JODY CORCORAN

by Powell, and which led to his immediate sacking by prime minister Edward Heath, has not gained much traction here as it has elsewhere in Europe and the United States, as represented by the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps that is a consequence of the relatively small numbers of immigrants coming here. The opinion poll finds broad acknowledgement that a more cosmopolitan society leads to a better society and broad consensus that immigrants here make a positive contribution to the economy. And so say all of us. *** A fascinating analysis of Trump’s controversial chief strategist, Stephen Bannon — he of Irish extraction — is published in a recent edition of the US digital magazine Quartz. Bannon’s political influence is said to be Edmund Burke, the influential 18th-century Irish political thinker, regarded to be the father of modern conservatism, whom Bannon occasionally references. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke presents his view that the basis of a successful society should not be abstract notions like human rights, social justice or equality, which is a view not uncommon in Fine Gael. Rather, he believed, societies work best when traditions (privilege?) that have been shown to work are passed from generation to generation. The baby boomers, Bannon said in a recent lecture, failed to live up to that Burkean responsibility by abandoning the tried-andtrue values of their parents (nationalism, modesty, patriarchy, religion) in favour of new abstractions (pluralism, sexuality, egalitarianism, secularism). For both Burke and Bannon, failure to pass the torch results in social chaos. *** The aforementioned Cruiser, of course, wrote a brilliant, although unorthodox, biography of Burke in 1992 — The Great Melody — having brooded on the statesman, political thinker, orator, and ardent campaigner for decades. The Cruiser also considered Powell not a racist in a technical sense, as one who believes in the natural inferiority of some races to others and in the justice of legal and social arrangements designed to register that inferiority, but took him to be a racist in the more ordinary sense, as a person who does not like to have to associate, on a footing of equality, with persons belonging to a race different from his own. “Edmund Burke was not like that,” Dr Cruise O’Brien wrote in 1989.

Burke’s activity as a parliamentarian and political writer embraced many concerns, prominent among which were the problems of British rule overseas, including Ireland. His name was linked most strongly to a critique of the French Revolution. He was, however, more notable as a pundit than an executive politician. That said, in my view he did not bequeath a straightforward