Fin Keegan

The bigwigs (bigbeards?) in the Provisional IRA have “formally ordered an end to the armed campaign…all units have been ordered to dump arms.” Let’s hope that, this time, they mean what they say.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, where the Provisionals came from and where they ended up. A de facto mandate was seized by them when Civil Rights were denied to Catholics in the late 1960s. But they bungled it: rather than defend their people, they succumbed to a harebrained ideological dream, which quickly devolved into death-worship and, more recently, a brutal criminality. The courage of the McCartney sisters reasserted the voice of a decent society too long silenced by shame, fear, and grief. The IRA’s decision may mean, at last, an end to the nightmare.

Link: IRA Statement

Posted: July 29th, 2005

Martin Kettle, in passing, makes a useful point about some unexpected consequences of the 1989 revolutions:

It was not…just [in] eastern Europe [that Communism collapsed] but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world.

Source: Kettle: Germany and France are struggling with a new world, The Guardian, May 24th, 2005

“Anyone who isn’t paranoid in Northern Ireland has something wrong with them,” Dennis Bradley once said. And, certainly, never really knowing who to trust is the hallmark of civil conflict. Betrayal, lies, and casual violence; civilians routinely murdered on their doorsteps; security forces conspiring with sectarian assassins; religious leaders bellowing Scripture at the mob: such was life in the British-controlled portion of Ireland before the 1998 Peace Agreement brought relative calm.

For Clinton and Blair, adepts of spin and ambiguity, such conditions were perfectly suited to both the aspirations and pretensions they share. Together with local players and former Senator George Mitchell, the two overseas leaders made it their business to understand and accommodate the grassroots consensus for peace throughout the island.

Both men relished the late-night conference calls, the marathon negotiations, the legalistic contortions, and probably too the gallery of characters involved–from wannabe Ché Guevaras to fire-and-brimstone shitstirrers. The Irish Problem, you get the feeling, was something from which Clinton and Blair, Boomer Idealists bogged down in domestic governance, got a real buzz.

Not so the current President, who famously avoids the epic briefings ingested by his predecessor and has no peacemaking ambitions, at least where vital interests are uninvolved.

Why, indeed, bother with such a small, squalid, conflict? There is no strategic U.S. interest in permanent settlement, other than the removal of an occasional irritant in the “special relationship” enjoyed (or, latterly, endured) by the two largest English-speaking powers. And any number of needier countries in Africa could do with the diplomatic attention lavished on the provincial chieftains of tiny Ulster. But Ireland and America go back a long way–after all we saved civilization (Guinness; Thin Lizzy; James Joyce) and you once rescued a few million of us from starvation. We built many of your cities; you built many of our dreams: if any two countries can claim to be sister nations, they are Ireland and America.

But for all the complexities of the world beyond Crawford, Texas, the need for justice and freedom, as recent events in Beirut, Bishkek, and Belfast have shown, can be piercingly simple. In Ireland, an unexpected revolt against terror has come from the steadfast, outspoken courage of five remarkable women–sisters of a working-class Catholic called Robert McCartney, battered and sliced to death by IRA men in a crowded bar in spring of 2005.

Sinn Féin, political wing of the nominally dormant Irish Republican Army, has been caught on the back foot by the near-universal demand, even among their own supporters, for their paramilitary cohort to submit to the rule of law, release the many witnesses of the pub murder from threat of reprisal, and then “go away”.

IRA disbandment [see below] would leave the community, including an unshackled Sinn Féin, to rebuild their lives in peace. And it may surprise some to learn that the best way to achieve a reunited Ireland would be for the IRA, increasingly active in organized crime, to retire themselves into history.

In their pain, the McCartneys’ moral clarity has proved a beacon by which to guide the often-benighted ship of Irish peace. Washington’s job now is to provide a calm and prudent escort to safety, without brinksmanship or name-calling.

Update: Dropping the Armalite

Post Date: March 25th, 2005

Here’s a telling insight from Fintan O’Toole:

I sometimes think that much of the public life of [Ireland] since 1963 has been an attempt to fill the hole in our self-image that Kennedy’s visit [to Ireland] had exposed. We were supposed to be a deeply spiritual people, concerned with God, the land and the nation. The ecstasy evoked by the appearance among us of the first citizen of the great republic of the West revealed to us how utterly bedazzled we were by all the things we were not meant to want: his cool, sexy, glamour, his impregnable aura of wealth and his ability to embody the fridges and TVs, the porches and pools that our American cousins conjured up in those family photographs. We were embarrassed by our sudden, naked impulse to worship the golden calf

Source: Fintan O’Toole What We Think of America Granta #77, March 28th, 2002

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

FOR A PERIOD of six months towards the end of the 1990s this reviewer read for the Fiction Department of a major New York magazine of no small pretension and more Names in its past and present than, well, one could easily shake a stick at. My job in those haunted halls was simple: to read (i.e. to reduce; to liquidate) the Slush Pile, a Ionescian execresence of paper that was crawling up one wall of the office and threatening to choke a much-traversed shortcut through to the sanctum of the Literary Editor, a man who had already suffered his share for art (some of it at the hands of the Italian riot police, but that’s another story). This mound of unsolicited short fiction, a slow-motion volcano crudely distributed in Post Office bins as if by an Emergency Response team, was the most famous–and certainly the biggest–such heap in the world. Escaping it meant, and still means, instantaneous transformation of a life, the literary equivalent of triumphing on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. Read MORE of my review of Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams

LIKE THE WORK of Herta Muller and Victor Pelevin, Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares (Sostiene Pereira, 1994) observes the life of the individual under the strictures of State oppression: unlike them, in fact unlike most writers treating this theme these days, Tabucchi himself grew up in a democracy, in his case post-war Italy (albeit an Italy recovering from Fascism and war: the day after he was born his father cycled mother and child home through a Pisa all but destroyed by Nazi and Allied fighting). He has however steeped himself in Portuguese culture and is now a lusophile to the Beckettian degree of being able to compose high literary art–the novella, Requiem–in his adopted language… Read MORE of my review of Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares

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.

NOW THAT Jean Rouaud has produced the final volume of what has turned out to be a quintet the time seems propitious to reconsider Fields of Glory (Les champs d’honneur, 1990) and its four successors. The author grew up in the rainy département of Loire-Atlantique (precipitation features heavily in his books). At the age of twelve he lost his father, aunt, and grand-father, all within a year of each other. Rouaud’s work, which is profoundly autobiographical, has been written out of this pain. As Proust, presiding ghost over this work of memory, pointed out: we learn only through suffering. To judge by the reaction of a teacher, in the third volume of the series, to the young narrator’s account of visiting his father’s grave–he grades him bottom of the class, a judgement delivered with sadistic ritualism before the other boys–Rouaud was not especially mollycoddled in the aftermath… Read MORE of my review of Jean Rouaud’s “Loire-Atlantique” Cycle