Fergus Finlay: We need to recognise the recent acts of hate for what they truly are
Rally The Staff To Library Minihane Solidarity Who Of Lgbt+ Books City Support Abuse In Fórsa Denis Picture: Over Were Cork Subjected
You need a lot of hate in your heart to attack a library, or to destroy books.
The Nazis set up student unions in the early 1930s, and encouraged a national campaign of burning books that were considered “un-German”. It was motivated by an ideology built on hatred of “the other”. Everyone knows where that hatred went in the end.
Let me tell you something about the Cork City Library.
I went through a short period of loneliness in my life. I was 16, living in digs with my father in Cork, and a stranger in a new school. Pres Cork it was, and I joined it in sixth year. It was far more competitive than the school I had breezed through for the previous five years, so there was work to be done.
And Cork is one of those places where it’s not always easy to make friends — they take a while to size you up. (I did eventually make friends that are still friends, after too many years to mention.)
So that first term, from September to Christmas, was pretty bleak. I wandered often around the city after school, unwilling to go back to the digs. And it took me a while to realise, fool that I was, that the city centre was built on an island. You think if you followed the river it would bring you in to the centre, but it actually took you further away.
The one street you could always find was the Grand Parade. And down the end of it, near the river, was the Cork City Library.
The first time I went in there I felt completely at home. I remember it as a series of dark cool rooms, with comfortable desks and a quiet staff, mostly of women, who could answer, it seemed, any question I could dream up. It felt like one of those instinctively welcoming places, and almost more than anywhere else I can remember it helped me to settle down after a difficult period.
In later years I came to value libraries even more. I knew and (indirectly) worked with dozens of kids whose reading skills — and whose joy in reading — had been affected by what are called social and emotional factors. Kids who had grown up in difficult circumstances and missed out on one of the great joys of life. Watching the face of a little boy or girl who had mastered the skill of reading for the first time was intensely joyful, and introducing kids like that to libraries was a unique pleasure.
Naturally, not a single one of them was ever turned away or denied help.
That is the unique thing about libraries. They never turn anyone away. Ever.
We have legislation in Ireland that forbids discrimination on all sorts of grounds. From time immemorial libraries have never needed such legislation. Making people welcome is their job.
Libraries, and librarians, don’t just transform young lives. They offer shelter, comfort, growth, even warmth to older people, poorer people, lonely people.
Which is why attacking a library, or intimidating library staff, is a particularly vicious act of hate.
It’s happened a few times now, in Cork and then in Tralee. So called “protestors” have invaded LGBT+ events in the libraries or attacked LGBT+ books.
They have forced the Cork City Library to close several times for fear of violence or damage, and that has never happened in the proud history of an immensely valuable piece of Cork’s public realm.
If the target of these hate acts is really the libraries, then the motivation is a desire for censorship. Literary censorship was a blight on this country for decades after the foundation of the State.
Not only did it mean that Irish people were deprived of great literature in those years, but it was part of a wider and deeper oppression.
Those were the years where the relationship between Church and State was one of subservience, when abuse of children happened with impunity, when intolerance was part of daily life.
If the aim of these protests, and whatever movement is behind them, is a return to censorship, it has to be resisted everywhere. The changes that have happened in my lifetime, changes that have transformed Ireland from a dark and oppressive into an open and more welcoming place, are historically valuable.
But of course, it’s not the libraries that are the real target. The right-wing groups behind these outbursts of hate are really targeting gay and transgender people and anyone dealing with a gender issue.
They do it in part because of old-fashioned bigotry. There was a time in Ireland, and we all know that, when having a child out of wedlock was the great sin. There was a time when it took enormous courage to assert that you were gay. There was a time when people whose marriages had irretrievably broken down would have no second chance.
Except in all cases, they would all be the subject of gossip (and that would be the least that would happen). Ireland was The Valley of the Squinting Windows in those days. The ultimate irony of that time was that Brinsley MacNamara wrote a novel of that name, describing precisely those attitudes, his hometown reacted by boycotting his father’s business and having a ritual burning of the book.
But the deeper underlying motivation goes way beyond bigotry. Libraries in Ireland have made it their business to provide safe spaces for LGBT+ people and the literature they seek out. It’s because of a simple commitment to diversity. That’s where the hatred comes from.
And it’s growing. Slowly, incrementally, and in all sorts of different ways. The politics of hate has arrived in Ireland, and it is manifest.
A couple of months ago a young schoolboy was savagely beaten by some classmates — and the assault put online — because he seemed different to them. I wrote a piece here about the historic experience of sexual violence endured by Irish women, and it was greeted by a torrent of messages asserting that all of it was caused by foreign immigrants.
We are constantly reminded about the protests against asylum seekers, protest often fuelled by hate and fear mongers.
Nowadays, the principal scapegoats appear to be people who want to celebrate a different identity, or even want to establish what identity they have. It has always seemed to me to be a basic human instinct, and therefore a natural human right, to be who you want to be, as long as that doesn’t damage anyone else. Pride celebrations, and the assertion of identity, deserve to be celebrated.
There is only one word for an ideology that wants to attack the identity of other people. It doesn’t matter whether that identity is based on gender, colour, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Seeking to scapegoat identity and change it into something to be hated is an age-old tactic. When it’s coupled with violence and intimidation, the only appropriate word is fascism.
Fascism is here, among us. We can’t minimise it by calling it intolerance or bigotry. Ignore it, play it down, and it will continue to fester and grow. We need to call it by its name.