The Nice and the Good

Maria Farrell has a wonderful, warm appreciation of the recently deceased Garret Fitzgerald on Crooked Timber. I only ever met the man among crowds, but the picture of a complex and emotionally engaged person that she paints rings very true. The contrast between Fitzgerald and the far less attractive Charles Haughey, who paralleled his career, can drive Fitzgerald into a frame as a kind of plaster saint. As a serious public figure he deserves a more rigorous response. His values and character were very attractive, but his intellectual position and his record as a politician are both questionable.

Fitzgerald was Taoiseach (Prime Minister) for the bulk of the early and middle part of the nineteen-eighties. If anything that period was even more crisis-ridden in Ireland than the present moment and his governments failed to address the many crises successfully. The failures were not for want of trying. He sponsored a movement toward constitutional revision, an opening to a rearranged relationship with Northern Ireland and some tentative intiatives in economic reform. Every initiative failed and in most cases had perverse results. The New Ireland Forum and first Anglo-Irish agreement, for instance, were designed to outflank Sinn Fein and bolster the SDLP. The proposals he actually came up with were so politically impossible that they drove Mrs Thatcher into a restatement of the integrity of the United Kingdom (the famous "Out, Out Out" comment in 1984) and shattered the possibility of a nationalist solution brokered by the SDLP and Fine Gael. The long-run consequence was that the eventual settlement was shaped as a reaction to his ideas and led to the rise of Sinn Fein. 

The "Constitutional Crusade" had the same result. The proposal to liberalise the 1937 constitution mobilised the pro-life amendment campaign and contributed to the domination of Irish public life by the issue of abortion for a decade. In 1986 the campaign for the introduction of divorce in Ireland was so badly prepared that the provision was not only lost, but was voted against by a two-thirds majority. This despite the fact that in principle most people were in favour of the idea. As a politician he went through a recurring pattern. He seemed to fail to understand that in politics you have to win, you have to create the solution and the alliance committed to that solution in order to construct the institutions that in turn shape the life of the political community. If you don't find a solution for the political community someone else will. My suspicion is that his failures directly led to the dominance of Fianna Fail in the following period.

Even if the details of Irish political history are not close to your heart there is something important to learn from Fitzgerald and his politics and this is about the nature of politics itself. He never found a way to make his liberal, or more properly Christian Democrat, values and norms speak to the specific and local problems and situations he faced. I suspect, and this again I can only suspect, that this was because he had been captured by revisionist historiography. From that perspective the Irish Republic was fatally tainted by its origins in an act of violence in 1916 and the core political work to be done was to realign the polity to norms of legality. Much of Fitzgerald's politics can be understood through this optic of rescuing the polity from its provisional status. This disposition crippled him as a Prime Minister. It made his values and ideals more real than the polity he had responsibility for. So he lost again and again, because he was not crafting a solution for the time and place he found himself in, he was not slowly drilling the hard boards. When confronted with more robustly integrated models of ideals and a community, on the part of Unionists, Nationalists or even religious fundamentalists, he became immobilised and consistently overpowered. What he seemed incapable of doing was giving shape and form to the political community that was actually there before him; the "actually existing Irish Republic". In my view the damage he did to the credibility of the Irish liberals and even the  left, effectively to respond to the aspirations of the population was fatal. By being nice, he made it hard for us to be good, and we are living with the consequences. Salus populus ultima lex.

This is why we bother

At one point in Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz she has her characters wandering around the small roads of Limerick and Clare in a car, finding a way to talk to one another and when you are reading the book in one sitting on a Sunday morning this moment comes as a bit of a relief. Everything in her book is so pitch perfect that the lapse into basic Irish pastoral ("if only we lived in the beautiful West we could get it together") makes the performance less intimidating. And then you look at where they are actually driving and it is on the small roads that you used to have to take to get to Shannon Airport, and of course these are historically significant roads. Elizabeth Bowen has her character Jane in A World of Love drive along those roads to collect Richard Priam off the flight from America. Emma Winer made me see how important that excursion was for Bowen, it literally got her out of the Big House. Emma hasn't been the only person to make a lot of those back roads either. Roy Foster reads the whole novel as a final critique of the kind of society Bowen suffered in the Ireland of the 1950s and the journey as into a kind of nothingness. He places the incident into the context of what he argues was the failed effort of Bowen and her colleagues at The Bell to reconcile Anglo-Irish culture to the new state and society. Others, like Brian Corcoran, read it as a much more interesting opening to new possibilities on her part. So the roads have a literary intertext and speak to a contemporary political resonance. So much for a lapse.

I have no idea if Anne Enright had this set of references consciously in mind as she was writing and it really wouldn't matter anyway if she didn't. The basic architecture of the book is so secure that in some ways she may get those kinds of references as a kind of unconscious free gift. She makes it so easy to see the basic reference points for understanding Gina Moynihan, like Bovary or Gretta from "The Dead", that  the reviews I've read so far miss what seems to me to be the real ambition of the book to explore the modernisation of Ireland, from the fifties to the crash, through Gina. Gina is one of the many angels of history that see the debris piling up behind them. There is a lot to debate in some of the ideas that could be extracted from the book, but to be honest that seems pointless to me. What this book does is start to allow us to imagine the experience of my generation as a whole and to locate it in the sweep of our history. You can only know what you have first imagined.

It is a fierce book. The last line condemns a whole generation. But despite that it is also written from inside and with emotion rather than outside with anger. Only one real flaw. Imagine how much more depth and complexity it would have it set in Cork.

The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

I suffer from a very old-fashioned sense of poetry as successful divination. Good poetry makes objective and visible ideas that are haven't yet found expression, and since my old friend Shelley put this far better than I could in his Defence of Poetry I won't develop this thought any further. Sean O'Brien expresses the problems we confront when the transcendental horizon of judgement, often expressed through religious language, becomes totally disassociated from the local strategies we use to solve specific, local problems, in his poem "The Citizens". The idea of a negative dialectic of enlightenment is not new. Also this is not a perfect poem by any means. The echo of the Holocaust in the last two lines unbalances the central idea comprised in "all we want...". Something with more bathos is needed to follow the tragedy of small dreams. It is inaccurate, and a bit lazy, to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for anything else. For all that the first six lines unlock how humble, limited modern citizens who make no claim beyond their own interests, can still be monsters.

What language? You had no language.
Stirring bone soup with a bone, we sip
From the cup of the skull. This is culture.
All we want to do is live forever,
To which end we make you bow down to our gods
In the midday square's Apollonian light
Before we ship you to the furnaces
And sow you in the fields like salt

Another line from the collection, November, "Work is good, like love and company". Wish I'd said that.

Machiavelli and the Arab Spring

Why was Bin Laden killed now? One possible answer is that it is far safer to kill or capture him now than it was last year. There is at least some room for suspicion that the US knew where he was for quite a long time and that when Hillary Clinton complained last year that Bin Laden's whereabouts were known to elements in Pakistan it was because she had firm knowledge of the location herself http://tinyurl.com/32qvjbk. The consequences of an operation against him then were completely unpredictable though. Before the politics of the Arab world took their unforeseen turn just before Christmas it was entirely reasonable to fear that the death of Bin Laden might have provoked fundamentalist Islamicist revolts. What the last few months have shown is that the moment of Al Qaeda has passed. The new movements in North Africa and the Middle East may well be inspired or at least animated by themes within Islam, but they aspire to manage and negotiate modern life, not refuse it. As many commentators have argued, the politics of Al Qaeda were fantasies, murderous fantasies for the most part. It is hardly surprising that Arab societies have found far more rational and powerful political norms through which they can mobilise themselves. My speculation, and it can only be that short of evidence that is unlikely to emerge, is that it was possible to kill Bin Laden because in the most fundamental way he had ceased to matter.