There are people who’d tell you the Irish nationalist/republican psyche has a fracturing factor hard-wired into it. Brendan Behan caught it nicely when he said that at the launch of any new Irish organization or party, the first item on the agenda was always The Split. He has a point but it’s wider than that.
Consider Protestantism. I wouldn’t even begin to try and count the number of different churches – the subscribing, the non-subscribing, the born-again, the non-born-again, the High Church, the Low Church – and so it goes. Ian Paisley was a bit that way. He opted out of his original church and set up his own, he opted out of Official Unionism and founded his own party, he quit the Orange Order and went with some sort of Independent Orange Order. In the end, of course, Ian ended up with at least two daggers protruding from his back. Fracture once more. And although I didn’t see it myself, I have it on good authority that Peter Robinson on TV the other night looked like a man who was about to (i) cry (ii) resign; (iii) do both.
And it’s not just here, if we’re to believe Stephen Collins (no, no relation. I’ve researched it and mercifully we ain’t). He was on RTÉ television earlier today and he announced Irish politics was clearly fracturing, there were so many independents running and being elected in the south. He has a point . Between the Anti-Austerity Party and the People Before Profit Party and the Socialist Party and the …you get the idea. And there are over twenty of them in the Dail, I believe. And as I speak, in Dublin South-West an Anti-Austerity man is giving the Sinn Féin candidate a very very tight race, even though Paddypower had the Shinner as a racing certainty. And over in Roscommon, Fianna Fail was seen as having it pretty much in the bag and behold – an Independent now looks as though he’s going to win.
Is this fracturing good? Well yes and no. It’s good in that it shows people are fed up to their back teeth with governments that promise the earth and deliver sweet damn all. If it shows the southern electorate has finally roused itself from a decades-long sleep, that can’t be bad. But it is bad, insofar as the divide-and-rule principle still holds. If you go in there as a one-man or one-woman party, your influence is going to be limited and you’ll leave no political legacy. Jim Allister might be hailed as the unofficial opposition in Stormont but almost by definition, he’s got no one to take the reins when he finally slides off the horse.
Which is why it’s so important, politically, that people find common ground. Nobody agrees on everything, and you wouldn’t want to go for a drink with a lot of people, but if you can fix on enough things you’re agreed about, you’ll pack a lot more wallop politically than any single voice.
Which is why I’m convinced the wave of independents is, alas, a wave that will peak and then subside, leaving nothing much except a voice of dissent, a cry in the wilderness, and the odd footprint in the sand. Like it or lump it, you’ll go a lot further with a fist than four individual fingers and a thumb.
Jude, was it not the IRA army convention he was speaking of?. No matter, just love Brendan – particularly this gem.
When I returned to Ireland I was informed I’d been court martialed in my absence, found guilty in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence. So I told them they could shoot me in my absence
Could well have been, pretz. Brendan was the original broth of a boy.
The left has always had the same problem Jude. Too many divisive debates within its ranks while the right has been united. As the left argues over dotting The I or crossing the T, the Neo Liberals are all singing off the same hymnsheet and maintaining their hegemony in Irish politics. An odd victory here and there masks this. It’s time we got our heads together and developed a cohesive strategy that hs the agreed objective of replacing the established order with a government that has equality at its heart. It’s not too late to do so but we need to seize the moment now. If we wait we may win many battles but still lose the war.