There’s an intellectual insecurity to the Irish ruling class, its political parties, its media, its blind followers. Driven by despair, it needs little encouragement, enjoys company and this week Catherine Connolly’s defence of self-determination was all it took.
Nine days after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, George W Bush addressed not just Congress but the people of the US. "Every nation,” he said, “in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Thoughtful people, those secure in themselves, few in number though they were in the early years of the so-called war on terror, rejected that binary. Almost 15 years later, here in Ireland, they're fewer still among our leaders.
Catherine Connolly recognised this in a chat she had with The Ditch in Doyle’s last month. “We’ve reduced the world to them and us. We’re really back to that: them and us. We’re back to you’re with us or agin us. And it’s frightening, actually, to watch it on a daily basis,” she said.
She gave an interview to the British Broadcasting Corporation two days ago. She said things that brought a congregation of denouncement. This is what she said.
Asked if she agrees with Keir Starmer’s call for regime change in Gaza in exchange for Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state, she said, “Hamas is part of the fabric of Palestinian people.” Pressed, in a piece of absurd theatre, she said, “I don’t think it’s up to Keir Starmer to make that statement,” invoking Ireland’s colonial past and present, saying, “I come from Ireland, a history of colonisation and I would be very wary of telling a sovereign people how to run their country. The Palestinians must decide in a democratic way who they want to lead their country.”
Don’t be saying that about (Sir) Keir Starmer!
A statement of fact – that Hamas exists and is embedded in the structures of Palestinian civil society – and a straightforward condemnation of western intervention angered a class that’s never served Irish sovereignty, let alone Palestinian humanity.
Responding to Connolly’s lèse-majesté against Starmer, Micheál Martin, the Muhammad Ali of slíbhínism, agreed with the British. "There should be unequivocal condemnation of Hamas if we're trying to chart a future for a Palestinian state, with guarantees for Israel into the future. Hamas is not that option,” he said. Simon Harris talked tough. "Let me be really clear here at the United Nations today: Ireland, the Irish government, the people of Ireland have no truck with Hamas, no time for Hamas. They need to get off the stage and that is the position, end of,” he said. Alan Kelly, who still claims left status, said, “For me it is very simple” – get away – “Hamas is a terrorist organisation. The EU has agreed that Hamas is a terrorist organisation.”
Sovereignty is simple, just not in the way Kelly says.
This one is dedicated to the Raytheon 9
In 1979 at the UN, where Martin and Harris this week advocated foreign intervention, Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop spoke of how and why the west disavows southern agency. “These same reactionary elements,” referring to the interests driving the international arms race, “have been pushing the United States government to reintroduce Cold War principles and to create new or strengthen old military pacts, alliances, arrangements or manoeuvres aimed at serving the interests of expansionism and imperialism and/or of trampling upon the struggles of the people against fascist methods and the suppression of democratic rights.” The US enabled and endorsed his assassination four years later.
Rapper Lowkey, who we’re chatting with in Dublin tomorrow, in Hand On Your Gun, asked, “Who says what is and what isn't legitimate resistance?” Not Micheál Martin and Simon Harris anyway. Lowkey named the reactionary elements Bishop spoke of at the UN. “This is for the colonisers turned bomb-providers / Take this beef all the way back to Oppenheimer” and he identified how financial capital is entangled in war, how arms companies wield influence comparable to, if not exceeding, nation states. “Next in my scope is Lockheed Martin / They will tell you when the bombs need blastin'.” The song’s second verse recognised heroes of the Irish anti-war movement who simply said no. “This one is dedicated to the Raytheon 9.”
This doesn’t suit Irish media.
The subheading of the Irish Times analysis of Connolly’s comments was of George W Bush thought, reading, “This candidate of the left will be required not to equivocate.” Pick your side. And make it simple. Offering direction, Pat Leahy wrote, “But there is a broader point that the Connolly campaign will have to address. To win, she will have to extend her appeal beyond the left and into the centre.”
I’ll try to avoid making inferences where I shouldn't but it’s hard to take this advice, for Connolly to defang her campaign, to deradicalise and anti-intellectualise, sincerely given the politics of the Irish Times and its place in Irish public life. Leahy wrote of People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy decision to go on the attack. Murphy “accused the mainstream media of a ‘smear campaign’ against Connolly because they are – unwittingly or otherwise – aligned with the interests of the ‘establishment’. It wasn’t the first time many of those present had heard the critique, delivered with customary vehemence.” With customary vehemence or not, is Murphy wrong?
Connolly didn’t take questions from the media at her launch in Dublin this week. The man from the (Irish) Daily Mail was upset, including in a tweet the sorry tale of how an attendee told him, after he tried to insert himself, “That’s not the fucking format.” His paper went front page: “I want to be President but I will not be taking any questions at my launch!” with the ! and all, calling it a "media storm". Why should Catherine Connolly take questions from him at her launch? It wasn’t the fucking format. (And why should Heather Humphreys take questions from The bastard Ditch?)
This is a British newspaper whose executive editor pretended he thought, so he could get on TV, that Social Democrats TD Eoin Hayes should be sacked over a 16-year-old blackface photo. The left, having already made up our minds on Hayes, mostly rolled our eyes. This is what you’re dealing with. Like Tom Brady said, “Fuck ‘em all. Said that for a long time. They aren’t pulling for us anyways.”
‘Pernicious and misleading newspaper garbage’
James Connolly, considering the question of What Is A Free Nation, “one which possesses absolute control over all its own internal resources and powers”, said Irish media opposed this vision. The “pernicious and misleading newspaper garbage upon which the Irish public has been fed for the past twenty-five years”, Connolly wrote, had, intentionally, “confused” the people of Ireland. “Our Irish daily newspapers have done all that human agencies could do to confuse the public mind upon the question of what the essentials of a free nation are, what a free nation must be, and what a nation cannot submit to lose without losing its title to be free,” he wrote. It was a quarter-century of “misleading newspaper garbage” for Connolly back in 1916. Tack on a century.
Today Irish media and their public representatives try to tell you self-determination isn’t essential to a free nation. But freedom is either absolute or it’s something else. Former Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, writing to his wife from prison, said, “The only thing which we wanted for our country is the right to a worthy life, to dignity without pretence, to independence without restrictions.” Complicit western imperialists also celebrated his assassination. His words apply to Palestine. They apply to Ireland.
What unites the insecurity, the surrender to simplicity and deference to power, that presents in Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and their media, is a spiritual malaise, a despair, which Søren Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death. They have each other, happy, to a point. “He now acquires some little understanding of life, he learns to imitate the other men, noting how they manage to live, and so he too lives after a sort,” he wrote.
Catherine Connolly broke some of their taboos this week. That was unacceptable. In half-free Ireland, hearing plain support for a true sovereignty risks not only awakening this country, but embarrassing us in front of those our leaders consider our betters. Relying on inference, mistaking this for implication, two words so often confused not just semantically but practically, our political and media class came together in censure.
Maybe it’s really them and us.
