The Song Remains The Same

There were many things you might have done on Sunday July 4th. You might have gone to Druid's Glen to admire the Murphy's Irish Open golf championship. You could have gone racing, or hiking in the mountains. There were Bar-B-Qs and Yankee parades here and there. Lots of people went skateboarding and rollerblading. Others surfed the net, oblivious to the gusty sunshine that made it a day for sailing . . .
In and around the Point Theatre on Saturday night, and in the vicinity of Luttrellstown Castle, some people (the majority of them to do with the press) spent the day looking out for celebrities. To be fair, nobody in Dublin noticed much, which is as it should be.
Of course, hundreds of thousands of young people didn't rise early at all and were, quite frankly, relieved to find themselves in one piece after the previous night's escapades, and not facing the prospect of appearing before Mr Justice Windle, who might order them to stand in O'Connell Street wearing a placard and an apologetic expression.
But if you were a Munsterman with a sense of history, there was only one place to be, in Semple Stadium in Thurles for the Munster hurling final. And if you were a Portadown Orangeman, you had to be at Drumcree.
Some years ago Tom Humphries wrote a preview of the Munster hurling final. It was a fine piece that captured the awesome atmosphere of that annual event with its timeless aura of county, community and continuity:
This is something mighty, something a person hands on to his or her children. This binds men together who would otherwise sunder. This is the medium by which otherwise taciturn men can communicate with their fathers and their sons.
This is no mere sporting event. This is life itself birth to death and all the passions in between compressed into 70 coruscating minutes.
You don't prepare lightly. It comes complete with rites, rituals and superstitions.
But of course, there are others who would similarly describe Orangemen on July 12th or, indeed, any one of hundreds of other occasions when they meet in streets and fields, as they did last Sunday and will again next Monday.
Once again we find our protagonists in a field but this time it is not for sport. No, this is an altogether more dreary quest. Yet it could have a far greater impact than all the other events taking place last Sunday about which, let's be clear, the vast majority of people outside of Northern Ireland were much more concerned.
Orangemen also have their rituals, their superstitions, their sense of community and continuity. This is about identity, such as it is. And yes, these seem to provide a mechanism by which otherwise taciturn men can talk to their fathers and their sons.
What can I say? Personally, I'll go for the sport every time. But to each his own. So how do we reconcile these things? And how do the heathen and hedonistic majority on this island understand these stern and stony people?
I don't know. The world carried on its business last Sunday. On one BBC channel, Steffi Graf and Lindsay Davenport did battle. Elsewhere there was golf, motor cycle racing, movies and cartoons.
Drumcree was the main feature on three channels, RTE, BBC and UTV, interspersed with interviews with various people, like David Trimble, on the governments' latest effort to break the deadlock in the peace process.
I was particularly struck by one brief studio piece on UTV, in which the Reverend Christopher McKelvey quoted scripture in support of his argument (he was pleading with the Orange marchers), and did so in a way that showed that he clearly presumed that Orangemen would know what he was talking about, would recognise the references and would see their immediate relevance to the issue of the moment.
As they would. Furthermore, they'd be able to use counter-quotations against him. That's the way it is.
I understood what the Reverend McKelvey was saying, and he is clearly a man of great biblical learning and compassion. But the discourse was earthed in another world to mine. It seemed as close to my experience as Afghanistan or Iran.
I was also struck by the TV coverage of the scenes around Drumcree. It's not Posh and Becks by a long shot, but nonetheless it has become a media event.
Ironies abounded. The service commemorated the Battle of the Somme, and by Sunday morning the British army had converted the fields around Drumcree and the Garvaghy Road to a passable imitation of the trenches in 1916. The wheel turns.
The day's events unfolded against the backdrop of the reaction to the statement by the British and Irish governments on the way forward for the peace process. There is cautious optimism on the nationalist side but, as ever seeking guarantees "in black and white", the Unionists seem set to reject it. Familiar ground, I suppose.
Of course we won't know for a week or so the nomination of ministers will take place on July 15th and the devolution order will be rushed through the British parliament on July 16th. Decommissioning should begin is to start within a specified time and progress will be monitored. A failsafe clause is to be built in whereby, if commitments aren't met, the whole thing can be suspended by the governments.
It is scarcely credible that we are still talking about failure, but we are. On Sunday, David Trimble made it quite clear that he couldn't support the proposals from the two Governments. We already know that Paisley is against them, as are many in the Republican movement. So we may be moving into very dangerous times.
Black and white, black and white. It is the root of the problem!! Some of the most effective solutions to problems are grey! Has nobody in the UUP heard of fuzzy logic? It's the science whose appliance runs a vast array of systems, such as the Tokyo underground. It is based on the understanding that black and white systems are incapable of dealing with complex states or systems.
The UUP might also profitably study the history of this state. Of particular relevance to the present time is the early Fianna Fail, which began life as, to quote its former leader Sean Lemass, a slightly constitutional party .
Many of the same fears attached to their surly adoption of democracy in the 1920s as now attach to Sinn Fiin in Northern Ireland. And yet, when they took Government they demonstrated a punctilious constitutionality. Moreover, they ruthlessly confronted anti-democratic opposition from both fascists and republicans.
One cannot say for sure, but it could be that Sinn Fiin might actually turn out to be a trump card against other paramilitary forces. Certainly, it is preferable to have them (as Lyndon Johnson famously put it) inside the tent pissing out rather then outside the tent pissing in.
And that is what the unionists seem to want Sinn Fiin outside pissing in, unless they tie themselves down in a way that, as any student of history can attest, is anathema to Republicans.
Which brings us back to the bible and to the stony forthrightness on which so many Northern Irish people pride themselves (including many nationalists). In situations of conflict, it is imperative to find the common ground and the fuzzy logic response. And that, I think, means peace first, clarity second.
What the Governments seem to envisage, and it is likely that they are right, is peace and politics obviating the need for the gun and bomb. And it is clearly their view that they can't impose it agreement has to come from within. But there's the conundrum that's the one thing that the UUP and Sinn Fiin won't deliver. Neither seems able to take that last giant leap of faith in the other.
An indication of why the IRA would drag its heels over complete decommissioning came in a sombre and deeply unsettling article in The Irish Times on Saturday last. It was written by Jim Cusack, the paper's security correspondent, and it described the campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out by the South Antrim UDA against Catholics and mixed-marriage households in Carrickfergus and its environs.
I am not suggesting that ethnic cleansing is a one-sided process, although the complete clearing of one ethnic group from a town and hinterland would be unique.
But the point is this peace process or no peace process, a quiet, vicious dirty war is already being fought, and some groups seem to be staking out their territory in advance of either democratic structures or the collapse of the peace process.
In this kind of violent and intimidatory situation, there is immense pressure on the IRA to hold onto its weaponry as an insurance against doomsday. And that's always a possibility. Once ethnic cleansing becomes accepted, it's hard to recover any sense of common purpose. And then we're in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia.
One of the NATO personnel who showed journalists a mass grave in Kosovo is reputed to have said to them that they might now understand that Northern Ireland was not as bad as they might have thought well, maybe. But the bodies of the disappeared seem easier to locate there then here.
And everything is relative.
The two key protagonists are unwilling to take responsibility. Leaps of faith are out. In default, they (and especially the UUP) want the Governments to make the decisions and the running. In other words, they want to be able to absolve themselves and have the Governments to blame if it all starts to go wrong. It's a cop-out, and it's yielding the initiative to the the fascists and thugs.
Hold tight and pay no mind to Nostradamus.
The Hog