Mick Clifford: 2024’s political heavyweight hardbacks

A whole slew of books have been written in recent years attempting to understand what has happened to American politics and, by extension, the country itself. As with much that happens in the US, there is a warning that what is happening there now can be expected on this side of the Atlantic in the near future. One of the most perceptive and even-handed works to look at the polarisation stateside is Frank Bruni’s The Age Of Grievance.

In it, the New York Times columnist ascribes much of the polarisation to the persistent grasping for grievance of one sort or another. If you are not happy, if life is not working out as you planned, if you see your neighbour living as you would prefer to, you have a grievance.

Bruni suggests that the fuel of grievance pumps through society, touching every political party, sex, race, or socio-economic class.

“They feel cheated. They feel disrespected. They’re peeved unless they’re outright furious,” he writes.

And what’s the point in being furious unless you have somebody to direct your fury at? Of course, some grievance is justified. However, Bruni documents a world in which grievance is a default position based not on circumstances or facts. The aggrieved on all sides “have lost — or lost interest in — the ability to see beyond their slights to a common good in which they don’t get all that they want”.

“Grown-ups are supposed to be able to compromise like that. But ours is an era of mass immaturity.”

The book is littered with cogent and sometimes bitterly ironic examples. One involved the shooting of six people, including three children, at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023.

The shooter, it turned out, was transgender. Thereafter, prominent news organisations gave more coverage to the difficulties faced by transgender people in Nashville rather than the fall-out from the tragedy for those afflicted.

In one panel discussion on the shootings on MSNBC, the screen showed a banner headline: ‘Transgender Americans Under Siege’. The grievance felt by transgender people, some of which is entirely justified, superceded consideration for the loss of life and the dreadful fallout for that community.

“What the left sees in the right and what the right sees in the left are almost the same,” Bruni writes.

“A bullying force intent on imposing its out-of-touch, out-of-whack values on unbelievers and on crushing them if they persist in their heresy.”

We have seen echoes of this here.

The identity politics propagated by the illiberal or authoritarian strand of the left is obsessed with grievance harboured by minorities, or perceived victims, to the point where reason for the grievance trumps any actual discrimination or injustice. Then we have the far-right, which has pushed its perceived and fraudulent grievance about asylum seekers crowding into an island that can’t cope.

As with much in this area, the echoes in this country are faint. However, in a world fuelled by social media — which makes its money on grievance — there is every chance that things will get worse. As with American politics, a whole sackful of books are being published these days looking back at aspects of the violence that dominated the North of this island for 30 years.

One of the best is Four Shots In The Night by Henry Hemming, an author who comes to the subject of the North new and without any baggage.

In it, Hemming traces how Martin McGuinness in particular — but also Gerry Adams — were spotted early on as men who might be able to move the provisional movement from killing to politics. Thereafter, these two figures were to a large extent protected by the British, Hemming writes. They weren’t agents, as some have speculated, but senior elements in the security services wanted to see them kept in place as they were the best bet for the Provos ending their campaign.

What this in effect means, in McGuinness’ case, is that he was sending young men and women out to kill and die for a united Ireland which he knew was unattainable, while the British did what they could to ensure he stayed alive and in a position of power.

Four Shots hones in on McGuinness’s role in the killing of Frank Hegarty. Hegarty was recruited as a British agent in 1980 and, six years later, was whisked out of Derry when it became apparent his cover was blown.

While he was away, McGuinness repeatedly visited Hegarty’s mother Rose and assured her that her son would be left alone if he returned. He did return and a few weeks later met by appointment senior IRA figures.

His body was found on the other side of the border, his eyes taped, gunshot wounds to his head. Subsequently, MI5 shut down a criminal investigation into McGuinness for the murder as the police honed in on him. The IRA leader had to be protected.

Four Shots in the Night is chilling and brings home the reality that, for the upper echelons of both the British security services and the Provos, all those at the frontline were pawns to be moved around, their lives expendable, in order to bring the masters to a point of winning the chess game.

A lighter, yet somehow darker, world is evoked in one of the novels of the year, Kevin Barry’s The Heart In Winter. 

It’s set in Butte, Montana, in the 1890s, yet is inherently Irish in its pitch and tone. The main protagonist is Irishman Tom Rourke, who sings the immigrant song of chasing dreams through a haze of mind altering drugs — including alcohol.

It’s also a love story amidst the chaotic West, but is told with Barry’s usual calling cards of dark humour and wild narrative. Above all, it’s the writing that lifts it up, confirming the author as one of the best to emerge from this island in recent decades.

Did I say three books? There is a fourth that must be noted and that is Arthur Mathews’s Walled In By Hate — Kevin O’Higgins, His Friends and Enemies. It wears its considerable research lightly and gives a fresh perspective on a man whom history has not always treated kindly. Most definitely worth a read. The business of 2025 begins in a few days. A few deep breaths and off we go again. Happy New Year.