Brit Happens

Well I never. Apparently the Fightin’ Irish don’t want their children to be conscripted into a European army. This rather startling fact has emerged from research commissioned by the Government into the reasons why the Lisbon Treaty referendum was lost. Nobody here at Hog House saw that one coming. Just how it got out there without anyone noticing it is a mystery worthy of Inspector Clouseau. Is this what people took from the discussion of neutrality?
But at the same time, the Fightin’ Irish are joining foreign armies in droves, with the specific intention of seeing action! According to a report by Conor Lally in the Irish Times recruitment from Ireland into the British army jumped by over 500% between 2007 and 2008. Others join the American armed forces.
This is part of a longstanding tradition. Irishmen have joined foreign armies, but in particular the British armed forces, for centuries. Two separate factors are in play. The first is the lure of danger, the wish to earn one’s keep as a soldier. Some of the new recruits say that they joined up because the Irish army wasn’t recruiting. This desire for military action is in complete contradiction of the kind of pacifism espoused by the Peace and Neutrality Alliance.
The second is more complex and is bound up with the intimate relationship between the peoples of these islands. We may be surrounded by water but in truth the Irish Sea has been as much lake as ocean for millennia. The peoples on either side are actually very closely connected as DNA research will show in the near future.
It follows that many Irish are quite comfortable in an Anglocentric world, primarily British but also American. Check what television is watched, listen to the names being checked, what sports are followed and what issues and personalities are discussed. Where do we shop and what do we buy? It even extends to politics. More Irish people know the name of the mayor of London than know the name of the mayor of Dublin, and that’s a fact.
It’s largely cultural and to a surprising degree hasn’t so far intruded into political discourse. It’s there all right, but is as yet unnoticed.
Since the 1970s the general (and essentially nationalist) ideology had been that the EU was the context in which the Irish would carve an identity clearly separate from the UK and would be able to free the economy from over-dependence on one market. As part and parcel of this we came to see ourselves as Europeans…
With the benefit of hindsight one can see the election of Bill Clinton and then Tony Blair as the turning points. They replaced the dull George Bush Senior and even duller John Major respectively. They made things new and spicy. They were even interested in solving the Northern Ireland problem. They revived Hibernian Anglocentrism.
All of which is neither bad nor good, it’s just the way things are. It’s possible to dance jigs and reels and to shop in London and New York. We’re said to be the most globalised country of all and being open to the world is a good thing.
So, just as British and American French and Italian outlets set up here, we sell our cheese and butter and meat in the UK, in America and Europe, and our services and knowledge too.
Yet a new kind of colonialism may also be in play and it’s found where culture and politics intersect. There is very high penetration of the Irish market by British media, including those with ‘Irish’ editions. Most of these, including the broadsheet Sunday Times, tend to be anti-European.
A briefing memorandum prepared for the European Commission and reported in the Irish Times argues that the Irish media became more Eurosceptic and more tabloid in their reporting between the last Nice referendum and the present.
In addition, a lot of the material carried by the Irish Times and Irish Independent is out-sourced from UK titles. Coupled with the tendency of Irish print and radio journalists to use Anglophone web sources to provide background material, it means that there is a very heavy Eurosceptic ‘tidal wash’ into the Irish media.
This can be both very silly and very damaging, as can be seen in the recent controversy over competition cakes. Readers may remember reports that new EU regulations had banned the consumption at country fairs and shows of cakes and confectionery made for competitions. Uproar ensued and a good deal of anti-EU sentiment was loosed.
Thing is, there is no such regulation. It’s all hogwash. The story was described by an EU spokesperson as ‘a typical Euro-lie’.
It’s a summer story and yet, within it may be found one of the seeds of rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. What a way to go, cut down between conscription and competition cakes.
For a generation we’ve adroitly manoeuvred between the Anglo-American axis and Europe. But we may have just run out of wriggle room. We’re getting very close to a fork in the road. Which way will we go, towards Boston/Birmingham or Berlin?
Last week we saw photos of Taoiseach Brian Cowen puttin’ up his dooks in the company of the Olympic boxers. The Fightin’ Irish stance indicates his resolve to deal with the economy. But an equally daunting task will be to fuse the respective strands of Irish identity and allegiance. You know, like how we can fear conscription on one hand and go to fight someone else’s war on the other…
Some task.