Fintan explains the language of politics. Gee, thanks Fintan

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Fintan O’Toole is in possession of the biggest brain in Ireland. At regular intervals, that jumbo-size intellect is seen in his Irish Times  columns, explaining to us how to understand  the world that would otherwise bother and bewilder us. There’s a prime example in today’s Irish Times.

It’s headed ‘Sinn Féin may reject commemorating the Normans, but there are some suspiciously Saxon names in its ranks’. (Never let it be said that  Irish Times missed out on a snappy headline). Fintan starts by quoting  SF TD. Aengus Ó Snodaigh  

“We Irish know well enough the legacy of William’s successors invading and subjugating Ireland in the name of his English crown, with Strongbow ushering in the 900 years of occupation, with the North still under the descendants of William the Conqueror’s Crown.”  With this as his spring-board, Fintan’s massive brain goes after any and all of Ireland’s republican or nationalist heroes and is hugely ironic about the need to purge Irish history of those with Norman names.

For example, Charles Stewart Parnell’s antecedents would have come from Normandy,  Wolfe Tone’s name derives from the Norman lordship of De Tosny, Bobby Sands can be traced to William de Sandes or Walter de la Sonde, who established themselves as landowners in Surrey in Anglo-Norman times. And “Gerry Adams hardly bears a name redolent of Gaeldom’.

Maybe Fintan’s massive brain took a blow before writing today’s column, or maybe he was thinking of something else, but there are at least three major flaws in his overblown column.

The first is that he equates surname origins (Norman, Anglo-Saxon, etc,) with people’s political identity. This is what’s known as the ‘genetic fallacy’, where ideas and values are judged by their supposed ancestry rather than by merit. Wolfe Tone, Pearse, or Sands weren’t “less Irish” because of their surnames — Irish national identity is cultural, political, and chosen, not biologically determined by names.

But head down, Fintan ploughs manfully on into the bog of what’s known as ‘false binaries’. Modern Irish culture (language, law, religion, literature, music) is the product of multiple layers of influence — Gaelic, Norse, Norman, English, Scottish, European, global. In short, Fintan’s whole column rests on the notion of “true Irishness” belonging only to Gaels, erasing centuries of integration and denies the reality that nations are always culturally mixed.

Towards the end, Fintan raps Aengus’s knuckles for using the term “We Irish”,  because…Well, because some far-right nutters have used it. This is known as the Daft as a Brush error in logic.

Of course, it’s possible that Fintan is giving his Brain free rein for a tongue-in-cheek romp. If so, he really should have told us, otherwise we’ll be left as intellectual pygmies, dwarfed by events and not knowing a thing about anything.