We are the appeasers. We stand for nothing. Sadly, this is the current role of the Irish in international affairs.
The latest manifestation of the emptiness at the heart of modern Irish politics came last week in the unlikely setting of Saudi Arabia. President Mary McAleese was there to speak at the Jeddah Economic Forum, which was held under the auspices of what is widely recognised to be one of the most repressive regimes in the world.
It is repressive in that it is a monarchy, ruled with brutal force by the sons and grandsons of King Abd Al Aziz Al Saud. It is represssive in that there are no political parties and no elections. It is repressive in that it recognises no religion other than Islam. It is repressive in that draconian laws are in place to deal with any form of dissent. It is repressive in that women are treated as second class citizens and are denied basic human rights and any semblance of equality with Saudi men. It is repressive in that the Government prohibits or restricts freedoms that we take for granted – of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.
It is, in other words, the kind of place that sensible people avoid like the plague.
So why did the President accept an invitation to travel to a place with this kind of anti-democratic pedigree? Why did she agree to speak at a conference there? Well, apparently she was assisting with a bit of business being pursued by Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland: in other words, in essence, she was part of a trade mission. This trip was about money, honey, about taking advantage of the travails of Denmark over the Mohammed cartoons row and trying to get Irish beef back into the Saudi market.
Now, if the Saudis want to buy our beef, there is hardly a sustainable reason for refusing to sell it to them. In the absence of an agreed international boycott, there is no point in the likes of Ireland grandstanding in opposition to any regime. But it is an entirely different thing for the President to make a ‘fraternal’ visit to Saudi Arabia. And it is even more different again for her to speak at a conference at which women were forced to sit in a separate room, out of public view, behind a glass partition.
But she did this, presumably because there might be a few bob in it for the hard pressed beef barons of Ireland. Whatever natural revulsion she may have felt at the treatment of women – and who knows if she did? – or at other aspects of Saudi culture, was willingly suppressed. She stood up and thought of Ireland.
Actually, she went further than that: she purported to speak on behalf of the Irish people, muslim and non-muslim alike as she put it, saying that we abhorred the publication of the Danish cartoons satirising Mohammed and Islam. It is not clear on what she based this statement. I have seen no evidence that this view is widely held here. On the contrary, most people who have commented publicly believe that it is the intolerance of the Imaams and their violent response to the cartoons which is the problem.
So why does the President feel that she can go out and say merely what she thinks people want to hear, even in a horribly repressive country like Saudi Arabia, and do it on our behalf? We fought hard for the freedom that people now enjoy here to express themselves, without undue constraint, on matters of public importance. Selling out on this ideal because it happens to suit the objectives of a trade mission is utterly unacceptable.
But then this kind of appeasement is going on all the time. Look at the Government’s attitude to the use of Shannon by the U.S. military, en route to whatever dirty deeds they are currently getting up to in Iraq and elsewhere. Look at the silence and acquiesence of the FF/PD coalition in relation to the process of “extraordinary rendition” – the point of which is to allow U.S. agencies to interrogate individuals outside the jurisdiction of Americn courts, thus facilitating the sedation, intimidation, torture and in some cases murder of ‘suspects’.
“If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” one former CIA agent has said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.”
And why are we so unwilling to put the U.S. government under real pressure in relation to this? Because we are afraid that to do so might cost us money – that peeved U.S. multi nationals could pull out of Ireland or that the U.S. government might look a little bit more stringently at the way in which Irish-based multi-nationals deal with their U.S. tax affairs.
“What need you, being come to sense,” William Butler Yeats wrote in his great poem, ‘September 1913’, “But fumble in a greasy till/ And add the half pence to the pence/ And prayer to shivering prayer, until/ You have dried the marrow from the bone/ For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/ It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
We pray to Mammon now and care not a whit how we compromise our ideals. How prescient he was…