"The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots," the 19th essayist Sydney Smith once famously said. He would amend his sentiments today as follows: "The moment that the name of the IRA is mentioned, the world seems to bid adieu to common standards, common history and to common sense, and to act with the fatuity of infants and the gullibility of fools," writes Kevin Myers
In last Sunday's Observer Henry McDonald revealed that
Gerry Adams addressed a conference on "religion, conflict and reconciliation" in New York at which Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was among the speakers. But Gerry Adams is the leader of the only organisation in Europe which holds an annual knees-up or goose-step to honour a Nazi collaborator, Sean Russell, at the latter's statue in Dublin. No one else does this. No one. This would be tolerated in no other country. Governments would either ban such demonstrations, or they would be broken up by counter-demonstrators.
But not here. The Sean Russell Nazi-lovers were apparently at their capers again the other day, once again honouring their hero, and of course there was no counter-demonstration, either because most people do not care that we have a bunch of unrepentant Nazi-loving goons in our midst, or because they are scared. A bit of both, I'd guess.
Consider the supine passivity towards the IRA by much of the Irish people, a section of whom actually elected Mary Lou McDonald to the European Parliament even though she had been present at a we-revere-Sean-Russell rally. (I wonder: does she regale the MEPs with her own version of the Nazi anthem "Horst Wessel", now retitled "Sean Russell"?) So it's hardly surprising that there's no counter-demonstration, not any attempt by Dublin Corporation to remove this abominable statue to an abominable man.
But what on earth was Elie Wiesel doing associating with Gerry Adams? It was Wiesel who coined the phrase, "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all". Was he not doing both in the company of a man whose organisation yearly honours a Nazi collaborator?
Was he not associating with a man whose father, as a member of the IRA, actually lit bonfires on the Black Mountain to guide Nazi bombers to destroy Belfast in 1941? Was he not associating with a man who repudiates or disavows neither of these deeds?
Maybe Elie Wiesel is a little old to know such things - but surely he gets advice from someone or other. Could the Israeli government or the Simon Weisenthal Centre not inform him of the political pedigree of these people ?
Still, we have to congratulate that grisly confection, the Clinton couple, with their utterly perfect timing for their conference on "religion, conflict and reconciliation", as Orange thugs tore apart the capital city of the province they profess to love. "Conflict Resolution" has been the political art-form in vogue around the world for the past 15 years or so, during which we have had Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Chechnya, the West Bank and Iraq, and of course the cult of suicide bomber. So much for conflict resolution.
The truth is that genuine conflicts are not resolved. They are won or they die down of their own accord. Human agencies are incapable of peacefully interfering where genuine conflict exists and creating enduring institutions which permanently bring opposite sides together. Indeed, the very act of "resolution" institutionalises the conflict. Extremes are bribed to be in government: therefore, why not be an extreme? Thus Sinn Féin-IRA was put into government and continued to behave as it always did, smashing kneecaps, robbing banks, plotting murders, and so forth, just as Orangemen continued to behave as they have always done, marching wherever they weren't wanted.
You cannot put a cat and a dog in a bag and expect them to make apple pie.
The hoary old example of conflict resolution is South Africa, where the conflict was not resolved, but won, by the majority black community. The white man stays on in South Africa with the permission of the majority; but that permission could be revoked at any time, as it has been in that other model of conflict-resolution, Zimbabwe.
In the North, the tribal difference has been deepened and prolonged by the unprincipled Belfast Agreement. This particular IRA campaign is over, but the war declared in the proclamation of 1916 is not. Yet for years we have been treated regularly to inane RTÉ and newspaper reports declaring that major IRA decommissioning is imminent, followed by months of non-decommissioning, followed by fresh headlines declaring that major IRA decommissioning is imminent, followed by et cetera, et cetera.
So of course the IRA knows that the rules which apply to others do not apply to it. Everywhere else, Nazi sympathisers and their celebrants are excoriated, but not if they're Sinn Féin/IRA, in which case they might find themselves publicly cosying up to some Holocaust survivors. Everywhere else, people who cross the globe to train narco-terrorists in Colombia are utterly reviled in their home countries, but not if they're IRA.
Everywhere else, fascist terrorists who murder ambassadors, or blow up old people and children in a boat, or take civilians off a bus and massacre them, are objects of contempt. But in our
wretched country we have degraded democracy in order to put such vile people with their filthy practices into government.
This is rip-off Ireland all right, but in principles, not prices: the original Hobbesian nightmare.