Hitchens On Ireland.pdf

Ireland

`We Ourselves': Suffering, faith and redemption*

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I can remember very distinctly the last time I was in Belfast. It was during

the crucial general election which brought Margaret Thatcher to power.

I was writing an article for the old New Statesman about the neglected Ulster

dimension of this conjuncture ± it having been Northern Ireland more than

any other matter which had brought an end to the period of what we would

now have to call `Old Labour' rule. My essay, when it was published,

recommended above all things that the question of the Six Counties, and

indeed the Six Counties themselves, be internationalised. Only by placing

the issue in a context at once Atlantic and European, I argued, could the

petrifying grip of antiquity be broken, and the fetishes of sovereignty be

deposed by the revived notion of self-government. (I hope you notice

that I have already referred to this historic part of this extremely historic

province by each of its three loaded colloquial names. People who say that

terminology isn't worth fighting over are saying in effect that language

doesn't matter. The latter proposition is much more dangerous than the

former.)

I don't particularly care for numinous dates, except that everybody cares

for numinous dates and that, as I walked around in the steady rain, it was

13 April; in that hinge year of Thatcherism also both Easter and my thirtieth

birthday. April 13 is as well the birthday of Seamus Heaney, and I rounded

off my piece with a stave from `Linen Town':

It's twenty to four

On one of the last afternoons

Of reasonable light.

Smell the tidal Lagan:

Take a last turn

In the tang of possibility.

* Lecture

precede

Mahler's

Resurrection

Symphony

the

Belfast

Literature

Festival,

15 November 1997

Ireland: `We Ourselves': Suffering, faith and redemption

(People sometimes complain about Heaney, and certainly since 1979 far

too many journalists have tried to wrap up a short piece by raiding him for

an encapsulating couplet or so, but I ask you to look again. Who else, even

suggesting that time might be running out, would put it so mildly and

genially as to say that it was `twenty to four, on one of the last afternoons of

reasonable light'? The usual game here is to say, `five minutes to midnight'

or `the eleventh hour' or some such. It's like the old joke about the re-

lationship between Gaelic and the sense of urgency.) Compare, for example,

Louis MacNeice's 1931 poem, `Belfast':

The hard cold fire of the northerner,

Frozen into his blood from the fire in his basalt

Glares from behind the mica of his eyes

And the salt carrion water brings him wealth.

Down there at the end of the melancholy lough

Against the lurid sky over the stained water

Where hammers clang murderously on the girders

Like crucifixes the gantries stand.

Not at all the benign `Giant's Causeway' account. Even in the Ulster

passages of Anthony Powell and Philip Larkin, indeed, neither of them

conditioned to subversive or anti-national accounts, one can find in their

sojourn the explicit sense of being, as English or Welsh people in this

province, somehow definitively expatriated if not in fact `abroad'.

Anyway, on the very same day exactly ninety years before I was

revolving these reflections, on 13 April 1889 to be precise, Oscar Wilde

published a review article in the Pall Mall Gazette. The book under

discussion was J. A. Froude's novel The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. In an effort

to capture the annihilating dullness of this work of fiction, composed as

it was by a noted historian of the Anglo-Irish relationship, Wilde com-

pared it to a government `Blue Book', or policy report. Let me quote from

his review:

The last of these Blue Books, Mr Froude's heavy novel, has appeared,

however, somewhat too late. The society that he describes has long since

passed away. An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development

of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To

mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own

strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the

Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a

strange land it realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What

captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. America and American

influence has educated them. Their first practical leader is an Irish American.

Wilde's peroration was:

Critical Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1

There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish

question by doing away with the Irish people. There are others who will

remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to

reckon with her not merely in the Old World but also in the New.

Allowance made for Wilde's slightly diva-like Fenian style, this must count

as one of his more prescient and incisive judgments. He was raising the

curtain on the future Americanisation of the entire Irish and Ulster

question. Parnell did indeed have an American mother. It's generally

thought that de Valera's American connection may have saved his life at the

time of the Rising, since England needed not to offend American sensibility

while seeking Washington's entry into the Great War. Men like O'Donovan

Rossa had led effectively American-Irish (rather than Irish-American) lives,

giving rise to the unshakeable belief on the British mainland ± still

extremely often met with ± that the entire source and arsenal of mischief in

Ireland is the great Republic across the Atlantic.

Now I'm back in Belfast and I find that the stewardship of Northern

Irish affairs is substantially in American hands. An ex-Senator of Lebanese-

American background, George Mitchell, chairs important discussions on

politics and economics, and on political economy, while reporting back

regularly to a President who has sponsored most of the public elements of

political or, if you prefer, of national dialogue and mediation. American

money, American prestige, American spirit if you will, are slowly but

unmistakably beginning to assert themselves. I don't mean to down-

grade the importance of economic and community initiatives from the

European Union, because I also believe that the co-membership of the

two Irelands in one customs and political union was a necessary if

not a sufficient precondition for the present stage, but Americanisation

is becoming so much the world's pattern and mould that it's here we

must look for the waves of the future, in point of character and tone

and the other unquantifiable things that go to make up a nation, and a

culture.

In the course of a stay in Belfast a matter of a year or two ago, President

Clinton bit his lip with that special insincerity that he believes to be at least

a version or simulacrum of sincerity, and announced that `Blessed Are

The Peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth'. He had made exactly

the same observation at a signing agreement between Israel and the

Kingdom of Jordan a short time before. I call it an `observation' because of

course, in the Beatitudes that form the culmination of the Sermon on the

Mount, it is the meek who inherit the earth. The peacemakers are called

the children of god. Either the President ± who sometimes ostentatiously

claims to be a Bible student ± had confused his Beatitudes or, no less

Ireland: `We Ourselves': Suffering, faith and redemption

probably, he had balked at referring to his immediate political and

diplomatic partners ± Mr Trimble, Mr Adams, Mr Peres and King Hussein ±

as `children of god'. On one interpretation of course, since we are all, often,

referred to in scripture as god's children, we can all be counted peace-

makers. But that seems to me too trite and uplifting a piece of hermeneutics.

More likely, perhaps, that the President was much influenced when young

by screenings of The Life of Brian.

Accidentally perhaps, Mr Clinton still performed a service by neatly

encapsulating the three crucial moral elements of an American future. If

this part of this province, like the three tigers of Munster, Leinster and

Connacht and the three frisky cubs of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal, is

going to develop henceforth as part of the American universe, it may as

well do some reflecting in advance on the American way. And the Clinton

slip reminded us of the three most salient and distinctive features of the

American public sphere. America is the special country: one might almost

say the Promised Land, first of the multi-ethnic and the multi-cultural,

second of the secular and third of the amnesiac. None of these, I believe it is

safe to say, has been the distinguishing mark of Ulster life in this century.

It's a good question as to how far plural citizenship and nationhood ±

those two elusively compatible entities ± need to depend upon the friend-

ship of amnesia. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garc Â a-M Â rquez

has a population in Macondo which suffers from an epidemic of insomnia,

leading to eventual amnesia. The absurd results of total forgetting are

eventually tragic. Yet many are those who have resorted to Ernest Renan's

justly celebrated essay `Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?' (What is a nation?) and

posed his dangerously paradoxical definition:

Or l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses

en commun, et aussi que tous aient oubli Â bien des choses.

Simple translation: Those who wish to make up a nation must possess much

in common and also be willing to forget many things.

I actually used this as a chapter-heading in a book I wrote about Cyprus ±

Britain's other large European island colony ± and was fully conscious that,

only a few chapters earlier, I had quoted Milan Kundera, in his wonderful

Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as saying that: `The struggle of man against

power is the struggle of memory against forgetting'. Does this only appear

to us as a contradiction? We must bear in mind that, in demotic speech,

forgetting is a close ally of forgiving. The best epigram here is Arthur

Balfour's remark ± `I can never forgive, but I always forget'. That is a

mnemonic by most definitions. Some say that only the work of educated

memory can begin the work of intelligent forgiveness; that only by making

Critical Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1

a moral decision to remember can one make a distinction, among one's

former antagonists, between guilt and responsibility or between the

collectivisation of these in the figures not of other people, but of whole

other peoples. A theory not unlike this supplies the animating principle of

the National Holocaust Museum, in my home town of Washington. But if

the theory was as effective as it is advertised to be, surely there should have

been a National Museum of Slavery, on the very ground of the market and

the auction block, well before now? The responsibility of the memory you

assume, like the guilt you accept, must be your own. Note, again, that there

is a modern proposed connection between memory and our theme of this

evening, which is that of reconciliation or I suppose you could say ± not a

term I propose to employ ± `the healing process'. But in that case, why is

that other modern phenomenon of retrieved or recovered memory ± a

sudden and perhaps conditioned access of the blessed mnemonic ± such an

ally of revenge and of renewed bitterness? Finally, let us bear in mind that

one of the prime functions of the human memory is precisely to forget and

to discard, and that a person who is unable to flush and void his or her

memory can only be one kind of savant, and an idiotic one at that. To say

that memory is selective is not in principle a condemnation ± because the

forgetting faculty must know how to discriminate, just as the aware and

conscious faculties must know how to discriminate also. Incidentally, by

what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing

bigots and tribalists of the sin of `discrimination'? They are the ones who

judge severely by category, and yet can't tell anyone apart. `Discrimination'

is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable

to perform.

These old selection processes have a way of reiterating and reinserting

themselves. I was recently reading the splendid new account of the

repressed woes of modern Germany, another country with a memory and

identity and unification problem of the sort to put most to shame, The File,

by my friend Timothy Garton Ash. Not at all to my surprise, he also and

early reprinted the quotation from Ernest Renan on the business of common

things here being combined with forgotten things there. But, in a quite

separate section, he tried to imagine an English history and English present

that would not compromise him or make him feel awkward:

Personal memory is such a slippery customer. Nietzsche catches it brilliantly

in one of his epigrams: ` ``I did that,'' says my memory. ``I can't have done

that,'' says my pride and remains adamant. In the end ± memory gives way.'

The temptation is always to pick and choose your past, just as it is for nations:

to remember Shakespeare and Churchill but forget Northern Ireland. But we

must take it all or leave it all; and I must say `I'.

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