It is one those truths which you learn at a certain stage in life that there's little justice in this world, that some people inexplicably succeed way beyond their natural talents, and there's no point in complaining. Allow yourself a small smile and get on with it.
Yet it was hard indeed to keep a small smile on the face when I saw that Tim Pat Coogan's book Wherever Green is Worn - The Story of the Irish Diaspora is being republished in paperback. For without exception, it is the worst book about Ireland that I have ever read, an execrably written and rambling farrago of errors in which just about the only things that are crystal clear are an obsession with national victimhood and the indefatiguably buffoonish egotism of the author. ("At a dinner given in my honour. . .)
The writing
First, the writing: "Curiously, although Tom McEnery never heard McDonnell speak of Collins, for some reason which he cannot fully explain, when Tom came to to do his thesis he chose Michael Collins, not knowing that Mick McDonnell whose activities he was researching for it was the kindly old Irishman of his boyhood, at whose funeral Mass he had been an altar boy."
Here's more of same: "Sabina Hertz who lectures at the Celtic Department of the University of Berlin told me that from one hundred students, attendances had dwindled to eighteen. Sabina attributes the lack of funding to the Germanisation of German society in which Celts don't fit."
Did you like that? You did? Good! Here comes another: "As someone who was close to the subterranean negotiations of those days I can testify to the fact that if the views of senior Dublin politicians and diplomats in the Irish Peace Process at the time had been made known, the classrooms of New York would have resonated to a view of a London toad under the harrow of a Unionist plough which would have occupied the letter writing efforts not only of Ambassador Kerr, but of the entire embassy for considerably longer than did the Pataki affair."
Or this: "Drugs spread, young males suicide increases, and, fuelled by a particularly wooden leadership-lacking Government, inertia on the asylum-seekers problem, xenophobia and and downright racism have reared their heads towards immigrants seeking a new life in Ireland."
Vauxhall riots
Or this, on Vauxhall in London in 1909: "These riots were a mirror image of events that subsequently befell in Belfast. Protestants afterwards expressed strong feelings of betrayal that the police attacked them. `Their' police and `their' order had been directed at them instead of at the idolatrous papists. As in Northern Ireland, the police, with good reason, were often regarded by the Irish Catholics as the legal arm of Orangeism, but, as in Ireland, when conscientious officers attempted to administer the law impartially, the meat in the sandwich syndrome took over."
Oh, dear me. A mirror image of something that hasn't happened, a comparison with a state which hasn't come into existence, Orange aspersions on a London police force which in those days recruited strongly from Irish Catholics, all concluding with a metaphor of dismal ineptitude - and with more to come. For the author's apparent ignorance of history is at times morbidly compelling, rather like watching a drunken ice-skater repeatedly fall on his bottom.
"From the time of Henry II in the 12th century a succession of British monarchs found themselves engaged in `putting down rebellions in Ireland.' " Calling Henry II, son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Maine, and Duke of Normandy, "British" when "Britishness" was not to be invented for another half a millennium is the sort of witless gibberish Christian Brothers used to rant a couple of generations ago. To see it being reiterated by Tim Pat Coogan doesn't surprise me in the least, but to see a British publisher in the year 2001 provide the vehicle for the regurgitation of such bilge passes all belief.
"By 1770 Vatican diplomacy had come to recognise that the policy of attempting to control the Irish Church through Catholic monarchs in England, initiated under Nicholas Breakspear, was ceasing to pay dividends." So the smart lads in the Vatican had finally twigged, had they, that William of Orange and Mary of the so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 were not Catholics? And nor was their son George I? Nor his son George II? And perhaps by 1770 the Vatican had heard of the '45 Jacobite Rising against the Protestant Hanoverians?
After all, Charles Stuart had left Rome to start it, and if the Pope was in any doubt about its outcome, Charles Stuart could have informed Pope Clement XIII when they met in 1766. (Well Charlie, what do you think of my policy of controlling Ireland through Catholic monarchs in England? Pretty cunning, what?)
National self-pity
There are over 700 pages of such ill-informed vapouring. And what's more unendurable than his wearying conceit is the national self-pity that he peddles. Taking the index as a guide, it is surely telling that there are four pages which refer to the injustices done to the Birmingham Six and 28 to the Prevention of Terrorism Act. However, only three pages are given over to the Birmingham bombings themselves, and though this atrocity (his word) took the lives of, he admits, "21 innocent civilians" - are there any other kind? - the account here deals almost entirely with subsequent Irish victimhood.
Wherever Green is Worn. Dreary rubbish about the Irish diaspora. Available now in paperback.