The kids are alright - shame about the parents

am wandering up the Glen, pondering the meaning of strife, when who should I see wafting her way into St. Eithne’s but Hilary, with a faraway look in her so-brown eyes. What you at?, I yell.

A mural, she answers at the bottom of her voice, come on in and see.
We are big into murals around here. I once adapted a revolutionary phrase, You Are Now Entering Free Berkeley, for inscription on a wall, and I find it now on touristy items on city-centre stalls labelled ‘Official Souvenir’. Which wasn’t the intention at all.
But that’s the thing. Intentions aren’t decisive in the decipherment of art. What point was being made by the portrayal along the corridor at St. Eithne’s of Samuel Pepys, Florence Nightingale and Hailglorious St. Patrick spectating at the Great Fire of London? I wouldn’t know. Except to suggest that the collective imagination of the five-to-eleven year-olds of St. Eithne’s isn’t containable within the constrictions of time, space, logic and such.
There’s a map of the world traced in louche, wiggly lines on layered squares of lurking grey, night-deep mauve and gashed vermillion, with Australia, if it isn’t South America, in the shape of a stomped prune and Europe in an interestingly primaeval stage of gestation. Plus stencilled fish, a Viking warship en route for Byzantium, a face wearing a gas mask or some fearsome tribal camouflage, or it’s one of the space-persons who gouged rock-sworls across the face of Peru, and all manner of bibs and blobs in kaleidoscopic array. And there’s crescents of mosaic in the making to link the line of wall-panels like a train of colourful thought along the corridor, featuring polaroid faces of the students/artists affixed to the necks of animals, the ankles of footballers, the shoulders of mountains and whatnot.
The piece is the work of St. Eithne’s pupils, visions of the world which travel along the hallway through history in time-warp step with the progression of the artists though classes, from P1 depicting the bright dawn of all to P7’s contemplation of dark life as she’s lived now, or would be if St. Eithne’s had its brilliantly scatter-brained way, the mayhem of creation having been entirely mistress-minded by preternaturally calm P3 teacher, Jacqueline Coyle.
As beguiling as the juxtaposition of daubs and deft flourish is the difficulty in telling which is which, so that it’s all obviously the work of wide-eyed children and just as obviously the product of a steady, adult mind. Hilary explained she’d taken sheet-paintings and drawings in water colours and crayon from each of the classes and, under surveillance by the begetters, reproduced them as meticulously and exactly as possible in her own hand on the wall. The effect is of a symphony played on a hurdy-gurdy, skipping songs performed by a philharmonic.
I told her I thought it altogether marvellous, and she said, Yes, as she wafted away, but there’s this sort of stuff on corridor walls everywhere at the end of the school year, and I thought about that and realised it was so and decided this was more marvellous again.

Mention of Sam Pepys’ observation of the Great Fire of 1666 reminds me of Lord Levy, who never offered anyone the bribe of a peerage in exchange for a party loan, and Charlie Haughey, who never dispensed political favours for parcels of dosh.
Pepys presided for years over procurement for the British Navy, then the biggest spender in all the realm, forever in need of timber for new ships, cloth, cannon, victuals for the crew, and so forth. Many assumed he was on the take, on account of him accepting gifts of all sorts from naval suppliers, not to mention the failure of merchants who didn’t offer him gifts to win contracts to supply anything at all.
Reading over his Diaries more than three centuries later, Pepys’ deep outrage at suggestions of corruption fair shudders off the page. When notorious fixer Peter Luellin offered him 50 gold pieces down and £200 a year thereafter to source timber from Edward Dering, who had recently stolen a number of Irish forests, Pepys accepted the arrangement while indignantly rejecting any hint of a bribe: “I told him that I would not sell my liberty to any man. If he would give me anything by another’s hand, I would endeavour to deserve it, but I will never give him himself thanks for it, nor acknowledge the receiving of it...I did also tell him that neither this nor anything should make me do anything that should not be for the King’s service besides.”
Likewise, there was no connection between Blair’s bagman Levy offering peerages to anybody who’d help fund the New Labour scam, or between Haughey savouring sweeteners from fellows who made zillions from the Financial Services Centre and his government backing the centre with tax-payers’ cash.
Anything given came from a clean heart; any favour in return was in the State’s service besides.
They handled these things so much more elegantly in Pepys’ day, did they not?
The glorifiers of bloodshed were out in full force at the beginning of July, selling the Old Lie about the Somme. Britain’s high representative, naturally, led the chorus. The Protestants and Catholics who’d died in droves, declared Peter Hain, had given their lives ‘for freedom’.
In the South, Mrs. Mary McAleese was predictably to the fore, dishing out dollops of the same-brand moral mush.  
The simultaneous slaughter of Nationalists and Unionists in the service of Empire was presented as a means towards reconciliation and peace.
Can the braying donkeys of the British high command have ever imagined that 90 years later there’d still be dependable dolts across in Ireland pumping out the old propaganda?
The issue in the Great War was which gang of blackguards would win the right to rule the waves and rob the world. There was nothing in it for Shankill or the Falls, for Belfast or for Dublin.
The German ruling class had commenced the extermination of the Herero people of South West Africa – the campaign which was to provide the model for the Holocaust. Meantime, in South Africa, the British were using Maxim guns in the mass murder of Zulus. The objective in both cases was to scour indigenous peoples off the face of the land to make way for white settlers, to drive them down into mines to be worked literally to death in the bowels of their own earth, for the enrichment of an effete bourgeoisie back home.
Which of these cut-throats would continue to make killings? It was to settle this that the flower of Ireland’s manhood went out to die, without dignity, in the mud-fields of France.
Once upon a time we could rely on Nationalist parties to take a stand against the repellent sentimentalisation of slaughter. But now even the Shinners assume their place in the ranks, reverential heads bowed, and ‘pay tribute’ to the Irish who walked into eternity upon the orders of British imperialism.
As if to be misled and betrayed, treated like dirt and sent uselessly to death, were the finest play under the sun.
We should be united in rage, not in reverence.