Beyond contest, the column of mine which attracted most responses appeared here two weeks after the devastation of the World Trade Centre last September 11th, in which I wrote about the most heartbreaking image I had ever seen: a photograph in a magazine of a man and woman jumping from one of the towers, hand-in-hand, writes John Waters.
I described their descent, speculated about what preceded it and shudderingly considered what might have passed between them in the moments before they jumped and just before they hit the ground. A few local pedants wrote to inform me that it was a "simple" matter of the temperature in the building as the fire reached the height of its frenzy. But most correspondents got the point and expressed their sense of identification, grief, horror and, humblingly, gratitude to me for enabling them to comprehend the event at some more personal level. It moved me greatly that many were from the United States.
Like many others, I had watched the events as they happened in the company of someone I love far more than I am capable of loving a thought, a belief or a political idea, and was overcome by the thought that, with a slightly different spin of the dice, this person might have been plummeting to Ground Zero. I have no doubt that this is why this became for me a life-changing moment. As Camus observed: asked to choose between those we love and even the most refined and beautiful ideas, we will choose the ones we love.
A couple of weeks later I revisited the theme to express a view, based on my new sense of the meaning of things, that Irish neutrality had reached the end of its relevance. My thinking, if I can summarise it at all, was that September 11th had made a luxury of objective moralising about international conflict. In the past, I believed, we had properly reserved our right to stand back from any potential conflict and debate its merits and our responses on the basis of rights and wrongs. September 11th posed a simpler question: whose side are we on?
I'm sorry to put it in such illiberal terms, but if I am sitting on an aeroplane and a turbaned, swarthy man to my right pulls a knife from under his cassock and puts it to the throat of a passing stewardess, then it really doesn't matter that I may agree with him about the Palestinian question or the degeneracy of Western civilisation. He will kill me and my loved ones because of what I am - white, Western and English-speaking - and this means I am with the tall, broad-shouldered man with the crew-cut who is sizing him up from behind. I wrote: "Unless we support the United States against this barbarism, we are not entitled to the protection we will surely need if these agents of evil are not dealt with for good." That remains my view.
The feedback to these ruminations ranks as the most viciously vituperative and personalised I have received. People wrote that I had "disappointed" and "betrayed" them. Some speculated on how much of a backhander I had taken to write what I did. Others decided that I had written it to fall in with the editorial and commercial agenda of The Irish Times.
All this is by way of explaining why I have decided to vote Yes to Nice.
Without allegiance to any organisation or ideology, I have opposed what is known as the European project since it became an issue, and have long defended Irish neutrality against, broadly, the same forces as push us towards integration.
DURING the campaign of the 1992 referendum on the Treaty of Maastricht, I spoke on platforms around Ireland in the company of that late, great gentleman, Raymond Crotty, in a determined though doomed effort to persuade the electorate that this project was ill-advised.
I continue to hold to nearly all my objections to the EU, including that its promoters are arrogant, bullying and no great friends of democracy. But many of these objections acquire a new perspective in the context I have outlined, presenting themselves as capable of correction and reform, once the immediate and, for me, the most definitive argument - that of Irish military neutrality - has shifted out of vision.
Moreover, I have comprehended from the response of my erstwhile fellow travellers to my own sincerely advanced revisionism that arrogance and contempt for free expression are not monopolised by the Euro-bullies. There is increasing evidence of this with every passing day of the Nice Take Two campaign.
There is one other factor. When Raymond Crotty and I urged our fellow citizens to reject Maastricht, we were challenged about the £9 billion we would have to forgo if we allowed our principles to overrule our interests. Could we provide it? We were forced to admit we could not.
For me, Maastricht offered us a choice between, as the Euro-bullies might have it, the shillelagh and the shilling, and we took the shilling. I don't lay claim to the same virtue as many of my journalistic colleagues; but I have, in such matters, one core principle: once bought, you stay bought.