Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny

Edna O’brien has been wrongly criticised for accepting a damehood. Imperial rule helped women and Catholics, says Mary Kenny

That venerable oldie, the Irish novelist Edna O’brien (88 later this year, and still writing) is being given a welldeserved damehood by the Queen. But she has been excoriated in the public prints in Dublin by a younger Irish writer, Emer Martin, for ‘accepting the tainted honour’ of association with the hated British Empire.

Martin (whom I know personally as an amiable woman, married to an Iranian) says it’s a ‘huge disappointment’ that Edna should ignore the fact that ‘this racist system of imperialism looted the world, whitewashing history and engaging in cultural destruction. It is hard to see a part of the planet that the British Empire did not bully…’

Martin’s views would be fashionable among Corbynistas and at those British universities currently bashing Nelson, Wellington and Rhodes. Still, I do like to point out that, in the year 1900, it is calculated that a third of those serving the British Empire overseas were Irish.

This was, paradoxically enough, because Catholics found it harder to rise in the home civil service at the time – where Unionists prevailed (often through the freemason network) – but advanced successfully in the overseas Empire. A brainy great-uncle of mine, James Conroy, was much esteemed in British Ceylon, where he was a district judge and police magistrate.

Aside from providing Irish Catholics with jobs, the Empire nearly always advanced the status of women – helping to halt foot-binding in China, banning suttee in India, outlawing honour killings and opposing female genital mutilation. Jomo Kenyatta railed against ‘meddling Christian missionaries’ campaigning to restrain female circumcision in the 1920s and 1930s.

Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist whose statue was recently erected in Parliament Square and unveiled by Theresa May, was a stalwart feminist defender of the The other Dame Edna...

British Empire. Wise oldies know that, as Dorothy Parker once said, there is good and bad in everything, and life is woven in a crazy plaid. The British Empire did some bad things, but it did some good things, too. Arise, Dame Edna, with your well-deserved accolade.

Brexit emphasises political and economic issues, but cultural contrasts are often as significant. The controversy over the short life and sad death in April of Alfie Evans, born with a severe neurological condition, perplexed Italians. Italy offered to make the little boy an Italian citizen and treat him in Rome, but, as we know, British courts ruled that out.

What puzzled Italians was that the law had such power over a child’s medical treatment. They told me they found this attitude ‘cold and rigid’, with a ‘blind respect for the law’ which seems to exclude humanity – and the primacy of the family. There is a fissure here between British and Mediterranean attitudes. The British tradition is based on the idea that the law is impartial, rather than ‘emotionally’ involved. Ian Mcewan’s novel The Children Act explores this situation with clarity, in a case where a Jehovah’s Witnesses family disallows treatment for a teenager: the law intervenes to arbitrate. Italians couldn’t understand why the family couldn’t bring Alfie to Italy, as they wished. Yet, after the child’s death, it was a British doctor who wrote, ‘Now his parents will never know in their hearts whether he could have been saved by treatment in Italy’.

If you want friendlier treatment at borders, dye your hair a peculiar colour; that’s my advice to travelling oldies.

Moving between Ireland, England and, when I can, France, I’m accustomed to going through security machines, which ‘bleep’ because I have artificial hips. Sometimes this has occasioned stern treatment from the security staff. I was strip-searched at Luton Airport by a couple of strict security ladies who didn’t believe me when I mentioned the hip prostheses. Like St Thomas with Jesus Christ, they brought me into a tent so they could verify the actual scars.

But much has changed since I dyed my hair bright purple: it seems to cheer up officials to identify a punkhaired grandma. Recently, I was ushered through the VIP line at airport security because an official said that my startling hair colour had brightened her day.

I didn’t, on that occasion, get the opportunity also to show her my tattoos.

I’m sure we’ll all enjoy the forthcoming royal christening, but radical feminists will no doubt wish Britain was more like Sweden, where the Bishop of Stockholm, Eva Brunne, who baptises Swedish royal sprogs, is not only a woman, but also the only lesbian bishop in the world registered in a same-sex relationship. Surely the Church of England should make an effort to catch up with go-ahead Swedish Lutheranism?

www.mary-kenny.com Twitter: @Marykenny4