It was an inauspicious start for bridge-building, to judge from the journalists invited to the presidential inauguration: Niall O'Dowd and Nell McCafferty are both of what one might call the nationalist school of journalism, to which academy our new President unashamedly belongs. Building bridges with those on the same side of the river as you is no great feat, requires no tolerance, involves no risk. The befriending of the foe, to achieve amity with those you personally and politically detest is surely the purpose behind the bridge building metaphor, else it is meaningless.
It was unquestionably a triumphant day for Irish nationalism. How generous is that nationalism in victory? Were those who have been vocally aligned against Irish nationalism considered as possible guests? Was the name Eoghan Harris ever contemplated? Conor Cruise O'Brien? Or is bridge building only to be done with those already regarded as being amenable to a bit of pontification, otherwise, scram? That looks like a pretty unadventurous piece of engineering.
Christopher Logue poem
Still, the Christopher Logue poem was a nice touch, for a number of reasons, not least its pontifical appositeness. But there are other connections, for the name Logue has resonances in Northern Ireland. It is a Derry name, and according to MacLysaght comes from the Irish, meaning devotee of St Mogue. The best-known holder of the name is the former SDLP representative Hugh Logue, whose cousin, like Hugh a Catholic, was one of the few RUC men murdered by Protestant paramilitaries in the North.
Christopher Logue wrote his words in 1968 for a festival in honour of the 50th anniversary of the death of the French poet Apollinaire. Apollinaire did not die naturally, but of war wounds, on November 9th, 1918, two days before the guns fell silent. That same day, revolution broke out in Berlin and the Kaiser abdicated.
Bolshevism was from that day no longer a Russian phenomenon but a world force, and a new world order was being formed. We are emerging from that world only now.
That world was a polar world. The creation of political totalitarianism by the Bolsheviks created a moral order throughout the world, and throughout the imaginations of the human race, in which there was always enmity and the possibility of war. The fear of totalitarian communism sustained right-wing regimes throughout the world. It is no coincidence that the quasi-fascist regimes of South America and the apartheid regime of South Africa collapsed within half a decade of the collapse of communism.
And perhaps the intellectual and psychological influence of world bi-polarity helped the IRA to create its own bizarre little bipolar world, with it being the force of virtue against the evils of unionism and the British. For it is important to remember that the self-image of the IRA is quite unlike what those outside it might expect: IRA volunteers see themselves as reluctant takers of human life, patriots who are merely opposing injustice and state criminality.
International responses
That we might think this is utter drivel is irrelevant. The IRA has lived in a greater bipolar world in which the great powers of the world were aligned against one another, and a resort to arms to resolve differences was proper and logical. The IRA merely imitated locally the international response to international political differences. It is certainly not the first time that Irish political militarists have imitated events elsewhere. The 1916 Rising was merely a domestic replica of the Western Front.
That universal bi-polarity is now over virtually everywhere. People are coming to recognise the intensely local and particular nature of their political problems, which had hitherto been presented as responses to the good/evil vision of the world. That vision - more a mirage - was largely created by the bipolar lens of the communism/capitalism argument. That argument is over. It was won by the capitalists.
But it began internationally the day that the Kaiser abdicated and Apollinaire died of wounds in Paris. Apollinaire was a true European and not French at all. Born in Rome, half Italian, half Polish, his real name was Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky, and two of his lines, written in 1912, are hauntingly prescient of the bugles of war which were shortly to echo over Europe: "Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse, Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent."
Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies amid the wind. But in Ireland the memories did not die but rather caused to die. They killed. For nearly 30 years we have allowed our present to be governed by the mangled and distorted memories of our tribes. Almost mirroring a world moral order which was governed by the threat of force, this island has been home to a barbarous admixture of righteous violence and intense tribal memory.
Vanishing heresy
The larger context for that violence has been removed. Nuclear silos are empty sockets around the world. The greatest news of the week did not come from Dublin Castle, but from Peking, where the two great powers emerging from the long night of totalitarian communism at long last settled their border dispute. We have now entered the era of negotiated final settlements.
Everywhere across this globe, conscripts are going home. War is a vanishing heresy, a barbarity which belongs to an age of cannibalism and infanticide. The moral justification for a resort to arms is now gone over almost the entire world. Such imperfections and injustices as exist are endurable. Does the Nation Resurgent which was so evident in Dublin Castle acknowledge, to a man and woman, that no matter what happens in Stormont, there cannot be a justified return to war? Let us hope so. But I doubt it.