by John Waters
More than six months before the campaign would rightly begin, Robinson began her work in Allihies in west Cork, and afterwards travelled the length and breadth of Ireland trying to overcome her disadvantages and persuade ‘ordinary’ Irish people to vote for her. She did not slap any backs, but she clasped the sweaty hand of middle Ireland. She forced a smile and kissed babies. Her rhetoric was inclusive and almost warm. She said that there did not have to be winners or losers, there did not have to be sides. By fighting against the perceived conservative forces in Irish society, she had come to appreciate the nature of those forces: that they were not merely the preserve of a diehard minority, but an essential part of the equilibrium of the society. Conservatism and liberalism, she explained, were not for her exterior forces, but intrinsic parts of herself, of her own experience and outlook, just as they were parts of all Irish people. ‘I’m a Catholic from Mayo,’ she said. ‘So there’s nothing about that Ireland that I don’t know. So it’s me. I understand it from within and I want to develop it on, but in a way that one would want to develop oneself, almost. I don’t repudiate as much as want to coax along into a different mould.’
Afterwards, there were assiduous efforts to reinterpret her victory as emblematic of a narrow range of orthodoxies. When the writers came over from Time and Vanity Fair, they were facilitated by Robinson proponents in writing simplistic analyses of what was going on. The country, which just four years earlier had rejected divorce, the world was told, had had a sudden and dramatic change of heart. The ‘old’ Ireland was in retreat. The Irish were now ready to join the modern world.
What this ignored was that most of the people on the Robinson train espoused a multiplicity of complex and often contradictory views about everything. Some of them, for example, had no problem with divorce but abhorred abortion. Some of them were simply sick of the old tribal politics. Some of them were female chauvinists. Some of them were men who thought that electing a woman President would be a nice exercise in window-dressing. And so on.
The rinsed-down reason we elected Robinson was that we suddenly became drunk on the possibility that we could. In truth, her election was more of a gesture than a symbol. She won at a time when people were beginning to think it might be fun to overturn the party political bandwagons. Robinson succeeded in presenting herself as unthreatening to a sufficiency of people to enable her to sneak past the post on the second count. We had no idea what it might mean, or how on earth it could be deemed to mean anything, but somehow we decided that it was better to do it than not do it. In this sense, her election was emblematic of the modernizing-cum-liberalizing ethic with which she had come to be identified, representing a form of change which was purely reactive, which has no real announcement to make but simply wanted to denounce what already existed.
Having promised to reinvent the presidency, Robinson appeared to use it as a platform for her own advancement and greater glory. The very fact that she had been elected was enough, it seemed. Nearing the end of her term of office, she pulled plant to take up a big job in the UN. So much for her desire to reinvigorate the self-confidence of the Irish people.
In the end, the Irish people were left wondering what, other than the career of Mary Robinson, it had all been about. What had changed other than that the person going around opening gymkhanas was a woman rather than a man. It wasn’t just that the whole thing had been an elaborate con-trick to get Robinson elected, but that it had been an elaborate con-trick that created an impression of ‘change’ and ‘progress’, when really nothing much was changing or progressing at all.
If this was not sufficient to display Mrs Robinson in her true colours, an episode that occurred some three years later would put an end to any remaining doubts. Robinson, now United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking on International Women’s Day. By now she had been replaced as President by another woman, Mary McAleese, an entirely different class of individual by any standard.
‘Apparently,’ Robinson told her receptive audience of like-minded sisters, ‘there are small boys in Ireland who are complaining to their mothers, “Why can’t I grow up to be President?” That seems to me to be an excellent experience for small boys in Ireland.’
Finally, it was all laid bare. The grandiose rhetoric of inclusiveness had fallen away and we were left with the spectacle of one of the pettiest chauvinists the nation had ever nurtured gloating because, as a result of her glorious endeavours, little boys could no longer hope to become the first citizen of the Republic. Sisters, what a triumph!
In Robinson’s defence, it might be said that the remark was an attempt at a joke by someone with no sense of humour. But no – underlying her words was a deeply disquieting hostility – even managing to exceed the standard everyday feminist rancour towards males. By virtue of being specifically directed at young boys, her words attained a new level of unwomanly malevolence.
Of course, deep down, very few of those who voted for her expected Robinson to be otherwise. None of it really meant anything. She had become the incarnation of values that we were instructed we had to adopt but in which most sensible people saw very little value. We liked the idea of having a President who represented ‘liberal’ ideas without having the right to express, still less implement, them. We welcomed her necessary fudges and enforced silences, because they allowed us to have the name of modernity without having to work out what it might actually mean – in concrete Irish terms. She represented our unspoken desire to be perceived as liberal without surrendering the fabric of our existing society to a process of unravelling for which there seemed to be few rules or principles. In short, Mary Robinson did not turn the first sod on a new highway to the future: she cut the tape on a cul-de-sac into which we pulled to have a look at the map. And we’re still there.
29 Louis Walsh
As the 1980s progressed and the emerging Irish rock’n’roll constituency began to come to terms with the fact that U2 were, really and truly, the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world, the disbelief and wonder provoked by this began to give way to a sense of national entitlement. Very quickly the conversation shifted to oscillating between backbiting about the fact that U2 were regarded as perhaps the least worthy of their generation of post-punk contenders and desultory debates about who would become ‘the next U2’.
A couple of top-flight acts did manifest themselves, notably Sinéad O’Connor. But, generally speaking, the growing conventional wisdom that Dublin could come to be to the 1990s rock’n’roll imagination what Merseyside had been in the 1960s was a little thin on content. Various contenders came and went, but only U2 and O’Connor seemed to have staying power.
But then the future of Irish music declared itself. One night on The Late Late Show, following a discussion about the future of rural Ireland between a journalist, a priest and, for some reason, a female disc jockey, a bunch of daft-looking young fellas shambled on to the set. Rumour had it that it was some new wheeze of Louis Walsh, a showbiz impresario who had become prominent in the showband era. The word was that the new act would be a kind of Irish Take That. The obvious question was: why?
The bunch of young fellas called themselves Boyzone. They didn’t sing that night, but instead mimed to a dance track. Everyone laughed uproariously at this evidence of Louis Walsh’s hard neck. Nobody thought it remotely serious. But within months, Boyzone were one of the most successful music acts in the UK. In no time at all, the success of Boyzone was dwarfed by another Walsh-inspired sensation, Westlife, who seemed to turn everything they touched into gold.
Where once we were known as the Island of Saints and Scholars, Ireland is nowadays famous as the Nation of Boybands. Never was this truth so visible as during the celebrations to mark the onset of the third millennium, when it seemed that boybands had supplanted the entirety of Irish culture in the previous 1,000 years. The nation of Carolan and Ó Riada, the nation whose bardic culture had once been called ‘the earliest voice from the dawn of West European civilization’, t
he nation that had once given the world missionaries dedicated to painstaking calligraphy and Christian gratuitousness was now known globally as the producer of ambiguous-looking young men who could cavort to a beat created by a machine operated by a man from Mayo who had spent a lifetime studying the odds and watching for the main chance.
If ever there was a necessity for evidence of how the Irish nation had lost touch with itself, a video of the proceedings on the premier national television channel in the last hours of the second millennium would be enough to convey to an indefinitely extending posterity our inability to explain anything about ourselves. Anyone who watched could hardly be surprised about anything that followed: the excess, the loss of the country’s run of itself, the economic and psychic breakdown that followed hard on the indulgences of the Celtic Tiger.
Here we had a succinct proof of Jean Baudrillard’s theory that time has started to go backwards, as the coverage cut from the boyband mediocrity on Merrion Square, where a New Year’s concert was taking place, to the sad spectacle of the one-time king of the ballroom circuit, Joe Dolan, playing in Killarney, the whole thing suggesting not so much a celebration of the future as an attempt to drag posterity down to our level. Weirdly, the ‘past’ being focused upon was not the great sweep of time through the annals and battlefields and mass graves of Irish history, but Ireland’s alleged strides in the world of popular entertainment in the previous forty years. More than that, what emerged from it was a strong sense of how post-Independence popular culture in Ireland had continued to slide backwards into its congenital rootlessness.
Even if he cannot be held completely responsible for this miasma of selective forgetfulness and remembered inferiority, Louis Walsh was so constantly at the scene of the crime(s) that he qualifies for special blame. Walsh had been one of the main players in the showband industry, which, for all its flaws, had at least the redeeming quality of innocence. The boyband craze of the Tiger years was indistinguishable from showband culture except that we at least had the decency to keep showbands to ourselves.
In their time and proper place, actually, showbands weren’t anything like as bad as they’re sometimes ‘remembered’. Far more than Gay Byrne or Mary Robinson, people like Joe Dolan and the Drifters, Derek Dean and Billy Brown of The Freshmen, and Brendan Bowyer with the Royal Showband, revolutionized Irish attitudes to sexuality and freedom. It is, in a certain light, arguable that Big Tom was more central to the modernization of Irish society than the cumulative effects of the Irish Times, the Labour Party and the First Programme for Economic Expansion.
Louis Walsh was for a time manager of The Freshmen, one of the genuinely great bands of the showband era. He was therefore at the scene of the Big Bang of Irish popular culture, a spontaneous explosion of activity from a void of nothingness. When you factor in the deeply derivative nature of much of what passed for originality in early Irish rock’n’roll, it occurs that, in their own way, showbands were as creative as anyone. Certainly they were creative of excitement and abandon on a previously undreamt-of scale, and some showband records, like The Royal’s version of ‘The Hucklebuck’, and The Freshmen’s version of ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, can stand with anything in the past fifty years of Irish pop music.
But no argument of this kind can be mounted in defence of boybands, which came after a time when Ireland had shown itself capable of producing the finest and most creative musical artists in the world.
One of Westlife’s hit singles, released at Christmas 1999, was a ditty called ‘Seasons in the Sun’, an English-language adaptation of the song ‘Le Moribond’ by the stunning Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. It had been a mega-hit back in the mid-1970s when recorded by one Terry Jacks, a truly awful recording, a mawkish, revolting excess of self-pity and frothy pathos, utterly devoid of Brelesque irony or self-parody. ‘Goodbye Michelle’, went the lyric, ‘it’s hard to die/When all the birds are singing in the sky.’ To be fair, Terry Jacks knew that a capacity to tap into these darker feelings was the song’s only ‘redeeming’ feature, and hammed it up for all it was worth. Westlife, on the other hand, didn’t even appear to have noted this aspect of the song, which they sing as though it were ‘Baa-baa Black Sheep’.
Louis Walsh had learned something dark and deadly in his showband days. He looked into the soul of his fellow man and figured out what it would be prepared to settle for. His refusal to carry this insight with him to the grave will not be easily forgiven.
30 Ian Paisley
Once, back in the 1970s, Paisley boasted of how John Hume had once turned to him in frustration and said, ‘Paisley, you’re just an Ulster Protestant.’
‘I replied to Mr Hume: “I am glad that at last you have got the message. I am indeed an Ulster Protestant!”’
Although there has since been the bones of an accommodation between Southern nationalism and Paisley’s tribe, the truth of the matter is that the condition of Ulster Protestantism is still as mystifying to most of those who live south of the border as it ever was. We just don’t get it: their reciprocal ignorance of Southern nationalism, their rage against the Republic, their belligerence, their dogged insistence on being ‘British’ in defiance of geography and self-interest. Neither do we get the way they don’t get us: their persistent prating about ‘Rome rule’, long after the fact. Their continuing condescension about the ‘banana republic’ and their ironic references to the ‘Free State’, even though their own little ‘statelet’ went to wrack and ruin while the Republic was going to Paradise and back. ‘They try to explain Ian Paisley, but they don’t understand,’ the Big Fella elaborated to a meeting of his followers in Omagh in 1981. ‘Ian Paisley is the incarnation of every Protestant Ulsterman here at this meeting tonight. I am only saying what you want me to say, what you want to hear.’
In a speech denouncing the latest joint initiative of the British and Irish governments, Big Ian criticized both Charles Haughey, Taoiseach of the Republic, and Humphrey Atkins, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State. The readings that night were from the Old Testament, the music was ‘Rock of Ages’. A bystander’s report described a scene of passionate intensity. When speaking, the Reverend Paisley delivered an improvised oration that transported his audience to new heights and new places in themselves. His arms flailed and the sweat poured off him. His voice rose in pitch and power, like a tenor coming to the climax of his final aria.
‘We shall defend what is ours. We be determined men, come to do a task, and with God’s almighty grace we will do it. I say to Charles Haughey, that son of an IRA gunman from Swatragh, that guardian of the IRA whose murderers have darkened sixty Fermanagh homes with death. Charlie Haughey, the Godfather of our intended destruction, the green aggressor, I say to you, Charlie Haughey, that you will never get your thieving, murderous hands on Ulster, because we are determined to fertilize the ground of Ulster with Protestant blood before we enter your priest-ridden banana republic.’
There have been many books, many articles and a multitude of broadcast documentaries produced about the ‘troubles’ on the island of Ireland over the past forty years. But not even the best among these efforts has come close to capturing the complex interflow of currents and forces, the undertows and whirlpools of this most incomprehensible of conflicts. This story is all but untellable, in part because the roots of the conflict extended to so many levels of Irish society, north and south. And yet, somehow, the mysterious nature of both the conflict and its eventual resolution is summarized in the personality of Ian Paisley, and the complex nature of his relationship with those inhabitants of the island who were not happy to call themselves British.
Not long ago, Ian Paisley was greatly feared by the people of the Republic – and not in an abstract sense. He was feared in the manner of a demonic force of nature whose tempers seemed to threaten on a scale that was godlike. He was the stuff of our nightmares, and not just the metaphorical, political kind. He was someone who had us crunching bolt upright in bed in the deadest hours, quaking unde
r the thunderous bellow of his voice, recoiling from the fiery torches of his eyes and wiping his spittle from our fearful faces.
Fast forward to the Noughties, and Paisley had metamorphosed as though into our favourite uncle, a cheery broth of a boy who made us laugh inwardly at the ridiculousness of the idea that we had ever seen him differently. Even those of us who never met him in the flesh – who might even yet recoil from such a meeting for fear that he would revert to type in our presence – have come to, yes, love Paisley. The word is not too strong.
This change of heart did not occur for wholly political reasons, nor can its drifts and shifts be conveyed by psychological analysis. But if the story of recent Irish history can be comprehended at all, it is to be comprehended in the personality of Ian Paisley, and in his shifting relationships with the various political and human entities on the island.
Paisley belongs to a rare elite of political figures who have brought to politics the fullness of a strong personality and confronted history as though it were a little boy asking for more. The nearest equivalent produced in the Republic was Charles Haughey, but compared to Paisley, Haughey was, as Paisley always intuited, that little boy.
Only by understanding how we came to love Paisley can we begin to understand what has happened to ourselves. This is not comprehensible in terms of memoranda, discussion documents, declarations, still less of bombs, bullets and kneecappings. These were but the surface events of a drama that went to the core of the identities of the peoples on the island of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century.
The image of the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ conveys something of what has happened. We watched Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in the paroxysms of mirth brought on by their blossoming friendship, and something of the benign mystery of reconciliation came across. These men who used to hate and slander each other, now belly-laughed at each other’s jokes. But this was more than an image of two men. It was an image from a culture that changed because of the complex interworkings of human personality as much as by the plodding and drudgery of politics. The Chuckle Brothers were the children of reinvented public desires, two men who stood for many more. The spectacle of their bodies trembling with laughter would not have been possible unless something enormous had shifted deep in the soul of Ireland. For many years these two men had engaged in ritualistic disavowals of one another because that was what their respective tribes wanted to hear. The process by which we travelled from there to where we ended up did not happen by chance, nor was it some maudlin reconciliation conducted for the sake of peace. It was a profound human interaction which collapsed the ideological, historical and political barriers between two men who happened to be politicians, because such a collapsing had first been achieved at a more general level. This one-on-one human reconciliation drew its energy from a profound change in the surrounding culture, and in turn nurtured the changes that had given it life.