Feckers

by John Waters

  John Waters was born in Castlerea, Co Roscommon. Against the trend of modern journalism, he worked in a variety of roles before entering the media as a late vocation. After somewhat prematurely leaving the education system, he held a range of jobs after leaving school, including railway clerk, showband roadie, pirate radio manager, petrol pump attendant and mailcar driver. He began part-time work as a journalist in 1981, with Hot Press, Ireland’s leading rock’n’roll periodical, becoming a full-time journalist with the paper in 1984, when he moved to Dublin. As a journalist, magazine editor and columnist, he has specialized in raising unpopular issues of public importance, including the repression of famine memories and the denial of rights to fathers. His previous books include Jiving at the Crossroads (Blackstaff, 1991); Race of Angels (4th Estate/Blackstaff,1994): Every Day Like Sunday? (Poolbeg, 1995); An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Ireland (Duckworth, 1997); The Politburo Has Decided That You Are Unwell, (Liffey, 2004); Lapsed Agnostic (Continuum, 2007) and Beyond Consolation (Continuum, 2010).

  He has written a number of plays for radio and the stage, including Long Black Coat (1994), Holy Secrets (BBC, 1996), Easter Dues (1998), and Adverse Possession (BBC, 1998). He has been a columnist with the Irish Times for almost twenty years and currently also writes a weekly columns for The Irish Mail on Sunday. He is also a born-again songwriter and the father of a teenage daughter, Róisín.

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011

  Copyright © John Waters, 2010

  Illustrations copyright © Aongus Collins, 2010

  The right of John Waters to be identified as the author of this

  work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84901-687-2

  eISBN: 978-1-84901-924-8

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Padraig Pearse

  2 Maud Gonne

  3 Arthur Guinness

  4 Eamon de Valera

  5 Rev. R. S. Devane S.J.

  6 Brendan Behan

  7 Ignatius Rice

  8 Ben Dunne Snr

  9 Neil Blaney

  10 Gay Byrne

  11 Pope John Paul II

  12 Charles J. Haughey

  13 Garret FitzGerald

  14 Bishop Eamonn Casey

  15 Albert Reynolds

  16 Shane MacGowan

  17 John McGahern

  18 Mike Murphy

  19 Conor Cruise O’Brien

  20 Frank McDonald

  21 Desmond O’Malley

  22 Big Tom

  23 Ray MacSharry

  24 Jack Charlton

  25 Gerry Adams

  26 Bono

  27 Gerry McGuinness

  28 Mary Robinson

  29 Louis Walsh

  30 Ian Paisley

  31 Martin Cahill

  32 Sean Doherty

  33 Tony Blair

  34 Charlie Bird

  35 Niall Crowley

  36 Terry Keane

  37 Frank Dunlop

  38 Charlie McCreevy

  39 Paddy O’Blog

  40 The Begrudger

  41 Bertie Ahern

  42 Declan Ganley

  43 Judge Mary Fahy

  44 Owen Keegan

  45 Ryan Tubridy

  46 Seanie FitzPatrick

  47 George Lee

  48 Brian Cowen

  49 Thierry Henry

  50 Enda Kenny

  10 Per Cent Extra Recession Buster

  St Patrick

  HM Queen Elizabeth II

  Master James Flynn

  Fintan O’Toole

  Bill Graham

  Introduction

  Everyone in Ireland, at least everyone who knows anything, knows what a ‘fecker’ is. But few, put under pressure to define the term, could do more than produce a synonym or two: ‘gobshite’, ‘chancer’, ‘bollox’.

  The word ‘feck’ is obviously related to another much-employed f-word. In daily usage it often acts as an alternative, supplanting the coarser, harder impact of the other with a gentler, more ironic inflexion. So it has all the connotations attaching to its more ubiquitous brother-word, and yet seems somehow not just to be less splenetic, but also less angry, less condemnatory somehow. There is an irony about ‘feck’, while also, strangely, a deeper quality of contempt. A ‘fucker’ is someone for whom the speaker retains a degree of respect, whereas ‘fecker’ has a hint of dismissiveness about it.

  But the word ‘fecker’ retains about its person some element of regard. There is a sense that the accused is, if not exactly admired, at least held in a somewhat exasperated tolerance. A ‘fecker’ is someone who may exhaust the patience but not entirely the affections. When the epithet is directed at some absent miscreant, a smile is always in the offing. When levelled face-to-face, it is liable to provoke a wink or a grin.

  The invitation to ‘Feck off!’ was used with abandon by Father Jack in the comedy series Father Ted. And, although this has given rise to the idea that ‘feck’ is a uniquely Irish word, the etymology of the word traces it to various sources in Middle English, Scots English and Hiberno-English.

  ‘Feck’ is a verb with several distinct meanings. One meaning relates to an improper or precipitous departure, as in: ‘He fecked off and left her to mind the babby herself.’

  Another, not unrelated, meaning suggests the abandonment of some responsibility, commitment or endeavour, to ‘throw something there’; because, it is to be inferred, it was not going well. For example: ‘He fecked the whole thing there and fecked off.’ More prosaically, ‘feck’ can also mean simply ‘to throw’. ‘He fecked the bicycle in the lake and fecked off.’

  ‘Feck’ also means ‘to steal’. ‘He fecked a load of apples out of me garden.’ Or, as used by that fecker James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘They had fecked cash out of the rector’s room.’

  In everyday usage, however, the word ‘feck’ is often used as a general-purpose swear-word. To ‘feck things up’, then, means simply to make a mess, or a ‘hames’ of everything. This use of the word seems also, though it may be coincidence, not entirely unrelated to the concept of fecklessness.

  Whatever way you look at it, Ireland has certainly been fecked up. Popular opinion might at the moment be disposed to argue that it has been ‘fecked’ in a quite literal sense – that certain individuals and interests have stolen the fruits of Ireland’s hard-won struggle for autonomy and self-sufficiency. You could, without raising a sweat, come up with fifty names of people who might be deemed blameworthy in this literal sense.

  But this would be monotonous and somewhat misleading. While it is true that, in the past decade or so, a considerable amount of what called itself entrepreneurial activity amounted to a form of theft, it is also true that the roots of this go much deeper. To simply trawl through the newspapers, therefore, and pluck out the most frequently used names of venal bankers, developers and their political cronies would be to suggest that all the present misfortune is of recent derivation.

 
; The failure of Ireland was not unforeseeable, nor was it an accident. Contrary to the analysis being peddled on a daily basis by ideologues with axes to grind, it did not flow from the corruption of a few bankers and politicians. Such an analysis would suggest that all sins are financial ones, as if nothing that has happened of late has any roots or connection to patterns established in the past when, really, nothing that has happened lately was in any serious degree unpredictable on the basis of even the most cursory observation of the weave of Irish life through the last century.

  But in itself the recent economic catastrophe should have been an opportunity to ask a number of questions. How much longer could we congratulate ourselves on the ‘opening up’ of Irish society, without acknowledging that ‘opening up’ also destroyed the taboos which preserve many of the understandings of human nature that define civilization? For how long could we continue to quantify only those aspects of our alleged modernization which had been agreed as unambiguously virtuous, while ignoring the creeping consequences? And for how long could we continue to disregard the ambiguities of virtually every aspect of what we term ‘progress’, even in the face of escalating breakdown and complication?

  Our failure to ask these questions stemmed from Ireland’s most fundamental and ominous flaw: a failure of self-understanding.

  ‘Change’ is one of the most over– and misused words in the lexicon of modern Ireland. All the time we are reminded of how much Ireland has changed since that or then: since de Valera’s ‘comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’ speech, since we crossed the border into what is deemed ‘modernity’ in 1960, since the First Programme of Economic Expansion, since the Robinson presidency, and so on. Invariably, the implication is that change can only be for the better. The problem with the kind of progress so loudly and pervasively celebrated in this society for several decades is not that it has occurred, but that it has occurred without a great deal of thought being applied to the complexities that change inevitably brings.

  The origins of this problem are located not at the scene of the car crash of recent years, but long before, embedded in the grain and groove of Irish life, thought and everyday reality. It is arguable that the roots of the present crisis run deep into history, in the long saga concerning the abusive relationship between Ireland and its nearest neighbour. Undoubtedly, many of the difficulties of modern Ireland are profoundly connected to the Famine of the 1840s, and the failure adequately to incorporate the full meaning of that experience into the national imagination.

  The problems began with a failure of thought. The way we had come to think about ourselves was problematic, because, although we had no clear insight into this, we were thinking about ourselves upside down. We did not understand the most basic facts about ourselves – for example, that we had for a long time been enslaved and were now embarking on a project of freedom as though there were nothing to it except embracing and acting out the role of freedom. But because we had no sense of what freedom meant, our efforts were doomed by virtue of a disastrous mimicry of things that did not suit us. The Irish became a nation of copycats, in which imitation was indicative of the highest form of intelligence we recognized.

  There was a simple reason for this: it was how we had been conditioned by our history and the abusive relationship that characterized that history. In order to be fully human, we had been led to understand, we needed to become as unlike ourselves as possible. A long time ago, we had been told – and had believed – that a nation of savages such as ourselves could never come to much. Our only hope was to emulate our abusers. Dependency suited our natures. It was our destiny. Even in freedom, we could not escape these facts of life.

  The continuing avoidance of this self-awareness also made it essential that we did not think too deeply. Excessive self-reflection might lead us to gaze into the true nature of our history, and this might occasion a psychic reaction that would be impossible to predict or control. It was better, then, that we think about things at only the most superficial levels, and find ways of policing the thinking of our countrymen wherever possible. This is why almost everything that is said at a public level in Ireland is some kind of knee-jerk reaction against the most immediate interpretation of the most superficial facts. Nobody looks to history, to a deeper understanding of patterns that might still be holding Irish society in their grip.

  This collection, in an attempt to shine a light on those patterns still evident in Irish society, will concentrate on the period, and people, of Ireland’s independence, essentially the near-century since the final drive for sovereignty was started by the Easter Rising of 1916. A few figures pre-date this period, but usually because of some residual influence to be detected in the Ireland of today. If we are to discuss the entity that is present-day Ireland, it is to these ‘feckers’ we look in order to define our collective life and endeavours as a free nation. For these, I would argue, are the feckers who fecked up Ireland in as many ways as there are definitions of the word.

  1 Padraig Pearse

  Perhaps something most people in Ireland can agree upon, albeit for a host of different and often contradictory reasons, is that the undoing of national independence probably began with its genesis in the Easter Week of 1916. There is a school of thought, for example, holding that the Easter Rising was a misconceived folly, a pre-emptive strike that sought to achieve by force what was already in train. There is even a view – a ludicrous view, to put it frankly – that the Rising was an unwarranted attack on Irish ‘democracy’, being unapproved by a majority of the people in the occupied Dublin of the time.

  More recently, Padraig Pearse and the other leaders of 1916 have been blamed for the outbreak of conflict in the north of Ireland in the late 1960s – a few years after the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Rising in 1966. It should go without saying, of course, that the 1969 uprising in the North did not occur as a result of northern nationalists rediscovering their myth of destiny, but because a relatively small group of protestors, seeking to draw attention to the wholesale discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, had been brutally stamped upon by the unionist establishment.

  Latter-day analyses of Ireland’s historical condition mostly agree that they blame 1916 for everything that came after it, while extending no credit for its achievement and no consideration of the fact that none of the leaders was in a position to control what happened afterwards.

  Padraig Pearse has become a much caricatured figure in modern Ireland, his understanding of the nature of freedom being largely unappreciated by those who inherited the benefits. This vision is to be found in many of Pearse’s poems – now disparaged by the modern literati – and other writings. In a series of essays written not long before the Rising, for example, Pearse outlined in detail the specifications of true independence, and the process by which it would be attained. The essays are rigorous and clear, and leave very little room for ambiguity about what the author saw as being necessary.

  In one of these, ‘The Murder Machine’, about the effects of the English education system in Ireland, Pearse outlined the precise nature of the psychological effects of the colonial process. This was some fifty years before the groundbreaking works of the great Caribbean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who exposed the interior workings of the colonial machine in his classic works about the effects of French colonialism in Algeria.

  Pearse perceived that the ‘murder machine’ had, in effect, created in Ireland the conditions of slavery. English rule in Ireland, he contended, had ‘aimed at the substitution for men and women with “Things”. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.’

  True independence, Pearse wrote in another essay, ‘The Spiritual Nation’, ‘requires spiritual and intellectual
independence as its basis, or it tends to become unstable, a thing resting merely on interests which change with time and circumstances’.

  He and the other leaders of the 1916 Rising were clear that the project of Independence must be a spiritual and psychological, as much as a political or cultural, process. Like Fanon, they intuited that only a superficial understanding of this necessary transformation could result in a disaster. But, following their execution, such elevated notions were replaced with more mundane understandings.

  Without these deeper insights, everything seems simple: surely you simply undo what has been done to you? It takes a long time to perceive that such undoing is impossible without causing everything to unravel. The indigenous culture, having been interrupted, lacks a definitive sense of its own nature or direction. It still exists, but in an altered form, and cannot simply be decontaminated and reconditioned for a new phase of existence. The collective mindset is affected by a series of paradoxical conditions. On the one hand, there is a desire to purge everything alien; on the other, there is the unavoidable fact that the mindset itself has been infiltrated by alien influences, the most insidious of which is a tendency to imitate. The native wishes to redefine himself, not merely in contradistinction to his historical abuser, but in a manner that will bear witness to his authentic self; and yet, this authentic self can no longer be located, because it has been altered by the influence of the colonizer, whom the native has been conditioned to perceive as the most worthy subject of emulation. The native has been convinced, unbeknownst to himself, that his authentic self is a worthless thing, and that his only salvation resides in imitating his master, whom, at a conscious level, he imagines himself to despise. Who, then, is in charge? What is the nature of authenticity? What is to be made of the liberated native’s determination to again become ‘himself ’, if his sense of direction is provided by the indoctrination he has received?

  Such understandings of the scale of the task that lay ahead were lost to the work of the firing squads. Thus, the very moments that provoked the surge towards freedom also began its undoing. The momentum was created but the intelligence that had already defined the freedom project not as a political or economic process, but as a spiritual rebirthing and a psychological recasting, was lost. What remained was the crudest understanding of what required to be done. The inevitable outcome was a failure of intellectual and psychological reintegration, which spawned a mishmash of confused and inauthentic identities. On the one hand, driven by the unattainable desire for a reclaimed authenticity, there began an era defined by protectionism and backlash, a ritualistic purging of everything ‘alien’ and, therefore, false. At the other extreme, governed by the self-hatred inculcated by the colonizer, there developed a repugnance and mistrust of everything indigenous. Most of this remains unresolved.