The Faking of a Statesman

Down in Dublin for a couple of days a fortnight ago, I bumped into a rubicund retired diplomat in a Merrion Row pub. How long will Albert the Statesman last? he enquired. And we had a warm chuckle to ourselves over hot ports and brandy.

Albert the Statesman hounded into our lives simultaneously with the Downing Street Declaration, Shazam! suddenly, without any preliminary announcement or indication, taking the place of Albert the Unprincipled Opportunist, Albert the Tongue-tied Eejit, Albert the Shifty-Eyed Fixer and all the other uncongenial and somewhat unattractive Alberts who had for years skulked and ambled through the media coverage.

There was a particularly dramatic report of a first sighting of Albert the Statesman on the back page of the Sunday Indo, contributed by Eamo Dunphy, the soccer controversialist and fearless exposer of the hypocrisies and evasions of what he aptly enough refers to as “Official Ireland.” Now he wanted it to be known that he’d been wrong, wrong, wrong all these years to depict Albert as anything other than a noble Statesman and a Great Irishman.

He had read the Declaration. He had glimpsed therein the Promised Land. His eyes had seen the glory of the coming of Albert the Statesman. He took back each and every one of the carelessly horrible things he’d said about Albert. He didn’t mind a bit how utterly ridiculous this admission made him appear. Of what consequence was his, Eamo Dunphy’s, image and reputation, when set beside the splendid work of the Downing Street Declaration, the work of our Taoiseach, Albert the Statesman.

Over at The Irish Times, they were beginning to approach Albert in much the same way. On all fours.

Ms. Geraldine Kennedy, formerly of the Progressive Democratic Party, if memory serves me right, and a woman who sometimes seemed to be taken with a touch of the vapours when anything pertaining to the Fianna Fail Party was mentioned in her vicinity, now took to writing pieces about Albert the Statesman, couched in tones of reverential awe interspersed with squeaks of pleasure. Albert wasn’t just a ceremonial joint author of this truly magnificent Declaration. He was the main author. Indeed, he was the prime mover, as you might say.

The whole thing – the idea of a joint statement of principles by the two governments – had actually been his idea. And he’d literally written passages in it himself, more or less. Very high up civil servants were being bowled over by Albert’s continuing commanding performance. He was a Statesman, that’s what they were saying now about Albert, the Statesman.

Ms. Kennedy even had the nice little detail that during the protracted drafting period Albert would sometimes sit up in bed at night suddenly electrified by the thought of possibilities which might be opened up by the shifting of a particular comma!

The rest of the national media has largely followed suit. Albert figured as Albert the Statesman in every Review of the Year piece I chanced to see. Columnists, pol. corrs., leader-writers and even RTE disc jockeys felt it incumbent to remark on how Albert the Statesman now towers above his normal-sized contemporaries.

As far as I am aware, as of now, nobody at all in the mainstream media in the South is directly and forthrightly challenging this general assessment of Reynolds’ standing. I suppose it was a taste of what was to come when Reynolds and his Labour side-kick Spring marched into the Leinster House chamber on their return from the signing ceremony in London and were greeted by a unanimous standing ovation. John Bruton, Dessie O’Malley, Jim Kemmy, Prionsias de Rossa, Tony Gregory, the lot, on their feet applauding the Heroes of the Hour, before either of them actually said anything.

All this surely tells us more about what Official Ireland really thinks on the North than it does about the objective role or current mind-set of the pet food man from Mullingar.

What it tells me is that the ruling class in the South wants the Northern bother brought to an end on any basis at all, just as long as there is the least possible disruption of the society they rule over. In the middle of December they got the idea into their heads that Albert Reynolds, with the British Government, had worked out a way of achieving this. Hence, the euphoria and the eulogies.

But the possibility of peace which exists in the North is not rooted in the Downing Street Declaration, in the “Hume-Adams process” which preceded it, or in any other inter-party or diplomatic exercise. On the contrary, as I have explained before in this space, the possibility of peace arises from the fact that many thousands of the people who have suffered most in the war have been signalling for some time that they want an end to it. In particular, the Catholic working-class people who provide the bedrock of support for the Republican Movement have in great numbers come to the conclusion that the armed struggle, and the politics of armed struggle, can carry them no further forward.

This doesn’t mean mass defections from the Republican camp. In fact, it is in the areas where Republican support remains most solid that the demand for peace is most intense; in Catholic areas of North Belfast, for example, where for much of last year people have been living in fear, and during the hours of darkness effectively in hiding. It has been their demand, not for anything which might be construed as surrender, and certainly not for a return to the past, but for a different way forward, which has produced and been reflected in the “mood for peace.”

Neither Albert Reynolds nor John Major has had anything to do with this development. And they don’t offer any way forward either. How could they, when they can’t offer a decent future to their “own” people in the South or in Britain?

Major and Reynolds say that all things will be possible once there’s peace. In Belfast before Xmas, Major talked of “undreamed of prosperity” in the North if the violence ended. So what, then, is preventing prosperity on Tyneside, in central Scotland, in south Yorkshire, inner city London, where 14 years of Tory Government, unimpeded by guerrilla warfare, has seen the cumulative devastation of local economies and the lives of hundreds of thousands of working class people thrown onto the slagheaps?

What has Albert Reynolds to offer the people of Derry when he can offer only misery to the people of Darndale? We do need an end to the violence. But we don’t need the Major-Reynolds Declaration. What we need is a different way forward against Major and Reynolds.

Looked at like this, we can see the Downing Street Declaration not as a prospectus for peace but as a possible impediment to it. By effectively demanding that the people most intimately involved in these matters, the working-class people of the North, choose either the Declaration or the armed struggle, Reynolds/Major makes it harder for the people to choose peace.

The hacks who, whether through incurable crankiness or deep-dyed conservatism, present a shifty politician like Reynolds as a Great Statesman, don’t make peace any easier either.

I told my jowly diplomat friend that I gave Albert the Statesman about six weeks. He thought I was going soft in my old age.

I was going to do a review of Helen Brady’s four sell-out gigs at the Dungloe over the New Year, but if I did that she would no longer be the best-kept, longest-standing secret in Irish music, would she?

Next issue, though, the temptation might just overwhelm me . . .

MICHAEL CLEARY RIP

Michael Cleary bit the dust. Even so, he was an oul bollix. I remember him mainly for two things. First, his manic antics at the Ballybrit racecourse at Galway in 1979, prior to the arrival of the sicko from Cracow, John Paul II, for a “Youth Mass”.

The demented Cleary, drafted in as master of ceremonies by a hierarchy which reckoned that some OTT flamboyance might be helpful for the day, whirled and wind-milled like a crow-clad dervish on acid as he strove to whip the crowd up into a frenzy of anticipation of the Great Whited Sepulchre’s arrival, orchestrating Nuremberg rally-style chants of “We Love the Pope” and relentless choruses of the worst spiritual ever written, ‘He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands’ and occasionally yelling out about what a happy wee woman the “Virgin” Mary must be this minute looking down from high heaven at this wonderful sight.

Local bishop Eamon Casey bull-shitted afterwards about Cleary’s supposed credibility with young people lending weight to the sicko’s sermonising – which had to do with the necessity for the most strict adherence to the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, else you’d roast in hell forever. Now that I come to think of it, I’m surprised Casey managed to stay so calm throughout the proceedings. Maybe it’s that he reckoned it was all a heap of shite.

Then there was Cleary’s performance at the time of the X case, when he first seemed to suggest that the 14-year-old girl who was pregnant as a result of rape and who wanted an abortion either wasn’t pregnant at all or, alternatively, had become pregnant deliberately as part of a convoluted plot designed to discredit the constitutional prohibition on abortion. He then changed tack and said that had he been the girl’s father he’d have procured an abortion and lied to the gardai about it afterwards, thus preventing public scandal and controversy.

He did have a certain significance in that Casey and himself accurately represented two important strains within the RC church in Ireland as we come to the close of the 20th century, the one an oul bull, the other an oul bollix.