The way we war

In a speech at Fermoy on October 8, Bertie Ahern quoted the verse from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For The Fallen’ which is recited every year at Remembrance Day ceremonies across Britain.
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
The Taoiseach was speaking at the unveiling of a monument to 131 local men who had perished in the Great War.
“As a country,” he declared, “we owe it to the many Irish men who fought and died in that war to remember the part that they played.”
It was this which grated on the sensibility: not the fact that the fallen of Fermoy were remembered, but Ahern’s tone of reverent pride in “the part that they played”.
Like all of the 49,000 Irish dead of World War One, the part the men of Fermoy played was as dupes of Empire. They had been lied to to lure them into war, encouraged to view the conflict as an existential death-fight between those who loved and those who hated freedom and human rights.
There wasn’t a syllable in Ahern’s speech to suggest dissent from this view, nothing to hint that those who’d left Fermoy for death in France had done other than fulfil a proper, sacred duty.
“These men were Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist, but their differences were transcended by a common higher purpose.” To die in the service of Britain’s Empire, then, in a slaughtering match against a rival imperial power, was to serve “a common, higher purpose”.
This was the line of the recruiting sergeants who had whooped it up for liberty in 1914, coming now from the mouth of an Irish Taoiseach. Might he have been preparing the way to present the resource wars of our own time as a moral conflict between bright values and glowering evil in which we, too, shall have a part to play?
At any rate, no political figure, North or South, appears to have expressed alarm or even concern at Ahern’s endorsement of dying for Empire.

Bumped into a Civilian at the checkpoint in Sainsbury’s the other day who told me that the band had broken up.
I’d first met Civilian last year, at a coincidental moment when Irish music was being disgraced before the eyes of the world through the involvement of Sir Geldof and Little Big Man in the Gleneagles scam against the poor. Civilian were blistering the paint off the trembling ceiling of the Verbal Arts Centre on Derry’s Walls on a balmy Brecht July night of chaotic, cultural congeniality.
“We owe you nothing new but picture-perfect nonsense/Talk slowly, you’re confusing me/Your politics goes right through my head,” Caoimhin was compaining as I ambled into the arms of the enveloping mayhem. They were bursting with energy, bristling with wit, bouncing with disciplined couldn’t-care-lessness.
It hasn’t worked out. Caoimhin is studying music at the University of Ulster now and taking solo gigs here and there. Brendan, Stephen and the other Brendan have headed hither and yon to whichever universities have offered the courses of their choice. Which is as good a reason as I’ve heard for a band breaking up.
We’ll likely never know what they might have contrived given a real run at themselves. But we do know we once knew a band that was maybe set to save the soul of music from the bombast of bullshit aristos, except that they broke up to begin with. Maybe there’ll be another one along soon.

Kevin Myers has been complaining about me. During a discussion of immigration on Newstalk it was, on that crack-of-dawn programme which Dunphy used to present before he amassed so much money he was able to go back to sleeping in and RTE.
By the magical wonders of modern technology, I have been able to access a podcast (?) of the argy-bargy.
“This is the reason I was reluctant to participate,” Kevin explained after I’d suggested that people like himself have a habit of quoting phoney statistics of dodgy derivation to give apparent substance to their claims that the country’s on the high road to hell on account of too many dusky sorts being let in.
This is typical, Kevin continued, just typical. Anybody who tries to discuss immigration in a calm and rational manner is accused of racism, hysteria, xenophobia. He didn’t deal in wild claims or unproven assertions. He merely cited well-established facts about patterns of immigration which the panjandrums of political correctness would rather were suppressed.
Kevin then offered an example. “I live near the small market town of Naas... Now we are told that there are 400,000 immigrants in Ireland. Well, since 30 percent of the population of Naas, according to shopkeepers, are now immigrants, I’d love to know what the real figures are.”
Keep that in mind, people. The next time you see or hear Kevin hitting some hapless liberal over the head with a case-load of heavy statistics, be aware from whence his scientific truths are taken: Naas shopkeepers.

The only admirable thing about David Blunkett was his refusal to be patronised because of his blindness. Now that’s gone, too.
This from his just-published diaries: “When I was leader of Sheffield City Council, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came to Sheffield for an official visit and I was hosting lunch. It was one of those very pleasant occasions when it was possible to sit next to Her Majesty and have a genuine conversation, but (and I know she will forgive me for recalling it) it was strange when twice she asked me if I would like my meat cutting up – strange not because it was not a kind and thoughtful question, but because of the comment she made when I politely declined: ‘You know, I often do it for the corgis’.”
Queen does it for the corgis?

He’s at it again. William Reville, associate professor of biochemistry at UCC and writer of the weekly ‘Science Today’ column in the Irish Times, claims (October 26th) that “Scientific jury is still out on the power of prayer.” No, it isn’t, and a science writer in a serious newspaper shouldn’t be saying so. There is no scientific evidence, none whatsoever, that prayer “works”, and a mountain of evidence that it does not.
Reville draws attention to the major American Heart Journal study, mentioned here previously, which showed that heart surgery patients who were told they were being prayed for did less well than either patients who weren’t prayed for or who hadn’t been told they were being prayed for. Reville suggested that such studies had been “inadequately controlled or designed” – but didn’t venture to guess where the alleged flaws had arisen.
This is light-minded blather. The obvious conclusion is that seriously ill people are made worse by the knowledge they are being prayed for. As in, “Holy Mother of Jesus, they have the nuns praying for me!”
The headline should have read: “Science shows prayer makes things worse.”
Shouldn¹t somebody at the Times have a word with Prof. Reville?