Bodenstown speech betrays fatal lack of self-awareness

Official Ireland had a bigger influence on the scale of violence in the North than we realise, says John-Paul McCarthy

IN his absorbing new book on the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude, Prof Ciaran Brady of Trinity College Dublin reminded us of an important distinction.

Froude believed that every country produced reformers, and re-formers. He was much more attracted to the latter group of characters, namely those who excel at the art of self-fashioning.

Peter Robinson’s recent GAA speech suggested he too knows something of the charms of political re-formation.

He has come a long way from the days when he and Nigel Dodds used to flank Ian Paisley at the Big Man’s various impromptu press conferences. (Those who witnessed Paisley’s attempt to ‘invade’ Castle Buildings a few hours before the Good Friday Agreement assumed its formal form in 1998 are unlikely to forget it in a hurry. Think John Calvin in a windbreaker).

Robinson’s confident statecraft is a product of the trauma that engulfed unionism in 1985 when they found that their indifference to the way others viewed their case was rewarded with the Hillsborough diktat. It took them 13 long years to void this treaty, but its message remains burned in their hearts to this day. Abstention from the fray equals a form of moral defeat.

So unionism retains that strategic pulse David Trimble sought to nurture after 1995.

Does Irish nationalism possess a similarly acute selfawareness at the moment?

Judging by the Fianna Fail leader’s recent Wolfe Tone speech, probably not. Those who know Micheal Martin’s book on revolutionary-era Cork city will be familiar with his basically conservative and risk-averse sensibility.

But last week’s Bodenstown oration suggests the presence of a mind on some sort of auto-pilot.

If you only had his script to go on, you might never have guessed that Tone is a very awkward house-god for contemporary nationalists.

After all, he despised Roman Catholicism and the Irish language. (After finding himself trapped by a league of harpers in Belfast in 1793, Tone wrote disobligingly afterwards “strum, strum and bedamned to you!”)

He makes even less sense then in the context of Fianna Fail foreign policy axioms.

How can the party of neutrality get any benefit from someone who wanted a diplomatic alliance with France?

The point here is not to factcheck political speeches. A speech is not a lecture, but something that comprises what Michael Oakeshott called “various invitations to understand, to choose, and to respond. It is an instrument to be played upon, not a tune to be played”.

No, the point of all this is the speech’s near total lack of irony.

This limitation becomes particularly acute any time the Fianna Fail leader tries to move from the past to the present. One of his verbal tics since assuming the leadership has been the continuous attempt to quarantine the violence in Northern Ireland.

In this idiom, the Provisional IRA stand convicted of misreading or misinterpreting the founding documents of modern Irish nationalism.

For Martin and Fianna Fail, the vocabulary that was used to defend bombings at La Mon and Enniskillen was a forgery, which if you remember is a sub-standard imitation of a true bill. At one level, most people probably agree with him if only because the Northern Ireland conflict lasted so much longer than earlier ones.

But if you think about this formulation of the problem for a moment, you can see how it masks a prim indifference. If the Provisional campaign was really propelled by a misinterpretation of our founding documents, then we here are basically blameless.

We can remonstrate, but ultimately responsibility for mangling our holy writ lies with the manglers.

Froude himself summarised this way of thinking when he advised British politicians in Ireland to remember that “the spiritual truth of a doctrine or a mythology lies in the recognition which the mind gives to it”.

And minds are notoriously hard to change.

Anyone who cares enough about these issues must know however that this reading is a travesty, if only because the fate of the two nations on this island is and always has been inextricably linked.

The sensibilities of official Ireland had a bigger influence over the pace and scale of the violence in Northern Ireland than we probably realise. Fianna Fail’s indifference to this suggests a fundamental lack of seriousness on their part.

Anyone who slogs through our Supreme Court’s major opinions on extradition handed down during the Eighties and Nineties can see how the Republic’s mores were very close to republican mores. The “national territory” formulation in the old Article 2 had a very real presence, for example, in Justice Brian Walsh’s analysis of the scope of the political offence doctrine in Finucane Vs McMahon in 1990. And one could and should multiply these assonances ad nauseam.

Not at Bodenstown though where the self-critical listener must have felt like a witch in church.