Begrudgery of Bono may also mask toxic tribal agendas

NO matter what the summer weather has in store, I am happy to be back in Field’s coffee shop in Skibbereen. Here feedback is right in my face.

This is hard-copy country which favours the print format of the Sunday

Independent. Fans and critics alike will produce the paper itself to hammer home a point.

In West Cork I sometimes get stick for saying sharp things about the public sector. But few fault me for sticking it to RTE and Sinn Fein sometimes as two sides of a single green coin.

One reason is that Ireland is a small country and most people know I’m on a virtual RTE blacklist — this column is hardly the darling of It Says In The Papers.

Luckily, that’s a plus with most people. It means I’m free of the self-censorship of columnists who seldom (never) criticise RTE for fear of losing their cosy chairs in current affairs programmes.

Even fewer readers have a problem with me hammering Sinn Fein as that party has no shortage of fans — not least in RTE.

So I’m a bit baffled by a letter from a reader we publish today who supplies me with a suggested list of taboo topics.

He would like me to stop criticising not just RTE and Sinn Fein, but also The Irish Times!

But I only mentioned The Irish Times last week to plug Peter Murtagh’s story on Simon Coveney’s spat with an Air Corps pilot.

But alarm bells began to ring in my mind when this reader added he wants me to stop writing about the Bandon Valley massacre of Protestants in April 1922 — which he claims is hurtful to his Protestant friends.

This arouses some scepticism in me because its all of seven months since I mentioned the Bandon Valley murders, and then only as an aside.

The reader is entitled to his opinion. But let me explain why I write a lot about RTE and Sinn Fein, and tend to revisit the Bandon Valley murders.

Most columnists have a core point of view which structures their work, otherwise they would be contradictory, confusing and lack coherent punch.

Gene Kerrigan seldom shifts his beady gaze from the abuse of power, financial and political. Eilis O’Hanlon holds fast to the hard humour and harder insights of her Belfast background. Fergal Keane monitors the global suffering of humanity.

Naturally I do write about politics. But seldom just as a stand-alone subject. Nearly always what I write is never far from what I call ‘the national question’.

Every country in Europe has an historical national question. For Germany, it is the Holocaust which still affects how it handles Muslim refugees today.

For England, the national question is how to psychologically extricate itself from Empire’s last lingering shadows of isolationism — as the recent nervous breakdown over Brexit showed.

In Ireland, our national question is the nexus of contemporary problems which can be traced back to the War of Independence, Civil War and Partition.

The national question includes how we handle suppressed history — the enforced exodus of southern Protestants and IRA atrocities — during the forthcoming five years of War of Independence commemorations.

Above all, it includes the abortive Provisional campaign to bully a million Northern Protestants into a Sinn Fein-style state.

For me, the national question is a trampoline. Jump on one story and apparently unrelated stories suddenly fly upwards, but all linked to the national question.

RTE News is the most powerful player on that trampoline. It shapes how we see our past and present. If it skews these stories it skews our future.

Some of my most critical columns traced how RTE News coverage of a story had been tainted by a tribal culture on the national question going back to the 1980s struggles over Section 31 — which left behind a softness towards Sinn Fein.

Let me finish by showing how three news stories last week were linked to the national question.

The first was RTE TV News’s failure to show the decent side of the Twelfth by covering the only Orange Order celebrations in the Republic, at Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal.

It can hardly be argued it had no news value because Arlene Foster had driven the 40 miles from her Fermanagh home to join the happy crowd.

In spite of the efforts of some, it could be said that RTE does try to put a rise to the human face on our Protestant neighbours.

It was not always so. In July 1972, as the North began to bleed, my old programme 7 Days visited the Protestant village of Drum, Co Monaghan.

The film told us that the village had 54 Protestants and five Catholics, one pub, three churches, one school and one Orange Hall.

The Drum band did not attend. Endearingly, someone had lost the key to the Orange Hall.

Last Monday, we got another bit of the national question when Michael Hayes admitted his role in the 1974 Birmingham bombing which killed 21 civilians.

RTE News online told us Hayes had “apologised”. But there was no real remorse in that hard face.

The sincerity of Hayes’s half-assed “apology” was eroded by his careful, choice of a camouflage jacket to denote his past membership of the Provisional IRA.

Finally, last Wednesday, The Guardian asked: why do the Irish hate U2?

Baffled by the lack of love, it rightly made the following point.

“If another country produced the biggest guitar band in the world — let alone one with a population of just 4.8 million — you’d expect airports to be named after them.”

At first sight the national question seemed to play no part as The Guardian ran through possible reasons for the animus against U2. They ranged from begrudgery, to U2’s tax arrangements, to Bono’s self-righteous aura.

But we don’t begrudge Liam Neeson, we give out more about welfare cheats than tax avoiders, and we like Gabriel Byrne’s lectures.

The Guardian asked the questions in Grogan’s pub, which in my time was a bit like RTE today: a favourite hang-out of the radical chic.

Harry Browne, author of The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power), and a serious socialist, probably doesn’t drink in Grogan’s but his answer reflected a reflexively radical chic view.

Harry predictably believes our problem with U2 is a “post-colonial phenomenon”. Ah, yes.

But I believe Bono is right to remind us the rejection began with the band’s brave opposition to Noraid, the Provisional IRA’s fundraising arm in the USA.

In short, the bitterness began with the national question. And there is one more factor that matters to the toxic tribal fringe who dominate discourse on social media.

Bono comes from a Protestant background. But confident in his patriotism he rejected the naff nationalism in which some southern Irish Protestants took refuge as a form of fasttrack acceptance.

These themes may well surface in discussions at the West Cork History Festival, July 28-30, at the lovely Liss Ard Estate near Skibbereen, Co Cork.

‘The bitterness against U2 began with the band’s stand against Noraid, the Provos’ USA funders’