ON THE MARCH

The Anti-Nazi League march against racism two Saturdays ago in Dublin was an altogether splendid affair. I carried a placard reading, Jail the corrupt politicians Don t blame refugees!
Three to four thousand swaggered raucously through town on a beautiful day, people on the pavements smilingly supportively. Siniad sang a song like only Siniad sings a song. All the speeches were short, even mine. The faces in O Connell Street looking down from the platform were as pepper and salt. Best-looking crowd ever seen out in Dublin.
The only minor piece of aggro I encountered came when somebody questioned my placard. No need to drag in issues like planning corruption and political sleaze. What s that got to do with refugees?
The woman had a point. Sloganeers shouldn t assume everybody sees the connections they think obvious. We chatted for a while as we sashayed along, and agreed with one another, more or less, by the end.
Colm McGrath. He made the connection all on his own.
McGrath was outed as Frank Dunlop s Mr. Insatiable in the Tribune the following day. He s the county councillor for Clondalkin who demanded more and more money, and then more money, as he helped Dunlop steer the Quarryvale development through the planning process on behalf of Owen O Callaghan.
A former chairman of the Dublin Regional Authority, no less, McGrath is the class of chap who can stick more than one finger into the same pie at the same time. His security company, Essential Services, landed the contract to look after the huge construction site as Quarryvale was transmogrified into the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre.
He s also a bigot. He was one of the first in Irish politics into open racist propaganda. During the 1997 general election he had leaflets distributed around Clondalkin claiming that immigrants were taking up resources needed by the Irish people . One leaflet suggested that aliens allowed into Clondalkin would carry out the ritual slaughter of animals in front gardens.
A vote for Colm McGrath, he declared, was a vote for our own people .
And that s the key to it, and to understanding the motivation of racist politicians everywhere.
To the extent that voters accept McGrath s definition of immigrants as aliens , definitively outside the category of our own people , they define themselves as being members of the same moral community as McGrath.
The more important the distinction can be made to seem between aliens and us , the less important will seem the differences between ourselves .
If the likes of McGrath could convince voters that the distinction between aliens and us was all that mattered, the fact that we are being ripped off wouldn t matter at all.
It is becoming increasingly clear that a number of politicians in the pay of builders, developers, financiers and entrepreneurs, manipulated the land market for a quarter of a century to ensure it was used not for the benefit of the mass of the people but for the profit of a few. They deployed the vast resources of the Irish construction industry not on projects to provide affordable housing for ordinary people but on projects to provide rich pickings for themselves.
Now we have half-finished estates of bleak aspect and few amenities, and people are properly angry. At which point, the race card is played to divert the anger onto small groups of recently-arrived aliens who, obviously, played no part at all in creating the problems generating the anger.
This is the function of racism everywhere. The best antidote is not to preach at people at the bottom of the pile to still their anger, but to organise against the source of the angering ills.
Jail the corrupt politicians Don t blame refugees!

The poet and novelist Seamus Deane spoke on RTE a couple of weeks back about comparisions between his book Reading In The Dark and Frank McCourt s Angela s Ashes, and reminded me of something I d meant to say about Richard Harris.
The Deane and McCourt books are, or purport to be, based on childhood memory, the one set in Derry, the other in Limerick. They were published within the octave of one another two years ago and were commonly reviewed together. On RTE, Seamus allowed that, this apart, he couldn t quite see the widely-supposed similarities.
Seamus s book won one of those prestigious literary prizes and sold middling well. Frank s sold zillions and was made into a movie. But what Seamus meant, I think, was that his own book is a serious piece of writing, whereas McCourt s is trite, light and aimed at the gullible end of the American market. Which is no more than the unvarnished truth.
But there s are at least two good things about Angela s Ashes.
One, it accurately describes the social conditions in which many thousands of Irish working-class people lived only half a century ago, and honestly depicts the role of Catholic Church and the local professional and monied classes in sustaining this mass misery.
The second good thing to be said about Angela s Ashes, and in defence of McCourt, was revealed a while back by the once-promising Limerick actor Harris on Eamon Dunphy s radio show.
Harris had taken it upon himself to mount a crusade against McCourt for defaming Limerick. Twasn t like that at all at all, he almost said in response to the probing questions of the vibrant little ball of angst who has so transformed drive-time radio.
He remembered Limerick well. His parents had owned businesses there. Well he recalled the scrawny poor coming in pitiful procession to the iron gates of Harris Towers begging alms and the bright smiles of optimism which wreathed their sunlit faces as they skipped cheerfully down the gravel path afterwards clutching one of the bags of crusts which the parlour maid had instructions to distribute to the more deserving-looking of the insanitary pests.
Why, when the elder Harrises passed away, did not the destitute line the streets of Limerick in tearful lamentation as the gleaming horse-drawn hearse made its stately way through the sorrowing town?
Something like that.
Anyway. There might indeed have been poverty in Limerick. But it was greatly alleviated by the benignity of the better-off, such was the happy sense of amity which bound Limerick folk of all classes together for all time.
(Working from memory, I may have gotten one of two minor details of the conversation wrong. But you get the picture.)
He didn t want to say all this, Harris said to the for-once dumbstruck Dunphy. But he had tried to help McCourt in his early literary days in New York, one Limerick man for another. Had persuaded critics and columnists to say positive things about Angela s lad s first stumbling efforts at literature. And what thanks did he get from the ungrateful whelp, eh?
I ll tell you, he told Dunphy, and did.
When word first emerged in Village literary circles of the tenor of Frank McCourt s script, he, Harris, had felt it his bounden duty to express his strongly-felt views on this guttersnipe portrait of his lovely hometown. He felt suffused with a pleasant sense of parochial patriotism as he sat at the bar of the Lion s Head one inoffensive afternoon later, supping his quiet pint and dreaming of Garryowens gone by, no hint of a hindrance to anybody. When, without the slightest warning or prior indication, he was sent flying from his stool into collision with a pillar as the side of his head exploded in pain.
McCourt, he explained in those tremulous gravelly tones which gave us such pleasure in epics like the one about the big bull of a farmer from Kerry, had snuck into the bar, sidled sneakily up behind and hit him a ferocious sudden blatter on the ear. By the time he had sufficiently recovered to refocus on reality, McCourt s arse end was scuttling through the swinging door as he fled pell-mell from the scene of his vicious assault.
Let s face it Angela s Ashes might be shite, but the man who created a scene like that can t be all bad.