For some time now, I have found it hard to get rid of the nagging thought that Ireland has been taken over by beings from outer space, writes Fintan O'Toole.
The notion has the advantage of explaining much that is otherwise inexplicable. The way, when Bertie Ahern speaks off the cuff, there is always the haunting sense that something is being lost in translation from a strange language with a whole different syntax. The way Charlie McCreevy appears to lack the capacity for basic human feelings, like being upset by distressed old people having to lie for days on trolleys in hospital corridors. The mysterious appearance and disappearance of money into and out of the bank accounts of some senior Fianna Fáil politicians. All those "bogus non-residents". Without having all the details yet, I think the outlines of the truth are beginning to emerge. The key to the story is the Blasket Islands, and State documents released last week under the 30 year-rule fill in a crucial part of the jigsaw.
We already knew that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Blaskets, then home to a small Gaelic-speaking fishing community were invaded by so-called scholars from abroad. Posing as linguists and folklorists, they urged the people to write detailed accounts of their lives, giving us the books of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Tomás and Seán Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers and her son Micheál Ó Guiheen. Innocent scholarship or a cleverly concealed exploratory trip, gathering extensive data on Irish civilisation? Is it mere co-incidence that, in 1956, the remaining human population is moved off the Blaskets, leaving the islands empty? The evidence of what happens next is well-concealed, but there is an extraordinary document in the files released last week. It reveals that in 1973, an American space scientist, Gary Hudson, approached the IDA and the Irish Consulate in Chicago with an idea. He said he was acting on behalf of a group whose members wished to remain anonymous, one of whom had "walked on the moon".
The group planned to take over Inishnabro, a Blasket island adjoining Charles Haughey's Inishvickillane, as a launch pad for spacecraft. Hudson was brought to Ireland by Bord Fáilte and got an "enthusiastic" response from local officials in the south-west.
The one member of Hudson's secretive consortium who is named in the papers is Sir Fred Hoyle. Hoyle, who died in 2001, was a leading English astrophysicist of the mid-20th century, who contributed significantly to the development of radar and to theories of the evolution of stars. He was also, however, a popular science fiction novelist. One of his novels, Ossian's Ride, appeared at an interesting time. It was published in 1959, the first year of the globalisation of the Irish economy, but is set in 1970.
The narrator, Sherwood, a young English mathematician is summoned by what appears to be British Intelligence and sent on a mission to penetrate the headquarters of ICE, the Industrial Corporation of Eire, a fictionalised version of the IDA. The nature of ICE is explained to Sherwood: "ICE came into being some twelve years ago. A small group of very able scientists approached the government of Eire with what seemed an entirely straightforward proposition. Their proposal was to establish an industry for the extraction of a range of chemicals from the organic material in peat." ICE sets up in south-west Ireland and invents the contraceptive pill, which it apparently manufactures from turf. It switches from chemistry to physics and invents the thermo-nuclear reactor. Ireland becomes an industrial, and potentially a military superpower. The old world powers need to know what is going on, and Sherwood is sent as a spy. He finds out that ICE is developing fabulous new technologies and transforming the Irish countryside. He penetrates deeper into its territory and discovers that its holy of holies, the inner sanctum where the head scientists are based and from which they organise their futuristic enterprise to make Ireland the centre of the modern world, is Inishvickillane.
The Inishvickillane-based architects of ICE, are, as Sherwood ultimately discovers, aliens who have taken human form. They came to the Blaskets from a distant, imploding planet, bringing with them the knowledge accumulated by their vastly more advanced civilisation. They took over human bodies but transferred into them their own extraterrestrial minds.
Fools that we were, we took it all as fantasy, when obviously the great astro-physicist was trying to give us a warning and suggest that we take action before it was too late.
Hoyle's involvement in the 1973 plans to build a launch pad for space rockets beside Inishvickillane was obviously a desperate effort to provide us with the means to send the aliens back where they came from. But of course, the plan was nobbled. An unsigned memo in the file from an unnamed government official recommends that "we should not waste too much time" on the Blaskets space plan, and dismisses it as science fiction. The author, I've no doubt, was one of Them. Hoyle's attempt to save us was blocked and it was only a matter of time before the takeover would be complete.