High On The Hog

One of the beauties of getting out of Ireland, even briefly, is that you can step away from the humdrum, the repetitious, the mundane. It’s not just that the sun is more reliable. Nor is it that the service in bars and restaurants is more civil, more speedy and generally more professional, although these things help greatly. No, what you find is that you are welcomed as an Irish person. People think you have some mainline to a truth they have lost, to a decency and an honesty that the world has forgotten.

Moreover, in some places, the idea of being Irish is pretty broad, and in western America, for example, where the Hog holidayed, individuals rarely bother to discriminate whether their ancestor was Irish-Irish or British-Irish.

This high esteem is seductive, but we should be wary because, of course, we don’t deserve it. Oh maybe we did once, and perhaps this individual or that still does. But the Irish as such don’t anymore. We’re really just like others! Only the pub and music set us apart, and even they are under threat!

Conversation? Ya kidding? Who talks nowadays?!? Unless it’s to complain or declaim (often with justification, let it be said) about traffic, the price of alcohol and houses and whatever yer having yerself.

Oddly, this positive image survives the negative news on Ireland, about which the world is well informed. Thanks to the internet, you can pick up smatterings of what’s going on no matter where you are. And it’s the predictable but depressing stuff that gets the headlines, the intractability of the Northern Ireland problem, for example, or the corruption tribunals. This is tough for those who huff and puff the positive message about the economy, but it’s the news baby.

So why do people still love us and want to be part of us?

I have no idea, except to say that we fill some gap in the global consciousness. But, for all the great and important things some of us have achieved, we shouldn’t have been allowed away with such gross misrepresentation, or (worse still) to profit from it. But there you are.

By way of example, the internet featured the news that David Trimble had resigned. And the general global coverage implied that this was bad news, but typical of Northern Ireland – what would you expect? Similarly, the ongoing impasse, the failed discussions, the murder of a Catholic youth, the rattling and banging about at Drumcree and on July 12th. The lot.

Americans look at Northern Ireland and think of Groundhog Day. The protagonists just have to keep coming back at it until they get it right. Which might not mean what you or they think. It’s hard to know what next. Not war, I think, but yet, not peace as we might imagine it.

Meanwhile, the arrest and trial of Slobodon Milosevic on charges including genocide raises a whole range of legal and political questions. Apparently, many powerful states are not at all enamoured of the thought that the International Court in the Hague would be able to carry out such trials, and indeed question that such might be so.

For example, the British worry that Margaret Thatcher might be charged over the General Belgrano, and the French worry about their role in Algeria. The Americans are fearful that Henry Kissinger could be charged arising from actions undertaken during the Vietnam War, such as the bombing of Cambodia, and in other states in which America exercised itself, such as Chile.

Indeed, the bould Kissinger was invited to drop in for a chat about the disappearance of five French citizens in Chile by a French judge. He declined, as he also did with another invitation from an Argentinian judge.

So, like the now apparently senile General Pinochet, and notwithstanding his alleged membership of a pan-national ruling elite, Kissinger may not be able to travel anywhere he pleases in future. Fascinating.

But it begs a question. Haven’t we had our own war crimes in Ireland? Like Omagh or Enniskillen, or Greysteel, or Dublin and Monaghan, or Belfast’s Black Friday, or Derry’s Bloody Sunday?

Funny enough, many of those who applaud the pursuit of Milosevic, Pinochet and Kissinger would be horrified if members of Sinn Féin or the PUP or whatever were arrested. Imagine, for example, if a Spanish judge were to investigate the murder of Spanish students in the Omagh bombing and order the arrest of (say) an alleged member of the Real IRA who was on holiday in the Balearics (or indeed in the Basque Country) ...

Personally, I’d have to say that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So, why not?

But, if it were a French judge there would be uproar, both here and there. Because, for all their intellectual strengths, the French are hard on outsiders and soft on insiders (like their police and their antipathetic relationship with their Arab and African-French population). They are also sympathetic to the IRA, whereas they furiously suppress the Breton and Corsican freedom movements. They see no contradiction in this, just as many in Ireland still don’t recognise a war crime as a war crime if it’s committed in Northern Ireland.

Similarly, many who call for a boycott of China over Tibet, or Afghanistan over the treatment of women, or Israel over Palestine, or whatever, would be supporters of wannabe regimes (like the IRA or the UDA) that would cheerfully drive a tank over you if you protested too much.

Some day we’ll all get a bit more honest. It’s good that tyrants might be made to tremble by the arrest of Milosevic and the threats to Kissinger. But the world is full of tyrants, big and small. Pound for pound, some of the Irish tyrants have committed crimes as heinous as many of the Yugoslav war criminals. In years to come they will be politicians and police officers and who knows what else. So, should they also (at least) be made to fear the long arm of the International Court?

Me, I think so. What about you?