An Irishman's Diary

"Afri" is one of those ghastly little relics from a time when everyone believed in peace man, and lurv, and equality and justice…

"Afri" is one of those ghastly little relics from a time when everyone believed in peace man, and lurv, and equality and justice, and was opposed to war, and hunger, and other things which damaged flowers and children and other living creatures, writes Kevin Myers

It was always enough to bring a Technicolour yawn of diced carrots and half-digested peas to the lips of most right-thinking people. That it is still around says something for the boundless appetite for brainless sanctimony in this country.

Afri's latest piety is "Death from a Distance: the ongoing militarisation of Ireland." To tell you the truth, this misled me for a while. I assumed that Afri had finally had an attack of common sense, and was welcoming the development of a military dimension to the Irish economy. But, no alas, my optimism was misplaced. It was more of the grisly old rodomontade for which far too many of us have such an insatiable appetite.

Afri - which "campaigns for peace and human rights", according to a report in this newspaper, as if this marked it out from all other organisations, which of course campaign for war and oppression - has declared that it has discovered links between EU-funded research in aerospace in Ireland and military projects. But it seems - alas - that this is not the case. The various universities in Limerick, Cork and Galway, have - I hope regretfully - denied that there are military applications to what they do.

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Well, as they fielded the boringly pious enquiries about the implications of their research, they no doubt were fully aware that you cannot create technologies with absolutely no military potential. A whittled stick is a point and four feathers away from being an arrow. A piece of string is a yard of yew away from being a bow. A tin of beans is an angry arm away from being a projectile.

But what is this infatuation with believing that we are a country which has no weaponry, and no need of it? What is this fatuous drivel that somehow we are marked out from the rest of the human race as being above armaments and guns of any kind? When the wind is right, I can hear the steady booms from the Glen of Imaal. That is not the sound of puddings. It is 105 mm mortars on live-firing exercises, and the people being exposed to the real explosive power of genuine munitions are not nurses in training for Africa, or the Riverdance troupe, but soldiers.

Those soldiers are also trained to kill. If they're Rangers, they're trained to kill with their bare hands, with knives, and indeed, with spades if necessary. Ah. Perhaps we should close down our spade-factories. Do we not all know this? And has anyone who so disapproves of armies and guns and the weapons industry ever gone anywhere that has known tyranny, and asked the people there what they thought about Western governments or NATO? The answer is not hard to find. Almost unanimously, former Moscow bloc countries have lined up to join NATO. They know the meaning of oppression; and they know that the only reason why Communism did not stretch all the way across Europe until its ferrous drapes enclosed the western seaboard of Ireland was the armed might of NATO. And for NATO, read the US.

Because without the willpower and the taxpayers' dollars and the weapons systems of the US after 1945, there would not even have been NATO, for Europe has repeatedly refused to pay for the cost of its own defence - and Ireland most pathologically.

This would be bad enough without our pathetic and ceaseless boasting about our not spending much on defence, the arms industry is evil, and aren't we blessed that we never went down the road of militarism, when in fact the sword and shield that are protecting us were paid for in the US and hammered into shape on the forges of Seattle and Burbank.

Yet this cretinous moral superiority so informs our public ethos that Afri's baseless denunciations of our universities for becoming centres of military research are treated as a matter for serious journalistic enquiry, instead of being hurled where they belong, the bin. Once picked up by national papers, the matter was then transformed into a subject of shrill student indignation, with the University of Limerick student newspaper shrieking indignantly that the college was engaged in military projects.

If only it were. And in its own way, it probably is. You cannot erect firewalls around technologies or indeed any human endeavour, and on this side there is peace, on that war.

The internet was originally dreamt up as a means of enabling USAF Strategic Air Command to help turn the Soviet Union into a car-park. The spin on the dam-buster's bouncing bomb was based on a slow-bowler's wrist-action as he delivered a googly.

The chemicals that put the bang in bombs were originally invented just for fireworks. Oh yes, and chaplains bless tanks.

Sad, isn't it? But have all those people who think we should be an island of peace read Genesis, especially the bit about Cain? Mankind is a violent species, and he who doesn't defend his borders and his beliefs will sooner or later find the borders crossed by armoured columns, and his political systems forcibly exchanged for someone else's.

This is a fact of life as old as the bow, and as true as the arrow. Only in Ireland is it possible to declare otherwise, with a straight face and a bleeding, sanctimonious heart.