In tiny monastic communities, where not a word has been exchanged for 200 years, the silences have become positively acrimonious. Poor Clares who once bathed the foreheads of the doomed and whispered sweet consolations of a paradise ahead now anoint them with vinegar and hiss curses into their ears. Members of the Simon Community withdraw the soup from the trembling lips of the homeless and strip their few remaining clothes from them before they jeeringly depart.
Here we are again at that old familiar pastime: as Brendan Behan once described it, the first item on any republican agenda is the split. But the split, of course, is not a republican thing, but an Irish thing; and great "whose-side-are-you-on?" divisions have occurred so often in Irish life over the centuries that we must conclude they are a national characteristic.
Primary targets
These splits, these great popular chasms, might in part explain some of the vaster events in Irish history - the 1641 rebellion and the 1798 rebellion were not against simple "foreigners", but against neighbours. The primary targets for the 1916 Rising were Irish soldiers and policemen, and much the same can be said for the "Anglo-Irish" war, in which the majority of victims of both Crown, loyalist and IRA violence were Irish people.
That tragedy did not end in peace, but in a split of another kind, between Collins and de Valera, and a civil war of surpassing awfulness, followed by a division in Irish life which lasted in the body politic for at least two generations.
But that division merely echoed divisions which had gone on before. The Young Irelanders hated Daniel O'Connell more than they did the union. The Catholic Church and the clericalist wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party wanted to see Parnell destroyed more than they wished to see Home Rule. And the 1916 Rising, and the 1918 Sinn Fein election victory, were motivated more by a loathing of Redmond's Nationalists than by a desire to see a united Irish republic.
Hatred is a mighty thing. It destroyed O'Connell, Parnell, Redmond and Collins. It exhausts nations, empties their treasuries, and culls their young; yet fortunately, not all our divisions are quite so vile. Often enough, when there is no mood for war, they are like the mock fight at Scarva, socialised public re-enactments of our appetite for division.
Charles Haughey provided a prime example of that. He was the focal point of Irish divisiveness for an entire generation. He, and Irish politics generally, were no strangers to the notion of a consensus-free polity, in which no core values seemed to bind all the participants in political life. Hostility was all. Small differences were seized on, magnified, exulted in, and made badges of honour.
Faction fight
In other words, it was the culture of the faction fight: the Wards and the McDonaghs elevated to the national stage. So when the McCarthy-Keane faction fight erupted, we were culturally and psychologically prepared for it. We knew how to take sides, to break open the armouries and distribute the pikestaffs and the broadswords. Trench-digging came naturally to us; we instinctively knew how to semaphore differences and to marshal improvised armies. Our guerilla instincts erupted.
The Irish football supporter who said on the radio recently that he would be supporting the Cameroons on Saturday was merely echoing ancestral Irish voices which chose failure above compromise. Similar voices of purism rejoiced at Parnell's downfall, cheered the death of Collins, and even conspired to extend the writ of the Third Reich to Ireland.
For such as him and them, if perfection is not achievable, then nihilism is preferable: the destruction of all more desirable than partial success. These are absolutists whom conciliation disgusts and moderation offends; and occasionally, the mood of national vehemence in Ireland made such nihilism extremely influential.
Not now, however; but we still know how to divide, and be angry. The McCarthy-Keane split on the far side of the world was followed almost instantly in Ireland, as if the fissiparity were dormant in our DNA like a fault in granite: the slightest tap with a hammer, and the country neatly divided in two. There is now barely a nonagenarian Cistercian or a new-born child in Holles Street who does not possess rabbinical powers of talmudic exegesis in the intellectual discipline of Keanology. How soon before a university curriculum, with a degree which sums up the man perfectly: B. Keane?
Arts of healing
But at least now we have finally learnt some of the arts of healing. Most of us know this is a game, and more importantly, know that we were never going to win the World Cup, with or without the greatest player the Republic has ever produced. And regardless of the rights and wrongs of Saipan, that is one central truth which enables most people to retain a certain perspective on this entire affair.
In one sense, we have already had our World Cup triumph. Nothing the Irish team was going to do on the pitch would ever have caused the headlines of the world to so focus on Ireland, even pushing David Beckham's foot onto the births, deaths and marriages pages of the British press. For one brief, shining hour, we were the talk of the footballing world, and not just because of the dispute, but because that world knew that one of the greatest and most dedicated players soccer has produced anywhere might miss the finals.
And hard as it is to see now, whatever happens will soon pass, and be forgotten, and life will continue. As it always does.