Fin Keegan

Britain is going through such tumult at the moment–between the Iran Hostages episode and its aftermath, the prospect of Scottish nationalists effectively destroying the Union, and, almost as a footnote, ex-terrorists joining sectarian bigots to take control of a ‘home nation’–that it is beginning to seem as though a new historical phase is announcing itself.

The shift–or downshift–is all the more painful coming as it does on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their last memorable exercise of unilateral power: the retaking of the Falkland Islands.

Now Britain is characterized as the impotent partner in the transatlantic alliance: a perception verified as actual by President Ahmadinejad who has expertly demonstrated how pitiful is the UK’s friendship with continental Europe and even, to some extent, with the US (arguably the US laid low in order to keep the situation calm–but the plight of limey sailors also failed to capture the American public imagination).

Geopolitics aside, the behaviour of Faye Turney and her 14 colleagues has exposed some ugly division, none more so perhaps than in a Jan Moir piece for the Telegraph whose anger at Turney in particular for “singing like a canary” to the Press and “writing screeds of damaging propaganda” for Iran after being “lightly coerced” shades into a classist subtext.

How, one senses the traditional Tory class wondering, did this ignominy come about? Moir provides the answer: desire for ‘cash and celebrity’ among the cannon-fodder multitudes, the “low-ranking workhorse…personnel” as she calls them.

British elites have always been somewhat embarrassed by their working classes, upon whom the whole show has always depended–as Kipling knew but the world, before mass media at least, did not.

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting side by side is such an unprecedented image that it sets the mind flicking back through the mental archives for aparallel: Vaclav Havel as President of the State that had but months before assaulted and imprisoned him seems closest.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Since 2002, the Six Counties has been mired in the excruciating stasis of Direct Rule from London–which well suits the obstructionist rump of Paisleyite Unionism. Dennis Bradley raises the prospect of a Plan B:

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

Listening to Margaret Atwood recently, defining Canada’s identity solely in terms of its heavyweight neighbour, made me fear for the future of smaller, peripheral nations such as Canada and my own native country, Ireland.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

Alexander McCall Smith visits Las Vegas:

After Beverley Hills I am taken to speak to the Las Vegas Literary Society. There are more society ladies, and the event there is even grander. I sit opposite the wife of the last Governor of Nevada. She has two guests to entertain that week, the other one being Mr Gorbachev. The night before, whispers one of the other ladies, they took him to a Russian Restaurant. I nod: the Russian Restaurant is in my hotel and I have noticed it. You couldn’t fail to notice it: it has outside it a large statue of Lenin and they have chopped the head off it. Then they have covered it with artificial bird droppings. It is a gesture of quite unbelievable triumphalism. I reflect on the fact that they took Mr Gorbachev to dinner there. Even by the standards of Las Vegas that defies belief.

After lunch and the signing of books, I jump into the powerful car of one of the society ladies and am taken off to the Liberace Museum. There is much to be seen there, and in a very curious way it is rather touching. The human spirit, I have decided, moves in mysterious ways.

Source: Alexander McCall-Smith: A flea in your ear can be a very pleasant thing, The Scotsman, April 12th 2004

Australian writer, Peter Carey remembers his younger self believing that Australian writers, “couldn’t be any good”. Now he has come to believe that such prejudices “show the level of self-hatred . . . colonialism brings on”.

I remember feeling something similar in Ireland. As a child, indeed, I thought one had to be English to be a proper writer. There was a sense of impoverishment attached to those few Irish writers (Patricia Lynch; Sinéad de Valera) I was aware of. Ironically, my favourite author was himself Irish but the extensive biography at the back of my Narnian books revealed that he had been born in “British” Ireland, boarded in England, and was now (or had become) a thoroughly Oxbridgean figure, as English as warm beer and cricket bats. C.S. Lewis’ journey, and the books borne out of it, proved my prejudice incontrovertibly: books belonged to the English.

There were other literatures I was aware of, of course, chiefly Francophone (the Tintin and Astérix comic-books; Dumas; The Little Prince), but these were all piped to us through London: not only was England the origin of stories, it was the arbiter of stories from elsewhere.

It was quite something therefore to discover, in my late teens, that Ireland was so teeming with writers that the “Irish Writer” had become almost a stereotypical figure.

Carey quote comes from Writers and Company, CBC Radio, Dec 14th, 2003

Just as (per Laforgue) the secret heart of milk is blackness, so the secret heart of P. G. Wodehouse is cliché. Never has a writer played with hollow language to such profit as he, skirted it so narrowly, worked the inertia of pop slang into a style as fresh now as the day it was written.

And, like milk, there is no trace of the “secret heart” in the final product: Wodehouse is devoid of cliché.

WITH THE DEATH IN 2001 OF W.G. SEBALD, Europe lost one of its greatest writers. He was born in Germany–the initials stand for Winfried Georg–in the alpine town of Wertach-im-Allgau in 1944. Since his early twenties he lived in England, first in Manchester and then, from 1970, in Norwich, where he taught at the University of East Anglia. We can safely say Sebald did not cross the North Sea to hobnob with the literati: his own agent once claimed never to have met him… Read MORE of my review of W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn