“Prominent Irish Labour Party member Mary Robinson, who subsequently became President of Ireland, resigned from the Irish Labour Party because she believed that the Agreement “could not achieve its objective of securing peace and stability within Northern Ireland… because… it would be unacceptable to all sections of Unionist opinion”

which would then and subsequently be one of her most controversial stances, but she had a point. Ultimately the same aims and concessions were achieved, but with Unionist agreement (first the Ulster Unionist Party in 1998, and then in 2005 with Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party…a frequent pattern in Irish history is that of political parties who took their nation or grouping so far to then be superseded by a rival, often more radical and intransigent grouping). Yet that movement was likely caused by the British and Irish governments being able to move forward themselves, and effectively force the extremes in Northern Irish politics to follow them rather than waiting for them to agree on their own - but at something at a cost for liberal, moderate parties.

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easpageag:

A denouncement of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, painted on a wall of the Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1985.

This is … an interesting set of graffiti. Largely (at least from our point of view) because it comes from a Republican.

No matter which political ideology you wish to subscribe to, Thatcher was a liar. But there are several lines which need to be read between here. Harland And Wolff attracted a predominantly Protestant workforce, and not just Protestant, but Protestant Unionist. Considering H&W were situated deep within Protestant Unionist lines (especially by the 80’s, when Thatcher was in Power) the odds are that this was a message written by a Protestant Unionist, designed to be read by a Protestant Unionist.

Of course, we could be totally wrong in our reading of this picture (and some context would never go amiss) but we think this is a kind of interesting artifact. The typical lines drawn in Northern Ireland are between those who want to be Irish and those who want to be British. But as we’ve posted before, those who wanted to be be Irish did not (necessarily) want to succumb to the repression inherent in the Republic, and by the looks of this sign, those who considered themselves British did not want to concede that whoever was in power in Britain held the best views on how to run Britain.

As we’ve always said, Northern Ireland is a fucked up and weird place, that can’t just be boiled down to simple divisions like so many history books and tv movies want you to believe.

I’m guessing the context is the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement signed by Margaret Thatcher and Garrett FitzGerald, which was rejected by Unionists in part because it gave the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the government of Northern Ireland. We tend to remember Thatcher’s intransigence - ‘No, no, no’ - more, but it wasn’t everlasting - hence the ‘liar’ and ‘traitor’ from the Unionist perspective. It’s certainly not a pro-Republican statement.

One of the basic factors to know about the conflict in Northern Ireland is, I think, the degree of separation between (Ulster) Unionists and mainland British opinion. It’s the same in any colonial or semi-colonial situation - e.g. the pieds-noirs of French Algeria, and metropolitan France. There was always a strong alliance between Unionists and the Conservative Party, but their interests were never identical and almost by definition hardline Unionism is an extreme position of Conservatism - hence for a period in the late 19th century there was a separate Conservative Unionist Party in British politics; or that one of one of the more vocal opposers of Thatcher’s decision to sign the agreement was the anti-immigration conservative Enoch Powell, who became an Ulster Unionist MP in 1974 (a fact I had forgotten until just now).

British identity can survive without Northern Ireland (as it has done without the rest of Ireland, or India, or the idea of Empire) and while the opposite is, of course, not really true for Ulster Unionism, there is a separate identity there based on being in Ireland for hundreds of years (and being very Protestant at the same time). The centenary of the 1912 Solemn League and Covenant, to keep Ulster British, poses the challenge of how to maintain that identity in a way that recognises the practical reality of power-sharing, the moral lesson of the Troubles, and perhaps also the peripheral relevance of nationalism to a globalised world (or an increasingly integrated Europe). Something about the eagerness - and unintended irony - with which the production of the ostensibly unsinkable Titanic by the (Protestant-dominated) Harland & Wolff shipyards has been celebrated I think points to a certain urge to avoid or overcome complexity, although ideally the aim should be to embrace it.

(Source: fyirishhistory)

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tomewing:

There’s nowhere to go for the Express after this one: the zen essence of Express-ness has been located.

“Opponents fear the plan [“for merging the jobs currently done by Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission”] could create a modern-day equivalent of the European empire envisaged by Napoleon Bonaparte or a return to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne that dominated Europe in the Dark Ages.”

I’m only vaguely interested in seeing the rest of the article and how it justifies the headline - probably the very last paragraph, which no-one reads, factually contradicts it. No doubt the plan to merge the two top bureaucrats isn’t even really true (and wouldn’t that be an efficiency - or is the Express above that sort of mere quango-burning?)

On a historical note, the Holy Roman Empire and Charlemagne could be said to be the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the Dark Ages, and the start of the medieval period. And it was more advanced than the Saxon kingship in ‘Britain’ at the time - among other things, the early renaissance of the medieval ages brought about the rediscovery of Roman law and jurisprudence; much like the Napoleonic conquests spread the basis of the modern (non-Anglo-Saxon) European legal system, the Napoleonic code, across much of the continent.

Of course, not only are those two things obvious precursors of the EU, they’re both pretty French (or Frankish, as the case may be)… obviously the Express is still stuck in Agincourt, although the “shady Berlin group” is a masterful piece of updating their political coverage to the Second World War.

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“ There is a great deal of solace at News Corp in the fact that phone hacking and the problems in Britain remain a largely special-interest story in the US. Even Tuesday’s charge that Murdoch might have wilfully ignored what his company was doing in the UK is not so bad because few people in the US actually know what it was his company was doing.

—

Rupert Murdoch: the view from his New York bunker - guardian.co.uk

Ahem.

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God Bless The British Brewer

tomewing:er

“”OLD Prickly is a trad. pale ale brewed by Hobson’s to celebrate the
30th anniversary of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society”

Been waiting for an excuse to post this quote from Tony Judt on the shift from class- or occupation-based politics to that based on policy ‘issues’:

“Britain’s remarkably successful Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is a representative instance: founded in 1971 to reverse the trend to gaseous, homogenized ‘lager’ beer (and the similarly homogenized, ‘modernized’ pubs where it was sold), this middle-class pressure group rested its case upon a neo-Marxist account of the take-over of artisanal beer manufacture by mass-producing monopolists who manipulated beer-drinkers for corporate profit - alienating consumers from their own taste buds for meretricious substitution.

In its rather effective mix of economic analysis, environmental concern, aesthetic discrimination and plain nostalgia, CAMRA foreshadowed many of the single-issue activist networks of years to come, as well as the coming fashion among well-heeled bourgeois-bohemians for the expensively ‘authentic’. But its slightly archaic charm, not to mention the disproportion between the intensity of its activists’ engagement and the tepid object of their passion, made this particular movement necessarily somewhat quaint.”

(Postwar, p. 486)

Obviously, in terms of trickle-down politics it took about a decade for the subject of the activists to move from beer to hedgehogs.

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thesefewpresidents:

popscenesters:

awkwardedmilibandmoments:

Ed took Pulp’s advice and made Labour live as Common People do.

A couple days ago, I saw this incredibly powerful picture of Barack Obama sitting on the Rosa Parks bus. The amount of things that image managed to say all at once was amazing.

This is our British equivalent.

I mean, I like Greggs, but c’mon.

I just. How is this not a satirical photoshop. How.

Um, is it such a bad thing that leading British politicians (admittedly very few of them are non-white, so there’s not the same resonance) lack the opportunity to solemnly remember the racial segregation of public transport within living memory?

Not that the UK doesn’t have its own history of injustices - racial and otherwise - though perhaps fortunately not the same degree of social schism based in overt and official dogma. Although simply in the civil rights context (and not to otherwise too closely compare African-American and Irish nationalist struggles) recent history with Northern Ireland has provided some equivalent moments - David Cameron’s speech to parliament on the Bloody Sunday report, Queen Elizabeth at Dublin Castle, and likewise former President of Ireland Mary McAleese (born in the UK, in Belfast) and everything she did in embodying the transformations of the peace process.

This is really more just the equivalent of Rick Santorum suggestively eating a hotdog or whatever - as in, politicians everywhere have to look folksy and ‘of the people’, but there seems to be an especially strong tradition in the US of photographing politicians with large local food items…?

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the narcissicism of small countries

still enjoying Tony Judt’s Postwar, but there are few passing details (more than details really, key definitions) about Ireland’s place on the periphery of European history that are in error: of course it’s a book which attempts to tell the full story of Europe after 1945, East and West, so in between the oft-neglected experiences of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc on the one hand, and the course of the big Western countries like Britain, France, and Italy on the other, obviously Ireland doesn’t feature much, at least in the earlier decades. nevertheless, the otherwise minor mistakes that have jumped out at me somewhat undercut that notion of a fairer, less Paris-, London-, or Rome-centric history.

in the opening chapter, there’s a map of Europe in 1942 which includes ‘Eire’. Which isn’t the name of Ireland unless you’re speaking Irish, the same way an English-speaking map doesn’t typically have ‘Deutschland’ and ‘España’ written on it (although some do, in an attempt to be more faithful to nationality - in the case of ‘Éire’, properly spelled, however, it’s usually an exception that has more do to with British politics than the Irish language; which is only one, albeit the first and ‘national’, of our official tongues - with English being of course the virtually universal medium of communication, administration and thought.)

yet some pages previously, there are two maps of Europe today and in 1947, both with the ‘Republic of Ireland’ instead. which wasn’t technically declared until 1948, before which the part of Ireland not in the United Kingdom remained the ‘Irish Free State’ from 1922 until 1937 (tellingly, the official Irish name Saorstát Éireann is not common amongst English speakers), when the Constitution of Ireland came into force - describing the name of the country as “Éire, or in the English language, Ireland”. it’s an obvious complication when the name of the nation is not the same as the state, although this also applies, for example, to the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (i.e. West and East Germany) in much of the intervening period - ironically this is referred to as the ‘German question’ for much of the start of the book.

I haven’t reached the 60s and 70s yet, when the prewar Irish question flared up again in the start of the Troubles, but it is obliquely referred to in relation to the conflict over Algerian independence, and decolonisation generally, in the 50s:

“…if there was a France-outside-France it was in Algeria - confirmed as we have seen, by Algeria’s technical presence inside France as part of the metropolitan administrative structure. The closest analogy elsewhere was Ulster, another overseas enclave in a former colony, institutionally incorporated into the ‘mainland’ and with a long-established settler community for whom the attachment to the imperial heartland mattered far more than it did to the metropolitan majority. The idea that Algeria might one day become independent (and thus Arab-ruled, given the overwhelming numerical predominance of Arabs and Berbers in its population) was unthinkable to its European majority.”

The closeness, or coherence, of the analogy depends on the timeframe: ‘Ulster’ was not a single geographical unit post-1921, although prior to that the fear of Home Rule across the entire island of Ireland created similar fears - amongst Unionists both North and South - to those described above. Instead, for most of the 20th century ‘Ulster’ has been a geographical region divided between Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland (or previous appellations)*. It has also been a cultural and political focus for Unionists and Loyalists - defending ‘Ulster’ - but in technical terms the conflict has always, post-partition, been about the six counties in Northern Ireland, in which Protestants retained a majority**.

Perhaps the analogy can be saved - or grossly over-extended - by comparing the insecurities of a Northern Ireland within Ulster to those of French Algeria after the noted independence of the neighbouring French colonies in Tunisia and Morocco, while the comparison of pied-noir attitudes to those of Northern Irish or Ulster Unionists is an illuminating point (whether the ensuing violence and the racial, rather than political, attitudes are comparable is another argument). However, the use of terms like ‘Éire’ and ‘Ulster’ are not only incorrect (the first more egregiously so) but also illustrate history from a particularly British perspective: which may have a value - even if factually wrong, they display the way of thinking about Ireland from within the metropole and the loyally British parts of the ‘colony’ (not that that phrase is wholly correct either). False perspectives, you could say (even if they’re really just partial - no group, however oppressed, have a monopoly on history).

*six counties making up Northern Ireland (Fermanagh, Armagh, Tyrone, Derry, Antrim and Down, giving the acronym FAT DAD, or FAT LAD for those who use the name Londonderry) and three in the Republic (Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan).

**interestingly, the partition of Germany left most of its Protestants in the East, strengthening the hand of Germany’s Catholics in West German politics.

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healthcare debates: UK, Ireland, USA

“It ought to be mandatory, for instance, for Andrew Lansley to reveal whether or not he has private medical insurance, just as it should be for an entire coalition cabinet suspiciously relaxed about slashing the NHS.”

—

from this Guardian piece about tax transparency for politicians

My first reaction to the above is, wouldn’t you just assume they have private insurance? But that’s an Irish perspective, not a British one - testament to the actual strength of the NHS that the level of private health insurance in the UK is in the low teens. Whereas in Ireland, where the establishment of proper public healthcare was constrained historically by a combination of lack of government resources and strong Catholic opposition to buying off the doctor’s private interests (as was essentially done by Bevan in post-war Britain), private health insurance is used by around 30-40% of the population (the number has dropped with the effect of the recession on incomes) and is a pretty typical middle-class thing.

So one would just assume that the cabinet, Fine Gael and Labour, are of the income bracket that would choose private health insurance rather than rely on a creaking public system which they are ostensibly committed to reforming. Although the current scheme being proposed by Minister O’Reilly, of universal health insurance, is a combination of the neoliberal imperative of privately-purchased insurance with the social necessity of public care. It’s practically American in its awkwardness! (actually it’s Dutch, but it’s supposed to be working out to be quite expensive and relatively inefficient, long-term, there)

Speaking of which, I’ve come to understand (in an obviously limited, even ironic sense of the word) that the current debate about the individual mandate in the US healthcare legislation is complete and utter insanity. Not because it’s objecting to government regulation of markets in order to make them more efficient - that’s ideological libertarianism, and at least it’s a (somewhat) coherent opinion. But those objecting to the government requiring individuals to purchase insurance are not themselves people who don’t wish to or have not already acquired insurance, nor can they be conceivably interested in the moral freedoms of anyone who wants to live without insurance - they simply don’t want to contribute, as employers and taxpayers, to a system where everyone has access to healthcare! Seriously America, WTF?

uk irish politics Healthcare american exceptionalism

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» Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook, 50 years on | Books | The Guardian

Excellent piece from four generations of female writers on this book, which is one of the best novels I’ve read in the past few years. One of those books that really do ‘contain multitudes’ (the quote on the back of my copy of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is true outwardly and stylistically, but The Golden Notebook delves much deeper and more revealingly into the interior psychology of politics and sexuality.)

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