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| A Tepid Dawn for the Emerald Isle |
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| God was once asked if peace would ever come to Ireland. "Yes," he said, "but not in my time." |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, September 02, 1998. Gerry Adams, the leader of Sein Finn, the IRA’s political arm, gave a few days ago what might be the best news in Ireland’s history. He said that the days of violence should be over, cast away, nailed to history. Given that there is a splinter group of the IRA led by the brother in law of the late IRA warrior Bobbie Sands, this was both a gutsy and welcome move. Surely there is nothing as pleasing in Ireland’s recent history. I almost said “bloody history” because so much journalistic cliché actually originates in coverage of that sad land’s doings. The Irish, north and south, Protestant and Catholic, have become such successful self promoters of their perceived various martyrdoms and murders that they early on became self-parody. Worse, it was a self-parody the Irish seemed to enjoy. During the 1960’s, a relatively popular folksinging group, The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, would be featured on various American television shows to do a few tunes, but then also to do comedy bits with the hosts. Always and without exception, they were portrayed as drunken, violent thugs, given to fist fighting each other at a word, and who spouted doggerel about the Emerald Isle. It is hard to imagine such a racial portrayal surviving today; even Arabs and black street gangs are portrayed better than the Irish in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It is reasonable to inquire why in the world Irish patriots would allow and seem to encourage that portrait. First, it connected a relatively wealthy Diaspora of Irish in America with the struggle in the motherland. This was handy on St. Patrick’s Day, especially in Boston, when the hat was passed to buy the explosives to fight the British and the Ulstermen. It provided a frame of reference, a template for the Irish in America to view themselves and their former country that was often never quite former enough. Until very recently, this portrayal of the Irish as gandy dancers and tarriers and bar room brawlers fit very well the IRA’s projected view of their countrymen as literal slaves of the British and Scot landowners, both in Ireland, Canada, and the United States. So for Gerry Adams, a violent man himself, to both repudiate the men of a splinter group of the IRA for the recent, typically stupid and pointless slaughter of innocents by bomb, and then to say that all violence is simply passe and of no further use in Irish history, THAT is a momentous event. He is casting aside the international, debilitating and self-chosen stereotype of not just the IRA, but of the Irish in general. In truth, most people do not think of Michael Flatley and his beautiful women when they think of Ireland. Rather some still remember the Irish rebelling during World War One, and staying neutral against Hitler. They think of John Wayne in The Quiet Man, the vicious IRA psycho tracking Harrison Ford, and an endless series of horrible, horrible bombings, body parts, and whispered coded confirmations. All of it to no logical goal except a seeming love of murdering someone because they just wanted to kill a Catholic for killing a Protestant for killing a female Catholic for killing an infant Protestant. Etc. Applying logic to it underscored the psychoses. It may be that the Irish were as bamboozled by the IRA as the rest of the world. It may be that Adam’s statement is not a signal to the Irish, but an acknowledgement by the IRA that they finally received the message, sent long ago by the people. Nobody in their right mind can work up a blood lust anymore over the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nobody can defend the actions of street gangs claiming patriotic sentiments but really just a bunch of drug pushing thugs. And nobody, anywhere, can pass off a bomb in a market stall, or in a car outside a government building beside a school, as anything but blood and guts for bored, drunken, non-entities. It may be a historic moment in Ireland’s history. And it may be that the IRA has finally realized that its time is not only closing down, it was over long ago. If we hear a similar sentence from the Orangemen of Ulster, perhaps children, eighty-year-old diplomats, and pregnant mothers can breath easier in both Irelands. Good riddance to all of those bloody bastards. And an Ireland producing quality computers, software, and a thousand other products of artistic note may finally replace the image of barricaded streets and ski masked thugs in the eyes of a justifiably skeptical world. God. Wouldn’t it be something if it were true? |
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