Mick Clifford: Plenty of room left on the middle path

His latest book, Can Ireland Be One?, is in some respects a meditation of the question in the title, but also serves as a request to give him a good, solid reason why he should vote for a united island. In this, he is starting from a different point than that espoused by those most eager for a border poll.

Unification in his world might be a good idea but it needs some teasing out.

For him and, one suspects, for a small but growing cohort from his background, unification has to be about more than an end in itself.

His tome asks awkward questions and questions old Shibboleths about what passes for nation builders and the building thereof. Daniel O’Connell, a man largely forgotten in contemporary discussions on the island, features prominently as a visionary, and unfashionably, as one who abhorred violence as a means to an end.

“Daniel O’Connell and Padraig Pearse both claimed to speak for the Irish people, but if we define a people according to what they are ready to fight for, it is impossible to conceive of a coherent sense of purpose … O’Connell wanted to speak for Ireland when some of us were defending slavery and some opposing it. Pearse presumed to speak for all of us, when more were about to die in Flanders than in Dublin.”

O’Doherty examines the histories, cultures and people of the two traditions, all the time looking for clues that might suggest any coming together would be a hugely positive development for everybody. That the North was a sectarian state for the first fifty years of its existence is beyond doubt but O’Doherty muses on whether Catholics in the statelet were better off being second-class citizens or part of the majority just over the border.

“Many Catholics, such as my own family, came to Northern Ireland to be better off, to have enhanced job prospects, free healthcare and better housing and welfare benefits. So the argument that we were ditched into conditions worse than those we would have known in the Republic do not stand up.”

New Ireland

So what exactly would this new Ireland look like? O’Doherty doesn’t pretend to know, but he does wonder about the “are we there yet” constituency, including Sinn Féin, which just want the damn thing done.

“The party (Sinn Féin) has adopted and discarded several visions of a united Ireland, from Catholic to socialist, inside and outside the EU, allied to Libya and to Irish America, its one constant being the unification of the island,” he writes.

And therein perhaps lays the conundrum for those in a hurry for a border poll.

They speak of getting stuck into the work to bring about a nation once again, but maybe it’s the wrong line of work they are concentrating on. Hearts and minds like those of O’Doherty are there to be won but they need to be neither cajoled nor lectured to, but persuaded.

His thesis deserves far greater attention in the wake of the polls published in the Irish Times before Christmas which show that we are still a long way from anything approaching consensus on what shape the future should take.

The past is the subject of a compelling account of the civil war in Kerry, Owen O’Shea’s No Middle Path.

Some of the worst atrocities — on both sides  — occurred in Kerry, and as such, it was a microcosm for the sense of madness that appears to have temporarily taken hold in the nascent state for the duration of that conflict.

“The divisions within the IRA in Kerry came swiftly and ran deep,” O’Shea writes. “At the beginning of 1922, the Kerry IRA was organisationally strong than it had been at any time since the end of the War of Independence and was strongly predisposed to resist political compromise.”

O’Shea’s account is even-handed, wears its deep research lightly and is overlain with a fittingly sombre tone. It should be compulsory reading for any generation that takes for granted the imperative of democracy or is inclined to glamourise political violence from any juncture in history.

Hysteria

The New Puritans is a polemic on a modern-day conflict, that of the so-called culture wars. Andrew Doyle is a comedian with roots in Derry who also holds a doctorate in Renaissance poetry from Oxford. His book, subtitled ‘How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World’ uses the Puritans who oversaw the Salem witch trials as an example of the hysteria, he submits, which is being currently wrought by what we might call the authoritarian left.

As Doyle puts it: “The new puritans have eschewed the traditional socialist goals of redressing economic inequality and redistributing wealth and replaced them with an obsessive focus on race, gender and sexuality”.

This is straight to the heart of culture war stuff, including the insistence from his new puritans that there are only binary positions in this conflict. You are with us, or you are with the fascists. And who are the fascists? “In these circles, there is no distinction between the racist, sexist, the homophobe, the transphobe; each designation implies the other. One may as well use the term ‘sinner’ and leave it there.” Doyle’s study is sprinkled with humour and is analytical and timely. One doesn’t have to agree with it fully to recognise he speaks plenty of sense.

During the year, I wrote a couple of pieces that sparked wrath among what might be described as kindred spirits of Doyle’s new puritans. The reaction online was staggering, involving heightened righteous indignation and condemnation, some of it even laden with regret that I can’t see the light.

These people, with the kind of delusion that can infect zealots, really do believe that anybody who deviates from their worldview is defective. As Doyle points out in this tome, they also subscribe to the zealot’s position that debate is not to be countenanced as it might puncture their cherished views. So read it and chuckle and if you’ve any religion yourself, pray for the new puritans because they know not the damage they do to the causes they claim to espouse.

So that was the year that was. The one arriving, as always, brings with it promise. Let’s hope it’s a good one. Happy New Year.